“Whatever happened to the copy of Maimonides?” I asked him. You put a copy of Maimonides in the window and taped up a sign: guide for the perplexed.”
“It’s very rare,” Marcus said. “There are two copies of the Arabic text in the British Library, and a couple more in the Bodleian. It was written in Arabic, but with Hebrew characters. You can’t read it unless you understand Jewish Arabic—Arabic and Hebrew.”
“People saw the sign and kept coming into the shop,’ I said. “It was an oasis. People just wanted to sit quietly for a few minutes in a room full of beautiful books.”
“An oasis,” he said. “That’s a good image. That’s what you’ve got here, in this room.”
“Marcus,” I said. “I have to tell you, I’m thinking of getting out. That’s what Dad wanted. Go to the south of France, or Italy.”
Marcus put his hand on my arm. “Gabe, you’re upset about your dad’s death. I understand that. But don’t make any big decisions right now, okay? Are you listening to me? Your dad was a Luddite. He didn’t want to change with the times, didn’t want to sell books online. I don’t blame him, but—that’s no excuse for you.”
“Our last two printed catalogs sold ninety percent.”
“That’s not the point,” he said. ”Don’t go to the south of France, don’t go to Italy. Come to New York. I think that’s what your dad would have wanted. My dad too. If we joined forces, we’d be a dominant force.”
“I can’t think about it now,” I said. “You just told me not to make any big decisions now.”
“But promise me you will think about it?”
“How did that go again, what you said at the funeral?”
“Baruch dayan emet—Blessed is the true judge.”
I repeated it after him: “Baruch dayan emet. I don’t get it.”
“I don’t get it either,” he said.
“Did you ever sell the Maimonides?” I asked.
“We sold it the next week, right after Bin Laden escaped at Tora Bora.”
“Who bought it?”
“Someone with a lot of money.”
Marcus’s flight left at five the next morning. I rode out to O’Hare with him in a Yellow Cab.
“Gabe,” he said on the way, why don’t you marry that woman?”
“It’s complicated.”
“It’s not complicated,” he said. “Listen to me. If you don’t want to marry that woman, just tell me and I won’t mention it again. I know she fucked you over a couple of times. But so what? It doesn’t matter. But if you do want to marry her, you’ve got to step up to the plate. She has to know that Borders is in trouble, serious trouble. Borders stock is trading so low now they may take it off the New York Stock Exchange. They had to sell off all their subsidiaries. Outsourcing their online business was a huge mistake, and that wasn’t the only one. It’s a shame, but that’s the way it is. Make her an offer she can’t refuse, throw her a lifeline. She’d be a fool not to take it. She’s, what, forty-four, forty-five? She’s got a daughter who wants to make nice with the Arabs. She’s paying tuition at the University of Chicago. Looks like you get on with the daughter okay. She seems like a smart kid. She told me you give her presents, books, talk to her. You’re the good uncle, right?”
A “lifeline,” I thought, was what Marcus had thrown me earlier. Would I be a fool not to take it?
“She’s a good kid,” I said—“Saskia. You know, I was there when she was born. I was the first one to hold her in my arms.”
“There you go,” Marcus said. “I’ll propose the first toast at the wedding.”
I asked the driver to take me back to the shop. I wasn’t ready to go home. In Dad’s office I lay down on the couch. I woke up about an hour later and had to go to the bathroom. I thought about Montaigne, who boasted that he could hold his water for eighteen hours. Maybe I could start over in the south of France, or in a villa in Tuscany. Maybe I could live life instead of reading about it. It had never occurred to me that I could choose my own way, that I wasn’t chained to old books.
When I came back from the bathroom, I booted up the computer, poured some Scotch in my empty glass, and started searching for properties in Italy, New York too, and France—the Dordogne, near Montaigne’s old estate. I thought maybe I’d crossed a line in my sleep. The more Scotch I sipped, the more I felt the need to get out of Hyde Park, away from Fifty-Seventh Street, away from the shop. The genius loci had gone. I was admiring a two-bedroom terraced house with a riverside garden in a popular market town (not named) between Sarlat and Bergerac.
Prêt à emménager
Maison mitoyenne de 2 chambres avec jardin au bord de la rivière 45m2 au cœur d’un bourg populaire entre Sarlat et Bergerac en Dordogne
Endroit charmant… grand investissement.
99000 € (frais d’agence inclus).
“The greatest thing in the world,” Montaigne says somewhere, “is to know how to belong to oneself.” That was the most important thing I remembered from Weintraub’s seminar. Could I learn how to belong to myself in this two-bedroom terraced house between Sarlat and Bergerac, not far from Montaigne’s old home? I was trying to picture myself in a little garden on the banks of a river when Delilah came bursting into the office. I closed the window immediately.
“Looking at pornography?” she asked. “This early in the morning? Shame on you.”
“I was looking at a house in France,” I said.
“Right,” she said. “That typescript of a ‘Simple’ story you gave Daddy,” she said. “Funny way to pay for a funeral. He wanted me to thank you. That’s all. I didn’t mean to interrupt your fantasy.”
“I told you,” I said. “I was looking at a house in France.”
“If you say so,” she said. “You don’t look too good. You been sitting here all night?”
“Marcus was here,” I said, “till about three o’clock. I rode out to the airport with him, got back about four thirty.”
“Blessed is the true judge,” she said. “Sounds better in Hebrew, but I like it. Better to bless the true judge than sit around feeling sorry for yourself.”
I was too tired to argue.
“Why don’t you go home? I’ll look after things here.”
“I’ll go in a minute,” I said. I clicked a computer key, but I couldn’t find the site with the two-bedroom terraced house with a riverside garden. I could, however, still picture the whitewashed walls and red window. Only €99,000. I could sell Grandpa Chaz’s Americana and buy a whole row of terraced houses. And then it hit me: I could do whatever I wanted to do, go wherever I wanted to go.
But now that Dad was dead, where did I want to go, and what did I want to do when I got there?
XI. THE SHOUT
(September 2009)
At the end of July, the following obituary appeared in The Caxtonian:
Charles Johnson, Jr. 1931–2009
Mr. Charles Johnson, Jr., died at his home on Tuesday, July 6. A memorial service will be held later at the bookstore on Fifty-Seventh Street that was founded by Charles Johnson, Sr., in 1934—one of the oldest bookstores in the Midwest.
His death signals the passing of an age in which a bookseller’s inventory was recorded on three-by-five cards, not on computers; in which the bookseller knew many of his customers personally and understood their different interests; in which a bookseller often worked with individual collectors to build collections that had a clear sense of direction.
The store on Fifty-Seventh Street held about 10,000 rare books when Charles joined his father (Chaz) in the business in 1955, at age sixteen, and now holds over 20,000 rare books and over 200,000 secondhand books.
A longtime member of the ABAA and the ILAB, Charles served for two terms as the President of the Midwest Chapter of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America. He a
lso served on the Board of Directors, the Ethics Committee and the Membership Committee of the National Chapter of the ABAA. He was an active member of the Caxton Club and regular contributor to The Caxtonian.
He is survived by his son, Gabriel, who joined his father and his grandfather in the business in 1981, after being graduated from the University of Chicago. A memorial service will be held later in September at Chas. Johnson & Son, Ltd. Antiquarian Booksellers, on Fifty-Seventh Street.
Olivia and Delilah had organized everything, even putting up copies of articles about the closing from the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. Olivia was standing in the doorway of the shop, wearing a white silk blouse and a dark blue skirt that fell just below her knees—right where she’d been standing the morning we started putting together the Orwell display back in 1984. I didn’t recognize her at first, and when I did, it was as if I were seeing her for the first time, standing in this doorway in her orange Balenciaga shoes and her “enchanted boat” sweatshirt.
“Everything under control?” I asked.
“Delilah’s gone to talk to Piccolo Mondo to see about getting more wine. A lot of people are here already. I’ll get the Piccolo Mondo people to help me push the chairs up. People can stand in the back. Your job is to stay here and greet them.”
“Like a greeter at a funeral? My own funeral?”
“Don’t be difficult, Gabe,” she said.
I stepped up to the plate and greeted members of the Caxton Club, Chicago authors, patrons of the shop and U of C professors, and people who came in off the street for a free glass of wine and an hors d’oeuvre. I greeted friends and neighbors and students. Everyone kept saying how sad it was, and I had to bite my tongue. If you’re so sad, I wanted to say, why are you buying your books online instead of coming into the shop? But that would have been preaching to the choir. The people who were there that night were the people who had come into the shop. They had a right to be sad.
I’d called Mrs. Ogilvie to make sure the Loft was free. I was planning to leave that night. I had to get away, away from the empty house, away from the doomed shop.
Some people dressed up, and some dressed down. Suits and ties, jeans and T-shirts. Parker Abrams looked splendid in a gray silk suit with a ribbed yellow tie. Delilah wore one of her yellow dresses, not bright yellow but earth-toned. Miss Sullivan, her cane hooked over the back of her chair in the front row, was all in black. Toni Glidden, the mayor of St. Anne, who still had a condo on Lincoln Park West—was looking very smart in a blue-black silk dress, the color of the ink I used in my Aurora fountain pen. A woman in the back was wearing a straw hat and a cream-colored dress. Her face glowed, like the face of a movie star. She was probably wearing some kind of expensive radioactive makeup that an ordinary person couldn’t buy in an ordinary shop.
I was glad when Dr. Connor, the Caxton Club president, finally stepped up to the microphone. After the usual squawks and hums, he began by remembering Grandpa Chaz and the early days of the shop, and moving on to Dad’s role in building our inventory in Modern Firsts, and then to the readings he used to organize, and his service to the Caxton Club and to other professional organizations, especially the Midwest Chapter of the ABAA.
I was supposed to bring up the rear, and it was getting late—the caterers would start clearing in half an hour, but I was disoriented and still had no idea what I was going to say. While Ruth MacDonald, the director of the library at St. Anne’s, was telling a story, the woman wearing a straw hat got up to leave. She was holding a book in one hand and had slung a huge leather purse over her shoulder. She walked straight toward me, looking at me boldly as if she were trying to intimidate me. I thought she intended to walk out of the shop with the book and I was prepared to stop her, threaten her with a citizen’s arrest, but when she got closer, I could see that she’d been crying.
“Gabe,” she whispered, and I realized that it was Shirley. She took my arm and pulled me outside. “I’m sorry, Gabe,” she said. “It’s just too sad. About your dad. I have to go. I’ve got to pick up my son at O’Hare, and I’m already late. You know I loved him, and I think he loved me too. Maybe I didn’t understand at the time, but I understand now. I saw the article about the memorial in the Trib.”
Up close I could see the fine lines that radiated from the corners of her eyes. “Shirley? Is it really you? Did you come all the way from Vegas?”
“No,” she said, “I came from Glencoe. I’m a suburban matron now. I married Angelo Salvatore.” Angelo Salvatore was a prominent defense lawyer; someone you called when you were in serious trouble. “We have two kids. One’s in law school at Stanford. The other—I just wanted to see the store before it closed. Angelo’s a big reader; he wanted to come, but he’s in LA. But you’d better get back in there.”
“Will I see you again?”
She laughed. “Probably not in this lifetime.”
“That’s what you said the last time.”
“Unless you come to Glencoe,” she said. “We’re in the phone book. Or commit a serious felony. Then you’ll want to talk to Angelo. He wanted to come tonight but something happened and he had to go to LA. They’re probably wondering what happened to you. I’d better go.”
“Shirley,” I said. “What was the book Dad give you? The one he left on his desk for you?”
She looked puzzled for a minute. Then she smiled. “To the Lighthouse,” she said.
“Did you read it?”
She laughed. “No, but I still have it.”
Olivia was coming out the door. I knew the look. She was goi derstand these passions at the time, but the rivalry between collectors is as fierce as the rivalry between the Cubs and the Cardinals, the Yankees and the Red Sox. Fiercer.
“Over the years, Dad and I helped Dr. Martin build his Kelmscott Press collection, till he had everything. I got a call from him about a week after Dad died. He was sorry he hadn’t come to the funeral, he said, but he couldn’t get out anymore. Now that he’d filled out his run of Kelmscott Press books, there was nothing for him to look forward to. He wanted to sell. ‘The kids don’t want them,’ he said. ‘They won’t know what to do with them when I’m gone, and I haven’t got much longer to go.’
“‘You ever think about giving it to a library? The whole collection, I mean. Your alma mater? Northwestern, isn’t it? Keep them all together?’
“‘The kids want the money,’ he said. ‘Besides, I don’t like the idea of locking the books up in an institution. Let other people have a chance to enjoy them. I’m starting to think of them as old sailors returning to the sea after a spell on dry land.’
“‘That’s a lovely image, Dr. Martin. I’ll remember that.’
“‘I want to keep them at home,’ he said, till I set sail myself, or whatever the hell happens at the end. I used to worry about it, but I don’t worry anymore. I think I’ve mixed up my metaphors,’ he said. ‘I used to worry about that too, but I’m eighty-six years old. I guess I can do whatever I want.’
“‘How do you want to handle the books?’
“‘Gabriel, you remember when you and your dad came back from New York with the Chaucer, and I met you at Union station?’
“‘Of course I remember.’
“‘That was probably the happiest day of my life. I remember everything about it. Your dad was his usual rumpled self, but you were wearing a vest suit and flared slacks and a wide belt. That was the year after your Mamma went away, wasn’t it. They were still working on the Sears Tower. You ever hear from her?’
“‘I got a letter after Dad died,’ I said. ‘We always figured she was living in Rome, but she’s living in Florence. She doesn’t like the bread there. No salt.’
“‘I’d like to see you again,’ he said. ‘I’d like to see your dad again too, but I guess that’s not going to happen now. But you and I can sit down together and take a last loo
k at the books, figure out what to do with them. Just the two of us. I’d like that. Give me a call.’
“‘I’d like that too,’ I said. ‘Give me a week or two, okay?’
“‘We’ll have a glass of whiskey and drink a toast to your dad, and we’ll figure something out,’ he said. And that was the last time we spoke. He was dead by the end of the week, and the Kelmscott Press books are going to return to the open market without my help. ‘Old sailors returning to the sea after a spell on dry land.’ It’s a lovely image, isn’t it? I hope you’ll remember it when you think of Dad and of Chas. Johnson & Son, Ltd. Antiquarian Booksellers.”
The only thing left to drink at the end of the evening, after the Piccolo Mondo staff had cleaned up, was a half bottle of pinot grigio, which Olivia had set aside on a shelf behind the cash register. We carried the bottle with us and walked through the empty shop, drinking out of plastic cups. We walked all four floors, up and down the aisles that opened off the atrium at the front, up the spiral staircases in the back of the shop, through Children’s Literature and Cookbooks and Mysteries, through Africa and Asia and the Americas, through Ancient Greece and Rome, through Art and Architecture, through Psychology and Biography, Philosophy and Religion, History of Science, Literature.
“You can feel the sadness in the old books,” I said, “in their spines, in their dust jackets, in their smell. It’s like feeling a glass of wine moving into your body, softening the focus.”
“I suppose people didn’t want to sell them,” Olivia said. And I thought she was right. People sold their books when they were desperate, facing bankruptcy or illness or divorce. Or death.
Or because the next generation—like the Martin kids—wasn’t interested in maintaining a private library.
Olivia pulled a book off a shelf and found a grocery list, which she read to me: “one bottle Perrier, white wine, tomatoes, supper, apples, green peppercorns (near the hot peppers), polpa, tortelloni. At the end it says, ‘Love—H.’ And after that: ‘Don’t forget the cottage cheese—medium curd.’ Underlined. Medium curd?”
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