Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  In the morning—Christmas morning—I opened up my computer and managed to locate the property in France, the place between Sarlat et Bergerac that was prêt à emménager, ready to move into—not far from where Montaige wrote his essais. Ninety-nine thousand euros seemed like a real bargain. Then I Googled the Monadnock Building and imagined Montaigne in the lobby, waiting for one of the slow elevators, or buying a hat at Optimo, or a shirt at Zeglio’s Custom Men’s Clothing, or getting his hair cut at the Metropolitan Barber Shop, or having an espresso in the Intelligentsia Café. I Googled condos on the Upper East Side, not far from where Marcus lived with his wife and his youngest daughter, tried to picture Montaigne walking through Central Park, or standing in front of Cohn & Son on Seventh Avenue, admiring the books in the window as he might have admired the unbound sheets of Plutarch’s Lives in the workshop of Simone Millanges on the rue St. James in Bordeaux. And then I called Mrs. Ogilvie and asked if the Loft was available, which of course it was, and would she turn some heat on. I threw some clothes in an overnight bag and drove to St. Anne.

  The Loft was warm enough when I got there, but there was nothing to eat, and I was hungry. I unpacked my overnight bag and drove back to the highway, to the Casino, which I had never visited. It was pretty amazing. Huge. Over four hundred rooms and suites. I wasn’t looking for the “pulse-pounding experiences” that the Casino promised: change your life by winning $500,000 at the wheel of fortune® or at super spin™. Or you could go to the specially designed high-limit slot area for “maximum exhilaration.” This is just like a book fair, I thought. My pulse was already pounding; I was as close as I wanted to be to “maximum exhilaration.”

  I ate a 42-day-dry-aged steak at the Copper Rock Steak House for a very reasonable price, and then I experienced some exhilaration by losing a hundred dollars betting on the red at the roulette table. But the sight of so many people pouring money into slot machines canceled out the exhilaration. You don’t even have to put coins into the machines. You just create an account up front and then keep pushing buttons on your machine till it tells you you’ve run out of money. But, in fact, the Casino brought a lot of people to St. Anne, provided two thousand jobs, and put a lot of money into the Pokagon Revenue Sharing Fund.

  I had to make several calls in the morning before I managed to locate a real estate agent. The woman who answered the phone at Shoreline Realty said they were closed for the long Christmas weekend; she’d just come in to pick up some files, but she agreed to wait for me. She turned out to be a very attractive woman, part schoolmarm, part night club hostess. She was dressed in jeans and a man’s white shirt. Her dirty blond hair was in a tangle. “Merry Christmas,” she said.

  It was a medium-size office. Two desks in front. Two comfortable chairs. Maps on the walls. Cubicles farther back. Lakefront properties with photos listed on a large bulletin board.

  “Nothing under half a million?” I asked.

  “Not on the lake,” she said. The agent was tall and blond, hadn’t put on her makeup but she looked good without it. She offered coffee. “It’s good coffee,” she said. “Hasn’t been sitting around. I made it after you called this morning.”

  I had trouble explaining the location. “Just on the other side of the state park,” I said, and finally she said, “Oh. That must be the old Palmisano place.” She laughed. “Sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t laugh, but… I don’t have that listing, and I don’t know who does. I didn’t even know it was on the market.”

  “There’s a for sale sign in the window.”

  “Are you sure we’re talking about the same place? Looks like it’s going to slide into the lake?”

  “You could say that, I suppose, or you could say it’s cantilevered out over the edge of the bluff.”

  “Look, Mr. Johnson. I’m not in the business of discouraging buyers, but—you’re asking for trouble.” She paused. “I’m in the business of selling houses. Well, it’s more complicated than that. It’s more like matchmaking. You want people to be happy in their new home. Let me show you one of the new condos. They’re really lovely. You’d have a fantastic view of the lake. Pool, sauna, meeting rooms, doorman.”

  “I see where this is going.”

  “I see it too, and it’s not what I’d like to see.”

  “Who has the listing?”

  “I don’t think anyone does. Look, you’ll never get a mortgage because you’ll never get insurance.”

  “Lloyd’s of London?”

  “Yes.” I’d expected her to laugh at the joke, but instead she named three or four insurance companies up there with Lloyd’s of London. “But you’ll pay twenty-five K a year for it.”

  “What if I just don’t get insurance?”

  “You won’t get a mortgage.”

  “What if I pay cash?”

  “You’re prepared to pay cash?”

  I nodded.

  “And if it slides into the lake?”

  “Aren’t there companies that stabilize bluffs?”

  “Groins, revetments… They help, and there’s new stuff coming down the pike. Ecofriendly, native plants, diverting the ground water. But you still won’t get insurance.”

  “Can I at least look at the place? It ought to be cheap, given the housing market, all those empty condos.”

  “The market’s coming back. The crisis has brought people together. And the new mayor has got yuppies and locals on the same side for a change. She used to be an editor at Chicago Magazine.”

  The new mayor, I explained to her, was, in fact, an old friend—Toni Glidden—but I don’t think she heard me. Or maybe she didn’t believe me. “What about the Palmisano Place?”

  “Right. That house shouldn’t be on the market at all. Did the for sale sign list a realtor?”

  I shook my head. “It was a hand-lettered sign in the window.”

  “Let me make a few calls. Old Man Palmisano’s still alive. Augustus Palmisano. He’s out at The Dunes. Nice place. Upscale. Top of the line, not bad at all. Good food. Car service will drive you into town. He’s not going to be easy to deal with. He was a broker on the Benton Harbor Market. Indicted more than once for tax evasion, and some things worse than that. Maybe a lot worse. All kinds of rumors. His uncle was Eddie from Chicago.”

  “My grandfather used to talk about Eddie from Chicago. You’d think the nephew’d be glad to sell.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “You want to convey my offer, or shall I find someone else?”

  “Let me make the calls. I’ll get back to you. Are you prepared to make an offer?”

  “I’d like to sell my house first, but that shouldn't be a problem.”

  “So there’s no rush.”

  “I’d like to know, that’s all. Like to have a figure.”

  “Give me a week. I’ll call you in Chicago.”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “Saturday?”

  “Why not? I’m here now.”

  “Did you get a firm figure?” I asked the real estate agent—Anne Marie—on Saturday morning. I hadn’t been able to pin her down on the phone. Now we were on the way to see the house. She was driving a red Jeep Wrangler, two doors with a canvas top and a tire bolted on the back. Instead of driving along LaSalle Road, she took Duval Street out to the highway and headed north.

  “First you have to see it,” she said. “Then we’ll talk.”

  “You talked to someone.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “How can you ‘not exactly’ talk to someone?”

  “I talked to a lawyer.”

  “I see.”

  “But you have the key? So you must have been out to see Signor Palmisano?”

  “Yes. But he’s not sure he wants to sell.”

  “Who put up the sign in the window
?”

  “It’s not clear.”

  “Is it for sale or not?”

  “You won’t know till you make an offer.”

  “I could stop by The Dunes and talk to Signor Palmisano.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not professional.”

  “What do you know about the house?”

  “It’s Finnish. Originally. The original owners were Finnish, moved down here from the UP in 1939. The house was built with precut, machine-planed logs. I guess you could say it captures the drama of the forest on the east and the drama of the lake on the west. At least that’s what I’d say if I were the acting agent. The logs for the sauna house were trucked down from the Upper Peninsula.”

  “It’s beautiful, whatever it is.”

  “And the sauna’s a plus. You can’t really see it from the beach. Everybody in Finland has one. But then the husband died and the wife moved back to the UP. Go figure.”

  “It doesn’t look like a house with a lot of secrets. Except for the sauna. That might have a few secrets. It’s not locked. My friend and I went inside. I’d be moving from a house with a lot of history to a house with no history.”

  “It’s got plenty of history, though it’s hard to sort out the facts. Well, it was owned by Signor Palmisano, but it was his uncle who put up the money. “Eddie from Chicago. He was involved in some kind of feud with the New York Mafia. Quite a legend. No one ever saw him. They say he was at the going-away party for Al Capone at the Hotel Vincent in Benton Harbor. Signor Palmisano says he was there too, but he was pretty young, so he doesn’t remember much, but he’s got a lot of stories.”

  The driveway, originally an extension of Pier Road, was bordered by huge maples and oaks. It had curved off to the north and then zigzagged down the bluff to one of the lumber piers that had been built out into the lake. We crossed a culvert over a small stream, frozen now, that flowed into the park and emptied into the lake. The road had been plowed up to the property line and no further. “Signor Palmisano wanted to sell the house for a teardown, but the lot isn’t deep enough to build a McMansion. You can’t build that close to the bluff now. He tried to sue the state to get a variance, but he didn’t get anywhere.”

  The yard hadn’t been mowed in the fall, and dry weeds stuck up through the snow cover.

  “From here,” I said, “the house looks just like a house. From the beach it looks like it’s getting ready to step down the bluff, like that painting Nude Descending a Stairway.”

  “I think it’s Staircase,” the agent said. “Nude Descending a Staircase. And in the painting the nude is already halfway down the stairs, or staircase.”

  “Post and beam construction,” I said. “It’s not going to go anywhere. You can see the piers are sunk back from the bluff. I love the wide overhangs, the old-fashioned Finnish wooden shutters on the outside to protect against storms. A person could be happy here.”

  “It’s going to be dark inside,” she said, “unless you go around and open those shutters on the lake side.”

  “The electricity’s on, right?”

  “So we can turn the lights on.”

  The house was beautiful—a big kitchen with a restaurant stove, a balcony that ran the width of the house, a billiard room in the back (or the front, depending). A reading nook at the northwest corner of the living room, cantilevered out over the edge of the bluff. “‘Cantilevered’ is a good word,” I said. “You could sit here and look north and south as well as west. There’s room for a low bookcase and two comfortable chairs.”

  I liked the word “cantilevered” and used it several times.

  “It’s not really cantilevered,” she said. “And it’s not exactly sticking over the edge, not yet. But the bluff has been eaten away underneath.”

  “I prefer ‘cantilevered.’”

  “I think he’s asking half a million.”

  “Offer him fifty thousand.”

  “I’d be embarrassed to do that. Besides, he’d think you’re joking.”

  “Do you think I’m joking?”

  “I don’t know enough about you to venture an opinion.”

  “So you’re not prepared to convey my offer? He probably wants to get out from under. And aren’t you obligated to convey my offer? Like a lawyer. A lawyer has to advise his client that the prosecution’s put an offer on the table, right? Even if the lawyer’s going to advise his client not to take it.”

  “I’m not a lawyer, and no, I don’t have any legal obligation to convey your offer. And you’re not my client anyway, not till you sign a contract.”

  “You don’t think you’re under an obligation?”

  “You’re prepared to pay cash?”

  “Cash as in used hundred dollar bills?”

  She laughed. “No. Cash as in a certified check or a bank transfer. I can’t advise you to make this offer, and I couldn’t advise Mr. Palmisano to accept it.”

  “I won’t have the money available till I sell my house. You don’t want me to talk to Signor Palmisano?”

  “That’s my job.”

  “I’ve got a lot to think about,” I said. But it seemed to me that I was contemplating the implications of a decision that had already been made.

  I spent a week at the dining room table with the books from Grandpa Chaz’s North Americana collection spread out in front of me, arranged in chronological order. These books had come from the estate of Henri Bruneau, who’d died of heart failure during the banking panic of 1931. Dealers and collectors who’d been paying top-drawer prices for books and whole libraries at the end of the twenties were forced to sell. Grandpa Chaz had been scouting for Frances Hamill and Margery Barker, whose shop on Michigan Avenue contained the best rare book inventory in the Midwest, and with some help from these two women, he put enough money together to buy Bruneau’s entire library. He’d been going through the rare books collection, which wasn’t all that he’d hoped for, when Bruneau’s sister, who’d come from France, said, “Hey, wasn’t there another house? Where Papa was cared for while he was dying?” Only she said it in French. Grandpa Chaz, who spoke Canadian French, liked to imitate her when he told the story: Hé, il n’y a pas une autre maison? Où Papa été soigné pendant qu’il mourait? There was, in fact, another, smaller, house on the edge of the property, where two servants had cared for M. Bruneau as he was dying, and that’s where Grandpa Chaz found a copy of the Al Aaraaf—in a locked vault, a big metal door in the wall, like something you’d see in a movie—and about three hundred other high-end books. All these books were sold years ago, of course, except for Grandpa Chaz’s private cache of Americana, which was now spread out on the table in front of me.

  These were important books, several of them worth more than the Al Aaraaf, which is now in the rare book collection in the Regenstein Library—the early voyages of discovery, the Native American portfolios—portraits of Indian chiefs, accounts of dress, of customs, of treaties, maps of the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys. The earliest attempts to honor and preserve Native American culture, or cultures. I didn’t think there was a single library, apart from the Library of Congress and the Newberry, that owned all these books, and I wasn’t one hundred percent sure about the Newberry.

  I looked at some of the asking prices on ABE: $78,000 for the Melchisedech Thévenot; $100,000 for James Otto Lewis’s Aboriginal Portfolio; $420,000 for a copy of the Champlain’s Voyages with a rare double sheet engraved map (missing from our copy): “Add to basket.” “Free shipping.”

  “Free shipping”?

  There were only three or four Americana dealers in the country who handled books like these. I knew them; we spoke to each other at book fairs. But I wasn’t one of them. I thought of a television show that I used to watch with Mamma up in her little sewing room. The Millionaire. A man i
n a suit and tie would show up at someone’s front door with a cashier’s check for $1 million, tax free, and by the end of the show, whoever got the $1 million would be miserable. I would have to watch my step.

  On Monday morning I called the real estate agent—Anne-Marie—in St. Anne and told her to offer Signor Palmisano $50,000 for the house on the lake. She wouldn’t do it. “Offer him a hundred thousand,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said, “but you’re going to have to do better than that, and you’re going to have to start thinking about a private mortgage. I can help you with that. ”

  “Call me,” I said.

  That afternoon I walked over to Borders to see Olivia, back from Ann Arbor. She was at her desk. She held up the book she was looking at: No Fear Shakespeare.

  When I told her what I’d done, she said, “Gabe, you need a minder, or a psychiatrist.” But she didn’t say it in a mean way. She wished me luck, she touched wood, and she put No Fear Shakespeare on a cart next to her desk.

  The first agent I talked to—from Hyde Park Realty—told me to get rid of all the books. The next day I found a more congenial real estate agent, and two weeks later, I had a tentative offer from a Mr. Al-Dajani, who was going to be the new head of cardiology at Bernard Mitchell. I never met Mr. Al-Dajani, but Mrs. Al-Dajani came from Cleveland to look at the house and fell love with it right away. A week later we had a deal. The Al-Dajanis wouldn’t be moving to Hyde Park till the first of June. They were both from Amman, Jordan, but they’d met in Cleveland and had lived in Cleveland for forty years. They had three children, a son and two daughters, and several grandchildren, who liked to visit. Which was why, she explained, they needed such a big house.