Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  I capped my pen, put my computer to sleep, and went downstairs. My first visitor was Anne-Marie, the real estate agent. She was wearing a striped linen shirt over a dark blue T-shirt, white jeans, a pair of large-lens sunglasses pushed up onto her forehead, and I recognized an invitation. I asked myself, “What would Montaigne do?” And I answered, “Why not?”

  “I just came by to see if the house was still standing,” she said.

  “Coffee?” I said.

  She took one look at the bookcases surrounding the room, the Jefferson bookcases two deep, and at the books spread out on the table and said. “You used to run a bookstore in Chicago, isn’t that right?”

  “In a former life,” I said.

  “I love the smell of old books.”

  “Hundreds of volatile organic compounds,” I said, “ released from the decaying paper and the ink and the adhesives. My grandfather could make a good guess at a book’s age simply by smelling it.”

  “Like a wine expert,” she said, reaching for a copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town on the Prairie on the top shelf of one of the bookcases. I almost stopped her, but she knew enough not to tug the book off the shelf by the headcap. “I thought it was Little House on the Prairie,” she said.

  “Little House was the first of a series,” I said. “Little Town came later.”

  She held the book to her nose and sniffed it. “Grassy notes,” she said. “Hints of vanilla and almonds, acidic finish.”

  “I’ll make a pot of espresso,” I said.

  “I’m thinking I could show you some properties,” she said, putting Little Town back on the shelf. “There’s still space in the old depot, but there won’t be for long. That would be ideal for a bookstore. There’s already a coffee shop lined up, and an art gallery. You need to speak to the mayor, but she’s in Chicago right now, and I think she’s planning to go to Nepal to stay or sit for a while in a Buddhist monastery. Sounds crazy to me, but who knows. Maybe there’s something to it. I can’t picture Toni in a Buddhist monastery.”

  “I can,” I said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I keep forgetting that you already know her.”

  It was easy to picture Toni in a Buddhist monastery, and it was easy to picture the depot too—an old-fashioned red brick Michigan Central station, sprawling out along the tracks, with narrow windows and separate waiting rooms for men and women. Separate baggage rooms too, though men and women were no longer separated. Mamma and I had waited on Friday afternoons to pick up Dad and Grandpa Chaz. The depot had been built at a time when St. Anne dreamed of competing with Chicago, but it lost out to St. Joe farther north because the St. Joe River was more navigable than the St. Anne.

  Amtrak, unwilling to maintain the building, had sold the depot to the city for $10, and it had become part of the development project.

  “What do you do all day?” she asked.

  “I’m working on a translation of Montaigne.”

  “‘To study philosophy is to learn how to die.’ Reverend Sarah has a sign in her office at the Episcopal Church. It’s on her bulletin board.”

  “Yes, but that’s Montaigne quoting Cicero.”

  “This town needs a bookstore,” she said. “Walden Books closed out at the mall. The college bookstore doesn’t have any books. Just textbooks. And they rent them. Can you believe it? The nearest Barnes & Noble is in South Bend. I could show you some properties.”

  “These are ‘rare’ books,” I said. “It’s a different kind of business.”

  “Duh!” she said. At least she didn’t say she’d rather live life than read about it. “Let me at least show you the depot. I’ll pick you up in the morning.”

  The restoration of the old depot, on Duval and Merchant in the center of town, was being funded largely by a grant from the state. I didn’t have to look too hard to see that it was a wonderful space, something I hadn’t thought about as a child while Mamma and I were waiting for Dad and Grandpa Chaz. There was a central corridor or atrium. The framing was already in place for a coffee shop and an art gallery. Workmen were installing a new cabin in the old elevator shaft, by the front door, so we had to enter through the side door. If you picture the depot as a cathedral, the wide aisle that runs from the east side (the parking lot) to the tracks on the west side would be the nave. The longer, narrower corridor that bisects the nave would be the transept.

  “My mother and I used to ride up and down in the elevator,” I said. “She’d say, ‘Primo piano, per favore,’ if we were going up, or ‘Pianterreno, per favore,’ if we were coming down,” and I’d push the right button.

  “She was Italian?”

  “Right, and she always spoke to me in Italian.”

  “So you’re half Italian. What about the other half?”

  “A mix. My father’s mother was French Canadian. What about you?”

  “Look,” she said. “They’re testing the elevator.”

  We watched as the elevator door closed. In about sixty seconds we heard the door open on the second floor.

  “A law firm has already rented the north half of the second floor,” she said. “You want to see if we can ride up in the elevator?”

  “I can wait,” I said. “You’re handling all the rentals?”

  She nodded. “I just poked around on the web a little,” she said. “Googled ‘rare bookstores.’ There are some pretty fancy bookstores out there.”

  “Right,” I said, “but mostly it’s mom-and-pop operations.”

  She dropped me off at home and waited for me to invite her in. I walked around the Jeep to the driver’s side and stood outside her window and we chatted for a minute. I was tempted. It was time to cocker up my genius and start living free, but I was feeling shaky.

  Anne-Marie picked me up at home again a week later, and we visited the depot a second time. It was coming right along. We rode up and then down in the elevator. Work had not begun on the second floor—office suites—but on the ground floor you could see the shape of the coffee shop, and the art gallery, and a jewelry store, and a children’s clothing store. Anne-Marie had more information. And she said she knew for a fact that I wasn’t the only party interested in the space—three large rooms on the east side, along the tracks. “Two guys from Chicago are interested in opening a brewpub,” she said. “And it’s an ideal site for a new community center. But nothing’s going to happen till the mayor gets back from Nepal.”

  She drove me home. It was five o’clock. I offered her a glass of wine.

  Inside the house she headed straight for the books spread out on the library table, and I didn’t blame her. They weren’t the most beautiful books in the room, but they were interesting, powerful. All twenty volumes of Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian were stacked on one end of the table. I showed her the signatures in Volume I, Curtis’s and Theodore Roosevelt’s. And we looked at some of the photographs.

  “What did your grandfather want with all these books?”

  “You mean, why didn’t he sell them? I think he was looking for accounts of the Garden of Eden. Before the white men destroyed it. He and his pal Claude Duval.”

  “Did they find it?”

  “Yes and no. Their real animus was against the British. They thought that the French were in tune with the natives in the Ohio Country—everything between the Great Lakes and the Appalachians. The French respected the Indian customs, they adopted native diplomatic protocols, they understood ritual acts of reciprocity, they understood the importance of kinship networks and extended kinship ties, they accepted the sovereignty of the different nations: the Potawatomi, the Odawa, the Ojibwa, and about half a dozen others. The British not only trampled on all these things, they used biological warfare. Blankets infected with smallpox.”

  “And if the French had defeated the British?”

 
“In the French and Indian War? We’d probably be speaking French,” I said. “Or Algonquin. An Algonquin Grammar sold at Sotheby’s last March for over five hundred eighty-five thousand dollars.”

  She opened her eyes wide and then closed them tight and then opened them again. “You’re kidding,” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “Well, that would probably rule out teaching Algonquin in the public schools.”

  “It went way over the estimate,” I said.

  I showed her the first mention of Lake Michigan in print—“Lac de Michigami oú Illinois”—in Melchisedech Thévenot’s. Recueil de Voyages (Paris, 1682). “Thévenot invented the spirit level,” I said, “and wrote the first book on how to swim. It’s here. Somewhere.” I opened James Otto Lewis’s Aboriginal Portfolio to a hand-colored drawing of Me-No-Quet in full regalia. “He was a Potawatomi chief,” I said. “Lewis painted this at the Treaty of Fort Wayne. Three million acres ceded to the federal government.”

  “You ought to sell it to the Casino,” she said. “The Pokagon Band was part of the Potawatomi. The Pokagon Fund spreads a lot of money around this town, five or six million last year. They could display it in the Casino.”

  “That’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” I said. In the kitchen I opened the refrigerator and poured two glasses of pinot grigio from a bottle that was already open.

  “I’m just telling you,” she said, carrying her wine back into the living room and starting to pick up, with one hand, the copy of the Gettysburg Address I’d bought from Helen Barstow.

  “Careful,” I said. “Let me take your glass. “There’s no place to put anything down in here,” I said. “Not till I get the books sorted out. I’ll put our glasses down in the kitchen.”

  “Is this the Gettysburg Address?” she asked.

  “Lincoln’s part is at the end,” I said. “Last two pages. The rest is Everett’s speech.”

  “Huh,” she said, turning to the back of the book. “‘Four score and seven years ago,’” she read. She read it to herself, all the way to the end. “Where’s ‘With malice toward none’?” she asked.

  “That’s in the Second Inaugural Address,” I said.

  “I’ve always liked that,” she said. “‘With malice toward none.’”

  We had a second glass of wine and went up to my study to look at the Montaigne. I told her about buying it at the Boston Fair.

  The Montaigne was on my desk, where I’d been working. She touched one of the raised bands on the spine with a fingertip. I opened it to the arrière boutique passage, which I had bookmarked.

  She looked at me. “Is this some kind of a test? Because if it is…”

  “Of course not,” I said. But I suppose it was. In a way.

  “I can read it, you know… Four years of high school French, three years in college, junior year abroad.” She started to read: “‘Il se faut reserver une arrière boutique toute nostre, toute franche, en laquelle nous establissons nostre vraye liberté et principale retraicte et solitude.’”

  She read confidently, voicing her r’s in the back of her throat.

  “Very nice,” I said.

  “I can understand it,” she said, “but the spelling’s funny.”

  “It’s ‘Middle’ French,” I said. “But it’s closer to Modern French than Chaucer is to Modern English.”

  She sat down on the old sofa that I’d salvaged from Dad’s office and tucked her knees under her. I sat down next to her. “There’s something sexy about French,” she said. She raised one shoulder and then the other, not a shrug but a little dance.

  “My dad had a sign on his office door,” I said. “‘I’d turn back if I were you.’ I have it here somewhere. To remind me.”

  “Je ne veux pas revenir en arrière.”

  “Moi non plus,” I said. “We’ll have to use this sofa for a bed. The bedrooms are too full of books. You can’t get to the beds.”

  “Where do you sleep?”

  “Right here,” I said.

  The next morning I translated several pages of the Essais, not moving steadily from page to page as I had planned to do—the argument didn’t go in a straight line, so why should I?—but jumping around from chapter to chapter, just translating whatever matched my mood, becoming a different person in the act of reading each chapter.

  In the afternoon I drove into town. I wasn’t a stranger in St. Anne, of course. I enjoyed mixing with the first of the summer people, down by the marina—young mothers with children, people like me in the middle of their lives, older people too, all of us admiring the beautiful boats in the water and dreaming. I enjoyed fantasizing about the used catamaran at the Boat Factory, like the one I’d learned to sail on when I was a boy. I enjoyed drinking a cup of coffee at Atkinson’s, listening to Jack Donnelly, the harbor master, tell astonishing stories about the corruption in the Department of Harbors and Marine Services in Chicago, where he’d worked for years. The last four directors he’d served under, before he became the director himself, had wound up in federal prisons, the last two on his testimony. He’d been terminated in 1993 for stepping on too many toes, but he hadn’t been indicted! I enjoyed dropping by the college library and chatting with Ruth MacDonald, or stopping on the way home to pick up a bottle of wine at Vitale’s, where Signora Vitale always asked about Mamma. I enjoyed drinking a glass of Michigan wine with Ben Warren, who had collected all sixty-five books in the Rivers of America series, published between 1937 and 1974, and was working on his own book about the St. Anne River. And I enjoyed Anne-Marie’s visits. She always took me by surprise.

  My good life was taking shape: a beautiful house on the lake, a library full of rare books, meaningful work (Montaigne), plenty of money, a girlfriend (so much less complicated than loving Olivia).

  It was the good life, but was it good enough?

  Je ne creins point à dire, Montaigne writes at the end of the essay “On Cruelty”: “I am not afraid to admit that my nature is so tender, so childish, that I cannot well refuse my dog the play he offers me or asks of me outside the proper time.” Even though I’d been looking for it, the passage took me by surprise. Like a poem that puts something into words for you, something you’ve known all along. How could you live the good life without a dog? I still had Punch’s vet records in my file. The black urn holding his ashes was in the garage.

  I drove to the animal shelter on Duval, halfway to Harding’s Friendly Market, and came away with a medium-size black-and-tan German shepherd–Lab mix named Bowser and a supply of HeartGard for heart worms and Frontline for fleas and ticks. The HeartGard he could have with his food. The Frontline I would have to rub into his fur between his shoulder blades. I wrote everything down.

  At the pet store on Merchant Street, I bought a large bag of expensive dog food, an expensive leash, an expensive collar, and an expensive Kong toy. I figured I had enough bowls at home for food and water.

  I didn’t care for the name “Bowser” and spent the rest of the day trying to discover the name of Montaigne’s dog. I searched through the French in a PDF file that I’d downloaded, searching for chien. Then I paged through Donald Frame’s translation. No luck. Most of the references to dogs were in the form of historical anecdotes or of general truths. I telephoned the French Department at the University of Chicago—an important center for Montaigne studies—and spoke to the secretary. She laughed. Five minutes later I got a call from the head of the department. Professor Marchand. He laughed too. “Montaigne didn’t have a dog,” he said. “He had a cat, but the cat didn’t have a name. He had hunting dogs, but he didn’t have a pet dog, and the hunting dogs didn’t have names.”

  I read him the passage in French.

  “You’ve got a decent accent,” he said.

  “I spent a summer in Bordeaux,” I said. “With the family of a school friend. This
passage doesn’t sound like he’s talking about his hunting dogs. You’re sure Montaigne didn’t have a dog?”

  “I’m sure,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll figure out something.”

  I tied a red bandanna around Bowser’s neck and we went down to the beach for the first time. He was very handsome in the soft light, filtered through a thin ribbon of clouds just above the horizon in the west. I took his collar off and we had a serious talk. I’d thought I’d change his name to Bookman, which was on Grandpa Chaz’s tombstone, but then I thought “Booker” sounded better. And Booker it was. “Booker,” I said. “I’m not going to keep you tied up, so you’re going to have to make a choice. You can stake out your territory. There’s plenty of room. You can come down to the lake. You can mess around, play with other dogs on the beach. But if you run away, I’m not going to chase after you. Do you understand? I repeated it in French. Je ne vais pas courir après toi.”

  “D’accord,” he said—two quick barks—and took off running on the hard-packed sand, heading north. “Booker,” I called after him, but of course he wasn’t used to his new name. “Bowser,” I shouted, but he was gone.

  He came back in fifteen minutes and we walked south together all the way to the Loft, about two miles, so I thought we had a good understanding. On the way back, as we approached our own stairs, Mrs. Ogalvie’s dogs—a big brown Lab named Barley and a big poodle, Whitefoot, who had not been shaved, and who’d been following us at a distance—joined us. They touched noses with Booker and sniffed butts. I thought they might be planning to get together in the morning.

  It was six o’clock when we walked into the kitchen. I fed Booker and he cleaned his bowl. We looked at each other. I gave him a couple of baby carrots, tossing them into the air. Neither one hit the floor. He investigated the house while I cooked some pasta. I still had Mamma’s only cookbook, Tavolo d’Oro, and thought I could learn to make some of the southern dishes that Mamma used to make. Tonight it was spaghetti cacio e pepe—Romano cheese and lots of pepper. I mixed the cheese and pepper in with some thick spaghetti and added a little of the hot pasta water to bind everything together. It wasn’t my favorite dish, but made me feel at home.