Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  Booker patrolled the house a second time, and didn’t come back to sit with me until he had completed a thorough inspection. I put the leftover pasta in his bowl and he wolfed it down.

  I’d forgotten to buy a dog bed. That night I spread out a blanket on the floor. Booker managed to wrap himself up in the blanket so that he was totally covered, except for his long snout.

  The next morning Booker rendezvoused on the beach with Barley and Whitefoot, herding them this way and that, like a true German shepherd. I walked along the beach by myself and was relieved when, after twenty minutes or so, he joined me. I walked behind him. He kept looking back over his shoulder to make sure I was still there. The water was too cold for me, but not for Booker, who plunged right in to retrieve the piece of driftwood that I tossed into the incoming waves. Back in the kitchen, he stood very still while I toweled him off. I filled his bowl, poached an egg. I translated a page of the Essais and then we drove into town and walked along Water Street to look at the boats in the Municipal Marina. It was the end of May. Summer people were starting to arrive and the boat ramp was busy. I sat on a bench in front of a store called Inner Peace and watched a police cruiser—a converted bass boat—taking on fuel at the gas dock and thought about the passage I’d translated that morning: “One man who was being led to the gallows said they must not go by a certain street, since there was a danger that a certain merchant might have him collared for an old debt.” Well, I thought, we’re all in the same boat, but I didn’t pursue this thought because Booker had attracted a handful of children and their athletic mothers. After half an hour, Booker indicated that he was ready to go. At home we ate a snack and then followed an unmarked trail into the woods. The forest floor was covered with old leaves, cast down by the wind; but the trees were leafing out, bringing forth a new generation to replace the old. Wildflowers too, blue and white. I had Grandpa Chaz’s Michigan Trees: A Guide to the Trees of Michigan and the Great Lakes Region, by Burton V. Barnes and Warren H. Wagner, Jr., University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1981. But I didn’t open it. “Everything has a name,” I said to Booker, “I should have listened to Grandpa Chaz when he tried to teach me, but right now I’m going to make do with the little store of names I’d picked up on Blackstone, between the Midway and Fifty-Seventh Street: oak, hickory, maple, gingko.”

  “D’accord,” he said, a sort of stutter-bark.

  Some of these trees had been standing at the time of the American Revolution. They had survived the first wave of logging in the nineteenth century because the loggers had been looking for white pine, not hardwoods. They had survived the second wave, in the thirties and forties, because the Duval family had gone bankrupt in the Depression and couldn’t afford to pay the real estate taxes on the land, and so had given everything north of Pier Road to the state for a state park—everything except the plot of land at the end of the road that they’d already sold to the Finnish people from the UP.

  Booker was waiting for me every morning when I got out of the shower, eager to lead me down to the beach. He would press his shoulder against my leg as I pulled on my pants, and bang my knees with his pointy snout as I put on my shoes, and we soon developed a comfortable routine that gave me a reassuring sense that time was going in a circle. At the bottom of the stairs, he would exercise his free will. If he pooped right away, he would turn to the left, toward St. Anne. Otherwise he’d turn right, toward St. Joe.

  Montaigne was waiting for me too, after breakfast. Montaigne and Seneca and Lucretius, and Pliny the Elder, and the rest of the gang I’d invited into my library. We were like a gang of booksellers talking shop before the opening bell of a book fair, wondering if there was time to grab another cup of coffee. Or enjoying a glass of whiskey after the closing bell.

  XV. YOU CAN’T

  ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT

  (June 2010)

  I’d made the mistake of telling Anne-Marie—pillow talk—about the estimates from the auction houses for Grandpa Chaz’s Americana, and Anne-Marie told Reverend Sarah—the “dynamic” priest at St. Anne’s Episcopal—and Reverend Sarah told others, and by the end of the summer, Anne-Marie was not the only one who thought it was my civic obligation to open a bookstore in the old depot. Space was still available.

  Mayor Toni proposed a dinner at Stefano’s—three formidable women and one formidable man, and me. Toni, Ruth MacDonald, the head of special collections at the college library, Reverend Sarah, the dynamic priest at St. Anne’s Episcopal, and Ben Warren, the former chair of the Chicago Board of Trade. Ben was a family friend, a member of the Caxton Club, and someone who knew a great deal about the rare book business, so I was sorry to learn at the last minute that he wouldn’t be able to make it.

  On my way to the restaurant, outside a bar on the corner of Marquette and Indiana—the Corner Connection—I heard a woman cry out: “You can’t always get what you want.” I thought she was shouting at me, taunting me about Olivia. Her voice was high pitched but not quite a screech. “Speak for yourself,” I shouted through the open door.

  Reverend Sarah was standing in front of Potts Hardware, next to the restaurant, looking at something in the window.

  “Reverend Sarah,” I said. “Reverend” didn’t sound comfortable. What I knew about her, I knew from Anne-Marie, though she had paid a pastoral visit back in April to invite me to become a part of the St. Anne (Episcopal) family. “May I ask you a personal question?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “How did you decide on ‘Reverend’ Sarah?”

  “As opposed to what?” she said. “‘Father’ Sarah? ‘Mother’ Sarah?”

  “How about ‘Sister’ Sarah. That has a nice ring to it.”

  “I’m not a nun. Actually, It was a choice between ‘Reverend’ and ‘Pastor.’ I chose ‘Reverend.’”

  I wasn’t sure how to move the conversation forward. “I planted eight tomato plants back at the end of May,” I said. “They already have a lot of blossoms. My grandfather always said that the sandy soil in Michigan was good for tomatoes. Sandy and acidic.”

  “We’ve got about twenty plants at the church,” she said.

  I had a feeling that something was wrong.

  “I buy all my nails and screws here,” she said, nodding at the display window. “I’m looking at the rolling tool chest. It’s beautiful, isn’t it.”

  “You have to do your own repairs?”

  “My father was a carpenter,” she said.

  “Doesn’t the church have a custodian?” I asked.

  “Yes, we’ve got one, and we’ve got a sexton too, but I like the physical work. I feel that I know what I’m doing when I’m patching drywall or changing sash weights, or putting a new door on a kitchen cabinet. I’m in my area of competence.”

  “And your mother?”

  “A seamstress. Made all my clothes. Now I have to do my own repairs and make my own clothes.”

  “I thought they had special stores for priests’ clothes.”

  She laughed. “Not if you want a blouse with breast darts or curved panels.”

  I didn’t know what “breast darts” were, and I didn’t ask.

  “Are we waiting for Toni and Ruth?”

  “Actually,” she said, “Ruth is already inside. Toni’s late, but she’s always late. I was waiting for you. I wanted to have a word with you. I even thought of making another pastoral visit.” She looked me right in the eye. “This is a little awkward, and I hope you won’t take it in the wrong way, but I just wanted to be sure that you know that Anne-Marie is married.”

  “Anne-Marie?”

  “The real estate agent who sold you your house. The woman you’ve been bonking.”

  Whoa, I thought. “Of course,” I said. “Yes,” I said. “She’s a big fan of yours. But why are you telling me this? What business is it of yours?”

  “I just
wanted to be sure,” she said. “That you understand what you’re doing. She’s not very stable, you know. But you’ve probably figured that out for yourself.”

  “Maybe we should go in,” I said.

  “It may be fun for you, but you’re not doing her any favors. There are plenty of eligible women in this town, especially in the summer. Divorcees crawling all over the place, looking for men like you. You don’t need to prey on married women. Anne-Marie and her husband are trying to sort out their marriage, and you’re not helping. And you’re not the only one either. You should leave her alone.”

  “You don’t beat around the bush, do you.”

  “Just looking after my flock,” she said. “I’ve already spoken to her. She and her husband are coming in for counseling.”

  “You’re a good shepherd,” I said. She had some nerve poking her nose into my business, but to tell you the truth, I was a little relieved.

  In the restaurant Sarah sat down opposite me and ordered a bottle of wine while we waited for Toni. I sat next to Ruth. I started to tell them about the voice: “You can’t always get what you want.”

  “That’s a line,” Sarah said, “from a Rolling Stones album, Let It Bleed. They’re riffing on the Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude.’”

  “Oh,” I said. “I thought it was from Montaigne.”

  “But maybe she was yelling at you. That would make a better story, wouldn’t it? As far as you knew, she was. Yelling at you.”

  The wine arrived and Sarah filled our glasses. We tasted it, and it was fine. It tasted expensive, northern Italian,

  “Your real estate agent,” Sarah said, “says you’re translating Montaigne’s essays. How’s that going?”

  “One day at a time. One page at a time. When I sit down at my desk in the morning, after a swim, Montaigne is there, waiting for me. I translate a page and then I read it aloud to the dog, Booker. He’s good company. I’m not trying to nail down the big picture. I’m going to let the big questions get sorted out without my help. Two or three pages a day, that’s all. I’m in no hurry. After that, after lunch… Doing a little drawing, practicing my guitar. Rereading Proust. Tony Hillerman too. Walter Mosley. I’m halfway through Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale. No one ever said anything about that book that made me want to read it, but it’s a great book. Totally absorbing.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Go off by yourself in the country, cultivate your modest talents, appreciate the beauty of nature, enjoy the servant girls, have sex with cripples. It’s too easy.”

  I was relieved to see Mayor Toni walking across the room toward us, brushing something off her linen jacket, stopping at every table—the restaurant was full—touching everyone she talked to. She was one of those women who come trailing clouds of gestures and touches and smiles.

  “What are we talking about?” she asked when she got to our table and sat down at the end of the table.

  “Having sex with cripples,” Ruth said, “and translating Montaigne.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “What I meant to say,” Sarah said, “was that Montaigne’s essays have been translated several times. There’s no point in translating them again. And Montaigne’s a lightweight anyway.”

  “Did he like to have sex with cripples?” Toni asked.

  “Well,” I said, “he quotes an Italian proverb: ‘You can only taste Venus en sa parfaicte douceur in the bed of a cripple.’”

  “You need to surrender to something larger than yourself,” Sarah said.

  “Like what?” I said. “The church?”

  “We always need help in the kitchen at St. Anne’s. We serve a meal for the community every Thursday and a dinner once a month after the service on Sunday.”

  “Don’t let her get her hooks into you,” Toni said. “She’ll have you protesting the power plant and the dune mining, and the next thing you know, you’ll wind up on the vestry.”

  Sarah started to protest.

  “And don’t give her all your money!”

  Sarah continued to protest, and then she laughed. “Gabe heard a voice on his way to the restaurant,” she said. “Shouting ‘You can’t always get what you want.’”

  And Toni said, “I intend to get what I want.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Something to eat.”

  “You’ve come to the right place,” Ruth said.

  Toni ordered a tris for all of us—three pasta courses served family style—and we talked while we ate. Each woman had her own idea of what a bookstore should look like. Ruth had in mind a really good academic bookstore, full of books that would support the curriculum—the Midwest Studies Center and the Great Lakes Study Center—instead of sweatshirts and beer mugs and key chains. Like the old Bryn Mawr college bookstore before it was turned over to Follett.

  Sarah had in mind the small bookstore in the Newberry Library, where, she said, “every book counts.”

  Toni was still thinking of the store on Fifty-Seventh Street, where she and her husband had been regulars. A store where you could find a cheap copy of Anna Karenina in maybe two or three different translations.

  “What is it that you want, Gabe?” Sarah asked.

  “Now that I’ve got a dog?” I said. “Nothing.” And it was true.

  XVI. THE SAUNA

  (September 2010)

  I was able to resist Reverend Sarah and Ruth and Mayor Toni, and Ben Warren too, who’d dropped by the house to have a look at Grandpa Chaz’s Native American books, but I couldn’t resist Signor Palmisano, not that Signor Palmisano gave a fig about a bookshop. He was interested in getting the second mortgage payment nine months early. I agreed to talk to him—not that I intended to advance the money, but because I had some questions about the house.

  According to several articles in old issues of the St. Anne Examiner, Eddie from Chicago—Augie’s uncle—was a real person, though some thought he had been more or less invented by Joe Valachi when Valachi testified against the Mafia in October 1963, just before the Kennedy assassination. I was thinking of putting together some books on Berrien County. Not only the Mafia presence, but the literary presence too. Carl Sandburg, Ring Lardner, James Fenimore Cooper, Michigan writers. But, in fact, I was curious about the history of the house.

  The Dunes wasn’t a bad place. It didn’t have a bad smell. The hallways were wide, the floors buffed and full of light, the bulletin boards papered with notices: a guitar player coming for a sing-along; “Dog Days”—relatives could bring their dogs to visit—were going to be celebrated in the Common Room; a reading by a local poet; trips to different malls and to the library. The door to Signor Palmisano’s suite was open. I could hear the TV. I knocked on the open door.

  He took one look at me and struggled out of his chair. “That fountain pen you gave me,” he said. “It leaks. You gave me a fountain pen that leaks.”

  “Let me have it,” I said. I took my second Aurora fountain pen out of the carrying case in my left pants pocket—the one with the green cap and the black barrel as distinct from the one with the black cap and the green barrel. I gave it to Signor Palmisano. “I’ll get yours fixed,” I said. “It’s probably the pump. I’ll send it to Fahrney’s. This one’s got a fine nib. I hope that’s okay.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “Tell me a little bit about Eddie from Chicago,” I said. “Your uncle, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Eddie was a virtuoso with a machine gun. He could shoot from every angle.”

  “Funny you should say that. I read the exact same words about three times in different newspaper articles. He was ‘a virtuoso with a machine gun.’”

  “Well, it was true. He could shoot with a pistol too, and a sawed off shotgun, and probably a bow and arrow too if you gave hi
m one.”

  “Whom did he shoot?”

  “He shot a lot of people. You heard of the Castellammarese War. Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. It was Eddie who gunned down Masseria’s lieutenant, Giuseppe Catania, on Belmont Avenue, in Brooklyn. It was Joe Valachi picked him up in a car afterwards. Eddie was talking to a cop on the street, telling the cop there’d been a shooting. He put Catania away, but didn’t hit his wife. That’s how good a shooter he was.”

  “Valachi said Eddie was killed in a fight over a craps game. At least that’s what I read.”

  “That’s what Eddie wanted people to think. He didn’t trust the New York mob and they didn’t trust him. He went to California for a while, then came back here.”

  “Why did they call him Eddie from Chicago?”

  Augie shook his head. “Because he was from Chicago.”

  “They don’t call you ‘Augie from Chicago.’”

  “I’m not from Chicago. I’m from Cicero. Four-story walk-up on South Forty-Ninth Street. By St. Anthony’s. Besides, they needed to tell him apart from ‘Eddie the Clutching Hand.’”

  “Who was Eddie the Clutching Hand?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Eddie from Chicago was your uncle, right? How did you wind up here?”

  “I fell and broke my hip.”

  “I don’t mean here. I mean in St. Anne.”

  “Eddie brought me with him when he bought your place. The family still had a farm—thirty acres, vineyards—over by Coloma. Made a lot of wine during Prohibition. Still producing grapes. Eddie always liked this area. A lot of the old mob guys did. Killer Burke had a place up in Stevensville. It’s still there. It’s a real estate office now. A lot of other guys too. Louis ‘Little New York’ Champagne, Philip D’Andrea, Jake Guzik, Edward Konvalinka, and Paul ‘The Waiter’ Ricca. DeLucia was his name. Ricca-DeLucia. There was a regular Little Italy up in Benton Harbor. Capone liked to come down and play golf, he’d stay at the Whitcomb in St. Joe, or the Vincent in Benton Harbor. Eddie come down for his going-away party, you know. When he went up for tax fraud.”