Vinyl Cafe Turns the Page

by Stuart McLean

  “Not him,” said Murphy. “His son, the stamp collector.”

  The son, Philipp, inherited his father’s fortune and lived all his life in Paris, in the house where he was born—a house so fine that today it is the official residence of the French president. And he used his father’s fortune to accumulate the greatest stamp collection—

  “Ever,” said Murphy again. “Greatest in the world.”

  Philipp dedicated three entire rooms—large rooms—in his Paris home to stamps, with shelves crammed full of them all the way to the ceiling. He employed three people—full time—to curate his collection while he travelled the world, buying stamps and paying for them with gold.

  Murphy was running his finger around and around the froth clinging to the lip of his empty cup.

  “I,” said Murphy earnestly, “am going to be the next Ferrary.”

  Just the week before, he was going to circumnavigate the world on a unicycle.

  And here he was, a mere seven days later, rummaging through his backpack, which was slung over the back of the chair.

  “The thing about being a stamp collector,” said Murphy, turning around again, “is that you need only one thing to get going.”

  “A rich father?” said Sam.

  Murphy pulled a huge magnifying glass out of his pack. A thick disc of gleaming glass with a long gold feather-shaped handle.

  “A magnifying glass,” said Murphy, “gives a person a certain gravitas.”

  He put the magnifying glass on the table.

  “A person like me,” said Murphy, squinting at Sam, “needs a certain gravitas in his life.”

  He had removed his glasses. He was polishing them on his shirt-tail.

  Sam picked up the magnifying glass and held it between them, staring at Murphy through the distorting lens.

  Then he leaned forward and whispered, very quietly, “Have you ever considered that you might be—completely crazy?”

  And that is when Mr. Harmon appeared out of the cellar—his red face set off by his white shirt and his forest-green apron. Mr. Harmon was carrying two espresso cups.

  “I have to get back to work,” said Sam.

  But he missed his chance. The moment Sam started to get up, Mr. Harmon waved him back down.

  “Sit down,” said Mr. Harmon. “I want you boys to try something.”

  He set the two cups of espresso down in front of them and stood back with his arms awkwardly by his sides.

  “Go on,” he said. “Go on.”

  Sam peered at his cup suspiciously.

  “Mr. Harmon,” said Sam. “Have these got alcohol in them? You know we’re too young for alcohol.”

  Murphy had already chugged his.

  “Café correcto,” said Murphy. “The grappa is way too sweet, Mr. Harmon. It tastes like Kool-Aid. You should try a frozen caramel latte.”

  They didn’t talk about stamps again until the following weekend.

  “I have been busy,” said Murphy. “Researching.”

  He was holding an orange cloth-covered book. How to Start a Stamp Collection.

  Sam took the book and flipped to the title page. It was published in 1930.

  “Your research is a little out of date.”

  Murphy said, “When I’m studying history, I like to get it from people who were there.”

  Then he leaned back. “Did it ever occur to you …” he began.

  This was classic Murphy. This was Murphy about to do what Murphy loved doing more than anything in the world. This was Murphy about to hold forth.

  Sam smiled. This is why Sam loved Murphy.

  Murphy said, “It’s been almost two hundred years since stamps were invented. Two hundred years, and they haven’t changed in any important way. They’re still little pictures you stick on envelopes.”

  Sam nodded.

  Murphy smiled.

  “Has it not occurred to you,” said Murphy, “that they might be the most perfect invention ever? They got them perfect on the first go. How often does that happen?”

  He was still going an hour later. They had changed venues but not topics. They’d moved from the grocery store to one of the study rooms at the far end of the library. Murphy was lying across the table on his back; Sam was sitting on the chair.

  When finally Murphy paused, presumably to take a breath, Sam said, “You understand this is not normal, right? You understand we’re supposed to be out skateboarding or something?”

  Sam’s comment didn’t even slow Murphy down.

  Murphy said, “Here’s the best part. You know why they were invented?”

  He didn’t want an answer. Or expect one. He was happy just to have the audience.

  “Mail delivery used to be collect. You paid when you got the letter, not when you sent it. So everyone wrote coded messages on their envelopes. And people would look at the envelopes, read the coded message, then refuse to pay.

  “They had to figure out a way to get people to pay for delivery in advance. Et voilà. Le stamp. Perfectly brilliant.”

  “What would be perfectly brilliant right now,” said Sam, “would be a chicken burrito.”

  It was another week before Murphy came up with his plan.

  “I’ve got it,” he said.

  “I knew you would,” said Sam.

  The morning bell hadn’t yet rung. They were doing laps around the ball field.

  “Attics,” said Murphy. “Everyone has a shoebox of letters in their attic.”

  Sam said, “They do?”

  Murphy stopped walking. He held his arms out, palms up. This was so elementary.

  “People keep old stuff in attics. We get into attics, we are going to find old stamps. It’s the old ones that are valuable.”

  Lunchtime, the next day. The school cafeteria. Murphy and Sam are sitting opposite each other across a lunch table.

  “I printed business cards,” said Murphy.

  He slid an official-looking piece of card stock across the table.

  Sam picked it up and turned it over.

  MURPHY KRUGER, it read. ATTIC INSPECTOR.

  Sam said, “First off, no one is going to believe you’re an attic inspector.”

  Murphy said, “Why?”

  Sam said, “Well, first, because there is no such thing. And second, even if there was, you’re too young, and third, you can’t go into someone’s attic and pretend to be an inspector. That’s false pretenses.”

  “How about junk removal,” said Murphy, pulling a second card out of his pocket and sliding it across the table.

  “That would be theft,” said Sam.

  “Not if they gave me permission,” said Murphy.

  “But it’s not junk you’re removing,” said Sam. “It would be unethical junk removal.”

  Murphy put the cards away.

  He had a new one the next day.

  MURPHY KRUGER, PHILATELIST.

  “Honesty is always the best policy,” said Sam.

  “I made one for you too,” said Murphy.

  Sam read his card. PHILATELIST ASSISTANT.

  The rarest Canadian stamp in existence was printed in 1868. It’s a two-cent stamp that features an image of the queen—Victoria—and it’s printed on unusually thick paper. It is called the two-cent large queen on laid paper.

  There are only three copies known to exist. Although collectors have long believed there must be others.

  “In attics,” said Murphy. “They’re in attics.”

  Experts say that whoever finds the next two-cent large queen on laid paper will have made themselves a million dollars.

  “One million dollars,” said Murphy.

  Murphy and Sam talked about it incessantly. How should they split the million? What would they do with their share? They decided the right thing would be fifty-fifty with the owner. Then fifty-fifty between themselves.

  “You deserve more,” said Sam.

  “A quarter of a million is enough,” said Murphy. “It’s not good for you to get too much mone
y too fast. Look what happened to Justin Bieber.”

  He drew up a contract. They each signed it.

  They decided to start the following weekend.

  It was Murphy’s idea to dress up.

  “Shirts and ties,” said Murphy. “Clothes make the man.”

  Sam said, “I don’t have a tie.”

  Murphy said, “Borrow one of your dad’s.”

  So the following Friday, after school, they were standing in Sam’s kitchen—each of them wearing a too-large shirt that they’d borrowed from their fathers.

  Murphy was holding a briefcase. “Magnifying glass and contracts,” he said, tapping it.

  Then he turned and headed for the door.

  On his way he said, “I thought we should start at your house.”

  Sam said, “We are at my house.”

  Murphy nodded at Sam’s mother. Morley was sitting at the desk by the back door. Murphy said, “We’ll be right back.”

  They went out the side door and headed around to the front.

  Murphy said, “We have to be professional.”

  Then he said, “You ring the bell.”

  Sam said, “Why me?”

  Murphy said, “I’m the philatelist. You’re the philatelist’s assistant.”

  They went out again the next Friday. It was this second Friday when Murphy got his first stamp.

  They found it in Dorothy Capper’s house. Dorothy runs the little bookstore a few doors down from Sam’s father’s record store.

  Dorothy, who lives by herself, was delighted to welcome them into her house and give them the blessing of her attention. They sat at the kitchen table and Murphy explained their proposal. She signed the contract, and then she went out to her garage and returned with a box of letters.

  “We must agree on one thing,” she said. “You may examine the stamps but you must not read the letters. The letters are private.”

  Murphy nodded solemnly. Murphy said, “We can assure you that we are not interested in your private affairs.”

  They took the box into Dorothy’s basement and emptied it onto the floor. They made a pile of the envelopes and went through them one by one.

  They were almost done when they found the torn fragment of brown paper with the blue stamp.

  Or Murphy did.

  He stared at it through his magnifying glass for the longest time.

  “What is it?” said Sam.

  “It is beautiful,” said Murphy.

  Sam crawled over and sat beside his friend.

  “It is a miniature work of art,” said Murphy.

  “Let me see,” said Sam, tugging the magnifying glass away.

  He was looking at a fifty-cent Bluenose.

  Issued in 1929, the Bluenose stamp has an engraved image of the same schooner that sails across the Canadian dime. The stamp is the rich grey-blue of a faded five-dollar bill. The ship, sailing across the stamp from left to right on a windward tack, its sails full, is heeling ever so slightly.

  Murphy said, “If you keep staring, you feel like you could crawl right in.”

  Sam said, “I have been on that ship. I was on that ship in Halifax.”

  Not the exact ship. A replica. The Bluenose II.

  The original, the one on the stamp, was a fishing boat. Sleek, fast, and well sailed, it won the international fishing trophy year after year after year, undefeatable, it seemed, until sailing schooners were replaced by motored ones and she was relegated to freighting bananas around the Caribbean. She sank, off the coast of Haiti, in 1946.

  The Bluenose II, the one Sam had been on, carries tourists out of Halifax Harbour every summer.

  “It is beautiful,” said Murphy.

  I’m not sure whether Murphy meant the boat or the stamp. Not that it matters. He would be right about both. The boat is beautiful. And collectors from around the world say that the Canadian fifty-cent Bluenose stamp is one of the most beautiful stamps ever printed. Anywhere. There is something about the blueness, the lines of the engraving, the lines of the boat. The composition and the scale, the sea and the subject.

  A beautiful one, in mint condition, might go for three or four hundred dollars. A soiled one, cancelled and creased like the one on the brown paper the boys were looking at, well, you can get one like that for thirty bucks.

  They brought it upstairs to Dorothy.

  “I want this one,” said Murphy.

  He had no idea of its value. There was just something about the way it looked.

  “You can have it,” said Dorothy.

  Sam and Murphy went right to Murphy’s house and looked the stamp up on the web.

  “I knew it,” said Murphy.

  It was the first stamp in his collection. He put it in an envelope and put the envelope in his book about stamps. He put the book about stamps on the table by his bed.

  On Monday after school Murphy went to the bank and withdrew thirty dollars. He met Sam at Harmon’s and gave him $7.50. Then he went to see Dorothy. He had a twenty-dollar bill in his pocket.

  When he got to Dorothy’s store he walked by it and kept going—around the block to Lawlor’s drugstore, where he bought a bar of dark chocolate and a bag of chips.

  He ate them both. And then he headed back to Dorothy’s.

  He hung around the back, looking at magazines, waiting for the store to empty. When it did he went over to Dorothy and pulled out the twenty-dollar bill.

  “I owe you fifteen dollars,” he said.

  Dorothy almost didn’t take it.

  She almost said, “It’s not like I knew it was there or anything.”

  Then it occurred to her that that might be disrespectful.

  Murphy, sensing her hesitation, thought, Go ahead, insult me.

  It was the briefest moment, but they were both aware of it, so it didn’t seem brief. It seemed big. It felt awkward.

  Then, awkwardly, Dorothy nodded, and Murphy pulled out the bill and she took it and gave him change.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  They signed a contract that said the stamp belonged to him.

  And that was that.

  Murphy extended his hand, they shook, and he put the piece of paper they had signed in his briefcase with the magnifying glass.

  Out on the street, Murphy felt an unexpected surge of exhilaration. There was something about paying for the stamp that made it more precious.

  He couldn’t wait to get home to check it.

  It was his now.

  As he hurried along, it occurred to Murphy that it was probably harder for him to hand over his fifteen dollars to Dorothy than it would have been for Philipp Ferrary to fork over a bar of gold.

  Ferrary’s fortune had been given to him; Murphy had to earn his money shovelling walks and cutting grass.

  He admired the French collector’s perseverance, but he was feeling something different. It was a feeling he’d never had before—pride mixed with something else, something intangible.

  When he got home, he went up to his bedroom and opened his briefcase on his bed. He put the page that Dorothy had signed carefully on his desk. Then he pulled the stamp out and stared at it.

  Ferrary was no longer a hero—he was a brother in arms.

  And so Murphy’s life as a collector had begun.

  He couldn’t imagine it then, but over the years his feelings for this stamp will be eclipsed by his feelings for others.

  Like all collectors (and artists), Murphy will always be in love with his most recent acquisition. His favourite stamp will almost always be his latest—the one that still evokes the thrill of the hunt.

  Eventually, he will put his collection away. But memory is patient.

  One evening, years and years from now, Murphy will be looking for something, and there, in a box of books in his attic, he will find his long-forgotten, cloth-covered history of stamps. The book that got him going. As he picks it out of the box, it will all come flooding back: he and Sam, dressed in their fathers’ shirts, going through the letter
s on the basement floor, and how he stood in the little bookstore, praying that Ms. Capper wouldn’t take his money. And how good it felt when she did.

  And as he remembers all that, he will flip the book open, and there, lying between the pages, he will see the piece of torn brown paper with the little blue square and he will feel the tug that he felt that night in the basement when he first saw it.

  It is the tug of beauty. The awareness that there are things in the world that move us. Music and poetry, paint perfectly rendered, a building well conceived, big blue skies and big blue moons, and sometimes, when you are very lucky, things so small and soft you would never imagine: a little glimpse, a little smile, the ever so light touch of a hand on yours, and, yes, a little stamp stuck to a little piece of paper that says, if you just look long enough and hard enough, that it is beautiful enough that you could actually climb right into it.

  All the beauty stored there, in the tiny picture of the little blue boat sailing across the deep blue sea.

  FOGGY BOTTOM BAY

  The vestibule between two cars on a passenger train is one of the few spaces in the world of transportation that has remained virtually unchanged. We have flown to the moon and we can scoot around this old earth on the world wide web, but if we want to walk from the club car to the dining car—if we’re lucky enough to find a train that has either of those things these days—we still have to lurch through the same accordion-walled rattletrap that our mothers and fathers passed through all those years ago. And when we do, we’ll pass the same Dutch doors, the ones that open on the top so that the attendant can watch the platform as the train pulls in or out of the station.

  They are the same doors Dave used to lean out of whenever he could get away with it. The prairie was his favourite place to do this, his head out the window, his mind in the clouds. You weren’t supposed to, of course. Even back then it was against the rules. But back then conductors and porters weren’t as fussed by rules as they are today. Today the lawyers have their hands on the throttle, so Dave, with a wary eye to time’s heavy hammer, was trying to be circumspect as the train he was on swayed past the Prescott Golf Club and the adjacent village—a short fifteen minutes, by his reckoning, to the town he was waiting for.