I saw at once that there were other rooms; PLUMSHAW’S RARE BOOKS was a warren of small rooms connected by short dark passages lined with books. The invasion of alien objects was more noticeable as I moved deeper into the back, where entire shelves had been cleared to make way for stacks of maroon record albums containing heavy, brittle 78’s as thick as roof slates, boxes of old postcards, empty cardboard cylinders the size of soup cans each bearing the words EDISON GOLD MOULDED RECORD and an oval photograph of Thomas A. Edison, daguerreotypes, tintypes, stacks of pen-and-ink illustrations torn from old books, a moldering gray Remington typewriter with dark green keys, a faded wooden horse with red wheels, little porcelain cats, a riding crop, old photograph albums containing labeled black-and-white photographs (Green Point, 1926) with upcurled corners showing traces of rubber cement, a cribbage board with ivory pegs, a pair of high cracked black lace-up shoes. Here and there I saw brass standing lamps with cloth shades and yellowed ivory finials, and armchairs with faded doilies; I wondered whether they were for sale. All the rooms were gloomily lit by dim yellow bulbs with tarnished brass chains.
I had slipped into one room to examine a little music box with a red-jacketed monkey on top, who turned slowly round and round and raised and lowered his cup as the melody played, when I happened to look up to see a figure standing in the doorway. At first she said nothing, but only looked at me from the shadows. I placed the music box back on the shelf—the tinkling music was playing, the monkey was turning and raising its cup. “May I be of help?” Plumshaw said at last, decisively. “I was just browsing—a nice little fellow!” I answered, wanting to strangle the little monster. I turned to push it deeper into the shelf, as if to conceal a crime; when I looked up, Plumshaw was gone. I cursed her suspicions—did she think I’d pocket him?—but felt obscurely obliged to purchase some trifle, as if my visit to the shop were an intrusion that required apology. With this in mind I began looking at engravings, stereoscopic views, a box of black-and-white photographic portraits on glass. It seemed there was nothing here for me, nothing in all of Broome for me, or in all the gray universe, and with a dull sort of curiosity I came to a table on which stood a black wire rack filled with old postcards.
They were black-and-white and sepia and tinted postcards, showing topiary gardens, and Scottish castles, and boats on the Rhine, and public buildings in Philadelphia. Some bore stamps and postmarks and messages in ink: Dear Robert, I cannot tell you how lovely our rooms are—but then, I’ve never been interested in other people’s mail. The pictures had a faded and melancholy air that pleased me; there is a poetry of old postcards, which belong in the same realm as hurdy-gurdy tunes, merry-go-round horses, circus sideshows, silent black-and-white cartoons, tissue-paper-covered illustrations, old movie theaters, kaleidoscopes, and storm-faded figureheads of women with their wooden hair blown back. I examined the postcards one by one, turning now and then to look at the doorway, which remained ominously empty, and after a while I found myself lingering over a sepia postcard. The back was clean; it had never been sent. The melancholy brown photograph showed a rocky point extending into a lake or river; on the other side of the water was a brown forest of pines, and above the trees were long thin brown clouds and a setting brown sun. In the upper left-hand corner of the sky, in small brown capital letters, was the single word INNISCARA. On the farthest rock two small figures were seated, a man and a woman, looking out at the water. Beside the man I could make out a straw hat and a walking stick. The woman was bareheaded, her hair full and tumbling. The details were difficult to distinguish in the dim light, but the very uncertainty seemed part of the romantic melancholy of the brown scene. I decided to purchase it. Perhaps I would send it to Claudia, with a terse, ambiguous message.
There was no price on the rack of cards, no price penciled on the backs. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a price anywhere in PLUMSHAW’S RARE BOOKS. I wandered back through the jumble of ill-lit rooms and when I reached the cash register I presented my postcard with a flourish to Plumshaw. Majestically, with her torso flung back, she took it from me. She looked at the picture, turned the card over and studied the blank side, and gave me a sharp glance, as if estimating my bank account. She held the card up and appeared to examine one corner. At last she lowered the postcard to the counter, where she rested it on its edge and supported it lightly with both hands. She drew her shoulders back and looked directly at me.
“That will be three dollars,” she said.
“Three dollars! For a postcard!” I couldn’t stop myself.
She hesitated; looked at the card again; reached her decision. “Some postcards are two dollars, some are three, and some are five. It depends on the condition. This is in very good condition, as you can see—no postmark, no stains, no creases. Only here, at the corner”—she held the card toward me—“it is bent a little. It hardly touches the picture itself, but the card is not in mint condition. I can let you have it for two dollars and fifty cents, but I cannot possibly—”
“Please,” I said, holding up my hand. “I’ll take it for three. I was just curious.”
“My customers never complain. If you think three is too high—”
“I think three is perfect—perfect.” Quickly, one after the other, I placed three dollar bills on the counter. She slipped them one by one into her hand and rang open the cash register.
“If you would care to see other cards, I have a number of unopened boxes—”
I assured her that I wanted only the one card. She picked it up, glanced at it once more, and slipped it into a small flat paper bag. She folded the top over once and flattened the fold with a single slow stroke of her long thumb. She held it out to me and said, “A very nice postcard.”
“Thank you,” I replied; it seemed the only thing to say. She banged the drawer of the cash register shut. No smile from Plumshaw—no flicker of friendliness—only, for a moment, she turned to look at the streaming window, as if imagining my misfortune.
Through cold, gusting rain I trudged uphill, keeping under the occasional awnings. Rain coursed down my face and neck and trickled onto my collarbone; the bottoms of my pants darkened. I walked with bent head, my hands thrust deep in my trench coat pockets. Between the shops the gray of the water met the darker gray of the sky. Somewhere on the water a bell clanged, and I heard ropes creaking and a faint tinkling sound. It struck me that Columbus had been wrong. The earth was flat, and ended right here, at Broome—you could fall over the edge into grayness, and be lost forever.
In my room I rubbed my hair with a towel and changed into dry clothes and slippers. Despite the chill the radiator was cold, and I put on my summer bathrobe, wishing I had brought my winter one. I had placed the paper bag on the night table and I now drew out the postcard and propped it up against the white porcelain base of the lamp. I had chosen well. The sepia sun, the sepia lovers on their rock, the gloomy reflections in the lake, all these pleased me. In the light of the lamp I saw details I had failed to notice in Plumshaw’s cavern: the tips of grasses rising through the shallow water in front of the pines, a pine root twisting through the bank and hanging over the water, a ribbon in her hair; and it was now plain that the figures were not looking out over the water, but were turned slightly toward each other. I could make out part of his face, and she was turned almost in profile. Her miniature features were sharply caught by the camera: I could see her eyelashes, her slightly open lips, a brown shadow of cheekbone. She was beautiful, but it was difficult to read her expression; I seemed to detect something questioning or uncertain in her face.
Lunch was served in the chilly room of small tables. There were seven other guests at OCEAN GABLES, all of them elderly except for a thin, fragile-looking, thirtyish woman with eyeglasses and sharp elbows, who sat hugging herself as she leaned over a book held open by a saucer at one edge and the top of a sugar bowl at the other and who looked up now and then with large, startled eyes. Even among the three couples there was no conversation, as if the presence o
f others compelled secrecy. After a hefty lunch I sought out the manager, John Kearns. I found him sitting in the living room reading a newspaper: a boyish gray-haired man with round, clear-rimmed eyeglasses and shiny cheeks, wearing a corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches over a buttoned sweater that revealed at the throat a red-and-black lumberjack shirt. He continued to hold open the paper while looking up with a big, hearty smile. “A cold snack,” he said, and shook his paper sharply once. I realized that I must have heard incorrectly: a cold snap. “We never turn the heat on before the first of October. By law I can wait till the fifteenth.” He paused and lowered his voice. “There’s a man coming to look at the furnace next week. Unusual weather for this time of year. Bracing. You’ll see: in two, three days people will be complaining about the heat and humidity. Never fails, does it.” The last sentence seemed not quite to fit, but I was certain there would be no heat at OCEAN GABLES.
I sat for a while in a small room off the living room, in a plump, flowered armchair beside a bay window dripping with rain. The room contained a small bookcase filled with faded forty-year-old best-sellers and back issues of an architectural journal. I felt myself falling into a black mood and I suddenly sprang up and went upstairs for my coat and umbrella. Outside the rain ran in black rivulets along the sides of the lane. When I reached the main street I walked down the other side, stopping in a warm store to look at bamboo napkin holders, lacquered wicker picnic baskets lined with red-and-white-checked cloth, and white wicker wine carriers each with an empty green wine bottle, and then stopping in an even warmer store to examine a perforated wall hung with big shiny brass numerals, brass knockers, barrel bolts, cabinet catches, and double-pronged door hooks. Toward the bottom of the hill I looked across the street for PLUMSHAW’S RARE BOOKS, but it had disappeared. I imagined Plumshaw folding it all up like a cardboard box and walking away with it under a black umbrella. A moment later I caught sight of a white telephone number in a dark window; beside it Plumshaw’s dripping black window reflected a white storefront, through which a dim book was visible. At the bottom of the street I walked through the muddy field past a gray rowboat half-filled with water. On the slippery pier I stood looking at a lobster boat with its piles of wet buoys, its slick tarpaulin spread over something with sharp edges, and its dark crate with a slightly open lid from which emerged a single brown-green pincer.
Back in my chilly room I wrapped myself in my bathrobe and walked back and forth rubbing my arms. The windows rattled. I began turning the sash locks, and discovered that one was missing—there were four little holes for screws. Still in my bathrobe I got into bed and lay reading one page in turn of the three impossible books I had brought with me: a history of the United States beginning with the Bronze Age, a complete Shakespeare in double columns, and a novel set in ancient Rome. I tossed the books aside and tried to sleep, but I was too bored for sleep. Rain lashed the windows—hammer-blows of rain. At any moment the panes were going to crack like eggshells. Then the rain would fall on the cold radiator, on the bedspread, on the open suitcase sitting on the wooden chair. Slowly the room would fill with water, slowly my bed would rise—and turning and turning, I would float out through the window into the angry sky. In the lamplit dusk of midafternoon I reached for my postcard. Despite a first, general impression of brown softness, I was struck again by the sharpness of the image as I drew the card close. I could distinguish the woman’s brown iris from her darker brown pupil, and I could see her individual eyelashes. With surprise I now saw that the man faced her directly: his forehead, the straight line of his nose, even his lips, were distinctly visible. I detected a harshness about his expression; she for her part appeared sorrowful, the set of her lips mournful. On the rock beside him I could see the interwoven pattern of straw on his boater and the tiny ivory monkey, his hands pressed over his eyes, on top of the walking stick.
I replaced the card against the lamp and tried to nap, but the rain splattering against the windows, and the rattling sashes with the missing lock, and the rattling gray universe, all banished sleep, and I lay with my arm over my eyes waiting for dinner in my darkening room.
Dinner at OCEAN GABLES was served from six to eight. At one minute past six I stepped into the room of small tables covered with fresh white tablecloths and lit by fat candles in colorless glass globes. A small electric heater with a black rubber cord rattled in the center of the room. I wondered what occasion called forth the use of the main dining room and chose a corner table beside a curtained window. As I sat down the woman with sharp elbows appeared in the doorway, wearing a heavy baggy sweater that came down to her thighs and clutching her book against her stomach. She cast an alarmed look in my direction and chose a table in a far corner, where she sat down with awkward suddenness and bent her head over her book. Slowly the other couples came in and took their silent places. “Still raining,” one man said, perhaps to his wife, perhaps to no one in particular, and “Yes,” a woman from another table answered, “it certainly is coming down,” before we subsided into silence. Dinner dazzled us: duck à l’orange with wild rice, hot homemade bread, hot apple crisp for dessert. I lingered over a superb cup of coffee and wondered how on earth I would pass the time till bed. The expression struck me: how on earth. Was it possible I needed some other place? Slowly the room emptied, leaving only me and my destined companion. She had the look of a librarian or a third-grade teacher. We would be married in a white church on a green hill and open a gift shop in Broome. I stared at the bowed top of her head and began counting slowly, but at two hundred thirty she had not looked up. I finished a second cup of coffee and rose, but my fading bride remained rigidly bent over her book. In the living room a number of guests and John Kearns sat on flowered armchairs and couches and watched television. The screen showed rolls of smiling antacid tablets, dancing. Kearns wore a heavy, ribbed sweater and thick shoes with spongy soles; he looked like a happy bear. At the reception desk in the front hall I found a boy of ten reading a toy catalogue open to a page of robots. When I asked about movie theaters he said there was one over in Rock Ridge, at which moment a door opened and Mrs. Kearns came out, holding a tissue to her reddish nostrils and suddenly turning her face away to give a delicate, suppressed sneeze. Rock Ridge was twenty-five miles away through heavy rain. There was a drive-in theater ten miles away but sometimes the bridge was washed out and you had to go through Ashville. I recommended tea with lemon juice and three thousand milligrams of Vitamin C and returned upstairs, where I took a hot bath in a claw-foot tub. In my room I sat in pajamas, shirt, and bathrobe on a hard wooden chair at a small writing table and held my ballpoint poised above the back of a postcard I had found in the drawer, showing on the front a pen-and-ink sketch of OCEAN GABLES. I wrote the C of Claudia, brooded for ten minutes, and went to bed.
Before turning off the lamp I took my sepia postcard from the table and lay holding it upright on my chest. With surprise I realized that I had been looking forward impatiently to this moment, as if in the brown rectangle of the postcard I could forget for a while the rain and the room and the town and my restless, oddly askew life. In the light of the close-pulled lamp the sharpness of the image was almost startling. I could see the needles in the pine trees and the wingtip of a bird on a branch; in a tiny opening in the pines the spotted back of a fawn was visible. I could see the knot in the ribbon in the woman’s hair and the minuscule lines streaming outward from the knot. The hardness of the man’s expression was unmistakable, the tension in lip and nostril sharp and clear. For the first time I noticed that his face was tilted toward hers, which was pulled back slightly, as if from a fire. A long brown cloud was reflected with a single ripple beneath the reflected pines. Uncomfortably I returned the postcard to the base of the lamp and turned out the light.
Perhaps it was the unnatural earliness, perhaps it was the second cup of coffee, perhaps it was only my life, my life, but I could not fall asleep. I listened to the rain, the dark rain of Broome, to the heavy creak and crack of foots
teps on the stairs, to the always opening and closing bathroom door—and long after the floor had grown quiet, and I was drifting off to sleep, again I heard the creaking of the stairs as someone climbed slowly, very slowly, pausing as if abashed at each loud crack of wood, until I wanted to shout into the night: and still the steps ascended, timidly, crashingly, and suddenly stopped forever. I fell into a restless sort of half-waking sleep and dreamed that I was wandering ankle-deep in water in a dark tangle of decaying rooms. I came to a massive door with a handle so high I could not reach it. The wood of the door was slippery and covered with greenish slime, and when the door sprang open I saw Plumshaw before me, but she was grinning wildly and her hair was blowing in the wind. I turned over and Plumshaw vanished but the rooms remained, filled now with small tables heaped with bowls of soup. Claudia was complaining about the soup, knocking one bowl after another from the tables, and when I crouched down to pick up a bowl I saw a woman seated on the floor with her head bowed, who looked up with startled eyes as I woke in the dark. My windows were rattling. I turned on the lamp. It was 11:46. Grimly I threw off the covers and marched to the writing table, where I folded the OCEAN GABLES postcard in half and in half again before thrusting it between the clattering pair of unlocked sashes. Back in my bed I lay in lamplight listening to the rain. As I turned on my side and reached up to turn off the lamp I glanced at the postcard.
There was no possibility of misreading their expressions: she was in anguish, his face was twisted in anger. The dark sun seemed to have slipped lower, it was barely visible above the pines. His body leaned harshly toward her and she was straining away. The dark brown sun half-sunk behind the trees, the unpeaceful lovers, the sharp rocks, the brown clouds, all were burdened with sorrow, and with a sense of oppression I thrust the picture back against the lamp.
I must have fallen into a light, uneasy sleep, for I was wakened by what sounded like a faint gasp or cry. I lay listening, but heard only the harsh rain. In that black room my chest felt heavy, my lungs labored, I could barely breathe. With a feeling of anxiety I sat up and switched on the lamp, which instantly sprang up in a black window. I snatched the postcard and looked in anguish at her face stricken with terror, his face taut with fury. A tendon stood out sharply on his neck and I saw that his slightly raised right hand grasped a small sharp rock. I could see the tense knuckles and the tiny, carefully manicured nails.
The Barnum Museum: Stories (American Literature Series) Page 10