One evening as they sat together, O took a book from the top of one of the piles – a collection of Chinese poetry translated into English. She started reading and was quickly captivated by the simplicity of the words, the clarity of the images, the deep emotion that pulsed below the tranquil surface of the poems.
When she glanced up, Aunt Emily was snoring in her chair. Her glasses had slid to the end of her nose, and her book lay slack in her hands. As O sat looking at her, the words of a poem came into her mind. She grabbed a pencil and a scrap of paper and quickly wrote them down:
Sleep steals quietly into the room.
Eyes grow leaden and close like flowers.
Books grow drowsy on the shelves.
If you listen, you can hear
The murmur of dreams in the still air.
As she crept quietly from the room, she heard her aunt moan softly in her sleep.
10
The magician performed tricks with cups and balls, sleights of hand with handkerchiefs and linking rings. Reaching into the wicker trunk, he brought out a pair of intricately wrought mechanical birds, which flapped their jewel-encrusted wings and sang on command. Next he withdrew the miniature figure of a man in Hindu costume, sitting cross-legged on a small decorated box. The automaton was less than two feet tall. He asked several volunteers up onto the stage to examine it. They were invited to ask the figure mathematical questions, which the automaton answered by reaching into a hatch beneath his left hand and sliding numbers in front of a small opening.
The mechanical man was also able to play cards with them. The magician dealt the cards and placed those the automaton was dealt in an arc-shaped holder before him. The mechanical man selected the card he wished to play by swinging his arm up, plucking the card from the holder, and showing it to the audience. He won every game he played.
“And now,” said the magician as he tucked the figure away, “we have come to the entertainment entitled the Mystic Mirror. I will need a volunteer from the audience.” He rolled the large mirror forward to the front of the stage. It was set in a heavily ornamented wooden frame, with a pattern of leaves and branches skillfully worked in the wood. Here and there, the hint of a face peered through the leaves.
When the magician had asked for volunteers before, he’d given each of them a copy of a little book, which he said contained the secrets of his magic art. Several children clutched copies in their laps. But now there was a hesitation, for it suddenly seemed to the children that there was something oddly mechanical about the magician himself, as if behind the veil of flesh were only cogs and wheels and bloodless moving parts.
“Come, come,” said the magician in his soothing voice. “I assure you, there is nothing whatever to fear. Surely you have all wondered what lies within the mirror’s depths. Is the world we see there the same as this? Is it simply an illusion, or can we enter the mirror world and return to tell the tale? Come now, I need one brave spirit, an adventurer in the realm of magic.”
His deep eyes settled on a boy who sat among the others. Without a word, the boy rose and approached the stage.
“Let’s give this brave young man a hand,” said the magician. He walked the boy over to the mirror, where he stood facing his reflection in the glass.
“Now I want you to reach out and touch the surface of the mirror,” said the magician. The boy reached out and touched the glass.
“How does it feel?”
“Cold,” said the boy.
“Indeed. Then perhaps the mirror world is a colder world than ours. You must go prepared.” He reached into the wicker trunk and took out a heavy cloak. He laid it over the boy’s shoulders and drew its deep hood over his head.
“Now, this time, I want you to reach out as if you were laying your hand on the handle of a door. Give that handle a turn and walk through. Are you ready?”
From within the depths of the hood, the boy nodded his head. An uneasy silence fell over the room.
As the boy reached out his hand again, something rose from the flat surface of the mirror to meet it. The boy’s hand closed over it. He gave it a twist and strode forward.
A gasp went up from the crowd as first his arm and then his entire body slowly passed through the surface of the mirror. The cloak fell in an empty heap to the floor. One of the younger children screamed.
Like the surface of a pool after someone has plunged in, the mirror settled into stillness again. Once more, the trappings of the stage were reflected in its calm.
“Who knows what wonders await us on the far side of the mirror,” the magician said. “Perhaps our brave adventurer will tell the tale.”
He turned, and from the deep shadows behind the stage, the boy walked forward. The magician pressed a copy of his little book into his hand. To the applause of the crowd, the boy took his place again among the others.
But as the show continued, several children seated nearby noticed a strange chill in the air about him and shifted nervously away.
11
Emily took a long look in the dusty mirror mounted on the wall by the desk. She reached out, put her hand to the glass, and gave a little push, as if she half-expected it to go through.
The radio, tuned to the local jazz station, sat humming to itself on the shelf beside the desk. The desk was piled high with books and papers. The papers on the bottom had been there so long, they had begun to turn color. It was a vast sea of chaos, with a tiny island of order directly in front of her, at which she worked.
Today, she was making her way through a box of books she’d bought from a young man who had come in that morning. She needed more books like she needed another hole in her head. But she had a soft heart, and when some poor soul came through the door with a box of books for sale, she was as likely as not to buy the lot. Meanwhile, O was busy dusting, muttering to herself about the condition of the shop, just loud enough to be heard.
Over time, a bookshop will take the shape of its owner. Emily had been at the Green Man so long that it had grown around her like a second skin. The books were her flesh; the words that flowed through them were the blood that ran through her veins. The poetry section was the beating heart of the collection. Along with the familiar names, it contained many scarce and obscure items – small-press publications, chapbooks, broadsides, limited runs, books by local authors.
But the mazy aisles and teeming shelves of the shop mirrored other interests in her life as well. Just inside the doorway to the back room were three shelves of books on Victorian stage magic. And on the wall of books that ran the length of the shop beside the desk was a full bay devoted to supernatural fiction.
The supernatural collection was a large and, in many ways, a private collection. Much of it was housed along the hallway of the flat above the shop. It was, without doubt, the most valuable part of her entire stock, and she guarded it zealously, keeping the full extent of it secret from all but her closest friends.
The roots of her interest in the supernatural ran deep. Now and then, one of the shop regulars would gently scold her about it. “You don’t really believe in all this bunk, do you?” Emily would arch her eyebrow, as she did when something got her goat, and her brow would furrow lightly.
For the supernatural was not something she merely dabbled in; she was deadly serious about it. She herself had experienced incursions from that realm just the other side of what people liked to call the “real” world, and those incidents had shaped her into the person she was.
As with all the serious things in her life, she wrapped her beliefs securely in silence. Wasn’t that the poet’s task, after all – to safeguard the silence? It was not merely the words on the page that mattered, but what one glimpsed from time to time through the latticework of letters.
She was a friend of silence, an ally of the dark. She had always done her most creative work at night, while the rest of the world slept. She needed the silence so that she could hear her own words forming; needed the dark so that she could see her own small light bu
rning. She caught sleep when she could.
Lately, sleep held its terrors. Twice in the past week she had dreamt the old dream. It had been years since she’d dreamt in that terrifying way – blissful years, they seemed to her now.
The sun was warm on her back as she sat at the cluttered desk, prepping books before adding them to the stock. She sprayed a little watered-down Windex on a cloth and wiped down the covers of the paperbacks until they gleamed.
The radio was playing an old Bix Beiderbecke number, “Singin’ the Blues.” Pure poetry. Beiderbecke had the sweetest tone of any horn player she had ever heard. She let the tune wash over her as she fanned through the books, checking for markings, seeing if the past owners had left anything behind.
People left the most remarkable things in books: postcards, pressed flowers, photographs, locks of hair, love letters, newspaper clippings, theater tickets tucked away for safekeeping and then forgotten. Bits of life, left unknowingly behind.
The books she was working on now were all fairly new and yielded nothing but a scattering of light pencil markings, which she carefully erased. She dipped into several of the books as she readied them for the shelves. It was one of the pleasures of the job, and a necessity, she assured herself. For she needed to know a little about the items she was adding to the collection. Up until recently, she had personally shelved every book herself. That way she knew exactly where everything was. Now, things had changed.
Since her “incident,” as people politely called her heart attack of a few months back, she had been unable to do many of the chores around the shop she had before. She was not supposed to lift anything heavy, not supposed to stretch and strain. The slightest overexertion or upset brought on an attack of angina and resort to the tiny nitroglycerin pills she had to tuck under her tongue, where they quickly dissolved and took away the pain.
Until now, she had managed quite well with the aches and pains growing older had sent her way. But this was different. There was an unmistakable smell of mortality about the pain that visited her now. And her doctor pulled no punches in letting her know that, if she was not careful, she would be bound for the secondhand bookshop in the sky sooner than she might imagine.
As much as she resented her independence suddenly being taken from her, she knew in her heart of hearts it was a godsend that Charles had found some excuse – transparent though it might be – for sending Ophelia to spend the summer with her. She was a very bright girl, with a good sense of humor and a nice keen edge to her. Emily would not be at all surprised if what Charles suspected about her was true.
Emily gathered up the books she had gone through and was about to call Ophelia to shelve them for her.
“Oph –” she began, and quickly stopped herself, remembering the exchange at breakfast that morning.
Ophelia had prepared oatmeal. It had been years since Emily had eaten oatmeal. Normally, a quick coffee and a cigarette were what she used to ease into the day. But the oatmeal was Ophelia’s way of seeing that she started on a more heart-healthy diet. The girl was on a mission.
Emily sat down at the table, poured her coffee, and went to light up a cigarette.
“I’d rather you didn’t do that.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said I’d rather you didn’t do that.” Cool as a cucumber. She’d done some odd thing with her hair. It looked like she’d stuck it in a socket.
“But I always have a cigarette with my morning coffee.”
“Well, it’s not good for you. And I know it’s not good for me. So I’d rather you didn’t.” And with that, bold as brass, she snatched up the ashtray from the table, emptied it in the garbage, and put it in the sink, running water in it.
Emily was left holding the book of matches in her hand, the unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth. It was her house and she wasn’t about to let this slip of a thing with the electric hair – she saw now that there were red streaks running through it – tell her what she could or couldn’t do in it.
She yanked a match loose from the book. Testing the limits, that’s what they used to call this back when she was the eldest in a family of little demons who were always seeing exactly how far they could go. She brought the match close to the striker.
“Don’t … light … that,” said Ophelia, turning from the cupboard, where she was searching for something or other. She folded her arms across her chest. Plucky young thing. She gave Emily a look that was pure Charles – Charles with electric hair. Was that eyeliner she was wearing?
Emily looked right back at her, the match poised over the striker. The nerve of the girl. The cheek, as her grandmother used to say. Yield now, and there would be no stopping it. She lit the match.
“Don’t,” warned Ophelia, as if she were talking to a child. “It makes me feel sick. It makes my clothes stink. Oh, and – by the way – it will kill you! Do you have any brown sugar in this place?” She turned back to the cupboard and started going through tins.
Emily sat holding the match while the flame crept perilously close to her fingers. Finally she blew it out, perched it on the edge of the table, plucked the unlit cigarette from her mouth, and put it back in the pack. The entire incident had about it the unmistakable odor of defeat. She would live to fight another day, she assured herself, as she pushed the pack of cigarettes into her dressing-gown pocket.
The brown-sugar search finally yielded results – an opened package in a tin in a corner of the cupboard. Emily had no idea how long it had been there. She could not remember having bought it. It had fossilized in the package – a solid brown rock of what had once been sugar. Ophelia chipped away at it with a grapefruit spoon until there were enough shards to scatter on their oatmeal. She wrote brown sugar down on a scrap of paper and taped it to the spice shelf above the sink. Not only was the girl a tyrant; she was an organized tyrant.
The oatmeal was delicious. But Emily sulked – justifiably, she felt – and said nothing. Still, when offered seconds, she readily accepted. Ophelia went at the brown sugar again with the grapefruit spoon.
“That’s not necessary, Ophelia.”
“Please don’t call me that.” She was chipping with a passion now.
“Call you what?”
“Ophelia.”
“Well, that is your name, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said, plunking the oatmeal down in front of Emily, “but none of my friends call me that.”
“Why ever not?”
“Well … let’s see. How about because it’s a perfectly hideous name? How would you like to be named after some girl who goes mad and drowns in a river? No, wait – drowns in a river, singing?”
“As you wish. But don’t you think you’re being a little hard on the poor girl? Consider her situation. She’s in love with Hamlet, and he is in love with her. Her father forces her to betray him. Hamlet goes mad, rejects her, and kills her father. The weight of all that grief and guilt is too much for her to bear, and she goes mad. She’s not the first to go mad from heartbreak – nor, I suspect, will she be the last.”
Ophelia was mining brown sugar for her oatmeal and appeared to be paying not the least attention.
“Very well, then,” said Emily. “What do I call you?”
“O.”
“O?”
“Yes. O.”
“You’re kidding?”
“I’ve never been more serious in my life. My name is O. Not Ophelia, not Oph, not Felia. Just O.”
“And that’s what your father calls you?”
She nodded.
“Very well, then, O it is – on one condition.”
O looked over at her.
“That you just call me Emily. Not Aunt Emily. I detest ‘Aunt Emily.’ Just Emily. Deal?”
“Deal.”
So now, as she gathered up the books for Ophelia to shelve, she corrected herself. “O, I have another few books here for you to shelve.”
She found she actually liked the quirky sound of the name. It suited the gir
l. Perhaps she should start to call herself E.
Then again, maybe not.
12
LITERATURE – front room, right wall, alphabetical by Author. MYSTERIES – front room, left wall near window, alphabetical by Author. PHOTOGRAPHY – front room, right aisle, shelves facing PSYCHOLOGY.
And how did you spend your summer, O? Well, actually I had an absolutely amazing summer memorizing the Subject Guide to the Green Man bookshop. I know, I know. Guess I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
O flipped the page: POETRY – front room, center aisle, left side, just past CHILDREN’S BOOKS.
She walked the aisles with the list in one hand and a pink feather duster in the other, locating each section as she read it off the list. They were identified by hand-lettered cardboard labels, thumbtacked to the shelf. She ran her eye over the contents of each section, pulling out a title or two that caught her interest, running the feather duster over the tops and the spines of the books.
If the shop had a mouth, it would have laughed at the feather duster. The shop was way beyond feather-duster stage. Dust lay thick over everything. What they really needed was a huge vacuum cleaner – or a small hurricane. All the duster did was stir the stew around a little.
O ran her eye over the contents of the poetry section. She recognized some of the “biggies,” like Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Whitman, and Eliot, but many she’d never heard of before. There were even a couple of Emily’s books tucked among the masters. She pulled out one and looked at the black-and-white photo on the back cover. A very young Emily looked back. There was a touch of the otherworldly about her even then. It seemed she was not so much looking at you, as through you.
She was suddenly aware of Emily staring at her from the desk. Sliding the book back in place, she moved on. The last thing she needed was to show that she had an interest in poetry. That was her secret, and she intended to keep it that way until she was ready.
The Green Man Page 5