My Darling Detective

by Howard Norman

  We made a date to meet at the Wired Monk the next evening at eight o’clock, and both of us showed up on time. “All that talk about my drawings I laid on you, Jacob. You were sweet to listen. I can get carried away. I must sound like a typical art student to you, right?”

  “I don’t know any typical art students,” I said. “I don’t know any atypical ones either.”

  “Oh, I’m your first?”

  “You could put it that way. Yes.”

  “Anyway, I only make drawings. This one day, I made a drawing of a birch tree in the small park near Historic Properties. I just looked at it in a kind of anthropomorphic way, I guess.”

  “Anthropomorphic?”

  “Something not human that you give human characteristics to. To me, the tree looked like a ballet dancer. And after that first drawing, I made my life-altering decision. To draw only birch trees. I want to be a kind of birch tree savant. So far I’ve made four hundred sixteen drawings of the same birch tree. I will continue to make drawings only of the one birch tree, unless it’s blown down by a hurricane, and even then I can draw it from memory. And I intend eventually to rent an apartment with a window looking down on the park, and I’ll set up my easel and look at the birch tree through the window and draw it. I’ll live in that apartment hopefully for decades, until I die. I’ll have by that time made a very stalwart attempt to draw the birch tree into infinity, and hopefully I’ll fall over dead in the process, age one hundred five, my face wrinkled as a fingerprint.”

  Despite thinking her analogy between a birch tree and a ballet dancer unoriginal, still, I was so impressed, so taken aback at how someone her age could already know what she wanted to do in life, that it didn’t yet occur to me that she was a solar system beyond pretentious, and maybe a little nuts. She just sounded all passionate intent. It was really something, to be so prescient about one’s own life.

  “My father always told me, ‘Make a road map for life and follow it,’” she said, “and mine leads me to an apartment near Historic Properties, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, overlooking a birch tree.”

  “I hope you sell a lot of drawings. I really do,” I said.

  “Well, Jacob, that’s beside the point, really. It’s all about art.”

  “I’m always thinking about how to pay my bills, I guess. Sorry.”

  “When my father first saw my drawings—of people; this was before I started exclusively drawing the birch tree—when I showed him my portraits, he got me an interview at the police station. He found out they were advertising for a police artist. How it works is, the police call in witnesses to a crime, and those witnesses try the best they can to give a physical description of the criminal to the police sketch artist, and the sketch artist is supposed to come up with a close enough likeness to put on a Wanted poster.”

  “Would you ever consider doing that?”

  “Jacob, no.”

  “It sounds like steady employment to me, is why I asked.”

  “I’m drawing my birch tree. I wouldn’t have time for that shit.”

  “You couldn’t fit it in somehow? It probably would pay pretty well. If you got the job.”

  “You and my father would get along well.”

  Outside of university, I worked all day Monday and Friday evenings, after store hours, in the stock room at John W. Doull, Bookseller. Also, thanks to my mother, I worked weekend days at the Halifax Free Library. In that capacity I oversaw the Delinquent Borrowers File. During the average Saturday and Sunday, I’d process anywhere between a hundred and a hundred fifty book delinquencies. “You’re the truant officer of the library,” my mother would say. On average, books were two to three weeks overdue, sometimes a month. I’d tuck overdue notices into envelopes with the library’s return address on them and drop a stack of the notices into the nearest mailbox. On occasion the library would receive letters in return. One read:

  Dear Halifax Free Library,

  I received notice that the book A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway, is three months overdue. However, please consider the fact that I have a very busy life. I do not have time to read every evening as some people do. Don’t you think that the Halifax Free Library should take into account actual real daily lives of their patrons in this regard? A Moveable Feast, in case you don’t know, is about the author’s life in Paris when he was a young and mostly unknown writer. I still have two chapters to go. What is more, I have been to Paris twice and very little of what the author writes squares with my own experience. My disappointment in this is endless. Ernest Hemingway and I are not in touch, so I could not relay this to him. In addition, given the fact that my husband, Gerald, is pretty much confined to the living room sofa—by choice—I cannot ask him to return A Moveable Feast. Let’s strike a compromise. I will return the book as soon as I am finished with it and the Halifax Free Library can keep the advice I have given about how to better take into consideration the lives of your patrons free of charge.

  Best regards,

  Mrs. Peter Irby

  I had been seeing Alexis regularly for six months when the incident with the stolen book occurred. Between my work commitments and her academic courses, plus her obsessive drawing of the birch tree, we decided to meet a maximum of twice a week, for dinner, a movie, or just to sit in the Wired Monk Café. When one of us had a little extra money, we’d take a room at the Lord Nelson Hotel. The best way I can describe our relationship is that it didn’t seem to get any deeper, and yet it didn’t get any shallower either. Which must’ve meant we were treading water. Early on, she had indeed rented a one-room apartment overlooking the park near Historic Properties (one year’s rent paid in advance by her father), and the only thing on the walls were her drawings of the birch tree, held up by thumbtacks. There was a cot, one chair, and a ratty sofa. No refrigerator. Bathroom down the hall. I didn’t much like visiting her there. Some evenings I’d go over as planned and would find that Alexis had set out folding chairs for eight or ten of her art student friends. They’d listen to music, mainly John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, and then they’d play the same goddamn rock songs over and over—“Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” “Nothing from Nothing,” “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” “Bungle in the Jungle,” “I Shot the Sheriff,” and “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain”—which would drive me crazy, the way they sang along with sanctimonious devotion, though Alexis did point out that everyone thought I was a pill and didn’t know how to have fun, and “in this miserable world, if you can’t have fun, you’re really lost.” But I suppose I wasn’t capable of seeing, given that her rent was paid and she could do exactly what she wanted all day and night, every day and night, and that she ate at restaurants four or five nights a week, just how miserable life was for her. “People have inner lives, Jake,” she’d say, “not just outer lives.” Her friends liked to discuss all manner of esoteric theories about painting. I heard one fellow say to Alexis, “Your trees are definitely in the same lineage of genius as Mondrian’s early drawings, before he went all geometrical.” On a number of occasions, when there were new friends in the apartment, Alexis would often not even introduce me, and when I’d mention this, she’d say, “It’s not what a person is named but what he or she thinks that matters.”

  “I must not matter much, then,” I said, “at least to your friends. Since I don’t tell them what I think about anything. Neither do they ask.” To me, Alexis was unusual.

  One Saturday afternoon I was going through delinquent notices and discovered that one Alexis Boyce (address: Nova Scotia School of Art) had failed to return the two volumes of Henri Matisse, by Louis Aragon, for nearly two months. Not only was I surprised to see the name Alexis Boyce, but I immediately recalled registering in the inventory at John W. Doull those very same volumes. To give Alexis the benefit of the doubt, I privately dissembled on her behalf: thousands of copies of the two-volume set had been published. They were elegant books, and Denise Carle, the buyer of used books at John W. Doull, would no doubt have paid anyone
a decent amount for them. Still, I started to get a stomach cramp and walked over to the bookstore. I lied and said that I was worried about a mistake I might’ve made in the inventory ledger. My immediate boss at the time was a man named Mordechai (Morty) Shaloom, who had worked in antiquarian books for twenty years. He said, “Go ahead, Jake. Good of you to be so conscientious.” I went into the storeroom, checked the ledger, and, sure enough, listed there were the two volumes on Matisse. Next I went to the art section of the store and found the books on a low shelf. I examined the inside back covers and could detect the faint outline of the library’s pocket in which the borrower’s card would be stamped and dated. Someone had taken great pains in removing those pockets. My heart sank.

  When I reported all of this to my mother, she said, “I never liked that Alexis. And I certainly can’t like her now, can I? But you have to figure this out for yourself.”

  Over the next few days my mother went through the delinquent notices for the past year and found that Alexis had borrowed no fewer than sixteen art books listed as Outstanding Delinquencies. The library was always way behind in its paperwork, so a six-month or even a year’s delinquency wasn’t all that unusual. However, now that my mother had been specially alerted, and with the authority and responsibilities of being head librarian, she felt the need to address the issue with her board of directors, which she did. The board insisted on taking immediate legal action against Alexis. One evening at our dining room table, my mother said, “Jacob, there’s something I want you to do, please. I’m going to give you the delinquent notices that pertain to Alexis Boyce, and I’d like you to check them against the inventory at John W. Doull. You can, of course, say no to this. Because what I’m asking, in part, is for you to help investigate Miss Boyce, and she being your present girlfriend, that cannot be a pleasant task, not pleasant for me or for you, and potentially quite seriously unpleasant for Miss Boyce herself. But she may be in real trouble, and you may want to discuss it with her. I have not told the board of your relationship, and I never will. It’s none of their business. You’re my son, and I’ll trust you to handle this for yourself.”

  The next day, I checked the bookstore’s inventory against the library’s delinquent notices. Every single book in question had been taken from the Halifax Free Library and sold by Alexis to John W. Doull—every one. In turn, more than half had already been sold to bookstore customers. I hurried over to Alexis’s apartment, but she wasn’t home. She never locked the door, so I went in and described at length, on three pieces of drawing paper, what the situation was. I asked her to telephone me.

  The following day, I learned that my mother had Alexis arrested. By the time I got to the police station, Alexis’s father had posted bail for her, and I never saw her again. I contacted a number of her friends at Nova Scotia School of Art, each of whom said something to the effect that she had been “sent to Europe.” They didn’t seem to be hiding anything; no, I think it was all they knew. A month later, I was near Alexis’s former apartment and saw her landlord, Mrs. Templeton, stepping from the building. I asked her what happened to all the drawings in Alexis’s apartment. “Oh, right,” she said. “Well, before her arrest, she slipped an envelope under my door. Inside was a request that I gather up all the drawings and send them to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She’d left enough funds in the envelope to cover the cost, dear girl. And so I followed her wishes to the last drawing. There were hundreds, you see. I’ve had no word yet from the Museum of Modern Art. But I imagine these things take time.”

  “Did Alexis leave a forwarding address?”

  “Her father dropped by saying he would do that, but never did,” Mrs. Templeton said. “Alexis is living in Europe somewhere, I believe.”

  “Well, thank you anyway,” I said.

  “Would you be Jacob, by any chance?”

  “I am—Jacob Rigolet.”

  “Oh, Lord, well, wait right here. I’ll go fetch what she left you.”

  I waited in front of the building for a few minutes, and when Mrs. Templeton returned, she handed me a rolled-up drawing, held fast by a rubber band. “This one she left for you, Jacob,” she said. “You can see your name printed in pencil there on the back. Along with the title.”

  I saw that the title, in quotation marks, was “Birch Tree #344.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “There, that’s properly done. Goodbye, then.”

  The End of the War Café

  To further consider Martha’s question concerning Nora: “What really happened, Jacob?”

  A year before I was employed by Mrs. Hamelin, my mother began to put up family photographs on the walls of our house at 78 Robie Street, across from the Common. Ours was more a bungalow than a house. It had two bedrooms: mine was at the back, my mother’s directly off the dining room. There was a modest-sized kitchen, a small study, a front porch, and a backyard. The house was painted white, with black shutters and flower boxes. “The flower boxes will always be the fullest extent of my gardening,” my mother said.

  My mother worked long hours, especially after she became head librarian. She would be at work by 7 a.m., though the library opened at 10 a.m. She held weekly staff meetings and attended intra-provincial library conferences and, once a year, the national library conference in Ottawa, at which time she’d be away for three nights. She visited elementary and high schools to talk about the Halifax Free Library, was occasionally quoted in the Chronicle-Herald about civic issues, and once even spoke on the radio, when she commented on the ten most frequently borrowed books of that year. I thought she did brilliantly. I was very proud.

  But when my mother arrived home from her stint on the radio, she seemed quite despondent. She slumped into the Morris chair in the study (which also had a pull-out sofa, and would have served as a guest room, had we had any guests) and said, “Would you bring me a whiskey, please, Jacob. And I fully realize it’s only five o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon.” Sipping the whiskey, she said, “I listened to the playback and felt I sounded like a fuddy-duddy spinster librarian. I just hated it. I hated my voice. I hated what I said.”

  “Well, I listened carefully, and I thought you did a very good job,” I said.

  My mother took another sip. “Is that how you think of me, Jacob? Be honest with your mother now. Do you think of me as a spinster librarian?”

  “Whatever that is, I don’t think of you that way.”

  “‘Whatever that is’?” I could see her hesitate, to summon up a little courage. She finished off the glass and held it out for me to pour her another, which I did. She took several sips from the second glass, then said, “It’s a woman—in my case a widow—who is dried up. Here”—she moved her hands over her body, from neck to knees, then clutched at her heart—“and here.” She threw back the rest of the whiskey. “Oh, have I embarrassed my son? I don’t mean to embarrass you, Jacob.”

  “Mother, nothing you could do, absolutely nothing, would embarrass me.”

  “You know, several men have found me quite beautiful over the course of my lifetime. And I think lately Mr. Hebersall in children’s books might have certain designs . . . ”

  “Bernard Rigolet must have,” I said.

  “Must have what?”

  “Thought you were beautiful.”

  “Oh, Bernard, well. Well, Bernard.” She was slurring her words slightly. “Bernard Rigolet found me ravishing. You see, I have very nice features, if I may put it that way myself. Put it that way myself to my grown son. Very nice features under the silk pajamas, as they used to say. Oh, I see you’re blushing. But I am only telling you something of my early marriage. Before the war. Before my husband went off to die in Germany. The German city of Leipzig.”

  This was the first time I’d ever heard her utter the name Leipzig.

  “The love of my life, Bernard. Such a handsome man. I might even elevate that to dashing. He said I was like a figure in an Edwardian painting.”

  “So, my father knew E
dwardian paintings?”

  “Well, I’d brought home a book of Edwardian portraiture. To put on the table.”

  That same night, I heard my mother banging around in the dining room. When I went out to investigate, I saw that she had dragged three boxes of old photographs into the room and was hanging them on the wall. She was dressed in her pajamas and robe and bedroom slippers.

  “Need some help here, Mom?” I said.

  “No, I have to curate this room myself. But you can sit and keep me company if you want to.”

  “What are you doing, exactly?”

  “Portrait gallery of happy days. Hand me that picture there on top, that box nearest to the table.”

  I lifted the black-and-white photograph in its frame and looked at it. It showed my mother and father—that is, the man I believed at the time was my father, Bernard—standing in front of the very same bungalow Mother and I still lived in. The words “Nora looks quite fetching here,” in what I figured was Bernard’s cursive, were written along the bottom. It was a winter scene; my mother was wearing an overcoat and high boots. Her dark hair fell loosely, and she wore a stocking cap. She had a worried smile. Bernard was wearing a U.S. Army–issue coat and his hair was cut short. He had his right arm around my mother’s shoulders and was looking directly at her, so his face was in profile. “It’s the day before Bernard left for Europe,” my mother said. “To join ranks with the U.S. First Army.”

  It wasn’t until 4 a.m. that she had hung the last photograph of the night. Now the dining room walls and the walls of her bedroom were covered, and I mean covered, from near the ceiling to eye level. I broke down the empty boxes and put them in the trash. When I went back inside, my mother was asleep on the sofa.