by Ann Waldron
McLeod couldn’t get to Rare Books every day—after all, she had a class to teach. The class met for only three hours once a week, but the students seemed to require a lot of conferences with the teacher. They also sent her frequent e-mails, which McLeod answered scrupulously. Then there were the classes themselves to plan, and the visiting speakers to arrange, meet, host, and see on their way. Busy as she was, she went to Rare Books when she could and plowed slowly through the van Dyke papers. When she saw George, she told him about some of the things she found—essays and orations van Dyke had written in college, and the promised letters from six presidents of the United States.
“The plum I’ve found so far,” she told George one night, “is this fight song he wrote for Princeton. It was to be sung to the tune of ‘Marching Through Georgia.’ I wrote down some of the lyrics:
“‘Nassau! Nassau! Thy jolly sons are we
Cares shall be forgotten, all our sorrows fly away
While we are marching through Nassau.’
“Isn’t that gorgeous?” she asked.
“Well,” said George, “not exactly.”
BUT WAS THERE a book in all this stuff? McLeod didn’t think so, but she kept on with the research. Sometimes she thought it must be her innate curiosity that drove her, and sometimes she thought it was just deeply satisfying to sit in the octagonal Reading Room and read old letters and clippings. And maybe she persisted because she was interested in all the people who worked in Rare Books and Special Collections. She talked to Diane, the clerk who sat all day at the table in the Reading Room, and found out that she was a single mother whose child had a learning disability. Diane was trying to get him into a special school. Molly, the receptionist, took ballet lessons at night and dreamed of dancing. Jeff, one of the pages, was writing a novel.
She sometimes chatted with other researchers who came to the Reading Room. One was Barry Porter, an English professor on leave from Harvard, who was doing research on Eugene O’Neill.
“What’s O’Neill’s connection to Princeton? Why are his papers here?” McLeod asked him when they were having a quick cup of coffee in the little café in the basement of Chancellor Green.
“There’s an extraordinary collection, despite his brief stay at Princeton. O’Neill matriculated in the fall of 1906, but he dropped out after his freshman year,” said Porter.
“Why?”
“Disciplinary and academic problems,” said Porter. “He worked in a mail-order house and then went to sea before he started writing plays and went on to win the Nobel Prize. But he had some sort of feeling for Princeton—he gave them a collection of his earliest manuscripts.”
Another researcher, or “reader,” as the staff called them, was a delightful woman named Swallow. Her hair was white, though not prematurely white like McLeod’s. Miss Swallow might be old, but she was writing a book on botanical painters—Princeton had wonderful books with beautiful paintings of plants and flowers, Miss Swallow told McLeod, as well as loose prints.
“They’re all so gorgeous,” Miss Swallow said. “I’m writing about the lithographs and researching the lives of the painters. I’m concentrating on the women. Rachel Ruysch in Düsseldorf was one of the first women to earn a living painting, and she did flowers. Her thistle is superb. And Princeton has Elizabeth Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal. She painted the specimens in the Chelsea Physic Garden in London in the eighteenth century. Did I tell you more than you wanted to know?”
“It’s fascinating. How did you get interested in this?” McLeod asked her.
“I’m a gardener, and an amateur painter, and I like to write. I used to write children’s books.”
“Did you illustrate them yourself?”
“Sometimes I did,” said Miss Swallow. She paused and then said, “This is the best project I’ve ever worked on.”
McLeod liked Miss Swallow, liked her looks, her energy, and the way she dressed, in trim pantsuits, always with a nice piece of old jewelry—a silver pin, a cameo, or a coral necklace.
She was a paragon, McLeod thought, and she deserved a super project. If flower painters was her master work, then good luck to her.
Six
IF MCLEOD DIDN’T see Nat Ledbetter as she came into Rare Books, he nearly always stopped by the Reading Room to speak to her when she was there. One day when she was signing in, Ledbetter was on his way out with another man. He stopped to introduce her to his companion, who was the curator of Rare Books, Randall Keaton.
“But everybody calls him ‘Buster,’ ” Nat said.
“I’m glad to know you,” said McLeod, shaking hands with Buster, who was dark-haired, dark-skinned, and angry-looking. Almost bellicose, she thought, creating a device to remember his name.
“Have you had lunch?” Nat asked her. “Won’t you come with us to the Annex?”
“I shouldn’t,” said McLeod, “but I will.” And she put her coat and hat and scarf and gloves back on and happily went out with Buster and Nat. Later, she was glad she went—Buster turned out not to be bellicose at all, but more of a bluffer, with a tendency to make sweeping statements. Buster the Blusterer, she came to think of him.
“How are you coming with the van Dyke papers?” he asked her.
“Slowly,” she said.
“The dullest man who ever lived,” said Keaton.
“Hardly,” said McLeod. “There’s Calvin Coolidge.”
“But nobody’s writing anything about Coolidge either,” said Keaton.
And so it went. Tomato soup (which McLeod had just ordered) was the blandest soup in the world, according to Buster. The news in the paper that morning about global warming, or whatever was the top story of the day, was the worst thing that had ever happened. His cup of coffee was the vilest he had ever had. The director of libraries at Princeton was the biggest fool he had ever seen. That winter’s weather was absolutely the foulest yet.
What Buster really liked was books. He was obsessed by books. “It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen,” he said when he was talking about a Book of the Dead from Egypt. “It’s a manuscript on linen, and it dates from the Ptolemaic Period.”
McLeod wondered when the Ptolemaic Period was, but before she could find out, Buster had moved on to talk about a copy of Richard Lovelace’s Lucasta, published in London in 1648, which was up for sale.
McLeod had never heard of Lovelace or Lucasta but didn’t get a chance to find out more because Buster had already moved on. “But even more important,” he was saying, “is the copy of The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America. You know, by Anne Bradstreet, the first book of verse published in America. We must have it to go with Sheridan’s Bay Psalm Book. I want it more than anything.”
“You always want the next thing ‘more than anything.’ ” said Natty. “Maybe we can get it. Let me look at our funds.”
SHE MET FANNY Mobley, the curator of manuscripts, on her own. Fanny stopped her as she was leaving late one afternoon and said, “You’re McLeod Dulaney, aren’t you?”
“ I am.”
Fanny introduced herself and said, “I just wanted to tell you how glad we are that you’re working on Henry van Dyke. We’ve had those papers a long time and I’ve always wished someone would do something with them.”
“I think he’s a very interesting man,” said McLeod.
Fanny was a tall woman with longish red hair that was turning gray. That day she wore a fringed, woolly, home-spun skirt that fell well below her knees and a gray cardigan over a maroon silk blouse. “I hope you’re finding everything you need.”
“Oh, I’m finding more than I know what to do with,” said McLeod.
“Everyone is being helpful?” asked Fanny.
“Everybody is wonderful. This is a marvelous place to do research.”
“I hope so,” said Fanny. “Let me know if there’s anything at all I can do to help you.”
“I certainly will,” said McLeod. “Thank you so much.”
The next morning, McLeod stopped
in Fanny’s office door to say hello. Fanny merely scowled at her. “I’m sorry,” said McLeod, “are you busy?”
“Very,” said Fanny. Still scowling, she got up to close her office door.
Odd, thought McLeod. Miss Congeniality had turned into pure Gorgon.
AND SHE WAS interested in Dorothy Westcott, who wasn’t on the paid staff, but was always around. Everyone called her Dodo. Dodo had beautifully coiffed pinkish blond hair and wore designer suits. She was president of the Friends of the Princeton University Library, the group of mostly rich townspeople who generously supported Rare Books and Special Collections, sponsored lectures and symposia, and financed publication of the Princeton University Library Chronicle, a scholarly journal that published articles about material in the collections.
Dodo invited McLeod to lunch one day and asked a few questions about her background and education. She was also interested in McLeod’s hair. “You never—well, touch it up?” she asked.
“Good heavens, no,” said McLeod. “I don’t have the patience. Besides I like to swim and the chlorine turns dyed hair green, doesn’t it? I find my white hair is kind of an asset when I’m interviewing people for the newspaper. They tend to tell me everything and I’ve always thought that was because I look so harmless.”
“I see,” said Dodo doubtfully.
“Yours looks lovely,” McLeod said, eyeing Dodo’s well-cared-for pink coiffure with awe. She moved into her interrogatory mode and learned that Dodo “just loved Princeton.” Her great regret was that she was not an undergraduate alumna.
“Alas, Princeton was not coed in my day, so I went off to Northampton and Smith, but I came here lots of weekends for dances and football games.” She did have a graduate degree from Princeton, “but that’s not the same,” she said.
“I think it’s wonderful myself,” said McLeod.
Dodo also regretted that her husband, Bob Westcott, was not an alumnus (“He went to Rutgers, poor soul”), but she had married him, it was clear, when she had learned for certain that he had made lots of money on Wall Street, was going to make even more, and was willing to commute to New York every day from Princeton. “So we live here—the children did very nicely at Princeton Day School until they went to Lawrenceville—and I try to help the university library all I can. Running the Friends is practically a full-time job, but Bob likes me to do it—although he wouldn’t stand for a regular job, say teaching, which I am fully qualified to do.”
“I’m sure you are,” said McLeod.
“And I guess this has a little more prestige than some things,” said Dodo. “You work with such lovely people . . .” And she recited a list of names that McLeod vaguely gathered belonged to the richest people in town.
The conversation languished, and McLeod could think of nothing to say except to compliment Dodo on the suit she wore. “Thanks,” said Dodo. “I do like good clothes. You have your own style, don’t you? I’ve noticed. At least, your clothes don’t come from Talbot’s.”
“I guess it is my own style, whatever it is,” said McLeod, who didn’t know whether not buying clothes at Talbot’s was a compliment or an insult and hoped it didn’t mean she looked like frumpy Fanny Mobley, who certainly had her own individual style. Then something occurred to her. “Did you know Jill Murray?” she asked Dodo.
“Everybody knew Jill Murray. She was quite the grande dame of Princeton,” said Dodo. “Of course she was ages older than I was, but she was involved with everything—the Present Day Club, Trinity Church, the Garden Club.”
“Who do you think murdered her?” asked McLeod.
Dodo looked around the restaurant, leaned closer to McLeod, and lowered her voice. “I’ve always thought it was Mary.”
“Mary?” McLeod asked.
“Her daughter-in-law,” said Dodo.
“Her daughter-in-law?” McLeod had known women who professed to hate their mothers-in-law, but never any woman that she thought would actually be driven to murder. “What was her name?”
“Mary Murray. Do you know her?”
“No, I don’t,” said McLeod.
“She’s married to that ridiculous Little Big Murray, and I think she was jealous of Jill. Of course, some people say it was Little Big that did it, but I never could see that. He’s too stupid, really. Jill had a brother, Arthur Lawrence, who was a foul-tempered old man, and some people thought he might have done it, just out of spite. She had another brother, Vincent, but he died before she was murdered. The police never found out who did it. The yard man was under suspicion a little while, but I’m sure it was Mary Murray. She’s so quiet and so good, and that’s the kind who always breaks out and does something awful like murder.”
McLeod shook her head in disbelief. It sounded like utter nonsense to her, and Dodo Westcott was probably projecting her own feelings onto Mary Murray, but she merely said, “Interesting.”
Seven
ONE DAY, CHESTER, Philip Sheridan’s assistant, came in the Reading Room and asked McLeod if she would stop by to see Mr. Sheridan before she left that day.
“Of course,” she said. “I’ll come right now.”
“He didn’t want to disturb your work,” said Chester.
“I’d love to stop work,” said McLeod, and followed Chester to Sheridan’s hideaway.
“Ahhh, McLeod. May I call you McLeod?” Sheridan stood up and smiled at her.
“Certainly.”
“McLeod, thank you for stopping to see me. I have a little present for you, if you’ ll accept it.” He handed her a book. It was a fat hardcover book, heavy when McLeod took it into her hands. She looked at it and saw that it was The Vicar of Bullhampton. Puzzled, she opened it, and looked at the title page. “It says ‘1870,’” she said. “Is it a first edition?”
“It is,” said Sheridan. “Chester and I both spotted it in a London antiquarian bookseller’s catalog soon after you came in here, and we ordered it for you.”
“But shouldn’t it be in the Sheridan collection?”
“We already have two firsts of the Vicar,” said Sheridan.
“I’m overcome,” said McLeod. She sat down in the wing chair, and looked at her new book. “This was very sweet of you. Thank you so much.”
“I told you we’d make a collector out of you.”
“I’ll have to become a collector—out of gratitude.”
“For the joy of it,” corrected Sheridan.
“How do people become book collectors?” asked McLeod. “How did you get started?”
“I started early. I’ve been around fine books all my life, and I loved the children’s books my father bought for me. My favorite was The Wind in the Willows, I read it over and over. I loved Rat and Badger and dear old Toad. It was a quite ordinary copy bought in the thirties but it had illustrations by E. H. Shepard. When my father saw how I loved the book, he bought me the first edition from 1908—and I never looked back. I loved those two different editions of the same book. Over the years I bought other editions of The Wind in the Willows illustrated by other people—Arthur Rackham, Tasha Tudor, and Michael Hague.”
Sheridan said he had turned briefly to collecting Ernest Hemingway. “If you collect Hemingway, you get interested in books about Spain and bullfighting and in the other expatriate writers in Europe between the wars. Just like people who collect Shakespeare have to have Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives because that’s where Shakespeare got his Roman plots, and Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles because that was the source of details for his history plays. I could talk forever.”
“Go ahead. How did you get from Hemingway back to the English?”
“Hemingway was the aberration. My heart wasn’t really in Americana. My father loved it, and I had a dear friend who was interested in American writers and we used to talk about them a lot. I’m an Anglophile at heart; I really like Dickens and Trollope and Thackeray and even Sir Walter Scott. And Galsworthy and then Evelyn Waugh—well, just all of them. It’s been very rewarding.
”
McLeod took her expensive, heavy copy of The Vicar of Bullhampton and put it in her locker, thinking that she would never become a serious collector—it was so much easier to read a paperback than a heavy hardcover. Still, it was nice to own a Trollope first.
WHEN SHE SAW Miss Swallow in the Reading Room, she went over to her and whispered an invitation to lunch. Miss Swallow accepted, and at noon they went to their lockers to get their coats and purses. McLeod brought along her copy of The Vicar of Bullhampton.
“I have something to celebrate. Lunch is my treat. Let’s go to Prospect.”
“That’s lovely,” Miss Swallow said. “I haven’t been there in years.” Prospect was an Italianate house, once the home for Princeton presidents, and now the faculty club.
“This is nice,” Miss Swallow commented when they were seated at a table by the window overlooking the formal garden that Woodrow Wilson’s wife had designed when her husband was president of Princeton.
They both ordered chicken salad. McLeod admired Miss Swallow’s pin, a silver angel.
“Thanks. And what are we celebrating?” asked Miss Swallow.
“This,” said McLeod, handing her The Vicar. “Philip Sheridan gave it to me. It’s a first edition. He found out how much I like Trollope.”