Walking around to the side, she used a key to open the door and led us inside what looked like an apartment. It was small but had the essentials of life: a kitchen, a living room, one bedroom, and a bathroom. It didn’t look like anyone had lived there in a while, but I couldn’t imagine why—the place was great, even though it didn’t have a window that looked out to the ocean like the big house did.
“Years ago I had this apartment built so I could have living space for household help. It turned out I couldn’t stand having anyone around. But the times have changed, and I’m gone a lot of hours each day for work, and frequently I’m out of town for meetings. So here’s the deal. You can rent this place from me and live here while you go to college. But don’t get any ideas! If you throw loud parties or play music at all hours, I’ll kick your asses out in a heartbeat.”
“We couldn’t afford…,” Bill started.
“Hush up and let me finish,” she reprimanded him. “I want someone around the place. I’m getting older and don’t like being alone without someone nearby. I know—crazy, huh? So I’ll rent you this place if you’ll help out a little around the house and be here in case I need some help.”
“How much?” I asked, almost dreading the answer.
She looked at us, crossed her arms, and said, “I don’t need money. I’ve got more money than God. I can’t pick men to live with, but at least I picked rich ones who gave me a lot of money when we parted company. That, plus I earn way more money than I can possibly spend, and I’ve got everything I could possibly want.” She gave us a number that seemed unbelievable.
“No way!” I shouted. “Sorry!” I added, chagrined that I had allowed that personal outburst.
She laughed. “I was a little worried about you, but now I can see that I don’t need to.”
“But you could get so much more—” I started.
“Don’t you listen? I don’t need more money. What I need is someone I can trust, someone quiet,” she emphasized, “who can make the place not look so damned deserted all the time, and who can be handy if I do something stupid like fall and… oh, hell, don’t make me say it.”
Bill quickly glanced my way and could tell from the light in my eyes that I was wholeheartedly behind the idea. “We’ll take it,” Bill said.
“There’s a pool,” she said, pointing out a feature we had both missed. “I won’t use the thing. Don’t want to risk getting skin cancer from too much sun. If you take over cleaning it and keep it up, you can use it all you want.” She led us back to the house and asked, “So when do you start school? Fall?”
“Yes, fall semester, probably in August, but we were going to move out earlier, probably as soon as school finishes and we graduate. We’ve got to find some jobs so we can survive.”
“Okay. You’ll be back here in what? Mid-June? Late June? Early July?”
We hadn’t really talked about it, so we simply nodded. “Something like that.”
“Okay. Let’s say you’ll be back on July first. I’ll get keys made, get the housekeeper to come in and freshen the place up a little. Get the walls painted, the floors cleaned, things like that. You’ve got a car?” she asked.
“Yes, but I don’t think it will make it across country. We’ll probably leave it back in New York.”
“How the hell did you get over here?”
“Bus,” I said.
She nodded but didn’t say anything. “So you don’t have furniture of any sort?”
“No,” we agreed. “We’ll have to see what we can find when we get back.”
“Don’t. I’ve got a house full of furniture. I’ll get a bed, sofa, desk, chair, stuff like that, move it and set up so you’ll be able to move right in. You’ll have to buy your own sheets and pillows and towels and food, but….”
“Wow! Thank you!” Bill looked at her and said, “Okay. What’s the rest of the story?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
Bill had that look in his eye. He was incredibly good at reading people. He crossed his arms and looked at her. “There’s more to the story of why you’re doing this. I’m just asking what it is, that’s all. I want to know what we’re getting into. I told you, we’ve got to focus on education. We’ve got to be sure we’re not moving in with some crazy person.”
She nodded. “Good. You’ve got the right approach. You’ll make it.”
“And?”
She looked away for a moment. When she looked back, she sighed and said, “My daughter isn’t my only child. I had a son….”
“Had?” Bill asked when she didn’t immediately continue.
“He killed himself. And don’t worry, it wasn’t in the place you’ll be living.”
“Why…,” Bill started.
“He was gay. He was bullied. And that was back in the time before everybody was talking about bullying and how it can kill people.”
“You should hear Bill’s talk about how hate kills,” I said. “He gives a real kickass presentation. It was so effective that it got him expelled the first time he gave it.”
“Hey! You were assaulted! I wasn’t going to stand by and do nothing!”
“Good,” she said simply. “I wish my son had had someone to stand up with him.” She looked away again. “But that was a lot of years ago. I’ve finally made peace with it, and now, to answer your question, if I can do anything to help out someone who reminds me a bit of my son, then by God I’m going to do it.”
I wanted to hug her but figured that that wouldn’t be a good move. We exchanged information, stuff like names, addresses, phone numbers. She suggested that we go take some pictures with our smartphones so that my mom and dad would know that we weren’t going to move into “some crack house in a dive part of town,” as she put it so effectively. I’d brought my digital camera on the trip so we got lots of pictures to take back home.
Sitting at her computer, she wrote up a quick, simple agreement (she clearly knew the right language to use). We gave her a deposit and said we would be back July 1.
We finished and left, thanking her, and made our way back to the bus to go back to our room on campus. The rest of the visit was an absolute whirlwind. We toured the campus. We attended some classes. We met a gazillion students and other people. And we fell in love with the campus and the whole idea of going to college and living on our own. And needless to say, we used the time away and our private room in the dorm to make mad and passionate love as many times as humanly possible.
When our time in California was finished, we were of very mixed minds as we headed back to New York. We hated leaving the place we’d fallen in love with so quickly, but at the same time we knew we had a lot to do to get ready to move. I had more stuff than Bill, and I’d have to decide what I needed to have with me: Which computer do I take? Do I buy a new printer or get my own printer out there somehow? Do I take any of my books with me? Things like that. Not to mention finishing school and graduating.
When we got back, we were bubbling with excitement, which told my mom and dad all they needed to know. They couldn’t believe the way we had found a place to live, and when they saw the pictures they were convinced that it was a reasonable idea. My mom said, “It just goes to show you that what I’ve always said is true: You do for someone and they’ll do for others they don’t know when those people are in need.
“My grandmother used to sing a song,” my mom explained, “that went something like ‘cast your bread upon the water and it will come back to you’. I can’t remember any of the rest of it, but those few simple words have sort of become one of my mantras in life. Life is a giant circle of people helping one another out. And she was right.”
Chapter 24
WHEN we were back in New York after our whirlwind trip to Los Angeles, Bill remembered that we hadn’t ever opened the trunk or the suitcase that we had found at his old house to find out what they contained. So one day when we had some free time we went down into the basement. After looking it over we decided that we were proba
bly going to have to break the lock to get into the trunk.
“Wait a minute!” I said, having a sudden inspiration. “Where’s that key that was in one of those envelopes?” Bill raced upstairs and came back a moment later with the key.
He leaned over and tried the key in the lock on the trunk, and sure enough, the key fit. “Ha!” he said. “Good thinking!”
The lock easily opened with the key. Not knowing what to expect, Bill slowly opened the top of the trunk to see what was inside. The first thing we saw was what appeared to be a tray filled with envelopes. We checked out a couple and saw that they contained letters—very old-looking handwritten letters.
“Do you recognize the name?” I asked, pointing to the person the letters were addressed to.
“No, I don’t. But I think the last name was somewhere in my mom’s family.”
Bill carefully placed the letter back in the tray to inspect more carefully later. Together we then lifted the large tray from its resting place to find out what rested beneath. After carefully setting the tray on the floor, the first thing we spotted inside the trunk was… what? We couldn’t tell at first. On closer examination it appeared to be books wrapped in brown paper.
Selecting one at random, Bill lifted it from its long resting place, carefully unwrapping the paper to see what it was. Inside he found a copy of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Wow. We’d had to read that last year in English class.
“Looks like somebody liked the book,” I observed.
Bill handed the book to me and then reached for another. I flipped the cover open and said, “Bill!”
“What?”
“Um… um… um… this book is signed.”
“By who?”
“By the author! This book is signed by Mark Twain!”
“No way!” he said. “Wow! I think people collect things like this. I bet there’s someone who might pay to buy something like this. It might be worth fifty dollars? Maybe a hundred? That’ll help with the rent for our new place.”
“Maybe even a couple hundred!” I said.
“No way anybody would pay that much for a book!” he said. “I wonder how it came to be in this trunk?”
I carefully returned the book to its paper wrapping and set it aside. Bill pulled out another of the brown-paper packages and unwrapped that one to see what it contained.
This package contained another pristine looking book. The only difference this time was that the book was one neither of us recognized. The cover identified the book as The Sleeping Wolf. “Hey! Jack London,” I observed. “Cool.” I carefully flipped through a few pages and said, “Hey, this is Call of the Wild. I wonder why it’s called something else?”
I didn’t expect to find anything, but I had to look inside. I was shocked that this book too was autographed by the author. The front title page was signed John Griffith “Jack” London and was addressed “Dearest Isabella.”
“Isabella, isn’t that the name on the envelopes?” I asked.
Bill picked one up and said, “Yes. Sounds like whoever she was, she was quite a reader or a book collector. He wasn’t as famous as Mark Twain, but maybe this one might be worth a few dollars as well. What do you think? Maybe fifty?” he asked.
“I don’t know, but it might be.”
We checked several more of the packages and found that each contained a book, each in pristine condition, and each signed by the author. We found books by Willa Cather, several more by Mark Twain, one by Henry James, whoever that was. There was one by Edith Wharton. We’d had to read something she wrote back in the seventh or eighth grade. All I remember was that it was kind of interesting. There were several more by names we didn’t recognize.
After we’d checked each of the packages, we repacked them and returned them to their original resting place inside the trunk. We carried the letters upstairs, where we spread them out on the living room floor and started examining them. When my mom saw us she asked what we were doing, so we explained to her about the trunk, the key, and the contents of the trunk. She seemed excited and asked Bill to show her one of the books. He went and got one which she carefully unwrapped at the dining room table.
She didn’t say anything at first and then asked him if she could look at it for a moment. Of course he had no objection. Bill returned to the living room floor and kept looking at the letters with me. The handwriting was sometimes hard to decipher, but over the course of a couple of hours we made some headway. At first neither of us recognized the author of some of the letters written to this Isabella person, but my mother excitedly told us that Samuel Langhorne Clemens was better known as Mark Twain. Wow, not only did the trunk contain a signed book by Mark Twain, but the author seemed to have had an ongoing correspondence with this person, whoever she was.
Over time we found that there were letters from each of the authors to go along with the signed books. Isabella had apparently been a teacher and an avid reader who had been a contemporary of the different authors. She had apparently written to them (plus who knew how many others who never responded) to inquire about using their books in her classes. We didn’t have her original letters, but from the responses we gathered that she had written to the authors with some specific, detailed questions about their work. In some cases an ongoing correspondence had developed, and in one case even a true friendship. Some of the names meant nothing to us, but my mom recognized most of them. She excitedly asked Bill if she could tell a friend of hers who was an antiques dealer about what he had and get her opinion. He readily agreed, so my mom made the call.
We were all quite surprised, to say the least, when not ten minutes later the person my mom had called appeared at the door to our house and excitedly asked to see what we had found. After spending about twenty minutes looking at the books, she said, “These are first editions. First editions that have been signed by the authors. These are signed first editions in incredibly good shape.”
“Are these worth what I think they are?” my mom asked her.
“More. Way, way more.”
“I’m already thinking pretty high.”
“Go higher. Way higher.”
“Way?”
“Way higher.”
“What are you saying?” Bill asked.
My mom answered. “Simply that your college education may just have been paid for in full.”
“What?” Bill and I shouted nearly simultaneously.
My mom asked her friend a simple question. “Could you find a buyer for these?”
“No. No way would I even try that,” she answered. “Something this valuable and one-of-a-kind would have to go to an auction house. These are way too precious to risk the mistake of going to an individual buyer who might low-ball us. Do you want me to make some calls?” she asked. My mom looked at Bill who simply nodded in stunned disbelief.
In his spare time (!), Bill went to the local library and did some research. He wanted to learn something about his mysterious benefactor. From the books that she had saved we knew when she was alive and most active. Using the local newspaper, which unfortunately wasn’t online but was only available on microfiche, Bill went through paper after paper after paper. After two hours he had found only one brief mention of the woman. But then, as he started his third hour of tedious searching, he hit the mother lode. Not only was there an article, but it was a front page article with a big headline: “Local Teacher Welcomes Twain.” We quickly skimmed the article.
Apparently Miss Isabella Brown had persuaded her “friend,” Mr. Mark Twain, to come to the school and speak with her students, giving a reading from one of his books. Twain was a big deal, so apparently the entire community wanted in on the action. He consented to give a talk one evening in the largest gathering place in the community, and according to the article the place was packed—filled to overflowing. Our Isabella was hailed for her relationship with the famous author and for getting him to speak to them. For her part, she downplayed herself and put the importance of idea
s front and center, extolling the virtues of reading, learning how to write well, and being able to tell stories.
The article gave us more facts than we had expected to find, as well as a number of leads we could follow later when we had more time. We searched a bit more and finally found an obituary for her. The note of her passing was brief and didn’t provide much additional information, but we made a copy of it anyway, to add it to the record. He didn’t tell me then, but Bill was thinking that someday, some future day when college was finished and he was a completely independent adult, that future day, he wanted to write a book—the story of Isabella. He wanted to tell her story, the story of her life, and the story of her legacy and how her descendants had kept her bequest safe until he came along. As near as we could tell, Bill was her youngest living descendant. He felt that it was his responsibility to keep Isabella alive by telling her story and maybe encouraging others to think ahead, to plan for their descendants’ education, and to encourage learning, reading, and thinking.
The small suitcase we had found in the basement at Bill’s old house turned out to give us the greatest gift of all. Isabella had not only appreciated literature and writers, but she was one herself. The suitcase contained more than a dozen journals, each filled from top to bottom, edge to edge, with handwritten words. She had maintained a journal of her activities, her thoughts, her feelings, and what was going on around her. Bill now had the perfect tool for getting some insight into the woman who provided such a huge gift to him, even though she was born well over a hundred years before the present day. She didn’t know who would benefit from her foresight, but she provided the greatest gift of all nonetheless.
Her journals provided a treasure trove of details, including her correspondence with some of her favorite authors. She was very precise in everything, even going so far as to copy the text of the letters she sent to people into her journals. It was through our reading that we found some of her correspondence with Mark Twain, as well as her thoughts and reflections on meeting him, introducing him, and remaining in touch with him.
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