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The Secret of Lost Things
Sheridan Hay


A stunning debut from a Australian writer – the story of a treasure hunt through a vast New York bookshop.At eighteen, Rosemary arrives in New York from Tasmania with little more than her love of books and an eagerness to explore the city she's read so much about. The moment she steps into the Arcade bookstore, she knows she has found a home. The gruff owner, Mr. Pike, gives her a job sorting through huge piles of books and helping the rest of the staff – a group as odd and idiosyncratic as the characters in a Dickens novel.There's Pearl, the loving, motherly transsexual who runs the cash register; Oscar, who shares his extensive, eclectic knowledge with Rosemary, but furiously rejects her attempts at a more personal relationship; and Arthur Pick, who supervises the art section and demonstrates a particular interest in photography books featuring naked men. The store manager Walter Geist is an albino, a lonely figure even within the world of the Arcade. When Walter's eyesight begins to fail, Rosemary becomes his assistant. And so it is Rosemary who first reads the letter from someone seeking to ‘place’ a lost manuscript by Herman Melville. Mentioned in Melville's personal correspondence but never published, the work is of inestimable value, and proof of its existence brings the simmering ambitions and rivalries of the Arcade staff to a boiling point.Based on actual documents the author found while doing research on Melville, ‘The Secret of Lost Things’ is at once a literary adventure that captures the excitement of discovering a long-lost manuscript, and an evocative portrait of life in a bookshop.









The Secret of Lost Things

Sheridan Hay












FOR

MICHAEL,

my own tempest


“…for experience, the only true knowledge…”



Herman Melville, The Confidence Man




Table of Contents


Cover Page (#u83e26c18-0008-50cf-bf5c-5808e5534971)

Title Page (#u43c0afd1-9af6-5a26-832a-3a95a4ccc74e)

Dedication (#ub81d89a2-d7fa-5046-8632-4e4df5d1b513)

Epigraph (#u4b4f25a0-30df-52bd-a37f-a51b6660c364)

PART ONE (#u3c871a68-7769-5afa-8f88-09f13c19d604)

CHAPTER ONE (#u4af1ae65-449f-595d-a438-ad2fedececdb)

CHAPTER TWO (#u642448d0-185c-57b1-9613-7f5b2edece11)

CHAPTER THREE (#u0c9302d8-41ae-57d2-939e-7ef09e0ce82f)

CHAPTER FOUR (#u3895f63d-c4be-5af7-b69c-e2e6e2c170e3)

CHAPTER FIVE (#u4d75f7c8-7ea9-5373-af20-90ee0ff9831a)

CHAPTER SIX (#ua56aa95d-1556-57a3-9370-2502dad1a9db)

PART TWO (#u47e7db52-e50a-550b-a6a7-b28e558a667e)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#u1a7dfa85-162b-5a21-b863-7793a446cf86)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)

PART THREE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

PART FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

AUTHOR’S NOTE (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)



PART ONE (#ulink_92aeb82c-5aa7-5759-8549-cce98de15a24)




CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_94b84306-78bb-5623-88e4-c0f7deb9c8c8)


I was born before this story starts, before I dreamed of such a place as the Arcade, before I imagined men like Walter Geist existed outside of fables, outside of fairy tales. My time at the Arcade would have gone very differently but for him, for his blindness. His eyes were very nearly useless when I met him, and were it not for his condition, I would never have known about Herman Melville’s lost book. Walter Geist’s blindness is important, but it’s my own, with regard to him, that remains a lasting regret. It’s the reason for this story. If I start with my own beginning you will understand how I came to the Arcade, and how it came to mean so much to me.

I was born on April twenty-fifth, never mind what year precisely; I’m not so young that I care to put my age about, but not so old now that I forget the girl I was.

My birth date, however, is significant in another sense. April twenty-fifth is Anzac Day, the most important day of commemoration on the Australian calendar. It is the day when Australians pin sprigs of rosemary to their breasts to remember those lost to war, to remember that first great loss, at Gallipoli, where rosemary grows wild on the beaches. “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance,” says Ophelia, once she’s lost her mind to grief. “Pray you, love, remember.”

It was April twenty-fifth on the island state of Tasmania, when my mother saw stalks of spiky rosemary pinned over hearts, the day she walked to the free public hospital to give birth to me, walked through the crowded Square trying to avoid the ragged annual parade of veterans and gawking locals. That hardy plant stayed in her mind through a difficult labor, not as the symbol of loss, for she was gaining me, but as an emblem of memory.

Anzac Day, then, determined my name—Rosemary. And given along with my name, the occupation I practice here—to remember. After all, memory is a kind of obligation, perhaps the last duty owed anyone.

I have only one other name. My last—Savage. And Mother too gave me this name, only Mother. She brought me home to the small flat she rented above the shop off the central town Square. Remarkable Hats was the only store of its kind on the island of Tasmania, and we grew up in that shop, Mother and me. But like a pair of goldfish, we grew only so much as the bowl allowed. We came to fit it, but we lived in a bowl of separateness, a transparent wall between us and the rest of the town. Mother had come from the mainland, she was an outsider, and everyone knew that “Mrs.” Savage was a prefix that didn’t disguise one single defining fact: there wasn’t a husband in sight.

But disguise, in a way, was Mother’s business. Hats, after all, can cover up a good deal of what one might not want revealed. Hats can even grant a measure of acceptance to a woman who’d appeared from the mainland to establish a small, decent business—pregnant, without an apparent partner.

“It’s hats that saved us,” Mother often said. “That’s why I call these hats remarkable. They made me unavoidable to respectable people.”

It was imagination that saved us. Hers, in particular. And I like to think imagination was her gift to me.

Remarkable Hats made Mother something of an arbiter of taste in our town as well as wise to vanity. She could guess the hat size of customers within moments of laying eyes on them. The measurements of regular customers she memorized, along with a characteristic that, to her, matched the circumference of their head.

If she saw our prosperous and ambitious landlord, Mr. Frank, in the Square she’d say: “That Mr. Frank, no wonder he’s a nine-and-three-quarters. With all those big ideas, he certainly needs the space.”

Or she’d mention that Mrs. Pym, the florist, had been trying on hats to wear to the Cup: “Of course, Rosemary, nothing I had was right. Pym is one of those five-and-a-halfs. Practically a pinhead. No room in there for a thought, let alone a decision.”

Hats were oracles, divining rods to behavior, and while Mother’s way of judging her fellow Tasmanians was often accurate, matching the opprobrium of a small town with her own brand of snobbishness did little to relieve our isolation. Of course, isolation itself worked on our imaginations, our illusions, separating us even more. We were only glancingly acknowledged, and never included. I helped in the store after school. Friends were discouraged, if they’d ever been interested, or more precisely, curious.

We had each other.

“Better to do well in school,” Mother advised. “Keep up your reading.” And she’d tap her temple with her index finger for emphasis. “All your future’s there beneath your hat.”

She didn’t mention my body. She never did, except in the most perfunctory way, imparting only biological information. As Mother knew firsthand, bodies caused trouble.

She did have one close friend, Esther Chapman, a mentor to me and the owner of Chapman’s, the only shop in the village that sold books. Miss Chapman (I called her Chaps from early on) helped to educate me, taking me to any theater that made its way to our small town, favoring the rare Shakespeare troupe that occasionally washed ashore in Tasmania. Chaps taught me to read before I started school, endowing my purposes with words she would have said, quoting from her favorite play. Chaps held that books were essential, whereas hats were a kind of ephemera, a fancy, objects that ultimately wouldn’t provide Mother or me with security.

She worried for us.

“Books aren’t lumps of paper, but minds on shelves,” she urged Mother. “After all, hats aren’t books—people don’t need them.”

“Tell that to a bald man in the summer,” Mother teased back. “Or to a plain-faced woman.”

But Chaps was right to be concerned.

By the time I finished school, Remarkable Hats was mostly remarkable in that it was still in business. Hats were no longer fashionable, no longer the article of differentiation between decent people and ill-bred ones. Hats went the way of gloves and stockings. Eventually, even regular customers were infrequent, not immune to the whims of fashion or mortality. The town itself was waning.

Mother’s own health had been in steady decline for some time, linked as it was to the dwindling business. She was a small woman, and dark, and she grew thin and pale with worry. As I grew older, Mother diminished. In the absence of customers, Mother had me try on hats after school. I had the height, she liked to tell me. It cheered her up.

I’d find her dozing on her stool behind the high serving counter in the afternoon. She said she could only rest in daylight, that she was most comfortable in the opened store, and that nights were spent endlessly waiting for day. When I finally discovered how deeply in debt we were, Mother’s insomnia was all at once explained.

Late morning one April day, a few months after I’d finished school, I came down the back stairs which joined our small flat to the shop, and found Mother collapsed behind the counter. Her breath was halted, her face the livid color of a bruise, as if she’d been beaten.

Mother died a day later, in the same free hospital where she’d given birth to me. By grotesque coincidence then, it appeared that the town, the state, and the whole of Australia commemorated my private loss publicly, the day I turned eighteen. Anzac Day. I didn’t consider the rosemary pinned to lapels an admonition to remember.

I would never forget.

Mother’s funeral was a short, unsentimental proceeding the following week. I stood in disbelief at the copper door of the mock tomb, a deco affair, that housed the crematorium, set on the highest hill above town. Five old regulars were good enough to come. Both men respectfully held hats to their chests, while the women thoughtfully appeared in Remarkable chapeaus. I thanked them along with Chaps, now my unofficial guardian.

The service was impoverished. Mother and I possessed no religion, save the worship of imagination, of living a kind of fiction, which death, in all its realness, had made a mockery of.

Afterward, we gathered awkwardly in the parking lot outside the tomb until the regulars departed solemnly in their cars, single file, down the steep road. I watched them grow smaller as they separated at the crossroads, the town below just a handful of scattered red tiles, haphazardly thrown across low green hills, without order or pattern, carelessly. It was a narrow, ugly spot on an island of tremendous beauty. The village had never seemed smaller or more unremarkable.

“She’s gone, Chaps,” was all I could manage, feeling short of breath.

The funeral director approached after a while, handing me Mother’s ashes sealed inside a wooden box.

“You said you wanted the simplest one, Miss Rosemary. And this here is the simplest. It’s a native timber, Huon pine. Tasmanian heartwood. Very strong and durable.”

He rapped the box with his knuckles. I winced. Chaps knew him, and, helpfully, the one funeral director in town who wasn’t too unctuous was also the least expensive. But he was nervous for his line of work, and oddly unpracticed in handling grief. He chatted away, not oblivious to my distress but perhaps made so anxious by it that he sought to fend it off with information.

“My supplier told me once that Huon pines can live a thousand years. Practically forever. Isn’t that something?” He went on: “The wood has a very distinctive perfume, too—strong.” He sniffed. “It’s usually found on the west coast of the island—”

“Yes. Thank you,” Chaps said, cutting him off. She took me by the elbow and tried to lead me toward her car. I appeared fixed to the spot.

I held the box of Huon pine with both hands spread beneath, unable to move. The box was warm and smelled faintly corrupt. My eyes began to tear, the water on my face as startling to me as to the nervous director.

Chaps finally pushed me to her car and drove me to her little house. I couldn’t get out, or really move at all, so we set off again, driving in silence down long Tasmanian roads all the way to the coast.

“The ocean,” Chaps said by way of explanation when, eventually, the paved road ended in sand and the sea stretched away, white-capped and vast, before us.

Chaps rolled down the windows so I could smell the salt and feel the pure, fresh Roaring Forties blow their way west to the bottom of the world, to the end of the great globe itself. My throat choked in the cleanest air that exists and I tried to catch my breath. Staring at the ocean, I felt at once surrounded and alone. Between me, there on the Tasmanian island, and ice-covered Antarctica lay nothing but empty, open sea, unpeopled and unknowing. I bent over the Huon box, but couldn’t utter a word until night came in, cold and complete, carried across the Great Southern Ocean by those same prevailing winds.

“What will I do?” I finally breathed aloud.

Chaps, who always had an aphorism to hand, was silent.




CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_b4ca8393-f0ba-5fee-a6b4-ec262bbbf6e4)


For nearly every year of my early life I went with Mother to Sydney, on the mainland, to buy hats and the materials milliners use to dress hats. We made sure to spend my birthday in the city; it was, of course, a public holiday. At first, we stayed in a boardinghouse in Surrey Hills, on Sophia Street. Mother had known the landlady, Merle, before she’d moved to Tasmania, when she lived a life I know nothing about. Her own life before mine.

Merle was a fat, angry woman with small eyes and dyed hair. She resembled a magpie, all black and white and on the lookout for morsels. Her rooming house was cheap, smelled of boiled vegetables; and until I was five and old enough to go with Mother to suppliers, I was left there with Merle for several hours.

Those early hours away from Mother are circumscribed in my memory by a shortage of breath. I can’t have actually held my breath, but the sensation of breathlessness is attached to Mother’s absence like a keepsake. Afraid to upset an invented balance that would result in Mother’s continued nonappearance, I stayed as quiet as possible in the stale-smelling sitting room. Her return was marked with great intakes of breath and tremendous exhales: life restored to the small cadaver I’d become.

“That’s the quietest child I’ve ever seen, Mrs. Savage,” Merle would say, tutting, and shaking her big, smooth head.

“It’s not natural to be so good. I’m happy to watch her, she’s no trouble, but it’s like she only exists for you.”

“I’m all she’s got,” Mother said, often.

“Next year, Rosemary love, you can come with me and do the rounds,” Mother promised. “I don’t want to leave you any more than you want me to.”

So began annual encounters with haberdashery and notions, with felt workrooms full of rabbit pelts and beaver furs, with polished wooden heads and metal blocks (screws protruding from their necks), devices that formed crowns and shaped hats. The storefront shops were bright and cool, but the workrooms behind them were vaporous and warm, the air thick with condensation from steam used to mold and clean hats.

Every supplier indulged me. I was distracted, entertained with bright buttons and lengths of silk ribbon while Mother placed her orders and reviewed new styles. Like a bower bird, everything that sparkled caught my eye. I was served triangular sandwiches, and drank milk from a frosted glass with a striped paper straw. I was a small sultana, my treasure counted in the currency of trifles.

Foy’s supplied all the biggest department stores with accessories. The notion display room was lined with a wall of slim wooden drawers, built half a century before, that opened to reveal a collection of bric-a-brac: zippers, buttons, samples of fur and skins, silk flowers, sequins translucent as fish scales, glass beads, dye samples, feathers from unimaginable birds, sweets and fruit made from wax. The wall of drawers held hundreds of brilliantly colored trinkets designed to trim hats, to dress lapels or shoes or belts. Ornaments came from all over the world: marcasite stones from Czechoslovakia, brilliant as metallic diamonds, and rhinestone pins, direct from France, were stored in deep lower drawers, pirate’s chests unearthed.

I used to imagine that the endlessly varied objects contained in the drawers appeared only moments before the knob was pulled and the drawer opened, as if conjured by my wish to see them. The wall of drawers appeared to my small self to hold everything; and “things,” of course, were the sum of the world.

Workroom girls told Mother I would be beautiful one day, “What with that hair,” they’d say. Mother looked dubious. My hair was thick and red, and seemed hardly to belong to me. I must have favored my father, and likely shared as well his green eyes and freckled skin, for Mother’s dark hair set off fathomless blue eyes, and her skin was flawless, the color of very milky tea. She was bird-boned and compact, her bosom high. It seems barely credible that I was her child, so little did we resemble each other.

At Foys, and at other suppliers, rabbit fur was pressed into fine felt: fur felt, for bowlers, fedoras, and the peculiarly Australian work hats with old-fashioned names like the Drover or the Squatter. The most expensive used imported beaver and were never worn to work but kept for best, for show.

In the very rear of Foys workroom was a dim adjoining chamber, piled with skins and smelling sharply of lye, frightening even to pass. I held a strange empathy for the mounds of lifeless pelts, waiting to be shaped into something purposeful. I had felt just as empty, as breathless, as those flayed furs during the hours Mother had left me with Merle. The other side of glimmering bric-a-brac was this grim sepulcher. Evidently, appearances deceived.

Yet Sydney made me happy. I loved the city. We were anonymous, and even then I had the sense that cities were yielding; that they moved over and made room. In the city, I wasn’t a girl without a father. I wasn’t outside of things. I wasn’t even Rosemary. In a city there is no one who can tell you who they think you are, who they want you to be. Once a year we were special and complete.

Here was the start of my scrapbook full of city scenes, any city, decorated with buttons and ribbon collected from suppliers, and painstakingly glued onto the oversized pages.

Peculiar to Sydney, in those days, was a single word written in chalk in beautiful, looping copperplate on street corners. Sydney was known for it, the word chalked at the feet of the inhabitants and visitors, like a letter consisting of a lone word, but personally addressed to each member of a crowd.

“What does it say?” I asked Mother, pointing to what I took to be scribble, the year I was five. The letters didn’t resemble any in the books that Chaps had given me.

“It says ‘Eternity’, love,” Mother replied, taking my hand. “A man has been writing that word in chalk for thirty years. It’s famous now. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t see it, written there on the street.” She put her arms around me.

“What does it mean?”

“We’ll never know it, Rosemary. It’s a word that means something going on always and forever. And you know, nothing does. Not a human thing, anyway. Everything ends eventually. That’s something you should remember, love.”

She looked absently up the crowded city street, staring past my face and into the distance.

“Remember, Rosemary,” she said. “Nothing lasts.”

It was weeks after Mother’s death before I slowed from the manic activity that marked the days following the funeral. A madness held me. I quickly closed Remarkable Hats, sold off the stock or returned it to suppliers for credit against accumulated debt. I was helped and advised by Chaps, and by Mr. Frank (the nine-and-three-quarters.) There was no other decision to be made. It isn’t true that he who dies pays all debts: I couldn’t preserve the store any more than could our life together. Mother and I had depended on a complex web of credit and postponed payments, revealed once she was gone as a great tangle of insolvency.

I cleaned the flat, the three rooms I’d lived in my entire life. I couldn’t tolerate the space without her; every article reflected her absence. I kept the only photograph I had of her, taken before I was born. After that, she’d always been behind the camera with me as subject.

Those first days I was a somnambulist, but it wasn’t like living a waking dream, even a nightmare, it was its opposite. My whole life up until her death had been the dream, and this reality—the one without Mother, the one where every object I thought mine was either sold or returned, where every thing familiar to me disappeared—had waited, hidden behind all I loved.

Suppliers were kind but businesslike. Only the girls at Foys sent a condolence card. I sold off the furniture and the contents of the flat, but after settling accounts, there was little money left. Chaps moved me into her spare bedroom and encouraged me to rest. As my mania subsided, stupor took its place. Chaps urged me to come into her bookstore, where I had worked before, usually stocktaking, during school holidays. Chapman’s Bookshop was cozy, safe; and the small tasks we performed together helped stave off a wave of terrible passivity.

“No one dies so poor that something isn’t left behind,” Chaps said one afternoon, as we unpacked a box of books together. “You are what your mother left, Rosemary. You’ve got to make good on that legacy. I know you will.”

Her talks became daily affairs. I just listened.

“You have to think of your mother’s passing as the way to get out. To escape. You have to begin your life,” Chaps would urge.

Esther Chapman took very seriously the opportunity to advise me. She’d always been a sort of maiden aunt, and I loved her. But after all I’d taken care of in the past weeks, after what I’d lost, I was languid with grief. Before Mother’s death, I hadn’t any idea of real despair, even while I’d been hurtling toward it for eighteen years.

Chaps was stoic, and that helped. She’d lost her own mother after a long illness, and lived in her childhood home. Her father—an Anzac, as it happens—had been killed in the Great War. When called a spinster, Chaps would say: “And far better off that way, not that it’s anyone’s business.” She shared a smilar social position to that of Mother (invisibility), and their recognition of this was what had first made them friends. They were oddities, marginal and not exactly respectable. For her part, Chaps was too well read to be considered entirely proper. Books had made her unreasonably independent.

Judging by photographs in her neat house, with age, Chaps resembled her own mother. Both had pigeon-breasted bodies, small gray heads, large light eyes full of candor. I set my only picture of Mother beside one of Chap’s mother in the living room. The silver frame wasn’t terribly old, but there was something timeless in Mother’s photograph. Black-and-white, it had been taken when she was around eighteen, my age exactly at the time, but taken by whom I would never know. Her youthful face looked out at me vivid with the secrets of her past, her future, and, I fancied, more alive than I was in that same unformed moment.

At the end of that first month, sick with my own drowsy sorrow, I took the Huon box outside Chaps’s tiny house and sat in the neat square of her garden, bordered with flowers that repeated themselves on three sides. The orange, red, and yellow heads worked against melancholy; their unopened leaves, like little green tongues, reproached me. I picked a few red ones, Mother’s favorite color, and put them on top of the box.

I knelt down to inspect a large, open leaf, an almost perfect circle. A silver drop of water balanced on its surface, shiny as a ball of mercury. Carefully, I picked the leaf and spun the bead of water inside its green world—a tiny ball of order, isolated and contained. Focusing on the drop relieved an increment of anguish, about the same size, near my heart.

“Help me,” I prayed to the water drop. “I want Mother. I want it all back. I want my life.”

Chaps arrived home early from the shop. I heard her fussing with the kettle, making tea in the kitchen. She called through the little house.

“I’m out here, Chaps!” I replied.

“Ah, I wondered, dear,” she said, coming outside. “Lovely here in the garden. What are you doing on your knees? You look as if you’re praying to the flowers.”

“It makes me feel better,” I said, embarrassed. “They look so happy, with their bright faces. They smell like ants, though, these flowers…”

“Nasturtium is their variety, and I’m sure I don’t know what ants smell like.” She raised her eyebrows. “But I’ve no doubt you do.”

The tea kettle whistled and she went in briefly to turn it off and brew the tea.

“I see you have her ashes with you,” she said, coming out with a tray.

Perhaps she considered a talk about the maudlin nature of my attachment to the Huon box, but let it go. She sat down on a wrought-iron chair, after laying the tray on the matching table.

“I’ve something to talk with you about,” she said, growing serious.

“I know what you’re going to say, Chaps.”

“You only think you know,” she said, pouring out two cups.

“You’re going to tell me again that ambivalence is fatal,” I said to the leaf.

She had been saying such things all week.

“You’ll tell me to give sorrow words. You’re going to say that I must choose, decide, begin to make my way. You’re going to suggest I bury these ashes—”

“Well, I certainly would say all those things,” Chaps cut in. “And have said all those things, but that’s not what I have to tell you.”

She sat up straighter, filled with the drama of surprise. She hesitated, then took a deep breath.

“I bought you a ticket today. An airplane ticket. I want no argument about it—I had the money saved. Guess where you’re going?”

I stared at her, unable to answer. Did she want me gone? Was she sending me away?

“Can’t guess,” she said. “I thought it would be easy.”

I was silent.

“You love cities, but the only one you’ve ever been to is Sydney. It’s not to there, so don’t consider that one.”

I couldn’t imagine what she’d done, or what I’d done to want her rid of me. I had no money for school. I had no means to travel. I had nothing, so far as I could see, but her affection for me, a box of ashes, and a black-and-white photograph of someone I had loved more than life.

“Come on, why don’t you guess?”

I couldn’t guess. I had that new, hurtling feeling again, the rapid and unpredictable movement of events coming toward me, like getting into a car after a lifetime spent walking. I thought I’d just stay in Tasmania with Chaps, that she’d teach me the book trade. That I’d live as she did, quietly and in my head.

“I’ve bought you a ticket to…” she paused dramatically, and with an uncharacteristic flourish.

“New York!”

I dropped the leaf, sat back on my heels and, after a confusing moment, burst into tears.

“Now, now. I’m not throwing you out, my dear Rosemary.” Chaps bent across and patted my shoulder, my back. She was awkward with affectionate gestures. Her voice remained firm.

“Out of tears, plans!” she said, and handed me the handkerchief she kept folded and tucked inside the sleeve of her cardigan. I never carried one.

I wiped my eyes and nose.

“There now, dear. If you really think about it you’ll see you’re ready to go. The best is not past. Your mother’s death is a break in your life but your life is not broken. You can mend it by living it, by living a different life than either you or your mother imagined.”

“I have imagined it though, Chaps,” I said, thickly. I had, but I was afraid. More than I’d ever been. “I want to leave and travel. I want to discover things, to know things. But I’m frightened. And now you’ve gone and sorted it out for me. You’ve taken away my excuse.” I blew my nose on her handkerchief.

“I’ve done nothing but make the decision for you about where to start, Rosemary. And that was easy because of your scrapbook, all those pictures of New York, of cities. I thought you must have always intended to go there, making a fetish of the place, collecting up clippings and things since you were small. All I’ve done is give you a push. I’m sure your mother would have done the same thing.”

Chaps herself became a little teary. But she was vehement, too.

“You have to get away, Rosemary. You must go abroad! It’s what I would have done, my girl, in a minute, if I’d had the chance.”

Her filmy gray eyes locked on mine. Chaps could be fierce. “It never came for me, Rosemary. The chance to really make a break, to leave and not look back. Now you must go. You must begin! It’s what your mother would want for you, my dear Rosemary. What I want for you. A larger world. You know now where to start. We’ve a couple of weeks left together to arrange everything.”

New York was a fantasy. It was Sydney multiplied, which was all I could imagine then of a great city from the peculiar vantage of Tasmania. It was true I had kept a scrapbook of images since I was small, and many were of New York, but that fact was secondary to the freedom the pictures represented. Liberation was in the very scale of the city: a goldfish bowl one could never grow to fit. I had postcards of tall buildings sharp against the sky, of the magnificent interiors of train stations and libraries illuminated by slanting shafts of light. Spaces between pictures I had filled with bits of ribbon, buttons, and flakes of colored felt.

I hadn’t consciously imagined traveling to New York, or to any other city but Sydney, while Mother was alive. But Chaps had guessed the shape of my deepest wish: I thought my father lived in a city. I didn’t know where. A place free and anonymous and far away. The opposite of Mother. Father could only be foreign. Unknown and mysterious.

My father was a city; the scrapbook my attempt to make him real. In the absence of an actual photograph, any one of the faceless men in the postcards or newspaper clippings of cities could be him. Many of the images were old street scenes, and Mother used to say, “Look at all the men wearing hats! Those were the days to be in business!”

She never guessed at my real interest—I didn’t know it myself. My father was in a city, any city, and I was collecting evidence, clues to his existence. He had long before suffered a sea change.

As Mother gave me no tangible detail of him to build upon, my fancy was as real to me as any fact. She barely knew him, and what she did know she’d kept to herself, would keep to herself, forever.

How much Esther Chapman did for me, letting me go as she did! As a reader of fables, she must have recognized that I would need one of my own. An antidote to catastrophe. My world had been emptied of all its contents, save her, and she knew a city would be the cure to the small life I had lived, the one I’d lost.

But it was myself I was calling into being.




CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_e047122c-add3-5b3b-beea-7f0733c30154)


I arrived in New York late at night, unprepared for a life I only dimly suspected might be found there. A storm caused the plane to land roughly. I never saw my destination; clouds covered the city, the ground visible only moments before the plane’s wheels struck it. I felt myself land hard, as if thrown to earth.

I had three hundred dollars. In my suitcase, underneath my clothes, lay my scrapbook and Mother’s photograph. At the airport, with tears on her cheeks, Chaps had pressed upon me two presents: a green stone necklace (the color of my eyes) which she assured me was an amulet against further heartbreak, and a small book—her very favorite, she claimed—wrapped in her store’s bluish paper. I couldn’t bear to open the package, the Chapman’s Bookshop paper as dear and familiar to me as the wallpaper in my childhood bedroom, in fact, its surrogate. I told Chaps that I would keep her parcel intact, waiting for the day that I desperately needed a present. I didn’t doubt it would come, and for the moment, travel was gift enough. The necklace, though, I put on immediately. A guard against heartbreak couldn’t wait.

Mother’s ashes were covered in an orange scarf at the bottom of a carry-on I was reluctant to put down.

My arrival was not auspicious. The rain continued, veiling the city, and when the taxi I took from the airport tried to deposit me in front of the residential hotel Chaps had booked, it appeared to no longer be in business. I couldn’t have known it, but I had arrived in the final year of a difficult decade for the city. New York itself was stirring from years of financial hardship, and many inexpensive hotels then housed residents permanently courtesy of the state.

Terrified, I agreed to an additional fare and the driver took me further downtown to a hotel he knew was cheap and, he said, safe. The Martha Washington Hotel for Women had a dingier address (29 East Twenty-ninth Street or 30 East Thirtieth street, depending on the entrance), but it was open, with a room vacant at the right price. There was little evidence that it had once been an impressive establishment, even prosperous, with many rooms. Built in 1902, the hotel was now dilapidated. More than seven decades after it opened, the upper floors were closed off for repairs that would never eventuate. The restaurant had been shuttered for thirty years.

A woman sat behind the battered reception counter watching a tiny black-and-white television, connected by twin earplugs. She was striking and dark, about sixty, with aristocratic features. After I had her attention, she explained the hotel requirements in heavily accented English: payment a week in advance, linens changed once a week, no guests in the rooms, no smoking, no cooking, no noise.

I had no intention of breaking any rules. I was barely eighteen years old, absent Mother and country, soaking wet, and so bereft that I sagged inside my damp clothes, shrunken and childlike.

I paid the taxi driver, handed over one week’s rent and staggered to my room at the end of a shadowy corridor. I took the Huon box from my bag and placed it beside my pillow.

“Come back,” I said aloud to Mother, my voice thin and trembling. “Come to me here.”

It was hours before I slept, kept awake by sadness, by anxiety, and by cars passing on the avenue, their headlights flashing in the room like counterfeit lightning, tires plashing into potholes where rainwater pooled.

A hot June sun appeared the following day, the weather surprisingly steamy. I spent that early summer week trying to stay out of the dun-colored room as much as possible. The room was fetid by early afternoon. A single, clouded window, with bars across it, faced the bed. I had to keep the window closed against the street noise and also because this wing of the Martha Washington was downwind from an Indian restaurant on the next block.

At first, I shared a grubby bathroom with two women along the same corridor, although they might as well have been phantoms. They banged around slamming doors and drawers, but I never once saw either of them except from behind—in retreat. They soon disappeared altogether, a fate I feared awaited every fresh arrival to the city. If I sat in the room during hot daylight hours I felt I had been sealed into my predicament, held inside a shrinking box, with no escape but sleep. I woke early, claimed the bathroom first, and promptly ventured out. My life depended on it.

The dark lady of the reception desk appeared to live at the Martha Washington. I heard her speak Spanish to a stern man I gathered was the owner, and I called hello to her each day as I left to investigate the city, as much to speak aloud as politeness. But after several days without acknowledgment, I stopped. She was either too intent on the television or hard of hearing. Or perhaps she simply didn’t care to answer.

The labyrinthine city waited. It anticipated me. I was swallowed whole, surrounded by a populace buzzing and purposeful, a remedy for grief and a goad to it. I was utterly alone, and lived at first without the imposition of order, too scattered and overwhelmed to effect any. I recognized no vista. No building was familiar, apart from the iconic Empire State and the Chrysler (motifs of my scrapbook), but even those were unrecognizable from my altered perspective on the ground. I forgot to eat, and an entire day would pass before I spoke out loud. Even then it might just be an acknowledgment of thanks, or a plain request: “Could I have milk in my tea, please?” My own voice was alien and took my ear strangely. No one addressed me, no one knew my name, and my anonymity was at times a raw joy in my chest, freedom at its most literal, while at others, a source of paralyzing fear. I didn’t know then that this was how deep emotion most often comes, from opposite directions and at once, when you are least aware and farthest from yourself.

I did know profound dislocation, and had to remind myself that the young woman I caught sight of in store windows was me. She had no family. No one expected her home. Yet she existed. There she was reflected in the glass, her wild red hair on end as if with fright.

I needed money and I needed work. I had to know who I might become. I walked and walked around the immediate neighborhood, tracing a large circle, the Martha Washington and Twenty-ninth Street the fixed foot of my compass. I was searching for something I recognized, apart from what I found in my own face, for a sense of the familiar in the unaccustomed.

By odd happenstance I had landed at the eastern edge of New York’s garment district. The streets surrounding the Martha Washington were known for their small accessory suppliers, and tiny storefronts displayed crowded windows full of hats and caps, wigs and handbags, sparkling appliqués and notions of all kinds. It was as if Mother had herself selected the location of my first residence without her. There was a looking-glass quality, almost antipodean, to my immediate location. Mother and Remarkable Hats, the Foys workroom, were far away on the other side of all things, and yet in New York I was surrounded by their emblems.

I ventured farther downtown and actually walked passed the Arcade on several occasions without realizing what it was—the largest used-book store in the city. I hadn’t heard of its reputation for housing lost things: books once possessed and missed or never possessed and longed for. I hadn’t read Herman Melville; only his famous name was familiar (just another on the rather limited stock list at Chapman’s Bookshop). And I knew nothing whatsoever of the value of rare manuscripts. I fancied bookstores were generally similar to each other, in their way. But the Arcade was of an altogether different order; and because then I was in every sense lost, once I was inside, it proved irresistible.

The Arcade’s charm is oddly absolute, but that day it was also intensely personal. Walking into the store, I had walked into an image from my postcard collection, into a picture pasted in my scrapbook. I was inhabiting space I thought imaginary. In this way, I had the distinct impression that I had conjured the Arcade up, had made it appear, a whole cloth woven from unexpressed need.

From the unimpressive entrance, the ceiling rises in an enormous curve toward the rear of the store, a sweep of space that lifts one’s eyes upward in search of another firmament. Of course, there isn’t one; the ceiling is just a deep, dusty dome, like the inside of a skull. (Both are vaults, both repositories of knowledge). How could so slight a portal reveal so impressive a space? It occurred to me that I had been tricked into entering.

Understand, the Arcade is itself a city; itself an island. That bookstores are such places is always hoped for, but the Arcade is like the original wish behind such hopes. In that first visit New York was made actual. The Arcade was population, mass, was the accomplishment of a city. Books were stacked like the teeming New Yorkers, invisible inside their buildings, but sensed as bees in a hive. The hum of life issuing from the crowds that filled the city I had begun to experience, but in the Arcade that buzzing life was made calculable in things. Chaps always told Mother and me books were minds on the shelf. Here it was true: books didn’t seem inanimate; a kind of life rose from the piles heaped on tables before me.

I moved toward a laden table and placed my hand upon the closest stack, listening, waiting. I recall it exactly. An opening, a beginning. I must work here, I thought. I will. Less an act of confidence than of will. I surprised myself.

I looked around in the soft, faded light. I wasn’t startled by the Arcade’s shabby randomness, by the small areas of order within a more general chaos; by its filth, its quiet, and its occasional bursts of jarring sound. Or by the precariousness of book stacks which seemed to lean, without regard to gravity, toward some apprehended but unseen center. I was at home. Dust filtered what sunlight made its way through two dirty windows. Huge, dim lights hung by heavy chains above customers’ heads, bent in concentration.

Turning to the entrance, I checked that outside on the avenue it was actually a sunny, ordinary day in late June. Inside, it was cool and obscurely timeless.

I edged along goat-track passages winding between stacks, only navigable foot in front of foot, a few inches at a time, trying to avoid piles of titles stacked and leaning against spine-out-only shelves. I stopped before a raised platform, an oasis of space amid the clutter. A small man stood behind its oak railing, elevated higher than even the tallest customer. He was pricing old books, but his compelling gestures suggested a priest at a lectern. The brass name plate that faced the store from his oak desk shone: GEORGE PIKE, PROPRIETOR.

His gestures were practiced and repetitive. A stack of volumes sat to Pike’s left. He took a book from the top of that pile, frowned, ran his eyes over the binding, checking for rips or nicks. Then, quickly and elegantly, he flipped to the title page, his eyes scanned the copyright, his thumb fanned rapidly along the edges of the entire book. Reaching the end, he closed the volume, only to reopen it at the first page. He took a pencil from behind his ear and lightly scribbled in the upper-right-hand corner, tracing a looping filigree. He returned the pencil above his ear and rubbed his index finger beneath his nose. He then unfrowned his forehead, set the volume to his right and, having priced the book, immediately reached for another at his left.

He repeated these actions as a single gesture, without variation. It was unconscious; a rough magic. There seemed no moment for contemplation, for the weighing of competing possibilities. Pike alone appeared the arbiter, the heart of the enterprise.

I had made my pledge to work in the Arcade, Pike was evidently its captain. I wanted proximity to such mastery, such certainty. I seized upon the existence of the place like a buoy floating in the middle of the sea.

“Excuse me, sir. My name is Rosemary Savage,” I said to Pike, my own accent peculiar, nasal in my ears.

He was unaccustomed to interruption. I went on hurriedly, shocked at my own boldness, at how sharp was the desperation that prodded me forward.

“I have worked in a bookstore before, Mr. Pike. And I must work here.”

He looked up from his task to register my temerity. Raised eyebrows were the only indication of affront on his rather unremarkable face. He was an anachronistic figure. His striped waistcoat, his shirt bunched above the elbows by arm bands, suggested a man that hadn’t altered his style of dress in decades. He wore a waxy-looking mustache, a darker shade than his whitish-gray hair, and he ran his finger over it before lowering his eyebrows to return his gaze to the book in his hand.

“You must work here?” he said in an odd, thin voice. He appeared to address the book in his hand rather than me, asking the cheeky thing if it really had the gall. “Do you imagine this an infrequent request?” he asked the book.

I didn’t know what to say. Too much was already at stake. I looked up at him and calculated that his platform was a good twenty-four inches higher than where I stood. It was designed to meet the floor at an angle, masking its height and disguising its purpose. It was a stage. I guessed Pike a full head shorter than my own five feet ten, but recognizing this didn’t reduce his stature. He loomed, flanked by books.

But I had given Pike my future, and I wonder now if he saw this himself. There was a long pause as he made his way through his litany of gestures. His movements seemed the process by which he could figure the book’s price, winding himself up to calculating its value.

He set the volume to his left.

I waited. He drew a long breath.

“What we want here is the mild boredom of order. Don’t try to be too interesting, girl.” He read me as easily as the book he had put down.

“Find the Poetry section and begin to shelve what remains on the floor.” He waved his hand in a shooing gesture. “You’re probably ripe for poetry,” he added, in a lower voice.

Was he hiring me on the spot?

“Order by poet, mind you. Only by poet. Don’t give a damn about editors and translators—that’s all a charade. You will shelve by poet or you will not be employed by George Pike. Remove all anthologies! Alphabetical, that is all. There are a few things that should be predictable.”

I had followed this breathlessly, even while it didn’t appear to be directed at me. Had he said “ripe”?

“Ah, yes, sir. Mr. Pike…ah, alphabetical, of course.”

“Find Poetry and my manager will assess your competency shortly.”

He picked up the next unvalued volume to his right.

I hurried deeper into the Arcade and found the Poetry section halfway down a tower that leaned dangerously toward the public toilet, in a far corner. Quickly I began the task of rearranging books that had apparently never been shelved in any order. The section began at eye level. Above it appeared to be books on Occult Practices. The juxtaposition of subjects struck me as deliberate, only accidentally alphabetical. To reach the shelf I had to lean across a tall pile of books on the floor, awkwardly moving volumes around, my arms stiffly extended. I decided to take handfuls off the shelf and sort them while sitting on the floor. This too proved pointless, as I had to constantly reorder each section, accomplishing only what amounted to tidying up. Was this a test of my patience, of my real interest, a practical lesson in the overwhelming nature of bringing even the slightest amount of order to the Arcade?

After half an hour I’d barely managed to complete a single shelf, and was standing with my back to the aisle, wresting another few volumes off the shelf, when I had the sensation of being watched. I heard a sibilant whisper and turned, promptly dropping the books in my hand.

An albino man of uncertain age was no more than two feet from me, his pale eyes moving involuntarily behind pince-nez glasses. From the first it was his eyes. His eyes could not be caught. He stepped back and knocked over several books I had set aside. Ignoring his clumsiness, he took in my surprise with practiced unsurprise. I had never seen anyone like him, nor any face more marked with defensive disdain.

“Walter Geist, the Arcade’s manager,” he whispered, turning. “Follow me, girl.”

I picked up the books I’d dropped, forced them onto the shelf, and caught up with him as his stooped shoulder disappeared around a corner stack.

As I trailed behind his quaint figure, I had the fleeting fantasy that this man was what someone would look like if he’d been born inside the Arcade, never having left its dim confines. Pigment would disappear and eyesight would be ruined beneath weak light, until one lay passively, like a flounder on the ocean floor.

In fact, as I walked behind him, Geist’s white ears reminded me of delicate sea creatures suddenly exposed to light, vulnerable and nude. There was a shrinking quality to him, a retraction from attention like an instinctual retreat from exposure. I was fascinated and repulsed in equal measure, a contradiction that was never to leave me. As I follow him there in my memory, I feel again that charge to his strangeness, a shock that compelled.

He led me to a small office in the very rear of the store, built high into the corner of the vast ceiling like a reef. I followed him up a narrow flight of wooden stairs, the handrail loose and broken.

“Wait here, girl.”

He indicated the patch of landing at the entrance to the office.

“My name is Rosemary, Mr. Geist. Rosemary Savage,” I said, tired of his anonymous address. I extended my hand then, thinking it appropriate, brave even, as I had seen Americans do. His hands remained clasped behind his back. He entered the office and reemerged holding several forms.

“Please fill these out. Print only.”

He handed me a pen and stood examining the activity on the floor below. From that high landing the chaos of the Arcade was fully evident, with the exception of Pike’s platform, where he moved as if choreographed, a small flicker of concentrated activity. I leaned over the rail, following the inclination of Geist’s head, to see what drew his attention. An obese man sat on the floor in a cul-de-sac made by piles of books, his legs splayed out like a toddler’s. He was turning the pages of a large photography book with one hand, his other hidden beneath the heavy covers opened across his lap. Even from the landing I could tell the images in the book were nudes.

“What are you looking at?” Geist asked me.

“Ah, just looking down where you were,” I said nervously.

“I don’t mean that,” he said. “What do you see?”

I described the fat man studying the photographs.

“Arthur!” Geist called down from the landing. “You should be shelving.”

“Just familiarizing myself with my inventory, Walter,” Arthur returned sardonically, his accent British and articulate.

He looked up at me and put a thick finger to his lips, indicating silence. Had I informed on him? Couldn’t Geist see what I had seen? Arthur returned to his nudes, his hand beneath the book’s cover moved rhythmically.

Geist stomped his small foot with impatience, and I noticed he was wearing elegant, polished boots, their smooth black shape nosing from his pant legs like the shiny heads of tiny seals.

“Mr. Geist, could I have something to lean on?” I asked, finding it difficult to write legibly without the support of a desk, and wishing to distract him, and myself, from Arthur.

“No,” he replied, his shifting eyes still directed over the rickety railing. He removed his glasses, placed them in his breast pocket, and continued to wait for me to complete the forms, his manner uncanny as his appearance.

Now that I was closer to him I could see Geist was younger than I at first thought, perhaps twenty years Pike’s junior, in his late forties. He was an unfinished version, a poor copy, of the masterful Pike, yet equally a creature from another time. Every feature was pallid. His hair was white and fleecy, the sheepish outcome of his soft face. His clothes were not as fastidiously kept as his boots, his trousers slightly frayed along the pockets. I completed the forms and handed them back to him.

“You will begin work tomorrow morning at nine,” he instructed without seeming to actually address me, a tactic he perhaps learned from Pike.

“You will finish for the day at six. Your responsibilities at the Arcade will, for the time being, be that of a floater. This means you do not belong in a specific section, as you have no expertise, but will float between tasks that are assigned to you. Do not concern yourself with assisting customers, you will only frustrate them with your ignorance.”

“I have worked in a bookstore before, Mr. Geist,” I said, defensively.

He replaced his glasses, lodging them in the wrinkles of his forehead and frowning to keep them in place—or frowning because he thought me impudent. He leaned in toward my face, and his nostrils twitched as he appeared to take in my scent.

“Not in this one, Miss Savage,” he said. “Please do not interrupt. You will receive a salary of seventy dollars per week. There are no advances on wages. Do you have any questions?”

“No,” I said, afraid to lose the opportunity.

“Good. There is one more condition of employment you must understand.” Geist’s pink ears shifted back delicately. “George Pike will not tolerate the theft of money or books. Immediate termination of employment will result if theft is suspected.” This last admonition was said in an emphatic whisper.

Later, I saw the statement printed in placard capitals on a sign in the women’s bathroom, and again over the clock all employees punched when the day began and ended. Another sign was located directly in the line of vision on the wall in front of the staircase that descended to the cavernous basement. Reading these signs was like being regularly rebuked, and so they paradoxically served to remind patrons and staff alike that theft was in some sense assumed.

George Pike himself called to me as, newly hired, I passed his platform on my way out.

“George Pike will not tolerate the theft of money or books!” he cried, characteristically speaking of himself in the third person.

Theft was a problem, as I would discover. The Arcade was regularly scouted by shoplifters; but more seriously, there had been several scandals involving ludicrously overpriced volumes whose provenance had been fictitiously embellished, resulting in what Pike defended as imaginative pricing. Scandals only increased the number of customers, both sellers and buyers. In other words, theft ran both ways at the Arcade.

“Why you stopped saying hello to me?” the dark lady of the front desk asked loudly when I returned to the Martha Washington. She had taken the wires attached to the television from her ears, and I could hear a tinny whining, the sound of cartoons speaking cartoon language.

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to be pleasant. “But I stopped saying hello to you because you didn’t respond. I just gave up.”

“Don’t give up!” she said, enigmatically. “You just got here. That’s what can happen in New York. You give up. I know. I come to this country from Argentina. My brother, he own this hotel. My name is Lillian. Lillian La Paco. Still say hello, miss. You the only one who does.”

“All right, Lillian,” I promised. “I’m Rosemary,” and for the second time that day I stuck out my hand, only this time it was taken.

“Rosemary Savage,” I told her as we shook hands. “Nice to meet you, Lillian, and I’ll still say hello. I’m certainly not about to give up. I just got a job. My first proper job ever.”

“Ah,” Lillian said wisely. “Then you begin!”

“Yes,” I nodded, pleased with her pronouncement. “Yes, now it all begins.”

I went to my room at the end of the corridor and locked the door. I’d bought a pound of cherries from a street vendor to celebrate my employment, and I sat on the single bed savoring them. I felt optimistic; felt breath coming back into my flattened-out self.

Now that I had work, surely someone would notice if I died tragically at eighteen, having, say, choked to death on a cherrystone I might have neglected to spit out. I could stop fantasizing about what terrible things might befall me and write home to Chaps, reassuring her and myself. I could stop searching the streets for a sign. I had already found more than I could have imagined.

I pulled the Huon box from its silk scarf and recounted what had happened that day: how strange Pike was but how commanding; how bizarre Geist, and how I was already sure he disliked me; Arthur sitting with his nudes in the art section like a great obscene baby.

I missed Mother with an ache that could only be managed by a sort of separation from ache. A pain so deep that I came to observe its presence at a slant, sensing it crouched, and off to one side. If I could contain the pain in something like a transparent globe, it wouldn’t overwhelm me. If I didn’t look at it in its dark entirety, I could manage. Speaking to her helped. Chaps had told me I must give sorrow words.

I kissed the smooth Tasmanian heartwood, set it aside, and sat back against the pillows to relish more cherries. I spat a stone across the room, aiming at the metal bucket that served as a garbage bin, and heard a satisfying ping as it hit home.

“This is the beginning,” I told Mother. “Don’t you worry and I won’t either.”

I had a job to go to, and was expected at nine. They would know Rosemary Savage there, and notice me gone if I happened to disappear. I was an inhabitant of a great, perhaps the greatest, city. And what was more, I would always have books to read.




CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_b2f9f62b-2054-5138-853b-ed71275e09de)


The Arcade existed according to a logic all its own, governed by a set of arbitrary rules invented and maintained by George Pike. Paperbacks were never shelved. As the poor relations of hardcovers, they were heaped without order upon tables near the store’s entrance and priced identically—one dollar and fifty cents—whether fiction or history, a thousand pages or barely more than a hundred.

Pike was unimpressed by innovation. Any “new” book (one published within the past two years and hardbound) would never cross his oak table but was immediately sent to a vast, low-ceilinged basement, to be priced by Walter Geist. These books Pike cared nothing for, although he received a daily accounting of their acquisition, at one-quarter of the publisher’s list price, and subsequent sale, at one-half of that same price. So if a reviewer brought in a book that the publisher listed at sixteen dollars, Geist would give him a quarter of that, four dollars, and the book would go on the Arcade’s shelf in the basement priced at eight dollars.

Every other hardcover book in the Arcade, Pike had held in his hands at one time, remembering more of them than seemed humanly possible.

Pike employed a considerable number of eccentric individuals, Geist aside, and it remained a mystery why he had employed me. I was not eccentric, unless being an eighteen-year-old orphan from Tasmania made me so. As well, a number of the Arcade’s employees had rather dramatic aspirations. They were variously failed writers, poets, musicians, singers, and were marked with the clerkish frustration of the unacknowledged, the unpublished. The Arcade’s thousands of volumes mocked, in particular, literary aspirations. The out-of-print status of most of the stock was further proof of the futile dream of publication. As a monument to literature, the Arcade had an air of the tombstone about it.

“You will work this morning with Oscar Jarno in Nonfiction,” Geist directed, my first morning. “You will follow his orders.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Walter,” Oscar said, his voice mild and confident.

He had approached us soundlessly. He smiled then and touched my arm, almost imperceptibly. I was struck by his appearance, and moved by his gesture, the first indication of kindness since my arrival. Oscar’s extraordinary eyes were brass-colored and large; warm as the sun that never reached the Arcade’s interior.

“Don’t mind Walter,” Oscar confided, steering me away from the manager and toward the rear of the store, my elbow cupped in his hand. His touch left me a little breathless; eager to catch every word he spoke.

“He really can’t help his officious manner,” Oscar went on. “It’s important to Walter that he appear in charge. Obviously, he requires all sorts of allowances.”

Immediately then, I imagined Oscar Jarno took me into his confidence. He released my elbow once we reached the Nonfiction section, and ran his hand over his pale brow, leaving it to rest at his temple, as if he had a slight headache.

“Your blouse, Rosemary, is made from a type of polished cotton not commonly available in this country. I am interested to see how well it takes the dye.”

He fingered my sleeve gently and I thought in that moment that I’d do anything to keep his attention.

“Lovely,” he said into my face. “A type of faille.”

Oscar was slightly taller than me, and handsome in a poetic sort of way. His head was perfectly shaped, as if sculpted, and the contrast of his golden eyes against the pallor of his skin was dramatic. There was little else dramatic about him—he was soft-spoken, articulate—but there was a magnetism to his face: in the smooth planes of his cheekbones, the wide brow above rich eyes.

When I met him, Oscar had been at the Arcade for five years, and because he was quiet and reliable, Pike had come to accept that he worked only in the Nonfiction section and that whatever Oscar was doing in that suburb of twelve tall stacks would be accomplished with a minimum of fuss. More than a few customers were devoted to him. Oscar passed most of his day seated on a stool, writing in a black notebook, exempt from the loading and unloading of heavy boxes of books. No one questioned his special status.

He knew a great deal about many subjects, but his personal interest was cloth. His mother had been a dressmaker and had introduced him to fabrics—their names and properties.

Pike had occasional use for Oscar’s knowledge; he’d ask him to check rare bindings and speculate on their provenance or even how they might best be repaired. Oscar had had some experience with restoration, and with arcane materials like vellum. I witnessed his value to the Arcade during the first days he was training me. Pike called for Oscar from his platform, and I followed as he hurried to respond (the only time Oscar moved quickly).

“Ah, Oscar,” Pike said sharply, gesturing to a customer at the base of his platform who held an old volume in his hands.

“We have here Old Court Life in France, which should be on its way to the Rare Book Room for repair but has been kidnapped by this fellow. At the risk of encouraging such practices, please examine.”

Customers were always trying to snatch books before Pike had appraised them, before they had been allocated a value and destination. No doubt they wanted to believe that they had discovered something of greater worth than Pike would have reckoned.

As I watched, Oscar took the book gently in his hands, turning over the tattered binding, a smile cornering his mouth. Oscar was thin. His skin was so fine and dry it made a slight rustle when his hand moved across his brow, in an anxious sweep. His dark hair receded in a way I quickly loved, revealing, as it did, more of his remarkable face.

“This volume is bound in Chardonnet silk,” Oscar said, his voice soft, authoritative. “A fabric named for the French chemist who invented a process to produce it.”

Pike’s eyes narrowed appreciatively, pleased at the opportunity to overprice the shabby volume based on Oscar’s remarks.

“Chardonnet silk was first commercially produced in France in 1891,” Oscar added unnecessarily, as the customer was already removing it from his hands in a proprietary way.

“Thank you, Oscar,” Pike said, dismissing him.

Pike stretched down from his platform and took the volume from the customer. He then unconsciously proceeded through his ritual gestures—he flipped to the title page, scanned the copyright, his thumb fanned the edges of the entire book, he closed the volume, reopened it at the first page, took a pencil from behind his ear—and marked a reassessed price. He handed it down to the customer.

“But this is outrageous, Pike!” said the man, furiously. “Nothing short of robbery!”

“Rosemary,” Oscar whispered, as we returned to his section. “Do you know what the common name for Chardonnet silk is?”

“No,” I said cautiously. “I’ve no idea.”

“Rayon,” he said, stifling a small chuckle. “Made from extruded wood pulp. Not silk at all, of course. Remind me to tell you the history of silk.”

He covered his mouth with his fine, long hand and, sitting up on his tall stool, took out a black notebook and began to write in it rapidly.

Oscar’s face appeared composed of layers of papier-mâché, and this quality made his face seem expressionless as he wrote. He gave the impression of a man-sized marionette: his head large and shaped upon a soft, slight body. When Oscar looked at me, his round eyes glowed as if they reflected light, but over time I came to understand that this was a trick of their splendid color. The irises were actually golden.

It was something of a trick also that Oscar often sought to engage in conversation by expressing an interest in clothing. He was reserved by nature, phlegmatic, but knew well that an interest in another’s clothes flattered the wearer. I imagined this something his mother, the dressmaker, had taught him.

Oscar was sought after by regular customers looking for an insider watchful on their behalf, a staff person willing to perform special favors and engage in secret confidences. Oscar always played for both sides.

The Arcade was frequented daily by several bibliophiles who obsessively searched for fresh inventory; books that were stacked to be shelved after Pike had priced them. Oscar was especially favored by two competing Civil War buffs, both of whom bought his consideration with morning coffee, the occasional lunch. Small cloth-wrapped bundles (like Japanese favors) would appear at intervals, bribes for withholding books from sale. Oscar wasn’t particularly interested in the Civil War, except for the uniforms, but he was knowledgeable about the volumes in his section and managed to conduct intense conversations with collectors in diverse subjects—history, biography, philosophy, anthropology, science.

I consciously chose to emulate him. Oscar was quick, and remembered most of what he’d heard or read. He wrote everything down. Impressionable as I was, I took to carrying a small notebook, determined to assume for myself Oscar’s observant style.

It is through my own notebook that I recall these days, my first months in the city, my apprenticeship. And through my clear recollection of that girl who was so raw, so avid, that she ate up every detail, absorbing into her body whatever might later be needed as provision, whatever might sustain her should it all, once more, disappear.



At the Martha Washington, I befriended Lillian slowly, in increments, for she was prickly.

“What are you watching there, Lillian?”

“I am not watching, Rosemary,” she answered, her eyes flickering from the television screen for an instant.

“It looks like you’re watching,” I ventured.

“Everything not how it looks. Especially not here. I am not watching, but I am thinking. Watching help me to think, and sometimes not to think.”

“I don’t know how you can think with that thing in your ears and the sound turned up so loud.”

“I need that noise. I don’t hear so well. But I’m thinking all the same,” she said.

“What do you think about, Lillian?” I asked, wanting to know her, needing a friend. She was a little older than Mother, but younger than Chaps. She was the only person I knew outside the Arcade, and really the first person I met in New York.

Lillian heaved an enormous sigh, and closed her eyes against the tears that had filled them.

“I cannot say what I think of,” she answered, thickly.

I couldn’t understand what I had provoked with my question. Confused and embarrassed that I’d been unwittingly careless, that I’d upset her, I was about to apologize. But Lillian visibly collected herself, focused instead on the television, her expression changing rapidly into one of disdain.

“Well,” she said, sniffing. “One thing I think from this television is that Americans are stupid!” She waved her hand at the small screen.

“Oh, I don’t think Americans are stupid,” I said, thinking of Pike, of Oscar, “I have a job now, at an enormous bookstore, and it’s full of brilliant Americans. Readers!”

“Pah,” Lillian said, smiling, recovered by the change in subject, by her sense of humor. “You only think they are brilliant,” she imitated my accent, “because you are a child.”

“Lillian, I’m eighteen years old,” I said, indignant.

She nodded as if to say, “Exactly—you are a child.”

“They have Spanish books in that store where you work?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but I’ll look for you. I think you can find anything in the world at the Arcade.”

“You can’t find what I’m looking for,” she said, darkly. “But bring me Spanish books if you have. I will pay you for them. I maybe should be trying to read again. And to forget about these idiots.”

Before she replaced the earpiece and turned her attention back to the television screen, she handed me a letter.

“This come for you,” she said. “From your country.”

“Thank you, Lillian.”

The letter was from Chaps. I hurried to my room eager to read my first letter in America. It was disappointingly short.

July 5

Dearest Rosemary,

Thank you for your card. Tasmania is a lonely place without you, without your mother, but, as I like to say, loneliness is good practice for eternity.

I was heartened to hear from you and thrilled that you would so soon have found yourself employed—and in a bookshop! I couldn’t wish a better occupation for you, my dear Rosemary. My own little shop has given me a dignified, ethical life, and work I believe meaningful. Selling books provided shape to my life, and reading them, a shape to my mind that I doubt I could have formed otherwise. That you are employed in such an extraordinary place gives me great satisfaction. (Perhaps I was training you all along!) The difference, though, is that you are also immersed in experience, and not just taken up with lines on a page.

You will find interesting people, you will read, you will be able to live the way you want. I have heard of the Arcade, of course, but never imagined you would find your way there.

I’m sure your mother is with you always, but her absence is perhaps at times unendurable. For me it is. Don’t be frightened to love. Look for it. I want you to have the life I did not choose. Take it, Rosemary dear.

With all my love, I am your own

Esther Chapman

P. S. Have you opened the package yet? Remember, a book is always a gift.

George Pike was not a demonstrative man. As he worked on his platform in a reverie of pricing, his gestures were reverential, ritualistic. His intention was that he remain inaccessible, above us all. Geist was his foil and henchman. Pike had a deep love of books, but his motivation for maintaining the Arcade was not esoteric. His chief inducement was evident: Pike loved money.

In slow moments—when gathered together awaiting a shipment, or lining up on Fridays to receive our meager pay from Geist—the staff liked to pick over rumors of Pike’s legendary wealth, his frugality, his stinginess. Each secondhand book passed through his elegant hands because he trusted no one but himself to assess its value. No one else could, the value being weighed not only against some actual market notion but against his very personal assessment of the book’s worth to him: what it cost him to acquire, and what the volume’s sale would put in his pocket. The margins and his profit were tabulated instantly, the result of years of obsessive deliberation, an abacus in his head shifting beads back and forth in a silent, urgent reconciliation.

That Pike was exceedingly rational didn’t mean that his notion of value wasn’t arbitrary. It was particular and absolute, almost adolescent in its despotic insistence.

At intervals throughout the day and at closing time, Pike would momentarily replace Pearl, the Arcade’s rather arresting cashier, then a preoperative transsexual, at the single register. Pike would remove larger bills, checks, and credit-card receipts, then disappear up the broken wooden stairs to the office at the back, reappearing (as in a conjurer’s trick) moments later upon his platform, behind his table, a book in his hand, a pencil behind his left ear, his meditative pricing resumed. Pike shrunk considerably whenever he left his platform, only to attain his previous consequence once he returned to the stage.

That there was a single cash register was an instance of the Arcade’s antiquated operation and evidence of Pike’s apprehensions with regard to money, with regard to theft. Contradiction was key, and efficiency mattered not at all.

Although there were lulls in customer purchases, for most of the Arcade’s business hours a queue snaked single file through and past the tables of paperbacks. Customers would become impatient and occasionally abusive while waiting. It was something of a sport among the staff to inflame already angry customers while they waited in line, a game that shocked me at first, unfamiliar as I was with that sort of impoliteness, schooled as I had been by Mother and Chaps to treat customers obeisantly.

“I’ve been standing here for thirty minutes!” a disgruntled customer would complain.

“Today’s your fucking lucky day then,” Bruno Gurvich, a burly Ukrainian who sorted paperbacks at the front tables, would shoot back.

“Pearl must be picking up the pace a bit! Yesterday you’d have been here an hour at least.”

Bruno was a musician with the temperament of an anarchist and the breath of a bartender’s dishrag. He gave the lie to bookselling as a genteel occupation, to Chaps’s ideal.

Bruno winked at me when he noticed my horror at this sort of exchange.

“Don’t look so shocked, girlie,” he said, dumping paperbacks in front of me. “Pike doesn’t care how you talk to the regulars so long as they’re buying. I got two separate assault charges pending for roughing up customers over Christmas last year, when we were really busy. This is nothing.”

No doubt he was trying to impress me.

“I wouldn’t be boasting about that, Bruno, if I were interested in keeping my job.”

Geist had appeared behind me; he was always sneaking around, his sibilant voice making the hair on my neck stand up, his whiteness like a visible reproach.

“That’s Pike concern, not yours,” Bruno said contemptuously, and stalked off.

“I’d keep away from that one,” Geist warned, standing uncomfortably close to me. “An-nasty P-piece of work,” he stuttered slightly. “Come to me if he gives you any trouble.”

I watched him bump into a table as he headed back to the basement, and I imagined he was returning to the bottom of the sea.

Pearl Baird, the cashier, was, apart from Geist, Pike’s most trusted staff member on the main floor. I loved her. She had taken the name Pearl after the biblical parable, and indeed she gave everything she had to become her female self, to become Pearl. Sitting behind the register, the no-nonsense slash of her lips a brilliant vermilion, she was unconcerned by the repetitive nature of her task.

Life had taught her patience.

Although she had a loving nature, Pearl was steely in her contempt for restless customers who often hurled down the books they had been holding for far too long, belligerently tossing cash or credit cards at her. Pearl took her time to open each cover, look for the price and punch it into the register, her extended finger tipped with a long nail. (She took pride in her nails and frequently changed the vivid polish). She muttered things like “Swine before Pearl!” at the most unpleasant types, but her air of superiority was mostly comment enough.

“It’s just us girls among all these weird men,” Peal first said to me by way of introduction in the ladies’ bathroom. She was aggressively applying lipstick as I washed my hands. Our eyes met in the mirror above the sink, and we smiled simultaneously.

“We girls got to stick together, you and me,” she said. “We’re friends already, I can tell.”

Pearl was large, with enormous hands and feet, a beautiful long, brown face, and a singing voice that rang in the bathroom like a fleshy bell. She was an aspiring opera singer, and spent most of her two fifteen-minute breaks sitting on a ruined vinyl couch in the anteroom of the ladies’ bathroom, rifling through a large bag of sheet music or humming to a tape played on a portable player. She took rehearsal very seriously and would repeat a difficult phrase, working on her diction and pitch, over and over again. She took lessons from a professional opera teacher after work, paid for by her Italian boyfriend, Mario. He was mad about Pearl, and had promised to pay for her operation after she’d lived the requisite year as a woman.

Pearl earned the reluctant respect of George Pike through her diligence and consistency, but chiefly through her willingness to perform a job that no one else could tolerate for more than a day. Only Pike or Walter Geist relieved Pearl on her breaks. She could detect any attempts to alter Pike’s scribbled prices, and was merciless on the few occasions when fraud was suspected. At her command, customers suspected of shoplifting had been sent sprawling on the sidewalk outside the Arcade by Bruno, ejected like drunks from a bar.

I understand now that Pearl’s ferocious honesty derived in part from her mutable sexuality. Truth was crucial to her; she knew her own veracity and had no choice but to live it.

Oscar knew the odd details and sad stories of many of the Arcade’s staff. He elicited confidences, chiefly through silence, and sometimes flattery. With the Reference section at his disposal, he looked up details that might further his understanding of an individual’s personal history. A gifted researcher, curious to the point of voyeurism, Oscar like to say that the world existed to end up in a book, and that it might as well be his notebook.

He told me, for example, that Pearl’s dream was to sing the role of Cherubino, the adolescent boy in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, a role usually performed by a woman playing a man; but she knew that at thirty-five, she was perhaps too old, and that the hormones she took were wreaking havoc with her voice and her body. Oscar had implied that if Pearl thought she had a chance at opera, then it was her mind the medication had affected. It took me rather a long time to understand he could be vicious.

I imagined that, unlike my own poor attempts Oscar’s notebooks contained a stream of never-completed biographies of people who struck his fancy or provided an interesting word, the starting point of an investigation. Under “Pearl” he might have written “Cherubino” in his crabbed handwriting, followed by a thumbnail sketch of Mozart’s life, a summary of the opera’s plot, or the details of gender-altering surgery. Oscar knew that Walter Geist had the kind of albinism known as oculocutaneous. He told me that Geist’s eyes never stopped moving because of a condition called nystagmus. Oscar knew all about Gallipoli and the Anzacs, and, of course, I’d told him myself why I was named Rosemary. He knew the Tasmanian tiger was extinct. He knew I longed for my mother; that I was often lonely.

He was my guide to the Arcade, translator of its strange histories and inhabitants. The entire store was his occupation in many ways, his means of making sense of the world. Eventually, I would I come to know something of Oscar’s own secrets. After working together in his section for a month, he told me the story of his early fascination with cloth.

When Oscar was a child, he’d kept an old hatbox his mother had given him under his bed. It was filled with small pieces of luxurious fabric she’d clipped from the seams and hems of dresses she made and repaired—fabric far richer and more exotic than anything they could afford. The hat box was Oscar’s treasure and favorite plaything.

He would take out the pieces of fabric—gossamer chiffon, lustrous silk, thick velvet—and rub them across his face. The box was his source of comfort and pleasure, and although the adult Oscar always dressed uniformly in black trousers and a crisp white shirt, he’d never lost his fascination with fabric. He knew all the fancy names and adjectives—organdy, tulle, crepe de chine, damask, moire, zephyr, batiste. He knew how they were made: colored, processed, woven.

Scraps of fabric had been Oscar’s only toys, but as he grew older he became increasingly bookish. He too had an absent father, was devoted to his mother, and had never lived alone until her death. Oscar’s mother had emigrated from Poland as a girl with her parents, but had fallen out with them over Oscar’s father, who’d deserted her sometime after his son’s birth.

Although he was ten years older, I used to think that in Oscar I’d found my double, a counterpart accidentally born in America, so similar were our circumstances. I thought we matched perfectly—his eternal investigations the match to my endless curiosity. Through his mother’s instruction, he’d learned everything important—how to read, how to live an orderly life, and the value of remembering as much as possible. Which is how he’d come to always keep a notebook; his mother had had a dressmaker’s book, filled with the measurements and particularities of her customers. He had imitated her, as I copied him, inscribing a life from fragmentary items.

If I’d been older, or really a grown woman at all, I might not have been so moved by Oscar’s life, by his story, by our resemblances and correspondences. I might not have clutched the idea of him to me as if it were a secret leaf fallen from a lover’s book. But then, my heart escaped me.




CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_1891d5bf-4f61-52de-b414-237f923cd1f6)


George Pike had employed Robert Mitchell for forty years, but their long collaboration had done little to improve an essentially antagonistic relationship. That Mr. Mitchell worked four floors above Pike made their professional interaction possible. Pike himself limited their contact to frequent telephone exchanges, often petty squabbles over money and, in particular, the costs of repairing extremely old volumes and collections of papers, whose fragility found a devoted champion in Mr. Mitchell. The care he took over damaged volumes seemed an extension of the interest he took in the well-being of the motley staff, who gladly rode the cranky elevator up to his own small store-within-a-store. It was a task we bickered over. His presence filled the Rare Book Room with gentility, a trait I now associate with the enveloping reek of a pipe.

Accompanying customers up to the Rare Book Room on the store’s fifth floor was my favorite task, once I was actually floating. It was an opportunity for conversation with collectors about their particular tastes and obsessions, and I learned something from every encounter. A trip to the Rare Book Room meant I could visit with Mr. Mitchell and breathe in the vanilla scent of his pipe. I adored him.

The first time I escorted a client up to the Rare Book Room, struggling with the elevator cage, Mr. Mitchell was waiting. Pike had called ahead of our arrival to clear the customer I accompanied for credit approval.

“What a pleasure, young lady! You must be our antipodean newcomer. Rosemary for remembrance, if I’m not mistaken. I am Robert Mitchell,” he said with a courtly reach of his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

In his late sixties, with vertical peaks of snowy hair, he had the complexion of a man who didn’t manage his blood pressure. He was large and seemed professorial in a saggy, postathletic way. Tall, with an enormous belly that sloped from his breastbone and disappeared into his high-belted trousers; his face reminded me of an amiable bird’s. I was at once struck by the odd happenstance that he resembled a type of cockatoo I’d long wished to own (but which Mother had refused me on account of its noise, its mess). This bird too was large, pink and white, but native to Australia and coincidentally named after an historical personage, some early dignitary, a certain Major Mitchell.

“Oscar told me I would enjoy meeting you,” I told him, far more comfortable in the Rare Book Room than four floors below. The contrast with the belligerent paperback fellows, Jack and Bruno, couldn’t have been more stark.

“Oscar told me the same thing, my dear. And also that you are very far from home. Van Diemen’s Land, no less. A rare and beautiful place, I understand. A wild island. We must be sure to make you welcome,” he said, and repeated. “We must be sure to.”

The warmth in his voice spread through me like the melancholy I carefully, daily, kept at bay. And perhaps because Mr. Mitchell caught me on a particularly homesick day, or because my own lost father could not in my imagination have been more kindly disposed to me, or simply because unexpected kindness exactly locates one’s well of sadness, tears itched the corners of my eyes.

“Indeed, Rosemary, you are very far from home,” Mr. Mitchell said again, noticing my upset, “but you must feel welcome here. And safe.” He took my hand inside his and patted it affectionately. I had to turn away.

“Now, then, who has accompanied you to my aerie?” he asked in a businesslike way, leaving me to compose myself. “Who has come to see the infinite riches in my little room?” He knew perfectly well, of course.

The customer cleared his throat, impatient to be attended to.

“Ah, Mr. Gosford! Yes, the Beckett first edition, if I’m not mistaken? I’ve been waiting for you to pick it up.”

Mr. Mitchell and the collector, Gosford, moved from the elevator into the first of several rare rooms, crowded with volumes and folios.

“Where are we—Whoroscope?” he called, and reached toward a shelf to the right of his desk.

“Rosemary, are you interested in an opportunity for instruction?” Mr. Mitchell inquired, still trying to locate the book.

Oscar had prepared me. One of Mr. Mitchell’s favorite things to do was teach. (Oscar had said “lecture.”) He never waited for assent from the prospective student, but would go on, searching for the volume, chatting all the while.

“Let me see, Whoroscope, Whoroscope. You are very lucky, Mr. Gosford,” he said, finally finding the book. “Now, Rosemary, perhaps you are not aware that this,” he ran on excitedly, “that this, Beckett’s first published poem, was composed in a single night! He wanted to win a thousand francs in a competition which called for submissions of no more than one hundred lines. Yes, that’s right. A poem on the subject of Time.” He paused thoughtfully. “Time, you see? He won, evidently. Ah, there we are.”

He handed the book to Mr. Gosford like his own prize, a reward for his patience. The little book had brick-red wrappers and a white band, printed with a note from the publisher. It was incidental to me that it was a book by Beckett, with whom I was unfamiliar. What struck me was that it was a small, beautiful object, and that both men wanted it.

“One of a hundred signed by Beckett, Mr. Gosford. A bit dusty, slight fading at the top edge, no foxing, and otherwise a fine copy. A steal at ten thousand dollars. I’ve spoken to Pike and your credit is excellent. The bill will be forthcoming.”

He leaned away from Gosford, in a perfectly timed motion, as if to better appreciate the moment. He paused.

“Rosemary, no need for you to wait,” he took up after a minute. “Mr. Gosford is good for it, I assure you.”

I left him to secure the signature. It was the practice of the Rare Book Room that a customer who’d selected and wanted to purchase a book had to be accompanied down to the main floor of the Arcade and straight to Pearl at the register. The potential for theft was the obvious reason for this ritual; but in the case of extremely valuable items, approval was often granted in advance. Customers like Mr. Gosford were billed monthly, so frequent and so large were their acquisitions.

This first visit I rode the elevator down alone, but I was to welcome any opportunity to visit Mr. Mitchell and be warmed by his affection, his information; to be at once reminded of my loneliness and comforted by its acknowledgment.

The other role as escort was to descend to the basement. Walter Geist worked there beneath a single blinding globe of light suspended from a cord attached to the low ceiling, its bare bulb casting shadows along the creases of his face, the only darkness there the hollows of mouth and nostrils. I carried new books to Geist at least two or three times a day, accompanying book reviewers from the city’s major newspapers and periodicals. They cast anxious, furtive looks about, hoping not to cross paths with one of their colleagues. It was a shifty business, not exactly stealing but hardly legitimate, either.

Selling copies of books that had been mailed free of charge was considered one of the perks of reviewing. It was impractical for reviewers to keep stacks of books around after reviewing them (or not reviewing them) for a newspaper or magazine, and publishers knew the activity was part of the Arcade’s operation—knew that they too lined Pike’s pockets—although it wasn’t widely sanctioned. When customers requiring escort showed up, Pearl would bellow either “Review!” or “Rare Book Room!” and whoever was on the floor at the time had to scurry up front to meet the waiting customer. I didn’t mind, preferring the task of escort to shelving.

I often chatted with the more familiar sellers, asking them for recommendations or whether they’d given the books I carried to the basement a positive or negative review. In this way I came to be on speaking terms with several literary journalists and publishing types. My notebook from that time is peppered with recommendations of books I’m certain I never read. But I much preferred collectors to those disposing of books. Collectors were passionate, at least; opportunistic, but in a different way. Their attachment to books as things, I believed then, had more to do with love than with money. The fact is, collecting has an erotic appeal.

After Geist had tallied up the total of the books sold to him in the basement, he scribbled the amount on a small yellow square of paper and the seller returned upstairs to wait in line at the register. Pearl took the yellow square and dispensed the specified amount in cash. Certain journalists then retired to one of the nearby taverns and drank their unearned dividend, each glass an ironic toast to Pike’s financial health.

He didn’t return their deference. Pike referred to reviewers as “spivs” and directed Geist to handle the entire enterprise involving new books.

The basement was Walter Geist’s domain; Mr. Mitchell’s, the fifth floor. Heaven and hell, we used to joke. All of us on the main floor floating in a kind of limbo, Pike watching, raised omnipotently overhead.

Competing for my favorite task of a trip to the Rare Book Room was Bruno (who often had the distinct advantage of being near Pearl at the register, tending to the paperback tables) as well as his ragged-faced colleague, Jack. Pike had designated these two paperback people, and their proximity to Pearl’s bellowed calls meant they were more often than not in either the basement or with Mr. Mitchell upstairs.

Jack Conway, an immigrant like me, was a musician, a traditional fiddler, and Irish. He’d had the end of his nose bitten off in a pub brawl and it was now an abrupt silvery edge. The scarred skin was shiny and pale, giving the impression of a punctuation mark in the center of his face that quickened the rest of his ruddy features. Jack seemed not to care how he looked, and his abbreviated nose had little affect on his attractiveness to women. He had a French girlfriend, Rowena, a sullen poet who often stopped in, but several women visited him during the course of a day.

I saw him, more than once, enter the single public toilet with various women. While they both remained inside for a good twenty minutes, customers in need jostled desperately with the locked doorknob.

Jack’s hatchet look matched his manner. He was tough, and his thick accent often made him unintelligible to other staff members, including Geist (for all his facility with languages). I understood him perfectly, his Irish brogue not so thick to my Tasmanian ear. But I couldn’t translate the filthy fliratious remarks Jack directed at Pearl, who told me she found his inarticulate muttering exciting. Some I simply couldn’t comprehend, but it wasn’t a question of diction. It was a harmless attraction that upset Rowena, not because Jack was really interested in Pearl but because Pearl’s fleshy laughter made a kind of triangle that included me. As the go-between, I was the one Rowena disliked, suspecting, as I came to, that Jack’s mumbled obscenities were intended for my delight as much as for Pearl’s.

I stayed clear of him. Mother had been overprotective to the point of mania about sex. Of course, I had my bookish fantasies, my adolescent ardors. But by then, Sidney Carton had been happily traded for Oscar Jarno, for an infatuation I mistook to be other than fictional. I was nervous around men, around all the displaced desire that ran beneath the surface of the Arcade. It wasn’t that I ever thought they wanted me; simply that they wanted. I’d had no experience with men, and chose to deposit all ideas of romantic promise with the unattainable—with Oscar.

Every morning but Sunday, mail was delivered to the Arcade by a mailman named Mercer. A rather elegant Trinidadian, he’d lived in New York for many years, and despite his uniform he looked more like a diplomat than a representative of the postal service. Chaps would have cast him as Othello in a minute. Mercer and Peal were friends, and it was her custom to bellow to Pike across the huge store that the mail had arrived.

At the Arcade, mail was almost as coveted as books.

Letters brought requests for rare titles, offers from estate libraries, queries and contacts from all over the world. Mr. Mitchell would frequently appear right around the time Mercer showed up, and try to charm him into a quick glance through the day’s mail. It was a slightly silly exercise, unworthy of him. Mercer wouldn’t part with the letters until they were in George Pike’s hand, as if he were more courier than postman. And Pike actually ceased his pricing to greet Mercer at his platform and formally receive the clutch of epistles.

Mr. Mitchell would follow, calling Mercer his “man of letters” and hovering about until Pike told him to go away, that any letters for him would be dispatched upstairs once Pike looked them over. It was a pantomime that made Mr. Mitchell appear childish, as if he had been waiting for a letter to drop from Mercer’s hands so that he might snatch it up and read it before his magisterial employer.

Shoplifting was a regular pastime for some, and I became familiar with one of the Arcade’s more notorious thieves one morning after I answered Pearl’s call of “Review books!” a couple of months after I’d started. Tall, about twenty-five, the shoplifter had hair was as vivid as my own. He was waiting for me at the front register, leaning against the counter, his long legs crossed in jeans spattered with colored paint. Mr. Mitchell had christened this particular thief Red-burn, although I didn’t know that at the time.

“I was wondering when you’d accompany me to hell,” the man said flirtatiously.

“I don’t know you, do I?” I asked, taking several hardcover books from him, part of my job as escort.

“We haven’t met before, but it’s apparent what we have in common. They call me Redburn here because of it.”

“Lot’s of people have red hair,” I replied, ahead of him on the steep stairs. Pike’s capitals fairly shouted in my face as I descended: GEORGE PIKE WILL NOT TOLERATE THE THEFT OF MONEY OR BOOKS!

“Pike overdoes that warning, don’t you think?” he said, indicating the sign. “It’s very threatening.”

“Only if you’re thinking of stealing,” I returned.

We reached the bottom of the staircase.

“Some would say that buying review copies is stealing,” Red-burn developed. “New books may well have been shoplifted from a regular bookstore.”

He challenged me with auburn eyebrows raised, conventionally attractive and confident of the fact.

“Are these stolen?” I asked him, stopping in the maze of stacks that wove through the basement. The low ceiling met the tall shelves, creating an oppressive tunnel through to Geist’s lair in the rear.

“Why would you care?” he asked.

It was a question I didn’t exactly know how to answer, so I ignored it. I resolved then to generally ignore Redburn as well.

“My guess is you don’t approve of stealing, is that right?” he persisted, as we reached Geist’s counter, starkly vacant beneath the blinding bulb.

“I don’t approve of stealing, no,” I replied, stacking the books on the counter. Geist stood some feet away, examining a book held close to his face, his back to us.

“Then give me my heart back,” Redburn whispered, leaning toward me, his hands over his chest, feigning pain.

I couldn’t help laughing out loud. Geist turned around abruptly, and I wondered if he’d overheard the man’s request.

“Check the copyright, Rosemary, then read the list prices to me,” he said, coming forward, all business, his glasses firmly in place.

“I wouldn’t dream of cheating you, Geist,” Redburn said slyly. “Not today at least.”

I opened the covers of each book, confirming that they had been recently published, and read out the printed prices to Geist, who reduced them to quarters in his head, calculating what Redburn would receive. He scribbled the total on a yellow square of paper, sliding it across the counter.

“Want to tell me where you got these books?” Geist asked, his finger securing the note.

“Nope,” the shoplifter answered, snatching it up.

“I didn’t think so,” said Geist. “Rosemary, in future you’re not to escort this man anywhere in the Arcade. He is banned from the store.”

Redburn smiled at me mischievously and headed back upstairs to redeem his yellow slip with Pearl.

I had begun to understand that a significant part of the Arcade’s operation was based on deception; few questions were asked about the provenance of books. Whole libraries were bought in bulk sight unseen, and once priced individually by Pike, a few items often earned back what had been spent on the sum. It wasn’t cheating exactly, or stealing; it was the canny leveraging of desire. Manipulating the lust for things that retained or lost value depended in whose hands they were held.

“Mr. Geist,” I asked, before returning upstairs. “Did that man steal the books you just bought?”

“Most likely,” he said. “No concern of yours, of course. Just tell Jack or Bruno to throw him out if you see him in here again.”

Oscar told me later that Mr. Mitchell had coined Redburn’s name for him, and not only because his red hair was vivid enough to be ablaze. Wellingborough Redburn was the protagonist in a novel by Herman Meville, a first edition of which Mr. Mitchell had discovered beneath the thief’s tatty shirt, tucked into the waistband of his trousers.

The valuable copy of Redburn had been set aside for the Arcade’s most prodigious collector, a man who’d never set foot inside the store. Julian Peabody owned the largest private library in the country, and Mr. Mitchell was expecting his librarian, Samuel Metcalf, to pick up the volume from Pike’s stage. He had been awaiting that gentleman, along with Walter Geist, an old friend of Metcalf’s, when both were distracted by Pike, who chose that moment to argue for an increase in the book’s price. While they bickered, Red-burn audaciously pilfered it right off Pike’s desk. The volume was dislodged accidentally when Bruno slammed into the thief as he hurried from the store.

Peabody acquired the book, and added it to his large collection of nineteenth-century American authors, the most significant outside any private institution. Herman Melville was a Peabody favorite and, shortly after I knew of this incident, Melville would become my favorite as well.




CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_b147bf48-c501-5f47-a2ce-bb7b76c01860)


I returned in the evenings to the Martha Washington, to Lillian and to the closet of my rented room. After two months, the Arcade had become my home, and the city that housed it the larger world Chaps had wished for me and, I realized, that I’d wanted for myself. Tasmania was remote indeed, an ideal of home that merged over time with Mother, with her absence, and with the contradiction of her occasionally overwhelming presence. In the framed photograph, her face at my age returned my own green gaze with dark eyes, projecting a confidence I still hadn’t found.

I dreamed she lived often enough to wake with the kind of longing that makes memory eloquent. While I slept she had lived, and the pain upon waking was as much a fleeting uncertainly of her state as anguish over the clear fact of my own life continuing without her. We are never so aware of those we have lost, and dreamt of, than in that waking moment.

I developed the habit of walking for hours in the early evening after leaving work at six, and invented a zigzagging pattern of one block up, one across, to vary my route, reversing the pattern to return downtown. Something soothing in the process reminded me of picking up a practical skill, like learning letters so as to read, or learning steps so as to dance. It was light for hours then, and hot. The city’s grid ordered my mind. I walked as a way of thinking and, walking, I felt as sturdy and sensible as the shoes I’d change into before setting off.

Following a pattern gave me an assurance I often hadn’t felt during the working day. My lack of knowledge of the Arcade’s vast contents nagged at me, but through my walks I remembered, took note, and played out the day’s events. I was determined not to be lost in the city, and through my walks I mapped more than locations and points of reference. I found a way to manage. I let the city work on me, into me, and I learned that I wanted the freedom it held out.

In the evenings, when the city cleared out, there was room for me in the geometry of emptiness that took over certain neighborhoods. The varied architecture taught me a sense of proportion, a contradictory sense even of scale. As I’d learned in Sydney, there was room in cities. Yes, I was a mote inside New York’s great, swirling energy, but I was there. At twilight, I was even outlined against buildings, my shadow tall and attenuated upon century-old facades. Using zigzagging increments, I measured myself against blocks, buildings, streetlights. Of course, I was overwhelmed by New York, but was at once oddly freed of any requirement to agency. Although my shadow quickly disappeared as night fell, I carried a memory of its shape long against the great buildings: animated and free.

One hot July evening, I ran down an empty street as the peppery smell of city rain rose up from where the rain fell, spotting the pavement. The sharp scent set me sneezing. Seconds later huge heavy drops began to pelt my head and back. I took shelter beneath an awning and watched the storm through an amnion of water. Ten minutes later the rain ceased, as abruptly as it had started. The temperature dropped a few degrees, and I felt the materiality of weather, impervious to the great constructed landscape. Manhattan was at once sealed and, as I watched filthy rainwater disappear into subway grates and down street drains, as permeable as any thing in nature. It absorbed everything, as I was learning.

Summer kept me out quite late into August. I worked at the Arcade every day of the week but one. Evenings I walked. I waited the delicacy of the approaching fall as a seasonal shift I’d never before experienced. Toward September I felt a kind of unfamiliar anticipation. A dirty park on my way to the Arcade, around Twenty-third Street, became my bellwether, its trees gushed out greenly amid the traffic and surrounding buildings. Several people were permanent residents of the park and sat beside their possessions. I just visited.

Beneath the trees, inside their shallow shade, was my only constant reminder that nature was marking time, that trees at least were routine and predictable. Even though, for me, the cycle was reversed and more defined than it ever was at home, the trees in my park were committed to seasons, as I must become as well.

When I returned from walking, Lillian would ask what I’d been looking at, what I had found. Our tentative friendship grew as she used me as her emissary to the larger city. She did not want to go anywhere, except (on certain days) back to Argentina.

“Where my Spanish books, Rosemary? You said you’d find.”

“I’m sorry, Lillian, I’m still looking.”

“Pah, my brother say you can’t find nothing there in that place where you work.”

“I’m sure there’s something there for you, Lillian, I just have to find it. What did you read when you lived in Argentina?”

“I read Borges. Jorge Luis Borges. He think he too good for me, but I love him,” she said. “He was a blind man who see better than anyone.”

“I’ll look,” I promised. “Write his name down for me.”

“You never heard of him?” she scoffed. “What do they read there in Tasmania?”

“They read lots of things, Lillian. But everyone has gaps.”

She laughed out loud. Lillian had a warm, deep laugh, velvety with intimacy, with experience.

“Then you find Borges for me, but mostly for yourself. For your gaps. He will fill them, I promise!”

That Walter Geist was an albino was a distinction he could neither hide nor help. And he could be difficult. He was consistently unpleasant to both staff and all but a few select customers. He was even unpleasantly obsequious on the few occasions that called for mild pleasantness, mostly in his dealings with collectors whose large libraries Pike was trying to acquire.

But toward me he behaved differently.

I am ashamed now, when I remember how I shrank from him, and from his whiteness. Ashamed, too, of my fascination. Or perhaps just guilty that I longed to stare at him.

At first, Geist would not meet my eyes and spoke to me with such particularity that I became fixed upon his strange speech patterns and upon his lips with their sibilant consonants. He spoke to me very little in the beginning, addressing me only when he was called upon to give directions for the removal of Pike’s priced pile, to instruct me to wait at the rear door to help unload a delivery, or to tell me where to place the “new” books I’d brought down to him in the basement. I suppose a fascination with his appearance was not unusual; he seemed to almost have a dry expectation of it. He was sadly practiced at subjection to close inspection.

Walter Geist’s parents had been refugees from Germany; this much Oscar had told me, but he hadn’t gathered much more of Geist’s personal details, at least that he ever shared. Geist had not, as my imagination initially proposed, been born in the basement of the Arcade, but in Berlin, in the old Kreuzberg section of the city. He’d grown up in Pennsylvania after immigrating with his parents when very young. Walter Geist had never married, and lived a largely solitary life outside of the Arcade.

Geist’s slight lisp was not the result of any actual speech impediment but suggested the palimpsest of languages he had mastered, a hint of them all compressed and vaguely present in his whispered English. It wasn’t an accent like mine, broad and flat and, I feared, ignorant. His diction was subtle, exquisite in its way. According to Oscar, Geist spoke five languages fluently, his father having been a linguist at the university. What Oscar didn’t know of Walter Geist’s personal history, he supplemented with research on albinism. Oscar had his preoccupations and, briefly, Geist had been one, as he would become mine.

Inside the Arcade, Geist affected the use of a thick pair of pince-nez glasses that sat in his shirtfront pocket, attached to a silver chain around his neck. More often, though, they were miraculously affixed to the bridge of his nose, held in place by the folds of skin that his squint made about his eyes and forehead. Geist’s eyes were of an undetermined color, but in some lights, particularly bright sunlight, they appeared violet.

“Actually, Rosemary,” Oscar told me when I mentioned this odd fact to him, “Walter’s eyes are colorless. I looked it up. The violet color is caused by blood vessels in the retina. You can see the blood because his retina is without the color of an iris. I suppose you could say Walter’s eyes are transparent.”

“Transparent,” I repeated, fascinated. Oscar’s golden eyes were beautiful but opaque; the idea that Geist’s eyes were transparent was too whimsical, too curious, not to captivate me.

And yet, the wobbling movement of his eyes confused me as to where exactly to look—how to meet him. His eyes swam. Weak muscles caused this vacillation, and the constant motion gave the impression that his eyes were perpetually averted in a kind of deflection. I wanted to follow his shifting gaze into some other, quieter space—to see what he saw. He appeared particularly sensitive to light and shadow, and to scent.

“Yes, transparent. Interesting, isn’t it?” Oscar smiled, and took out his notebook to write down something that had occurred to him. “I have quite a bit of information about Walter’s condition.”

“Do you?” I asked, curious. “It seems as if Mr. Geist doesn’t want me to look at his eyes. They always move away. I want to look, though. It’s as if I’ll be able to stare right into his brain.”

“Really? How odd,” Oscar said, momentarily considering me.

“I imagine his thoughts might have color, even if his eyes don’t.” I could have added that he was entirely without color, but that would have sounded cruel. I did picture Geist’s thoughts, however, as bright and secret things, moving just behind the transparent plane of his retina like exotic fish.

“I saw him looking at my hair outside yesterday,” I told Oscar. “While we were waiting for that library. When I asked him if something was wrong, he cleared his throat and pretended he hadn’t been looking.”

“Well, Rosemary,” Oscar said matter-of-factly, “perhaps Walter thinks your hair is beautiful.”

Then, seeming to lose interest as quickly as he had found it, he continued to write in his notebook.

“Oscar,” I ventured, my heart hot in my chest. “Do you think so?”

But he didn’t answer or even acknowledge my question, absorbed as he was in his own note taking. I watched him, writing away, and felt ill with longing. His sculpted head bent over his task, his face expressionless.

Occasionally, I would come upon Geist in the stacks of Oscar’s section, holding books close to his face, his white fingers splayed against their covers like spread wings. The volumes he held at the tip of his nose had the compressed heft of textbooks, and their weight made him stoop with effort. Walter Geist was a lonely figure even within the world of the Arcade, and as Pike’s designated other, he remained on the fringes of staff camaraderie. He was management, after all: George Pike’s pale avatar, some variation of a shadow. But he also held himself separate, certain that he would always be distinct and removed from that which defined the lives of others. In this respect, he knew better than any of us the condition of his life, and I suppose, like everyone else, I assumed he was reconciled to that condition. It wasn’t compassion on my part that made him so interesting to me. It was curiosity. My imagination was always overactive, and I made him a figure of significance in the fairy tale I was inventing, in the one I was living. Perhaps, as well, I just couldn’t reckon with his humanity.

The staff at the Arcade played a game to pass the time, a game prompted unwittingly when customers asked a question that was exceedingly difficult to answer. The game was called Who Knows? and it did make a long day pass more quickly, but it also served the practical purpose of sharpening the skills required to work in the Arcade. A sense of humor was necessary as well, particularly about the demands placed on one’s memory.

There were no reference guides, save Books in Print (the place most likely not to list a book sought by a customer at the Arcade), so the only reliable source of reference was the staff and their collective memory. Memory was the yardstick of achievement at the Arcade, the measure of one’s value to Pike. Memory housed the bookstore’s contents like a constantly expanding index, an interior, private library organized by some internal, fleshy variation on the Dewey decimal system.

There were customers who knew only the title but not the author, or only the author but not the title, or even only the color and size of the volume but neither its author’s name nor its title. A customer’s hands might move apart as if to say “It’s about this thick.” The game became a way to address how difficult it could be to find anything in the Arcade. For the staff, each obscure question seemed like another bead in a string of non sequiturs. These inquiries demanded an equally nonsensical response, the standard Arcade response. Hence the name of the game: Who Knows?

Jack Conway, his friend Bruno, along with the huge Arthur (Pike seemed to think it amusing to have hired an Art for the Art section), liked to shout out, sometimes with real belligerence, the name of the game. At first I thought they were really serious, and angry, but I caught on eventually.

“Who knows?” they would call out to each other across the heads of inquiring customers, and then, if no echo returned, call with greater rancor, with a full, open throat: “Who the FUCK knows?”

I learned that this was actually a challenge, a call for others to help, and could even draw Oscar from his stacks if he wasn’t already occupied. Oscar’s recall of his section was practically infallible, but if the book didn’t fall into the shapeless category of nonfiction, those with a slightly less remarkable memory needed to be found and consulted. Even Pike would participate, particularly as it often meant the certain sale of a book.

Where is the book I saw here once on the history and design of Russian nesting dolls? Can you tell me where I might begin to look for a monograph on Franz Boaz’s dissertation entitled “Contributions to the Understanding of the Color of Water”? Do you have the classic gay novel Der Puppenjunge by Sagitta in English? I must have William D’Avenant’s Gondibert—you know, it has fifteen hundred stanzas? Do you have a book of patterns for Redwork? Where are the decorative planispheres based on Mercator’s projection? Listen, I know you have Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns, but where is it?

Customer inquiries were like cartoon thought balloons making visible what was on the mind of the city. They were as random, as subjective, as experience itself, and our only defense against the arbitrariness of the questions was our game.

Who Knows? helped find the most obscure books, and after several months even I became blasé about the astonishing capacity of longtime employees to place their hand on a slim volume, seven shelves down, nine books in—miraculously pulling out just the book a confounded customer had been seeking. Occasionally, I had seen Chaps performing in this way in her tiny, tidy shop in Tasmania, but the scale of this game was entirely different, as was the range and variety of interest. At the Arcade, finding the improbable was an act best accomplished with an impassive air, a bland repudiation of the feat of memory it displayed. The magical act of finding anything, let alone a specifically requested book, within the Arcade’s repository was actually a point of pride. This rabbit-out-of-a-hat trick was the single exhibition the Arcade staff could perform that rivaled Pike’s mysterious pricing.

“I found this for you, Lillian. But it’s in English.”

I handed her a small paperback by Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, uncovered inadvertently while I waited at the paperback tables.

“Ah, I like this one. I read it a long time ago. You and me, Rosemary, we are like this, no? Imaginary beings, here, no?”

“What do you mean?”

“It is like we are made up, like these creatures in here. See?” She opened the paperback at random. “The Lunar Hare—this is the man in the moon, you see? The Mandrake, the Manticore…” She smiled. “We are like these things. No one knows we exist, except a few people. And if we disappear, there is no Borges to make a little story of us, to remember us. Who knows you are here? No mother, no father. And look at you, already so different. You do not look like the girl that came here weeks ago. A girl from Tasmania.” She screwed up her eyes, assessing me. “You look like a lion. Where is that other girl now, eh? Now she is imaginary being!”

I had changed. Tall, and long-boned, I’d become physically strong working at the Arcade, developing muscles in my arms and back for the first time in my largely sedentary life. Helping out in Remarkable Hats hadn’t required much physical effort. But the carting of boxes of books, mostly overpacked, strengthened me, as did my walking and the strictures of a diet confined to what could be bought cheaply, and eaten uncooked in my room at the Martha Washington.

“But we are real to each other, Lillian,” I told her. “We aren’t imaginary.”

“You not know anything about me,” Lillian said frankly, thumbing through the paperback.

“Nothing,” she added, with a finality that hurt me. “I might not even exist.”

“Well, it takes a while to know someone, Lillian, but I hope we will be friends.”

“I am sorry, I don’t want to read this in English. Thank you for the book,” she said abruptly, and handed it back to me.

Perhaps reading the hurt on my face, she added, “You keep it. You read it for yourself. Fill up your gaps. I have no need of such things anymore.”

Turning away, she put the television plug back into her ear.

I went to my room feeling rejected. I wanted friends, something I’d never had at home. Mother had discouraged such connections; she was fiercely private and secretive about our life. Although I loved the Arcade and New York, the other side of a teeming city was relentless isolation. There was nothing I had been to anyone, no impression I had made, no one to remember me. People here were tricky, and odd—sometimes deceitful. I needed to be careful. I fingered the green amulet at my throat that Chaps had given me.

The exchange with Lillian reminded me that I really needed to live elsewhere, to properly establish myself. Although I had been managing at the hotel for months, I longed for somewhere that didn’t feel like a place of transition. The dirty park, my bellwether on the way to the Arcade, told me that fall was coming, and I knew little about the real winter that would follow. I wanted my own bathroom, free of grubby ghosts, and a stove to cook on, as well as a window I could open that didn’t tease my hunger with the promise of Indian food I couldn’t afford, despite its designation as cheapest cuisine in the city. The Martha Washington was also paralyzingly quiet, up until late evening. Then, the thump-thump of cars and taxis that failed to spot the large pothole directly outside the building’s entrance began. The synchronized double-banging of the front and then the rear of each car, as its tires sank momentarily up to their hubcaps, was repetitive and deadening.

That evening I lay in bed, in darkness, and measured the thump-thump of passing cars against the more predictable beat of my heart. I needed a place to make my own, and determined to ask around at the Arcade to see if anyone knew of an apartment to rent or to share.

Unable to sleep, I switched on the light and took up the Borges I’d found for Lillian, and which she insisted I keep. Why was Lillian so difficult to befriend? The little volume cheered me up. Lillian was right about Borges filling up gaps; he knew all about the lazy pleasure of useless and out-of-the-way erudition; all about the fertilizing quality of knowledge.

The book was arranged alphabetically, and so I started with Abtu and Anet, the Egyptian life-sized holy fish that swam on the lookout for danger before the prow of the sun god’s ship. Theirs was an eternal journey, sailing across the sky from dawn to dusk, and by night traveling underground in the opposite direction.

I lay reading the short entries with interest, and passed the hardest part of the night forgetting about my larger concerns.

Some creatures were familiar, like the Minotaur, half bull and half man, born from the perverse passion of Pasiphaë, queen of Crete, for a pure white bull, and hidden within the Labyrinth because of its monstrousness.

The book’s final entry was the Zaratan, the island that is actually a whale, “skilled in treachery,” drowning sailors once they camped on its back, having mistaken the Zaratan for land.

I finally fell asleep with the book on my chest, my mind full of whales and white bulls, fish-men and girl-lions—a zoology of dreams with a cast made to populate the one I was living.

Arthur Pick was something altogether different. Another foreigner, an Englishman, he adored his Art section and was constantly examining photography books, in particular those that featured naked men, as I had seen him do the day I was hired. Arthur loved paintings as well, but photography was his passion. He gave me a nickname I hated, but he insisted on it, and insisted too that I look at photographs he fancied.

“Hello, my Tasmanian Devil, are you floating today? Are you busy? Come here and look, look at these pictures. Are they not lovely?”

“Well, yes, they’re very, ah, powerful…But I think I prefer the paintings you showed me.”

“Do you? I can’t imagine why.” Arthur turned several pages and my face reddened. I hadn’t seen anything like these men. Ever.

“Don’t you see that the photograph has made them innocent?” Arthur said. The question astonished me.

“They are frozen and unaware that they will change, or die, or even that they live at all,” he went on.

“Innocent?” It was exactly what I thought of Mother’s black-and-white photo, that she was captured in there before her life had overwhelmed her. But innocent? These men were hardly unwitting, they were complicit.

“Innocence is their appeal,” Arthur explained. “Their nakedness is only part of it. I thought you’d see it, my Tasmanian Devil, because that’s a bit like you.”

“But how do you know I’m innocent?” I asked him, my face aflame.

“Ah, now you stretch credibility. It is what everyone here sees in you.”

“I really don’t understand you, Arthur…and I told you, please don’t call me that name anymore.” I knew he was being ironic calling me devilish, but just then I couldn’t laugh it off.

Arthur continued to turn the pages of the large book. “It is my gaze that brings the nude alive. They live in my mind, you see. Isn’t that marvelous?”

“So, will you stop calling me that name?”

“Tasmanian Devil? Of course, as you wish. Would you permit just TD then, for short?”

“But not, I hope, for long,” I returned.

“Ah,” Arthur said, surprised. “The stirrings of wit! Delightful! Perhaps, after all, you are not irreparably Tasmanian.”

One October evening, walking back to the Martha Washington, I first experienced a ritual of American fall. Passing my dirty park, I stood to watch as workers blew leaves into tall piles. Autumn leaves were collected up in colorful mounds of brown and orange, a few yellow edges fluttering out, like the slips of paper presented to Pearl for redemption at the register. Time was passing, heaped up on the path, blown into piles for carting off and burning to ash. I shivered.

Looking up into the trees, I noticed that one still had a few dark leaves clinging to the upper branches. Under my gaze, the leaves became a semé of birds, scattering upward and away in a salutary swoop, leaving only a plastic bag, caught and hanging listlessly in the bare limbs.

I hurried to the Martha Washington.

“I’m paying up for this week,” I told Lillian when I arrived. “But I really want to find an apartment. I think it’s time for me to move.”

I had decided to look in earnest, despite a lack of funds.

“What’s wrong with staying here?” said Lillian. “I keep my eye on you. I see you come and go. I make sure you not imaginary,” she joked. “I see what you become after the lion.”

She moved her hands around her head, simulating my messy mane.

I smiled.

“It’s fine here, Lillian, but I’d like to have a place of my own. I want to cook, and feel more settled. Guests come and go here all the time. I’d like to think I had a home. The weather is changing. It’s time I settled a bit more.”

“I don’t think you should go. Not yet. You are safer here,” Lillian said, dropping her hands and looking fretful.

“People, they disappear,” she said. “You have no idea…”

“What are you talking about, Lillian?” I said. “I’m not going away. Finding a proper place to live is the best way to become permanent. I’m not about disappear.”

Lillian shook her head, but not in disagreement.

“I hear you’re looking for somewhere to live,” Jack muttered to me a few days later as I stood talking with Pearl up front. “I’d be happy to oblige…”

“Do you mean you know somewhere?”

“Me mate’s just shot through, and I know somewhere cheap enough.”

“It’ll have to be cheap, Jack, on what they pay here,” I said. “Is it far?”

“Walking distance,” he answered. “If you’re up for a walk. It’s east of here.” He waved his thick arm wildly, not specifying a direction.

East of the Arcade was a notoriously squalid section of the city; the neighborhood was known for its drug dealers and cold-water flats.

The following week Jack and Rowena took me to look at his friend’s apartment after work. They led me down a block lined with several abandoned buildings, past a garbage-covered vacant lot to a dingy storefront, its windows clouded over with swirls of paint and wooden boards covered with graffiti. A battered-looking door opened on the side of what had once been a small grocery store. Inside the dank hall, I took in the hypodermic needles strewn under the stairwell, and the gray paint on the walls peeling off in damp flakes. The room was on the second floor. Jack had the key. His friend, a fellow musician, had left the apartment empty, although he retained the lease and wanted to sublet for only six months.

The door opened on a long, narrow space like a train carriage, with two dirty windows that faced the street. An oven, sink, and old claw-footed bathtub sat in the center against an exposed brick wall. A slightly narrower alcove with a tiny closet (and the toilet) was in the rear behind a filthy curtain. Worn, dark, wide planks on the floor were covered with the detritus of hasty departure: paper, rags, and lumps of clotted dust. The room was cold. The whole building was without heat.

“The boiler’s out just now,” said Jack, rubbing his hands together against the chill of the room. “Me mate used to turn the oven on and leave the door open when it got really cold in winter. Warm as toast after a while.” He attempted a grizzled smile.

“There’s even some pots under here you can boil up water when you need a bath,” Rowena threw in.

After the Martha Washington, the squalid look of the place didn’t bother me. In fact, in some perverse way it fit my developing ideas about bohemian life, about the requirements of adventure. Besides, I reasoned, I had always lived above a store, and while Mother would have been appalled at the place, something in its aspect reminded me of the flat above Remarkable Hats.

“I collect the rent,” Jack said. “Fifty a week. But I need a deposit as well. Four hundred’ll do up front. That’s including the first month. Right? I’m to mail it to me friend.”

I would need more than four hundred dollars to move in. I had to sleep on something, and clean the place. I didn’t have the money.

“If you can’t manage it, I know someone else who can,” Rowena threatened, sealing the deal.

“I’ll take it,” I told them, wanting to move in right then, and lock the door against Jack and Rowena. Once I was alone I could worry about the fact that the small amount of money I had saved wouldn’t cover what Jack wanted up front.

“Can you give me a few days to get the money together?” I asked.

“Sure, love.” Jack grinned at me crookedly. “Day after tomorrow? So’s we can start with October’s rent.”

I couldn’t ask Chaps for money. It would have taken too long to arrive, for one thing; and she’d done too much for me already, and asking would only worry her. The day after I saw the apartment I discussed it, and my lack of funds, with Oscar.

“I’m not sure you want someone like Jack as a landlord,” he warned. “How can you be sure he’s honest?”

“But I haven’t found anything else, and really, Oscar, it’s perfect for me. I’ll fix it up. I just have to figure out how to get the money.”

“I shouldn’t tell you this, but I have known, on rare occasions, of Walter Geist pressing Pike for an advance on behalf of an employee in need. You know, a small sum, a loan against future wages. You have to sign an agreement, and the amount is deducted in small increments on a weekly basis. Pike, of course, adds interest: ten percent of the loan, spread over the length of time the amount is to be paid.”

Oscar sounded very familiar with what he had described as a rare practice. I suspect he was himself indentured by debt to Pike.

“I can’t ask Mr. Geist for a loan,” I said, loath to appeal to the store manager. But without a loan I couldn’t leave the Martha Washington for several more months, and by that time the apartment would be gone.

That afternoon, I came upon Walter Geist reading in Oscar’s section. He stood holding a book no more than an inch from his face. Watching him, I thought he brought a certain amount of dignity to this close inspection. His dreadful eyesight made him appear momentarily vulnerable and, with his swimming eyes, peculiarly appealing.

He must have sensed he was being watched, for he closed the book with a thud, peered around nervously, and assumed his ill-favored demeanor. He hadn’t seen me, but I had a fleeting glimpse of the expression on his face. He had the look of a child braced for a slap. Was it Pike who’d etched this expression on Geist’s face, in the way a volatile parent draws pain as plainly as if with a crayon? Theirs was an intense relationship, often conducted in stage whispers and emphatic sentences. I couldn’t have guessed at their bond, but knew that whatever held them, it was a fierce allegiance.

But in catching Walter Geist unawares, I had also seen something of his terrible defenselessness. His albinism, of course, meant that he was subject to all manner of vulnerability. He was trapped within a skin that appalled by its very perfection, but he was not without a strange draw. It was beneath another’s gaze that distortion occurred. Contempt becomes stronger by becoming more precise, and Geist’s whiteness served as a nexus for those that despised the strange.

My own experience with marginality didn’t give me any insight into what Geist suffered. I was a willing émigré to New York, after all, whereas he was marked by birth to always be an exile. Like much of my understanding, it was through fiction that I gained a sense of his truth. And it was Herman Melville, in particular, that gave me an intimation of Geist’s terrible distinction, and the abhorrence it evoked in others.



PART TWO (#ulink_9ef04e5c-5dd0-5b4d-bb13-4021039cee2a)




CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_45ba75a4-a972-59ec-9fdb-d1f8d1be3412)


They’re a peculiar pair, Oscar, don’t you think?” I asked after watching Geist, and puzzling over him. “Pike and Geist. A strange couple of fellows.”

“Oh, Rosemary, d’you think they’re any more peculiar than anyone else who works here? What’s strange anyway?” Oscar asked rhetorically. “Perhaps it’s all just strange to you because you’re a stranger—in New York, I mean. To some people a young girl with wild red hair from Tasmania, with no parents, who lived above a hat shop her whole life, is unusual.”

“I suppose,” I said. “But I don’t seem the least bit unusual to myself.”

“Well, you wouldn’t, of course. Any more than I seem odd to myself, or even Walter seems to himself. Really, though,” Oscar conceded, “I suppose Walter truly is unusual. Can’t help but be.”

“I saw him in your section, reading with a book inches from his face,” I said. “I thought I might ask him, you know, about the loan. But he seemed so intent, and so…well, vulnerable, I didn’t want to disturb him. It occurred to me he needed privacy.”

What I didn’t tell Oscar was that I saw something in him revealed, as if I’d seen him naked.

“He’s often in my section,” Oscar confirmed. “But I can’t help him much with the books he’s after. I don’t have much that’s current on the brain, or neurology. He also wants books on anthropology, but anything current just doesn’t come into a place like the Arcade. I have something intriguing on phrenology, but of course that’s very out of date, although not without interest…”

His voice trailed off as if his mind was following another, more interesting thought, and his hand stroked his own head, perhaps attempting to read his prominent occipital bone. Was he feeling for indications of adhesiveness?

“How long has Mr. Geist been here, Oscar?” I asked, trying to bring him back to the subject.

Oscar didn’t know exactly how long Geist had worked at the Arcade; but having spent his own adolescence in correspondence with either Pike or Mr. Mitchell, searching for books to satisfy his peculiar interests, he assumed Walter Geist was older than he was. Geist was actually not much past forty, despite the quaint figure he cut, which gave him an eternally aged aspect.




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