Bookman's wake

Grayson in the end was like most great artists, he could never reach his idea of perfection, and he was always too hard on himself. He didn’t understand that the charm of his Raven lay in the very flaws that always tormented him. They show the budding genius at work. The flaws illuminate the brilliance of the other parts, and they do what none of Grayson’s other works can begin to do. They show him as human after all. Especially the mistake.”

“What mistake?”

“There was a spelling error in the poem ‘Annabel Lee.’ He never forgave himself for that.”

“What did he do?”

“He spelled the word sepulchre wrong—with an re in one place, and an er in the other.”

“That’s an easy mistake to make.”

“Of course it is. But gods don’t make mistakes.”

“Actually, I think you can spell it both ways.”

“It had to be spelled the way Poe spelled it. To’ve messed that up was to a man like Grayson the height of incompetence. But it proves what old-time printers all knew—there’s no such thing as a perfect book.”

“Damn. Then what did he do?”

“After the denial stage, he went through another silly time—he decided to round up all the surviving copies and destroy them. Trish has this wonderful scene in her book, and who knows, maybe it even happened that way. Grayson had retrieved five copies and was about to set them on fire in the dump behind his house. But he couldn’t do it—thank God he couldn’t light that fire. I think it was then, that night, when he decided he’d do another Raven someday, in the distant future, when he had the money and the skills to do it right. He saw his career enclosed by those two Ravens , like definitive parenthetical statements.”

Huggins let a long, dramatic moment pass. Then he said, “Isn’t it too bad he never got a chance to do that second one?”

The clock ticked and the question hung in the air. A long silence fell over the room. I knew we were thinking the same thing, but Huggins would never admit it. Once or twice he looked to be on the verge of something: then he’d look away and hold his peace. I still had a million questions and the sinking hunch that even then it would come to nothing.

A simple question could tie us up for an hour. Huggins was expansive: a gesturing, conjecturing, extrapolating encyclopedia on the Graysons, and I didn’t know enough to be able to decide what of all he was telling me was relevant. Then I thought of the one thing that might boot us up to another level—that scrap of charred paper in my wallet.

“Could I ask you something…in confidence?”

“Certainly.”

I took the paper out and put it on the counter between us.

“What’s your opinion of that?”

He squinted at it, then got out his glasses. I heard him take in his breath as if an old lover, still young and beautiful, had just walked into the room. He looked up: our eyes met over the tops of his glasses, and I could see that my hunch was right. I had shaken him up.

“Where’d you get this?”

“I can’t say. That’s part of what has to be kept confidential.”

“What do you think it is?” he said, suddenly coy.

“You’re the expert.”

He gave a mirthless grin. “You’re trying to tell me that this little fragment is part of something that I’m an expert in. But what can you expect from me, with such a small piece? There are only four letters. How can I tell?”

“The word angel appears in The Raven .”

“I know that. But what’s it prove? You think this is part of Grayson’s Raven ? It isn’t.”

“How can you tell?”

He picked up the fragment and held it up to the light. He looked at it through a jeweler’s eyepiece, then put it back on the counter.

“The paper, for one thing. Grayson would’ve used a much finer stock than this. Probably an old stock. And he’d have printed it damp. You follow what I’m saying—he’d dampen the paper slightly, so the press could get a real bite into it, so the ink would go deep and become part of the page. Look at this and you’ll see the ink’s sitting right on top of the paper, which is a common and I’ll bet cheap brand of copy paper.”

I felt a surge of relief. It was a photocopy, my hunch was right, the real book was still out there, somewhere.

I picked up the paper chip and put it in my wallet. Huggins followed it with his eyes. He seemed irritated when I put the wallet away in my pocket.