Bookman's promise

can’t get enough of today.”

“Burton never did have any inhibitions when it came to describing what he saw.”

“For all the good it did him. I understand only a few copies survived.”

“How did you manage to save this one?”

“I was lucky. Charlie had taken this volume out of his library to look up something. It was upstairs where it wasn’t supposed to be the night he died. Later my mother found it and hid it. She kept it secret until she died, and it was found among her things. A few worthless relics, some worn-out old clothes, and this—the sum of her existence, but to me it was a symbol of what we’d been, who we were.”

I flipped my notepad to a new page. “So tell me who you were.”

“We were never rich, I’ll tell you that. We were always comfortable, solidly in the middle class while Charlie was alive, but people were more apt to be either rich or poor then, and the middle class was a much smaller part of the population. You could live very well in the middle class in those days.”

She slipped back into her dream face. “Everything we were in the good times began and ended with my grandfather. He was such a loving authority figure to me when I was a child. His friends called him Charlie, but of course to me he was always Grandfather; it would have been a sacrilege to think of him any other way. But on my eightieth birthday I suddenly realized I was older than him— when he died, you know, and got stuck at seventy-nine forever. That’s when he became more like a dear old friend and I started thinking of him as Charlie.”

“What about your father?”

“My father…” She struggled for a word but couldn’t find it. The moment stretched and became strained. “What do you want to know? I tried to love my father…but he wouldn’t let me. He wasn’t a bad man…just a weak one.”

“Did he drink?”

I saw her recoil in surprise.

“I’m not a mind reader, ma’am, it just figures.”

She fidgeted. She could feel me hemming her in, taking her into places she had avoided for a long time. At last she answered the question. “His drinking put my mother in the poorhouse after my grandfather died. That’s where she died, alone in a consumption ward. They all died within a few years of each other— Charlie…Mama…him.”

I decided to leave her father’s drinking for the moment, but I knew we’d get back to it. “So you were alone in the world at what age?”

“Thirteen.”

“This was in Baltimore?”

“Yes, but when Mama got sick I was sent to live with her brother in Boise, Idaho.”

“How did that work out?”

“It was horrible. He was a common laborer; he made very little money and his wife took in wash to help make ends meet. They already had five children, the last thing they needed was another one. I was resented by all of them; they never said it in so many words, but I knew. They put up with me because I was family, that’s what good people did then. I hated being an obligation, so I ran away after two years and I never saw any of them again. I’m sure they all said good riddance when I was gone.”

Her eyes drifted to the street, as if moving images from that old life had begun to play on my storefront window. “They’d all be dead now, wouldn’t they?”

“That’s hard to say. You’re still here.”

A pregnant pause: I flipped a page. “What happened then?”

“A lot of things you don’t need to know about. Just say I soon learned how to take care of myself and we’ll leave it at that. I went back to Baltimore and married Gallant in 1916. I’ve had an amazing ability to go from bad to worse all my life, and this was just another case of it. That doesn’t matter now, it’s all a very long time ago. Let’s just say Gallant didn’t live up to the promise of his name.”

She made a nervous gesture. “Let’s talk about something else. Those were hard times and I’d rather not think about it. Anyway, Gallant’s got nothing to do with this. I doubt if I ever said the word books the whole time we were married. But I never stopped thinking about them. They were on my mind all through those hard years.”

“Sounds like you had a few of those. Hard years, I mean.”

She made a little laughing sound. “Oh honey, I could tell you stories that would curl your toenails. The twenties weren’t half-bad; we had some good days then and some money too. But Tucker lost his shirt along with everybody else in 1929. Then he…died…and I lived in a cardboard box at a garbage dump all through the winter of 1931. The dump was the only place where the cops would leave me alone. I went to sleep every night with the smell of rotten meat in my nose and the sounds of rats in my ears. All I had was that little silver key to Tucker’s deposit box, where I kept my book. But what does that matter now? I lived through it and I’m still here, fifty-eight years after Tucker Gallant was laid out with two fellas throwing dirt in his face.”

She swallowed hard and looked off into the dark places of the store. “The tough part is when I think how different my life might’ve been if those books hadn’t been lost. Knowing all the time they were meant to be mine.”