Bookman's promise

“What would you have done with them then, sold them?”

“That would’ve been hard. They were such a part of my life.” She shrugged. “When you get hungry enough you’ll sell anything. They sure weren’t worth then what they’d sell for today, but I bet I’d have gotten myself a fair piece of change even in the thirties. Maybe put myself through college. I always wanted to go to college. Always wanted to study…”

“Study what?”

“You’ll laugh.”

“No, I won’t. Of course I won’t laugh.”

“It just seems silly now, but I always wanted to study something grand. Like philosophy.”

She rolled her eyes at her own folly. “My gosh, philosophy. Of all the silly things.”

I didn’t laugh: she did.

“Now I ask you, Mr. Janeway, have you ever heard of anything as silly as that?”

Two customers came in, high-rollers from Texas who passed through Denver once a year, and for a while I was busy showing them some high-end modern books. They bought a slug of stuff that I was thrilled to see hit the road, passing over two immaculate Mark Twains to throw about the same amount of money at Larry McMurtry, Hunter S. Thompson, and a few others whose names will be toast when old Clemens is still a household word. Ralston watched them peel off eight crispy bills from a roll of hundreds and saunter up the street with their small bag of books.

“Man, I’m in the wrong business.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not always like that.”

“Doesn’t need to be.”

Almost an hour had passed since I had last spoken to Mrs. Gallant. She looked exhausted, her eyes wide open, staring at nothing. I thought, God, I’d like to crawl inside your head, but if I’d had one wish, I’d liked to have been there when her grandfather died. I had some drippy, cavalier notion that I’d have rescued her life: that, one way or another, I’d have stopped her father from selling her books.

“Mrs. Gallant.” I pulled up my stool. “I know you’re tired, but can we talk about your father for just a minute?”

Suddenly she cupped her hands over her face and wept. I touched her shoulder and we sat like that, and after a while, when she was ready, she told me what had happened. Of course the old bastard had sold her books: to him they were nothing. “He never read a book in his life,” she said. “He couldn’t have cared less. He got thirty dollars for all of them and drank that up in a week.”

“Was there a paper, any kind of legal document?”

“None that I ever saw.”

Of course not—who makes up a paper for a thirty-dollar deal? But if money had changed hands it was legal, and who after eighty years could prove that it was not?

“He was told they weren’t worth anything—they were just junk books. Doesn’t that make it a fraud? And what right did he have to sell them? They weren’t his to sell.”

This was yet another legal mess. What had the law said in 1906, when a woman still couldn’t vote, about a man’s right to his wife’s property? Specifically, what had the law in Maryland said in those days of such enlightenment?

I felt the beginnings of a headache. There were still questions to ask, all leading nowhere, I knew, but I had to ask them. I made some notes and when I looked up, Mrs. Gallant had begun to teeter in the chair. I put my hand on her arm and then Ralston was there, holding her steady. “That’s all for now, Janeway,” he said, and there was no nonsense in his voice: we were finished.

We talked for a moment about what to do. “She’ll come home with me,” Ralston said. “It ain’t the Brown Palace, but she can rest easy till Denise gets home.”

We helped her out to the car. Ralston gave me a paper with his telephone number and told me to call him later. I leaned down and spoke to her through the open window. “One last question, ma’am. Do you have any idea who bought those books?”

“Yes, of course. He was looking for fast money, so he sold them to a bookstore.”

There it was, the only ray of light in what had so far been a damned hopeless story. If a book dealer had bought that entire library for thirty dollars, even allowing for the much cheaper values of the time, it had certainly been one hell of a fraud. But what did that matter now? Like Richard Burton and Charlie Warren, like her mother and father, the garbageman and his horse, Gallant, the Boise relatives, and all the others, that bookseller would have died a long time ago.

Then she said something that hit me like a slap. “When I think of those awful book people—those Treadwells—how can they live with themselves?”

It was the hint of present tense that turned my head around.

“Mrs. Gallant…are you telling me that place is still in business?”