It was one thing to theorize about Sandra, and quite another to climb the creaky blond wood stairs and face her closed door. “Sandra,” Jess called softly, but she heard no sound.
She descended the stairs halfway and looked back. Colm pantomimed his suggestion to knock again.
Up she went. “Sandra,” Jess called, knocking louder.
“It’s unlocked,” Sandra said, and Jess let herself in, shutting the door behind her.
The study was so tight that when Sandra turned around in her swivel chair, she almost ran over Jess’s toes. The room was slanted, tucked under the heavy angled roof of the house; its single window, large and low, looking out on the riotous garden; the desk, rough boards, built under the window. The walls were lined with scientific journals.
Sandra was wearing a long flowing batik dress, but her posture was schoolmarmish as she sat up paying bills, stamping and addressing envelopes; her mouth tight, puckered in concentration. Jess had a fleeting memory —or was it her imagination? The image of her mother sewing, with her mouth tight, full of pins.
“What is it?” Sandra asked, glancing up.
Jess took off her knit hat and held it in her hands. “Your cookbooks are the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.”
“Have you seen a lot of cookbooks?”
“They’re the most beautiful
“They don’t have sentimental value for
“Oh!” Jess could not conceal her surprise. “I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry for?”
“I misread you,” Jess said. “I thought you were upset.”
“I am upset.” Sandra’s voice caught. “I’m upset about my daughter. I’m upset about my uncle. I’m upset about the situation.”
Jess might have escaped then into the other room. Perhaps she should have, but she could hear the desperation in Sandra’s voice.
She knelt down level with Sandra. “What is the situation?”
“I promised my uncle I wouldn’t sell.”
“Do you think maybe he would understand?”
Sandra thought about this. “No,” she said. “He was in the hospital. He weighed nothing. He had no children. He was ninety-three years old. He was very clear. He said, ‘Sandra, you’re my only niece. I’m leaving you the house. Do anything you want with it, but don’t sell the books.’”
“Wow,” said Jess.
Sandra nodded grimly, appreciating Jess’s awestruck response. “He said, ‘Promise me that you’ll take care of them.’”
“But did you have any idea?”
“No!”
“Didn’t you come over to the house to see them? Didn’t you ever see them in the kitchen?”
“I lived in Oakland. He lived here, and he was reclusive. We weren’t close. I came twice, and both times he offered me iced tea. He never invited me inside his kitchen. He wouldn’t even let me clear away my glass.”
“When he said don’t sell the books, you thought he meant this stuff?” Jess pointed to the study bookcases.
“Of course.”
“How can you make a promise when you don’t know exactly what you’re promising?”
Sandra closed her eyes. “That’s what I tell myself. That’s what I keep telling myself. I’m afraid of him.”
Jess nodded. Instinctively, she understood what George did not. That as far as Sandra was concerned, Tom McClintock still hovered in the house.
“I believe in past lives,” Sandra explained, and she opened her gray eyes. “I lived before.”
Like a girl in a labyrinth, Jess tried to follow. “Really?”
“I believe we’ve all lived before, and will again.”
Someone else might have laughed, or cringed, or backed away. Jess asked, “What were you?”
“A Russian princess,” Sandra said quite seriously. “In the days of the Tsars.”
Which Tsar? Jess wondered, but thought it best not to inquire. She knew the kind of Russian princess Sandra meant: the kind who wore silk and velvet and danced in palaces and rode in sleighs through fairy-tale snows in the early pages of Tolstoy’s novels, until narrowly escaping execution at the hands of the Bolsheviks. “What will you be next?”
“That’s what frightens me,” said Sandra. “Every life hinges on the one before. And what I do now will shape …”
“I understand,” said Jess. Emily would have asked: Why is it that those of us who were serfs in some past life never remember the experience? But Jess thought: How dreadful to feel that guilt accrues like debt from this world to the next.
“Do you think your uncle is living a new life?”
Sandra nodded.
Jess looked at the photograph on the desk. Unsmiling, weak-chinned, the lichenologist seemed to peer out at the world from behind his glasses. “And do you think he’s sort of—watching you?”
She closed her eyes again.
“And you’ll join him there—and then maybe he’ll punish you?”
She closed her eyes tighter.
“You had no idea what he was giving you,” Jess said. “How could you have any idea what these books are worth?”
Sandra’s eyes popped open. “How much
“We’ll have to finish the appraisal,” Jess said cautiously, “and then George will make the offer.”
“I don’t like him,” Sandra said in a low voice. “I don’t think I can trust him.”
“You can,” Jess assured her. “He may come off as impatient or arrogant at times, but he’s a good man.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I’ve worked for him more than a year.”
“And what do you know about him?” Sandra asked.
Jess considered the question. “He’s old-fashioned,” she said at last. “He has a sense of history. If he had a past life, he would have been a gentleman—even though he acts so adversarial. He loves books more than anything in the world.”
“But will he keep the collection intact?”
“I think so.”
“Will he promise?”
Jess thought about the books George flipped regularly, the Whitman he had sold within days of acquisition, the small collection of early twentieth-century poets he had bought from a dealer in Marin and quickly dispersed. “You’ll have to talk to him,” Jess said.
“I don’t like talking to him,” said Sandra. “I don’t want to sell these books. Do you understand? They’re private. They are my uncle’s past life.”
“Then maybe he doesn’t need them anymore?” Jess ventured.
Sandra bristled, and instantly Jess saw her mistake. In Sandra’s mind everything was necessary. Every artifact counted in some grand celestial tally.
“I don’t want to sell them. I would never sell them for myself. My daughter needs money.”
For a moment Jess wondered whether this daughter was real. Perhaps she was imaginary too? A past
