Tom Coffey, who’s doing this because his wife Willa’s big in the Friends and he owns the truck, says, “Ma’am, you said you had several sizable boxes, and we didn’t want to keep you long.”
“Well,” says the old lady, “it’s terribly hot, and I don’t suppose your truck is air conditioned,” (it doesn’t even have a top over the back) “so why don’t you and the children come in and have some ice tea first?”
And that’s the way it goes. At this particular place I’m thinking of, we all trooped in—me feeling the wall to make sure it wasn’t gingerbread, I know my way around—and sweated all over her furniture, and laughed, and got to see a real tea ball made out of copper, which was something I’d read about but never seen before. (Mrs. Maas used Nestle’s Instant mix.) I told the old lady she ought to exhibit it at the Fair, and she said, “Do you really think so? Maybe I’ll come down this year and have a look.” So I’d gotten Elaine’s Fair another customer.
Then we toted the boxes out—fourteen, and some so heavy it took two to lift them. Right on top I saw Dreiser and Hemingway and
But the part I really wanted to tell about came when we got back up on the truck. We stacked her books on top of the stuff we had already picked up at some other places and sat on top of that, which put us up pretty high. From there I could see over the bushes and stuff; the house was on a hill and when I looked down between the nearest trees, the rest sort of fell away in a long wave, like the surf the time we went to Great Abaco Island. It was really beautiful. Away far away I could see this little white dot of building, almost like I was looking out the window of a plane, with this neat little black road running in front of it and bright green lawns all around it. And I thought: that’s the place! That’s where I want to be!
So I stuck my elbow in Les and said, “Lookit that! What do you suppose it is?”
And Les said, “That’s Barton High, you dummy.”
Ah, romance! That was exactly where we were going with our load of books, because they were setting up the Friends’ Book Sale in the chem lab, and Uncle De Witte Sinclair would be there to price them.
Uncle Dee wasn’t really my uncle, like Uncle Bert—that’s just what I called him because my father told me to when I was an itty brat. I ought to tell you about him because he’s sort of important to this story. But it’s going to be hard because about anything you could say about Uncle Dee that was true made him sound like an awful bastard. Except when you actually knew him, you didn’t think he was a bastard, you liked him a lot. At least I did, and I think quite a few people did; if they hadn’t, he’d have been flat broke.
Uncle Dee must have been at least sixty and maybe more, but his face was so smooth he looked, sometimes, like a much younger guy in makeup. He had bright blue eyes and bushy white eyebrows, and white hair so long and thick they’d put him in the Senate if he just walked through the door. His business was rare books, and I honestly didn’t know if he was rich or poor. He had a big house in Barton Hills, with rooms where his customers could look at his stock. Still, you never could tell—some people with big houses in Barton Hills were in bankruptcy court. And I ask you, rare books? Anyhow, I think Uncle Dee had been driving the same rusty Chevy and wearing the same old tweed suit with the leather elbow patches ever since I’d known him, which was around twelve years plus.
My father collected books about—you guessed it—safes and locks, and he used to say he could tell when Uncle Dee had found something really good, because then Uncle Dee would call him up and invite him out to his house. When it was only so-so, he’d come over to ours, usually with two or three things, and he and my father would talk about books and locks and The Great Houdini and so on for a couple of hours and have a couple of drinks, and then Uncle Dee would pull out an old magazine with a story that Houdini was supposed to have written, although both of them knew (but I bet you didn’t) that Houdini’s stories were ghosted by a man in Rhode Island.
Naturally they would yak about that for an hour or so, and maybe my father would pay twenty or thirty for it and maybe he wouldn’t. Then Uncle Dee would come up with something else and ask a hundred and maybe take forty or fifty. So, you say, who needs a friend like that? The fact is that my father did. He was never so relaxed or in such a good mood as when Uncle Dee finally started up his old car, unless maybe it was when he got back from spending an evening at Uncle Dee’s. All right, it cost him a couple of hundred bucks, but I’ve seen people spend a lot more and get a lot less. Sure he loved Elaine—in fact, he was so absolutely silly about her that sometimes I kind of thought he’d have burned the house down with me inside just to see her smile. But that was only because she was so damn beautiful and so much younger than he was; in person, if you know what I mean, she drove him bananas. His collection in the study and his shop in the basement, and Uncle Dee, were what kept him from turning on the gas.
Anyway what Uncle did was go to garage sales and grungy old secondhand shops around Chicago and everywhere else where there might be old books. He’d look through a thousand tons of junk hoping to find a first edition of
Just the same, there are a couple of other ways to look at it, too.
Like I said, Uncle Dee went through a mountain of garbage to find that magazine for my father, and these days even garbage men pull down ten bucks an hour. What’s more, Uncle Dee was one of the few people I’ve ever met who never tried to get paid when he hadn’t done the job. He never came to our house and said, “I looked all day for something for you, Harry, but there wasn’t a damn thing, so how about fifty bucks for my trouble?” Uncle Dee told everybody he was from Richmond, Virginia, but sometimes I wondered if he was really American at all, because I’ve noticed that most of the other guys who never try to chisel you are wetback Mexican busboys.
Besides, Uncle Dee loved his books, and I think that when he bought one for two bucks and sold it for two hundred he felt like the hero who finds The Lost Prince of Graustark slopping hogs and puts him on the throne. He felt that book was
So when I came in lugging my box and saw him there in the dusty smell of all those books with his wide smile and his soft lead pencil, I put down the box and put my arms around him and gave him a good smooch. Because that was another thing about Uncle Dee—white hair or not, he still liked girls. He wasn’t a pincher or a pawer (if he had been I would have kept a mile out of his reach) but when he turned on that southern-fried charm he was doing it for the same reason he had when he was seventeen, and wasn’t just going though the motions. I’ve seen him look at Elaine like a stray dog at a ham bone plenty of times, and you can bet she never gave him a big kiss and little squeeze to show him life was still worth living.
“Holly, my fairest flower,” he said, “how very good to see you! What a coincidence, and what a lovely surprise. So you’ve enlisted in our little project. You all are doing a wonderful job.”
“I’m a member now and everything, Uncle Dee,” I told him. “Gonna run for president next year. Vote the
