The Book of Illumination (5 page)

Like telling him he could turn the traffic light green if he blew hard enough. Like the father in a story I’d read one time burning the grilled cheeses and serving them to his kids anyway, black side down.

Oh, well.

“I’ll read you two chapters tonight!” I said. We were making our way through
Redwall
, one chapter a night, and two would be a treat.

“But I was gone
three
nights,” he reasoned.

I did a swift, silent calculation—three chapters would take us an hour. But if I read quietly and had him all tucked in, warm and cozy, he’d probably last about twenty minutes.

“All right,” I said, as though he had won a huge victory.

Momentarily forgetting that I was a girl, he gave me a hard hug, then pulled back, looked me straight in the eyes, and gave me a kiss.

A
HEAVY OVERNIGHT
rainstorm had washed the streets and the sidewalks and stripped the trees of leaves that might otherwise have hung on for a few more days. The low clouds were breaking up as I ordered my coffee and settled in at a table by the window. A police car roared by. A beautiful fat woman, who must have lived or worked in the building just in from the corner, was using a lime green power hose to wash the slippery fallen leaves into the street.

Inside the Café Rouge, a stack of cornstalks paid incongruous homage to the season, tucked in as they were among the stylish French posters and alabaster lamps. It was my second time in the place, and the guy who poured my coffee was so nice, and so cute, that I folded a dollar into the tip cup.

I was hoping that this meeting wouldn’t take too long. I had a two o’clock appointment in Carlisle with a demanding client and I needed to have my ducks in a row. It was the kind of job that fed the bank account but not the spirit. A wealthy developer in the western exurbs had hired me to create thirteen identical coffee-table books celebrating his completion of a dozen virtually identical trophy houses on the former site of a hundred-year-old orchard.

He’d hired an architectural photographer to document the destruction of the orchard and all the phases of construction. Now that the houses had all been sold, presumably to people who hadn’t caught up with the news that two-story “great rooms” were hard to furnish and had a tendency to make one feel small and unsettled, he’d hired me to make the actual books. They were to be bound in leather and embossed in gilt. He would present them to the buyers at the closings. Of course, he also wanted a copy of the book for himself.

I caught sight of Sylvia across the way. It was cruel to notice, but she already had the air of an old-lady-in-the-making, waiting patiently for the light to change with her umbrella and rain boots and bags. I stopped myself. This was mean. Still, I couldn’t help wondering if she had one of those clear, fold-up rain hats, the kind in the little vinyl sleeve, tucked into a compartment in her purse.

“Coffee?” I asked as she caught sight of me and approached the table.

“Tea, please. With lemon.”

“I’ve been thinking,” she said moments later, stirring honey into the steamy liquid in front of her, “that maybe I could hire you.”

I took a deep breath. While I have gotten paid (sometimes extravagantly) for my work with earthbound spirits, I had already decided that I was not going to take any money from Sylvia. This—uh, consultation—was a deposit in the checkbook of my soul.

“No, I really … I couldn’t.”

“But I thought you weren’t working full-time.”

“I’m not.”

She gave me a puzzled look, then shook her head. “I meant, hire you to bind some books.”
Oh
.

“I’ve got some discretionary funds.” She smiled slyly.

I saw the logic immediately: I would have access to the monks and the monks would have access to me.

“I’d love to,” I said. “But is there enough work?”

“Oh, yeah. Dozens of books on British history, memoirs of the Great Indian Uprising, Kashmiri travelogues. Finny’s father-in-law was a diplomat in Hyderabad. I could probably keep you busy for a couple of months.”

“That’d be great.”

“You could start anytime. In fact, you could even come in with me now. I could show you around.”

“Sure.” I didn’t have to leave for Carlisle until one.

Sylvia looked a little relieved. “We just have to stop by Finny’s house on the way,” she said. “Tad’s cleaning it out to put it on the market. He asked me to look at a couple of books that have turned up.”

We chatted, finishing our drinks slowly, then took our time walking down Commonwealth Avenue. The “house” was, well, frankly, a mansion in the middle of the block between Clarendon and Dartmouth streets. It was flanked by two other buildings that looked recently restored, and though its tiny front garden had been allowed to go to seed, the place had the worn and comfortable air of money. Old money. Sylvia rang the bell. The remaining leaves on the magnolia tree beside us glowed brightly in a shaft of sunlight.

I had learned to recognize some of the signs of vast, inherited wealth shortly after I moved to Boston. I was walking around this very neighborhood, looking for a studio or a one-bedroom to rent. It was the first of September and many of the apartments were turning over—students were leaving town and others were arriving, and U-Hauls were everywhere you looked. I happened upon an elegant matron having a conversation with someone I took to be a neighborhood “character,” if not actually a homeless person, resting on the building’s granite stoop.

I asked if by chance they (meaning the well-fed matron, of course) knew of any small apartments becoming available, and the vagrant offered to take me inside. To my surprise, she owned the building. And three or four others in Back Bay. She had a studio apartment for rent.

I moved in a week later, and over the next two years, I learned a lot about old money, Boston style. That the people who had it didn’t tend to put in “cook’s kitchens” with polished-granite countertops and Sub-Zero freezers and didn’t tend to worry too much about the sofas sagging and the walls cracking and the oriental rugs wearing thin. They rode old three-speed bikes and wore sweaters with holes in the elbows, and their summer places were less like the McMansions ruining Nantucket than like the cabins at Girl Scout camp.

A housekeeper, whom Sylvia introduced to me as Mrs. Martin, answered the door swiftly, greeted Sylvia warmly, and offered us banana bread, the nostalgic waft of which nearly brought tears to my eyes. Sylvia declined for us both
(Speak for yourself!
I felt like saying), so Mrs. Martin led us right up a formal staircase to Mr. Winslow’s second-floor study, where we were supposed to wait for Tad, who was on the phone. I longed for more than a glimpse of the first-floor rooms, being categorically in love with all things forlorn—falling-down houses, homely little kids in eyeglasses—but all I had time to notice were sheets covering the furniture, floors in need of refinishing, and large, dark rectangles on the faded wallpaper where paintings had formerly hung.

The study was partially disassembled, and Sylvia sank down on a hassock as soon as Mrs. Martin closed the door. It
was
sad, and I didn’t even know him. Half of the books were gone from the shelves, and the drawers of the tables waiting to be taken to Skinner, where they were going to be auctioned off with the rest of the furniture the heirs didn’t want, had all been emptied out. Cardboard
boxes under the windows were filled with papers, notebooks, and small, old volumes, and an open shoe box (Brooks Brothers) on top of Mr. Winslow’s desk held what I took to be the intimate contents of his top desk drawer: coins, old pens, a key chain, some faded Polaroids curling at the edges.

I thought of my mother and father in one such photo, sitting in the sand at a beach on Lake Erie. It was taken before they were married, when I imagine that the word
husband
on my mother’s tongue still had the tang of a rare, exotic fruit. I can easily recall the image, the way she’s leaning in under my father’s arm, her head tilted slightly in the softening light, caught in the middle of a word she is speaking to whomever clicked the shutter. Ten years later, she was dead.

We heard brisk, confident footsteps in the hall and Tad opened the door. He was probably in his late thirties, was uncommonly tall—six four or five—and had the healthy, even glow of a person who eats perfectly at all times, engages in regular, vigorous exercise (atop a polo pony? a windsurfing board? skis?), and drinks sparingly of very fine wine. As opposed to me, who gets her ass to the pool maybe three times a month, eats too little, followed by too much, and drinks whatever’s on sale in the two-for-ten-dollars bin. That Sancerre was a gift.

Sylvia stood up and introduced us, identifying me as a bookbinder she had hired to help complete “the Winslow Collection.” The phrase brought a flicker of a smile to Tad’s lips.

“That’s an unusual name,” he said to me.

“It’s short for Speranza.”

“Ah.”

“Which means
hope,”
I blundered on. “In Italian.” I smiled weakly.

He nodded vaguely. I could tell he wasn’t the least bit interested in either my name or me. He had a stack of books in his arms, and Sylvia hurried to clear off space on a nearby table.

“Thank you for coming,” he said, laying the volumes down one by one. “These were in the boxes from Father’s office. I doubt they’re valuable, but I thought I’d have you look at them.”

“Sure.” Sylvia picked up the first book and opened it to the flyleaf. I could see the faded, bubbly swirl of the marbled paper, which, from the looks of it, was probably French, probably mid—eighteenth century. I knew she wouldn’t be able to give Tad any definitive answers without examining the books closely and doing some research, so we’d probably be taking them all back to the Athenaeum with us. If I wanted to have a sneak peek at any more of the house, I had to act quickly.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but would you mind if I used the ladies’ room?”

Ladies’ room
. How ridiculous a term was that? It was silly to be embarrassed about asking to use the bathroom—I had potty-trained Henry with the help of a book called
Everyone Poops
—but I still felt a little sheepish drawing attention to bodily functions, especially because I had no intention of using a bathroom. I just wanted to snoop.

Tad looked up distractedly. “Down the hall, then take a left. It’ll be on your right.”

“Thanks.” I made a quick escape and closed the door quietly behind me. The hall stretched all the way to the rear of the building, and I walked back slowly, peeping into one gloomy room after another. You forget that the only windows in these buildings are the grand ones in the front and the considerably less grand ones overlooking the alleys in the back.

I turned the corner and there he was, the ghost of a butler. He was dressed in a formal uniform: dark gray tails over a pale gray vest. Though he didn’t wear gloves, there were links in his cuffs, and his feathery white hair appeared to have resisted a recent effort to smooth it into place.

“Hello,” I said. Though he was clearly stunned that I could see him, he bowed politely. His sweet, faded gallantry just about broke my heart.

“Who are you?” I asked gently.

“John Grady,” he answered. “Ma’am.” He pronounced it “Mum.”

“Did you … work here?” I asked. I often meet the ghosts of lonely old men who had lived for their jobs—ushers and waiters and doormen who had eaten most of their meals at lunch counters and spent most of their nights in boardinghouse rooms, counting the hours until they could return to life at work.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“For the Winslows?”

“For Miss Edlyn’s family, ma’am, the Shand-Thompsons. In London, and in Brighton in the summer. My Mairead, God rest her soul, she was Miss Edlyn’s—Mrs. Winslow’s—nurse.”

“After she got sick?” I was guessing.

“No, ma’am—when she was born. And every day of her life until—”

He broke off. I nodded.

“You came here with her? From England?”

Now he smiled. “We did, indeed. The missus and I, we like to say we were His Lordship’s wedding gift. So Miss Edlyn wouldn’t be alone in America. We loved her like our own.”

Suddenly, I heard voices; Tad or Sylvia had opened the study door. I hated to interrupt John Grady’s sweet reminiscences, but I had to.

“We don’t have much time. Could I ask you …?”

He nodded.

“Why are you here?”

“The deed, to the house in Swansea. I kept it in Gwennie’s rhyme book—
The Butterfly’s Ball.”

I heard footsteps approaching and recognized just whose they were.

“Gwennie?” I whispered.

“Our daughter. She and Miss Edlyn were like—”

The footsteps were nearly upon us.

“I’ll come back,” I whispered.

“Don’t go!” he moaned, loudly enough that Tad would have heard him, if Tad could hear the voices of ghosts. I wheeled around sharply, nearly colliding with all six and a half feet of the family executor as he rounded the corner. Which would have put me nose to chest, given my height of five six.

“Oh, sorry!” I said.