The Book That Matters Most (31 page)

Hank reached for the mustard-yellow phone on the wall and punched in Ava's phone number, which was written in small numbers beneath the name
Rosalind Arden
. She crossed her sevens. How weird was that? Hank thought as he listened to the phone ring.

When Ava answered, he didn't even say hello or who he was.

“I found your writer,” he said.

Ava gave a short, harsh laugh.

“I don't think so,” she said.

“Yeah?” Hank said.

“She's dead, Hank,” Ava said.

“Maybe,” he said. “That's entirely possible. But I think she's in Paris.”

“Paris?” Ava repeated, and laughed again.

“You home?” he asked her.

“Why?”

“Jesus Christ,” Hank muttered.

“I'm home,” Ava said, like she was admitting something.

“I'll be right over,” Hank said. “I'll explain everything.”

He didn't wait for her to reply. He just hung up, grabbed his notebook and
From Clare to Here
and his car keys, and drove toward Ava.

THAT MORNING

1970

Beatrice

Later, Beatrice would wonder if the idea took root that morning as she stood alone in the street watching the ambulance drive away with Lily's body. Was it possible in the midst of such sorrow to understand something vital? If so, she understood it somewhere deep inside her then:
Flee
.

They had been raised, Charlotte and Beatrice, on books. When they had a question, literature answered it. If they complained about being bored, their mother—a melancholy Parisian who used laudanum to assuage the pains of homesickness and her husband's infidelities—would hand them a book. “No one who
reads can ever be bored,” she'd tell them, propped up in her bed in her pink silk dressing gown. She was beautiful, and pale, with sharp cheekbones and circles like bruises beneath her eyes. “Darling,” she'd say, “hand me my tincture, would you?” Her tincture was in a small glass bottle with a cork and a red skull and crossbones on a label around the neck. Crest Brand, it said on the front of the bottle. Poison. She always had a book open in her lap. She favored the Victorians: the Brontës, in particular.

Their father—an absent-minded, charming scoundrel—quoted Chekhov and Shakespeare and Dickens. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, my lovies,” he'd say when they bickered. He'd hold his head and cry, “How, how, how?” when they felt confused. And Shakespeare. He could recite Mark Antony's eulogy to Caesar, Hamlet's “To be, or not to be” soliloquy, Romeo's “Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow” every night at bedtime.

Perhaps that was how Beatrice came to think these words that morning, standing alone in the street:
I was too young that time to value her, But now I know her. If she be a traitor, Why, so am I
.

As You Like It
. One of their father's favorites. They always had a cat named Arden. One Arden would die and they'd get another. Arden, where Rosalind and Celia were banished.

She was instructed to stay there until Ted arrived, and then to go to the police station to talk to Officer Lee. “Just a few more questions,” he'd said.

While she waited for Ted—and really, she didn't wait very long because he saw the ambulance leaving—she repeated the details.

Beatrice closed her eyes, as if she could block out the story. How she'd arrived late because she forgot she'd promised to
babysit and had gone instead to the bookstore to set up the window display for
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
. How with all those white seagulls soaring into the sky stacked around her she'd remembered her promise and left right away, leaving the window in disarray and the hippie college student—long braids, gypsy skirt, no bra, bells around her ankles, reeking of pot—in charge for the day. How when she got there she saw Lily in that tree and considered making her come down, but shouldn't she make them lunch? Shouldn't she tidy up the still-messy-from-breakfast kitchen? She hesitated. She did. But then she went inside and looked in the fridge—egg salad, melon balls, tomatoes—and tackled the dried batter in the frying pan. Why didn't people soak their pans? That's what she was thinking when she saw, from the corner of her eye, something fall from the tree.

“Weren't you watching them?” Ted asked her when he arrived, wild-eyed.

No. She wasn't watching them. She was washing the frying pan.

Beatrice wanted a drink. No. She needed a drink.

She went inside and found a bottle of Johnnie Walker and poured a finger's worth into a juice glass left on the table from breakfast. Inside, everything looked so ordinary. A family's morning still on display. A cup half filled with cold black coffee. A child's purple sweater draped over a chair. A jump rope tangled on the floor. A book left open, face down on the table,
The Swiss Family Robinson
.

Beatrice sat at the table and sipped her scotch, feeling herself calm as it hit her stomach.

She thought: It's my fault.

She took another swallow of scotch.

She thought: We need a plan.

A
s children she and Charlotte had been so close they were sometimes mistaken for more than sisters, twins. Even then, they'd had their roles, their different personalities: Charlotte was sensitive and beautiful, Beatrice rebellious and boisterous. Later that would mean Beatrice always got into trouble. At just sixteen she'd gotten pregnant by the son of her mother's friend in Paris, a boy who'd spent the summer with them. Her mother had arranged an abortion, almost resigned to the fact that of course this would happen to Beatrice. But Charlotte studied literature at New York University, and married well, and lived an exciting bohemian life until she got pregnant with Ava and settled in Providence, buying a rundown house and restoring it.

Already Beatrice had one marriage behind her, and had lost a scholarship to study theater, and had another abortion. It was Charlotte who convinced her to move to Providence and to open the bookstore together. Beatrice liked it, the two of them surrounded by books. Even as Charlotte's perfect life started to show cracks, Beatrice stood by her.

Of course, Charlotte would put it differently.
Had
put it differently. Charlotte would remind Beatrice how she'd warned her against marrying husband number two, how she'd worried over the drinking. Charlotte would say she'd stood by Beatrice. And it was true. It was.

But then came Charlotte's unhappiness, a slow unraveling not unlike their mother's. Except their mother had reasons to be unhappy. Their father's affairs. Her inability to fit in with the other mothers. Charlotte—Charlotte had a husband who adored her, and lovely children, and a profitable business, and a home with a goddamned historical plaque on it. Yet she was barely able to get out of bed for days at a time. And then Beatrice had to do everything: run the store, do the bookkeeping, deal with customers
and salespeople and shoveling snow and paying bills and answering phones. Yet Ted—foolish cuckolded Ted!—would complain that Beatrice was edgy, or drank too much. A bad influence around the girls. Once, when she went to check on Charlotte, who was in bed with the shades drawn on a beautiful spring day, she'd found her sister had overdosed on sedatives. If Beatrice hadn't walked in, Charlotte would be dead. Afterward, Charlotte claimed it was accidental. She couldn't sleep, that was all. She lost track of how many she'd taken. But Beatrice didn't believe her.

Then a man walked into her life, and Charlotte told Beatrice that maybe her unhappiness had come from not loving Ted, or not loving him enough. “I'm
fond
of him,” she'd said. This time, with this man, Charlotte assured Beatrice, it was for real. They loved each other. Her sister seemed younger, prettier in the wash of new love. Maybe this time it
was
real. But the idea of that made Beatrice angry. Why should Charlotte have such a love? She already had a family, a husband and children. A home. And all Beatrice had was a long line of mistakes.

Maybe that was why, after Lily died, Beatrice knew she had to fix their lives.

C
harlotte was like a wild animal in those weeks and months following Lily's death. Her eyes seemed to burn with anguish. She grew thin, and erratic. Sometimes she would burst into unexplained laughter. Sometimes she would disappear for a day or two and Ted would fear that she'd done it for real this time, taken her life. But Beatrice knew better, because they had made a plan.

The affair continued, with even more passion because Charlotte knew she would be the one to leave. She'd always written
poetry, old-fashioned poems and sonnets and villanelles. And short stories. But now she decided she would write a novel, a book that would explain why she had to leave everyone. Beatrice didn't ask questions; there was too much to do.

By fall she'd gone to Paris to find them an apartment and a small store. They would do the only thing they both knew how to do: lose themselves in books. In the midst of such grief over Lily, Beatrice's departure went virtually unnoticed. Besides, some people blamed her.
Ted
blamed her. He was happy for her to be gone. She secured an apartment that could house the bookstore on the ground floor and living quarters above. Then she began to acquire books. She bought paperbacks from backpackers for a few francs and asked hostel and B and B owners if she could have the books visitors left behind. People left books everywhere, Beatrice soon learned, and she combed the train stations and Métro cars for abandoned ones. Bodice rippers and classics and novels assigned for college English classes; bestsellers and paperback flops with their front covers torn off; guidebooks and children's books and slender volumes of poetry. She'd brought two suitcases full from the store on Thayer Street, and eventually with those and her finds the shelves of the small store began to fill.

But what a hodgepodge! When she tried to put them in categories, they defied the usual Fiction, Non-Fiction, Bestseller groupings. On index cards in purple Magic Marker, Beatrice wrote her own categories:
“Books Our Mother Loved”
(here she placed
Indiana
and
The Devil's Pool, Jane Eyre
and
Wuthering Heights
),
“Books Our Father Loved”
(here she placed
The Lady With the Dog and Other Stories
,
Great Expectations
, and
Twelve Plays by William Shakespeare
),
“Books I Love”
(here she placed
Siddhartha, The Painted Bird, On the
Road
),
“Books We Don't Understand Why People Like”
(and here she put
Peyton Place
and
Love Story
and
Hawaii
).

It took a year for all of this to be put in place in Paris, while back home Charlotte mourned and loved and wrote her novel that White Swan, a small publishing house in Boston, bought and she published under a pseudonym. The night before Charlotte was to arrive in Paris, Beatrice went out to the little café around the corner, a smoky neighborhood place known for its steak frites. Her hair had grown long and even wilder. Her arms were tanned, and muscular from hauling books and furniture and building shelves. That night Beatrice took the piece of wood she'd salvaged from someone's trash and painted the name of the store in purple, Charlotte's favorite color.
G
an
Y
me
D
e'
S
BOOKS
. It was her own little joke. If anyone ever came looking for either of them, maybe they would figure it out. She stepped back and admired her work, smiling to herself. But if Charlotte did her part right, who would ever come looking for them?

Ava

“You ever read
As You Like It?”
Hank Bingham asked Ava.

“I think we can settle this pretty quickly,” Ava said.

Hank looked like he intended to stay awhile. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up and he'd laid out a notebook and the novel
From Clare to Here
on the coffee table that sat between them. His long legs were stretched out, crossed at the ankles. Ava saw that he had on two different colored socks: one navy blue, the other black. What with the instant coffee and mismatched socks, she almost felt bad for him. Almost.

“That writer you wanted me to find,” Hank was saying. He
opened his notebook and flipped through the pages. “Rosalind Arden.”

“That was a pseudonym,” she said softly.

Hank looked up at her, surprised.

“You know who she is, this Rosalind Arden?”

Instead of answering him, Ava went and got the folder Helen Frost had given her. She opened it and slid it across the coffee table to Hank.

“She was my mother,” Ava said.

The words felt strange in her mouth, and she had the strong desire to erase them.

“You want some wine, Hank?” she asked him as he studied the papers in the folder.

“I don't suppose you have something stronger? Whiskey?”

“I have some Bailey's Irish Cream,” she said.

Hank scowled. “Wine'll be fine.”

Ava went into the kitchen and looked at the wine rack. She reached for her basic thirteen-dollars-a-bottle house red, but then reconsidered. Why did Hank Bingham think her mother was in Paris when he knew she had jumped off that bridge?

“The hell with it,” Ava said, pulling out the pricey bottle of zinfandel that she kept for big occasions.

When she returned with it and two glasses, Hank was tipping back in the chair, looking, Ava thought, smug.

“Could you not do that?” she told him. “The chair. It's an antique and kind of fragile.”

“Oh. Sure,” he said, lowering it.

She handed him a glass of wine, then settled back onto the sofa, curling her legs up beneath her, and took a long swallow of wine.

“Did you look at all this stuff?” he asked, tilting his chin toward the folder open on the table.