The Bookman's Promise (4 page)

For days after Boston I had crackpots calling at all hours: people who claimed to have real Burton books and didn’t, fools who wanted me to fly to Miami or Portland or Timbuktu on my nickel to check them out, wild people with trembling voices who needed a drink or a fix and had battered copies of Brodie’s biography or cheap Burton reprints that could still be found in cheesy modern bindings on chain-store sales tables. One man, certain that he was Burton’s direct descendant, had talked to Burton for years in his dreams and had written a twelve-hundred-page manuscript, dictated by Burton himself, with maps of a fabulous African kingdom that remained undiscovered to this very day. A woman called collect from Florida with a copy of Richard Burton’s autobiography, in dust jacket, signed by Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and some woman named Virginia Woolf. All she wanted for it was $1,500, but I had to take it
now
, sight unseen, or she’d get on the phone and after that it was going to the highest bidder. There were calls from Chicago and Phoenix and Grand Rapids, Michigan. An old woman in Baltimore said my book had been stolen from her family. She talked in a whisper, afraid “they” would overhear her, and when she insisted that the man in the inscription had been her grandfather and that he had been there when Richard Burton had helped start the American Civil War, I moved on as quickly as I could without being rude. One thing I knew for sure—there’d be another hot item in the next mail, and another with the next ringing of the telephone.

Packages arrived without notice at my Denver bookstore. Most contained worthless books that I had to return. A man in Detroit sent a nice box of early Burton reprints, which I actually bought. But the strangest thing was the arrival of a true first edition, Burton’s
City of the Saints
, in a package bearing only a St. Louis postmark— no name, no return address anywhere on or inside the box. I waited for some word by telephone or in a separate letter, but it never came.

By the end of the month the clamor had begun to calm down. The thirtieth came: the crackpots had faded away and my new friend in Rock Springs still had not called. My suspense was delicious. I was thinking of all the places I might take her, but then the old lady from Baltimore arrived and the mystery of that wonderful inscription came to life.

She was not just old, she was a human redwood. I got a hint of her age when her driver, an enormous black man in a military-style flak jacket, stepped out of a Ford Fairlane of mid-sixties vintage and stood protectively at her door. A bunch of rowdy kids roared past on skateboards: six of them, all seventeen or eighteen, old enough to be frisky and not quite old enough to know better.

East Colfax is that kind of street: common, rough, unpredictable. I heard one of the kids yell, “Look out, Smoky!” and I cringed at the slur and was shamed again by the callous stupidity of my own race. I could hear their taunting through my storefront, but the driver stood with patient dignity and ignored them. He had an almost smooth face with a short, neat mustache, and I liked his manner and the way he held himself. Sometimes you can tell about a guy, just from a glance.

The kids clattered away and the driver opened the car door. A gray head appeared followed by the rest of her: a frail-looking woman in a faded, old-fashioned dress. She gripped his arm and pulled herself up: stood still for a moment as if she couldn’t quite get her balance, then she nodded and, still clutching his arm, began the long, step-by-step voyage across the sidewalk to my store. She had to stop and steady herself again, and at that moment I saw the driver look up with a face full of alarm. Another wave of reckless kids was coming, and in that half second the first of them whipped by just a foot from my glass. The driver put up his hand and yelled “Stop!” and I saw the old lady cringe as a blur flew past and missed her by inches. I started toward the door, but before I could get there, the big man had stiff-armed the next kid in line, knocking him ass over apex on the sidewalk.

I opened my door and several things happened at once. Another fool swerved past, I got my foot on his skateboard, tipped him off, and the board shot out into the street, where it was smashed by a passing car. The first kid was up on his hands and knees, bleeding at the elbows and dabbing at a bloody nose. I heard the ugly words, “nigger son of a bitch,” and two more of his buddies arrived, menacing us on the sidewalk. The car had pulled to the curb and now a fat man joined the fray, screaming about the scratch on his hood. In all this chaos the big fellow managed to get the old lady into the store, leaving me alone to handle the fallout.

The bloody nose was flanked by his pals. “I oughta beat your ass.”

I laughed at the thought. “You couldn’t beat your meat without help from these other idiots. Maybe you better haul it on out of here before you get in real trouble.”

I juked them and they stumbled over one another as they backed out to the curb. It was hard not to laugh again, they were such colossal schmucks, but I let them put on a little face-saving sideshow, to which middle fingers were copiously added, and eventually they sulked away.

Now I had to go through another song and dance with the fat guy. He said, “What about my car, wiseguy, you gonna pay for my hood?” I asked if he knew how to read, pointing out that my sign said books, not State Farm Insurance. He suggested throwing a brick through my window and we’d see how funny that was. I took obvious note of his plate number and told him I’d be inside calling the cops while he was looking around for a brick. I heard him leave, putting down a foot of rubber as I opened my door and went inside.

The old lady sat in a chair with her eyes closed. I spoke to her driver, who had a name tag sewn military-style on his jacket. “Mr. Ralston, I presume.”

“Mike’ll do.”

I shook his hand, said, “Cliff Janeway,” and gave a small bow in her direction. “Welcome to East Colfax.”

The phone rang and I had a brief rush of business. The old woman sat still through it all, her balance eerily stable in what appeared to be a light sleep. Occasionally I made eye contact with Ralston, arching my eyebrows and cocking my head in her direction, but he shrugged and waited for the calls to subside. When it got quiet again I motioned him over to the end of the counter. “So…Mike…what’s this all about?”

“Beats me. I think she just got to Denver last night.”

“Just got here from where?”

“Back East somewhere. I don’t know how she made it all alone. You can see how shaky she is, and she’s got almost no money. That had to be one helluva trip.”

“What’s your part in it?”

“Let’s call it my good deed of the month.” He smiled, a humble man embarrassed by his own kindness. “Look, I’m no professional do-gooder, but this woman’s at the end of her rope. She’s staying in a tacky motel not far from here. My wife works there and I can tell you it’s not a place you’d want your grandmother to stay. Or your wife to work, either…not for long.”

“So?”

“So Denise calls and tells me she’s got a lady there who needs some help. Denise is my wife.” He said her name so lovingly that I could almost feel some small measure of the affection myself, for a woman I had never met. “You married, Janeway?”

I shook my head.

“Well, this is one of those things you do when you are. As the line goes, to ensure domestic tranquillity. You’ll understand it someday.”

I laughed and liked him all the more.

“All I can tell you right now is, this lady came a long way to see you, and she almost made it. The least I could do was get her the last few miles over here.”

I liked Mr. Ralston but I sure didn’t like what I was hearing. The arrival of an ancient and penniless woman at my door charged me with responsibility for her welfare. Maybe I owed her nothing—that was the voice of a cynic, and I am the great cynic of my day. I can be a fountain of negative attitude, but from that moment she was mine to deal with.

“I wonder if I should wake her.”

“Up to you, friend. I’m just the delivery boy.”

It was unlikely but she seemed to hear us. Her eyes flicked open and found my face, and I had a powerful and immediate sense of something strong between us. I knew that in some distant past she had been an important part of my life, yet in the same instant I was certain I had never seen her. Her face was almost mummified, her eyes watery and deep. Her hair was still lush and striking: now I could see that it was pure white, not gray, swept across her forehead in a soft wave that left her face looking heart-shaped and delicate in spite of the deeply furrowed skin. I pulled up a stool, said, “What can I do for you, ma’am?” and her pale gray eyes, which had never left my face, struggled to adjust in the harsh late-afternoon sunlight from the street. Suddenly I knew she couldn’t see me: I saw her pupils contract and expand as she lowered and raised her head; I saw the thick glasses in her lap and the lax fingers holding them but making no effort to bring them up to her eyes. The glasses were useless; she was blind. It was impossible but she had come across the country alone, trembling and unsteady…virtually sightless.

I couldn’t just shake that off, and I still felt some vague sense of kinship between us. It was probably simple chemistry, one of those strong and instant reactions that certain people have when they meet, but it had happened so rarely in my life that its effect was downright eerie. And this was doubly strange, because I now began to sense that her reaction to me was almost a polar opposite. Her face was deeply apprehensive, as if I had some heaven-or-hell power and she was finally at the time in her long life when the accounting had to begin.

“Mr. Janeway.”

Another surprise: her voice was steady and strong. She put on her glasses and squinted through the heavy lenses, confirming my original guess. She could make out colors, shades of light and dark, shapes moving past on the street; she could assess enough of my appearance to see a fierce-looking, dark-haired bruiser straddling a stool before her; she could find her way along a sidewalk if she didn’t stumble and fall. But by almost any legal definition, she was blind.

“My name is Josephine Gallant. You have a book that belongs to me.”

I thought at once of that mysterious
City of the Saints
that had dropped in my lap from St. Louis. This was actually going to be good news: I could pay her a thousand dollars for that copy; hell, I could give her
two
thousand and sell it at cost. Maybe that would make a small difference in her life and I could go back to my own life knowing I had given her my best. Then she said, “My grandfather was Charles Warren,” and at once I remembered that phone call from the crazy woman, surrounded by spooks in Baltimore. This is how quickly good news can turn into
oh shit
in the book business.

Before I could gather my thoughts she said, “What I meant was, it
once
belonged to me. Even after all these years I still think of them as my books.”

“Them?”

“There were more where that set came from.”

Again I felt her chemistry. She felt mine too, and suddenly she trembled. “You’re a formidable man,” she said; then, in a much smaller voice, “Aren’t you, Mr. Janeway?”

For once I was flabbergasted into near-speechlessness. She repeated it, more certain now—“You
are
a formidable man”—as if she half expected me to haul back without warning and knock her off the chair. Softly I said, “Ma’am, I am no threat to ladies.” After an awkward pause I went on in a silly vein, trying my best to lighten her up. “I haven’t robbed a bank all week. I don’t do drugs. Don’t kick dogs…well, maybe little ones, but I never eat small children. That’s one good thing I can say for myself.”

She stared. I said, “Honest.” She lifted a shaky hand to her eyes and I gave up with a soggy punch line. “Those are all rumors that got started by an angry bookscout.”

I had a flashing moment of insanity when I almost told her the actual truth. By nature I am a cavalier with women, but I was afraid if I said that I’d have her for life.

Then she spoke. “When I called you on the telephone that day you were busy. I should have considered that. I only realized later that I must have sounded like a fool.”

“I think it was just that business about not letting
them
hear you.”

I felt a hot flush of shame but my cutting remark didn’t seem to offend her.

“I live in an old folks’ home in Baltimore. I’m on Medicaid and I’m not supposed to have unreported money of my own. That’s why I didn’t want them to hear what I was saying. It took everything I had hidden away to get here.”

This was not going well. Her answer for
them
had been annoy-ingly believable, so I threw her another one. “I was also a little puzzled when you said Burton had started our civil war.”

“You thought I was crazy.”

I shrugged. “No offense, ma’am. I was getting a lot of crazy calls then.”

“Well, of course he didn’t
start
that war. If I said that I didn’t mean it literally.” She was agitated now, whether at me or herself I couldn’t tell, but the trembling in her hands had spread to her face. For a moment I thought she was going to faint.

“Are you okay, ma’am? I’ve got a cot in the back if you’d like to lie down.”

She took a deep, shivery breath. “No, I’m fine.” She didn’t look fine: she looked like a specter of death. She said, “I know I’m not going to make any headway trying to convince you about what Burton did or didn’t do,” then almost in the same breath she said, “How much do you know about his time in America?”

“I know he went to Utah in 1860 to meet Brigham Young. He was interested in polygamy and he wanted to see for himself how a polygamous society functioned.”

“That’s only what the textbooks tell you.”

It was what Burton himself had said in his books, but I nodded. “He had to get away from England for a while. He had been double-crossed by Speke, who took all the glory of discovering the African lakes for himself. I don’t know, maybe there was some truth to the story that he just wanted to come here and fight some Indians.”

“You know of course that he was a master spy.”

“I know when he was in India he often spied for the Crown.”

“And when he came to America, he disappeared for three months. What do you think he was doing here then?”

“Nobody knows. It’s always been assumed that he was on a drinking spree in the American South with an old friend from his days in India. But there’s no documentation for that time: the only evidence is Burton’s comment that they
intended
to do this. All Burton said was that he had traveled through every state before suddenly arriving at St. Joseph for his long stagecoach trip to Utah.”

“That’s not entirely true anymore. I heard that some pages from a journal have been found in England, supporting the view that Burton and his old friend Steinhauser were together after all. According to this account, they spent more time in Canada than in the Southern United States.”

“Well, there you are.”

“What if I told you there was
another
journal of that missing period, one that tells a far different story?”

“I’d have to be skeptical. A dozen biographers never uncovered it.”

“Maybe they didn’t know where to look.”

This again was possible. A man travels many roads—even a diligent biographer like Fawn Brodie never finds everything—but I still didn’t believe it. “I thought Mrs. Burton destroyed his journals.”

She simmered behind her old-lady face. “Well, this would be one she never got her bloody little hands on.”

“If such a book exists, I’d love to see it.”

“It exists, all right. Don’t worry about that.”

She fought her way through another attack of shakes. “It exists,” she said again.

“That’s pretty definite, ma’am…almost as if you’d seen it yourself.”

She nodded dreamily and I felt the hair bristle on the back of my neck. “A very long time ago,” she said. “A long, long lifetime ago. I don’t expect you to believe me. I just thought you might want to know that your book came out of a collection that was stolen from my family. But I guess that wouldn’t matter either.”

“Of course it would. But you’ve got to have proof.”

Outside, an ambulance went screaming past. In those few seconds I decided to take an objective and academic interest in what she was saying. Her great age demanded at least that much respect, so I ordered myself to go gently and save the assholery for someone who needed it.

I picked up a notepad and felt almost like a cop again. “How big a collection was this?”

“Large,” she said, and I could almost feel her heartbeat racing at my sudden interest. She had my attention: this was why she’d come, this was what she wanted.

“It was quite large,” she said. “You’d probably consider it the makings of a library. A good-sized bookcase full of books. A cabinet full of letters and papers.”

“A library like that isn’t easy to steal,” I said. “A man doesn’t just walk away with that in his hip pocket.”

“This was not a thief in the night. It was done through lies and

Immediately I asked the vital legal question. “Did money change hands?”

She said, “I don’t know, I’m not sure,” but her answer was too quick and her eyes cut away from mine. I knew she was lying and she knew I knew. But what she said next only made it worse. “What difference does that make, if it was a crooked deal?”

That’s the trouble with a lie, it usually leads straight to another lie. A question rooted in a lie is a lie itself. I figured she knew quite well what a difference it could make, and a lie is a lie is a lie, as Gertrude Stein, that paragon of the lucid profundity, would have gushed. Ms. Josephine Gallant dodged it by retreating into her own dim past, and there, so surprisingly that it surprised us both, she saved herself.

“That collection was put together by my grandfather more than a hundred years ago. My earliest memories are of my grandfather and his books. I remember the colors of them…the textures. I remember that room, in a house that exists only in my memory. The pale blue walls. The plaster beginning to crack in the far corner, over the kitchen door. The shiny oak floor. Me, sitting on my grandfather’s lap while he read, and outside, the sounds of horses in the street. The garbageman, with his speckled walrus mustache…nice old Mr. Dillard, who drove a wagon with a horse named Robert. Our windows were always open in the summer and there was noise—all the noises of the street—but it never disturbed my grandfather when he was reading. He could lose himself in a book. If I asked him, he would read aloud until I fell asleep. And if I awoke—if I nudged him—he would start reading again.”

She took a long breath. “If you’ve read Burton’s books, you know they can be difficult. But there are places where they bring a landscape to life, even for a child. My grandfather admired Burton tremendously. The cabinet was full of letters from Burton, written over twenty-five years. All of our books were inscribed to him by Burton, and he had many more that Burton had not written but had sent him over the years, on exotic topics that Burton had found interesting. There was always a little note inside, with some mention of the time they had spent together, and many of the books were extensively annotated with marginal notes in Burton’s hand.”

She smiled. “He often asked me, my grandfather, if I liked his books, and I always said oh yes, I loved them, and he said, they will be yours when you grow up.”

She cocked her head as if to say,
That’s all I have. I’m sorry it’s not enough
.

“These are my fondest memories. Listening to my grandfather read, in Burton’s own words, of his adventures in India, Africa, Arabia, and the American West.”

Her smile was faint: fleeting and wistful, lovely in the way a desert landscape must be from the edge of space. In that moment her small untruth seemed trivial and the general unease I had been feeling sharpened and became specific.

She wasn’t talking like a crazy woman now.

Not at all.