The Bookman's Tale (2 page)

—

F
or the first two months, Peter had left the cottage only to buy food at the local shop. He had ventured into nearby Chipping Norton on a couple of errands before Christmas, but had avoided the bookshop, where he might be recognized by the proprietor. The excursion to Hay had been the beginning of his attempt to address the fourth item on Dr. Strayer’s list: “Re-establish Your Career,” and he had to admit it wasn’t a wholly unpleasant experience to discover that the world of books still existed, that he could escape what Dr. Strayer called his “secret lair.”

“What do you mean by that?” Peter had asked.

“You’ve spent most of your life in hiding,” said Dr. Strayer. “Your secret lair is the only place you feel truly safe. When you were a child it was your room where you’d hide so you didn’t have to interact with your parents. In college it was the rare-books room; once you married Amanda, it was your basement book room. You bury yourself in these places, Peter. You avoid life there.”

“I left my lair plenty with Amanda,” Peter retorted.

“Yes,
with
Amanda. She was your trusty sidekick, the person who made the world safe for you. Be honest, Peter, the only places you ever really went without her were bookstores and libraries—and there you didn’t need Amanda to run interference because you could interpose the books between yourself and any meaningful human contact.”

And so he had started the process of emerging from his secret lair in Kingham with an excursion to bookstores. And just as Dr. Strayer had predicted, he had done everything he could to avoid any conversation.

Still, wouldn’t Dr. Strayer be pleased that Peter had taken some small step toward restarting his career? He hadn’t looked at his own books—the bibliographical reference library he had built over the past several years—since he lost Amanda. Even when he had boxed them up to be shipped to England, they had been only rectangular solids to be fit into empty boxes—boxes now stacked in the stone shed in the garden.

He thought he might have one or two books on Victorian illustrators so he turned on the lights in the tiny back garden, shoved open the door of the shed, and began carrying the boxes into the sitting room. Two hours later, he had opened them all and emptied the contents haphazardly onto the floor-to-ceiling shelves. On the coffee table he left two books:
A Treasury of the Great Children’s Illustrators
and Percy Muir’s landmark study
Victorian Illustrated Books
. Not sure he could bear another dead end without at least some sleep, Peter left the books where they were, picked up the watercolor, and went upstairs to bed. He slept soundly for the next twelve hours, dreaming of those Royal Academy catalogs and the building where he first encountered them.

W
hen it opened in 1957, the Robert Ridgefield Library had been the tallest building in Ridgefield—a nine-story neoclassical behemoth of granite and glass, columns and cornices, with an incongruous cupola perched uncomfortably on top.

The Ridgefields had come to North Carolina from Scotland just after the revolution and had spent the next two centuries going from success to success. A moderately wealthy nineteenth-century merchant family, they had become impressively wealthy in tobacco, then excessively wealthy in textiles, and now obscenely wealthy in banking. Along the way, they had turned a backwater two-year Bible college into the nationally recognized Ridgefield University.

The library had been built atop Ridgefield’s highest point—a hill on the edge of campus previously favored by students for late-night trysts. From the upper floors one could view the countryside around Ridgefield for miles—a patchwork of corn and tobacco, clouds of dust rising from the horizon as pickup trucks sped down gravel roads. In the Georgia granite above the library’s main entrance were carved the words, “Let those who enter here seek not only knowledge but wisdom.”

The moment Peter walked into the library for the first time, passing from the blazing sun of a North Carolina August into the cool dimness of its narrow corridors, its miles of shelving, its million and a half books, he felt at home. He was eighteen and had lived his life on that very farmland that was visible from the top of the library—a world in which he had always felt awkwardly out of place. His family had run a general store in a small town eight miles from Ridgefield, until his father’s neglect of the business sent it into bankruptcy. After that his parents seemed more interested in drinking and fighting than in spending time with their son. He had often gazed at the strange white building on the horizon and dreamed of a different life, a life free from the encumbrances of family and the daily interactions at school with people who understood him no better than he understood them. He dreamed of a life protected from everything outside of himself, but protected by what he could not imagine.

He had tried various ways of insulating himself over the years. As a youngster he spent most of his free time in his room with his stamp collection, meticulously mounting stamps and trying not to think of the wider world that those little rectangles of paper represented. During high school, he had taken to sequestering himself in the basement with a pair of headphones and a stack of classical records. But however carefully he mounted the stamps, however loudly he played the music, he could never quite escape. A part of him always knew that the world still existed outside his door and that, ultimately, he could not avoid it.

Peter had won a scholarship to Ridgefield, and freshman orientation had been a harrowing experience, focused on “getting to know” people. Peter did not want to know people. What he wanted was to find that world-within-the-world where he could be himself by himself. Following his tour guide through the foyer of the library into the stacks, he suspected he may have found that place. Lagging behind the tour and slipping into the rows of stacks that disappeared into darkness, Peter discovered exactly what would protect him: books.

It took him only a few weeks to secure a work-study position in the library. It was nirvana. Peter spent four hours a day reshelving books. Technically, he was part of the Circulation department, but he worked alone, wheeling his cart down the narrow aisles between towers of books, easily avoiding contact with anyone who might be browsing.

Even on those occasions when he had to push his cart through the main reading room, with its wide oak tables and banks of card catalog drawers, Peter remained invisible to his fellow students. The cart would glide almost silently across the smooth marble floor and heads would remain bent over books, his passing no more remarkable than a change in the light streaming in from the high clerestory windows as a cloud moved across the sun.

—

O
n a dark and rainy October day in his sophomore year—he would later tell her the exact date, October 14—Peter Byerly wheeled his cart into the reading room and first laid eyes on the woman he would marry. She was sitting alone at a table, poring over a biography of William Morris. She sat ramrod straight, with her book propped on the table in front of her, her posture almost daring the work to get the better of her, while all around her students slumped with the weight of impending midterms. She wore, in place of the unofficial uniform of jeans and a T-shirt, an impeccably tailored black suit, with pleated trousers and a crisp white blouse. Not a strand of her shoulder-length black hair was out of place.

She was slim, though not as slim as most college girls aspired to be. She was tall, though not as tall as those girls whose height inspired envy among their peers. Both her figure and her stature were enhanced by the one quality completely lacking in most coeds but which she possessed in abundance—poise.

He did not at first see that she was beautiful—though it would not take him long to notice. What he saw was that she was different, that she seemed, like himself, to inhabit a world on the margins of Ridgefield University. She did not fit in, and this intrigued him, made him want to shout,
Comrade!

Peter slid quietly into a chair at the edge of the room and pulled a book from his cart. For the next thirty minutes, he pretended to read, while watching her. Except to turn a page, which she did frequently, she did not move. At six o’clock she closed the book, put it on a pile of others, picked up the books and her red leather purse, and headed toward the exit. Peter followed. When she returned several of the books at the circulation desk, he swept them off the counter as soon as they had been processed.

Ten minutes later he was sequestered in the stacks perusing her books. In addition to the William Morris biography there was a book on the Pre-Raphaelite painter Holman Hunt, a volume of Edward Burne-Jones prints, and two volumes of the catalog of the annual exhibit at London’s Royal Academy of Arts—1852 and 1853. He glanced through the volumes of artwork and the Holman Hunt biography before reshelving them. The Morris biography he slipped into his bag without checking it out. He wasn’t sure what made him do it; for some reason he felt a need to illicitly possess a book she had read. He returned it to its shelf a week later, afraid that if she was as complex and multifaceted as Morris, she was way out of his league.

—

O
ver the next month he watched her for at least half an hour every afternoon. Her schedule was precise—she arrived at the library every day at two, spent fifteen minutes in the stacks, and read at the same spot in the reading room until six. She never varied her posture; she always wore smart clothes; she took notes with a fine pen in a black journal.

She read voraciously—biographies of Victorian artists along with poetry of the period and a smattering of history. She worked her way through the Royal Academy catalogs at the rate of one every two or three days. It was three weeks after he first saw her that he noticed, while shelving the volume for 1863, that the front cover of the 1865 volume was completely detached. He couldn’t abide the idea that she should find it in such condition, so he carefully removed the book and its detached cover from the shelf and trekked up six flights of stairs to a sturdy wooden door marked
CONSERVATION
.

The brightly lit room into which Peter stepped looked as he imagined an autopsy room might—but, instead of human cadavers, books lay on the counters in various states of disassembly next to neat lines of knives and piles of various kinds of paper. On a shelf to his left were a dozen or so beautifully restored books, some in leather bindings with gold decoration. The room was not a morgue, thought Peter, so much as an intensive care unit, from which all patients would one day be discharged, if not fully cured, at least substantially improved. A man in a white lab coat leaned over a strange sort of vice that held a disbound book. He was spreading something that looked like cold oatmeal on the exposed spine.

“Can I help you?” he asked, standing up. The man looked at Peter through round gold-rimmed glasses. He looked to be about thirty and had blond, almost white, perfectly straight and groomed hair hanging to his shoulders and an equally pale beard sticking several inches straight out from his face. He smiled through his beard and Peter’s first thought was that he looked like a Muppet. Peter couldn’t help but smile back.

“I have a book that needs repair,” said Peter.

“It has to be referred by library personnel,” said the man, his smile fading and his tone of voice indicating that Peter was not the first person to come barging into the Conservation department uninvited.

“I am library personnel,” said Peter. “I work in circulation.”

“Put it over there,” said the man with a sigh, nodding to a high pile of damaged books on a table near the door and turning his attention back to his work.

“When do you think it will be done?” asked Peter.

“We’re running about six months right now, assuming nothing major comes down from Special Collections.”

“Six months,” said Peter. “But I have . . . I mean, we have a client . . . That is, a student who needs this book in a couple of days. It just needs the cover attached.” Peter held up the book in one hand and its wayward front cover in the other. The man in the lab coat turned back toward him and considered both the book and Peter for a moment. His face softened and his smile returned.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll put it in the girlfriend pile.” He took the book and cover from Peter.

“The girlfriend pile?”

“Usually when a guy comes in here in a rush to get something repaired it’s because his girlfriend needs it. What can I say, I’m a sucker for love and chivalry and all that. How about I have it for you Monday afternoon?”

“Monday would be great,” said Peter, and he backed slowly out of the room, watching the young man return to his oatmeal paste.

Back in the stacks Peter could not get the Conservation department out of his mind. Suddenly he was seeing damaged books everywhere he looked: a frayed spine here, a torn endpaper there. He had thought of books before only as his shield, but now they seemed to be taking on lives of their own, not so much as works of literature or history or poetry, but as objects, collections of paper and thread and cloth and glue and leather and ink.

When he returned to the Conservation department on Monday afternoon, the book was waiting for him on the counter near the door. Peter inspected the front cover, the spine, and the front endpapers. “I can’t even tell it was ever detached,” he said.

“What can I say, I do good work,” said the man in the lab coat.

“I don’t suppose you ever let students work in here,” said Peter.

“We sometimes have a student intern,” said the man, “but they usually come from Special Collections.”

“Special Collections?”

“Yeah, you know, the top floor. The Devereaux Room.”

“What’s the Devereaux Room?”

“You’ve never been to Special Collections?”

“No,” said Peter.

“You’re a book lover, right?”

“Absolutely,” said Peter, who had never thought of himself as a book lover before this moment.

“Well, if you love books, you’re going to adore the Devereaux Room,” said the man. “Listen, I think there’s a work-study position available up there right now. I could put in a good word for you with Francis.”

“Francis?”

“Francis Leland, the head of Special Collections. I’ll tell him we’ve got a budding bibliophile on our hands and maybe he’ll take you on.”

“That would be great,” said Peter, wondering what exactly one did in Special Collections.

“I’m Hank, by the way,” said the man, holding out a hand. “Hank Christiansen.”

“Peter Byerly,” said Peter, returning Hank’s firm handshake. “Thanks for the . . . the recommendation.”

“Sure thing,” said Hank.

Peter turned to go, but stopped in the doorway. “And thanks for this,” he said, holding up the repaired volume of Royal Academy pictures.

“I hope she likes it,” said Hank.

Peter returned the book to its place in the stacks. The next day, she checked it out.

—

O
n November 15, 1984, a pair of books in the Ridgefield Library transformed Peter’s life. He had gone to the library after his ten o’clock class, hoping to finish his shift before his three-thirty interview with Francis Leland in Special Collections. At three he picked up a cart of books to shelve and scanned it for anything that might have been returned by his mystery woman. In a matter of seconds he found the repaired Royal Academy catalog. Smiling, he wheeled his cart toward the elevator.

Not until he pulled the book out and was about to place it in its proper spot did he notice a crisp piece of ivory paper sticking out of it. She had never left a bookmark in a book before. He gently pulled the paper out of the book. At the top, printed in royal blue, was the initial “A.” Below that, in a neat script, was a note addressed “To my admirer.”