The Green Man (15 page)

“What’s this?” she asked.

“It was in with the rest of this stuff. It seems to be a journal, most likely Linton’s. His initials are on the cover. But take a look inside.”

O fanned to a random page. The ink had turned a rusty brown. She tried to read the cramped, spidery handwriting. “It’s in another language,” she said.

“Yes. Hebrew.”

“Why would he write it in Hebrew?”

“Perhaps to keep it from prying eyes.”

“But why?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Emily said.

At ten o’clock, O turned the sign in the window, opened the front door, and dragged out the bargain bins. She rolled down the awning to keep off the morning sun. It was going to be a scorcher.

When she switched on the radio, the announcer was introducing a Lester Young number, “Lester Leaps In.” Emily’s voice boomed from the back room, “Turn that up!”

Lester was one of her aunt’s favorite jazz artists. He was the original hipster, the ultimate in cool. He spoke in a clipped, cryptic slang he had invented, wore his porkpie hat perched at a rakish angle, and held his sax sideways when he played. The Beat Poets of the 1950s embraced him as one of their own and used to compose poetry to his music.

While Lester played, O shelved the pile of books Emily had left for her. She was beginning to see a connection between jazz players and poets. They were both a little odd, outsiders and rebels exercising a sort of passive
resistance to society at-large, dedicated to expressing their unique gifts in their own way.

A few browsers wandered in. She sold a couple of books, made note of them in the log, and directed people to sections they inquired about. Business was picking up. Meanwhile, Emily continued working in the back room.

Around noon, the bell rang and O looked up. The dark-haired boy with the light fingers walked into the shop. He worked his way over to the poetry section. She noticed a couple of burrs stuck to the back of his sleeve, a couple more to the cuff of his pants.

She waited to see if he was going to take another book, unsure of what she would do if he did. Instead, he reached into his pocket, pulled out a book, and placed it on the shelf.

Emily came out from the back room with something she wanted to show O. She noticed the boy browsing through the poetry section and watched him for a minute, then wandered back into the rear room. No sooner had she disappeared through the doorway than the boy seized his opportunity. He reached out, slid another book into his coat, and made his way quickly out of the shop.

Okay – so he wasn’t a book
thief
. He was a book
borrower
. The Green Man was just his local library. O glanced
up in the mirror. Emily was making notes on a pad of paper balanced on the arm of the couch and appeared lost to the world.

O got up and headed over to the poetry section. She pulled out the book she had seen the boy return to the shelf. It was a collection of Edgar Allan Poe. She carried it back to the desk to take a closer look.

Poe was one of her personal favorites – one of the poets whose work her father used to leave lying around the house for her to discover. There was a strange beauty to his poetry, a sense of the nearness of the supernatural. So her mystery boy liked Poe too. He instantly went up a few notches in her estimation.

She leafed through the book. There were no markings, no signs of abuse. As she fanned through to the back, a piece of pale blue paper fluttered out. It had been folded twice. She unfolded it and found a poem written on it. She thought, at first, it might be a transcription of one of Poe’s, but as she read it through, she realized it was not.

There was no telling how long it had been in the book, but it didn’t have the faded look of old writing. Maybe it was the work of her mysterious stranger. So he was a poet. He shot up several more notches.

At that moment Emily reappeared with a book she wanted to look up in one of her reference books on the desk. O tucked the poem back inside the book. She was
tempted to show it to Emily, but there was no way of doing that without going through the whole story. And she would rather keep her stranger’s secrets to herself for now.

Emily put her book down on the corner of the desk and reached for the heavy old copy of
The American Bookman
. She started searching through the index. “Have you seen that boy before?” she asked, without looking up.

“What boy?”

“The one who was just in here.”

“Yes, he’s been in before when I was here alone.”

“Did he buy anything?”

“No, just browsing.”

“He reminds me a little of Arthur Rimbaud.”

“Who is that?”

“A French poet. Here, I’ll show you.” And she walked O down to a space on the wall near the front of the shop, where there was a picture of a group of men gathered at a table. She pointed to one, a boy who sat resting his head on his hand. He was much younger than the others.

“That’s Rimbaud. He was just sixteen when he appeared on the scene. Brash and outrageous, he turned the polite world of French poetry on its ear. But he was a genius. He wrote poetry as if he were making magic. Then, before he turned twenty, he abandoned writing completely and went off to Africa.”

She wandered into the back room, leaving O staring at the boy in the painting. He did look a little like the boy in the shop.

That night, O took the collection of Poe’s poetry upstairs with her. She read the poem tucked inside it over again. If the poem was his, he would probably miss it sooner or later and come back to retrieve it. She decided to tuck it back in the book and reshelve it first thing in the morning.

O
n the morning of the reading, Emily repacked the carriage-house collection into smaller boxes for O to cart upstairs, where they would be out of the way. Then she phoned her friend Isaac Steiner and arranged for him to come over that weekend to take a look at several items of possible interest.

O spent the morning sprucing up the reading room. She swept the floor, sneezed, dusted the shelves, sneezed, vacuumed Psycho’s fur off the old couch, sponged down the grungy spots, and strategically placed pillows to hide the tears in the upholstery. She unfolded a dozen chairs stacked against the wall and set them in two shallow rows. It would be the first poetry reading she’d ever attended, and she was excited.

Her excitement helped to alleviate her disappointment that Rimbaud had not returned to retrieve his poem from the Poe collection. She wondered when she would see him again. This time, she was determined to talk to him.

The weather threatened, and business was slow. There
were ominous rumblings in the distance. They decided to close early. Suddenly, the sky opened and it poured. O rushed out to rescue the bargain books, turned the sign in the window, and locked the door.

The meeting was scheduled for eight o’clock. That left them time to put together a quick supper and make any last-minute preparations. She was a bundle of nerves. Emily assured her it would just be a small affair – a few regulars O had seen around the shop and perhaps a couple of curious newcomers who’d seen the flyers she’d distributed around the neighborhood.

After dinner she went up and changed, put a clip in her hair, and pinched some color into her cheeks. At seven she headed downstairs.

Emily had brought out the large coffee percolator she used for the readings. O rinsed it and measured in the water and coffee. She sat it on a table covered with a clean cloth from upstairs. Alongside the coffeepot she set a carton of cream, a bowl of sugar cubes, some spoons from the kitchen drawer, and two tall spires of overturned Styrofoam cups.

She opened the pack of chocolate chip cookies she’d bought and put some on a plate. Then she made a sign suggesting a donation of fifty cents for a cup of coffee and a cookie, and leaned it against an empty jar on the table.

The rain was still coming down fairly hard. She was beginning to worry that no one would show up and the
whole thing would be a dismal failure, when the first arrivals came straggling through the door with dripping umbrellas.

Over the next half hour, a steady trickle of people made their way through the shop and into the back room. They stood around talking and eating enough of the cookies that O finally spirited them away so there would be some left for the break.

Poets, it appeared, came in all forms: young and old, made-up and rumpled, soft-voiced and loud, modern and traditional, stout and lean. The wonder of it was you could have passed almost any of them on the street and never have suspected they were poets. They made a virtue of invisibility.

She recognized some as regulars at the shop, friends who would stop by to chat with Emily. Leonard Wellman and Miles were there. Tiny from the Mind Spider Tattoo Parlor came with a couple of his friends. Most people seemed to know one another. A couple of newcomers hung around the fringes, cradling their coffees and scanning the spines of the books on the shelves. Someone’s rose perfume wafted in the air.

As O glanced around the room, she noticed someone leaning against a wall of books in the corner. He held a silver-handled cane in one hand and a black felt hat in the other. With his deep-set eyes and his little clipped
goatee, he looked enough like Ezra Pound to be his twin. And a woman who sat with her cup on her lap and a large hat on her head reminded O of the portrait of Marianne Moore that hung near the poetry section. She was tempted to run to the front of the shop and see if some of the frames on the wall were empty, their subjects having quietly slipped out to attend the reading.

At eight Emily rang a little brass bell, in the shape of a woman with a hoop skirt, and brought the meeting to order. The mutter of conversation died down as people took their seats. Considering the short notice and the stormy night, it was a decent turnout. Over a dozen people were in the room.

“I’m so glad you took the trouble to come out in such nasty weather,” said Emily. “It’s nice to see some familiar faces and to renew acquaintances. And, as always, we welcome those who are here for the first time.

“The Tuesdays have been an institution at the Green Man for a good many years, as most of you know. For the past few months, ill health has forced me to suspend our meetings. I have missed them, and especially the companionship of fellow poets. I would like to thank my niece, Ophelia Endicott, for helping to get them going again.” O could feel her face redden.

“Writing poetry is a solitary profession. We work alone – alone with words. Sometimes those words are as warm
and welcoming as lovers, at others as chill and remote as the moon. We come here like travelers returned from our solitary explorations, armed with the log of the journey and with an eagerness to share. That is the purpose of this meeting.

“The rules, such as they are, are simple. There is no sign-up sheet, no drawing of lots. We rely on a combination of courage and inspiration. If you have something you would like to share, we invite you to come to the front, state your name, and read. Please speak slowly, but loud enough that those of us with aging ears can hear. We ask that you do not go on for more than ten minutes.

“If you have written the next
Paradise Lost
, this is not the place to air that. You may, if you chose, share a small portion of your paradise – enough to whet our appetite. If you go on for too long, I will ring the little bell lady. Now, that’s quite enough from me. It’s your turn.”

There was a warm round of applause as Emily returned to her seat. O found it remarkable to see her aunt in such a setting. Here was someone different from the woman who sat across the kitchen table from her each day, who ruled quietly over her domain of books from behind the cluttered desk in the shop. Here was Emily in an entirely new element, where she was strong and forceful and honored among fellow poets.

Thin sheaves of paper had miraculously appeared from
pockets and purses. As she panned the room to see who would be the first brave soul to fill the silence, O caught a fleeting glimpse of someone she hadn’t seen – a dark figure merged in the shadows on the far side of the room. There was something vaguely unsettling about him. But when she looked again a minute later, he was gone.

A woman with short gray hair stood and made her way to the front. O had seen her talking to Emily before the reading began.

“Hello, my name is Elizabeth Redshaw, and I am very pleased to be here. I think I echo everyone’s sentiments when I say how delighted I am that the Tuesdays have resumed. Tonight I would like to share with you a piece I have written. It’s called ‘A Scent of Eden.’ ” And she began to read.

O had stationed herself on a chair at the entrance to the room, where she could keep an ear open for any latecomers. Before the meeting started, she had locked the door and switched off the lights out front so that people walking by wouldn’t think the shop was open for business. Suddenly, she heard a light rap on the door. She peered through the shadows but saw no sign of anyone out there in the dark. She imagined it must have been the wind and turned back to the room. Elizabeth Redshaw had finished reading her poem. The polite round of applause was cut short as she launched into another.

Again, there came a faint rapping. This time O rose from her chair and walked through the darkened shop. The rain had started up again in earnest, pelting heavily against the plate-glass window. Perhaps
that
was what she’d heard.

But as she peered past the
PLEASE KNOCK FOR POETRY READING
sign she’d hung in the door, she saw someone huddled under the overhang, with his back to her. She undid the latch and opened the door.

The figure turned. It was the boy in black – the book borrower. He was soaked to the skin. His collar was turned up, and his hair ran with rainwater.

“Oh my God!” she said. “How long have you been standing there?”

“Not long.”

“I’m afraid we’re closed.”

“Oh. I guess I have the wrong night.”

“Oh, you’re here for the poetry reading? Of course you are. No, this is the right night. I’m sorry, come in, please. It’s just in the back there.”