The Green Man (3 page)

The only part of the building still in service was a ticket window facing onto the platform close by the bench. A sign in the window said it was open between nine and five, three days a week. This wasn’t one of those days. There was no rest room, no phone, no clock – nothing but the damp bench and the boarded building.
Welcome to Caledon!

Someone called her name. For an instant it didn’t register that it
was
her name, for apart from people who absolutely didn’t know her, no one ever called her Ophelia anymore. People who knew her just called her O. It was a long story.

She turned to see a figure approaching from the far end of the platform, wearing a long loose trench coat, a broad-brimmed hat, and black rubber boots. Even before she glimpsed the familiar face peering out from under the floppy brim, she knew it could be no one but Aunt Emily.

“Ophelia,” said her aunt as she hurried up to her. “Forgive me for being late. I’m afraid I dozed off. My,
I’d hardly know you! You’ve grown so.” They greeted one another with a peck on the cheek and an awkward embrace.

“Where’s your luggage?”

“Over there by the bench,” said O.

They chatted as they walked with the luggage to the parking lot beside the station. There was only one car in the lot, an ancient station wagon that looked as if it had escaped from an automobile museum. Aunt Emily opened the rear door and lifted the heavy suitcase in with a grunt. She slid into the front seat and leaned over to lift the latch on the passenger side. With one fluid motion, she pitched a pile of books and papers from the passenger seat onto the backseat.

“There,” she said, turning on the ignition as O climbed in. The ashtray was full of crumpled butts, and the car smelled of cigarette smoke. O rolled down her window. The smell of cigarettes made her sick. She got the window down about two inches, when the crank came off in her hand.

“Don’t worry. That happens all the time,” said her aunt as she put the car in gear and backed out of the space.

Soon they were creeping down the sleepy streets of Caledon. Her aunt drove hunched over the wheel, her eyes riveted to the road, as if she thought it might leap up unexpectedly and take a sudden twist. Reaching over
with her free hand, she flicked on the car stereo, and the sound of jazz filled the interior of the car. O looked around for a place to put the window crank.

“Just leave it on the dash,” said her aunt, with a sideways glance. “I’ll take care of it later.” A plastic statue of the Virgin, with a suction-cup base, was stuck to the dashboard. She surveyed the interior of the car with sad eyes and hands folded in prayer. It would take a good deal of praying to save this car, thought O, as she set the crank down beside the little lady.

While they were stopped at a light, Aunt Emily reached up and plucked off her hat. She sailed it into the backseat –where all unwanted things appeared to go. As she hummed along to the music, she tucked some stray hairs into the bun at the nape of her neck. O noticed there was a hollowness about her cheeks, slack pouches under her eyes, a general frailty that had not been there the last time she’d seen her.

She watched with alarm as her aunt fished a cigarette from a pack in her coat pocket and tucked it between her lips. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?” It was more a statement than a question.

“Actually –” O started to say, but then the light changed and the car lurched into life, and somehow the words went unsaid.

“How’s your father doing?”

“Fine. Getting ready to go to Italy.”

“So I understand. Preparing to spill yet more ink on poor old Ezra Pound.”

There didn’t seem to be much to say to that. As the car filled with smoke, O glued her face to the window and sucked fresh air through the narrow gap. She was going to have to do something about this –and soon.

There was a tension to her aunt that she hadn’t noticed when they met at the station – something in the set of her chin, the way her thin veined hands gripped the steering wheel as she drove. O had the strange feeling that she was not sitting with the Aunt Emily she remembered, but with some smaller, frailer, more fretful creature, who wore Aunt Emily’s skin on her like an oversized sweater.

Something more than the smoke billowing through the car balled her stomach into a tight knot. She felt she might be sick.

“Are you all right?” asked her aunt as she turned onto a side street and began trolling for a parking space. “You look a little green around the gills.”

“Stomach’s just a bit queasy. I’ll be fine once I get some sleep.”

Aunt Emily stubbed out her cigarette and rolled down her window. The car cleared of smoke as the wind blew around the interior of the car, rustling the papers in the backseat.

For one crazy moment, O felt as if there were another passenger in the car with them, some infinitely fluid shape composing itself from the random papers rustling around behind them. At the same time, she saw Aunt Emily glance nervously in the rearview mirror.

“There’s one!” cried her aunt as she swung the car into a free space at the side of the road. They climbed out of the car, and Aunt Emily hauled the suitcase out of the backseat. A very ordinary seat, cluttered with very ordinary books and papers.

“Push down the door latch and hold in the button on the handle while you close it,” said her aunt. “Otherwise it won’t lock.”

They began walking along the deserted street. Aunt Emily lugged the suitcase, while O carried the bulging bag on her back. She hoped they didn’t have far to walk.

When they got to the end of the block, Aunt Emily put down the suitcase, glanced up at the street sign, and muttered the names of the intersecting streets. She looked back to where the car was parked, then picked up the suitcase and begin walking again, still muttering.

She noticed O looking at her. “No, I’m not going mad. At least, no more than usual. It’s just that, last week, I forgot where I’d parked the blasted car, and it took me an hour to find it.”

O thought that losing the car might not be such a bad idea. “That suitcase is heavy,” she said. “Let me carry it for a while.”

“Actually, it
is
pretty heavy. It must be that gold brick you brought as a present for your dear aunt. You really shouldn’t have. I’ll tell you what, why don’t we trade off? You take it for a block, and then I’ll take it for a block.”

They’d made the exchange twice, and there was still no sign of the bookshop. The strain of carrying the luggage had put an end to any small talk. They turned off the residential street and shuffled silently along a wide street lined with darkened storefronts. The occasional car slid by on silent wheels.

O was so tired, it was all she could do to put one foot in front of the other. It was like one of those dreams where you’re trying desperately to move, but your feet feel rooted to the ground. She dragged them along for one more block, and then Aunt Emily stopped and set down the suitcase.

“Here we are,” she said.

O glanced up and caught her first glimpse of the Green Man.

H
e leaned out from the old wooden sign like someone leaning from a window to look down at her. His green face was fissured with age, and the corners of his mouth were stretched wide by two thick green vines that sprang from them. The carved vines curled upward around his head and wound along the edge of the sign, until they met below and branched into the letters that spelled the name of the shop – The Green Man.

The sign swayed in the wind. As it swayed, it creaked. To O’s sleepy mind, the creaking sounded like an ancient voice, struggling to speak. She stood transfixed beneath the sign while Aunt Emily searched for her keys.

O had never seen anything like it before. What could such a strange thing mean? she wondered. It frightened and yet fascinated her. There was something deeply human in the grotesque figure, something that touched her despite the green stalks spilling from his mouth.

It was almost as if he were trying to tell her something.
She stared up into the ancient face, trying to make out words in the creaking voice.

“I see you’ve met my friend.”

O jumped about a foot in the air.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you,” said her aunt, looking up at the sign. “It was he who first drew me into this shop. I look on him as a sort of guardian spirit, watching over me.

“There,” she said as she opened the door. “Welcome to the Green Man.”

Even in the faint light of day, there seemed something magical about the shop. It was as if it had wandered from a different time and place and set itself down here, on a street corner in Caledon.

O picked up her suitcase and hauled it inside. The smell of dust and old books greeted her as she stood in the deep shadows just inside the door, while her aunt wandered off to turn on the lights.

“Don’t move,” Aunt Emily warned her. Then the lights came on and O saw why.

Books were everywhere. The outer walls were lined with shelves of them from floor to ceiling. Two freestanding ranges of books ran the length of the shop, each of them six feet high and crowned with spires of still more books. The two ranges divided the shop into three narrow aisles, one running down the center and two along the sides.

The narrow aisles were made narrower still by box upon box of books stacked at the base of the shelves along each aisle. Some of the boxes were open, their loose flaps like vines launching across a tenuous jungle path, threatening to reclaim it as part of itself. Others had split like ripe pods and spilled their contents onto the floor.

Aunt Emily flicked on another light at the rear of the shop, revealing even more unpacked boxes ranged around an enormous wooden desk, crowned with precarious piles of books.

O could see now what the Green Man was trying to tell her in his creaky, vine-choked voice: “Turn around, girl. Go home! You
don’t
want to go in there.”

She picked up the suitcase and threaded her way down the center aisle, toward the back of the shop.

“Things have gotten a little out of hand,” said her aunt sheepishly, as they stood and looked back at the chaos of the shop. “Don’t tell your father.”

Turning from the desk, she walked toward the book-lined wall beside it. She reached up under a shelf, and, as if by magic, a door swung open in the wall of books, revealing a narrow set of stairs that launched up steeply to the second floor.

Aunt Emily flicked a light switch. Nothing happened. “Can you manage that suitcase by yourself?” she called back over her shoulder as she started up the stairs.

Drifts of books were piled at the sides of stairs all the way up – books in the process of making their way up or down. Halfway up, her aunt sidestepped one of the stairs.

“Must you always sit on the steps?” she muttered.

“Pardon me?”

“Oh, not you, my dear. It’s Mallarmé. He insists on sitting on the stairs. Not a thing I can do about it.”

There was no one there, but O sidestepped the stair anyway.

Aunt Emily opened the door at the head of the stairs, and they entered a kitchen. A lean white cat was up on the table, licking milk from the bottom of a cereal bowl. It took one look at the stranger, launched off the table, and disappeared down a hall.

“That’s Psycho,” said Aunt Emily. “It will quickly become clear why she has that name.”

The state of the kitchen was a variation on the theme established downstairs. There was clutter everywhere. The only things that looked in place were the dustpan and broom that hung from a hook inside the door. It appeared as though they hadn’t been taken down for some time.

They crossed the kitchen and started up another flight of steps. If she had to haul this suitcase up one more flight, thought O, she would be the one having the next heart attack.

The stairs deposited them before a door on a dim landing, with no more stairs in sight. Aunt Emily reached up and took a key down from the ledge above the door.

“When I first moved here, this was where I used to write,” said her aunt. “I use it mostly for storage now.” She turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door. They stepped inside.

“I’m afraid it’s a little musty. I’ll open the window and air it out a bit.”

O set down her suitcase and looked around. So this was what she’d traveled two and half days through train hell for! She could have cried. It was the saddest-looking room she’d ever seen. The low ceiling sloped sharply to one side. A folded cot stood in a corner, covered in plastic sheeting. Other pieces of furniture hid beneath drapings of white cloth. A dozen boxes were scattered over the dusty floor, with the inevitable books piled on them.

After a bit of a struggle, Aunt Emily opened the window and a breeze blew into the room. The drapings on the furniture rustled like woken ghosts. The covers of a few stray paperbacks fluttered open, flapping their mute tongues.

“Nothing a little tidying won’t cure,” said her aunt. “I’ll go fetch a broom and some rags.” And off she went, leaving O rooted to the spot, unable to imagine turning the room into anything livable.

—

Over the next hour, working together, they shifted the boxes over against one wall, swept the floor, removed the plastic sheeting and opened out the cot. They slipped the white drapings from the furniture, uncovering a large old dresser with a mirror, an elaborately carved bookcase – miraculously empty – and a cherrywood secretary desk with a matching chair.

“This desk belonged to my grandfather,” said Aunt Emily, lowering the leaf to dust inside. “It was passed on to me when he died. I first began to write while sitting at this desk – long ago and far away.

“Now, I’m sure we can find some curtains for that window. The door beside it leads to a little deck outside. I used to sit there in the warm weather and sun myself. It has a nice view of the neighborhood. Just don’t wander too close to the edge. It’s quite a drop.”

Off she went again and returned a few minutes later, carrying a bundle of bedsheets, a pillow, and a pair of red brocade curtains. Standing on the chair, Aunt Emily hung the curtains. To O, it felt like a piece of a puzzle falling into place, and she wondered if these curtains had hung here when her aunt used the room.