The Green Man (4 page)

They made the bed together, tucking the corners in securely, spreading the sheet and blanket, and plumping the pillow.

“There,” said Aunt Emily. “I’ll leave you to yourself
now. I’m sure you must be exhausted. The bathroom’s downstairs, along the hall. And if you’re hungry, you know where the kitchen is.”

“Thanks. I think I’ll just get some sleep.”

“Good. I’ll see you when you get up, then.” Her aunt looked as if she was about to say something else. But then she turned and left the room, quietly closing the door behind her.

O sat down on the edge of the bed. There was no doubt about it; the woman was a little strange. She thought about unpacking her suitcase into the dresser drawers, putting her few books on a shelf of the bookcase, tucking her journal and sheaf of poems away in the drawer of the secretary. She thought about putting on her pajamas.

Instead, she lay back on the bed. She heard the drone of traffic in the distance, the opening and closing of doors and drawers as Emily moved about in the kitchen below. The bedsprings groaned beneath her.

The curtains, patterned with a repeating motif of roses, glowed red against the light. As the breeze blew through the open window, it gently rustled the roses. They seemed to drift through space. O felt herself drifting with them.

Suddenly the room seemed filled with their scent. As she teetered on the edge of sleep, O felt a little flutter of unease. But it was only a flutter, and, in an instant, she was asleep.

O
sat at the kitchen table, washing down a peanut butter sandwich on stale rye bread with mouthfuls of strong black tea. It was a little after noon, according to the clock that hung on the wall over the stove. She had woken up ten minutes earlier to the delicious aroma of baking bread and stumbled downstairs drooling, only to be informed by her aunt that the smell came from the bakery next door.

O loathed peanut butter sandwiches, but it was either that or starve. A peek in the cupboards had revealed an exhaustive range of dried beans in dusty jars – and not much else.

The fridge sat in the corner of the room, humming to itself and trying to look busy. There was next to nothing in it either, and what there was looked highly suspect.

“Maybe I could do a little shopping,” she suggested as she choked down another mouthful of the sandwich with a swig of scalding tea. It felt like she was getting second-degree burns on her throat.

“Oh,” said Aunt Emily, as if this was a startling new idea. “Yes, I suppose we could use a little shopping. There’s a health-food store a few blocks up the street.”

“I was thinking more of a supermarket.”

“A supermarket?” Obviously a new word in her vocabulary. “I imagine you’ll need some money.”

“Yes. That would be good.”

It was like talking to someone from a distant planet – not hostile, just a little vague about life on Earth.

“There’s money in the tin on top of the fridge,” said her aunt.

“Thanks. I’ll think I’ll go and unpack first.”

Back upstairs, O took her clothes from the suitcase, flattened out the wrinkles as best she could, and tucked them away in the dresser. She angled the dresser mirror so she could see herself in it. Placing
A Treasury of Great Poems
on the top shelf of the bookcase, she took her journal and sheaf of poems to the desk. She opened the journal and read what her father had written on the first page:
To my darling O
–
May your words bloom and bear fruit among the leaves of this little book. Love always, Dad
.

The sight of his handwriting called up the sound of his voice, and for a moment, he was there in the room. Her hand went instinctively to the small silver pendant he had given her for her last birthday. Shaped like a hand,
it was minutely engraved on both sides with mysterious words and symbols. As she held it now, she felt like she was holding him.

Turning to the last entry she’d made in the journal, she decided to sit down and write a brief account of the train trip while it was still fresh in her mind. When she was finished, she tucked the book away in the desk and turned her attention to the boxes. Aunt Emily had said she was free to go through them. They might contain some pictures and ornaments she could use to decorate the room.

It was a glorious day. The first hint of summer was in the air. Rather than sit inside, O decided to haul the boxes out into the light to see what they contained.

The rooftop deck was about eight feet square, bounded by a low brick wall just high enough that you could easily stumble over it and plummet straight to the ground, twenty feet below. In one corner, a metal railing interrupted the wall at the entrance to a rusty fire escape that snaked down the side of the building. A dingy plastic table and two matching chairs sat on the sun-bleached boards near the window. Drifts of dead leaves had gathered at the base of the wall beneath it.

O carried a box outside, set it down on the table, and began to go through it. It was full of papers – notebooks, sheaves of yellowed typescript, drafts of poems on random scraps of paper bundled with string. There were packets
of old letters and postcards, some of them dating back almost fifty years. She fanned through them and found several from her father. She wondered if he knew his sister had kept them all this time.

One by one, she went through the boxes, unearthing several treasures – a clutch of paperweights wrapped in faded tissue paper and nested side by side in a shoebox, a pair of ivory elephants crossing an ivory bridge, and several delicate watercolors in worn wooden frames. She set them all aside.

There was one box left on the floor of her room. Her aunt called up the stairs to say she was heading down to open up the shop for the afternoon. O unfolded the flaps and took a peek inside. This box was different. It contained a wealth of old family photos – school pictures of her father and Aunt Emily and their siblings; photos of family vacations, Christmases, and birthdays. With the rest of the family scattered around the continent, it seemed to have fallen to Aunt Emily to be the keeper of the family history.

As O was sifting through the photos, she came upon one of a woman in white, her long hair parted in the center and a string of beads about her neck. She was smiling into the camera. It was her mother on her wedding day. She and her dad had met at a poetry reading when they were in their twenties. He said that, when she read, it was as if
a crystal dome had settled over the room. And when she spoke into the stillness, it was as though the words were being born.

Some people lead epic lives, long and full. Some lead lyric lives, short and too soon over. Her mother led a lyric life. She died of leukemia before she was forty. O was just a toddler at the time. Her memories of her mother were gleaned from faded snapshots in old photo albums.

She hauled the box out onto the porch, where she could study its contents more closely in the light. As she was lifting it onto the table, something caught her eye. The short street that ran beside the shop dead-ended in a high stone wall. A boy was sitting astride the wall, looking at her.

He was a fair distance away, and it was hard to see him very well, but there was something eerily familiar about him. She set the box of old family photos down. They looked at one another for what felt like a long time but was probably no more than a few moments. Then the boy swung his leg over the wall and dropped out of sight.

A
few minutes before O’s experience on the rooftop, Emily was making her way down the dim stairs to open the shop after the lunch break, the cashbox tucked under one arm and a mug of hot tea in her hand. She did her best to dodge the books heaped at the sides of the stairs, while keeping one eye on the steaming tea, which threatened to slop over the edge of the mug.

The stairs were liberally spotted with milky tea stains from many a day’s descent to the shop. In her younger years, she had been a better housekeeper, but recently such minor mishaps occurred somewhere on the fringes of consciousness and were quickly forgotten.

So, too, with the books that accumulated unchecked on the edges of the spotty stairs. She navigated around them as though they were a permanent feature of the landscape. Occasionally, she would see the steps for the disaster they were and resolve to tidy them before she took a tumble down them one day and broke her fool neck. But then
the thought would slop over the edge of her mind, as the steaming tea slopped over the lip of the mug onto the dusty stairs, and be forgotten.

At the foot of the stairs, there was a light in the ceiling, which could be turned on by a switch at either end of the staircase. The light did not work – not because it was broken, but simply because the bulb had burned out several months back and had suffered the same fate as the drifts of books and the tea spills.

It was age, Emily told herself in her more anxious moments. Age, which would send her shuffling down increasingly narrow passageways, through increasingly dim rooms, until she dropped at last into a narrow pit from which she would never clamber out. A poetic thought, though a trifle grim. Most of her thoughts these days were grim.

That, too, was age. She hardly had a thought now that was not stamped by time, like those pathetic cartons of food in the fridge that lingered on beyond their expiry dates, which she picked up, eyed skeptically, sniffed, and returned untouched to the shelf.

She was not the woman she once was, and
that
was the lamentable truth. What she would give for one crisp, clear, unclouded moment – one moment that would enfold her and whisper sweet words in her ear. Poetry was made of such moments – not this whimpering nonsense
that went endlessly round in her head, like the painted horses on a merry-go-round.

Bah!
she said to herself as she pushed open the door to the shop with the toe of her shoe. She put the tea down on the edge of the desk, slid the cashbox into the top drawer, and shook a cigarette from the open pack she kept there. She fished the lighter from the pocket of the sweater she wore, lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew smoke into the shadows of the room.

It was a bad habit, as her doctor never failed to inform her, and a dangerous one for someone in her condition, whatever
that
was supposed to mean. But it was a habit that went back to the time she had first started down the winding road that led to here, and she was not about to let it go.

She took another drag and set the cigarette down on the edge of the ashtray that occupied part of the precious bare space on top of the large oak desk. Switching on the desk lamp, she ambled over to fetch the pile of books she’d bought yesterday morning from Miles.

Miles MacIntyre was one of a dying breed – the book scout. He made regular rounds of the Goodwill and Salvation Army shops during the week; spent Saturday mornings trolling the streets for promising yard sales; stood hours in line to get first pick of the books at church-basement rummage sales and at the university book sales
in the fall; ran ads in the local papers saying he was looking for book collections; and had an uncanny nose for estate sales, where private libraries often surfaced. Among “pickers,” he was without peer, always on the lookout for books he could buy at a bargain price and resell to a dealer for a profit.

He used to move like clockwork from one secondhand dealer to another, trundling his boxes of books from the trunk of his beat-up car into shop after shop and making a decent living. But now, many of the dealers had closed their doors, and those who were left had more stock than they could handle. Book scouts, like book dealers, were an endangered species. Those who remained, like Miles and herself, were simply too stubborn or stupid or set in their ways to let it go.

And so every Friday morning, she would sit at the desk and wait for Miles to drive up to the front of the shop in his rusted-out old beater and come walking through the door with a box of his latest finds. While she sifted through them, he’d pop into Gigi’s next door and pick up two large double-doubles and an almond croissant to share. Then the two of them would spend the better part of an hour talking shop – trading news of other dealers in town and how they were doing or not doing. Who was reeling under the latest hike in rents; who had decided to fold his tent and take his business onto the Net; what
sales were coming up and what they might find there; what was happening with the out-of-town sales.

They’d sip their coffee down to the sugary syrup that coated the bottom and do their best to raise old ghosts and ignore the new ghosts that dogged both their days. And, at the end of it, she’d buy most of the books in his box, even though she didn’t really need them – more for the sake of giving him something to tide him through the week, until they came together again. Two old prospectors, panning for gold on the same old river they had worked for years, still dreaming of the big find – a treasure trove of wonderful old volumes only they knew the true value of, which would end their financial worries forever.

Emily took the books she’d bought yesterday from the box and carried them to the desk, where she would clean them up, price them, and distribute them around the shop. She set them down, took a final drag of her cigarette, and butted it out. She would open the window by the desk a crack to air the place out, then flip the sign in the front door and open for the afternoon. A little later opening than usual, she glanced toward the front door to see if anyone was waiting.

There
was
someone standing at the front window, peering in, not at the display of books in the window, but at her. Their eyes met – and she gasped in shock.

The figure stood on the shade of the awning, backlit by the bright sunlight, but still she recognized him instantly. It was her brother Charles, Ophelia’s father. Not Charles as he looked now, but as he had appeared as a boy. The shape of the face, his short fair hair, those unmistakable eyes staring back at her now with the same sense of shock that she looked at him.

Everything felt unreal, as insubstantial as a dream. She gripped the edge of the desk, as much to assure herself it was solid as to steady herself. Her hand trembled as she reached for her glasses, suspended from a cord around her neck, and slipped them on.