The Green Man (7 page)

People left the most remarkable things in books: postcards, pressed flowers, photographs, locks of hair, love letters, newspaper clippings, theater tickets tucked away for safekeeping and then forgotten. Bits of life, left unknowingly behind.

The books she was working on now were all fairly new and yielded nothing but a scattering of light pencil markings, which she carefully erased. She dipped into several of the books as she readied them for the shelves. It was one of the pleasures of the job, and a necessity, she assured herself. For she needed to know a little about the items she was adding to the collection. Up until recently, she had personally shelved every book herself. That way she knew exactly where everything was. Now, things had changed.

Since her “incident,” as people politely called her heart attack of a few months back, she had been unable to do many of the chores around the shop she had before. She was not supposed to lift anything heavy, not supposed to stretch and strain. The slightest overexertion or upset brought on an attack of angina and resort to the
tiny nitroglycerin pills she had to tuck under her tongue, where they quickly dissolved and took away the pain.

Until now, she had managed quite well with the aches and pains growing older had sent her way. But this was different. There was an unmistakable smell of mortality about the pain that visited her now. And her doctor pulled no punches in letting her know that, if she was not careful, she would be bound for the secondhand bookshop in the sky sooner than she might imagine.

As much as she resented her independence suddenly being taken from her, she knew in her heart of hearts it was a godsend that Charles had found some excuse – transparent though it might be – for sending Ophelia to spend the summer with her. She was a very bright girl, with a good sense of humor and a nice keen edge to her. Emily would not be at all surprised if what Charles suspected about her was true.

Emily gathered up the books she had gone through and was about to call Ophelia to shelve them for her.

“Oph –” she began, and quickly stopped herself, remembering the exchange at breakfast that morning.

Ophelia had prepared oatmeal. It had been years since Emily had eaten oatmeal. Normally, a quick coffee and a cigarette were what she used to ease into the day. But the oatmeal was Ophelia’s way of seeing that she started
on a more heart-healthy diet. The girl was on a mission.

Emily sat down at the table, poured her coffee, and went to light up a cigarette.

“I’d rather you didn’t do that.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said I’d rather you didn’t do that.” Cool as a cucumber. She’d done some odd thing with her hair. It looked like she’d stuck it in a socket.

“But I always have a cigarette with my morning coffee.”

“Well, it’s not good for you. And I
know
it’s not good for me. So I’d rather you didn’t.” And with that, bold as brass, she snatched up the ashtray from the table, emptied it in the garbage, and put it in the sink, running water in it.

Emily was left holding the book of matches in her hand, the unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth. It was
her
house and she wasn’t about to let this slip of a thing with the electric hair – she saw now that there were red streaks running through it – tell her what she could or couldn’t do in it.

She yanked a match loose from the book. Testing the limits, that’s what they used to call this back when she was the eldest in a family of little demons who were always seeing exactly how far they could go. She brought the match close to the striker.

“Don’t … light … that,” said Ophelia, turning from the cupboard, where she was searching for something or other.
She folded her arms across her chest. Plucky young thing. She gave Emily a look that was pure Charles – Charles with electric hair. Was that eyeliner she was wearing?

Emily looked right back at her, the match poised over the striker. The nerve of the girl. The cheek, as her grandmother used to say. Yield now, and there would be no stopping it. She lit the match.

“Don’t,” warned Ophelia, as if she were talking to a child. “It makes me feel sick. It makes my clothes stink. Oh, and – by the way – it will kill you! Do you have any brown sugar in this place?” She turned back to the cupboard and started going through tins.

Emily sat holding the match while the flame crept perilously close to her fingers. Finally she blew it out, perched it on the edge of the table, plucked the unlit cigarette from her mouth, and put it back in the pack. The entire incident had about it the unmistakable odor of defeat. She would live to fight another day, she assured herself, as she pushed the pack of cigarettes into her dressing-gown pocket.

The brown-sugar search finally yielded results – an opened package in a tin in a corner of the cupboard. Emily had no idea how long it had been there. She could not remember having bought it. It had fossilized in the package – a solid brown rock of what had once been sugar. Ophelia chipped away at it with a grapefruit spoon until there were enough shards to scatter on their oatmeal. She
wrote
brown sugar
down on a scrap of paper and taped it to the spice shelf above the sink. Not only was the girl a tyrant; she was an organized tyrant.

The oatmeal was delicious. But Emily sulked – justifiably, she felt – and said nothing. Still, when offered seconds, she readily accepted. Ophelia went at the brown sugar again with the grapefruit spoon.

“That’s not necessary, Ophelia.”

“Please don’t call me that.” She was chipping with a passion now.

“Call you what?”

“Ophelia.”

“Well, that
is
your name, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said, plunking the oatmeal down in front of Emily, “but none of my friends call me that.”

“Why ever not?”

“Well … let’s see. How about because it’s a perfectly hideous name? How would you like to be named after some girl who goes mad and drowns in a river? No, wait – drowns in a river, singing?”

“As you wish. But don’t you think you’re being a little hard on the poor girl? Consider her situation. She’s in love with Hamlet, and he is in love with her. Her father forces her to betray him. Hamlet goes mad, rejects her, and kills her father. The weight of all that grief and guilt is too much for her to bear, and she goes mad. She’s not
the first to go mad from heartbreak – nor, I suspect, will she be the last.”

Ophelia was mining brown sugar for her oatmeal and appeared to be paying not the least attention.

“Very well, then,” said Emily. “What
do
I call you?”

“O.”

“O?”

“Yes. O.”

“You’re kidding?”

“I’ve never been more serious in my life. My name is O. Not Ophelia, not Oph, not Felia. Just O.”

“And that’s what your father calls you?”

She nodded.

“Very well, then, O it is – on one condition.”

O looked over at her.

“That you just call me Emily. Not
Aunt
Emily. I
detest
‘Aunt Emily.’ Just Emily. Deal?”

“Deal.”

So now, as she gathered up the books for Ophelia to shelve, she corrected herself. “O, I have another few books here for you to shelve.”

She found she actually liked the quirky sound of the name. It suited the girl. Perhaps she should start to call herself E.

Then again, maybe not.

L
ITERATURE
– front room, right wall, alphabetical by Author.
MYSTERIES
– front room, left wall near window, alphabetical by Author.
PHOTOGRAPHY
– front room, right aisle, shelves facing
PSYCHOLOGY
.

And how did you spend your summer, O? Well, actually I had an absolutely amazing summer memorizing the Subject Guide to the Green Man bookshop. I know, I know. Guess I just happened to be in the right place at the right time
.

O flipped the page:
POETRY
– front room, center aisle, left side, just past
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
.

She walked the aisles with the list in one hand and a pink feather duster in the other, locating each section as she read it off the list. They were identified by hand-lettered cardboard labels, thumbtacked to the shelf. She ran her eye over the contents of each section, pulling out a title or two that caught her interest, running the feather duster over the tops and the spines of the books.

If the shop had a mouth, it would have laughed at the feather duster. The shop was way beyond feather-duster
stage. Dust lay thick over everything. What they really needed was a huge vacuum cleaner – or a small hurricane. All the duster did was stir the stew around a little.

O ran her eye over the contents of the poetry section. She recognized some of the “biggies,” like Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Whitman, and Eliot, but many she’d never heard of before. There were even a couple of Emily’s books tucked among the masters. She pulled out one and looked at the black-and-white photo on the back cover. A very young Emily looked back. There was a touch of the otherworldly about her even then. It seemed she was not so much looking
at
you, as
through
you.

She was suddenly aware of Emily staring at her from the desk. Sliding the book back in place, she moved on. The last thing she needed was to show that she had an interest in poetry. That was her secret, and she intended to keep it that way until she was ready.

That morning, she had tangled with Emily over her smoking. It wasn’t like her to lash out like that, particularly at an adult. It had been the fatigue talking.

In the three weeks she’d been at the Green Man, O had gotten into the habit of leaving the door at the foot of the stairs to her room open a little at night. She wasn’t exactly afraid of being alone up there, but she’d heard noises – noises she couldn’t put a name to. They’d start
up as soon as the house was still. It was probably nothing more sinister than mice moving in the walls or raccoons scampering across the roof. But her imagination had different ideas.

Last night she’d gone to bed, as usual, with her copy of
A Treasury of Great Poems
. She had made her way safely through the seventeenth century without so much as a mention of madness. But as she entered the eighteenth century, all that changed.

It was the Age of Reason. Poetry was considered a decorative art. Those poets who dared search for deeper truths were scorned. Isolated and ignored, they did the one thing any sane person would do – they went mad.

Suddenly mad poets were everywhere – William Collins, William Cowper, Christopher Smart, William Blake. An epidemic of madness. Christopher Smart composed his long poem
Song to David
while confined in a madhouse. Denied the use of pen and paper, he scratched the verses on the walls of his room with a key.

William Blake claimed to be in communion with the spirit world. He spoke in a matter-of-fact way of the spirits of dead poets who visited him and inspired his own poems. He said everybody had the ability to experience visions and simply lost it through neglect. Most people thought he was mad, and he lived in poverty and obscurity for most of his life. Despite that, he wrote
some of the most beautiful lyrics in the English language.

O drifted off to sleep while she was reading. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sleeping, when suddenly she woke with a start, her heart pounding. There was a smell of roses in the room. Could it have drifted up from the back garden? she wondered. Or had Emily crept into her room to check on her while she slept and left a lingering scent of perfume behind?

She fumbled for the lamp by the bed and switched it on. The book was lying on the floor. The sound of it falling must have woken her. She lay back against the pillow, trying to calm herself.

Then she began to hear the noises again. They sounded like footsteps, moving stealthily around on the deck outside her room. She thought of the fire escape snaking up the side of the building and wondered if someone had stolen up it. She had the terrifying feeling that if she went to the window and threw back the curtain, she would find someone staring at her through the glass.

She lay awake for ages, too afraid to go and see if there actually was someone there, too afraid to fall asleep in case there was. Finally she got up and carried the boxes that had come with the room over in front of the door to the deck, stacking them six high and two deep. No one would be coming through there now without her knowing.

It was nearly four in the morning before she calmed down enough to close her eyes. Immediately she dropped into a dead sleep.

So when O stumbled downstairs that morning, she hadn’t been in the best of moods. Which explained the blowup at the breakfast table when Emily went to light her cigarette.

A few hours and several cups of coffee later, she was still feeling that the world was not quite solid underfoot, that a heavy thump of her foot on the floor of the shop would shatter the brittle shell and send her hurtling into the dark.

The bell above the door tinkled periodically as people drifted in. Not that all of them were customers. Some were regulars, friends of Emily who dropped by for a chat. Others were browsers, who came in, took a turn or two around the shop, and left empty-handed.

Some people were drawn in by the display of books in the window, others by the books in the dollar bins outside, where Emily banished all books she didn’t want. Some were students, some were businesspeople, some were residents of the neighborhood. Whoever they were, not enough of them were buying books.

In her brief time there, it had become clear to O that the shop was in dire trouble. It was a miracle Emily was able to make ends meet.

Some things were beyond their control. The neighborhood had changed. People’s interests had changed. Not as many people were buying secondhand books. In fact, there were more people wanting to get rid of their book collections than there were people buying books. Hence the boxes of books Emily kept buying rather than see them thrown out.

There was nothing much that could be done about all that. But about other things, there was. Earlier that day, while O had been up the ladder shelving books, a young woman in her late twenties had wandered into the shop. Sunglasses perched on top of her head, expensive haircut, classy linen skirt, designer sandals. Obviously one of the café crowd, looking for a little something to read while sipping her latte on a patio in the sun.