Little Doors (32 page)

As Lev had predicted, Mamoulian’s sixteen-year-old nephew had jumped at the offer to help his uncle establish a foothold in cyberspace. Together, man and boy had first gone computer shopping. The chosen hardware now bulked alienly on Mamoulian’s desk. Avram had chosen a host server for the Website, one that boasted the capacity for secure credit-card transactions. The kid had built a very handsome website, promising to add the bells and whistles later. To Mamoulian, the gleaming image on the screen looked just fine as it was. Now Avram sat daily in the shop doing the data-entry on Mamoulian’s stock and dealing quite competently with the odd walk-in customer.

On the day of his departure, Mamoulian had given the kid a fifty-dollar bonus in cash. Avram exhibited a sheepish grin, raising a forefinger to push back nonexistent slipping eyeglasses, until he remembered that he now wore contacts (thanks to Roberta’s care; the boy would probably be in rags if his welfare had been left solely to Lev at his worst).

“Gee, thanks, Uncle Alex.”

“You earned it, boy. If I have a good trip, I’ll sweeten up your next paycheck too. Well, I gotta hit the road now, before traffic gets too bad. Hold the fort against the goddamn Indians for me.”

Avram walked his uncle out to the rented van Mamoulian used on such trips.

“Thanks for what you did for Dad, too, Uncle Alex.”

“Purely selfish, kid. He owes me for loans back to ’eighty-six, and I figure this was my only chance to get repaid.”

“Whatever you say.”

Driving down a stretch of crumbling asphalt, eyes shaded by drugstore sunglasses against the August glare, Mamoulian shook his head ruefully. What he had told Avram had been pure sugar frosting on an unpalatable cake. He might just as well have set fire to a pile of his hard-earned cash, for all the chance he had of seeing it again. After a few weeks of sobriety at most, his brother would go off on a binge, and the whole downward booze-lubricated spiral would commence again. Mamoulian chided himself for being such a witless soft touch. What had he been thinking that day in the office? Flush from the big Thompson score, face to face with his pathetic older brother, he had plunged two grand on a nag hobbled from birth. And now here he was, forced by the rotten circumstances of his own senseless life (had he actually made any more of his opportunities than his brother had?), out on the merciless road again, cadging a nickel of profit here, a dime there, just to stave off the human creditor wolves circling Mamoulian Rare Books as if it were a busted sleigh mired on the goddamn tundra.

Despair and disgust washed over Mamoulian like slops thrown from a fishwife’s window, leaving him feeling weary and filled with bilious sludge. Suddenly, the prospect of arriving at the little down-at-the-heels city that was his immediate destination, of crossing the worn thresholds of the too-familiar stores and seeing the same hostile, ennui-engraved faces of the race of trolls that rolled up the steel shutters of such places, of spotting the same worthless titles he had seen in the last broken village — This scenario struck him as a veritable hell on earth. He just couldn’t face it.

At the next junction of roads, Mamoulian took an arbitrary turn away from his abandoned destination. He did the same at the next three crossroads until, after forty-five minutes, he found himself in a part of the valley completely unknown to him. He paused by the side of the road to consult a map, but he could only locate himself within a vague circle of territory. He shrugged, stuffed the map into the glove-box, and drove onward.

A shabby roadside diner beckoned ahead just as Mamoulian’s stomach was reminding him that another delivery was scheduled, the morning’s hash, eggs and toast being only partial payment for his continued existence. Mamoulian swung the van across the gravel lot, parked and locked it. Little chance that any larcenous rube would want the eccentric contents of this particular van, but why risk it?

At the counter of the busy restaurant, Mamoulian ordered up coffee, a steak sandwich and fries. He latched onto a rumpled copy of the local paper—
The Newbery Gazette
—and scanned the classifieds for rummage sales and the like, but came up blank. Typical of this whole trip. Why had he imagined that a few impulsive gestures would be sufficient to change his bad luck? Might as well expect a copy of the Gutenberg Bible to drop out of the skies into his lap.…

Working on a superlative piece of flaky cherry pie that went some small way toward brightening his mood, Mamoulian caught a stray phrase from one of his rural countermates:

“—book sale.”

Mamoulian turned to the local. Like so many of the valley’s residents, the man looked like some outdated funny-pages character, a homely archaic figure out of
Gasoline Alley, Terry and the Pirates, Polly and Her Pals
or
The Katzenjammer Kids
, as if the declining fortunes of the region had arrested the century’s transfiguring hand, leaving the natives in a pristine state of American innocence. Mamoulian’s prospective interlocutor resembled, of all people, Andy Gump.

“Did someone mention a book sale?”

“Sure did. Started a couple of hours ago, out at the Caxton Daye Academy. They’re looking to raise some money for renovations to the gym.”

“Whereabouts is this school?”

“Just head west when you leave here. You’ll see the sign.”

Mamoulian instantly paid his bill and departed without finishing his pie or coffee.

The road west of the diner trunked out into a leafy channel, and Mamoulian almost missed the shrubbery-concealed sign for the Caxton Daye Academy at the mouth of a badly paved drive. He swung a sharp left just in time, and motored up half a mile of degraded asphalt until a broad lawn opened up before him. The academy seemed to consist of a single large multistoried mansion at least a century and a half old, valiantly but ineffectively maintained, as well as several impoverished outbuildings. At this time of the year, no students roamed the grounds. Only three or four cars occupied the parking area. At least one of those had to belong to the person running the sale, making Mamoulian’s immediate competition look minimal—assuming some other dealer hadn’t arrived first thing and cleaned the place out.

The odors inside the building twanged chords within Mamoulian long unstrummed: decades of paste, wet galoshes, chalk and construction paper, not to mention the signature scent of old books. Unerringly, Mamoulian nosed along the strengthening scent gradient straight to the room hosting the sale. Presiding over boxes and card tables full of orderly ranks of books, three locals sat behind a long folding table, sipping coffee, chatting and eating donuts. A hand-lettered sign announced the sale’s prices: hardcovers, one dollar; paperbacks, fifty cents or three for a dollar. A lone old lady with purple hair rummaged among the cookbooks. Otherwise, Mamoulian was the only customer.

Mamoulian suppressed an impulse to chortle and rub his palms together like Snidely Whiplash. Jeez, a week in this Land That Time Forgot was starting to unhinge his mind! No matter what he found today, he’d have to head back home tonight, cut his losses and come up with some other money-making options.

With an expert’s eye, Mamoulian began to filter through the offerings like a whale sieving krill. A lot of the books were ex-library, bearing the stamp of the Caxton Daye Academy, which lowered their values considerably, but he nonetheless found quite a few good items among these discards, including, astoundingly, a copy of the first UK printing of Ballard’s
Empire of the Sun
($75 if fine, half of that in this condition). This odd synchronicity with his prized volume back home confirmed Mamoulian’s initial sense of his luck turning. Maybe his spontaneous departure from routine had been inspired after all.

A fair percentage of the volumes seemed to be donations unmarred by institutional stamps or card pockets. Among these, Mamoulian found a pleasing array of desirable stuff, including some Photoplays (but unfortunately not the
King Kong
one worth $1,500), the Armed Services paperback of Lovecraft’s
The Dunwich Horror
(at least $65), and—whoa, Nelly!—the Random House first edition of the John Holbrook mystery,
The Man in the Cage
($400). Within half an hour, he had accumulated two boxes of material worth at least twelve hundred dollars. His retail cost: thirty-five smackers.

Mamoulian lugged his purchases to the table where the organizers sat: two old gents wearing bowties and, despite the heat, sweater vests, flanking a trim middle-aged woman. His lust for books temporarily sated, Mamoulian spared some cursory attention for the woman. Despite her tightly pinned mousy hair, high-buttoned collar, Betty Crocker skirt and fuddy-duddy shoes, she wasn’t half bad-looking. Her pixyish face radiated a genuine pleasure in the simple act of reigning over this backwoods fundraiser. For a brief moment, Mamoulian actually envied her poise and serenity, her seeming happiness with her simple lot in life. Then he grimly pushed the feeling aside as she began to unpack the contents of his boxes in order to total his purchases. If she recognized any of these books as valuable and tried to jerk him around on the prices, she’d hear such a squawk about bait-and-switch tactics—

But the woman only smiled as she counted the spines, seemingly oblivious to titles, and said, “Quite a reader we have here.”

“Yeah, I spend a lot of lonely winter nights by the fireplace, just me and my Dickens.”

The old gents nodded sagely, and the woman’s smile broadened. “Oh, you love Dickens too! So do I! We have one of his first books in the Hemphill Collection. It’s not for sale, but if you’d like to see it, Mister—?”

“Mamoulian. Sure, I’d be happy to take a look.” Might as well humor the gal, now that he’d cleaned out her sale. Thirty-five dollars should buy at least a few shingles for the gym roof, right? Anyhow, she was probably inordinately proud of some tenth printing of some twentieth edition of A
Christmas Carol
, but Mamoulian would lay on the praise. Who knew, but this sale might become one of his regular stops.…

After money changed hands and Mamoulian’s books had been reboxed, the woman said, “Arthur, Fred, will you watch Mister Mamoulian’s purchases and handle the sale while we step away for a moment? Thank you so much.”

The woman led Mamoulian out a different door and down a dim corridor deeper in the academy. “My name’s Emily Lerner. I’m the librarian here. Have been for the past twenty years, and will be until I retire, I suppose. The job’s very satisfying, except of course for the lack of money.”

Growing impatient and not a little unnerved by the eerie quiet of the old building, Mamoulian was only half listening. “Yeah, salary’s always a bitch.”

“Oh, I wasn’t complaining about my wages. It’s true they’re low, but it doesn’t cost quite so much to live here in the valley as it does elsewhere. No, I was lamenting the relative lack of funding for new book purchases. Caxton Daye doesn’t exactly attract the children of privilege and their parents’ endowments. But that’s an old story. In fact, that’s how the Hemphill Collection first came about.”

Mamoulian made no reply to this gratuitous information, but simply followed Emily Lerner impatiently as she ushered him through another door—

—and straight into paradise.

* * *

Paradise was a small airless shadowy room where dust motes danced above a worn floor of wide wooden planks, the whole interior poorly illuminated by a series of porthole windows high up one wall.

Obviously, Mamoulian first observed, his awestruck brain working with some desperate attempt at objective precision, the single wall of shelves in the time-lost room held their contents not in alphabetical order, but in chronological sequence. The relatively drab books on the upper shelves were jacketless, leather-bound and gilt-lettered, as comfortingly bulky and solid as most other pre-twentieth-century artifacts—cast-iron stoves, say. As Mamoulian’s eyes traversed the shelves, left to right, up and down, straining to capture intriguingly suggestive names and titles, the books morphed sequentially into modern, more colorful shapes: trimmer, bejacketed, potentially lighter in heft. Eventually, after his stunned yet still avaricious gaze had raced over roughly a thousand books, he stopped at a couple of terminal volumes that might have come straight from the “new arrivals” table of a Barnes & Noble.

Like a sleepwalker, Mamoulian crossed the room to the shelves. As he got closer, names swam randomly into focus: Thackery, Eliot, Collins, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne, Stein, Poe, Colette, Twain, Faulkner, Alcott, Mailer, Kerouac, Hemingway— Dimly, he sensed the librarian of the Caxton Daye Academy, Emily Lerner, trailing him without speaking, as if respectful of his bibliogenic trance.

Mamoulian reached out for a volume spaced about midway on the shelves. He pinched it delicately and withdrew it reverently from its niche as if handling either a vial of nitroglycerin or the governor’s commutation of his death sentence. Where were his cloth curator’s gloves? Back in the van, of course, useless now. But he couldn’t tear himself away long enough to retrieve them. Cradling the handsome, well-preserved book as if it were a premature baby or the withered hand of his dying grandmother, Mamoulian opened its cover.

The inner pages confirmed this to be a Shakespeare and Company first edition of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
. That wasn’t a complete surprise, for Mamoulian had suspected as much from first sight of the book’s exterior, which he’d once seen in a Sotheby’s catalogue. But the presence of Joyce’s autograph below an inscription—”To Miss Rosemary Charcroft: long may you Bloom.”—was definitely not foreseen.