The Book of Air and Shadows (14 page)

T
HE
B
RACEGIRDLE
L
ETTER
(5)

C
rosetti, bearing the rolled and wrapped maybe-invaluable manuscript under his arm, waited out on the deserted street for nearly half an hour, which he thought excessive. What was she doing in there? Although he had occasionally waited as long for women to get ready to go out. Although they weren’t going to the prom. He looked at his watch and paced and felt the craziness pluck at his mind.

She emerged wearing one of her black outfits, as if going to Glaser’s to work, and he wondered why. Maybe Bulstrode insisted on a certain formality, in which case he would be disappointed in Crosetti, who needed a bath and a shave and was wearing a T-shirt from a Springsteen concert, grubby jeans, and Nikes. He did not, however, complain to her about the waiting.

Nor did she apologize. Instead, she nodded at him casually and started off. He did not ask any questions about their destination, resolving to play it cool. He could be an international man of mystery too. They walked to Van Dyke and took the 77 bus to the Smith Street station,
where they boarded the F train and rode noisily in silence to Manhattan. At Houston Street she got up and trotted from the car, and when he caught up with her he could not resist asking her about where they were going. Crosetti was not at heart cool.

“Mermelstein’s,” she answered. “They’re the last wholesaler of fine binding leather in the city.”

“They’ll sell you retail?”

“Mr. Mermelstein likes me.”

“Really. Does he…?” Crosetti made a pawing gesture. They were walking on the station steps, and she stopped abruptly and said, “He does not. You know, I’m really sorry I told you that about Sidney. Are you going to trot it out every time I mention a business connection with a man?”

“It’s erased from my mind as of this very minute,” said Crosetti, genuinely abashed, but also feeling a little manipulated. He also wondered why she was going to a wholesaler. Everyone in the old book trade in New York knew that the center of the bookbinding business was in Brooklyn, in Borough Park. He was about to ask her that but then stopped and figured it out for himself. Book dealers and major collectors had contacts among the regular bookbinders. If one of them were offered a Churchill
Voyages
at a fire-sale price, he’d check around with the bookbinder trade to see if the book had been doctored. It would not occur to any collector to imagine that the seller had done it solo, from raw materials. He was rather pleased with himself for having figured this out, any penetration of Rolly’s deviousness being to the good.

They walked east on Houston to an old commercial building near Second Avenue, where, in a pungent loft containing perhaps an acre of various animal skins, Crosetti leaned against a bale of the stuff and watched Rolly negotiate for a considerable time with an elderly man in a skullcap, a rusty black suit, and carpet slippers. They seemed to be having a good time, and Crosetti noticed with interest that Rolly had subtly changed her delivery. She smiled more with Mermelstein, actually laughed a time or two, and in general seemed a louder, more aggressive person than the one he knew, more…dare he think it?…more Jewish? Her speech had also taken on the pace and accent of the outer boroughs.

He remarked on this as they left with a small roll of fine calf wrapped in brown paper.

“Everybody does it,” she replied lightly. “You talk to someone, you take on a little of their shtick, their affect. Don’t you?”

“I guess,” he said, but thought, Yeah, but I’m something to begin with, and what, my sweet, are you? He rehearsed this line, thought about voicing it, declined. Instead he said, “So, where to now?”

“Take the F to Fourteenth Street and the Broadway train up to Columbia. We have an appointment with Dr. Bulstrode in forty-five minutes.”

“Can we get something to eat first? I haven’t had anything to eat since last night.”

“You ate all my cookies.”

“Oh, right, sorry. Your elderly cookies. Carolyn, what is going
on
with you? Why don’t you live like a regular person, with furniture and food in the house and pictures on the wall?”

She started walking toward the subway entrance. “I told you. I’m poor.”

He hurried to catch up with her. “You’re not
that
poor. You have a job. You make more than I do. Where does it go?”

“I don’t have a mother I can live with,” she said tightly.

“Thank you. That puts me in my place.”

“That’s right. I’m not sure you understand. I am
completely
alone in the world, with no backup at all. No brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, godfathers. I have a clerk’s salary with no benefits. If I got sick I’d be on the street. I’ve
been
on the street, and I’m not going to go back.”

“When were you on the street?”

“That’s none of your business. Why are you always so snoopy? It gets on my nerves.”

The train came and they boarded it. When they were under way and in the zone of privacy generated by the subway’s roar, he said, “I’m sorry. I get it from my mother. She sits down next to someone on the subway and in two stops they’re spilling their life’s story. You know, Carolyn, most people
like
to talk about themselves.”

“I know and I think it’s a waste of time, people blathering on about their hard luck. Or fishing for compliments. Oh, no, Gloria, you’re not really that fat. Oh, your son’s at Colgate? How proud you must be!”

“But that’s what people
do
. I mean what else do you talk about? Books? Bookbinding?”

“For starters. I told you I wasn’t a very interesting person, but you don’t seem to want to believe it.”

“You’re a fascinating person, in my opinion.”

“Don’t be stupid! I have a very dull life. I go to my job, I come home, I work at my craft, I count the days until I can get to a place where I can really learn what I’m interested in.”

“Movies,” said Crosetti. “We could talk about movies. What’s your favorite movie?”

“I don’t have one. I can’t afford to go to movies. And as you obviously know, I don’t own a television.”

“Come on, girl! Everybody has a favorite movie. You must have gone to movies in your hometown.” This got no response. He added, “Which was where?”

“Okay, what’s
your
favorite movie?” she asked without much interest, after a pause.

“
Chinatown
. You’re not going to tell me where you come from?”

“No place special. What’s it about?”

“What’s it about? You never saw
Chinatown
?”

“No.”

“Carolyn,
everybody
saw
Chinatown.
People who weren’t born when it came out saw
Chinatown
. There are movie houses in…in
Mogadishu
for crying out loud, that ran it for weeks. Best original screenplay ever written, won an Oscar for that, nominated for eleven other awards…how can you not have seen it? It’s a cultural monument.”

“Not of my culture, obviously. This is our stop.”

The train screamed to a halt at 116th Street and they left the car. She took off with her characteristic impatient stride, and he trotted after her, thinking that his initial impression of Carolyn Rolly as a vampire or
some other sort of unearthly creature had been fairly accurate, if she really hadn’t seen
Chinatown
.

They arose from the underground and walked through the noble gates into the Columbia campus. Crosetti had occasionally come up here to catch movies at film society showings and always felt, as he now did, a vague sense of regret. At age twelve his mother had brought him up to the campus and shown him around. She’d received her library science degree here, and he knew she had wanted him to attend. But he was not the kind of grind who could get the grades necessary for a white New Yorker to win a scholarship, and paying cash for an undergraduate degree on a cop’s pension and a librarian’s salary was out of the question. So he’d gone to Queens College, “a perfectly good school,” as his mother often loyally remarked, and also, “if you’re a success nobody cares where you went to college.” It did not rankle a lot, but it rankled; and on the occasions when he had to come up to the campus, he found himself studying the faces of the undergraduates and listening to snatches of their conversation to see if he could observe a major gap between their supposed Ivy-level smarts and his own. Which he could not.

Carolyn Rolly, he knew, had attended Barnard, just across the street. He knew because he was the filing system at Sidney Glaser Rare Books and had used this position to examine her résumé in detail. He did not at the moment think much of a Barnard education, since it had failed in her case to provide a familiarity with
Chinatown.
This was why she was so stuck-up, a Seven Sisters girl, after all, and probably brilliant too, since she said she was poor and clearly
she
hadn’t failed to get a scholarship.

In a mood to needle, he said, “So…back at the old campus, hey, Carolyn? I guess it brings those dear old Ivy League college days back. Look, if there’re any special customs like not walking on a particular plaque or bowing to a statue or something, you’ll let me know—I wouldn’t want to embarrass you or anything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You and your college days. Class of ’99, right? Barnard?”

“You think I went to
Barnard
?”

“Yeah, it was…” Here he stuck, but she instantly understood the reason.

“You little spy! You read my résumé!”

“Well, yeah. I told you I was interested. I went through your underwear drawer too while you were sleeping.”

At this he thought he noticed a look of real fear whip across her features, but it was gone in a flash, replaced by one of amused contempt. “I doubt that,” she said, “but for your information I didn’t go to Barnard.”

“You lied on your application?”

“Of course I lied. I wanted the job, and I knew Glaser was a Columbia alumnus and his wife went to Barnard, so it seemed like a good idea. I came up here, picked up some of the talk, learned the geography, audited a couple of classes, studied the catalogs. They never check résumés.
You
could say you went to Harvard. If you had, I bet Glaser would be paying you a lot more money.”

“Good God, Rolly! You don’t have any morals at all, do you?”

“I don’t do any harm,” she said, glaring. “I don’t even have a
high school
diploma, and I don’t want to work in a sweatshop or do cleaning, which is the only kind of jobs a woman can get without one. Or whore.”

“Wait a minute,
everyone
goes to high school. It’s compulsory.”

She stopped walking and turned to face him, dropped her head for several breaths, and then looked him straight in the face. “Yes,” she said, “but in my case, when my parents were killed in a car wreck I went to live with my crazy uncle Lloyd, who kept me locked in a root cellar from age eleven to age seventeen, as a result of which I didn’t have the opportunity to attend high school. I got raped a lot though. Now, is there anything else you’d like to know about my goddamned past life?”

Crosetti gaped and felt his face flush. He could see liquid trembling on her lower eyelids. “I’m sorry,” he croaked. She turned and strode rapidly away, almost running, and after a miserable moment he skulked after her into a tan brick building with a columned entryway and up two flights of stairs, stumbling a little because he was kicking himself so hard. Okay, end of story, expunge her from his mind, he’d done it God only knew how
many times before, no stranger to rejection, not usually
quite
this stupid, not
quite
so much his own stupid fault, but still he could go out classy, do this business with Bulstrode, a little correct nod and handshake afterward, walk off. God! How could he have been so tooth-hurtingly dumb! Woman tells him she doesn’t want to talk about her past, so of course he does nothing else, and…but here they were, she knocking tap-a-tap on frosted glass and a plummy voice from within, “Yeh-ehss.”

The man was wearing a vest, or what he would have called a waistcoat, and as they entered he was slipping on the brown tweed suit jacket that went with it: a short plump man in his fifties, with smooth dull pale brown hair worn medium long and arranged so as to hide a bald patch in the center. Jowly, with round tortoiseshell glasses. Hand when shaken unpleasantly soft and moist. Crosetti hated him already; it made a pleasant change from the current self-contempt.

They sat. She did the talking. Bulstrode was interested in the provenance, the age and origin of the volumes of the Churchill in which the manuscript had been found. She gave these details tersely and, as far as Crosetti could tell, accurately. While this went on he looked around the office, which was small, not much larger than a suburban bathroom, with one dusty window looking out on Amsterdam Avenue. A single glassed-in bookcase, books on only one shelf, otherwise full of stacked papers, untidily arranged. Besides that, two wooden armchairs (in which Rolly and he were sitting), a standard wooden desk somewhat battered, a scatter of papers and journals thereon, and a large framed photograph, whose image Crosetti could not see, although he shifted and peered to the extent propriety allowed.

“Very interesting, Miss Rolly,” the professor was now saying. “May I examine the documents?”

Both Rolly and Bulstrode now looked at Crosetti, and he felt his heart sink, as we do when an unfamilar doctor asks us to slip out of our clothes and into a gown. The papers were
his
, and now they were passing out of his hands, to be confirmed as genuine or rejected as spurious, but by someone else, someone he didn’t know, whose eyes were all funny behind those thick lenses, avid, crazed really, and Rolly’s eyes were
blank blue fields with less feeling in them than the sky itself, and he had to resist the urge to grab up his package and flee. But what he did was to pull out only the letter from Richard Bracegirdle to his wife. It was easy to distinguish these pages by feel from the rest of the sheets. Let’s see what this geek had to say about the letter before exposing the ciphered letters was Crosetti’s thinking.