The Book of Air and Shadows (8 page)

T
he crying lasted for approximately five minutes and ended in a series of deep shuddering breaths. Crosetti asked Carolyn what was wrong several times, but received no answer; as soon as the spasms had died down she pulled away from him and vanished behind the bathroom partition. He heard water running, footsteps, the delightful swishing sounds of a girl changing clothes. She's slipping into something more comfortable, thought Crosetti with unaccustomed anticipation.

But when she emerged, he found that she was dressed in a gray mechanic's coverall with her hair tightly bound up in an indigo scarf, below which her face had been scrubbed clean of even the light makeup she normally wore. Upon it no trace of the recent outburst. She looked like a prisoner or a nun.

"Feeling better?" he asked as she walked by him, but she didn't answer. Instead, she began to replace the blotting paper in the wet books.

He walked over and started to pull sodden toweling out of volume three. After a few minutes of silent working he said, "And…?"

No response.

“Carolyn?”

“What?”

“Are we going to talk about what just went down?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you going hysterical just now.”

“I wouldn’t call it going hysterical. I get a little weepy when I drink.”

“A little
weepy
?” He stared at her and she stared back at him. Aside from a slight reddening of her eyelids there was no sign she had ever been anything but cool Carolyn Rolly. Who said, coolly, “I’m sorry if I disturbed you. I really don’t want to discuss it, if you don’t mind,” and returned to her work.

Crosetti had to be content with that. Clearly, there was to be no leap into intimacy, no sharing of dark secrets, and no further physical contact. They worked in silence. Crosetti cleaned up the scant debris of their supper and the used paper towels. Rolly sat on a stool and did arcane things with her medieval tool-kit and the half-ruined books.

Something at a loss, Crosetti retrieved the manuscript pages, now barely damp, and spread them out on the kitchen counter and the spool table. He grabbed a magnifying glass from Rolly’s worktable and examined a page at random. Some of the letters were obvious—the vowels were similar to modern ones, and short familiar words like
the
and
to
could be picked out easily. But actually reading the thing was another matter. Many of the words seemed to be mere sawtooth swiggles, and there were enough completely indecipherable letters to obscure the meaning of well over half the words. Besides that, several of the sheets seemed to be inscribed in some unfamiliar foreign tongue, but he couldn’t be sure of that because the orthography was so difficult to make out. Was he really seeing such a word as
hrtxd
? Or
yfdpg
?

He decided to ignore the text and focus on the fabric and character of the sheets. All forty-eight were folio sized, and they appeared to fall into three classes. The first, consisting of eighteen sheets of fine thin paper, were closely written, neatly but with many crossed-out words and lines; they had at one time been deeply creased both vertically and horizontally.

The second group consisted of twenty-six sheets of heavier paper, inscribed on both sides, and on these the writing was larger and messier, with a number of blots: despite this, it was written—at least to Crosetti’s inexperienced eye—in the same hand used on the first eighteen sheets. On each page of this second group, the paper was evenly punctured along one side, as if it had been torn out of a book. Another peculiarity of this set is that they seemed to be overwritten upon faded brownish columns of figures. The word
palimpsest
popped into Crosetti’s mind, and gave him an obscure satisfaction, although he understood that this was not a true example: palimpsests were normally parchment, where an old manuscript had been scraped down to make way for new text. But clearly this set of pages had been written on paper pressed into duty at need. The remaining four were the pages that had correction marks in pencil, and were clearly a different sort of paper and in a different hand. Crosetti held each of the pages up to the overhead lights and confirmed his guess: three different watermarks. The eighteen sheets of fine paper were marked with a curled post horn and the letters A and M; the twenty-six punctured sheets were marked with some sort of coat of arms; and the last four bore a crown.

But how did this collection wind up padding a binding in the mid-eighteenth century? Crosetti imagined a bookbindery of that era. There was a bale of wastepaper by the binder’s table, a table probably not very different from the one at which Rolly now worked under the light of an articulated desk lamp, her slim neck shone bright and vulnerable against the dark matte of her scarf. It would have been stout English oak, scarred and stained, instead of laminated pallet-wood. The bookbinder sitting before it would have reached into the stack and pulled out six sheets, trimmed them to size with a razor knife against a steel rule, and laid them neatly against the boards.

It was just sheer luck, thought Crosetti, that so many sheets of what seemed to be from the same hand had ended up in this copy of the Churchill
Voyages
; but on second thought, maybe not. He imagined some old guy dying, and the widow or the heirs deciding to clean out the deceased’s papers. They stack it all in bundles on the front step and send
a kid to fetch the dealer in old paper, who comes, makes an offer, and carries the stuff away. Now they’ll have room for a proper pantry, says the heir’s wife, all that dusty old rubbish, pooh! And the old-paper guy tosses the bale into his bin, and after a while, he gets an order from a London bindery, regular customer, say, for a bale of scrap paper…

And because the pages with the pencil marks were not written in the same hand, the binder must have by chance mixed some unconnected printer’s copy in with the scrap from Crosetti’s tidying heiress. Yes, it could have happened that way, and this thought made him happy: he did not desire a miscellany, but a discovery. Although it was giving him a headache now, the peering through the glass, the way the black-brown squiggles refused to surrender their meaning. He put the magnifier down and walked the length of the loft.

“Do you have any aspirin?” he asked Rolly, and he had to ask twice. “No,” said Rolly, in a near-snarl.

“Everyone has aspirin, Carolyn.”

She threw down the tool she was using, sighed dramatically, dismounted her stool, strode away, and returned with a plastic bottle that she shoved into his hand so hard it rattled like a tiny castanet. Motrin.

“Thank you,” he said formally and took three at the kitchen sink. Ordinarily he would have reclined in a quiet place until the pounding pain ceased, but chez Rolly had no comfortable seating, and he was wary of using her bed. He sat therefore on a kitchen chair and was glum and shuffled the sheaves of old paper. Were Carolyn Rolly an actual sane human person, he thought, we could puzzle this out together, she probably has books on watermarks and Jacobean secretary hand or at least she knows more about this shit than I do….

But as soon as he had this thought, he brightened and drew his cell phone from his pocket. He checked his watch. Not eleven yet. At eleven his mother watched the
Tonight Show
and would not answer the phone during that hour to hear of the Apocalypse, but now she’d be in her lounger with a book.

“It’s me,” he said when she answered.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in Red Hook, at Carolyn Rolly’s place.”

“She lives in Red Hook?”

“It’s gentrifying, Ma.”

“It’s dockies and gangsters. Why is a classy girl like that living in Red Hook?” Mrs. Crosetti had met Carolyn on several occasions, at the shop, and delivered this assessment to her boy afterward, with the implication, like a thrown brick, that if he had any sense, he would put on some moves. She resumed, with a hopeful note, “And how come you’re there? You got something going with her.”

“I don’t, Ma. It’s the fire. She had to work on some heavy books at her place—she’s kind of an amateur bookbinder—and I helped her carry them over here from the city.”

“And you hung around after.”

“We ate. I’m just about to leave.”

“So I shouldn’t rent the hall. Or alert Father Lazzaro.”

“I don’t think so, Ma. Sorry. Look, why I called…do you know anything about seventeenth-century watermarks, or Jacobean secretary hands? I mean how to decipher them?”

“Well, for the secretary hand, that would be Dawson and Kennedy-Skipton,
Elizabethan Handwriting,
1500–1650. It’s a manual, although I understand there’s some good stuff on the Web, more like interactive tutorials. For the watermarks, there’s Gravell…no, wait, Gravell starts at 1700; just a second, let me think…oh, right, it’d be Heawood,
Watermarks Mainly of the
17
th and
18
th Centuries
. What’s this about?”

“Oh, we found some old manuscript in the covers of a book she wants to repair. I’d like to find out what it is.” He wrote the references down on a Visa counterfoil from his wallet.

“You should talk to Fanny Doubrowicz at the library. I’ll call her for you if you want.”

“No, thanks. It’s probably not worth her time until I know if it’s not just an old shopping list or something. Part of it, some pages, are in a foreign language.”

“Really? Which one?”

“I can’t tell. A funny one, anyway, not French or Italian—more like Armenian or Albanian. But that could just be because I can’t really read the script.”

“Interesting. Good. Anything to keep that brain working. I wish you’d go back to school.”

“Ma, that’s what I’m doing. I’m saving money to go to school.”

“I mean real school.”

“Film school
is
real school, Ma.”

Mrs. Crosetti said nothing, but her son could well imagine the expression on her face. That she herself had not settled down to what became her profession until she was years older than he was now did not signify. She would have helped him pay for serious grad school, but making movies? No, thank you! He sighed and she said, “I got to go. You’ll be home late?”

“Maybe real late. We’re interleaving wet books.”

“Really? Why don’t you use a vacuum? Or just send them to Andover?”

“It’s complicated, Ma. Anyway, Carolyn’s in charge. I’m just the help.” He heard music faintly in the background and applause, and she said good-bye and hung up. It never failed to astonish him that a woman whose profession had given her an immense store of knowledge and who typically finished the
Times
Sunday crossword in twenty-two minutes could waste her time watching a celebrity gabfest and listen to a moderately talented comedian tell a skein of leaden topical jokes, but she never missed an evening. She said it made her feel less lonely at night, and he supposed that lonely people were in fact the main audience for such shows. He wondered if Rolly watched the
Tonight Show.
He had not seen a television in the place. Maybe vampires didn’t get lonely.

Crosetti rose from the terrible chair and stretched. Now his back ached too. He checked his watch and walked the length of the loft to where Rolly was still bent over her tasks.

“What?” she said as he drew near.

“It’s time to change the blotter. What’re you doing?”

“I’m putting the cover of volume four back together. I’m going to have to completely replace the covers on volumes one and two, but I
think I can get the stains out of this one.”

“What’re you using to replace the manuscript pages as backing?”

“I have some contemporary folio scrap.”

“Just happen to have it around, eh?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” she snapped back. “There’s a lot of it available from books broken for their maps and plates. Who were you talking to on the phone?”

“My mom. Look”—he gestured to the walls of bookcases—“do you happen to have a book about watermarks? I have a reference…” He reached for his wallet.

“Well, I have Heawood, of course.”

Unfolding the counterfoil and smiling: “Of course. How about Dawson and Kennedy-Skipton?”

“That too.”

“I thought you weren’t a paleographer.”

“I’m not, but Sidney asked me to take a course on incunabula and early manuscripts and I did. Everyone in that field uses D & K-S.”

“So you can read this stuff?”

“A bit. It was some years ago.” Here again he heard a tone creep into her voice that discouraged probing.

“Can I take a look at those books after we do the interleaving?”

“Sure,” she said, “but early secretary hand is a bear. It’s like learning to read all over again.” They changed the blotters and then she extracted the two books from her shelves. She went back to work at her table and he sat down with the guidebooks at the spool table.

It
was
a bear. As the foreword to D & K-S has it, “The Gothic cursive hands of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries in England and elsewhere in Europe are among the hardest to read of all the scripts normally considered by paleographers.” Crosetti learned that the contemporaries of Elizabeth and James I made no distinction between
n
and
u
, or
u
and
v
or
i
and
j
, nor did they dot their
is. S
appeared in two different forms, and
r
in four, and there were strange ligatures tying
h
and
s
and
t
to other letters, distorting the shapes of each. They punctuated and spelled as they pleased, and to save expensive parchment they had invented dozens of incompre
hensible abbreviations, which had remained in common use even when paper came in. Doggedly, however, he applied himself to the exercises provided by the manual, starting with Sir Nicholas Bacon’s
An Exhortacion gyuen to the Serieaunts when they were sworne in the Chauncery in Anno domini
1559. By the time he had reached line three, checking nearly every word against the translation provided, it was well past midnight. Rolly was still at her task, and he thought that if he could just rest his eyes and his aching back for a few moments he would get a second wind. He slipped off his sneakers and lay down on one edge of the pallet.