The Secret of Lost Things

“There’s even some pots under here you can boil up water when you need a bath,” Rowena threw in.

After the Martha Washington, the squalid look of the place didn’t bother me. In fact, in some perverse way it fit my developing ideas about bohemian life, about the requirements of adventure. Besides, I reasoned, I had always lived above a store, and while Mother would have been appalled at the place, something in its aspect reminded me of the flat above Remarkable Hats.

“I collect the rent,” Jack said. “Fifty a week. But I need a deposit as well. Four hundred’ll do up front. That’s including the first month. Right? I’m to mail it to me friend.”

I would need more than four hundred dollars to move in. I had to sleep on something, and clean the place. I didn’t have the money.

“If you can’t manage it, I know someone else who can,” Rowena threatened, sealing the deal.

“I’ll take it,” I told them, wanting to move in right then, and lock the door against Jack and Rowena. Once I was alone I could worry about the fact that the small amount of money I had saved wouldn’t cover what Jack wanted up front.

“Can you give me a few days to get the money together?” I asked.

“Sure, love.” Jack grinned at me crookedly. “Day after tomorrow? So’s we can start with October’s rent.”

I couldn’t ask Chaps for money. It would have taken too long to arrive, for one thing; and she’d done too much for me already, and asking would only worry her. The day after I saw the apartment I discussed it, and my lack of funds, with Oscar.

“I’m not sure you want someone like Jack as a landlord,” he warned. “How can you be sure he’s honest?”

“But I haven’t found anything else, and really, Oscar, it’s perfect for me. I’ll fix it up. I just have to figure out how to get the money.”

“I shouldn’t tell you this, but I have known, on rare occasions, of Walter Geist pressing Pike for an advance on behalf of an employee in need. You know, a small sum, a loan against future wages. You have to sign an agreement, and the amount is deducted in small increments on a weekly basis. Pike, of course, adds interest: ten percent of the loan, spread over the length of time the amount is to be paid.”

Oscar sounded very familiar with what he had described as a rare practice. I suspect he was himself indentured by debt to Pike.

“I can’t ask Mr. Geist for a loan,” I said, loath to appeal to the store manager. But without a loan I couldn’t leave the Martha Washington for several more months, and by that time the apartment would be gone.

That afternoon, I came upon Walter Geist reading in Oscar’s section. He stood holding a book no more than an inch from his face. Watching him, I thought he brought a certain amount of dignity to this close inspection. His dreadful eyesight made him appear momentarily vulnerable and, with his swimming eyes, peculiarly appealing.

He must have sensed he was being watched, for he closed the book with a thud, peered around nervously, and assumed his ill-favored demeanor. He hadn’t seen me, but I had a fleeting glimpse of the expression on his face. He had the look of a child braced for a slap. Was it Pike who’d etched this expression on Geist’s face, in the way a volatile parent draws pain as plainly as if with a crayon? Theirs was an intense relationship, often conducted in stage whispers and emphatic sentences. I couldn’t have guessed at their bond, but knew that whatever held them, it was a fierce allegiance.

But in catching Walter Geist unawares, I had also seen something of his terrible defenselessness. His albinism, of course, meant that he was subject to all manner of vulnerability. He was trapped within a skin that appalled by its very perfection, but he was not without a strange draw. It was beneath another’s gaze that distortion occurred. Contempt becomes stronger by becoming more precise, and Geist’s whiteness served as a nexus for those that despised the strange.

My own experience with marginality didn’t give me any insight into what Geist suffered. I was a willing émigré to New York, after all, whereas he was marked by birth to always be an exile. Like much of my understanding, it was through fiction that I gained a sense of his truth. And it was Herman Melville, in particular, that gave me an intimation of Geist’s terrible distinction, and the abhorrence it evoked in others.

PART TWO (#ulink_9ef04e5c-5dd0-5b4d-bb13-4021039cee2a)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_45ba75a4-a972-59ec-9fdb-d1f8d1be3412)

They’re a peculiar pair, Oscar, don’t you think?” I asked after watching Geist, and puzzling over him. “Pike and Geist. A strange couple of fellows.”

“Oh, Rosemary, d’you think they’re any more peculiar than anyone else who works here? What’s strange anyway?” Oscar asked rhetorically. “Perhaps it’s all just strange to you because you’re a stranger—in New York, I mean. To some people a young girl with wild red hair from Tasmania, with no parents, who lived above a hat shop her whole life, is unusual.”

“I suppose,” I said. “But I don’t seem the least bit unusual to myself.”

“Well, you wouldn’t, of course. Any more than I seem odd to myself, or even Walter seems to himself. Really, though,” Oscar conceded, “I suppose Walter truly is unusual. Can’t help but be.”

“I saw him in your section, reading with a book inches from his face,” I said. “I thought I might ask him, you know, about the loan. But he seemed so intent, and so…well, vulnerable, I didn’t want to disturb him. It occurred to me he needed privacy.”

What I didn’t tell Oscar was that I saw something in him revealed, as if I’d seen him naked.

“He’s often in my section,” Oscar confirmed. “But I can’t help him much with the books he’s after. I don’t have much that’s current on the brain, or neurology. He also wants books on anthropology, but anything current just doesn’t come into a place like the Arcade. I have something intriguing on phrenology, but of course that’s very out of date, although not without interest…”

His voice trailed off as if his mind was following another, more interesting thought, and his hand stroked his own head, perhaps attempting to read his prominent occipital bone. Was he feeling for indications of adhesiveness?

“How long has Mr. Geist been here, Oscar?” I asked, trying to bring him back to the subject.

Oscar didn’t know exactly how long Geist had worked at the Arcade; but having spent his own adolescence in correspondence with either Pike or Mr. Mitchell, searching for books to satisfy his peculiar interests, he assumed Walter Geist was older than he was. Geist was actually not much past forty, despite the quaint figure he cut, which gave him an eternally aged aspect.