The Secret of Lost Things

I couldn’t imagine what she’d done, or what I’d done to want her rid of me. I had no money for school. I had no means to travel. I had nothing, so far as I could see, but her affection for me, a box of ashes, and a black-and-white photograph of someone I had loved more than life.

“Come on, why don’t you guess?”

I couldn’t guess. I had that new, hurtling feeling again, the rapid and unpredictable movement of events coming toward me, like getting into a car after a lifetime spent walking. I thought I’d just stay in Tasmania with Chaps, that she’d teach me the book trade. That I’d live as she did, quietly and in my head.

“I’ve bought you a ticket to…” she paused dramatically, and with an uncharacteristic flourish.

“New York!”

I dropped the leaf, sat back on my heels and, after a confusing moment, burst into tears.

“Now, now. I’m not throwing you out, my dear Rosemary.” Chaps bent across and patted my shoulder, my back. She was awkward with affectionate gestures. Her voice remained firm.

“Out of tears, plans!” she said, and handed me the handkerchief she kept folded and tucked inside the sleeve of her cardigan. I never carried one.

I wiped my eyes and nose.

“There now, dear. If you really think about it you’ll see you’re ready to go. The best is not past. Your mother’s death is a break in your life but your life is not broken. You can mend it by living it, by living a different life than either you or your mother imagined.”

“I have imagined it though, Chaps,” I said, thickly. I had, but I was afraid. More than I’d ever been. “I want to leave and travel. I want to discover things, to know things. But I’m frightened. And now you’ve gone and sorted it out for me. You’ve taken away my excuse.” I blew my nose on her handkerchief.

“I’ve done nothing but make the decision for you about where to start, Rosemary. And that was easy because of your scrapbook, all those pictures of New York, of cities. I thought you must have always intended to go there, making a fetish of the place, collecting up clippings and things since you were small. All I’ve done is give you a push. I’m sure your mother would have done the same thing.”

Chaps herself became a little teary. But she was vehement, too.

“You have to get away, Rosemary. You must go abroad! It’s what I would have done, my girl, in a minute, if I’d had the chance.”

Her filmy gray eyes locked on mine. Chaps could be fierce. “It never came for me, Rosemary. The chance to really make a break, to leave and not look back. Now you must go. You must begin! It’s what your mother would want for you, my dear Rosemary. What I want for you. A larger world. You know now where to start. We’ve a couple of weeks left together to arrange everything.”

New York was a fantasy. It was Sydney multiplied, which was all I could imagine then of a great city from the peculiar vantage of Tasmania. It was true I had kept a scrapbook of images since I was small, and many were of New York, but that fact was secondary to the freedom the pictures represented. Liberation was in the very scale of the city: a goldfish bowl one could never grow to fit. I had postcards of tall buildings sharp against the sky, of the magnificent interiors of train stations and libraries illuminated by slanting shafts of light. Spaces between pictures I had filled with bits of ribbon, buttons, and flakes of colored felt.

I hadn’t consciously imagined traveling to New York, or to any other city but Sydney, while Mother was alive. But Chaps had guessed the shape of my deepest wish: I thought my father lived in a city. I didn’t know where. A place free and anonymous and far away. The opposite of Mother. Father could only be foreign. Unknown and mysterious.

My father was a city; the scrapbook my attempt to make him real. In the absence of an actual photograph, any one of the faceless men in the postcards or newspaper clippings of cities could be him. Many of the images were old street scenes, and Mother used to say, “Look at all the men wearing hats! Those were the days to be in business!”

She never guessed at my real interest—I didn’t know it myself. My father was in a city, any city, and I was collecting evidence, clues to his existence. He had long before suffered a sea change.

As Mother gave me no tangible detail of him to build upon, my fancy was as real to me as any fact. She barely knew him, and what she did know she’d kept to herself, would keep to herself, forever.

How much Esther Chapman did for me, letting me go as she did! As a reader of fables, she must have recognized that I would need one of my own. An antidote to catastrophe. My world had been emptied of all its contents, save her, and she knew a city would be the cure to the small life I had lived, the one I’d lost.

But it was myself I was calling into being.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_e047122c-add3-5b3b-beea-7f0733c30154)

I arrived in New York late at night, unprepared for a life I only dimly suspected might be found there. A storm caused the plane to land roughly. I never saw my destination; clouds covered the city, the ground visible only moments before the plane’s wheels struck it. I felt myself land hard, as if thrown to earth.

I had three hundred dollars. In my suitcase, underneath my clothes, lay my scrapbook and Mother’s photograph. At the airport, with tears on her cheeks, Chaps had pressed upon me two presents: a green stone necklace (the color of my eyes) which she assured me was an amulet against further heartbreak, and a small book—her very favorite, she claimed—wrapped in her store’s bluish paper. I couldn’t bear to open the package, the Chapman’s Bookshop paper as dear and familiar to me as the wallpaper in my childhood bedroom, in fact, its surrogate. I told Chaps that I would keep her parcel intact, waiting for the day that I desperately needed a present. I didn’t doubt it would come, and for the moment, travel was gift enough. The necklace, though, I put on immediately. A guard against heartbreak couldn’t wait.

Mother’s ashes were covered in an orange scarf at the bottom of a carry-on I was reluctant to put down.

My arrival was not auspicious. The rain continued, veiling the city, and when the taxi I took from the airport tried to deposit me in front of the residential hotel Chaps had booked, it appeared to no longer be in business. I couldn’t have known it, but I had arrived in the final year of a difficult decade for the city. New York itself was stirring from years of financial hardship, and many inexpensive hotels then housed residents permanently courtesy of the state.

Terrified, I agreed to an additional fare and the driver took me further downtown to a hotel he knew was cheap and, he said, safe. The Martha Washington Hotel for Women had a dingier address (29 East Twenty-ninth Street or 30 East Thirtieth street, depending on the entrance), but it was open, with a room vacant at the right price. There was little evidence that it had once been an impressive establishment, even prosperous, with many rooms. Built in 1902, the hotel was now dilapidated. More than seven decades after it opened, the upper floors were closed off for repairs that would never eventuate. The restaurant had been shuttered for thirty years.

A woman sat behind the battered reception counter watching a tiny black-and-white television, connected by twin earplugs. She was striking and dark, about sixty, with aristocratic features. After I had her attention, she explained the hotel requirements in heavily accented English: payment a week in advance, linens changed once a week, no guests in the rooms, no smoking, no cooking, no noise.

I had no intention of breaking any rules. I was barely eighteen years old, absent Mother and country, soaking wet, and so bereft that I sagged inside my damp clothes, shrunken and childlike.

I paid the taxi driver, handed over one week’s rent and staggered to my room at the end of a shadowy corridor. I took the Huon box from my bag and placed it beside my pillow.

“Come back,” I said aloud to Mother, my voice thin and trembling. “Come to me here.”

It was hours before I slept, kept awake by sadness, by anxiety, and by cars passing on the avenue, their headlights flashing in the room like counterfeit lightning, tires plashing into potholes where rainwater pooled.

A hot June sun appeared the following day, the weather surprisingly steamy. I spent that early summer week trying to stay out of the dun-colored room as much as possible. The room was fetid by early afternoon. A single, clouded window, with bars across it, faced the bed. I had to keep the window closed against the street noise and also because this wing of the Martha Washington was downwind from an Indian restaurant on the next block.

At first, I shared a grubby bathroom with two women along the same corridor, although they might as well have been phantoms. They banged around slamming doors and drawers, but I never once saw either of them except from behind—in retreat. They soon disappeared altogether, a fate I feared awaited every fresh arrival to the city. If I sat in the room during hot daylight hours I felt I had been sealed into my predicament, held inside a shrinking box, with no escape but sleep. I woke early, claimed the bathroom first, and promptly ventured out. My life depended on it.

The dark lady of the reception desk appeared to live at the Martha Washington. I heard her speak Spanish to a stern man I gathered was the owner, and I called hello to her each day as I left to investigate the city, as much to speak aloud as politeness. But after several days without acknowledgment, I stopped. She was either too intent on the television or hard of hearing. Or perhaps she simply didn’t care to answer.

The labyrinthine city waited. It anticipated me. I was swallowed whole, surrounded by a populace buzzing and purposeful, a remedy for grief and a goad to it. I was utterly alone, and lived at first without the imposition of order, too scattered and overwhelmed to effect any. I recognized no vista. No building was familiar, apart from the iconic Empire State and the Chrysler (motifs of my scrapbook), but even those were unrecognizable from my altered perspective on the ground. I forgot to eat, and an entire day would pass before I spoke out loud. Even then it might just be an acknowledgment of thanks, or a plain request: “Could I have milk in my tea, please?” My own voice was alien and took my ear strangely. No one addressed me, no one knew my name, and my anonymity was at times a raw joy in my chest, freedom at its most literal, while at others, a source of paralyzing fear. I didn’t know then that this was how deep emotion most often comes, from opposite directions and at once, when you are least aware and farthest from yourself.

I did know profound dislocation, and had to remind myself that the young woman I caught sight of in store windows was me. She had no family. No one expected her home. Yet she existed. There she was reflected in the glass, her wild red hair on end as if with fright.

I needed money and I needed work. I had to know who I might become. I walked and walked around the immediate neighborhood, tracing a large circle, the Martha Washington and Twenty-ninth Street the fixed foot of my compass. I was searching for something I recognized, apart from what I found in my own face, for a sense of the familiar in the unaccustomed.

By odd happenstance I had landed at the eastern edge of New York’s garment district. The streets surrounding the Martha Washington were known for their small accessory suppliers, and tiny storefronts displayed crowded windows full of hats and caps, wigs and handbags, sparkling appliqués and notions of all kinds. It was as if Mother had herself selected the location of my first residence without her. There was a looking-glass quality, almost antipodean, to my immediate location. Mother and Remarkable Hats, the Foys workroom, were far away on the other side of all things, and yet in New York I was surrounded by their emblems.

I ventured farther downtown and actually walked passed the Arcade on several occasions without realizing what it was—the largest used-book store in the city. I hadn’t heard of its reputation for housing lost things: books once possessed and missed or never possessed and longed for. I hadn’t read Herman Melville; only his famous name was familiar (just another on the rather limited stock list at Chapman’s Bookshop). And I knew nothing whatsoever of the value of rare manuscripts. I fancied bookstores were generally similar to each other, in their way. But the Arcade was of an altogether different order; and because then I was in every sense lost, once I was inside, it proved irresistible.

The Arcade’s charm is oddly absolute, but that day it was also intensely personal. Walking into the store, I had walked into an image from my postcard collection, into a picture pasted in my scrapbook. I was inhabiting space I thought imaginary. In this way, I had the distinct impression that I had conjured the Arcade up, had made it appear, a whole cloth woven from unexpressed need.

From the unimpressive entrance, the ceiling rises in an enormous curve toward the rear of the store, a sweep of space that lifts one’s eyes upward in search of another firmament. Of course, there isn’t one; the ceiling is just a deep, dusty dome, like the inside of a skull. (Both are vaults, both repositories of knowledge). How could so slight a portal reveal so impressive a space? It occurred to me that I had been tricked into entering.

Understand, the Arcade is itself a city; itself an island. That bookstores are such places is always hoped for, but the Arcade is like the original wish behind such hopes. In that first visit New York was made actual. The Arcade was population, mass, was the accomplishment of a city. Books were stacked like the teeming New Yorkers, invisible inside their buildings, but sensed as bees in a hive. The hum of life issuing from the crowds that filled the city I had begun to experience, but in the Arcade that buzzing life was made calculable in things. Chaps always told Mother and me books were minds on the shelf. Here it was true: books didn’t seem inanimate; a kind of life rose from the piles heaped on tables before me.

I moved toward a laden table and placed my hand upon the closest stack, listening, waiting. I recall it exactly. An opening, a beginning. I must work here, I thought. I will. Less an act of confidence than of will. I surprised myself.

I looked around in the soft, faded light. I wasn’t startled by the Arcade’s shabby randomness, by the small areas of order within a more general chaos; by its filth, its quiet, and its occasional bursts of jarring sound. Or by the precariousness of book stacks which seemed to lean, without regard to gravity, toward some apprehended but unseen center. I was at home. Dust filtered what sunlight made its way through two dirty windows. Huge, dim lights hung by heavy chains above customers’ heads, bent in concentration.

Turning to the entrance, I checked that outside on the avenue it was actually a sunny, ordinary day in late June. Inside, it was cool and obscurely timeless.

I edged along goat-track passages winding between stacks, only navigable foot in front of foot, a few inches at a time, trying to avoid piles of titles stacked and leaning against spine-out-only shelves. I stopped before a raised platform, an oasis of space amid the clutter. A small man stood behind its oak railing, elevated higher than even the tallest customer. He was pricing old books, but his compelling gestures suggested a priest at a lectern. The brass name plate that faced the store from his oak desk shone: GEORGE PIKE, PROPRIETOR.

His gestures were practiced and repetitive. A stack of volumes sat to Pike’s left. He took a book from the top of that pile, frowned, ran his eyes over the binding, checking for rips or nicks. Then, quickly and elegantly, he flipped to the title page, his eyes scanned the copyright, his thumb fanned rapidly along the edges of the entire book. Reaching the end, he closed the volume, only to reopen it at the first page. He took a pencil from behind his ear and lightly scribbled in the upper-right-hand corner, tracing a looping filigree. He returned the pencil above his ear and rubbed his index finger beneath his nose. He then unfrowned his forehead, set the volume to his right and, having priced the book, immediately reached for another at his left.

He repeated these actions as a single gesture, without variation. It was unconscious; a rough magic. There seemed no moment for contemplation, for the weighing of competing possibilities. Pike alone appeared the arbiter, the heart of the enterprise.