The Secret of Lost Things

“I wouldn’t be boasting about that, Bruno, if I were interested in keeping my job.”

Geist had appeared behind me; he was always sneaking around, his sibilant voice making the hair on my neck stand up, his whiteness like a visible reproach.

“That’s Pike concern, not yours,” Bruno said contemptuously, and stalked off.

“I’d keep away from that one,” Geist warned, standing uncomfortably close to me. “An-nasty P-piece of work,” he stuttered slightly. “Come to me if he gives you any trouble.”

I watched him bump into a table as he headed back to the basement, and I imagined he was returning to the bottom of the sea.

Pearl Baird, the cashier, was, apart from Geist, Pike’s most trusted staff member on the main floor. I loved her. She had taken the name Pearl after the biblical parable, and indeed she gave everything she had to become her female self, to become Pearl. Sitting behind the register, the no-nonsense slash of her lips a brilliant vermilion, she was unconcerned by the repetitive nature of her task.

Life had taught her patience.

Although she had a loving nature, Pearl was steely in her contempt for restless customers who often hurled down the books they had been holding for far too long, belligerently tossing cash or credit cards at her. Pearl took her time to open each cover, look for the price and punch it into the register, her extended finger tipped with a long nail. (She took pride in her nails and frequently changed the vivid polish). She muttered things like “Swine before Pearl!” at the most unpleasant types, but her air of superiority was mostly comment enough.

“It’s just us girls among all these weird men,” Peal first said to me by way of introduction in the ladies’ bathroom. She was aggressively applying lipstick as I washed my hands. Our eyes met in the mirror above the sink, and we smiled simultaneously.

“We girls got to stick together, you and me,” she said. “We’re friends already, I can tell.”

Pearl was large, with enormous hands and feet, a beautiful long, brown face, and a singing voice that rang in the bathroom like a fleshy bell. She was an aspiring opera singer, and spent most of her two fifteen-minute breaks sitting on a ruined vinyl couch in the anteroom of the ladies’ bathroom, rifling through a large bag of sheet music or humming to a tape played on a portable player. She took rehearsal very seriously and would repeat a difficult phrase, working on her diction and pitch, over and over again. She took lessons from a professional opera teacher after work, paid for by her Italian boyfriend, Mario. He was mad about Pearl, and had promised to pay for her operation after she’d lived the requisite year as a woman.

Pearl earned the reluctant respect of George Pike through her diligence and consistency, but chiefly through her willingness to perform a job that no one else could tolerate for more than a day. Only Pike or Walter Geist relieved Pearl on her breaks. She could detect any attempts to alter Pike’s scribbled prices, and was merciless on the few occasions when fraud was suspected. At her command, customers suspected of shoplifting had been sent sprawling on the sidewalk outside the Arcade by Bruno, ejected like drunks from a bar.

I understand now that Pearl’s ferocious honesty derived in part from her mutable sexuality. Truth was crucial to her; she knew her own veracity and had no choice but to live it.

Oscar knew the odd details and sad stories of many of the Arcade’s staff. He elicited confidences, chiefly through silence, and sometimes flattery. With the Reference section at his disposal, he looked up details that might further his understanding of an individual’s personal history. A gifted researcher, curious to the point of voyeurism, Oscar like to say that the world existed to end up in a book, and that it might as well be his notebook.

He told me, for example, that Pearl’s dream was to sing the role of Cherubino, the adolescent boy in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, a role usually performed by a woman playing a man; but she knew that at thirty-five, she was perhaps too old, and that the hormones she took were wreaking havoc with her voice and her body. Oscar had implied that if Pearl thought she had a chance at opera, then it was her mind the medication had affected. It took me rather a long time to understand he could be vicious.

I imagined that, unlike my own poor attempts Oscar’s notebooks contained a stream of never-completed biographies of people who struck his fancy or provided an interesting word, the starting point of an investigation. Under “Pearl” he might have written “Cherubino” in his crabbed handwriting, followed by a thumbnail sketch of Mozart’s life, a summary of the opera’s plot, or the details of gender-altering surgery. Oscar knew that Walter Geist had the kind of albinism known as oculocutaneous. He told me that Geist’s eyes never stopped moving because of a condition called nystagmus. Oscar knew all about Gallipoli and the Anzacs, and, of course, I’d told him myself why I was named Rosemary. He knew the Tasmanian tiger was extinct. He knew I longed for my mother; that I was often lonely.

He was my guide to the Arcade, translator of its strange histories and inhabitants. The entire store was his occupation in many ways, his means of making sense of the world. Eventually, I would I come to know something of Oscar’s own secrets. After working together in his section for a month, he told me the story of his early fascination with cloth.

When Oscar was a child, he’d kept an old hatbox his mother had given him under his bed. It was filled with small pieces of luxurious fabric she’d clipped from the seams and hems of dresses she made and repaired—fabric far richer and more exotic than anything they could afford. The hat box was Oscar’s treasure and favorite plaything.

He would take out the pieces of fabric—gossamer chiffon, lustrous silk, thick velvet—and rub them across his face. The box was his source of comfort and pleasure, and although the adult Oscar always dressed uniformly in black trousers and a crisp white shirt, he’d never lost his fascination with fabric. He knew all the fancy names and adjectives—organdy, tulle, crepe de chine, damask, moire, zephyr, batiste. He knew how they were made: colored, processed, woven.

Scraps of fabric had been Oscar’s only toys, but as he grew older he became increasingly bookish. He too had an absent father, was devoted to his mother, and had never lived alone until her death. Oscar’s mother had emigrated from Poland as a girl with her parents, but had fallen out with them over Oscar’s father, who’d deserted her sometime after his son’s birth.

Although he was ten years older, I used to think that in Oscar I’d found my double, a counterpart accidentally born in America, so similar were our circumstances. I thought we matched perfectly—his eternal investigations the match to my endless curiosity. Through his mother’s instruction, he’d learned everything important—how to read, how to live an orderly life, and the value of remembering as much as possible. Which is how he’d come to always keep a notebook; his mother had had a dressmaker’s book, filled with the measurements and particularities of her customers. He had imitated her, as I copied him, inscribing a life from fragmentary items.

If I’d been older, or really a grown woman at all, I might not have been so moved by Oscar’s life, by his story, by our resemblances and correspondences. I might not have clutched the idea of him to me as if it were a secret leaf fallen from a lover’s book. But then, my heart escaped me.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_1891d5bf-4f61-52de-b414-237f923cd1f6)

George Pike had employed Robert Mitchell for forty years, but their long collaboration had done little to improve an essentially antagonistic relationship. That Mr. Mitchell worked four floors above Pike made their professional interaction possible. Pike himself limited their contact to frequent telephone exchanges, often petty squabbles over money and, in particular, the costs of repairing extremely old volumes and collections of papers, whose fragility found a devoted champion in Mr. Mitchell. The care he took over damaged volumes seemed an extension of the interest he took in the well-being of the motley staff, who gladly rode the cranky elevator up to his own small store-within-a-store. It was a task we bickered over. His presence filled the Rare Book Room with gentility, a trait I now associate with the enveloping reek of a pipe.

Accompanying customers up to the Rare Book Room on the store’s fifth floor was my favorite task, once I was actually floating. It was an opportunity for conversation with collectors about their particular tastes and obsessions, and I learned something from every encounter. A trip to the Rare Book Room meant I could visit with Mr. Mitchell and breathe in the vanilla scent of his pipe. I adored him.

The first time I escorted a client up to the Rare Book Room, struggling with the elevator cage, Mr. Mitchell was waiting. Pike had called ahead of our arrival to clear the customer I accompanied for credit approval.

“What a pleasure, young lady! You must be our antipodean newcomer. Rosemary for remembrance, if I’m not mistaken. I am Robert Mitchell,” he said with a courtly reach of his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

In his late sixties, with vertical peaks of snowy hair, he had the complexion of a man who didn’t manage his blood pressure. He was large and seemed professorial in a saggy, postathletic way. Tall, with an enormous belly that sloped from his breastbone and disappeared into his high-belted trousers; his face reminded me of an amiable bird’s. I was at once struck by the odd happenstance that he resembled a type of cockatoo I’d long wished to own (but which Mother had refused me on account of its noise, its mess). This bird too was large, pink and white, but native to Australia and coincidentally named after an historical personage, some early dignitary, a certain Major Mitchell.

“Oscar told me I would enjoy meeting you,” I told him, far more comfortable in the Rare Book Room than four floors below. The contrast with the belligerent paperback fellows, Jack and Bruno, couldn’t have been more stark.

“Oscar told me the same thing, my dear. And also that you are very far from home. Van Diemen’s Land, no less. A rare and beautiful place, I understand. A wild island. We must be sure to make you welcome,” he said, and repeated. “We must be sure to.”

The warmth in his voice spread through me like the melancholy I carefully, daily, kept at bay. And perhaps because Mr. Mitchell caught me on a particularly homesick day, or because my own lost father could not in my imagination have been more kindly disposed to me, or simply because unexpected kindness exactly locates one’s well of sadness, tears itched the corners of my eyes.

“Indeed, Rosemary, you are very far from home,” Mr. Mitchell said again, noticing my upset, “but you must feel welcome here. And safe.” He took my hand inside his and patted it affectionately. I had to turn away.

“Now, then, who has accompanied you to my aerie?” he asked in a businesslike way, leaving me to compose myself. “Who has come to see the infinite riches in my little room?” He knew perfectly well, of course.

The customer cleared his throat, impatient to be attended to.

“Ah, Mr. Gosford! Yes, the Beckett first edition, if I’m not mistaken? I’ve been waiting for you to pick it up.”

Mr. Mitchell and the collector, Gosford, moved from the elevator into the first of several rare rooms, crowded with volumes and folios.

“Where are we—Whoroscope?” he called, and reached toward a shelf to the right of his desk.

“Rosemary, are you interested in an opportunity for instruction?” Mr. Mitchell inquired, still trying to locate the book.

Oscar had prepared me. One of Mr. Mitchell’s favorite things to do was teach. (Oscar had said “lecture.”) He never waited for assent from the prospective student, but would go on, searching for the volume, chatting all the while.

“Let me see, Whoroscope, Whoroscope. You are very lucky, Mr. Gosford,” he said, finally finding the book. “Now, Rosemary, perhaps you are not aware that this,” he ran on excitedly, “that this, Beckett’s first published poem, was composed in a single night! He wanted to win a thousand francs in a competition which called for submissions of no more than one hundred lines. Yes, that’s right. A poem on the subject of Time.” He paused thoughtfully. “Time, you see? He won, evidently. Ah, there we are.”

He handed the book to Mr. Gosford like his own prize, a reward for his patience. The little book had brick-red wrappers and a white band, printed with a note from the publisher. It was incidental to me that it was a book by Beckett, with whom I was unfamiliar. What struck me was that it was a small, beautiful object, and that both men wanted it.

“One of a hundred signed by Beckett, Mr. Gosford. A bit dusty, slight fading at the top edge, no foxing, and otherwise a fine copy. A steal at ten thousand dollars. I’ve spoken to Pike and your credit is excellent. The bill will be forthcoming.”

He leaned away from Gosford, in a perfectly timed motion, as if to better appreciate the moment. He paused.

“Rosemary, no need for you to wait,” he took up after a minute. “Mr. Gosford is good for it, I assure you.”

I left him to secure the signature. It was the practice of the Rare Book Room that a customer who’d selected and wanted to purchase a book had to be accompanied down to the main floor of the Arcade and straight to Pearl at the register. The potential for theft was the obvious reason for this ritual; but in the case of extremely valuable items, approval was often granted in advance. Customers like Mr. Gosford were billed monthly, so frequent and so large were their acquisitions.

This first visit I rode the elevator down alone, but I was to welcome any opportunity to visit Mr. Mitchell and be warmed by his affection, his information; to be at once reminded of my loneliness and comforted by its acknowledgment.

The other role as escort was to descend to the basement. Walter Geist worked there beneath a single blinding globe of light suspended from a cord attached to the low ceiling, its bare bulb casting shadows along the creases of his face, the only darkness there the hollows of mouth and nostrils. I carried new books to Geist at least two or three times a day, accompanying book reviewers from the city’s major newspapers and periodicals. They cast anxious, furtive looks about, hoping not to cross paths with one of their colleagues. It was a shifty business, not exactly stealing but hardly legitimate, either.

Selling copies of books that had been mailed free of charge was considered one of the perks of reviewing. It was impractical for reviewers to keep stacks of books around after reviewing them (or not reviewing them) for a newspaper or magazine, and publishers knew the activity was part of the Arcade’s operation—knew that they too lined Pike’s pockets—although it wasn’t widely sanctioned. When customers requiring escort showed up, Pearl would bellow either “Review!” or “Rare Book Room!” and whoever was on the floor at the time had to scurry up front to meet the waiting customer. I didn’t mind, preferring the task of escort to shelving.

I often chatted with the more familiar sellers, asking them for recommendations or whether they’d given the books I carried to the basement a positive or negative review. In this way I came to be on speaking terms with several literary journalists and publishing types. My notebook from that time is peppered with recommendations of books I’m certain I never read. But I much preferred collectors to those disposing of books. Collectors were passionate, at least; opportunistic, but in a different way. Their attachment to books as things, I believed then, had more to do with love than with money. The fact is, collecting has an erotic appeal.

After Geist had tallied up the total of the books sold to him in the basement, he scribbled the amount on a small yellow square of paper and the seller returned upstairs to wait in line at the register. Pearl took the yellow square and dispensed the specified amount in cash. Certain journalists then retired to one of the nearby taverns and drank their unearned dividend, each glass an ironic toast to Pike’s financial health.