The Secret of Lost Things

He didn’t return their deference. Pike referred to reviewers as “spivs” and directed Geist to handle the entire enterprise involving new books.

The basement was Walter Geist’s domain; Mr. Mitchell’s, the fifth floor. Heaven and hell, we used to joke. All of us on the main floor floating in a kind of limbo, Pike watching, raised omnipotently overhead.

Competing for my favorite task of a trip to the Rare Book Room was Bruno (who often had the distinct advantage of being near Pearl at the register, tending to the paperback tables) as well as his ragged-faced colleague, Jack. Pike had designated these two paperback people, and their proximity to Pearl’s bellowed calls meant they were more often than not in either the basement or with Mr. Mitchell upstairs.

Jack Conway, an immigrant like me, was a musician, a traditional fiddler, and Irish. He’d had the end of his nose bitten off in a pub brawl and it was now an abrupt silvery edge. The scarred skin was shiny and pale, giving the impression of a punctuation mark in the center of his face that quickened the rest of his ruddy features. Jack seemed not to care how he looked, and his abbreviated nose had little affect on his attractiveness to women. He had a French girlfriend, Rowena, a sullen poet who often stopped in, but several women visited him during the course of a day.

I saw him, more than once, enter the single public toilet with various women. While they both remained inside for a good twenty minutes, customers in need jostled desperately with the locked doorknob.

Jack’s hatchet look matched his manner. He was tough, and his thick accent often made him unintelligible to other staff members, including Geist (for all his facility with languages). I understood him perfectly, his Irish brogue not so thick to my Tasmanian ear. But I couldn’t translate the filthy fliratious remarks Jack directed at Pearl, who told me she found his inarticulate muttering exciting. Some I simply couldn’t comprehend, but it wasn’t a question of diction. It was a harmless attraction that upset Rowena, not because Jack was really interested in Pearl but because Pearl’s fleshy laughter made a kind of triangle that included me. As the go-between, I was the one Rowena disliked, suspecting, as I came to, that Jack’s mumbled obscenities were intended for my delight as much as for Pearl’s.

I stayed clear of him. Mother had been overprotective to the point of mania about sex. Of course, I had my bookish fantasies, my adolescent ardors. But by then, Sidney Carton had been happily traded for Oscar Jarno, for an infatuation I mistook to be other than fictional. I was nervous around men, around all the displaced desire that ran beneath the surface of the Arcade. It wasn’t that I ever thought they wanted me; simply that they wanted. I’d had no experience with men, and chose to deposit all ideas of romantic promise with the unattainable—with Oscar.

Every morning but Sunday, mail was delivered to the Arcade by a mailman named Mercer. A rather elegant Trinidadian, he’d lived in New York for many years, and despite his uniform he looked more like a diplomat than a representative of the postal service. Chaps would have cast him as Othello in a minute. Mercer and Peal were friends, and it was her custom to bellow to Pike across the huge store that the mail had arrived.

At the Arcade, mail was almost as coveted as books.

Letters brought requests for rare titles, offers from estate libraries, queries and contacts from all over the world. Mr. Mitchell would frequently appear right around the time Mercer showed up, and try to charm him into a quick glance through the day’s mail. It was a slightly silly exercise, unworthy of him. Mercer wouldn’t part with the letters until they were in George Pike’s hand, as if he were more courier than postman. And Pike actually ceased his pricing to greet Mercer at his platform and formally receive the clutch of epistles.

Mr. Mitchell would follow, calling Mercer his “man of letters” and hovering about until Pike told him to go away, that any letters for him would be dispatched upstairs once Pike looked them over. It was a pantomime that made Mr. Mitchell appear childish, as if he had been waiting for a letter to drop from Mercer’s hands so that he might snatch it up and read it before his magisterial employer.

Shoplifting was a regular pastime for some, and I became familiar with one of the Arcade’s more notorious thieves one morning after I answered Pearl’s call of “Review books!” a couple of months after I’d started. Tall, about twenty-five, the shoplifter had hair was as vivid as my own. He was waiting for me at the front register, leaning against the counter, his long legs crossed in jeans spattered with colored paint. Mr. Mitchell had christened this particular thief Red-burn, although I didn’t know that at the time.

“I was wondering when you’d accompany me to hell,” the man said flirtatiously.

“I don’t know you, do I?” I asked, taking several hardcover books from him, part of my job as escort.

“We haven’t met before, but it’s apparent what we have in common. They call me Redburn here because of it.”

“Lot’s of people have red hair,” I replied, ahead of him on the steep stairs. Pike’s capitals fairly shouted in my face as I descended: GEORGE PIKE WILL NOT TOLERATE THE THEFT OF MONEY OR BOOKS!

“Pike overdoes that warning, don’t you think?” he said, indicating the sign. “It’s very threatening.”

“Only if you’re thinking of stealing,” I returned.

We reached the bottom of the staircase.

“Some would say that buying review copies is stealing,” Red-burn developed. “New books may well have been shoplifted from a regular bookstore.”

He challenged me with auburn eyebrows raised, conventionally attractive and confident of the fact.

“Are these stolen?” I asked him, stopping in the maze of stacks that wove through the basement. The low ceiling met the tall shelves, creating an oppressive tunnel through to Geist’s lair in the rear.

“Why would you care?” he asked.

It was a question I didn’t exactly know how to answer, so I ignored it. I resolved then to generally ignore Redburn as well.

“My guess is you don’t approve of stealing, is that right?” he persisted, as we reached Geist’s counter, starkly vacant beneath the blinding bulb.

“I don’t approve of stealing, no,” I replied, stacking the books on the counter. Geist stood some feet away, examining a book held close to his face, his back to us.

“Then give me my heart back,” Redburn whispered, leaning toward me, his hands over his chest, feigning pain.

I couldn’t help laughing out loud. Geist turned around abruptly, and I wondered if he’d overheard the man’s request.

“Check the copyright, Rosemary, then read the list prices to me,” he said, coming forward, all business, his glasses firmly in place.

“I wouldn’t dream of cheating you, Geist,” Redburn said slyly. “Not today at least.”

I opened the covers of each book, confirming that they had been recently published, and read out the printed prices to Geist, who reduced them to quarters in his head, calculating what Redburn would receive. He scribbled the total on a yellow square of paper, sliding it across the counter.

“Want to tell me where you got these books?” Geist asked, his finger securing the note.

“Nope,” the shoplifter answered, snatching it up.

“I didn’t think so,” said Geist. “Rosemary, in future you’re not to escort this man anywhere in the Arcade. He is banned from the store.”

Redburn smiled at me mischievously and headed back upstairs to redeem his yellow slip with Pearl.

I had begun to understand that a significant part of the Arcade’s operation was based on deception; few questions were asked about the provenance of books. Whole libraries were bought in bulk sight unseen, and once priced individually by Pike, a few items often earned back what had been spent on the sum. It wasn’t cheating exactly, or stealing; it was the canny leveraging of desire. Manipulating the lust for things that retained or lost value depended in whose hands they were held.

“Mr. Geist,” I asked, before returning upstairs. “Did that man steal the books you just bought?”

“Most likely,” he said. “No concern of yours, of course. Just tell Jack or Bruno to throw him out if you see him in here again.”

Oscar told me later that Mr. Mitchell had coined Redburn’s name for him, and not only because his red hair was vivid enough to be ablaze. Wellingborough Redburn was the protagonist in a novel by Herman Meville, a first edition of which Mr. Mitchell had discovered beneath the thief’s tatty shirt, tucked into the waistband of his trousers.

The valuable copy of Redburn had been set aside for the Arcade’s most prodigious collector, a man who’d never set foot inside the store. Julian Peabody owned the largest private library in the country, and Mr. Mitchell was expecting his librarian, Samuel Metcalf, to pick up the volume from Pike’s stage. He had been awaiting that gentleman, along with Walter Geist, an old friend of Metcalf’s, when both were distracted by Pike, who chose that moment to argue for an increase in the book’s price. While they bickered, Red-burn audaciously pilfered it right off Pike’s desk. The volume was dislodged accidentally when Bruno slammed into the thief as he hurried from the store.

Peabody acquired the book, and added it to his large collection of nineteenth-century American authors, the most significant outside any private institution. Herman Melville was a Peabody favorite and, shortly after I knew of this incident, Melville would become my favorite as well.

CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_b147bf48-c501-5f47-a2ce-bb7b76c01860)

I returned in the evenings to the Martha Washington, to Lillian and to the closet of my rented room. After two months, the Arcade had become my home, and the city that housed it the larger world Chaps had wished for me and, I realized, that I’d wanted for myself. Tasmania was remote indeed, an ideal of home that merged over time with Mother, with her absence, and with the contradiction of her occasionally overwhelming presence. In the framed photograph, her face at my age returned my own green gaze with dark eyes, projecting a confidence I still hadn’t found.

I dreamed she lived often enough to wake with the kind of longing that makes memory eloquent. While I slept she had lived, and the pain upon waking was as much a fleeting uncertainly of her state as anguish over the clear fact of my own life continuing without her. We are never so aware of those we have lost, and dreamt of, than in that waking moment.

I developed the habit of walking for hours in the early evening after leaving work at six, and invented a zigzagging pattern of one block up, one across, to vary my route, reversing the pattern to return downtown. Something soothing in the process reminded me of picking up a practical skill, like learning letters so as to read, or learning steps so as to dance. It was light for hours then, and hot. The city’s grid ordered my mind. I walked as a way of thinking and, walking, I felt as sturdy and sensible as the shoes I’d change into before setting off.

Following a pattern gave me an assurance I often hadn’t felt during the working day. My lack of knowledge of the Arcade’s vast contents nagged at me, but through my walks I remembered, took note, and played out the day’s events. I was determined not to be lost in the city, and through my walks I mapped more than locations and points of reference. I found a way to manage. I let the city work on me, into me, and I learned that I wanted the freedom it held out.

In the evenings, when the city cleared out, there was room for me in the geometry of emptiness that took over certain neighborhoods. The varied architecture taught me a sense of proportion, a contradictory sense even of scale. As I’d learned in Sydney, there was room in cities. Yes, I was a mote inside New York’s great, swirling energy, but I was there. At twilight, I was even outlined against buildings, my shadow tall and attenuated upon century-old facades. Using zigzagging increments, I measured myself against blocks, buildings, streetlights. Of course, I was overwhelmed by New York, but was at once oddly freed of any requirement to agency. Although my shadow quickly disappeared as night fell, I carried a memory of its shape long against the great buildings: animated and free.

One hot July evening, I ran down an empty street as the peppery smell of city rain rose up from where the rain fell, spotting the pavement. The sharp scent set me sneezing. Seconds later huge heavy drops began to pelt my head and back. I took shelter beneath an awning and watched the storm through an amnion of water. Ten minutes later the rain ceased, as abruptly as it had started. The temperature dropped a few degrees, and I felt the materiality of weather, impervious to the great constructed landscape. Manhattan was at once sealed and, as I watched filthy rainwater disappear into subway grates and down street drains, as permeable as any thing in nature. It absorbed everything, as I was learning.

Summer kept me out quite late into August. I worked at the Arcade every day of the week but one. Evenings I walked. I waited the delicacy of the approaching fall as a seasonal shift I’d never before experienced. Toward September I felt a kind of unfamiliar anticipation. A dirty park on my way to the Arcade, around Twenty-third Street, became my bellwether, its trees gushed out greenly amid the traffic and surrounding buildings. Several people were permanent residents of the park and sat beside their possessions. I just visited.

Beneath the trees, inside their shallow shade, was my only constant reminder that nature was marking time, that trees at least were routine and predictable. Even though, for me, the cycle was reversed and more defined than it ever was at home, the trees in my park were committed to seasons, as I must become as well.