Allegra Goodman - The Cookbook Collector

“They don’t have sentimental value for me ,” Sandra said, and she turned back to her bills.

“Oh!” Jess could not conceal her surprise. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?”

“I misread you,” Jess said. “I thought you were upset.”

“I am upset.” Sandra’s voice caught. “I’m upset about my daughter. I’m upset about my uncle. I’m upset about the situation.”

Jess might have escaped then into the other room. Perhaps she should have, but she could hear the desperation in Sandra’s voice.

She knelt down level with Sandra. “What is the situation?”

“I promised my uncle I wouldn’t sell.”

“Do you think maybe he would understand?”

Sandra thought about this. “No,” she said. “He was in the hospital. He weighed nothing. He had no children. He was ninety-three years old. He was very clear. He said, ‘Sandra, you’re my only niece. I’m leaving you the house. Do anything you want with it, but don’t sell the books.’”

“Wow,” said Jess.

Sandra nodded grimly, appreciating Jess’s awestruck response. “He said, ‘Promise me that you’ll take care of them.’”

“But did you have any idea?”

“No!”

“Didn’t you come over to the house to see them? Didn’t you ever see them in the kitchen?”

“I lived in Oakland. He lived here, and he was reclusive. We weren’t close. I came twice, and both times he offered me iced tea. He never invited me inside his kitchen. He wouldn’t even let me clear away my glass.”

“When he said don’t sell the books, you thought he meant this stuff?” Jess pointed to the study bookcases.

“Of course.”

“How can you make a promise when you don’t know exactly what you’re promising?”

Sandra closed her eyes. “That’s what I tell myself. That’s what I keep telling myself. I’m afraid of him.”

Jess nodded. Instinctively, she understood what George did not. That as far as Sandra was concerned, Tom McClintock still hovered in the house.

“I believe in past lives,” Sandra explained, and she opened her gray eyes. “I lived before.”

Like a girl in a labyrinth, Jess tried to follow. “Really?”

“I believe we’ve all lived before, and will again.”

Someone else might have laughed, or cringed, or backed away. Jess asked, “What were you?”

“A Russian princess,” Sandra said quite seriously. “In the days of the Tsars.”

Which Tsar? Jess wondered, but thought it best not to inquire. She knew the kind of Russian princess Sandra meant: the kind who wore silk and velvet and danced in palaces and rode in sleighs through fairy-tale snows in the early pages of Tolstoy’s novels, until narrowly escaping execution at the hands of the Bolsheviks. “What will you be next?”

“That’s what frightens me,” said Sandra. “Every life hinges on the one before. And what I do now will shape …”

“I understand,” said Jess. Emily would have asked: Why is it that those of us who were serfs in some past life never remember the experience? But Jess thought: How dreadful to feel that guilt accrues like debt from this world to the next.

“Do you think your uncle is living a new life?”

Sandra nodded.

Jess looked at the photograph on the desk. Unsmiling, weak-chinned, the lichenologist seemed to peer out at the world from behind his glasses. “And do you think he’s sort of—watching you?”

She closed her eyes again.

“And you’ll join him there—and then maybe he’ll punish you?”

She closed her eyes tighter.

“You had no idea what he was giving you,” Jess said. “How could you have any idea what these books are worth?”

Sandra’s eyes popped open. “How much are they worth?” she asked, and Jess felt a prick of fear; she felt the difficulty of her position, for Sandra was no longer keening and mystical.

“We’ll have to finish the appraisal,” Jess said cautiously, “and then George will make the offer.”

“I don’t like him,” Sandra said in a low voice. “I don’t think I can trust him.”

“You can,” Jess assured her. “He may come off as impatient or arrogant at times, but he’s a good man.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’ve worked for him more than a year.”

“And what do you know about him?” Sandra asked.

Jess considered the question. “He’s old-fashioned,” she said at last. “He has a sense of history. If he had a past life, he would have been a gentleman—even though he acts so adversarial. He loves books more than anything in the world.”

“But will he keep the collection intact?”

“I think so.”

“Will he promise?”

Jess thought about the books George flipped regularly, the Whitman he had sold within days of acquisition, the small collection of early twentieth-century poets he had bought from a dealer in Marin and quickly dispersed. “You’ll have to talk to him,” Jess said.

“I don’t like talking to him,” said Sandra. “I don’t want to sell these books. Do you understand? They’re private. They are my uncle’s past life.”

“Then maybe he doesn’t need them anymore?” Jess ventured.

Sandra bristled, and instantly Jess saw her mistake. In Sandra’s mind everything was necessary. Every artifact counted in some grand celestial tally.

“I don’t want to sell them. I would never sell them for myself. My daughter needs money.”

For a moment Jess wondered whether this daughter was real. Perhaps she was imaginary too? A past daughter? But she followed Sandra down this passageway as well. She chose to believe her. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What’s happened to her?”

“She’s losing her children,” Sandra said.

“What do you mean? Divorce?”

“Leslie raised them, but her partner is the biological mother.”

So Leslie is the one Raj meant to honor, Jess thought.

“You have no idea what it’s like,” said Sandra.

“I don’t,” Jess admitted humbly.

“Leslie was the one who cared for them. She was the one who woke with them and fed them, and pushed them in the stroller to the playground every day. She was the stay-at-home mother. She dedicated her life to those boys. They’re all she’s got, and her ex took them to New Jersey.”

That’s why she needs money. Legal fees, Jess thought.

“I’m worried,” Sandra said. “I can’t sleep at night. My daughter hasn’t seen her children in over a year. And I’m afraid …” Here, her voice broke entirely. “They’re only five and three. I’m sure they don’t remember her.”

Jess answered gently. “You never know what children can remember. I lost my mother when I was five, but I still remember her. I think I remember her sewing, and I remember standing on a chair and baking with her. And also …” Jess searched for another memory she could put into words, some event she might produce, although most of her memories were flickers: light and shadow, hedges along the sidewalk, her mother’s white hands pulling her away when she tried to lick—what was it?—a fence? She loved the tang of metal. The ladder to the slide?

“You’re missing the point,” said Sandra.

Again Jess felt that this was a test, and it was no ordinary exam: not a test of what Jess knew, but of what Sandra believed. “Your situation is more complicated than your uncle could have imagined,” said Jess. “You wouldn’t be selling for a profit. You’d sell to pay your lawyers. In that case, don’t you think that he’d approve?”

Sandra searched Jess’s face.

“I don’t know Raj. I don’t know what Raj would do with these books, but George appreciates them. He’ll study them—and so will I, and so will Colm. We’re not just collectors. We’re readers.”