Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

It was just sheer luck, thought Crosetti, that so many sheets of what seemed to be from the same hand had ended up in this copy of the Churchill Voyages ; but on second thought, maybe not. He imagined some old guy dying, and the widow or the heirs deciding to clean out the deceased’s papers. They stack it all in bundles on the front step and send a kid to fetch the dealer in old paper, who comes, makes an offer, and carries the stuff away. Now they’ll have room for a proper pantry, says the heir’s wife, all that dusty old rubbish, pooh! And the old-paper guy tosses the bale into his bin, and after a while, he gets an order from a London bindery, regular customer, say, for a bale of scrap paper…

And because the pages with the pencil marks were not written in the same hand, the binder must have by chance mixed some unconnected printer’s copy in with the scrap from Crosetti’s tidying heiress. Yes, it could have happened that way, and this thought made him happy: he did not desire a miscellany, but a discovery. Although it was giving him a headache now, the peering through the glass, the way the black-brown squiggles refused to surrender their meaning. He put the magnifier down and walked the length of the loft.

“Do you have any aspirin?” he asked Rolly, and he had to ask twice. “No,” said Rolly, in a near-snarl.

“Everyone has aspirin, Carolyn.”

She threw down the tool she was using, sighed dramatically, dismounted her stool, strode away, and returned with a plastic bottle that she shoved into his hand so hard it rattled like a tiny castanet. Motrin.

“Thank you,” he said formally and took three at the kitchen sink. Ordinarily he would have reclined in a quiet place until the pounding pain ceased, but chez Rolly had no comfortable seating, and he was wary of using her bed. He sat therefore on a kitchen chair and was glum and shuffled the sheaves of old paper. Were Carolyn Rolly an actual sane human person, he thought, we could puzzle this out together, she probably has books on watermarks and Jacobean secretary hand or at least she knows more about this shit than I do…

But as soon as he had this thought, he brightened and drew his cell phone from his pocket. He checked his watch. Not eleven yet. At eleven his mother watched the Tonight Show and would not answer the phone during that hour to hear of the Apocalypse, but now she’d be in her lounger with a book.

“It’s me,” he said when she answered.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in Red Hook, at Carolyn Rolly’s place.”

“She lives in Red Hook?”

“It’s gentrifying, Ma.”

“It’s dockies and gangsters. Why is a classy girl like that living in Red Hook?” Mrs. Crosetti had met Carolyn on several occasions, at the shop, and delivered this assessment to her boy afterward, with the implication, like a thrown brick, that if he had any sense, he would put on some moves. She resumed, with a hopeful note, “And how come you’re there? You got something going with her.”

“I don’t, Ma. It’s the fire. She had to work on some heavy books at her place-she’s kind of an amateur bookbinder-and I helped her carry them over here from the city.”

“And you hung around after.”

“We ate. I’m just about to leave.”

“So I shouldn’t rent the hall. Or alert Father Lazzaro.”

“I don’t think so, Ma. Sorry. Look, why I called…do you know anything about seventeenth-century watermarks, or Jacobean secretary hands? I mean how to decipher them?”

“Well, for the secretary hand, that would be Dawson and Kennedy-Skipton, Elizabethan Handwriting, 1500-1650. It’s a manual, although I understand there’s some good stuff on the Web, more like interactive tutorials. For the watermarks, there’s Gravell…no, wait, Gravell starts at 1700; just a second, let me think…oh, right, it’d be Heawood, Watermarks Mainly of the 17 th and 18 th Centuries . What’s this about?”

“Oh, we found some old manuscript in the covers of a book she wants to repair. I’d like to find out what it is.” He wrote the references down on a Visa counterfoil from his wallet.

“You should talk to Fanny Doubrowicz at the library. I’ll call her for you if you want.”

“No, thanks. It’s probably not worth her time until I know if it’s not just an old shopping list or something. Part of it, some pages, are in a foreign language.”

“Really? Which one?”

“I can’t tell. A funny one, anyway, not French or Italian-more like Armenian or Albanian. But that could just be because I can’t really read the script.”

“Interesting. Good. Anything to keep that brain working. I wish you’d go back to school.”

“Ma, that’s what I’m doing. I’m saving money to go to school.”

“I mean real school.”

“Film school is real school, Ma.”

Mrs. Crosetti said nothing, but her son could well imagine the expression on her face. That she herself had not settled down to what became her profession until she was years older than he was now did not signify. She would have helped him pay for serious grad school, but making movies? No, thank you! He sighed and she said, “I got to go. You’ll be home late?”

“Maybe real late. We’re interleaving wet books.”

“Really? Why don’t you use a vacuum? Or just send them to Andover?”

“It’s complicated, Ma. Anyway, Carolyn’s in charge. I’m just the help.” He heard music faintly in the background and applause, and she said good-bye and hung up. It never failed to astonish him that a woman whose profession had given her an immense store of knowledge and who typically finished the Times Sunday crossword in twenty-two minutes could waste her time watching a celebrity gabfest and listen to a moderately talented comedian tell a skein of leaden topical jokes, but she never missed an evening. She said it made her feel less lonely at night, and he supposed that lonely people were in fact the main audience for such shows. He wondered if Rolly watched the Tonight Show. He had not seen a television in the place. Maybe vampires didn’t get lonely.

Crosetti rose from the terrible chair and stretched. Now his back ached too. He checked his watch and walked the length of the loft to where Rolly was still bent over her tasks.

“What?” she said as he drew near.

“It’s time to change the blotter. What’re you doing?”

“I’m putting the cover of volume four back together. I’m going to have to completely replace the covers on volumes one and two, but I think I can get the stains out of this one.”

“What’re you using to replace the manuscript pages as backing?”

“I have some contemporary folio scrap.”

“Just happen to have it around, eh?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” she snapped back. “There’s a lot of it available from books broken for their maps and plates. Who were you talking to on the phone?”

“My mom. Look”-he gestured to the walls of bookcases-“do you happen to have a book about watermarks? I have a reference…” He reached for his wallet.

“Well, I have Heawood, of course.”

Unfolding the counterfoil and smiling: “Of course. How about Dawson and Kennedy-Skipton?”

“That too.”

“I thought you weren’t a paleographer.”

“I’m not, but Sidney asked me to take a course on incunabula and early manuscripts and I did. Everyone in that field uses D & K-S.”

“So you can read this stuff?”

“A bit. It was some years ago.” Here again he heard a tone creep into her voice that discouraged probing.

“Can I take a look at those books after we do the interleaving?”

“Sure,” she said, “but early secretary hand is a bear. It’s like learning to read all over again.” They changed the blotters and then she extracted the two books from her shelves. She went back to work at her table and he sat down with the guidebooks at the spool table.