Eric McCormack - Cloud

AS TO WHAT FRANK might make of himself, Alicia and I had assumed that in the course of time he’d take his place in the family business, though he’d never shown much interest in pumps. But it turned out he had his own ideas about his future.

He joined us for dinner one night not long after he’d moved into his apartment and presented us with a plan he’d clearly been thinking about for some time. It was this: he wanted to open a store that specialized in rare objects, particularly furniture and books. He’d done his homework and felt that such a store would be unique to Camberloo and the area around it.

“Those gifts you used to bring me when I was growing up— you know how much I always loved them,” he said to me. “When I got to university, I began to think: wouldn’t it be great to own a place that stocked things like that? It was at the back of my mind all through my degree.”

That surprised me. I wasn’t quite sure what I felt at being told I was the root cause of this unexpected announcement. Alicia — not surprisingly, for she always indulged him — didn’t seem to mind too much that he’d no desire to join me at Smith’s Pumps. And I suppose I didn’t really mind much either, though for different reasons — I’d often worried that we might not work well together, and that when he fully understood those ethical compromises I’d made, he’d think even less of me.

We began discussing in a general way how he might put his plan into action by finding a suitable store for lease and stocking it with suitable items — naturally, we expected to play a major role in financial matters. We all agreed that a downtown location would be best, and encouraged him to make further explorations.

AFTER FRANK LEFT that night, Alicia and I talked about his scheme. We were both realistic about its lack of realism: the kind of store he had in mind probably wouldn’t do much business. But we wanted him to be happy, above all.

That was when our talk took a quite unexpected turn.

“If anything ever happens to me, will you promise to look after him and make sure he doesn’t mess up his life?” said Alicia.

I scoffed at the notion of anything ever happening to her— she’d outlive me by decades. But she was in a serious mood, so I promised her I’d always be there to advise him. Not that I really believed sons are inclined to take their fathers’ advice in these matters — especially a son with whom the father had never really been at ease.

My promise seemed to alleviate whatever fears she had. “Thank you for that.” She smiled. “And don’t worry. I fully expect to outlive you, too.”

IN THE FALL, Frank leased a moderately sized old store — it had formerly sold shoes — on the corner of King and Delta near the City Hall. Much of the building looked as though it was unchanged since the 1920s, with crumbling brick walls and creaky plank flooring. Frank was especially charmed that it still had an ancient pneumatic-tube system: from the front counter, orders and cash would whiz overhead through a brass tube to the business office at the rear.

He himself was on the road quite a bit at this time, acquiring items for his store, but he also directed its renovations. Though that was hardly the right word. Frank’s notion of renovation was actually more like a restoration of the building to its primal state, revealing the interior brick behind the plaster and uncovering the pipes of its antique heating system. If there had been some way to restore even the unique odours the store must have had in its heyday, he’d have been very pleased.

In November, Smith’s Emporium opened for business without much fanfare. The use of the family name pleased Alicia a great deal. The night before the opening, while Alicia was attending one of her board meetings, Frank called and asked me if I’d like to come and have a preview of his collection.

“I’d like to hear your opinion of it,” he said.

I must admit I was delighted at the invitation. Perhaps this was a sign of a positive development in our relationship. So I met him at the store for a guided tour.

EVEN THOUGH THE Emporium wasn’t all that big, he’d split it into two distinctive areas, or “galleries” as he named them. The Furniture Gallery began just inside the front door and was guarded by four tenth-century Chinese temple lions. To fill this area, Frank had purchased almost the entire stock of a New York antiquities firm that had gone bankrupt. Included was an array of items from various centuries — armoires, walnut buffets, uncomfortable stool chairs, and heavy oak tables, as well as the four lions. All the acquisitions on display had little cards beside them to indicate their origins.

Some of the pieces were quite remarkable. Taking pride of place was an early Renaissance clothes trunk with inlaid panels that showed daily life in a ducal palace. Not far behind was a seventeenth-century French vaisselier containing porcelain serving plates, many of them broken and carefully glued together, depicting pastoral scenes.

A special section of the Furniture Gallery contained Frank’s own personal favourites. Protruding from the wall above them was an armless female nude figurehead from a Spanish galleon found off the coast of Florida. A worn-looking black walnut credence table from Peru had been used by the servants of conquistador Hernán Cortés to check his food for poison— several of them had, as a result, died in agony. An elaborate Florentine commode was from the bedroom of Maddalena de’ Medici, who’d been married to a son of the most depraved of pontiffs, the murderous Pope Innocent VIII. Near the commode were some folding military chairs from the American Civil War. A stain on the faded yellowish cushion of one of them had been identified as the blood of a Confederate officer at the Battle of Chickamauga.

THE FURNITURE GALLERY overflowed into the Book Gallery, which took up the rest of the store. It was mainly a repository of old leather-bound books in Latin. Their subjects weren’t all that enticing — treatises on horticulture, collections of prayers and pious meditations — but it was an extreme pleasure for a book lover just to caress them, skim through their ancient pages, and even inhale their ancient dust.

Some of the books in the “erotica” section were certainly eye-catching for other reasons. These were privately printed and hard to obtain. Amongst them were such titles as The Fair Concubine, Venus the Flagellant, The Discreet Copulator , and The Dildoad — An Epic . The authors of these books had wisely chosen to remain anonymous, for the most part.

FOR ME, the most fascinating part of the Book Gallery was a glass case near the back, with a sign over it: Four of the Great Lost Books of the West . The four books on display in the case had printed cards beside them with information on the books themselves as well as on the reputable European dealerships from which Frank had acquired them.

The books were aligned in chronological order.

The first was a tattered-looking volume entitled Inventio Infortunata . This was an anonymous, fourteenth-century eyewitness account of the seemingly impossible: a visit to the Arctic. The book had been mentioned by various scholars in subsequent centuries, but no other copy of it had ever been found.

The second book was a stained, cloth-bound work, Les Journées de Florbelle . Apparently this was volume nine of an erotic epic handwritten by the Marquis de Sade while in the lunatic asylum where he spent much of his life. Scholars had formerly believed that the entire work was destroyed by de Sade’s son after its author died in the asylum.

The third of the books was really just a smoke- and firedamaged writing tablet with the title, My Secret Love , scrawled on the cover. This was a pen-and-ink account, by Robert Louis Stevenson, of his affair with a Samoan woman. His wife, Fanny Osbourne, had found it in his bedside drawer after his death and thrown it into the fire. It was later retrieved by a servant.