The shops were more thickly clustered here, as if backing away from the muddy bottom of the street. They seemed darker and shabbier than the shops above, and the steepness of the descent gave everything a tilted and precarious look. I passed a red-lit window crowded with the glimmering lower halves of sawed-off women in panty hose; some appeared to be dancing wildly, some were lounging about, and some were upside down, their legs straining desperately upward, as if at any moment they would be pulled underground. There was a window with a handwritten sign that said BOOTS BAIT TACKLE. There was an empty dark window with a telephone number written across it in white soap, and another dark window that said PLUMSHAW’S RARE BOOKS. A dim light burned inside. Here the sidewalk was so steep that the left edge of the windowsill began at my knees, the right edge at my stomach. I felt oddly unbalanced, but something about the place drew me, and I lingered uncertainly under the narrow green awning.
It was a crowded, scattered sort of display, with here an open children’s book showing a boy trundling a hoop, there a set of twelve cracked leather volumes called Barnsworth’s Geographic Cyclopaedia. In one corner a doll dressed like Little Boy Blue was leaning with his eyes closed against a globe on a dusty stand, not far from a large atlas open to a faded map of the Roman Empire in 200 A.D. It was difficult to know what to make of this shop, where a Victorian toy theater with a red paper curtain sat next to a book of fairy tales open to a color print of a princess drawing a bucket out of a well, where a stereoscope mounted on a wooden bar lay aslant on its wooden handle in front of a glass-covered engraving of the Place de la Concorde, and thirteen volumes of a sixteen-volume set of Hawthorne rose like a crooked red chimney behind an old top hat and a pair of opera glasses. Plumshaw’s taste was odd and eccentric, but I seemed to detect in the display a secret harmony. The rain had begun to fall in earnest. I stepped inside.
A bell tinkled faintly over the door. The room was small and gloomy, lit by a single bare bulb at the bottom of a green-stained brass ceiling fixture shaped like flower petals. A dark passage led to a room beyond. On the counter stood an old black cash register and a small wire rack hung with cellophane bags of butterscotch squares, jelly beans, and gumdrops. Behind the counter was a tall woman with high hair who looked at me without smiling. Plumshaw, I decided. Her voluminous gray hair was pulled tightly upward and piled on top of her head in masses of sharp-looking little curls. She wore a high-necked black dress with long sleeves ending in stiff bursts of faded lace. A pearl circle pin was fastened at her throat, and on one wrist she wore a yellowed ivory bracelet composed of a ring of little elephants each holding in its trunk the tail of the elephant in front. Plumshaw, without a doubt. Oh, maybe some other Plumshaw had started the shop, maybe she was the unmarried daughter of Plumshaw the First, but she had taken it over and had stood motionless and unsmiling behind that cash register for forty years. The dark walls were lined with books, but here and there stood knickknacks of brass or ivory and boxes of stereoscopic views, and in one corner stood an umbrella stand containing three walking sticks with ivory handles, one of which was shaped like a hand curved over a ball. Evidently PLUMSHAW’S RARE BOOKS had fallen on hard days and was forced to drum up extra trade in antiques. Or perhaps — the thought struck me — perhaps these odds and ends were Plumshaw’s own possessions, brought down one by one from the backs of closets and the depths of attic trunks to be offered for sale. The books themselves, arranged carefully by category, were the mediocre used books of any second-rate bookshop (sets of Emerson, sets of Poe), and among them were library discards, with the Dewey Decimal number printed in white ink on the spine and the melancholy DISCARDED stamped across the card pocket in back. I lingered politely under Plumshaw’s severe gaze for as long as I could stand it and then escaped through the dark passage into the next room.
I saw at once that there were other rooms; PLUMSHAW’S RARE BOOKS was a warren of small rooms connected by short dark passages lined with books. The invasion of alien objects was more noticeable as I moved deeper into the back, where entire shelves had been cleared to make way for stacks of maroon record albums containing heavy, brittle 78’s as thick as roof slates, boxes of old postcards, empty cardboard cylinders the size of soup cans each bearing the words EDISON GOLD MOULDED RECORD and an oval photograph of Thomas A. Edison, daguerreotypes, tintypes, stacks of pen-and-ink illustrations torn from old books, a moldering gray Remington typewriter with dark green keys, a faded wooden horse with red wheels, little porcelain cats, a riding crop, old photograph albums containing labeled black-and-white photographs (Green Point, 1926) with upcurled corners showing traces of rubber cement, a cribbage board with ivory pegs, a pair of high cracked black lace-up shoes. Here and there I saw brass standing lamps with cloth shades and yellowed ivory finials, and armchairs with faded doilies; I wondered whether they were for sale. All the rooms were gloomily lit by dim yellow bulbs with tarnished brass chains.
I had slipped into one room to examine a little music box with a red-jacketed monkey on top, who turned slowly round and round and raised and lowered his cup as the melody played, when I happened to look up to see a figure standing in the doorway. At first she said nothing, but only looked at me from the shadows. I placed the music box back on the shelf — the tinkling music was playing, the monkey was turning and raising its cup. “May I be of help?” Plumshaw said at last, decisively. “I was just browsing — a nice little fellow!” I answered, wanting to strangle the little monster. I turned to push it deeper into the shelf, as if to conceal a crime; when I looked up, Plumshaw was gone. I cursed her suspicions — did she think I’d pocket him? — but felt obscurely obliged to purchase some trifle, as if my visit to the shop were an intrusion that required apology. With this in mind I began looking at engravings, stereoscopic views, a box of black-and-white photographic portraits on glass. It seemed there was nothing here for me, nothing in all of Broome for me, or in all the gray universe, and with a dull sort of curiosity I came to a table on which stood a black wire rack filled with old postcards.
They were black-and-white and sepia and tinted postcards, showing topiary gardens, and Scottish castles, and boats on the Rhine, and public buildings in Philadelphia. Some bore stamps and postmarks and messages in ink: Dear Robert, I cannot tell you how lovely our rooms are—but then, I’ve never been interested in other people’s mail. The pictures had a faded and melancholy air that pleased me; there is a poetry of old postcards, which belong in the same realm as hurdy-gurdy tunes, merry-go-round horses, circus sideshows, silent black-and-white cartoons, tissue-paper-covered illustrations, old movie theaters, kaleidoscopes, and storm-faded figureheads of women with their wooden hair blown back. I examined the postcards one by one, turning now and then to look at the doorway, which remained ominously empty, and after a while I found myself lingering over a sepia postcard. The back was clean; it had never been sent. The melancholy brown photograph showed a rocky point extending into a lake or river; on the other side of the water was a brown forest of pines, and above the trees were long thin brown clouds and a setting brown sun. In the upper left-hand corner of the sky, in small brown capital letters, was the single word INNISCARA. On the farthest rock two small figures were seated, a man and a woman, looking out at the water. Beside the man I could make out a straw hat and a walking stick. The woman was bareheaded, her hair full and tumbling. The details were difficult to distinguish in the dim light, but the very uncertainty seemed part of the romantic melancholy of the brown scene. I decided to purchase it. Perhaps I would send it to Claudia, with a terse, ambiguous message.