“So it could be valuable now. This document.”
“I don’t know. It depends on what it is. And who wrote it, of course.” She held it up to the light. “Oh, I get it now. This sheet was printer’s copy. It’s got corrections on it in lead pencil. Interesting-so it became a book, probably printed by whoever did the Churchill books for John Walthoe.” She unweighted and opened the first volume and examined the imprint. “Peter Deane. We might as well change the blotters now.”
After this was done, Crosetti asked, “Aren’t you curious to know what book it was the manuscript for? What if the rest of the backing is from the same book? What if it’s someone famous, like, I don’t know, Donne or Milton or Defoe? A holographic manuscript from someone like that’d be worth a pile, no?”
“It’s probably the musings of an obscure clergyman. Commentaries on the Epistles.”
“But we don’t know that. Why don’t you open the other covers and see?”
“Because it’s more work. I’d have to make them right again. And I don’t have a lot of time.”
“We have time now,” he said, “watching the books dry. Come on, I’d consider it a favor. I’m doing you one.”
She gave him a flat blue stare, acknowledging the manipulation, he thought. “If it’ll make you happy,” she said and picked up her little spatula.
An hour later, Crosetti regarded with pleasure what looked like a line of washing hanging from strings he had rigged between the support columns that held up the roof of the loft. They were the damp folio pages that had served as backing in the six volumes, four sheets from each cover, forty-eight pages in all. For reasons that were not entirely clear to him, the discovery of manuscript pages that had not seen the light for over two and a half centuries made him less uneasy about what he knew in his heart was participation in an act of fraud. He had rather shocked himself by how brazenly he had manipulated her into opening the covers to yield this manuscript, and he consequently desired that the papers hold some historical or literary importance. It was with great impatience that he waited for the sheets to be dry enough to handle.
In the meantime, the interleaving had to be changed on the hour. Rolly seemed content to let him do it unsupervised after she determined during the first few changes that he could manage it correctly. The main thing was to make sure not to rush the process by shoving in too many towels or interspersing the blotting medium between groups of fewer than ten leaves. If they did that, she’d explained, the book would swell out of shape and burst its bindings. Around six, Crosetti announced that he was hungry and learned that ramen noodles and take-out containers of varying ages constituted virtually all of her available foodstuffs. He could see why she went so often to lunch with Glaser. Crosetti ran out and braved the mean streets of Red Hook, returning with a couple of bottles of Mondavi red and a large pizza.
“You bought wine,” she said when he came in and placed the bag on the table. “I never buy wine.”
“But you drink it.”
“Oh, yes. This is very nice of you. Thank you.” Again that little wolf’s smile; number two.
Their employer made up the main subject of their table talk, as they otherwise had little in common. Crosetti’s interest in books as physical objects was as slender as hers in current films. Besides, he was curious about the old man, and Rolly was willing to supply information when pressed, the more so as the wine took effect. He liked watching her eat: she was ravenous, she ate as if the slices were about to be snatched away, she ate the crusts to the last crumb and licked her fingers while she spun out what she knew. The story was that Glaser had entered the trade from his life as a collector, a common progression. His family made its pile two generations ago in department stores, and he had been raised in the upper bourgeoisie of Manhattan. The Glasers had intellectual pretensions-opera boxes, concert tickets, European tours à la mode, and the rest of it; a large apartment near Central Park had held a substantial library. In the course of time the ancestral emporiums had been absorbed by larger firms, the money not well invested, the inheritance scattered thinly among a too-numerous family. By the late 1970s Sidney Glaser had converted his hobby into his livelihood.
According to Rolly, he was not much of a businessman. Crosetti objected that the shop seemed to be a going concern, with many choice items.
“That’s just the problem. He’s got no business buying stuff like that McKenney and Hall for a hundred and fifty thousand. That’s for Baumann or Sotheby’s and the other big boys, and Glaser’s not a big boy. He’s got the clothes and the air but not the resources. Or the eye. Someone on his level should be picking up thousand-dollar books for two hundred, not hundred-thousand-dollar books for eighty-nine five. And they’re going to raise the rent-it already takes nearly half the average monthly profit-I mean paper profit-I doubt he’s made a real profit in years. It’s an old story in the book business. A rich collector thinks, I buy lots of books, why shouldn’t I pay for my hobby out of the profits?”
“Doesn’t it work?”
“On occasion. But like I said, you have to know your level, and work up. You can’t expect to start selling at the level you operated on as a rich collector, unless you’re willing to pour your own money into the business. And then it’s not really a business, is it? It’s a more expensive hobby, with pretensions. Speaking of which, the little New York East Side antiquarian dealer with the paneled shop-it’s a complete anachronism. There’s no way he can pay that rent and compete with both the Internet mail-order dealers and the big-name houses. Glaser’s going down. That fire was the best thing that could’ve happened to him. He’ll diddle the insurance companies on a couple of dozen select items, declare total losses, and sell them as fair to good. It’ll give him some operating capital again, but it won’t last long…”
“You think he started the fire?”
“No, he’s a book man. He’d never knowingly destroy a book. He was practically crying-you saw it-over that Churchill. But since there was a fire, he’s not above taking as much advantage of it as he can.”
“Just like you.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Yes, just like me. But at least I have an excuse, since I don’t live in an eighteen-room apartment on Park Avenue. I need money.” She poured herself more wine, drank a swallow, added, “And how about you, Crosetti? If those sheets you’ve got drying turn out to be the holograph of John Locke’s preface to Churchill, what’ll you do? Take them to Glaser and say, Oh, look what I found, Mr. G., something you can sell to the Widener for ten grand, and can I have a pat on the head?”
“It’s not Locke, if you’re right about it being a Jacobean hand.”
“Oh, now he’s literate, is he? I thought you were a computer nerd movie guy.”
“I read book catalogs.”
“Oh, right. But not books. You don’t even like books, do you?”
“I like them fine.” He examined her in the waning light and found a belligerent thrust to her jaw he hadn’t noticed before this, and a blurred, aggrieved look to her face.
“You’re not going to be a nasty drunk, are you, Carolyn?”
“I will if I want to. It’s my place.”
“Uh-huh. But I don’t have to stay here. My sheets look pretty dry. I could just take them and leave you to change the diapers on your baby every hour all night long.”
And he would have too, except that no sooner were these words out than she burst into tears, horrible, hopeless wails, and, like the decent guy he was, Al Crosetti went around and knelt by her chair and held Rolly while she shook and soaked his shoulder with her tears.
THE BRACEGIRDLE LETTER (2)