One of them searched even more avidly than McBee could have hoped. My father was an Ohio bookseller's son, and he arrived on campus the day after his eighteenth birthday, almost fifty years after F. Scott Fitzgerald made it fashionable to be a midwestern boy at Princeton. Much had changed since then. The university was shedding its country club past, and in the spirit of the times, it was falling out of love with tradition. The freshmen of my father's year were the last class required to attend chapel service on Sundays. The year after he left, women arrived on campus for the first time as students. WPRB, the college radio station, ushered them in to the sound of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus. My father liked to say that the spirit of his youth was best captured in Immanuel Kant's essay What is Enlightenment? Kant, in his mind, was like the Bob Dylan of the 1790s.
That was my father's way: to erase the line in history beyond which everything seems stuffy and arcane. Instead of timelines and great men, history to him was ideas and books. He followed McBee's advice for two more years at Princeton, and after graduating he followed it all the way back west to the University of Chicago for a Ph.D. on Renaissance Italy. A year of fellowship work in New York ensued, until Ohio State offered him a tenure-track position teaching quattrocento history, and he leapt at the chance to go home. My mother, an accountant whose tastes ran to Shelley and Blake, took up the bookselling business in Columbus after my grandfather retired, and between the two of them I was raised in the fold of bibliophiles, the way some children are raised in religion.
At the age of four I was traveling to book conferences with my mother. By six I knew the difference between parchment and vellum better than I knew a Fleer from a Topps. Before my tenth birthday I had handled some half-dozen copies of the printing world's masterpiece, the Gutenberg Bible. But I can't even remember a time in my life when I didn't know which book was the Bible of our own little faith: the Hypnerotomachia.
It's the last great Renaissance mystery, Thomas, my father would lecture me, the same way McBee must have lectured him. But no one has come even close to solving it.
He was right: no one had. Of course, it wasn't until decades after the book was published that anyone realized it needed solving. That was when a scholar made a strange discovery. When the first letters of every chapter in the Hypnerotomachia are strung together, they form an acrostic in Latin: Poliam Frater Franciscus Columna Peramavit, which means Brother Francesco Colonna loved Polia tremendously. Since Polia was the name of the woman Poliphilo searches for, other scholars finally started to ask who the author of the Hypnerotomachia really was. The book itself doesn't say, and even Aldus, the printer, never knew. But from that point on, it became common to suppose that the author was an Italian friar named Francesco Colonna. In a small group of professional researchers, particularly those inspired by McBee, it also became common to suppose that the acrostic was only a hint of the secrets that lay within the book. That group's quest was to discover the rest.
My father's claim to fame in all this was a document he found during the summer I turned fifteen. That year-the year before the car accident-he brought me with him on a research trip to a monastery in southern Germany, then later to the Vatican libraries. We were sharing an Italian studio apartment with two rollaway beds and a prehistoric stereo system, and each morning for five weeks, with the precision of a medieval punishment, he chose a new Corelli masterwork from the compilations he'd brought, then woke me to the sound of violins and harpsichords at exactly half-past seven, reminding me that research waited for no man.
I would rise to find him shaving over the sink, or ironing his shirts, or counting the bills in his wallet, always humming along with the recording. Short as he was, he tended to every inch of his appearance, plucking strands of gray from his thick brown hair the way florists cull limp petals from roses. There was an internal vitality he was trying to preserve, a vivaciousness he thought was diminished by the crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes, by the thinking man's wrinkles across his forehead, and whenever my imagination was dulled by the endless shelves of books where we spent our days, he was always quick to sympathize. At lunchtime we would take to the streets for fresh pastries and gelato; every evening he would bring me into town for sight-seeing. One night in Rome, he led me on a tour of the city's fountains, telling me to toss a lucky penny into each one.
One for Sarah and Kristen, he said at the Barcaccia. To help mend their broken hearts.
My sisters had each been in a painful breakup just before we left. My father, who never took much to their boyfriends, considered it a blessing in disguise.
One for your mother, he said at the Fontana del Tritone. For putting up with me.
When my father's request for university funding had fallen through, my mother kept the bookstore open on Sundays to help pay for our trip.
And one for us, he said at the Quattro Fiumi. May we find what we're looking for.
What we were looking for, I never really knew-at least, not until we stumbled onto it. All I knew was that my father believed scholarship on the Hypnerotomachia had reached a dead end, mainly because everyone was missing the forest for the trees. Thumping his fist on the dinner table, he would insist that the scholars who disagreed with him had their heads in the sand. The book itself was too difficult to understand from within, he said; a better approach was to search for documents that hinted at who the author really was, and why he'd written it.
In reality, my father alienated many people with his narrow vision of the truth. If it hadn't been for the discovery we made that summer, my family might soon have found itself relying entirely on the bookstore for its livelihood. Instead, Lady Fortune smiled on my father, hardly a year before she took his life.
On the third-floor branch of one of the Vatican libraries, in a recessed aisle of bookshelves that even the monkish dusters had not dusted, as we stood back-to-back searching for the clue he'd been pursuing for years, my father found a letter inserted between the pages of a thick family history. Dated two years before the Hypnerotomachia was published, it was addressed to a confessor at a local church, and it told the story of a high-ranking Roman scion. His name was Francesco Colonna.
It's difficult to re-create my father's excitement when he saw the name. The wire-frame glasses he wore, which slunk down his nose the longer he read, magnified his eyes just enough to make them the measure of his curiosity, the first and last thing most people ever remembered about him. At that moment, as he sized up what he'd found, all the light in the room seemed to converge inside those eyes. The letter he held was written in a clumsy hand, in broken Tuscan, as if by a man who was not accustomed to that language, or to the act of writing. It rambled on and on, sometimes directed at no one in particular, sometimes directed at God. The author apologized for not writing in Latin or in Greek, which were unknown to him. Then, at last, he apologized for what he had done.
Forgive me, Holy Father, for I have killed two men. It was my own hand that struck the blow, but the design was never mine. It was Master Francesco Colonna who bid me do it. Judge us both with mercy.
The letter claimed that the murders were part of an intricate plan, one that no man as simple as the author himself could have contrived. The two victims were men Colonna suspected of treachery, and at his direction they were sent on an unusual mission. They were given a letter to deliver to a church outside the walls of Rome, where a third man would be waiting to receive it. Under pain of death the two men were not to look at the letter, not to lose it, not to so much as touch it with an ungloved hand. So began the story of the simple Roman mason who slew the messengers at San Lorenzo.