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" 'You can touch them, Roger, if you're careful,' he tells me. Fortwo years, he had let me come and listen to his classical records, andwe'd taken walks together. But I was just becoming sexuallyinteresting to him, though I didn't know it, and it's got nothing to do withwhat I have to say until later on.
"He was on the phone talking to somebody about a ship in theharbour.
"Within a few minutes we were off to the ship. We used to go onthese ships all the time. I never knew what we were doing. It had tobe smuggling. All I remember is Old Captain sitting at a big roundtable with all the crew, they were Dutch, I think, and some nice offi-cer with a heavy accent giving me a tour of the engine room, the maproom, and the radio room. I never tired of it. I loved the ships. TheNew Orleans wharves were active then, full of rats and hemp.""I know.""Do you remember those long ropes that ran from the ships tothe dock, how they had the round steel rat shields on them梔isks ofsteel that the rats couldn't climb over?""I remember.""We get home that night and instead of going to bed as I wouldhave done, I beg him to let me come in and see those books. I have tosee them before he sells them. My mother wasn't in the hallway, so Isupposed she'd gone to bed.
"Let me give you an image of my mother and this boardinghouse.
I told you it was elegant, didn't I? You can imagine the furnishings,heavy Renaissance revival, machine-made pieces, the kind thatjunked up mansions from the i88os on.""Yes.""The house has a glorious staircase, winding, set against astained-glass window, and at the foot of the stairs, in the crook of it,this masterpiece of a stairs of which Henry Howard must have beenprofoundly proud梚n the stairwell梥tood my mother's enormousdressing table, imagine, and she'd sit there in the main hall, at thedressing table, brushing her hair! All I have to do is think of that andmy head aches. Or it used to when I was alive. It was such a tragicimage, and I knew it, even though I grew up seeing it every day;that a dressing table of marble and mirrors and sconces andfiligree, and an old woman with dark hair, does not belong in a formalhallway....""And the boarders just took it in?" I asked.
"Yes, because the house was gobbled up for this one and that one,Old Mister Bridey, living in what had once been a servants' porch,and Blind Miss Stanton in the little fainting room upstairs! And fourapartments carved out of the servants' quarters in back. I am keenlysensitive to disorder; you find around me either perfect order or theneglected clutter of the place in which you killed me.""I realize that.""But if I were to inhabit that place again.... Ah, this is not important.
The point I'm trying to make is that I believe in order and whenI was young I used to dream about it. I wanted to be a saint, well, asort of secular saint. Let me return to the books.""Go on.""I hit the sacred books on the table. One of them I took from itsown little sack. I was charmed by the tiny illustrations. I examinedeach and every book that night, planning to thereafter take my time.
Of course the Latin was unreadable to me in that form.""Too dense. Too many pen strokes.""My, you do know things, don't you?""Maybe we're surprising each other. Go on.""I spent the week thoroughly examining all of them. I cut schoolall the time. It was so boring. I was way ahead of everybody, andwanted to do something exciting, you know, like commit a majorcrime.""A saint or a criminal.""Yes, I suppose that does seem a contradiction. Yet it's a perfectdescription.""I thought it was.""Old Captain explained things about the books. The book in thesack was a girdle book. Men carried such books with them. And thisparticular one was a prayer book, and another of the illuminatedbooks, the biggest and thickest, was a Book of the Hours, and thenthere was a Bible in Latin, of course. He was casual about all of it.
"I was incredibly drawn to these books, can't tell you why. I havealways been covetous of things that are shining and bright andseemingly valuable, and here was the most condensed and seeminglyunique version of such I'd ever beheld."I smiled. "Yes, I know exactly.""Pages full of gold, and red, and tiny beautiful little figures. I tookout a magnifying glass and started to study the pictures in earnest. Iwent to the old library at Lee Circle梤emember it?梐nd I studiedup on the entire question. Medieval books. How the Benedictineshad done them. Do you know Dora owns a convent? It isn't basedon the plan of St. Gall, but it's just about the nineteenth-centuryequivalent.""Yes, I saw it, I saw her there. She's brave and doesn't care aboutthe darkness or the aloneness.""She believes in Divine Providence to the point of idiocy and shecan make something of herself only if she isn't destroyed. I wantanother drink. I know I'm talking fast. I have to."I gestured for the drink. "Continue, what happened, who'sWynkende Wilde?""Wynken de Wilde was the author of two of these precious booksthat Old Captain had in his possession. I didn't figure that out formonths. I was going over the little illustrations, and gradually Idetermined two of the books were done by the same artist, and then inspite of Old Captain insisting that there would be no signature, Ifound his name, in several places in both books. Now you knowCaptain sold these types of things. I told you. He dealt in them through ashop on Royal Street."I nodded.
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