Godmother

Chapter One

I
LOVED ARRIVING AT THE BOOKSTORE FIRST THING
in the morning, when the streets were still quiet, the sun half risen, and the whole place felt like a secret meeting room. I liked walking through the still-dark city, as if I were wading through air—the buildings like shadows looming on either side of me, the streets rushing forward in black rivers. There was something about the empty store, too, the books piled all around, that made you want to whisper and walk as slowly as you could. The city was always on top of you, pressing in, but the moment you stepped inside Daedalus Books, it felt like you'd closed your eyes and gone to sleep.

That day it was so hot the place was stifling when I walked in. August had made the whole city seem to melt and turned the air to water. It sat on my skin, sank into it. I switched on the giant fan in the corner and stood in front of it, breathing in. Outside, I could see the glimmer of light from the bakery across the street. The steam of coffee, tshe baskets of bread being put out.

I had a ritual. Before I began sorting through the piles of
books, organizing and cataloging and shelving them, before I began attacking the dust that had accumulated the night before, I stooped down in front of the shelf of rare books behind the register. The books glittered like jewels behind the glass, with their ornate covers and bright gold edges. I unlocked the case, slid it open, and then paused, listening for any sign of life upstairs.

The smell of the old books was sharp as it hit my face. I loved the earthy scent of them, straight from another time. I could almost imagine I was being hurled back. I was always seeking out things and moments and places that were filled with the past, that made history seem like something you could touch.

I reached in and pulled out my favorite—the book at the end of the bottom shelf, tucked away, the pages like onion skins. I moved my palm over the raised cover.

I drew a deep breath, taking in its rich bark scent, then pulled back the front cover, carefully, as if I were juggling glass, and peered in. George had many old collections of tales, but this was my favorite. It had the most delicately rendered drawings, separated with translucent gold-speckled sheets that crackled when I turned them.

I felt something catch in my throat the way it always did, and I turned the pages, barely touching them, pressing them lightly with my palms so they wouldn't crumble.

The text seemed to have been stamped on the pages, among images of a girl sweeping the chimney and the floors. Scenes of a dance, a hall filled with men and women twirling like tops. The girl was drawn in pen and ink, her hair a mass of black lines. Leaves fluttered down the sides of the pages.

George had found the book, he said, at an estate sale, buried in someone's attic, with a stack of other books.
Peter Pans, Alice in Wonderlands,
wonderful old books as heavy as stones, filled with drawings and crinkled paper. He had bought the whole lot for barely anything at all, he said, and refused to sell them. I didn't question George. The store had been his father's, and his father's before him.

I sat down, pulled the book close to me, against my chest. I loved that each book had its own history. I kept a box under the counter filled with the ephemera I'd found in them, the notes and receipts and lists and bookmarks and bits of feather or plastic that people stuck between pages and forgot to pull out again. Once I'd opened a copy of
Middlemarch
and found a dried sprig of lavender and one pink rose. Another time a love letter had fallen out as I flipped through the pages of
Thérèse Raquin.”I can't see anything but your eyes,” the
lover had begun, and I would wonder who it was, if the lovers even remembered the fever that had passed over them once.

I loved the scribbles in the margins, the notes in the front of the books that told their stories, the ways they passed from one person to another.
“To Jennifer, Christmas 1921. May these words stay with you.”The
stray phrases and numbers jotted on the side of a page—
“Indian Taj, 74th Street”
emerging from the margins of
Utopia, “BUY PUMPKINS” blaring
up at me from the back cover of
To the Lighthouse.
As I sat behind the register, carefully erasing the penciled marks, I felt as if each book had a secret to tell, only to me.

In this one, my favorite one, someone had scribbled on the inside of the back cover, in French:
“Tous mes anciens amours vont me revenir.”

All my old loves will be returned to me.

I had often imagined who had written it, the faded pencil, the strange scrawl. Sometimes I imagined a young girl, daydreaming. Sometimes an old woman like me, left with nothing but memories. I wondered what had happened to the woman, if she'd ended up having a life rich with love or if she'd lived how I had lived, starving and alone. It could have been anything, an artist's note or a quote to tell a friend, but I felt I could see this woman, her face lit with hope, the pencil poised in her hand like a swooping bird.

I set the book down. What would someone say if they saw me? Silly old lady crying over a book for children. I put it away carefully. Locked the case. I used a mixture of white vinegar and clove oil to wipe it down, erase my fingerprints, and then I stood up slowly, facing the window.

The sun was starting to rise, and the light moved over the shelves, streaming in and onto the counter. Outside, the city breathed, groaned. Its hot breath steamed up the windows, and my own face stared back at me from the glass. The wrinkled, hanging skin, the dull hair that spiraled out like wires, the sunken dark eyes. I hated catching myself this way, by surprise.
This is not who I am,
I thought. Sometimes I ached so badly for my former beauty that I wanted to pull off my skin like an old robe.

I grabbed the broom and began tackling the floors. As I cleaned, I ticked off my day, what I had to do. Inventory, pricing and shelving, bills. There were boxes of books in back that George had dropped off the day before, and a few bags that customers had brought by to sell. This day I would be alone all afternoon while George headed upstate to track down some rare book. He was always off chasing treasures
and there was always someone in his array of contacts who would pay the price he asked for them. I thought of the bills I needed to pay and felt a twinge. The bookstore had limitless funds, thanks to George's family's other ventures— their horses and restaurants—and his own rare-book trade on the side. I was always struggling.

When I finished sweeping, I rubbed the shelves and counters with a damp cloth, then watered the plants I'd stuck in the windows. I straightened the books that had slumped over during the night, all the shelves the customers had wrecked the day before. It was mindless work, but satisfying: The dull floors began to gleam, and the dust-covered shelves came to life. During the day there was never enough time to fix what the customers unfixed, but here, now, in the early-morning hours, the place was perfect. A completeness and fullness that came as close as I could remember to life in the other world.

At ten
A.M.,
I turned the Closed sign to Open and wheeled out shelves of one-dollar books onto the sidewalk. A man passed me, walking his dog and carrying a newspaper under his arm.

I stood on the sidewalk. Stared out at the world, the comfort and hush of the store behind me. A few groups of people sat in the bakery now, sipping coffee, eating pastries. A woman stared intently into a laptop, tracing the screen with her fingers. Cars twisted down the street, nearly silent.

I went back inside. There were always mountains of new books to contend with, and the shelves were constantly shifting, transforming. Customers started trickling in, shuffling through the aisles, paging through books, slipping
science tomes into the poetry section, picture books in American history, Gabriel García Márquez next to Evelyn Waugh next to Casanova. I picked up a box of dusty children's books and got to work.

Around noon the back door opened and George walked in. He lived upstairs, in an apartment I'd never seen.

He had a book in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other.

“Good morning,” I said as he approached.

“Hey, Lil.”

“How was your date?”

“Oh,” he said, yawning and setting the book on the counter. A well-worn copy of
Revolutionary Road,
I saw. “It was a disaster.”

“It was?”

I stared at his long-fingered hands, his famished eyes, the dark streak of his hair.

“Yeah,” he said. “I just … Oh, I don't know. I guess I'm not much of a ladies’ man, Lil, despite all appearances to the contrary.”

I laughed. I wished I could say something. I never knew what to say. He stood there for a moment, watching me, and then he walked away, disappearing into the back office.

I stared after him. I didn't know why I cared the way I did, but I wanted so much for him to be happy. I wanted it more than my own happiness. A remnant from my former life, this feeling. It was always rearing its head.

I put a pot of coffee on the table by the register, and I could see George turning on the computer. It glowed on his face and he sat hunched over it, oblivious to anything else. I moved through the narrow aisles, straightening books, and watched him out of the corner of my eye. There was this
look that came over his face when he was concentrating, on a book or on something he was writing. He was writing now, his long fingers scrambling across the keyboard. I wished the women he met could see him like this, the way I saw him, all loose and flushed and taken over.