After Dachau (18 page)

She raised her eyebrows at me innocently. “I have no idea what you’re getting at.”

I spent some time thinking about how to explain it, then finally said, “At the Gramercy Academy, you learned some things you couldn’t live without. You needed to know those things so you could get on with your life.”

“Very true,” she agreed.

“Yesterday I learned some things I couldn’t live without,
though I didn’t previously know they were there to be learned. Now I’m wondering how I’m going to get on with
my
life.”

“I see. I
guess
I see.”

“So I ask you what you think we should do.”

“I don’t think
I
need to do anything, Jason. If
you
need to do something, you’re the only one who knows what it is.”

“That’s so,” I said. “I’ve thought of a couple things, and I wondered if you’d thought of any.”

“I’m not looking, Jason. To be honest, all I was thinking about was finding studio space in Manhattan.”

“We can do that,” I conceded. “But there are some things I have to do as well.”

She shrugged, as if to say,
well, go do them
.

I put in
a call to the newspaper that advertises itself as the world’s oldest continuously published daily, where an acquaintance from school days, Ward Woolton, had attained some sort of editorial position on the city desk. When I got through the telephone net, I was informed (in a tone that suggested I should know better) that Mr. Woolton would not be available until ten-thirty at the earliest. Then I called Mother to see if she could give me the name of Dad’s bookseller.

“Which one? He has several.”

“I’m thinking of the one who provided him with the first-edition M.R. James that pleased him so much.” Among his other eccentricities, Father is a passionate collector of Victorian ghost stories.

“That was Edmund Dial. He has a shop on Lexington in the Fifties.”

With my mother, to inquire is to be informed.

I made a phone call and learned that the shop was open, though Mr. Dial wasn’t in as yet, his schedule being similar to Ward Woolton’s. No matter. I took a cab to Hell’s Kitchen, retrieved my car, and headed for Lexington and 54th. Dial’s establishment was far too grand to be called a shop, having six high-ceilinged stories packed solid with literary collectibles.

I didn’t have to do more than mention my name to have the clerk’s undivided attention. I asked if perhaps I could await Mr. Dial’s arrival in his office, if he had such a thing. Certainly he did have such a thing, and certainly I was welcome to have a seat in it. And use the telephone to make a local call? Positively.

Ward Woolton had reached his desk at the world’s oldest daily, though he didn’t sound overjoyed to hear from me. We hadn’t been bosom pals, just classmates. After exchanging the usual formalities and pleasantries, I asked if he was in a position to discuss a news story.

“That is, in fact, exactly the position I’m in here at the
Times
, “he informed me dryly.” I’m here for no other purpose.”

“Could I drop by and see you this afternoon then?” I asked.

“Not this afternoon, unless you’re calling from a burning building or a crime scene.”

“Nothing like that,” I admitted. “Tomorrow morning?”

“Can you give me a hint? About the story, I mean. Is it something to do with the Tull family?”

“No, it has nothing to do with the family.”

“I trust you’re not just going to tell me you’ve found the girl of your dreams and are going to get married.”

“No, of course not.”

“Then how about it?”

“Let me ask a question back,” I told him. “Has it ever occurred to you to wonder if the history we teach our children is a lie?”

After a moment of stunned silence, he said, “Good Lord, Jason. I hope you’re joking.”

“Why?”

“Surely that’s manifest.”

“It isn’t to me.”

“You’ve
been
there, Jason. We were there together. It’s
all
lies and bullshit till graduate school. Why else
have
graduate school?”

“That’s very cynical.”

“Is it?”

“Suppose I were to tell you that the lies don’t stop in graduate school.”

“Golly, Jason, what great truth are you going to reveal to me? That the earth is hollow and inhabited by the survivors of Atlantis? That the human race is an experiment in sociology being run by little green men on Mars?”

“I haven’t lost my mind, Ward. Give me an hour and I’ll convince you of that.”

“An hour? Christ, what do you think this is, the reading room of the British Museum? This is a newspaper. If you can’t convince me in five minutes that you’ve got something I can use, then you don’t
have
something I can use. It’s as simple as that.”

“All right, give me five minutes.”

“I’ll gladly give you five minutes, Jason, but, please, no
bullshit about the lies of history. That’s not news, that’s just blather.”

I said I understood, and we made a date for eleven the following morning.

Edmund Dial, when he made his appearance a few minutes later, was nothing like I’d vaguely expected, an elderly gentleman with a bookish stoop and dusty clothes, but rather a trim, sharp-faced man in his mid-forties, dressed rather more smartly than I was. Though he came through the door wearing a smile intended for my father, he quickly recovered when he realized his mistake, not discarding the smile but ratcheting it down to a more appropriate level.

He asked if I would join him in a cup of coffee, and I naturally said I’d be delighted. Having used the family name as a calling card, I had to endure the attendant ceremonials. He summoned an assistant, issued instructions, and looked as if he had to restrain himself from sending her off with a clap of the hands. When the rituals had been attended to, and sufficient time had passed, he asked what he could do for me.

I said, “I suppose you’ve seen and handled every kind of book there is.”

He raised an eyebrow but agreed that this was so. “There are collectors,” he added gravely, “for
every
type of book.”

I took out Mallory’s copy of
The New Negro
, which I’d been carrying in an envelope, and handed it to him. He recoiled, not so much from its title, I felt, as from its condition, which was that of any old, heavily used book. Lifting the cover with his fingertips, he scanned the copyright page, shook his head faintly, and asked why I was showing it to him.

“You said there are collectors for every type of book. I was wondering if there are any collectors for
this
type.”

He gave me a frosty smile. “You caught me in an overstatement, Mr. Tull. I assumed you were hinting at some variety of erotica. There are hundreds of thousands of old books that no one wants—no one at all—and this is one of them.”

“So you wouldn’t sell a book a like this.”

“I’d be glad to sell it if there were someone to buy it. As it is, if it belonged to me, I’d throw it in the trash. I trash thousands of books a year, Mr. Tull, books received when entire collections and libraries are sold in a single lot.”

He handed me back the book.

“I take it that merely being two thousand years old doesn’t make it valuable.”

“Certainly not. Any pebble on the street is thousands of years old. That doesn’t make it valuable.”

“But surely there are
some
two-thousand-year-old books that are valuable.”

“Of course,” he said, beginning to look bored. “You’ve seen many such books in your father’s collection.”

“What distinguishes one from the other?”

He gave me a look of frank disgust. “The valuable books are the ones people want, of course. The worthless ones are the ones no one wants.”

“But how can you tell just by looking that no one wants this book?”

“That’s how I make my living, Mr. Tull. It’s my
business
to recognize books that are wanted, and
The New Negro
isn’t one of them, I assure you.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to revise your estimate, Mr. Dial.
The New Negro
has joined the ranks of the wanted.
I
want it.”

“Well,” he said, with a bit of a smirk, “luckily, you have it.”

“And I want others.”

He frowned. “Others of what kind? Books about Negroes?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Then what? You can’t simply want all the books I discard. They don’t constitute a
type
. All they have in common is that no one wants them.”

“Let me think for a minute,” I told him. “I assume you know who Adolf Hitler was.”

“Of course. The so-called Hero of Dachau. A semi-legendary character, I assume, like William Tell.”

“Actually, he was a historical person.”

Mr. Dial shrugged.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if someone wrote a biography of him in English during the Great War.”

“Why do you stress ‘in English’?”

“The English-speaking nations were Hitler’s enemies during the Great War.”

Mr. Dial looked as if he were being led into deep water. “So,” he said meditatively, “you’re looking for a biography of the Hero of Dachau as written from an enemy point of view—a Jewish point of view, in other words.”

“Why do you say that? I mean, why Jewish in particular?”

“Because most of the publishing houses of England and America at the time were in Jewish hands. I assume that’s
how
this
book came to be published,” he said, nodding at
The New Negro
. “Obviously no one but a Jew would care to publish such a thing.”

“Perhaps that’s the guideline we’re looking for, then—books published by Jews.”

Finally Mr. Dial knew he was dealing with a madman. He stared at me blankly, hopelessly, perhaps wondering if he would ever be called upon to repeat this lunatic conversation to my father.

“For the moment,” I pressed on, “do me this favor. Let me root around in your discards. It can’t do any harm, and if I find something I want, you can set any price on it you think is fair.”

For half a second he thought he would balk at this suggestion; then it seemed to occur to him that it was a way to get me out of his office. A few minutes later, I was in a vast underground chamber where two young women were engaged in the apparently endless task of separating newly acquired lots of books into valuable and worthless. It looked like nasty, boring work, but my presence and my quixotic enterprise provided some welcome amusement for them.

After three hours, I realized I was working too much in the dark. I’d made two finds that seemed remarkably lucky: an antiwar novel called
All Quiet on the Western Front
, translated from the German, and one called
It Can’t Happen Here
, about the possibility of a fascist takeover in the United States. I also selected an incomprehensible little item called
Three Lives
, by someone named Gertrude Stein, just because I felt sure Mr. Dial would say no one but a Jew would care to publish such a thing. I unearthed but ultimately left behind a few books by authors with notionally Jewish names like
Steinbeck and Dreiser, figuring they could wait till I knew more.

When I submitted my treasures to Mr. Dial for valuation, he was torn, feeling that in good conscience he could neither make me a gift of such rubbish nor charge me for it. We deferred the problem till later by opening an account for me, listing the three items as having a value “to be determined.”

Returning to
the hotel, I learned that Mallory was off touring spaces on offer as artists’ studios. I settled down with the phone to find someone who might know how to deal with two-thousand-year-old photo negatives. Most experts assured me they would be beyond salvation, but I finally tracked down a technological archeologist who said she knew a trick or two that others might not and agreed to have a look at them.

After Mallory returned and had a bath, we tackled the grave matter of where to dine. I made a number of suggestions, but she finally decided she didn’t want to “make a production out of it,” so we ended up in a dining room downstairs.

In the middle of our second cocktail, I told her I couldn’t imagine not asking her to marry me.

“That’s a strange way to put it,” she replied. “Are you asking or just making conversation?”

“I’m asking.”

She took out time to have a sip of her drink. “Actually, I know what you mean. I also couldn’t imagine your not asking me.”

“Are you accepting or just making conversation?”

“So far,” she said, “I’m just making conversation.”

“I see,” I said, in my owlish way.

“You know that scrawny black chick you saw in the photo yesterday? That’s me.”

“I realize that.”

“I slept with half the guys in the Club before I hooked up with Roy. Can you stand that?”

“That was two thousand years ago, Mallory.”

“To me, it was last year. I’m that person.”

“Okay, but I’m also some other ‘that person,’ you know. We just don’t happen to know what person it was. Maybe I was one of the guys who tracked you down to that tunnel.”

She wasn’t buying this. “If you were one of those guys, you aren’t him now. But I
am
that girl in the photo, I guarantee it.”

“I love you whatever girl you are, Mallory. It’s you I love, not a photograph.”

“Love is too much for me right now, Jason. That’s just the way it is.”

“I understand. I’m not trying to push you.”

“I know you aren’t. We’re having fun, and that’s a good start. Even yesterday was fun, in its own weird way.”

“I liked the part where I was hanging off that ladder thirty feet in the air.”

“I did too.”

We were back
in the suite by nine-thirty and having a nightcap when the phone rang. Mallory answered it and reported that a visitor downstairs was asking to come up, one Harry Whitaker.

“Harry Whitaker!”

“Who’s Harry Whitaker?”

“An old friend of the family. Do you want to have him up? It’s entirely up to you.”

Mallory told the desk clerk to send him up.

“What do you suppose he wants?” Mallory asked.