Writings

The best ones are always worth waiting for, even when they lie in the very bottom of the box. This one was A Gardener’s Fancy by Horace J Allen, lavender cloth with faded green vines twining round the gold lettering with an 1867 copyright. There had been no papers or forgotten mementos in her books so far, but I checked this one anyway just to be sure and that’s when I found the photograph.

This may be the best part of owning a used bookstore—sorting through the boxes of books people bring me, books they no longer want but wouldn’t dream of throwing away. The books I get cover a spectacular range, from ratty paperbacks of last summer’s hot romances to sturdy text books with important passages called out in yellow or pink. Sometimes there are beautiful old editions, with gilt page-edges and ornate cover designs on silky cloth, a pleasure to touch.

But what I love best is finding things left inside. I know just how it happens because I do it myself—just stick things into books, things I mean to take out later but never do. Some people are very cautious before they give their books away. I guess they take each book and shake it, dealing right then and there with the fallout. It’s the less thorough people I have the soft spot for, because they leave the treasures—and the junk—that I love to find. I’ve found letters; photos; pressed leaves, herbs and flowers; countless receipts; business cards; magazine clippings; recipes; birthday cards; half-written letters; even someone’s chemo appointment card. That was sobering. I would like to say I don’t read the letters, don’t examine the photos, but I do. So many stories, even in a small town like this. Someday I’d like to write a book about what I’ve found. Funny idea, isn’t it? Old books hiding things that lead to new books. Kind of like a Chinese puzzle. Or is that Jacob’s Ladder? I’m never sure.

Anyway, I had been over to Mrs Blake’s house earlier that day to pick up some boxes. I felt good about this pick-up. The ones that made me sad were the people who called because someone had died. All the books a human being had collected in a lifetime reduced to so many cartons. Cartons that would be examined and evaluated by a stranger. I didn’t know Mrs Blake well. I did know her to be a vital, healthy woman who had lived in town all her 84 years and looked as though she intended to keep it up for a very long time.

“Doing a little spring cleaning in September,” she had said when she called. It was just the two cartons, and I took them straight back to the store to go through them. I never can wait. Sometimes a box hides a rare or valuable book, but that’s unusual. More often I find books that would have been valuable if: if the dust jacket weren’t torn, if it hadn’t been stored in a damp basement, if a puppy hadn’t chewed it, if some child hadn’t crayoned a fire engine, a hat and three pigs onto random pages. An awful lot of cookbooks have been decorated by children through the years from what I’ve seen. I like to think about those. I conjure up a scene: a rainy day in 1957, a child kneels on a too-big chair at the kitchen table with a harried mother trying to bake or just wanting a few moments of peace. The footprints of that moment are right there in my hand.

Today, Mrs Blake’s boxes had held some nice middle-of-the road books, many from the 50s and 60s. No worm holes, furry moldy stuff or unpleasant stains here, but no real heart-stoppers either, at least until I got to those last few and found the forgotten photo. It was black and white and printed on a heavy, matte-finish board with fancy edges and spidery, curlicue borders. The picture, larger than a modern snap, showed three young girls posing self-consciously, one holding a tiny dog. All had long, thick hair and were wearing what looked like identical dresses. Written on the back in blue-black ink was “June 1932, Olivia, Lily and Rose. I made the dresses special for each.“ I turned back to the picture. Olivia. That was Mrs Blake’s name. Was she the squinty one holding the dog? The one with the slightly playful smile? Or the one who seemed surprised that the camera was there? The last was the least pretty of the three and for some reason, I hoped she wasn’t the young Mrs-Blake-to-be. It was a beautiful photograph in wonderful shape. I knew I had to return it.

*
“Come in, come in. I can’t wait to see what you’ve found.” With a little effort, I could still see the girl in the older woman’s face. “I’m as curious as a country cat!” Mrs Blake’s living room was gracious in time-muted tones. The colors weren’t faded in a depressing way, but more muffled in a comforting way. It was open and airy and suggested someone who hadn’t closed the door on the world. “I mean it, though,” she said. “Once I let those books go, they were yours. If the book is valuable, you just go ahead and sell it.” As she spoke, she shooed away something imaginary with her hands, as if this conversation were a loved but impish child. “It was just taking up space on my shelf.”

“Thank you. You know, I’m not exactly here about the book itself. It’s what I found inside the book.” I opened it to the page that hid the photo and handed it to Mrs Blake, setting the open book down on the coffee table between us.

Her hand trembled a bit as she looked first at the photo and then at me. She brought the tips of her fingers to her lower lip. “Well, you could just knock me over with a feather! I’ve been wondering for years where this went. I should have thought of this book. I plain forgot about it. Oh, my. Would you look at us? Oh, my.”

I couldn’t think of what to say. I felt like a time traveler, an intruder.

“Weren’t we something, though? Can you guess who this is?” That playful smile from the photo, there it was on Mrs Blake’s lips. The lips were thinner now, but the smile was the same.

“I have a guess.”

“This picture—oh, it was so precious to me! And I’m forgetting my manners.” She sat up a little straighter. “Thank you for bringing it back. This is a picture of me and my two younger sisters. And that’s Mother’s handwriting on the back. I remember that day so clearly. Like yesterday. Better than yesterday! I can just smell the flowers. See them blooming here on the trellis?” She turned the picture a bit to face me. “Honeysuckle and roses.”

“Oh, yes.” I smiled but I was waiting, hoping there would be something more than flowers to the story.

“Mother loved fragrant flowers. She named each of my two sisters for them. I always felt a little put out that she didn’t do the same for me. I asked her about it one day, and she told me that she just hadn’t thought of doing that with her first born. She did always call me Polly as a sort of pet name. Told me that it was in honor of her favorite flower of all. And you see, she had embroidered each of our pinafores with “our’ flower.” She pointed to the picture again. “See, there’s a lily for Lily, some roses for Rose and there’s mine. Funny looking thing, isn’t it? Oh, I knew which ones they were. They had the most marvelous fragrance and Mother planted them in tubs each year. I thought she called them Pollyannas, so that’s what I called them.”

“In tubs?”

“Oh, yes. Tubs. Pots. They’re very tender. Can’t take the New England winters, so you have to pull them inside before the first cold snap.” She paused a moment. “Mother died two years after this picture was taken. All my life, and this may sound silly, but all my life I kept her with me by growing her fragrant flowers. You know, I got so I cared a lot more about how my garden smelled than about how it looked!” Mrs Blake turned toward me a little bit more, pulling me further into her story. “I had such fun with it when the children were young. They helped. That was the best part of having them home from school in the summer.”

“You mean Philip and Alicia?” Philip Blake had been my lawyer all my life. He was near retirement now, and here I was hearing about him as a little boy with a garden.

“Yes. We planted every fragrant flower Mother had loved and then some, but,” and she looked at me, a little breathless, “I never knew how to find Pollyannas. One summer—let’s see now, it must have been the summer Philip was 10 and Alicia was 7—I decided I was going to find out somehow. I really went to work. Asked everyone I knew. I borrowed books from the library. Bought every old gardening book I could find.” She punctuated each item in her list by bringing her hands down gently onto the top of her thighs. “Even borrowed a few from friends. Finally, I found it in this one. Not Pollyannas, but polianthes. Polianthes tuberosa, a tropical bulb with such ordinary looking white flowers. But the fragrance, oh the fragrance! It was so intense and lovely. I’ve grown them ever since.”

“And the picture? You must have used it to compare the drawings in the book—”

“Yes,” she said, “with the embroidery on my pinafore. I guess I left the photo in the book.” She peered at the page over the top of her glasses. “Right in the polianthes page!

“This picture is the only one I had of the three of us. It’s been missing for so many years. I never did think I’d see it again. Weren’t we pretty, though? And so young.” She was almost whispering.

“The dog is cute, too.” I said.

“That little thing belonged to all of us, but he loved Rose best. Look how she’s holding him. And Lily! She was so nervous about that camera. Mother said she looked like she might jump out of her skin.”
We were quiet together for a few moments, Mrs Blake lost in thought. Finally, she looked at me and said, “How can I thank you for bringing this back to me?”

“The story has been enough, Mrs Blake, really. I’m just happy that this picture is back where it belongs. And I’m going to write down the name of those flowers and look for them myself.”
She tilted her head. “Would you like to see mine?” she said.

We stepped out back into the bright sunshine of the wrap-around porch.

“Here we go!” She swept the back of one papery-skinned hand in the direction of a row of large planters. Clumps of strappy, green leaves erupted fountain-like from the pots, with a tall, tall stem popping up from the center of each clump. The flowers at the top of the spindly stalks were small, white and nondescript.

“Oh,” I said, surprised at their awkwardness. I went over and sniffed one.

“You’ll never smell anything now. You have to wait until dusk for them to release their aroma.”

I must have looked doubtful, because she said, “We always used to cut them and put single stems in small vases, they are that lovely to smell. We’d carry them with us from room to room those late summer evenings. To enjoy that wonderful scent. Alicia used to call them ‘nose candles’ when she was little.”

We laughed. “They do make you wait, these flowers, don’t they? First for years to find them, then until late summer to bloom, and then until night to perform.”

“I suppose you’re right.” She sighed. “At least they’re worth waiting for. At my age, you get to be grateful for things that were worth waiting for. Let me cut you some to take home. No, even better, I want you to take a whole pot of them, bulbs and all. Then, if you like them you can grow them yourself next summer.”

“Oh, I couldn’t—“

“Oh, you could. You wouldn’t want to make an old lady unhappy, would you?” The smile again.
*
The book turned out to be rather ordinary, the seventh printing of a common work, but it had done its job—and then some. Mrs Blake was right about the flowers. The fragrance was magical, and now I grow polianthes tuberosa every year. I’ve read that of all the senses, smell is the most potent for triggering memories. Funny, isn’t it, that for me this scent evokes someone else’s memories? A lot like a book—a book worth waiting for.

Lydia Fazio Theys lives in Connecticut with her husband and a pleasing mixture of great big kids, fat cats and a wee dog. Lydia’s work has appeared in previous issues of All Things Girl, as well as in Cezanne’s Carrot, flashquake, Opium, Yankee Pot Roast, Gator Springs Gazette, Moondance (column nominated for a Pushcart), Quintessence, Somewhat, Mad Hatter’s Review, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Quiction, HeavyGlow and the humor anthology Just Bite Me. Her fiction has been read on KRCB public radio, printed on a coffee mug and used as inspiration for a dance piece by the Junction Dance Theater of Pittsburgh.

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