Annie looked at the page once more, and then back at the old man. They became one and the same thing – the old man standing beside her and the letter she held in her hand, and in that brief second they represented all she had ever wanted to know about her own history.
‘I came, you see, with an invitation,’ and then he smiled once again in that strangely familiar fashion.
Of her parents’ relationship Annie O’Neill knew little. Her father had died when she was seven, and in the years that followed, when she’d lived alone with her mother, Madeline, there was little said of him. Of course he would crop up in their conversations, perhaps her mother mentioning something about the shop, about a book they’d read … but the intimate details, the whys and wherefores of life before his death – these things went unspoken. Madeline O’Neill had been a woman of character, self-possessed and intuitive. Her intelligence and culture defied description, and time and again she spoke of things that Annie believed no-one could have known. She knew books and art, she knew music and history; she spoke the truth directly and without hesitation. She had been Annie’s life, a totality, a completeness, and for the years they had been together Annie could never have comprehended existence without her. But time marched, and it marched with foot-soldiers, and the footsoldiers carried weapons that weakened the heart and frayed the nerves. They arrived one evening a little after Christmas 1991, and they brought with them Madeline O’Neill’s call-to-arms.
After her mother’s death, after the funeral, after people she barely knew had come and gone with their words of sympathy
and regret, Annie was left with almost nothing. The house where they had lived all those years was sold, and with the proceeds she bought ownership of the shop and paid a deposit on her apartment. Aside from that there was a box of papers and oddments beneath her mother’s bed which Annie knew were meant for her. Among those things was a book. A single book from all the many thousands that had passed through the family’s collective hands over the years. It was a small book called
Breathing Space
by Nathaniel Levitt. Printed in 1836 by a company called Hollister & Sons of Jersey City and bound by Hoopers of Camden – companies both long since vanished into the tidal wave of conglomerates – and Annie had no real understanding of its significance. The book came to represent her father, and thus she had never investigated its significance, never searched out other works by its author. These things did not matter, and seemed in some way to challenge the memory of her father. Inscribed inside the cover were the words
Annie, for when the time comes. Dad
. and the date:
2 June 1979
. It was a simple story, a story of love lost and found once more, and though the places and names and voices were dated, there was something about the rhythm of the prose, the grace with which the slightest detail was outlined and illuminated, that made the book so special. Perhaps it meant nothing of any great significance, but to that book she had granted character and meaning far beyond its face value. It had been left for her. It had come from her father. And though she would perhaps never understand the time to which he referred it didn’t matter. It was what it was, but most of all it was hers.
Nevertheless, it struck Annie O’Neill that for the first time in many years she was thinking of her father as a real person: a person with his own life, his own dreams and aspirations. What had Forrester said? That if there was one thing her father had known
how
to do it was to love his wife, Annie’s mother. And love seemed now such a tortuous path, such an unknown territory. Navigating the arterial highways of the heart. And even how it sounded.
Falling in
love. Surely that
said everything that needed to be said. Like a headlong pitch forward into the hereafter. Why not
rising into love
? Hey, you never guess what happened? I
rose
into love … and man, was that a feeling. A feeling like no other.
Annie’s mother had always looked a certain way when they spoke of him. Annie would beg her to talk of him, to tell her what he was like, but there was something there, something so driven and powerful that seemed to prevent Madeline from expressing her heart. Losing her husband had devastated her, something that was evident in her eyes, in the way her hands tightened when his name was mentioned. Madeline O’Neill had possessed a strength of character that Annie had rarely seen in anyone else. Her wit and intelligence, her compassion, her
passion
for life, were things that Annie had always aspired to but always seemed to fall short of. It was that character that had made her mother so special to her father, of this Annie was sure, and from this single, simple fact she knew that her father also must have been a remarkable man to capture her mother’s heart.
Annie held the letter.
From the Cicero Hotel
. Why was he in a hotel? In a hotel and writing to his wife? She believed she had experienced more emotion in this single moment than she had in the last year. Emotion for her father, the man who had given her life, and almost as soon had disappeared from that life. Emotion also for her mother, for these few words seemed to say everything that could be said about the depth of their love for one another. There was a vacuum within her, as wide as the building within which she stood, and never had she discovered anything that could erase that emptiness.
She looked at Forrester. He looked back – unabashed, direct. He possessed a lived-in face, warm and generous. His features were neither clumsy nor chiselled, but somewhere in between. This was the face of a man who would reach the end of his life, sitting somewhere in a hotel lounge perhaps, or in a rocker on a porch stoop, and with unequivocal certainty declare that it had in fact been a life. A
real
life. A life of moment and
significance, a life of loves and losses and calculated risks. Here, she thought, was a man who would never ask himself
What if …?
Sadly for her, but nevertheless realistically, the antithesis of her own quiet existence.
Annie smiled. She handed back the letter.
Forrester raised his hand. ‘No, it’s for you to keep.’
She frowned, but didn’t question how or why this stranger possessed the letter in the first place.
Anticipating her unspoken thought Forrester smiled. ‘Frank … your father and I, we shared a room together many, many years ago. I have been away, have recently returned to the city, and in preparing my things to move I came across this letter, some others also –’
‘Others?’ she asked.
Forrester nodded. ‘Other letters yes, all of them from your father to your mother … also I found some snapshots, old snapshots … even one or two of you when you were younger.’ Forrester smiled. ‘That was how I knew you were Frank’s daughter when I came in.’
‘You could bring them?’
Forrester didn’t answer her question at first. He merely nodded, and placed his hand on the stack of papers on the counter. ‘This is my invitation,’ he said. ‘Your father and I, we started something. We started something special here in Manhattan many decades ago. It was soon after he leased this store –’
Forrester raised his hand and indicated the room within which they stood.
‘I met him here, and here is where it all began.’
Annie placed the letter on the counter. ‘Where all of what began?’
Forrester nodded and winked as if imparting a tremendous secret. ‘The reading club.’
Annie frowned. ‘A reading club … you and my father?’
‘And five or six others … closet bohemians, poets, even some writers … and every week we would gather here or in
one of the apartments and we would share stories and read poems, even letters we had received. It was a different time, a different culture really, and people wrote so much more … had so much more to say if the truth be known.’
Annie smiled. Here was a facet, an angle of her father’s life she had never seen before. He founded a reading club.
‘And as I am here for some time, weeks, months perhaps, I felt we should revive the tradition.’ Forrester smiled. He once again performed the small introductory fanfare with his hand, indicated the shelves that stood to all sides: literary sentinels. ‘After all, we have no shortage of material.’
Annie nodded. ‘You’re right there.’
‘And this,’ Forrester said, taking the sheaf of papers from its wrapping on the counter, hesitating for a second as if a little awkward. ‘Well Miss O’Neill, I thought that this might perhaps be the first subject of discussion.’
He handed the papers to Annie. She could smell their age, feel the years that had somehow seeped into the very grain of the pages. Perhaps it was her imagination, but it was almost as if her history was here, a history her father had been part of, and thus she might find something that would contribute to her own. An open door beckoned her and there was nothing she could do but walk right through it.
‘It is a novel I believe … at least the start of a novel. It was written many years ago by a man I knew for a very short time, all things considered. He was a member of the club, and while he was there he possessed all of us in some small way.’ Forrester smiled nostalgically. ‘Never met a man quite like him.’
He paused quietly for a second or two. ‘This is the first chapter … reads like a diary I suppose. I would like you to read it, and then next Monday I will come and we will discuss it.’
He smiled, and there was something so warm, so genuine about his face, that Annie O’Neill never questioned intent or motive or vested interest; she simply said, ‘Yes, of course … next Monday.’
‘So there it is … signed, sealed and delivered.’ Forrester held out his hand.
Annie looked at his hand, then up at his face, and his eyes were looking at the silk handkerchief that she still clutched in her hand. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Sorry …’ and returned the handkerchief to him.
‘It has been a pleasure,’ he said, and once again he bowed his head in that strange clipped European fashion.
‘Mr Forrester?’
He paused.
‘Could you … would you tell me about my father? I know that it seems a strange thing to ask but he died when I was very young … and … and well –’
‘You miss him?’
Annie could feel that tight fist of emotion again, threatening her ability to breathe. She nodded. She knew if she tried to speak she would cry.
‘I will come on Monday,’ Forrester said, ‘and you can ask me all the questions you like and I will tell you what I know.’
‘Could you … could you stay a little now perhaps?’ Annie ventured.
Forrester reached out and touched her arm. ‘I am sorry my dear,’ he said quietly. ‘There is, unfortunately, something I must attend to … but I will be here on Monday.’
Annie nodded. ‘You will come … you promise you will come.’
‘I will come Miss O’Neill … of that you can be certain.’ And then he turned, and Annie watched him go, and though there seemed to be a confusion of questions and noises inside her head she said nothing at all. The door opened, the breeze from the street stole in to gather what warmth it could, and then the door closed and he was gone.
Annie carried the sheaf of papers to the counter and set them down. She turned over the first blank page, and then started to read:
A friend of mine once told me something about writing. He said that at first we write for ourselves, then we write for our friends, last of all we write for money. That made sense to me, but only in hindsight, for I wrote these things for someone I believed I would never see, and then I wrote them for money. A great deal of money. And though the story I will tell you has more to do with someone other than myself, and though this thing began long before I met him, I will tell you about it anyway. There is a history here, a history that carries weight and substance and meaning, and I write of this history so you will understand how these things happened, and why. Perhaps you will understand the reasons and motives, perhaps not, but whichever way it comes out …
The bell above the door rang again. Annie paused midsentence and looked up. The wind had pushed the door open, and the chilled breeze hurried in once more to find her where she stood.
She closed the door, closed it tight into the jamb, and walked back to the counter. There were things to do, a new delivery to log and inventory, and the sheaf of papers would have to wait until she returned home.
She wrapped the papers carefully inside the package that Forrester had brought, tucked the letter he had brought in the package too, put it into a bag, and carried it through to the kitchen at the back of the store. She set the bag on a chair, and in the event that she might absent-mindedly hurry from the store for some reason, she covered it with her coat. She would not forget it;
could
not forget it.
Annie O’Neill thought of the papers throughout the day, like a promise waiting, a sense of anticipation and mystery surrounding them, but even more so she thought of the man who had visited. Robert Franklin Forrester. A man who had known her father, and in the few minutes she had spent with him had given her the impression that he’d known her father far better than she had. And the reading club. A club for only two it
seemed. First meeting evening of Monday, 26 August 2002, right here at The Reader’s Rest, a small and narrow-fronted bookshop near the junction of Duke Ellington and West 107th.
Seemed to all who knew him, and those indeed seemed few enough, he was called Sullivan. Just Sullivan. To Annie O’Neill he was Jack, the man who shared the third floor of her apartment building and the suite of rooms that faced hers. Jack was, like Annie’s mother, an anachronism, a man out of time and place, and perhaps the greatest living storyteller Annie had ever had the fortune, or misfortune perhaps, of meeting. He was there when she moved into the apartment back in 1995, standing at the top of the stairwell as she heaved and humped boxes and bags up the stairs. Never once offered help. Never really said a word until finally she came to rest and introduced herself.
‘Annie O’Neill,’ he said. ‘And how old are you Annie?’