The Nature of My Inheritance (3 page)

Among the very first things my mother told
me, after she gave me the calamitous news about
Dad, was, “Now you’re going to have to be the
head of the family and take your father’s place
in whatever ways you can. He would want you
to be responsible and mature enough to do that,
Liam.” At the time, while I nodded and said I
would do her as proud as I could, my fantasy
was that Amanda would move in with us as my
wife, and Drew and Mom would be like our
children. Something along those lines. The implausible
reverie didn’t linger longer than an August
icicle.

Now, though, as our laughter died down, I
did sense I might be on the right path to assuming
the role she described, wearing the pater’s
pants, despite the fact that I was faking illness to
ditch school like some punk third grader. It was
a necessary ploy, though. I wanted time to think.
Time to ponder what to do.

Needless to say, I couldn’t wait for my family
to leave so I could have the house to myself. I
traipsed upstairs, my glass of grape juice in
hand—the reverend bought bottles of this by
the case; we were all addicted to the stuff—and
pretended to go back to sleep. When my mother
checked on me, I offered her the comfort of
finding her sick son safely dozing in bed. I even
managed to twitch a little as if I were dreaming,
just to add to the effect. She said nothing, although
I felt I could plainly hear her thoughts,
Poor child’s been through the wringer, immune system’s off-kilter, good for him to have a day off
to rest. After I heard her walk back downstairs,
open and close the front door, and drive off in
the station wagon with Drew, I swung my legs
out of bed and in my pajamas dashed to my parents’
bedroom where I easily found a sock
stuffed with the keys to the locked volumes in
the top drawer of my father’s dresser. Not the
most canny hiding place anybody ever came up
with, but that was him all over again. I wasted
no time chasing back to my room and unlocking
the first Bible that came to hand.

The hidden book this time was from the fifteenth
century, Boethius’s
De consolatione
philosophiae
, in chestnut colored leather, very
plain Jane. It was so rare, or so it seemed, that I
couldn’t even find a copy offered for sale by any
book dealer online and, not knowing as yet how
to locate auction records, had to conclude the
thing was basically priceless. I marveled at its
text, not a line of which I could read, and at its
agelessness, these words written in 524 AD or
thereabouts, according to my research, while this
Boethius, about whom I knew nothing before
that morning, was in jail for treason, brought to
his knees by yellow-belly treachery. In other
words, an outlaw I could get behind. His book
seemed to make a bunch of nods to god, but really was a chat with the beautiful Lady Philosophy—
Amanda’s face floated into view—about
how fame and fortune melt away, about how all
of us are good inside even though we do wrong
things, about how prisoners should be treated
with kindness by their captors, about how god
doesn’t finally run things but men of free will
do. Awesomeness incarnate, I thought. I could
have spent the whole rest of the term in school
twenty-four-seven and not learned as much as
I did that morning, sitting with what I began to
wonder wasn’t just maybe a stolen Boethius and
chewing over what my father was doing with it
in his possession, not to mention the other concealed
rarities I found.

With the exception of one, which I guessed
the reverend used to read from, not a single solitary
Bible I inherited wasn’t hollowed out with
a rare book secreted inside. I found out they
were called smuggler’s Bibles, and were used in
the old days for a purpose that wasn’t much different
than what my dad seemed to be using
them for. It was pretty smart of the old man,
smarter than I suppose I’d have given him credit
for knowing, that if you wanted to hide something
in a place nobody would bother looking,
a good old Bible was perfectly suited to the task.

I started making a list of titles and a tally of
market values, aware that my phony cold would
have to worsen over the next couple of days so I
would have time to finish the job. Since I rarely
got sick and had a real excuse for coming down
with something—exhaustion from the shock of
losing my dad—my mother was lenient about
letting me continue to stay home from school
that week. My poor brother, who saw right
through my hoax, writhed with jealousy. But
there wasn’t a thing he could do, especially after
that bogus cough of his became a running joke
at mealtimes. So I tucked the aspirin and cold
medication pills in my cheek, just as I had seen
in the movies, drank water from the glass my
mom handed me, swallowed mightily, then spat
out the pills onto my palm the minute she
turned her back. I managed to drink hot tea on
the sly before she put the thermometer in my
mouth to take my temperature, and the results
were impressive. Part of me wished I had played
this game of charades earlier, but I knew my father
would have called me out in a heartbeat,
laid a choice line of scripture on me about lying,
and that would have been curtains, no encore.

But what about him and lying? Or, if not
lying, keeping a secret from his family to the
tune of half a million plus for starters—these
books added up fast, reaching into six figures even before I was a quarter of the way through
the trove. Just for example, the first edition in
English, 1640, of Niccolò Machiavelli’s
The
Prince
, which I learned was the greatest textbook
of all time for political leaders interested in
wielding power with an iron fist, brought in the
neighborhood of sixty grand or more. Little brat
of a book, too, a duodecimo they called it. Or
what about Voltaire’s
Candide
, one of a dozen or
so copies of what was known as the quote-unquote
true first edition, published in Geneva in
1759? A sheaf of fussy notes about its “points”
that verified it as legitimate was tucked into the
smuggler’s part of the Bible underneath
Candide
itself. Online, a British book dealer—I wondered
if they ought to call themselves bookies?—had
one of these for £60,000, which the conversion
chart made out to be about a hundred thousand
dollars just by itself. It went on like that. Mary
Shelley’s
Frankenstein
in three small volumes
hidden in three different Bibles, the 1818 first
edition? Worth a hundred and a half, easy.

But what on earth was my dad, the good reverend,
doing with Frankenstein when he
wouldn’t even let me and Drew see the movie
because he didn’t want our snow-pure souls corrupted
by the spectacle of a half-man, half-monster
roaming around terrorizing people and drowning little girls? Though he never found
out, we did see the James Whale original on a
friend’s computer, harmless enough moth-bait
relic that it was, but the more I thought about
Frankenstein
, Boethius, Machiavelli, and the rest,
the more I realized that my father and I couldn’t
be the only ones who knew about the pearls inside
these oysters. Couldn’t be blind to the fact
that his murder probably had to do with all this.
Problem was, if I talked to the detective about it,
I worried that the authorities might take my
books away from me. But if I didn’t, then whoever
pushed my dad down the stairs might never
get caught.

Late morning on the third day of my convalescence—
where was Amanda Nightingale
when her fallen soldier needed succor?—the
telephone rang. This threw me way off, since the
house had been quiet as a toothache during the
first two days. I debated whether to answer. If I
did and it was my mother checking up on me,
she might say if I’m well enough to talk on the
phone I’m well enough to go to school. Ixnay to
that, since I needed at least one more day to finish
going through the Bibles. On the other hand,
what if it was that detective who maybe had a
lead or something? Damned if I did, damned if
I didn’t, so damn it I did.

“Everett residence,” I half-croaked, in case it
was the mater.

“Who’s this?” was what the man on the other
end asked.

I’m not the epitome of etiquette, not by a
muddy mile, but that struck me as rude.

“Who is this?” as breezy as I could muster
now that I knew it wasn’t my mother.

“Is Reverend Everett there, please?”

“This is his son. And who, may I ask, is calling?”

Bread on the water, see.

“I need to speak with the reverend himself,
I’m afraid, on a private matter. Would you mind
letting him know there’s a party on the phone
who wishes to speak with him?”

Just as the decision whether or not to pick up
this call was a kind of crossroads, I found myself
at another crossroads here. Do I tell him about
my dad’s demise, or play out the line a little
more, see what this was about?

“He’s not here right now. If you give me a
name and number—”

And he hung up. Needless to say, as I continued
to work on cataloguing, and roughly, very
roughly, appraising the books inside the books
as best I could, recognizing my limitations and
at the same time continuing to marvel at the literary gems I unearthed, the dark cloud of that
call hung over me. Seldom the nervous type, except
in the presence of Amanda, whose mild
voice raised sweat on my palms and soft scent
made my heart race, every lousy sound I heard
downstairs, when the furnace boiler went on or
the hall clock struck the hour, caused me to
jump. I didn’t like that man on the horn. I didn’t
like that my father had left me with such a weird
legacy. I didn’t like it that my earlier little-boy
judgment about my dad’s death being a murder
had now transformed into my not-so-little-anymore
son’s conviction that I had been dead-on
right. I looked at the confounding array of
books, as many of them as worthless as the others
were valuable, and shook my head in wonder
and despair. If the reverend were here, as I very
much wished he were, he would no doubt have
had some catchy proverb to impart, some elegant
verse from the Bible that would bring this
mess into focus and help my suddenly incomprehensible
world make sense.

“Where are you, man? What’s all this mean?”
I asked and, ashamed as I am to admit it, began
crying.

Toggle life back to summer. Hot as skeet, sky the
color of a tin can, the air murky as math. My father and I together in the wagon with its fake
wood panels and shocks so spongy every pothole
made us heave and bounce like a rowboat
on rolling waves. We were headed over to the
church with some hymnals another ministry
was kind enough to donate, or re-donate, to the
First Methodist church. Brotherly-love sort of
gesture in the “Give and it shall be given unto
you” tradition. It was pretty nice of them, since
our church, whose lower middle-class congregation
was strong in faith but feeble when the
collection plate was passed around, had nearly
run out of hymnals. Guess some people wanted
to take them home so they could sing all the
verses of “The Old Rugged Cross” in the comfort
of their bathrooms.

I helped the reverend, who was in an off
mood that late August day, take the boxes of
chunky hymnaries out of the car and into the
church, where he had me unpack and tuck them
into the book racks behind each pew while he
went downstairs to his office. Off, too, was that
he palmed me two dollars and told me to head
over to the bodega a few blocks away and get
myself a soda or candy or whatever I wanted.
Hang on, I thought. Wasn’t he always on my
case, telling me not to drink soda or eat candy?
I didn’t really want soda or candy anyway, but dutifully tramped off into the sweltering heat,
wondering why he wanted me to amscray like
that, for no real rhyme or reason. Besides, it was
a lot cooler in the sanctuary than it was outside
under a sun hotter than the Eye of Sauron.

When I returned, I noticed there were two
other cars parked in front of and behind our
shabby vehicle, cars with far finer pedigrees than
ours. One was a Benz, black as venal sin, and the
other a most excellent vintage white bathtub
Porsche. For whatever reason, I was alarmed by
them, girdling our jalopy the way they did.
There was plenty of room to park up and down
the street, so why make it impossible for us to
squeeze out of our spot? Just seemed sinister to
me.

Inside the church all was hushed other than
men’s voices coming from the basement office,
softly distant as if they were murmuring in a
mine shaft. Following my instincts, I sat on one
of the wooden pews far off to the side and continued
to work on my half-melted chocolate bar
while waiting to see what there was to see.

I didn’t have to wait long. A fellow in a tailored
suit soon emerged from the doorway that
led to the stairs down at the end of the nave,
thickish leather briefcase in hand, and strode
with presidential purpose along the far aisle toward the front door. I didn’t stir or say a peep,
and he didn’t notice me as he passed by, his face
an unreadable blank, just a man walking along
minding his own. When he exited, a shaft of
brutal silver daylight invaded the dark interior
of the church long enough for the large oak
door to open and close. Right after that, my father
and another man I no more recognized
than the suit that had just come up from the catacombs,
in part because he averted his face, were
talking about things that, try as hard as I could
to understand, I couldn’t make hide nor hair
about. I do remember the man saying “Milton.”
But that was only because there was a skinny kid
at school with that name, Miltie Milquetoast
was his uninspired nickname, and he was always
catching flak because of it. And as they walked
down the aisle toward the door, their footsteps
on the stone floor echoing more audibly than
their voices, I swore I heard my father say,
“…generous margins.” Generous margins? Clueless
as to what they were talking about and feeling
a little weird that they were so close to me
but thought they were all by themselves, I
cleared my throat.