" 'You can touch them, Roger, if you're careful,' he tells me. For two years, he had let me come and listen to his classical records, and we'd taken walks together. But I was just becoming sexually interesting to him, though I didn't know it, and it's got nothing to do with what I have to say until later on.
"He was on the phone talking to somebody about a ship in the harbour.
"Within a few minutes we were off to the ship. We used to go on these ships all the time. I never knew what we were doing. It had to be smuggling. All I remember is Old Captain sitting at a big round table with all the crew, they were Dutch, I think, and some nice officer with a heavy accent giving me a tour of the engine room, the map room, and the radio room. I never tired of it. I loved the ships. The New Orleans wharves were active then, full of rats and hemp. "
"I know. "
"Do you remember those long ropes that ran from the ships to the dock, how they had the round steel rat shields on them¡ªdisks of steel that the rats couldn't climb over?"
"I remember. "
"We get home that night and instead of going to bed as I would have done, I beg him to let me come in and see those books. I have to see them before he sells them. My mother wasn't in the hallway, so I supposed she'd gone to bed.
"Let me give you an image of my mother and this boardinghouse. I told you it was elegant, didn't I? You can imagine the furnishings, heavy Renaissance revival, machine-made pieces, the kind that junked up mansions from the i88os on. "
"Yes. "
"The house has a glorious staircase, winding, set against a stained-glass window, and at the foot of the stairs, in the crook of it, this masterpiece of a stairs of which Henry Howard must have been profoundly proud¡ªin the stairwell¡ªstood my mother's enormous dressing table, imagine, and she'd sit there in the main hall, at the dressing table, brushing her hair! All I have to do is think of that and my head aches. Or it used to when I was alive. It was such a tragic image, and I knew it, even though I grew up seeing it every day; that a dressing table of marble and mirrors and sconces and filigree, and an old woman with dark hair, does not belong in a formal hallway. . . . "
"And the boarders just took it in?" I asked.
"Yes, because the house was gobbled up for this one and that one, Old Mister Bridey, living in what had once been a servants' porch, and Blind Miss Stanton in the little fainting room upstairs! And four apartments carved out of the servants' quarters in back. I am keenly sensitive to disorder; you find around me either perfect order or the neglected clutter of the place in which you killed me. "
"I realize that. "
"But if I were to inhabit that place again. . . . Ah, this is not important.
The point I'm trying to make is that I believe in order and when I was young I used to dream about it. I wanted to be a saint, well, a sort of secular saint. Let me return to the books. "
"Go on. "
"I hit the sacred books on the table. One of them I took from its own little sack. I was charmed by the tiny illustrations. I examined each and every book that night, planning to thereafter take my time. Of course the Latin was unreadable to me in that form. "
"Too dense. Too many pen strokes. "
"My, you do know things, don't you?"
"Maybe we're surprising each other. Go on. "
"I spent the week thoroughly examining all of them. I cut school all the time. It was so boring. I was way ahead of everybody, and wanted to do something exciting, you know, like commit a major crime. "
"A saint or a criminal. "
"Yes, I suppose that does seem a contradiction. Yet it's a perfect description. "
"I thought it was. "
"Old Captain explained things about the books. The book in the sack was a girdle book. Men carried such books with them. And this particular one was a prayer book, and another of the illuminated books, the biggest and thickest, was a Book of the Hours, and then there was a Bible in Latin, of course. He was casual about all of it.
"I was incredibly drawn to these books, can't tell you why. I have always been covetous of things that are shining and bright and seemingly valuable, and here was the most condensed and seemingly unique version of such I'd ever beheld. "
I smiled. "Yes, I know exactly. "
"Pages full of gold, and red, and tiny beautiful little figures. I took out a magnifying glass and started to study the pictures in earnest. I went to the old library at Lee Circle¡ªremember it?¡ªand I studied up on the entire question. Medieval books. How the Benedictines had done them. Do you know Dora owns a convent? It isn't based on the plan of St. Gall, but it's just about the nineteenth-century equivalent. "
"Yes, I saw it, I saw her there. She's brave and doesn't care about the darkness or the aloneness. "
"She believes in Divine Providence to the point of idiocy and she can m