The Book of Lost Friends(44)

I mull that as I straighten desks, listen to school buses rumble past, and impatiently wait until teacher-release time.

When it arrives, I am out the door with the speed of a cheetah on the hunt.

It’s not until I’ve made my way home and am hiking through the gardens at Goswood Grove that this whole thing starts to seem somewhat questionable. Why would Nathan Gossett give the key over so easily? Don’t send me lists. I don’t care. I don’t want any of it. None of this means anything to him? At all? Is he really so disconnected from the house’s history? From his history?

Am I taking unfair advantage of that?

I know where the growing specter of guilt originates from. I understand family division and family issues. Irreconcilable differences. Wounds and resentments and differing viewpoints that prevent opposite sides from ever meeting in the middle. I have paternal half sisters I’ve barely even met, a mother I haven’t seen in ten years and intend never to see again and can’t forgive for what she did. For what she made me do.

Have I taken advantage of the very ghosts that haunt me most—spotted them somehow in Nathan Gossett and used them to get what I want?

It’s a valid question, and yet I find myself on the porch at Goswood Grove anyway, trying to discern which door my key fits and telling myself that I don’t care if Take what you want is a cannonball, fired across a family battlefield. The best place these books can be is in the hands of people who need them.

Several doors have locks far too modern for the little brass key. The house has obviously been used through the generations, its various inhabitants modernizing it in puzzle-piece fashion—a window here, a door lock there, an aging set of air-conditioners laboring in the back even though the house is vacant, a kitchen that was undoubtedly added long after the home was built. Before that, a separate one probably stood in the yard, built a short distance from the main house to isolate the heat, noise, and fire danger.

A small alcove off the current kitchen offers two entry doors. Through the windows, I can see that one leads straight ahead into a storage pantry, and a second leads to the left, into the kitchen. The tumblers on the ornate brass lock turn as if they were used yesterday. Dust, paint, and a stray coil of ivy relinquish their grip when the door falls open. The ivy slides across my neck, and I shudder in an awkward little dance, tossing it off as I bolt through then stand a moment, unwilling to close the door behind myself.

The house is still and stuffy, humid despite the air-conditioners whirring. No telling what it might take to control the climate in a place this big, rife with ancient floor-to-ceiling windows and doors that list in their frames like tired old men resting against the walls.

I move through the kitchen, which, in the fifties or sixties, must have included all the latest. The red appliances sport space-aged curves, the dials and gauges worthy of the interior of a rocket ship. Black-and-white tile completes the sense that I’ve stepped into some odd sort of time warp. Everything is tidy, though. The glass-fronted cabinets sit mostly empty. A dish here. A stack of Melmac plates there. A soup tureen with a broken handle. In the adjacent butler’s pantry, the situation is similar, though the cabinetry is much older, the crackled, bubbled shellac testifying to the fact that it’s probably original to the house. Whatever fancy china or silver the shelves once held is mostly gone. Flatware drawers hang partially open, empty. An odd scattering of remnants collect dust behind leaded glass doors. The overall feel is that of a grandmother’s house on the day before the estate sale, after family members have divided up the heirlooms.

I wander, feeling like a peeping Tom as I pass through a dining room with an imposing mahogany table and chairs, the seats covered in green velvet. Massive oil-on-canvas portraits of the house’s generational residents look on from the walls. Women in elaborate dresses, their midsections cinched impossibly thin. Men in waistcoats, standing with gold-tipped walking sticks or hunting dogs. A little girl in turn-of-the-century white lace.

The adjoining parlor is appointed in slightly more modern fashion. Sofa, burgundy wingback chairs, console TV in a cabinet with built-in speakers. More recent eras of Gossetts watch me from hanging portraits and easel frames atop the TV cabinet. I pause at a triple-matted display of graduation photos featuring the judge’s three sons. Diplomas are framed under each picture—Will and Manford, business graduates from Rice University, and Sterling, the youngest, from the LSU College of Agriculture. It would be easy to guess, just by looking, that he was Nathan’s father. There’s a strong resemblance.

I can’t help but think, Doesn’t Nathan want any of these photos? Not even to remember the dad who died so young? Sterling Gossett is probably not too much older than Nathan in that photo. He didn’t live many more years, I guess.

It’s too sad to contemplate further, and so I move on through the parlor to what I know comes next. I’m acquainted with the layout of the house, thanks to my various porch peeking trips. Even so, when I cross the threshold into the library of Goswood Grove, I’m breathless.

The room is glorious, unchanged from what it once was and has always been. Save for the addition of electric lamps, light switches, a plug here and there, and an enormous billiard table that most likely isn’t quite as old as the house, nothing has been modernized. I run a hand along the billiard table’s leather cover as I pass, snag one of the countless paperbacks stacked there. The judge had so many books, they’ve spread like the growths of ivy outside the house. The floors, the space under the massive desk, the billiard table, and every inch of every shelf is laden.