The Bookseller(15)

Dearest Kitty,

I have been thinking about you all day today. I hope you are well, darling. You know, Aunt May keeps asking about you—whether you are happy, whether you have everything you want in life. And I tell her that of course you do. Of course. I tell her that if there was anything my Kitty wanted that she didn’t have, she’d find a way to make it so. I believe this, darling. You can do anything you want. You can be anything you want to be.

I hope you know what I am trying to tell you.

Love,

Mother



“What, Mother?” I whisper aloud to the quiet shop. “What are you trying to tell me?”

Is there somewhere else I should look? Some clue I am missing?

I consider my personal ad, think about the newspaper in the fall of 1954. If I saw the paper from those days, would it give me a clue?


I need to do some research,” I tell Frieda when we have our coffee break at ten o’clock. It’s not truly a break, because we don’t close the shop. If anyone came in, of course we would attend to the customer. But if no one is there, we settle on our stools behind the counter, sip our coffee, and have a chat. Sometimes we talk about business, sometimes about what we’re reading. Sometimes we fall into idle Pearl Street gossip—who we saw coming out of the Vogue with whom the night before, what other shopkeepers are doing to attract business to our little street, how unkind it was of the city to take our streetcar line away.

Frieda blows on her hot coffee. “What kind of research?” she asks.

I feel myself blushing. “It’s about a person. A . . . man.” It sounds so foolish, saying it.

Frieda has a gleam in her eye. “You’re holding out on me! Did you meet someone new? Where? When?”

I shake my head. “It’s nothing like that.”

Desperately, I want to confide in her. For over twenty years, I’ve kept almost no secrets from her. But besides being silly, this just seems so . . . personal. Like it belongs to no one else. Just me.

“It’s just someone I heard about,” I tell her. And then, hastily, I lie. “An author. He writes historical books.”

I know this will detach her interest immediately. Frieda can’t stand history. In the eleventh grade, despite my efforts to tutor her, she nearly flunked America: Columbus through the Great War—without a doubt the easiest course I’ve ever taken in my life. But Frieda is all about the moment.

“Anyway, I’m going to take an early lunch and go to the library downtown, if it’s okay with you.” I drain my coffee cup and rise from my stool.

She waves her hand. “Certainly. I have nowhere else I need to be.”


I walk over to Broadway and take the bus downtown, to the big central library that just opened a few years ago. In the research section, I ask the librarian to set me up with microfilm of the Denver Post from October 1954. It takes a while for her to find what I am looking for and set it up on a microfilm machine for me. I wait, browsing the stacks, thinking that the library is both the bookstore’s enemy and our friend. They have everything here—why would anyone ever need to buy a book? On the other hand, there is nothing like the library to awaken a reader to the endless possibilities of the written word.

Finally, I am settled in with the microfilm I requested. I turn the hand crank gradually, scanning the pages until I reach the personal advertisements in the back of each day’s edition.

Yes, my ad is there. I ran it for a week, from Sunday, October 10, until the following Saturday.

I smile ruefully, reading about my younger self, the self who still had hope for that part of her life.

I wonder what that self would think of me now. Would she be surprised that eight years have passed, and I have not changed all that much? That I still bop around my house listening to popular music in the morning? That I still root around in my closet for something to wear and leave a mess of clothes all over my bedroom, like a teenager? Would my thirty-year-old self tsk-tsk me about that? Would she be surprised that her personal ad got her nowhere, did not change her life one iota?

I don’t know. But I do know that nothing in my personal ad gives me any idea what happened to Lars Andersson.

I browse the remaining pages slowly. At first I feel discouraged by the lack of information in my ad, but after a while, I get immersed in that world that was. Hurricane Hazel smashed into North Carolina on the fifteenth, working its way up the coast and taking down homes and businesses in its wake. In England, dockworkers were on strike. On the front page of the Saturday, October 16 edition is a photograph of a woman with a little boy on her lap. Tragically, the boy was killed by a self-inflicted wound from a handgun left unattended in the home. The caption informs me that the photograph is of the boy with his mother, taken some months before the accident. A prizefight, reportedly “the greatest match ever offered in Denver” took place on October 19 at City Auditorium Arena. The Trinidad Junior College homecoming queen and her attendants are shown in a photograph on October 20. They look carefree, joyous, and very, very young.

And then, in the October 21 edition, I come across the death notices.


Andersson, Lars, 34, of Lincoln St., Englewood. Cause of death: cardiac arrest. Survived by sister Linnea (Steven) Hershall of Denver, one niece and one nephew. Preceded in death by his parents, Jon and Agnes Andersson. Services Friday at ten o’clock at Bethany Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church, Denver. Interment immediately following at Fairmount Cemetery.