The Cartographers(34)
The date at the end of the note was yesterday—just a day after her father’s death.
It was too late, Ramona had said.
Nell worked her finger under the taped flap and pried it open.
As she shook the envelope gently to encourage the contents to slide out, there was a hiss of paper on paper, and a small rectangular shape glided smoothly free and landed in her hands.
It was facing backward, but she could tell it was a photograph.
PS: I found this while cleaning out my files a few years ago. I know it might bring up painful memories, but I thought you might want it anyway, Francis had written in the blank space beneath the film development shop’s logo.
Nell turned it over, and gasped at the image with sudden, bittersweet surprise.
It was a picture of their family.
The three of them—her father, her mother, and Nell, no more than a toddler—standing in front of an old station wagon, the doors open, suitcases stacked on the seats, surrounded by a background of lush woods and sun. Nell was dressed in purple overalls, perched in her mother’s arms, and her father had his arms around them both. Her parents were even younger than Nell was now, their faces smooth and unlined, her mother’s hair as curly and wild as her own.
Nell touched her mother’s face with the tip of her finger, transfixed. Everyone always said she looked just like Dr. Young, but here in the picture, she could see how similar she was to the other Dr. Young, as well. Her mother was even draped in an oversized, stretched-out cardigan, much like the ones Nell herself wore, comically huge on her petite frame, so big it looked like she’d stolen it from Nell’s father. They all were grinning widely, as though at the moment the photo had been taken, they had been laughing out loud at something—her father most of all.
He did look so happy, she thought as she stared at him. She had seen her father happy before, of course—when she won her full scholarship to UCLA, when she graduated, when she got her internship at the NYPL—but there was always a painful undercurrent to it all. I wish your mother were here to see this, he’d say with a sigh sometimes, the most he’d ever say about her.
But here, in the photo, that deep wound hadn’t yet been cut into him, then scarred over. Nell could practically feel the intensity of his joy through the faded gloss barrier, so trusting and uncontained. The way Ramona had described him.
“Hi, Dad,” she said softly.
Finally, she set the photograph carefully down on the table and tugged the other page out of the envelope. It was just a single sheet of paper inside of a cardboard folder—an article? Perhaps Francis had been tracking down some research for her father? But what information could he have been after that he couldn’t just download from the academic journal database at a library? He had worked at one of the biggest ones in the world, after all. That seemed much easier than going through a shadowy middleman like Ramona to have someone else hunt it down. Unless he hadn’t wanted the search on his record?
But it wasn’t an article, but rather another map, Nell saw as it came free of its folder. An old one, judging from the scuff marks and condition of the ink, and also clearly mass produced, she could tell at once from the style of the print and quality of pulp.
Why had her father been seeking yet another insignificant commercial map?
She studied it quickly, trying to figure out its relevance. It wasn’t a highway map this time, like the Junk Box map, but rather a block plan of a single street’s buildings—interiors drawn from an engineering or industrial perspective—from the early 1900s.
Sanborn Insurance Map from Manhattan, New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1903–1919, Vol. 4, 1910.
It’s a construction diagram of the NYPL, she realized just as she caught sight of the faded stamp at the bottom of the page.
“Sanborn Insurance map?” Nell read the words softly out loud, confused.
Why on earth would her father need an outdated floor plan of the library he worked in? And what did this map have to do with the first one?
The back side of the folder the Sanborn map had come in answered her question.
On the brown cardboard, in a hastily scribbled hand, was the same symbol that she’d found on the gas station map.
An eight-point compass rose, with the letter C in the center.
IX
The reception was more crowded than Nell had been expecting. Someone had poured her a drink from Swann’s private Scotch, and she cradled the crystal tumbler in her hands as she wandered through his home. Around her, the entire staff of the library, members of its board, and other distinguished friends and colleagues of her father talked quietly in scattered groups. The periodic clink of glass filled the air as toasts were made. They’d all been gathered there after the funeral since the late afternoon, clustered throughout the historic brownstone building.
It had been so long since Nell had been to Swann’s, but it hadn’t changed—it was exactly how one would imagine an old bookish type’s place to be. Big windows with wooden shutters that did very little to stop the dust-swirled light from leaking in, a pipe on the desk, and books everywhere.
She’d missed it here so much.
“That was a lovely service.” A soft thump on her back made her jump, then smile. Humphrey squeezed her shoulder sympathetically. “Didn’t you think?”
“It was, actually,” Nell had to agree. Despite the metaphorical trampled bones Dr. Young had left in his wake, there had been no theatrics. No ruined researchers sneakily distributing letters to show how mercilessly competitive he had been, no museum directors appearing to demand apologies. And Nell had managed to keep her mouth shut as well. Not a single scoff or bitter eye roll as others sang his praises from the pulpit. Not even when she’d gone up to his coffin to say goodbye.