“My father,” I explained, telling the bookseller more in two words than I would ever reveal to the other waiters or the fellows in my tenement. “Well, I never knew he was, until I was thirteen. His church helped bring my mother to the village when she was a girl during the war, and then she assisted him in the work of arranging for others to come there. We could not be in his congregation, of course, but he would leave me books when I was a boy and, later, would let me pick them for myself. Sometimes I could hear his sermons from inside the library, which was above the chapel. When I told him I wanted to leave, he warned me the city would be too much for me, that it would be hard enough for a white man.”
“New York is hard for everybody; that is what makes it what it is. You know, Mr. Clover, when most people read a book, they take from its story happiness and strife, good and evil, morality and sin, so on and so on. That is not what is most important. It is always in the parts that we cannot fully understand—the holes in a story, the piece missing—where the real truth of the thing lurks.”
I shrugged, not seeing the point.
“There may come a day when you will understand what you are grieving today. Then the story you just told about Mr. Rapp’s loathsome prank will have another meaning, and be more important to you than an actual encounter with a so-called genius. Then you will think back and say, ‘Mr. Fergins was a true friend.’”
He seemed to guess I was most concerned at the moment about whether he would judge me for crying; he patted my arm reassuringly, which helped, and I sat back and listened to his wonderful descriptions of the latest books, as if he were offering up new and better lives. He even read me part of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” with all its stormy rhythms. We were the first that ever burst—as I listened, I felt as though his words were the winds and they were driving us on—into that silent sea. In later years, this would be one of my happiest memories of my time as a railroad man.
New York City was so expensive that on only six or seven dollars a week (depending on gratuities) my chief amusement besides reading had to be to walk the island from end to end and watch. Watch the wealthy families stepping up into extravagant four-horse chariots, watch the vendors in the crowded quarters of hardworking Chinese or Germans. Everyone, the wealthiest or poorest, seemed to be in a hurry, but not I, not when I was away from the railroad. My mother’s cousin had a stable for police horses, so I saw him once every few months, but mostly he would have me help tend to the horses. From time to time I would encounter the bookseller in the city. I was so accustomed to seeing Mr. Fergins on his rounds through our train, I marveled the first time I saw the man with the roar of the city around him—but there he was, bent over his green cart, pushing it through the streets as though he had done so for all eternity. On one particular day, I was passing through the uneven streets of the lower portion of the city, studded with mansions of bygone eras that had turned into warehouses as the wealthy were building estates closer to the park. It was growing late, the brick buildings tinted a peaceful orange by the sun, when he appeared, struggling over the dents and breaks in the sidewalk. I rushed to help.
“My poor legs rejoice for you, young Clover,” he said, his face wet and pink with effort. “I purchased this cart from a florist—that is why there are tulips painted on one side—and sometimes I think of what it would be like filled with bouquets. Nothing in the world—not a ton of bricks—feels as heavy as books being moved.” He pointed our way into a boardinghouse. It was a modest wooden structure near the slow, dark river that separated New York from New Jersey. Well-dressed and well-bred gentlemen boarders occupied the sitting room. Pushing the cart into Mr. Fergins’s chambers on the ground floor, the umbrella tumbled from the top shelf.
As I retrieved it, I noticed it was misshapen, with the general form of a banana, and there was a stain on the striped fabric of the umbrella, a dark red, perhaps rust. The bookseller seemed embarrassed by its condition and tucked it back into the cart. “Always rolling off . . .” he apologized.
I was amazed by the sheer number of volumes of all kinds of bindings, colors, and sizes wherever my eyes traveled. Every conceivable space on any table or shelf and much of the floor was claimed by piles about the height of a tall man’s knee, with a wobbly wooden ladder that could be wheeled around. Mr. Fergins, his energy restored, mounted this with an athletic step that propelled him to the tops of the highest peaks. There were strong fumes of oil, too, though not nearly enough light to read the titles of the books without putting your face against them.
“Now I see how you can boast such a wide selection in your cart.”
“Oh, no. These are not books that I sell on the train cars or in the street, dear boy. I have a pair of storage rooms two streets away for inventory.”
“Oh?”
“These are books and folios I collected, starting long before I had my own stall in Hoxton Square in London. Much of it was purchased from the stock of bankrupt publishing firms, private libraries, auctions, sometimes junk dealers who were too ignorant about books to know what they had in front of them. Go on, do look around for yourself. These books have witnessed life and death.”
I laughed at the grave proclamation until I saw he was contemplative and serious. I made my way through the great maze of books, careful not to brush any binding with my coat. Interspersed with the familiar names of literary greats lurked mundane, interchangeable titles such as Manual of Bibliography, Bibliographers’ Manual, and American Bibliography. There was a shelf of humorously titled books such as Drowsy’s Recollections of Nothing and History of the Middling Ages that were not books at all, but rather imitation volumes Mr. Fergins had purchased from a public auction at the country home of the late Charles Dickens, who commissioned the false books to conceal a door in his library. I stopped to examine some books resting above these.
“Have you ever read it?”
I was looking at about half a dozen books with the same title: editions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.