“The last bookaneer. She said I could be the best because I was heartless. She meant it as praise, Fergins. That unlike all the authors whose books we chased, I had learned to separate the sentiment from the ambition. I tried, I always tried to be what she thought I was. . . .” Then he hung his head. Overcome.
It was so rare for him to speak of Kitten that whenever he did, I hardly ever responded. After her death, I had held on to that French edition of Frankenstein I mentioned earlier, the one she had left behind at a hotel near Geneva during her opium haze. Even if Davenport would seldom discuss her, my time with Kitten on Lake Geneva left me wanting to try to understand her better. Though she had not been able to tell me anything about it, a secondhand book reveals much to the keeper of a bookstall. From the types of cracks in the spine and the edges of pages, I can tell at a glance a book that has been well read from a book that has been abused. I believe it was the litterateur Charles Lamb who told Coleridge that books are not just the words on the page, but the blots and the dog-eared corners, the buttery thumbprints and pipe ash we leave on them. I knew a bookseller who by habit marked his page with his wire-rimmed spectacles, dozens of his spectacles being found for years after his death in libraries across London. Books are written over with names, dates, romantic and business propositions, gift dedications; the pages could be pressed onto flowers, keys, notes. A book can unfold moments or generations, if you know how to see it. Most people, of course, do not. How odd it must be to go through life believing that a book is a book.
In the case of this particular edition of Shelley’s novel, it was one of the first translations to be printed after the young Englishwoman’s story became such a sensation. In France, unlike in many other countries, people will go without food in order to own a book they enjoy. The French publishers were fragmented by regions in the early 1820s. The whole world was smaller then, and there was no better example of it than in books. Booksellers and publishers in the olden days were one and the same. You would meet an author in person, print and bind his book, and sell it to your friends and neighbors. Though the bookseller who printed it was no longer in existence, I easily identified the area of France where it most likely had been first sold. I could also determine almost immediately it’d had at least two different owners, judging from the different ways pages had been held and marked, and some writing on two different places on the flyleaf—the first line of writing was crossed out too thoroughly to read; another appeared to be the name Loui.
I thought about that book as Davenport finished speaking about Kitten’s wishes for his career.
“If you could have overtaken Belial this time, what would you have said to him?” I asked, in part to relieve him of the topic of Kitten.
He smirked to himself, I suppose thinking of an answer, but had no intention of telling it to me. We stood there in silence.
Without a conversation, the flow of my memories continued: Whenever I was traveling near France after Kitten’s death, I brought her book with me as well as a list of all the aliases I had heard associated with Kitten, gradually narrowing them down through defunct directories to determine her birth name. Because it seemed to have had two owners with no familial resemblance in handwriting, I suspected this Frankenstein had been a secondhand purchase before landing in Kitten’s hands.
When I was satisfied I had identified her surname and its proper branch, I was able to discover several people who remembered Kitten’s family, which had moved away long ago. One old lady had a vivid memory of Kitten’s mother, whose name, Louisa, matched the one on the flyleaf. She did not recognize the edition of the book but did remember her fondness for Frankenstein, describing it as an obsession. “It was her favorite story—she said it was the only book other than the Bible that she read beginning to end, and her Bible she would throw at her children’s heads or use to beat them. She was a mean woman, had three or four sons and the one girl, who had to steal to feed herself. But that book, she loved. Why, that witch even begged her daughter to read the book to her when she was ill—imagine, a dying woman coughing blood onto her pillow, asking a fifteen-year-old girl to read such a disgusting story out loud. I’d spit on her if I saw her living again. A detestable picture!” She spit right on the book.
I was very moved by the image of Kitten as a young woman whose mother only appreciated her through this book. One of my earliest memories is of my own mother singing to me. Nothing sophisticated, Irish peasant songs she had heard from her grandmother. Over the years, I found the words to these songs printed in various obscure books, and when my mother had long forgotten the songs herself, I would sing them to her, and I believe that brought her some happiness, or at least the memory of happiness.