Excerpts

1. The first time I saw Newton Reddick he was drunk outside the Poquelin Society building on East Forty-Seventh Street. He was leaning against a cart filled with dollar paperbacks, looking pretty jaunty and not at all minding the cold. The Poquelin was a private library that had been started during the Gilded Age by a gang of bank clerks who believed reading during their lunch hours would make them into Rockefellers and Carnegies. It was still a private library in 2005 and also a scholarly society dedicated to the art, science, and preservation of the book, whatever that meant. Its membership rolls included a lot of academics, rare-book dealers, and a few unfashionable, old-money eccentrics who came down from the East Seventies on the chance of finding a literary evening. Newton Reddick was one of the book dealers, or had been anyway. I was told he was mainly a collector now. "Collector" seemed to me an overly polite term but at least it conveyed the fact he wasn't making any money at it. He was living off his wife, a much younger woman with inherited wealth to whom he'd been married just under ten years. That earned him a certain pride of place among the library's members, it appeared. He was holding court outside the Poquelin, leaning against that paperback cart and waving a cigarette around in his free hand while a trio of red-faced old-timers hugged themselves against the cold and seemed to hang on his every word. His voice, a crisp tenor, bounced off the skyscrapers and carried across the street to where I was standing with a coffee from the bodega on the corner of Fifth and Forty-Seventh. He was talking about somebody named Richardson. "The problem with Richardson," he was explaining to the others, "is the man has no sense of history, no feeling of a higher purpose. He thinks a Pulitzer makes a book worthy." The error of that kind of thinking was obvious to the little assembly outside the Poquelin, and before stubbing out their cigarettes and going back inside, they had a few more choice words for the Richardsons of the world, the ones who can't see the forest for the trees, who wouldn't know greatness if it walked up and punched them square in the nose. They were a lively bunch, those old bookmen. On another night, under different circumstances, I might have enjoyed listening to their fool talk. It was a Tuesday in November, just before Thanksgiving. All over the city people were drinking more than they should and visiting friends. It was the season for parties and parades and little flings that didn't mean anything. Normally I kept away from divorce work, but the case had come to me on referral. A woman calling herself Anna Reddick had shown up at my apartment the previous week, on Thursday evening, saying that she had met my friend Ulises Lima at a party. Ulises was a Venezuelan poet who sent me a lot of work. He thought it was awfully funny that I was a lawyer, not an artist or a writer or a poet like everyone else. He thought it was even funnier that I refused to work any longer at one of the big law firms in Midtown and was trying to make a go of it on my own in a careless and not very profitable way. He had sent around a good number of prospective clients for consultations. There were always people in his world who needed help and hadn't any ideas where to begin looking for it. Some had money and others would try to pay me with paintings or meals. Sometimes I took them up on it, though I didn't have an eye for that kind of thing, the visual arts, and I would have to ask someone, Ulises or another friend, to come by and appraise the thing for me. It was an endless cycle of imaginary economies, small profits, and favors done impulsively or not at all. That was fine so long as your rent was controlled. Anna Reddick came with cash in hand-ten thousand dollars. She had the bills neatly stacked and facing the same direction, the way a waitress arranges her tips at the end of a shift. "Catch him at it," she said, "and you'll get a bonus, paid out in cash, check, wire, money order, however you'd like, your choice." It had been a lean few months, and I was in no position to turn her down. Something about the case bothered me from the start. Whatever it was, I managed to put it out of mind. The job, as I understood it, was essentially a controlled buy, just as you might have bought some weed on the street or a box of Motorolas that had fallen from the back of a truck or a hundred other things whose provenance and ultimate destination you couldn't be sure of. Only in this case the weed was books. I had a list of five titles written for me on a note card. Any one of them would do, she said, and I didn't need to worry about actually buying them, so long as I received an offer of sale from her husband, the one she was about to divorce, and would swear to it in an affidavit. She believed he was trying to sell the books, which belonged to her. They had been passed down by her family. Her attorneys said she would need some proof to back her claim and advised her to get another lawyer involved, in order to cloak the job in privilege. That was just the kind of thing a divorce attorney would think of. Layering the secrecy until the truth was almost meaningless, so thoroughly and finally obscured you could hardly find your way back to daylight. The titles of the books were unusual. Long, ornate, and grisly. The Last Confessions of Tom Mansfield Who Corrupted and Murdered His Servant. Notes on the Investigation of Charles Mandell and of the Final Killing of Luke M. Johnston. They were legal volumes, apparently. On the surface, it was all very sensible. A lawyer in need of books. It happens all the time. I followed Reddick and his disciples inside and went up a narrow staircase to the third floor, where there was a banquet hall decorated with chandeliers and threadbare rugs thrown over the hardwood floors. It was debate night at the Poquelin and open to the public, though from the looks of it I was the only one who had taken them up on the offer. Seventeen old men in shirts buttoned to their chins. A few paintings on the walls and books on display. The speeches had already been delivered and the members had moved on to the drinking portion of the evening. I kept an eye on Reddick from across the room. He was long and slim and made an effort to hold himself up, propping his hands on the small of his back the way a pregnant woman does. He was sixty-three years old. His wife was in her early thirties. I suppose a part of me was bristling and judging him harshly, thinking meanly that if a man that age had been lucky enough going on ten years to hold on to a young woman of independent means, a really quite attractive woman in her own peculiar way, he ought at least to be modest and civilized about it when she finally came to her senses. He shouldn't go around selling her family's books. There was nothing worse than a shameless cuckold. Anyhow, that was the train of my thoughts as I carried a drink around the banquet hall and told the old men my story, which was meant to lure in Newton Reddick and eventually did. The story was more or less true: I told them I was a lawyer, an IP litigator. I was interested in the history of the Poquelin Society, but more immediately I was interested in buying a few books to decorate my office, preferably legal books, historical, rare. Reddick came over with two drinks, one for each of us, and introduced himself. "I understand you're just starting out," he said. He gave me the drink and we touched glasses. His grip was unsteady and his smile looked like the smile of a man who naturally trusts the strangers he meets and their intentions. There was a guilelessness about him, that is, or else the whiskey had stripped him of whatever he had. We spoke for a while, in general terms, about the Poquelin and about the city. He wanted to tell me how it had changed. In those years you often found yourself in conversations like that, and what the other person was really trying to say was that they had been there, in New York, a long time, longer than you quite possibly, and that was supposed to mean something. I didn't feel that from Newton Reddick. He was telling me about the city, but his memories seemed innocent somehow, the way you might talk about a childhood home that had long since been sold. In that way we came back around to the subject of books and the collection I was considering acquiring. "It's an exciting moment," he said. "I remember my firsts. I was sniffing around Book Row-you wouldn't know the shops, this was before your time. I worked in the back office of an insurance company but after hours I often found myself wandering downtown, toward Fourth Avenue, without really knowing why. I owned books, of course. Club editions. Boxes of dog-eared paperbacks. I had never given any thought to building a real collection, a library of my own." He had an odd glint in his eye. If I had been feeling mean I would have said it was greed, but the conversation had softened me, and I felt it was more generous than that, his memory. "What was the book?" I asked. "The Decoration of Houses," he said. "Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, 1919 edition." "Was it very valuable?" "Not especially. But it set me on a course." He smiled sadly and ran his hands down the curve of his back. "You remember the books you lose more than those you keep. Steel yourself." I took a slow sip from the whiskey he'd brought and pretended to be steeling myself for a long, melancholy future of book acquisition and loss. It didn't seem so dire to me. His library of late had been paid for with his wife's money and now that he had lost it, or was about to lose it to the divorce attorneys, at least he had his scholarly society to go to and they would treat him well and listen to his stories. All over New York, across the world, old men were suffering worse fates than that, disease and penury and loneliness, and they didn't have any book societies to go to. That's what I told myself, though the truth is I liked him. He had an odd, upright quality. "Do you care for Edith Wharton?" he asked. "I like her fiction. The rest, I haven't read." "Most people your age don't know anything about her. I'm told she's unfashionable these days. Not modern enough. I can't imagine how that figures. The only book of hers anyone wants to collect now is The Age of Innocence, and then they only want it because it won her the Pulitzer. They collect sets. Pulitzers, Bookers, Nobel laureates. A man was here last month who said that he owned every nonfiction Pulitzer finalist with a blue dust jacket. Can you imagine it?" I couldn't. I didn't try to. After a while I said something vague about The House of Mirth. It was a book I had read many times at another stage in my life, when I first arrived in New York and was living by the Brooklyn Museum, above a jerk chicken shop that sold dinners on flatware through the window. You would bring back the clean dish the next day if you wanted more. It was a long subway ride to law school on 116th Street and I used to read all kinds of books over and over again. Edith Wharton was the best of them. Sometimes you would miss your connection to the local, reading books like that, and you would have to backtrack or walk from Harlem. For some reason, I wanted to tell Newton Reddick about all that, but decided not to. "Lily Bart," he said, "is an admirable figure. Forceful. So for you, a literary collection?" "Sure, why not?" "So long as it doesn't hew to the prizes. Nothing vulgar." "No, nothing vulgar." I checked my watch. It was nearly midnight. "I'm also interested in legal documents," I said. He was looking down into his glass, thinking still about Edith Wharton, maybe, or about the young people who declined to read her and all the people who would never know her thoughts on decorating houses. It took him a moment to regain himself. I wondered how many sales he had lost over the years drifting off that way into reveries and private disappointments. "Legal documents," he said. "Yes, of course. There I can be of service to you." "What would you recommend?" "There's a fine tradition in the area of legal documents. And of course lawyers themselves have been great book collectors over the years. There was Pforzheimer at Yale, Walter Jr., not Carl. Allyn Peck and the rest of them at Harvard. It all depends on what area of the law captivates you." "I'm thinking about something more particular than a few Blackstones." "More particular?" "Curious. Something readable would be nice." It took him a moment but when the idea arrived, he smiled a kind, distant smile. I got the impression he had spent a lot of time and suffered some heartache looking for curious things. Tallied up, he had probably spent a good portion of his life stooped over in bookshops. "I'd like to show you something," he said. "Will you come with me?" He was good and drunk by then. His eyes were glass, like a lake at morning. I followed him down a hall and through a series of reading rooms, each outfitted with armchairs and inlaid shelves filled with books. None of the rooms were occupied and I got the feeling, a strange feeling that I didn't quite know how to articulate or reckon, that the floors we were walking belonged to the books, everything in that building did, and it didn't matter whose name was on the deed or who joined the society or didn't join it, the books would be there regardless and there would always be old men to shuffle through the rooms and look after them. Excerpted from An Honest Living: A Novel by Dwyer Murphy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.