Houses of Stone by KATHY (booksvooks .TXT) 📕

Hers hadn't been anything so impressive as a lost manuscript by a recognized author, but it had been her own, stemming from the book-collecting mania that had driven her long-suffering family to threats of violence. They didn't mind (her father explained patiently) having to buy a new bookcase every month. They weren't annoyed (her mother insisted, through clenched teeth) at having to move a pile of books when they wanted to sit in a chair or use a telephone or set the table. What they objected to were books on the stairs and under her bed and on the piano. The attic was full of books, the basement was full of books, the guest room . . .

By the time she began working on her doctorate, she had little time for outside reading or for browsing, but she celebrated the completion of her dissertation by going on an orgy of book buying—not in expensive antiquarian stores like Simon's, but dark musty cubbyholes where the cheapest book was a quarter. It was in one of these shops that she had found the slim volume of poems by the woman who called herself Ismene. It had been tossed into a carton with a number of other battered volumes. The hand-lettered sign read, "Two bits each, three for fifty cents."

Even Karen was not tempted by a forty-year-old chemistry textbook or a paperback reprint of Lady Audley's Secret. (She already had a copy of Lady Audley's Secret.) But only Karen would have looked twice at the thin volume whose front cover was missing and whose water-stained pages seemed to be glued into a solid mass. She inserted a fingernail at random. Only the edges were stuck together; the book opened.

Later she wondered what her reaction would have been if she had not happened to read that particular poem first. Faulty and faltering though it was, some of the lines had a haunting quality. "They have shut me in a house of stone . . . There is no victory in death—only the mute darkness ..." Squatting on the dusty pavement, she pried other pages apart, and gradually the importance of what she had found began to dawn on her.

The title page, exposed by the removal of the front cover, was so stained and torn she could only make out two words: "Verses" and what must be the author's name or pseudonym: Ismene. There was no date visible, but she had seen other books like this one. It had probably been printed during the first half of the nineteenth century. That was her field—nineteenth-century women's literature. She had never heard of a writer who called herself Ismene.

She paid her two bits and went home with her discovery. It took her six weeks to search the literature to make certain no such writer was known. It took another six months to prepare her edition of the poems, annotated, footnoted and equipped with all the necessary scholarly apparatus.

Ismene was no Emily Dickinson; her verses were not so sure, and certainly not so enigmatic. In fact, Karen had never been able to determine who she really was. Ismene had to be a pseudonym, derived from the name of the sister of Antigone in the classic Greek drama. Women who aspired to authorship in those early days seldom dared use their own names. If they didn't hide behind the anonymous "By a Lady," they chose masculine or ambiguous names—Currer, Ellis and Acton instead of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. The use of a pseudonym supported the other evidence as to the date of the book—the handmade paper, the printing technique—but it proved impossible to identify even the publisher. The book must have been privately printed, in a very limited edition; the product of a vanity press, paid for by the author herself.

Could Simon's discovery be something as significant? Crawling along the city streets, slowed by construction and thickening traffic, Karen tried to control her expectations. Yet, she argued with herself, they weren't completely unreasonable. Women writers had been ignored, snubbed by the literary establishment, for centuries. There must be more of them out there in limbo, waiting to be found. Simon knew her interests. "Right up your alley," he had said. "You won't believe it. I can hardly believe it myself . . ." He surely couldn't be so cruel as to lure her all the way to Baltimore on a wild-goose chase. Simon was no pathetic old man, hungry for her companionship. He had dozens of friends, and he preferred his own company to that of most people.

The shop was on Charles Street, north of the railroad station, in a neighborhood that clung by its fingernails to the crumbling edge of respectability. She had to park several blocks away. Snow drifted down as she walked, fat, feathery flakes that stuck to her eyelashes. Opening the shop door, she cleared her throat and began to sing: "These are a few of my favorite things ..."

The soft music from the back of the shop soared to ear-aching pitch. It was the coruscating aria of the Queen of the Night, from Zauberflote, and the high notes seemed to drill into her head. Karen covered her ears with her hands. In the shadows at the back she saw Simon sitting behind his desk. A lamp cast Satanic shadows across his lean, sculptured face.

"Turn it down!" she yelled.

Simon blinked at her. "Can't hear you," he mouthed. But the volume dropped, and he came to her, taking both her hands in his.

"How dare you warble sentimental popular drivel at me while the Master's work is playing?"

Karen laughed and let him help her off with her coat. Hanging it neatly on a hook, he remarked, "It is damp. Does it snow hard? Perhaps you had better spend the night."

She had done it once or twice before, but she hated putting him out, for he always insisted on giving up his own bed to her and curling