Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [130]
Those shelves, laden and much used, made this room more a boudoir than a chamber for sleeping. Books in the bedroom—serious books, and in great number—were considered an oddity; that I had known even as a child. However, I did not know, then or now, if my mother's intentions had been to bring the best of the outer world into her private chambers, or to keep her private life insulated from the world.
In either case, this room was where she spent what free hours we gave her. My father would take us swimming or out in the boat, and when we looked back at the house, Mother would be here reading, either on the balcony or just inside the glass doors. And it was not that she was shutting us out, for we were welcome to join her, with our own books or choosing one from her shelves. Other activities, board games or cards, were taken elsewhere; books from the shelves generally remained in the room, with cautious permission granted rarely for their removal. It was a room where my mother's worlds overlapped. A holy place, as it were.
Odd, I reflected: In Pacific Heights, I thought of books in association with my father and his library; here, it was my mother's books that dominated, while my father pursued more active forms of entertainment.
I went forward to the shelves, finding them as neat as they had always been: spines pulled evenly half an inch from the edge, a book-end at the right end of each row to allow for additions, every book, large or small, novel or theological treatise, English, Hebrew, or other, arranged by the author's last name. I had asked her once, when I was first reading—was I six? No, it must have been the previous year, if we had gone to England shortly after the 1906 fire—how she could order names when they were in different alphabets, and she had showed me how to transcribe Hebrew letters into their Roman equivalents. Thus, I saw stood easily between Hightower and Hindermann. I used the same system on my own shelves. When, that is, I could be bothered to shelve them properly.
The tight ranks of the books and my ingrained hesitation to borrow from those ordered shelves stayed my hand from reaching out and plucking one or another from its brothers. Instead, I wandered away to look over the rest of the room. The bath-room was bare and bright, its tiles clean and the usual detritus of such places—soap, bathtowels, and shaving equipment—tidied away, no doubt by Mrs Gordimer. Now that my attention was finally brought to the subject, it occurred to me how difficult it must have been for the woman to know just how to go about her cleaning duties. Regular dusting and the occasional scrub, yes, but what to do with the stubs of soap left by two dead people? Sliding open the top drawer of the chest beneath the wash-basin, I found Father's razor and soap-brush, and below it Mother's hair-brush and pins, but little of a more ephemeral nature.
On a sudden thought, I left the bright tiled room and walked over to the narrow door into the clothes closet. It smelt of cedar, but faintly, and although the clothes were still hanging there, they had all been pushed to the far ends of their rails, as if that was as far as Mrs Gordimer had been prepared to go without further orders.
I sat for a while at my mother's dressing-table before I could take up the tarnished silver powder-box that had waited ten years for the return of its owner. I pulled up the top and waited until the faint upsurge of powder reached my nose: a pang, nothing more, not even when I lowered my face to the powder and drew in a full breath of it. The still, small voice of my mother was not in the powder, nor had it been in the bedroom itself, nor in the house. A whisper of the voice, faint as a ghost, came from the shelves of her most beloved books, and so I went there and waited, unaware