The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [135]
I said that I did remember. People still collect stamps, I told her.
“Yes, yes, they dabble like my brother Edward,” she said. “But for Octave the stamps were everything. He kept his stamp collection in the bank’s main vault. One of this town’s best kept secrets is exactly how much money that collection was worth. Even I was not aware of it until very recently. When, as you know, our bank was robbed in ’thirty-two, the robbers forced their way into the vault. They grabbed what cash there was and completely ignored the fifty-nine albums and twenty-two specially constructed felt boxes framed in ebony. That stamp collection was worth many times what the robbers got. It was worth almost as much money as was in the entire bank, in fact.”
“What happened to it?” I was very much intrigued, as I’d heard only confusing rumors.
Neve gave me a sly, sideways look.
“My brother took bits and pieces of that collection, but he had no idea what was really there. I kept most of the stamps when the bank changed hands. I like looking at them, you see. They’re better than television. The collection is in my front room. Stacked on a table. You’ve seen the albums but you’ve never commented. You’ve never looked inside of them. If you had, you would have been enchanted, like me, with the delicacy, the detail, and the endless variety, at first. Later you would have wanted to know more about the stamps themselves and the need to know and understand their histories would have taken hold of you, as it did my uncle, my brother, and as it recently has me, though thankfully to a much lesser degree. Of course, you have your own interests.”
“Yes,” I said, “thank God for those.”
As we passed by the church, we saw the priest was there on his visit. The poor man waved at us when we called out a greeting to him. No one had remembered, so he was cutting the grass. He looked sad and overworked.
“They treat the good ones like simple beasts,” said Neve. Then she shrugged and we pressed on. “In reading my uncle’s old letters, going through his files, I’ve made a discovery. His specialty, for all stamp collectors begin at some point to lean in a certain direction, was what you might call the dark side of stamp collecting.”
I looked at Neve, thinking that I’d seen dark tendencies in her myself, but still surprised about the stamps.
“After he had acquired the Holy Grails of Philately—British Guiana’s one-cent magenta, Sweden’s 1855 three-cent issue which is orange instead of blue-green, as well as many stamps of the Thurn and Taxis postal system and superb specimens of the highly prized Mul-ready cover—my uncle’s melancholia drew him specifically to what are called errors. I think Sweden’s three-cent began it all.”
“Of course,” I said, “even I know of the upside-down airplane stamp.”
“The twenty-four-cent carmine rose and blue Invert. Yes!” She seemed delighted. “I’ve been reading through his notes and combing through the collection for that one. He says that he began to collect errors in color, like the Swedish stamp, very tricky, then overprints, imperforate errors, value missings, omitted vignettes, and freaks. He speaks of one entire album page devoted to a seventeen-year-old boy, Frank Baptist, who ran stamps off an old handpress for the Confederate government. I’ve yet to determine which it was, but am sure I’ll find it.”
Neve charged across a gravelly patch of road, much elated to share the story, and I hastened to stay within earshot. Stopping to catch her breath, she leaned on a tree and told me that about six years before he absconded with the bank’s money, Octave Harp had gone into disasters—that is, stamps and covers (envelopes or similar materials) that had survived the dreadful occurrences that test and destroy us. These pieces of mail, marked by experience, took their value from the gravity of their condition. They were