The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [136]
By then, we had come to the former bank/caf, and I was glad to sit down where I could take a few notes on Neve’s revelations. I borrowed some sheets of paper and a pen from the owner, and we ordered our coffee and sandwiches. I always have a Denver sandwich and Neve orders a BLT without the bacon. She is a strict vegetarian, the only one in Pluto. We sipped our coffee.
“I have just read a book I ordered,” said Neve, “on philately, in which it says that stamp collecting offers refuge to the confused and gives new vigor to fallen spirits. I think Octave was hoping he would obtain something of the sort. But the more he dwelt on the disasters, the worse he felt, according to my father. He would brighten whenever he obtained something valuable for his collection, though. He corresponded with people all over the globe; it was quite remarkable. I’ve got files and files of his correspondence with stamp dealers. He would take years tracking down a surviving stamp or cover that had been through a particular disaster. Wars, of course, from the American Revolution, the Crimean War, the First World War. Soldiers would frequently carry letters on their persons, of course. One doesn’t like to think how those letters ended up in the hands of collectors. But he preferred natural disasters and, to a lesser extent, man-made accidents.” Neve tapped the side of her cup. “He would have been fascinated by the Hindenburg and certainly there would have been a stamp or two involved, somewhere. And our modern disasters, too, of course.”
I knew what she was thinking of, suddenly—those letters mailed on the day we lost our thirty-fifth president, or the mail, I pictured White House thank-you notes, that had been waiting, perhaps, in Jackie’s purse. I went a little cold with dismay to think that many of these bits of paper were perhaps now in the hands of dealers and for sale all over the world to people like Octave. Neve and I think very much alike, and I saw that she was going to sugar her coffee—a sign of distress, since she has a bit of a blood sugar problem.
“Don’t,” I said. “You’ll be awake all night.”
“I know.” She sugared her coffee anyway and put the glass canister back. “Isn’t it strange, though, how time mutes the horror of events, how they cease to affect us in the same way? But I began to tell you all of this in order to explain why Octave left for Brazil.”
“With so much money. Now I’m starting to imagine he was on the trail of a stamp.”
“You’re exactly right,” said Neve. “I was talking to my brother yesterday, and oddly enough, he remembered that our father told us what Octave was looking for. This object had entered the possession of a very wealthy Brazilian woman. In his collection notes he mentions a letter that survived the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883, a Dutch stamp placed upon a letter written just before and carried off on a steamer. He had a letter from the sack of mail frozen onto the back of a New Hampshire mail carrier who died in the east-coast blizzard of 1888. An authenticated letter from the Titanic, too, but then there must have been quite a bit of mail recovered for some reason, as he refers to other pieces. But he was not as interested in sea disasters. No, the prize he was after was a letter from the year A.D. 79.”
I hadn’t known there was mail service then, but Neve assured me that mail was extremely old, and that it was Herodotus who’d coined the motto “Neither snow nor rain nor dead of night etc.” over five hundred years before the date she’d just referred to, the year Mount Vesuvius blew up and buried Pompeii in volcanic ash. “As you may know,” she went on, “the site was looted and picked through by curiosity seekers for a century and a half after it was discovered, before anything was done about preservation. By then, quite a number of recovered objects had found their way into the hands of collectors. A letter that may have been meant for Pliny the Younger, from the Elder, apparently surfaced for a tantalizing moment