The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [137]
“Imagine that. In Brazil.”
“No stranger than a small-town North Dakota banker amassing a world-class collection of stamps.”
I agreed with her, and tried to remember what I could of Neve’s uncle.
“Octave was, of course, a bachelor.”
“And he lived very modestly, too. Still, he hadn’t money enough to come near purchasing the Pliny letter. He tried to leave the country with the bank’s money and his stamp collection, but the stamps held him back. I think the customs officials became involved in questions regarding the collection—whether it should be allowed to leave the country, and so on. The Frank Baptist stamps were an interesting side note to American history, for instance. Murdo caught up with him in New York City. Octave had had a breakdown and was paralyzed in some hotel room. He was terrified that his collection would be confiscated. When he returned to Pluto, he began drinking heavily, and from then on he was never the same.”
“And the Pompeii letter, what became of it?”
“There was a letter from the Brazilian lady, who had still hoped to sell the piece to Octave, a wild letter full of cross-outs and stained with tears.”
“A disaster letter?”
“Yes, I suppose you could say so. Her three-year-old son had somehow got hold of the Pompeii missive and in his play reduced it to dust. So in a way it was a letter from a woman that broke his heart.”
There was nothing more to say and we were both in thoughtful moods by then. Our sandwiches were before us and we ate them.
Neve and I spend our evenings quietly, indoors, reading or watching television, listening to music, eating our meager suppers alone. If a volcano should rise out of the ancient lake-bed earth and blow, covering us suddenly with killing ash, ours would be calm forms, preserved sitting gravely as the fates, staring transfixed at a picture or a word. I have seen other plaster forms in books. I know the ones from Pompeii were first noted as mysterious absences in the solid ash. When the spaces were filled with plaster, and the volcanic debris chipped away, the piteous nature of those final human moments were revealed. Sometimes, I think I am more akin to that absence, before the substance. I am less the final gesture than the void preceding it. I have already disappeared, as one does when long accustomed to one’s own company.
Yet, I find my time from dusk to midnight wonderful. I am not lonely. I know I haven’t long to enjoy the luxuries of privacy and silence and I cherish my familiar surroundings. Neve, however, misses her two stepchildren and stepgrandchildren from the last marriage. She spends many evenings on the telephone, although they only live in Fargo and she sees them often. Both Neve and I find it strange that we are old, and we are both amazed at how quickly our lives went—Neve with her abduction and her multiple marriages and I with my own painful ecstasies. We are often surprised when we catch sight of ourselves.
As I often remind myself, I am fortunate in my age to have a good companion like Neve, though she does luxuriate in dark thoughts sometimes.
That night, she does have an episode of black moodiness brought on by the sugar in her coffee, though I do not say so, when I answer her first phone call. She speaks as she sometimes does of the strange beauty of her kidnapper, and what she taught him, or he taught her, on the mattress in the back room of his house. He became a decorated veteran and, when he returned from Korea, grew in charismatic perversity—he became the leader of a religion marked by unfathomable laws. A few leftovers have migrated, worn out and twisted, into the local churches over the years. But I’ve heard