Page 67 of Upstate

“She’d have been so proud of you, kiddo.”

“She’d have been proud of you, too, Dad.”

There was so much more on our list—rooms to be painted, light fixtures to be changed, hinges to be greased, walls to be patched—but the disease dictated that January be devoted to his dying. His oncologist stopped treatment. Hospice brought a hospital bed to the house. Visiting nurses let him self-administer as much morphine as he wanted. When Dad was awake, we sorted through boxes of mementos and talked about times past. When he got tired, I turned on the television to help him sleep. He snored right through President Obama’s State of the Union speech. During the long nights, I opened a notebook, the television flickering blue in the background as I transcribed the scenes of our day. They didn’t yet add up to a memoir, but even as my heart was breaking, I mined the moments for content, intent as a prospector panning for gold.

While the swelling on my bee-stung hand subsides, I reread my dog-eared copy of Dad’s Apprentice. I no longer recognize the memoir as mine, can hardly remember writing it. It might as well have been penned by a ghost, I think, setting the book aside. If I want to summon my father’s spirit, words on paper won’t do it. A hammer in my hands will. Fixing up the Kenosha house—by Dad’s side through his last winter, on my own into the spring—was how I survived that saddest season. In my own old house in Schuywich, with the bookshop closed and my mood as dark as I’ve ever known, I decide to throw myself into renovations, counting on the lessons I learned from my father to once again save me from self-destruction.

When I first toured the place with Rhonda, it seemed obvious I’d need to gut the kitchen and sister straight new framing to the bowed studs before filling the bays with fiberglass batts and boarding it all back up again. Though Sheetrock would be a poor substitute for lath and plaster, I needed walls that were plumb for hanging cabinets and running counters. I changed my mind about those uneven walls after reading the column Evelyn wrote about insulating with the fleece of Marcus Green’s sheep. In her honor, I scrap my initial plans and come up with a design centered on a huge island that leaves the exterior walls untouched.

Cabinets have the longest lead time, so the first thing I do is place an order for unpainted maple bases with inset drawer fronts and traditional mitered joints. The order instantly eats up my entire share of the profit from Wren’s pop-up, but it can’t be helped; skimping on cabinetry would ultimately devalue a historic house like mine. Looking to pinch pennies elsewhere, I drive to a stone yard in Vermont on an October day so vivid with color even my sad eyes widen in wonder. I find a single slab of soapstone with a starburst of veining so unique it’s been discounted as an orphan—which, as far as I’m concerned, makes it perfect in every way. The cabinets won’t be ready until after Thanksgiving, so I schedule a date in mid-December to have the soapstone delivered.

With cabinets and counter sorted, the next step is demolition. I begin by cutting and capping copper pipe and lifting out the sink. The kitchen counter splinters with a single swing of a sledgehammer. I disconnect the stove and move it out of the way, then tip the hideous fridge onto a handcart and wheel it as far as the driveway before toppling it on its side, to be disposed of the next time I make a run to the dump. Knocking down the pantry exposes a blocked window and opens up the length of the room from the fireplace at one end to the back stairs at the other. Six twelve-paned windows face off in three perfect pairs, bringing in light from both sunny south and tranquil north. With dark ceiling beams above the wide pine floors, the room feels antique as a Colonial museum.

In a perfect match to my emotional state, I spend the weeks up through Halloween hunched in the spidery crawl space under the kitchen, building a cripple wall to level the floor joists and support the thousand-pound slab of soapstone. After rolling out a plastic moisture barrier, I insulate with rigid foam so the PEX plumbing won’t freeze. The nerve-racking moment arrives when I drill holes in the kitchen floor where I’ve measured (twice, and twice again) for the island’s sink, running my water lines and dry-fitting the drainpipes. I feel like Persephone when I finally emerge from underground, except that the season I rise into is turning toward winter instead of spring.

The back stairs eat up twenty-four inches of precious space, but they’re too integral to the house’s history to demolish. Instead, I enclose them with a framed wall in which I install twenty-amp wiring for a new refrigerator and hide a chase for the exhaust hood. Though I covet an AGA range in Dartmouth blue, I’ve already overspent on a panel-ready dishwasher that will blend perfectly with the island’s cabinetry. I settle for restoring the vintage stove, repositioned now under the hood instead of against a window.

When the cabinets arrive, I cancel my classes between Thanksgiving and finals week under the guise of giving my students independent writing time. I spend days painstakingly shimming, screwing, and assembling the island, fingers crossed that the undermount sink will align with the cutout I template for the stone yard. I get the plumbing roughed in and the outlets wired but run out of time to paint the cabinets before the countertop arrives, which turns out to be just as well. Once the installers leave, I realize I’ll need to see the kitchen in all kinds of light before deciding what color will work best with the pumpkin floors and beige walls and green stone.

“I did it, Dad,” I say aloud.

The silence is so heartbreaking, I fill it with my own voice, lowered to my father’s pitch. “I always knew you could, kiddo.”

Speaking the words he would have said knocks the air from my lungs. I lean over and stretch my arms wide across the counter, tears pooling on the stone’s cold surface. I’m not any less lonely. I’m still just as sad. But unlike my mother and the boy Evelyn wrote about, I am, at least, alive.

Chapter 33

“A Woman’s Place” by Evelyn Cabot

Mademoiselle, August 1972

“Have you heard the senate approved that equal rights amendment for women?”

The posh accent of the socialite browsing the shelves at Red Barn Books reminded me of Katharine Hepburn.

“I can’t imagine the states ratifying it,” her equally elegant companion replied. “We already have the vote. What else do those feminists want?”

My ears pricked up even as I kept my nose buried in the book I was reading (a galley of Mary Renault’s next historical novel about Alexander the Great; keep an eye out for my review of The Persian Boy in the October issue of Mlle). The more I heard of their conversation, the more convinced I became that their wariness of new rights for women was rooted in ignorance of our historic struggle for equality. I opened one of the glass-fronted cases in which I keep the rare books I occasionally find in lucky auction lots and pulled out a leather-bound volume.

“Excuse me, ladies, but I wonder if you’re familiar with the work of Margaret Fuller?”

Thus began a rousing political discussion during which we touched on everything from the legacy of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique to the recent legalization of abortion in New York State. An hour later, I rang up their purchase of an 1855 edition of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, published after Fuller, returning from Rome with her Italian husband and son to speak at a suffrage convention in Seneca Falls, tragically died in a shipwreck off the shore of Long Island.

I waved goodbye as the women’s driver, who’d been waiting all the while by their parked Lincoln Continental with a cigar and the sports pages, whisked them away to the luxurious Adirondack camp where they were summering. It was the best kind of bookselling day, one in which I’d opened a couple of minds while earning enough money to keep my old house heated through the coming winter.

It would be fair to say I got into the book business on a whim. When I opened Red Barn Books, my initial inventory consisted of a dozen boxes of gifted books the village librarian had no use for. Once word got out, people started coming by the shop with crates and baskets and bags of books. Some were happy to drop them off and drive away. Others wanted payment. Before I had any idea how to ascertain a book’s value, I offered what I could afford (which wasn’t much) and accepted what was given.

Five years on, I’m a better businesswoman than I was then, and a more informed book buyer, too. I’ve been bitten by the acquisition bug, and my stock has swollen to thousands of books. I’ve driven north to Burlington after getting a tip on an estate sale. I’ve gone south to Manhattan to sort through the library of a retired editor. I’ve been east to Boston and west to Buffalo in pursuit of donated hoards and decommissioned collections. Whatever compass direction my pursuits take me in, even my big barn has a limit on the number of books it can hold. I’ve honed my experience and expertise into instinct — an instinct that applies not only to books but to the people who read them.

I’ve learned that tourists to upstate New York are eager to commemorate their trips with matted prints from artists of the Hudson River School, antique maps of the Adirondacks, and Revolutionary War histories. I regularly refuse outdated sets of encyclopedias that families think of as treasures, but that esoteric textbook on existential philosophy? I know a professor at Skidmore College who’d be interested. To serve inquisitive customers exercising their First Amendment rights, I acquire political treatises from points of view that would have gotten their authors blacklisted by Senator McCarthy. To balance the Schuywich library’s conservative bent, I keep sensitive materials concerning family planning and sexuality in boxes in my back room to be rummaged through in private. Other booksellers might turn up their noses at those paperbacks with lurid covers of buxom women, but I know plenty of lonely men (and a few frustrated housewives, too) who’d be eager to take one home for a dime — discreetly, of course.

I keep an eye on current events, too, knowing that what’s going on in the world today often spurs interest in what came before. This past month, the latest crisis in Gaza led a vacationing businessman to purchase a 1958 copy of Exodus by Leon Uris. A 1931 first printing of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth sat unsold on my shelf for three years until a customer, intrigued by President Nixon’s trip, asked if I had anything about China that wasn’t academic. After the papers ran that tragic photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack, a young man of draft age bought a 1929 edition of All Quiet on the Western Front. An episode of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau inspired a teenager to pick up Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, while a story in the paper about a Japanese soldier discovered in the jungles of Guam who didn’t know World War II had ended prompted the sale of Robinson Crusoe. I’m currently assembling a special display of sports books in anticipation of the Munich Olympics.

In the great metropolis of New York City, there are reading clubs and lecture series and specialty bookshops to cater to every fringe group imaginable. In the little village of Schuywich, though, Red Barn Books is the place where people come to have their minds challenged by new ideas, as well as finding themselves reflected in what they read. I may have opened my shop for the flimsy reason that used books are cheap, but becoming a bookseller has given my life here in Schuywich as much purpose as Margaret Fuller found in suffrage. Whichever way you vote on the Equal Rights Amendment when the question appears on the ballot in your state, I’m certain you’ll agree that every woman deserves to find her purpose in life, in whatever sphere she invests her efforts.

Chapter 34

Renovating my kitchen has the unexpected side effect of prying loose walled-off memories. I scribble in my notebook every night, re-creating any scene I can recall in which my mom was happy. When my pen draws me toward a traumatic trigger, like Dad hauling her unconscious body from the bathtub, I wrangle the instrument until the words that spool from its tip lasso better times. Instead of frustrated tears and burned pans, I remember a fabulous meal Mom successfully prepared. I recall the kitchen rich with succulent scents, the table candlelit. Mom’s red lips lifted in a smile as she set down a perfectly roasted hen. Flames dancing in Dad’s happy eyes as he carved meat from bone. Me, telling my parents to go watch TV while I cleaned up in the kitchen. The sound of their laughter from the living room.