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5 hours ago
7
My wife, Patricia, and I came to our nursing home with little more than clothes, a few photographs and some books we could still carry. The shelves we left behind still stand in the emptied rooms of the house we called home for 30 years. Those shelves once groaned under the weight of books we had gathered, page by page, year by year.
Our books told of who we were, or who we thought we might become. There were the novels Patricia read in the long evenings after the children slept, their spines cracked from her hands. There were the histories I brought home from the library sales, dusty volumes of wars and voyages that filled the quiet hours when rain beat on the roof. Poetry too, slim books with thin paper, marked where a line struck true. We kept them not only for the stories printed inside but for the story they made of us.
The day came when the movers stood in the doorway and asked what should go. We had known it would come. The nursing home allows only a small cabinet beside the bed. Four or five volumes at most. The rest must be given away or sold or simply left for strangers to claim. Patricia sat in the armchair and looked at the ranks of titles as though they were faces she would not see again. I walked the length of the shelves and touched the backs of books I had not opened in decades.
What struck hardest were the notes in the margins. In one novel of mine a pencil mark still shows where I disagreed with the hero’s choice. In Patricia’s copy of a memoir, she had written a single word beside a paragraph about loss. That word was “yes.” Elsewhere a date appears in the corner of a page, the day we first read it together by the fire. Those marks were private conversations with the print, small proofs that we had lived inside those pages. To give the books away was to give away the proof.
We packed a few to keep. One slim volume of poems for Patricia, the one she could recite without looking. One fat history for me, its maps still folded at the end, and a precious paperback of James Joyce, Dubliners, where in Araby the unnamed adult narrator describes the former tenant of Joyce’s childhood home, a priest, who died there, and left behind a few paper-covered books, the pages of which were curled and damp: The Abbot, by Walter Scott, The Devout Communicant, and The Memoirs of Vidocq. The rest of our books went into boxes. I remember the sound of the tape sealing those boxes. It was a dry, final sound. Patricia did not cry, but her hands stayed on the last shelf longer than they needed to.
Leaving the books was leaving the rooms where we had been younger. The chairs by the window, the lamp that threw a circle of light on the open page, the habit of reaching for a particular volume when the day turned sour. Those habits formed a kind of self. Without the shelves the self felt thinner. Who was the man who once knew the order of every title? That man stayed behind with the books. The man who walks the corridor of the nursing home is a smaller edition, abridged. Yet here, though our room holds so little space for our own, the common rooms carry shelves stacked high with books left by those who came before us. Volumes of every kind lean together, novels and histories and poems, their pages turned by many hands. Anyone may take them, read them, return them. They are not ours, and the margins hold no marks of ours, yet they stand open for the days that remain.
I can still close my eyes and see the blue spine of the travel book we bought the year we thought we might cross the sea. I can hear Patricia’s voice reading aloud from the novel she loved best. The margins we marked are gone, but the memory of marking them is not. In this narrow room the few books we kept lean against each other on the cabinet. When I open one I find the old pencil lines still speaking of the hours we spent with them. The print is the same. Only the room has changed, and the man who holds the book.
