1 #2
Dooryard Books is the kind of secondhand bookstore that might pass for an antiquarian bookshop, if you’re in the market for nineteenth-century American poetry and fiction.
There’s always one or two good editions of Leaves of Grass in the glass case upstairs.
But, like a lot of secondhand bookstores, it’s turned into a chaotic warehouse of books Patrick can’t even remember acquiring.
The way the shop is set up, most of the first floor is covered in bookshelves.
Along the walls, shelves stretch from the battered wooden floorboards to the tin ceilings.
More shelves, not quite so tall, form alleys and pathways that Patrick swears made sense when he put them there back when the store moved here from its old Fourth Avenue location, but since then seem to have tangled themselves up, like a piece of string left too long in your pocket.
The walls, in those rare places where they aren’t hidden by shelves, are painted a nondescript shade that must once have been a dusty green, years ago when this shop was something else—a pharmacy or a grocery store, judging by the contents of some of the junk that was lying around when they moved in.
Upstairs are more bookshelves, a locked glass case displaying some rare books, a safe containing the very rare books, and Patrick’s apartment jammed into a back corner, looking out over the scraggly courtyard.
On the first floor, at the front of the shop, are the cash register and Patrick’s desk and typewriter. Toward the back, the maze of shelves gives way to an empty space that’s just big enough for a table and four chairs crammed close together.
Beyond that is the back room, a dusty hellhole full of boxes upon boxes of uncategorizable stuff and one electric kettle balanced on top of one of the more stable piles.
Patrick threw some boxes in there when they moved in, but those boxes have multiplied, divided like amoebas, invited their friends over for drinks, and in general taken over the place.
He keeps that door shut so he doesn’t have to think about it.
Patrick gets distracted comparing two editions of The House of Mirth , and when he turns around both pizzas are nearly gone—they left him two measly slices—and the twins are doing what looks like algebra.
“Where are we?” Nathaniel asks, looking at the poster-sized subway map that hangs on the door to the back room.
“New York,” Iris says, without looking up from her paper, and with the bored patience of a child who’s humored her share of Mrs. Kaplan’s strays.
“New York City,” Hector clarifies. “Manhattan. You’re on Jones Street in the Village.”
“Not Great Jones Street,” Iris says. “People get confused.”
“You do not want to go to Great Jones Street,” Hector agrees. “Well, unless you want to buy—”
“Hector!” Iris hisses, low enough that Nathaniel probably can’t hear. “He looks like he has the supply chain figured out.”
Patrick winces. When he was fifteen, he was a lot of things, but a reliable judge of what drugs a person might be on was not one of them.
The spectacle of people enjoying varying degrees of success with an assortment of substances is hardly rare in the city these days.
Iris and Hector know what to think when they see a pale, underfed man in secondhand clothes.
But Patrick thinks the twins misunderstood Nathaniel’s question. He goes over to the subway map and points to a space between the Christoper Street and West Fourth Street stations. “We’re right here.”
Nathaniel smooths both palms over the paper.
He leans in close, squinting at the words, and Patrick tries to decide whether they need to take a trip to the eye doctor and pay for it out of petty cash.
When five minutes pass and Nathaniel still hasn’t moved, Patrick figures bad eyes might not be the problem here.
Iris and Hector exchange a knowing look.
When Nathaniel turns around, he peers at the twins’ homework. “What did those poor numbers ever do to you?” he asks. “Or, rather, what are you trying to make them do now?”
“We’re simplifying equations,” Iris says.
“Hardly. Who told you to do it that way?”
“The teacher?”
Nathaniel takes Hector’s notebook and scowls at it. “Your teacher needs to be brought before a tribunal.”
Patrick snorts and Hector laughs outright, but Iris folds her arms over her chest. “It’s how he taught us.”
“If you enjoy doing things the slow and silly way, I won’t stop you,” he says, then pulls up a chair and proceeds to erase half of Hector’s homework. Iris looks outraged, but Hector just looks glad someone else is doing his math for him. After a moment, Iris leans in and starts asking questions.
“Oh, Mr. Fitzgerald,” Hector says, ignoring his sister and Nathaniel. He leans out of his chair and pulls something from between two books about bird identification. “Did you lose this?”
“Can we stop with the ‘mister’?”
“No, sorry. I’m more afraid of my mother than I am of you.”
“Fair.” Patrick sighs and takes the envelope that Hector’s holding out. It’s the electric bill. He’s been looking for it for days. “Thanks,” he says. “I was going to have to call Con Ed to get a new one.
“How do you lose the electric bill?” Hector asks. “You always have a stack of bills on your desk. How did that one escape?”
For Patrick to know the answer to that question, he’d need an entirely different personality. He takes care of the bill and when he returns to the back of the store, the twins have moved on to biology homework.
“You mind if I read that?” Patrick gestures at the copy of the Times sticking out of Iris’s satchel.
He hadn’t bothered going to the newsstand that morning.
Iris is the kind of person you can count on to carry around reading material, a snack, and first aid supplies. She hands it to him without comment.
He unfolds it like he’s braced for a punch, or maybe like he’s driving past a graveyard.
Above the fold is a picture of children in Saigon amid the rubble of their smoldering home, using buckets to put out the fire.
He skims the articles about the sanitation workers’ strike and makes himself read every word about Vietnam.
He doesn’t feel guilty about not being there, not exactly.
For one, America doesn’t have any business in this war, and secondly, the army doesn’t want queers, and so they can’t have him.
The bartender at a place on West Street got out of the draft with a letter from a psychiatrist and an affidavit written by the Mattachine Society.
Patrick could have tried something like that, if he’d been called up.
Or maybe he’d have burned his draft card like the kids in Washington Square Park.
But he never did get called up, and now he’s twenty-seven, so he’s home free. Dumb luck.
“Good news,” Iris says, tapping the bottom corner of the front page. The state legislature is about to vote on expanding abortion rights.
“Good news,” Patrick agrees.
Iris takes the paper from his hand, flips a few pages, and folds it back to reveal a full page ad against the war. “More good news,” she says.
It’s an ad against the war, but mostly for Eugene McCarthy, who’s challenging President Johnson for the Democratic nomination in this fall’s election.
The ad reminds him, very unnecessarily, that sixteen thousand Americans have died in Vietnam.
Another hundred thousand are wounded. No mention of how many Vietnamese civilians are dead or wounded, but Patrick supposes that isn’t the kind of data that wins hearts and minds.
“Subways are filthy and the stations are foul,” the ad reads.
“Our cities are dying of neglect.” It sets Patrick on edge, because yes, the subways are filthy and yes, the city never has enough money, but that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with asking American kids to commit war crimes a few thousand miles from home.
This is his horrible city, graffiti and rats and all.
It’s sweet that Iris can see this ad and think it’s good news. Patrick was an optimist, too, when he was fifteen.
Nathaniel’s watching them. Patrick passes him the paper, then watches out of the corner of his eye as Nathaniel reads the front page, his lips pressed together, then flips to the second page.
Patrick can’t tell if he disapproves of the news, or of Patrick and Iris, or if that’s just what his face looks like when he’s reading.
He hasn’t said much, but there’s something in his voice that makes Patrick think about golf and the stock market.
Nathaniel doesn’t sound like someone Patrick would expect to be on his and Iris’s side—and the fact that there are sides is increasingly obvious.
Still, Patrick has yet to meet a conservative with hair as shaggy as Nathaniel’s.
But who knows, maybe Nathaniel missed a few haircuts while he was busy going off the deep end, or doing whatever it was that landed him at Mrs. Kaplan’s house.
As the afternoon slides into evening, Patrick watches Nathaniel closely, mostly to make sure he isn’t slipping off to get high, but also to figure out what kind of sad story he is.
There are only so many ways a person can hit rock bottom, and Nathaniel—distinctly twitchy, wearing clothes that don’t belong to him, living on a stranger’s charity, using a fake last name—has all the signs of someone who just scraped himself off the cellar floor.
Usually it’s drugs, booze, jail time, or mental trouble.
But there have been a couple women who left bad situations.
At least once a year there’s a kid who’s run away or gotten kicked out, and Patrick spends the next month grimly furious.
Hector and Iris go home, Patrick closes the shop, and he and Nathaniel head up to the third floor with a broom that Nathaniel managed to turn up and a set of sheets Mrs. Kaplan brought, correctly guessing that Patrick’s own spare linens are wadded up in the bottom of his closet, waiting for a trip to the laundromat.
The apartment is furnished, for a given value of furnished: a couch, a bed, a table and chairs. There are two bedrooms, even if the second one is tiny, empty, and only has the sort of half window that looks out onto a ventilation shaft.
Once Patrick switches on all the lights, he checks the bathroom for soap and toilet paper, and the kitchen cabinets for the same old pots and pans and mismatched dishes he found the last time he got this place ready for a tenant.
He and Nathaniel make the bed. Nathaniel sighs and readjusts every single corner of the fitted sheet.
“This is cop behavior,” Patrick says as Nathaniel checks that the top sheet is symmetrical on both sides.
“Take a look at your desk and then tell me which of us is the pig,” Nathaniel says.
Patrick, caught by surprise and always a sucker for a pun, laughs.
For a moment, under the too-dim overhead bulb, Nathaniel looks delighted with himself.
He isn’t smiling, exactly, but his face is lit up.
And Patrick, who spent the afternoon treating Nathaniel the way he treats all Mrs. Kaplan’s strays—like he’s signing a check for the minimum payment on a cosmic debt he racked up years ago, a truly shitty way to treat a person but there you have it—is brought up short.
The unforgiving light turns the dark circles under Nathaniel’s eyes nearly purple, and Patrick has to add a few years to his earlier estimate of Nathaniel’s age.
But there’s no mistaking the look of unholy glee on his face—at roasting Patrick, and maybe also at making Patrick laugh.
It makes Patrick feel like he’s seen too much, like he’s peeked through a keyhole.
Like he’s gotten a glimpse of something he wouldn’t mind seeing more of.
Nathaniel’s about twenty years too old to be a runaway. At some point runaways graduate into drifters. They drift in, they drift out. Patrick gives them a hand and he wishes them well when they leave. No point in getting attached.
Speaking of which. “There’s an A&P around the corner,” Patrick says, one foot in the hallway, thirty seconds from being on his sofa.
“They’ll still be open, if you need anything.
” Mrs. Kaplan will have given Nathaniel at least five twenty-dollar bills, smooth and clean and fresh from the bank, plenty for a man to buy his own groceries.
It isn’t wages, it’s a gift, she always tells them: Mr. Kaplan’s life insurance payout put to good use.
If they want to stick around the bookshop and work, Patrick pays them for their time and teaches them a little about buying and selling books.
Usually, though, they just need a few weeks with food and rent taken care of to get back on their feet, and then they come up with a plan of their own.
Nathaniel looks a little stricken—and, fair, nobody wants to buy groceries at eight p.m. in the coldest part of the winter, even when the streets aren’t paved with garbage. But that prospect would make most people look annoyed, not like a mouse freezing at the sound of an owl’s hoot.
“Or we can figure out groceries in the morning,” Patrick says. “Don’t worry about breakfast. I have coffee and milk in my apartment. I might even have cereal. I’ll get you tomorrow at nine?”
Nathaniel looks more grateful than anybody should about some corn flakes, and that just pisses Patrick off, which means it’s time to go. He says a terse good night and is halfway down the stairs before he hears the apartment door shut.