Chapter Three
DEATH DID NOT SILENCE ME. IT DID NOT STIFLE MY ABILITY to feel or to love. It did not pull me forever into the depths of the great, dark sea and extinguish my spirit. I emerged after the boat’s sinking, no longer in my physical form, but limitless, light-filled, and transformed.
It would be wrong to think that the dead remain static. Our curiosity does not die with us. We seek knowledge. We crave empathy. A ghost is the greatest reader of all.
Over the years, I have turned countless pages while watching the lives of those I love unfold. In the case of my mother, I witnessed her unfathomable grief, followed by her ultimately discovering a new sense of purpose in building a library to ensure that my books had a permanent home.
I have witnessed births and deaths. Peaks of triumph and valleys of despair.
And I have my own memories that return to me. My mother, sitting in her Philadelphia drawing room, dressed in waves of blue silk, a book spread open on her lap.
“You will love it,” she informs me. She had just purchased a new translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The verdant green cover, with its title pressed in gold foil, looked almost like a piece of jewelry as she lifted it up for me to see.
She always loved tales from distant lands. She was born with an explorer’s soul. Behind her dove gray eyes, a fiery inquisitiveness and desire to learn smoldered.
When she quoted one of the verses from this Persian poet, a smile rippled across her face, as if she were revealing a secret only the two of us shared.
It was my mother who revealed to me the world that existed in the inches between the reader and the writer, where two souls could mingle without ever touching.
She believed a good book spoke through you.
That is why she never collected books merely as display items. She instead had her menageries, her collections of French porcelain, her silver, and her jewels to fill her appetite for beauty.
With books, she simply purchased what she loved to read.
That was my first lesson I learned from her about collecting. “Only buy what you love” was one of her favorite mottoes.
The men in my family, on the other hand, often bought prized pieces to elevate their reputation as connoisseurs.
They wanted to rise above the adage that those with new money didn’t appreciate elegance and good taste.
On the walls of Lynnewood Hall, my uncle and grandfather worked together to build one of the most enviable art collections in the country.
The walls of our family’s estate were adorned with paintings by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Titian, and Raphael.
Grandfather commissioned the famous John Singer Sargent to paint his portrait and others in our family, hoping the outcome would be reminiscent of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Flemish painters he so admired.
But there was always something deeper to the way grandfather collected. For beneath the facade of a shrewd businessman, he was particularly sensitive to the fragility of life.
He did not speak often about the two children my grandmother and he had lost in the early years of their marriage. I had been named after my uncle Harry who had died at the age of eleven, and the weight of that loss often returned to him.
“You’re still too young to know this,” he reminded me as we stood outside our family’s estate, Lynnewood Hall, in its final days of completion.
Above the grand columns, inside the limestone pediment, Grandfather had commissioned a rather unusual design.
In the center, above the small circular window was a carving of an hourglass.
Flanking its sides were four figures: a mother, a father, and their two children.
“But the two most important things in this world are family and time,” he reminded me.
And while he didn’t say it aloud, I knew that as much as he loved to collect priceless works of art, my grandfather was sharing his wisdom with me. The most valuable things in the world could simply not be bought.