Page 69 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
He’s hoping it’s Iris, arriving early for their daily trigonometry session, but he has to suppress a groan when he sees who it is. “Patrick isn’t here,” he tells John.
“Oh,” John says. “When will he be back?”
He’ll be back any minute now, since he only went to the bank to make a deposit. “Who knows?” Nathaniel says.
John begins fiddling with a few books on a shelf near the cash register. That shelf has held the same three Whitman biographies since February, if not longer. Nathaniel stoppedpaying any attention to them. If John decides to buy one in order to impress Patrick, maybe Nathaniel can convince Patrick to put something other than another Whitman biography in its place.
“That’s funny,” John says. “When did you start carrying these?”
If John is confused about why Patrick stocks Whitman biographies, there’s really nothing Nathaniel can do for him. But then he sees what John is looking at. They aren’t biographies, or even any kind of book, but more of those pamphlets like the ones Nathaniel bought at the soda fountain earlier that summer. Zines, Patrick had called them.
At first he thinks he must have brought his own copies downstairs and Iris or someone tucked them away in a random place while tidying up. But, no, this is a different issue of one of the same publications, a cheaply printed black-and-white affair calledLouderwith a drawing of a dangerous-looking flower on the cover.
He’d enjoyed that one. It was funny. It was also, arguably, seditious, in that it plainly encouraged draft resistance, called for a national strike and refusing to pay income tax to protest the war, and listed the bridges, roads, and buildings that would be effective targets for demonstrators to occupy. People have been arrested for less. He’d been half impressed, half appalled, by the brazenness of the writers.
“We don’t carry those,” Nathaniel says. “A customer must have left them behind.”
“Six of them?” John flips through a copy, his eyebrows inching higher and higher. “Does Patrick know about this?”
Nathaniel actually laughs at the implication that he’s the one stocking the shop with radical underground newspapers and that Patrick would be shocked by their content. Has this man ever even talked to Patrick?
John narrows his eyes. “The old Jewish lady who owns the place, are these hers?”
Judging by the sheer quantity of old issues ofThe Daily Workerin boxes upstairs, Mrs. Kaplan wouldn’t even blink at the contents ofLouder. But John doesn’t need to know that, even if he hadn’t phrased that question as offensively as he had. “Like I said,” Nathaniel says, out of patience and not bothering to hide it, “someone left them here.”
John leaves the zines next to the cash register and leaves. Alone in the shop, Nathaniel picks one up and opens to the middle. “Every soldier is a POW” is printed in blocky capitals. He reads the issue from cover to cover—well, almost from cover to cover, because the back half is a Spanish translation that he can only partly make out. He flips back to “Every soldier is a POW,” and is still looking at that page when Patrick comes back.
“Where did these come from?” Patrick asks, pointing to the zines.
Nathaniel isn’t surprised that Patrick didn’t notice them. Patrick is disorganized and the shop is too crowded for even Nathaniel to keep track of everything. “They were on the shelf with the Whitman biographies,” Nathaniel says. “Your friend John noticed them, and he was very odd about it.”
“He isn’t my friend,” Patrick says. “You aren’t jealous ofJohn, are you?”
Of course Nathaniel is jealous of John, handsome, twenty-five, and—by the looks of it—gainfully employed. “Don’t be silly,” he says.
“I don’t want John. Do I need to spell this out for you?”
“I can’t imagine what you’re talking about.”
“It was in this very room,” Patrick says, pointing at his desk, “that you lectured me about emotional honesty.”
It wasn’t a lecture, and it wasn’t about emotional honesty—Nathaniel’s not sure he could even say emotional honesty witha straight face—but rather about how repressing grief can make you go crazy, but none of that is important right now. “You need to read that thing. It’s one of the zines I bought at Gem Spa with you, but I don’t know how six of them got into the shop.”
Patrick sits at his desk and starts to read. Five minutes later he puts down the folded newsprint and says, “Well. Really decent writing, I’d say.”
That was Nathaniel’s first reaction too, but the quality of the prose isn’t the crucial point here. “When I read it, I thought to myself, these people must want the FBI to start paying attention to them.”
Patrick, who had been examining the art on the zine cover, looks up sharply. “Do you think John is some kind of cop? Creepy. I knew I didn’t like him.”
If that’s how Patrick feels about a cop spending a few minutes in the store, Nathaniel doesn’t want to imagine how he’ll react to finding out who’s been living under his roof.
“It’s easy to imagine that man in a shoulder holster,” Nathaniel says. “But, no, I don’t think he’s a cop, just a reactionary busybody. I’d like to know how these got here.” He gets to his feet and puts the six zines back next to the Whitman biographies, assuming that whoever left them there might come back looking for them.
21
When Eleanor turns six months old, Susan buys a bottle of champagne and they drink it in front of the television while Eleanor chomps on a teething biscuit.
“This is where my expertise runs dry,” Nathaniel says, trying and failing to pitch his voice to something casual. “It’s all uncharted territory from here on out.”
