NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Daisy is carrying an old copper coalscuttle across the room to the couch. Sitting down under the Tiffany style standard lamp with her bowler hat balanced askew on top she hoists the scuttle up onto her knees. Its shape resembles a huge helmet with the handle as chinstrap, but its swelling sides are green with verdigris.
“These are my files.”
They are crammed in vertically and tight. The tops of faded rose, yellow and blue folders are visible, above the graceful line of the rim. They are hard to get out. After some searching among the labels at the top of each folder, she pulls out two with a sharp jerk and deeper original colors show where the tight fit kept them from the air. She coughs and sneezes as dust rises from the first one she opens on her lap, putting others on the cushion beside her. She gently pulls the lamp string threaded with yellow and blue beads and weighted at the bottom with a large piece of purple glass cut like a gemstone. The light comes on but the string breaks close to the lamp socket. She has the purple glass in her fingers but the blues and yellows are scattered across the floor and couch. There’s a little wisp of string visible near the mechanism.
“I knew that had to happen!”
“Did you have a premonition?”
“No, this is so inconvenient though … I mean it’s Murphy … his law … there’s no time to fix it … well it is lucky the boys are sleeping.”
“The boys Daisy?”
“Yes Fred, Dante, Gabriel and Rossetti, you remember Rossetti from the barbeque at Hank Dumpty’s ?”
Yes the Dormouse, of course, sorry I had forgotten.”
“No Fred he’s a wombat, all three are.”
“Okay, he was asleep under a tea cozy, or was it a hat?”
“It was my aunt’s old hat.”
She looks up at the lamp distractedly, reaching for the wisp of string and having grasped it between thumb and finger, she lets it go.
“Ahhh! At least eighty years old.”
“Same age as the coalscuttle?”
“The lamp is probably younger than that, but they both came over from England with a bunch of stuff from my Aunt’s place.
“Oh, when did they emigrate?”
“They didn’t but their house was damaged by blast from a Nazi V2 rocket and their furnishings went into temporary storage. I don’t know how this lamp survived. I made a lot of repairs to that glass shade though, and the colors aren’t a perfect match, but I love it. Anyway their house in London was rebuilt after the war. The American relatives had sent money to help and as they liked Art Deco design some stuff came over here and the rest went back into the house.”
“Daisy your files look as if they’ve been rolled up? I mean the paper is all curly.”
“Yeah, like trying to keep an old scroll flat.”
“Why a coalscuttle Daisy?”
“Well, the file cabinet is used for stained glass storage and this was empty and convenient when I first got it from the New York cousins, plus, I needed to keep these papers handy.”
She pulls out a ragged soft toy. Looks as if it has been chewed or possibly clawed.
“What is that doing in here?”
“You tell me Daisy.”
“It’s Rossetti’s. Well I thought it was but Dante had it for a while too.
Maybe he hid it in here to keep it safe.”
“I felt sure the water committee folder was in here …” She stops to focus more closely. “These are old Guild meeting minutes and bylaws from the forties and fifties. Mr. Ramsay gave them to me to read when I joined the Guild for the first time and here they are, still unread.”
“You mean you were elected.”
“Right, and I wasn’t ready, but Mr. Ramsay talked me into running and of course, no one else ran. I had been here less than a year and there I was trying to vote on community issues while not knowing the history; a big disadvantage.”
“I suppose Mr. Ramsay expected your support.”
“How did you guess Fred? Then I got to know Diddlie who brought me up to date, and changed my mind about a few things and I didn’t always vote his way, so … you can imagine …”
“I have the impression you get more of his attention than you want.”
“He’s unbearable when he’s had a few drinks. I saw him stoned once, just babbling to himself, so I used to offer him a smoke when he came around.”
She pulls out more folders and finds pages and pages of carbon copies on old-fashioned onion skin paper with rusty paper clips holding them in a reddish grip whose acidity had burned some of the paper away. Documents in the rose folder were held together with string. It runs through a single hole punched in the top left corner. Daisy holds up a sheaf of documents fastened with string.
“Oh these things are called “Treasury Tags”. See this little cross piece on the end of the string prevents it getting pulled back through the holes.”
“Good grief! It looks like something Scrooge might have used.”
“Sure, he would have, and so would ‘the King in his counting house.’ This is all to do with my British side. Looks like legal or financial stuff.”
She turns through several pages without unfastening the string.
“See the string is long enough to look through them! I don’t know … Oh I have forgotten … no time to read it now.”
Daisy doesn’t use her living room much as she prefers daylight in the conservatory out behind the kitchen, but she says it is too cold out there now. The thermometer read 27F this morning and now it is overcast there will be no warmth out there unless she lights a fire. The living room is dark with a large picture window shaded by huge azaleas growing outside in front. I can see numerous bookcases around the walls, but some are hidden behind the dented grey metal file cabinet. It looks like government surplus. A big bookcase fills the opposite wall while next to me, under the window there’s a row of small Arts and Crafts style oak bookcases. Here’s a copy of Ten Days That Shook the World by John Read. It’s a Modern Library edition with the red and white dust jacket nicely preserved since this reprint came out in New York in 1935. Under the dust jacket in faded gold, the logo’s Promethean athlete has reached the center of the red cloth binding carrying his torch aloft with two flames streaming back over his head.
While Daisy is busy with her coalscuttle collection I pull out another small volume, Holinshed’s Chronicle in another well preserved red paper dust jacket from J. P. Dutton’s Everyman’s Library. This is number 800, published in London, reprinted in 1955. The whole shelf is devoted to these small hardbound books, all of them either Dutton or Dent and all the same size though varying in thickness. Here’s, The Medici by Colonel G. F. Young, with Lorenzo on the dust jacket rendered in the style of a wood block print. Some papers fall out as I open it. They are penciled notes. Seven Medicis are listed from Cosimo I, 1519 -1574 to Gian Gastone, last of his house 1671 – 1737. The old paper is still white, only a little brown along the fold. At the top left it says “Park Otesli, Ayaz – Pasa, Istanbul – Beyogle” in blue ink. The Hotel stationary also provides a preprinted date on the right showing 195 with a blank space to fill in the year by hand. A small rectangle of stiffer paper also fell out and picking it up from under my chair I see it is a map of Firenze from the Hotel Porta Rosa with a space for notes on the back.
“Whose collection is this Daisy?”
Daisy has emptied the coalscuttle and the files are now arranged on the couch next to her and surrounding her feet on the Afghan war rug.
“I can’t find any record of the new well.”
“What new well?”
“You know the one the that Edie Carnap was drilling over on the Wittgenstein property.”
“Yes, The Women’s Wells Cooperative, I met her once on the street. A year ago, or more probably.”
“She hasn’t done much work on it since.”
“Why?”
“Ah! a number of reasons, for one thing, we haven’t paid her.”
“No, but she hasn’t finished. In fact she was only just starting that day we met.”
“Right, and we were supposed to give her some money upfront.”
“Ouch!”
“She is feeling the pain alright. This is disgraceful. I promised her I would get this straightened out.”
“Why you Daisy?”
“Partly because we are friends and also with Boyd on the Guild, I thought he would help push things along.”
“I should think he’s been too busy.”
“He’s so wrapped up in Albrecht, and all that political stuff its ridiculous.”
“Why don’t you talk to bel?”
“I did, and she said get the paper work together and we can move on it.”
“Oh!”
“Those books … Fred, were you asking about those books?”
“I was. Looks like an interesting old collection.”
“Those are from one of the New York Uncles who spent a lot of time in Europe. I forget how they ended up here.”
“I didn’t see any names written in them.”
“No he seldom wrote in his books, only if it were a gift.”
“Daisy, sorry I haven’t been much help on this project.”
“Fred, your time will come after I find the paper work.”
