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The first thing he had done was to clean out the library. It had taken an entire month. Haydon did not throw things away easily. His desk, files, and bookshelves were filled with esoterica, memorabilia, and items of seemingly small or no importance for which he had formed a sometimes undefined attachment. Everything with which he surrounded himself was evocative of another space and time, and nowhere was this more true than in the library.
For the first few days he mostly thought about it, randomly pulling from the shelves books that he hadn’t looked at in years. He opened the covers and read the owners’ names, usually in their own handwriting. He read his father’s name, his mother’s name, and his own. His father’s handwriting was elongated, thin, resembling the kind of decorative script one could learn from books sixty years ago. He often made eccentric remarks below his name and date: comments on the weather the day he bought the book, or if he had successfully concluded a particular case, or if something remarkable had occurred in the news or affected the family. His books were the marginalia of his life. His mother’s handwriting was small, clear, and exact. Name and date. Nothing more.
Haydon’s own handwriting was stylistically inconsistent, partly because there were books in the library that ranged from his childhood to the present. One could easily distinguish the awkward scrawl of youth and watch it grow steadier through a succession of books. But even as an adult, Haydon’s handwriting was always varied in appearance, a fact that privately annoyed him. There had been times when he was going through the family papers after his parents’ deaths, that he hadn’t even recognized his own letters. In this haphazard fashion, he slowly reacquainted himself with what Thomas Carlyle had called “the articulate audible voice of the Past.” He came to view the library itself as an aging personality in whom the key to his own threatened memory was fortuitously secured. This discovery was immensely calming to him and was a major factor in his emotional restoration, which was to require several months.
After nearly two weeks of this self-indulgent rambling, in which he spent long days reading whatever he happened upon of interest and letting that, in turn, lead him to some other loosely related book, Haydon began a systematic review of the library’s contents. He examined every single volume, journal, and pamphlet that crowded the room’s shelves, adding notes to their cards in the catalog that had been religiously maintained from the beginning by his father. In this process he discarded a variety of material that had seemingly found space on the shelves solely by virtue of the family’s habit of saving everything that loosely could be classified as a book, journal, or pamphlet that fell into their hands. He eventually threw away three large cardboard boxes of useless material, which he dragged out on the terrace for Pablo to haul away.
Finally, he consumed one full week selecting and ordering more books from the list he kept in a spiral notebook. It was nothing less than a bibliographic binge.
Toward the end of the second month, Haydon turned his attention to the long greenhouse that lay just beyond the citrus grove. For a good while it had been at the back of his mind to expand his collection of bromeliads to take up the entire space. So, with the moping assistance of Pablo, who regretted this new enthusiasm that had turned his lazy mornings into a sweating purgatory, he began the renovations. Huge chunks of limestone were brought in to build small outcroppings, and sphagnum moss was carted in by the hundreds of pounds. Electricians came with rolls of wiring, neatly packaged instruments, ladders, and scaffolding and installed the necessary devices to create a hermetically accurate rain forest, complete with varietal wind currents produced by electrically timed fans mounted in the ceiling beside an automated sprinkler system that simulated mists and periodic rains.
He scoured every nursery in the city for varieties of bromeliads that he did not already have and placed orders for others. At the end of six weeks the renovation was complete. Slate paths wound through the length of the greenhouse amid tiers of hundreds of species of bromeliads that fell from the ceiling to the spongy earth. High up, clinging to palms and the broken stumps of old trees, were the epiphytes, the airbreathers, whose roots served only as a means of attachment while they absorbed food and water through a system of scales common to all bromeliads, and which often gave to their leaves a silvery blue hue. Abundant clumps and clusters of them draped down to the boulders upon which the Saxicola lived, clinging to the crevices and lichen surfaces of the stones. The terrestrials flourished in the boggy osmundine of the greenhouse floor, among them the shimmering Cryptanthus “earth stars,” dazzling against the dark green of moss and peat.
By the beginning of the fourth month, Haydon’s days had settled into a comfortable regimen. He rose early and exercised briefly on the bedroom balcony over the terrace before going downstairs and out the front gates to jog three miles through the boulevards in the tenuous morning coolness. When he returned, he showered and ate a light breakfast with Nina as he restlessly scanned both Houston dailies with little interest. Eventually, he fell to daydreaming.
While the cooler temperatures of late morning hung in the citrus grove around the greenhouse, he spent his time there, cataloging his new imports and transplanting the pups that sprang up from the older plants. Often in the morning hours he was simply idle and would lie in a hammock in the lime trees and try to think of nothing. It was an objective he seldom achieved.
From lunch until evening, during the hottest part of the day, Haydon worked in the library. As with the bromeliads, he cataloged the new books he had ordered, which came in a steady stream of boxes every few days. He unpacked them, put the empty cartons outside on the terrace, and stacked the new volumes on the refectory table. Then he sat with his back to the French doors, beyond which the summer heat swelled to an intensity so fierce that even the cicadas seemed to scream in defiance of it, and immersed himself in the new books with an exhilaration he had almost forgotten was possible.
Another month passed in the natural cadence that his life had now assumed. The frantic need to stay busy that had obsessed him in the early months gradually subsided and, like a debilitating fever, left him drained and tranquil. But the routine of his days, carefully orchestrated by Nina, had been regenerative. His anxieties were fewer, less immediate. Those that remained would never go away. They were as much a part of his makeup as the rhythm of his heartbeat. For the first time in longer than he could remember he felt his life coming together with a cohesiveness that long had been absent and, he now realized, had been sorely missed. Nina meant more to him now than ever, for it was she who had patiently and unobtrusively structured his recuperation. After nearly twelve years of balancing her marriage and her career, Nina pushed aside her own work. Commissions from architectural firms were routinely rejected, and for weeks at a time she never walked through the doors of her studio. What work she did, she did at home. She never crowded him; she understood better than he did his need for periods of solitude, but she was never far from reach.
As always, she had seen clearly not only for herself but for both of them. For his present peace of mind, Haydon felt an indebtedness to her of the dearest sort, beyond reason or hope of repayment.