596
PARTISAN REVIEW
to have a copy of
The Winthrop Women
by Seton?" or
"Double Double
by
Feuchtwanger?" or
"Children of Abraham
by Asch?" or
"The Late George
Apley
by Marquand?" And do you know what? It got so, even in the space of
those three months, that I'd know immediately, in many cases, whether we
had the novel or not, and where in fact I could lay my hands on it. If we had
it, I'd dust it off, and run it upstairs to the waiting Lewis, standing with his
customer.
Like the fixtures, the employees, and the used books, there were also
the clients who regularly haunted my fiction shelves in those early months.
They too, looked used, worn, sometimes broken, always devoted. Some
were New Yorkers, some out-of-towners who never failed to make a book–
stop, if they came to the city, and buy up a batch of fiction for the next sev–
eral months' reading. The tall lady with the feathered hats and darting
glances was always on the lookout for a new Harvey Allen or Vicki Baum.
The charming couple from the Village, a short stout silent man and his
talkative thin wife, who hunted down the detectives with grim looks and
bulldog waggles, filling their brown shopping bags. A fancy East Sider-until
Schulte's, I didn't know of the sharp differences between the two sides, East
and West-wore the first ascot I had ever seen inside his tweed jacket, and
always seemed to ask for books I never had, then, nodding with superiority,
found two or three others to take as compensation. Interestingly enough,
only after two or three months of seeing me there regularly did these odd
souls begin to admit me into their presence, acknowledging tacitly my right to
tenant their basement.
One gentleman in particular began to stand out, in part because our
earliest meeting turned into a minor confrontation, in which he muttered
something like, "Why the hell don't they get a boy who knows real books for
a change!" after he asked me for a copy of
The Possessed
and I asked him,
"Who wrote it?"
It
took him a few visits before he saw that I was actually a quick
learner and eager to do my job well. A bulky man who wore a gray fedora
and sports jacket, sometimes a tie, he spoke in a brusque voice, but was
slightly taken aback when I told him on his next visit I had learned the Dos–
toevsky titles.
"Hmm," he muttered when I rattled them
all
off, "have you read any?"
I shook my head.
"What do you read?"
I didn't want to mention the Classic Comics, or the aviator hero books,
and said, "Oh, adventure stuff, I guess."
"Aren't you in high school? What do you read there?"
When I explained that in Jefferson High, I read books and plays like
