C - Brady's Bookshop

Looking through the frosty window, Margaret could barely make out the shelves of books beyond their silhouettes. Chicago was in the midst of a an icy pummeling that cast a blue gloss over much of the landscape, and her breath nearly froze upon contact with the small square of glass through which she peered. She wandered out this stormy
day indifferent to the cold, tired of being bundled up in the house on a Saturday with nothing new to read. The library had closed early
because of the weather, and Margaret now saw the perfect opportunity to spend the fifty cents she earned two weeks prior for watching Miss
Ketchum's little boy Roger.

With the unbound enthusiasm only a girl of twelve can possess, Margaret entered Brady's Bookshop with a gust and a clang of bells as the door
blew shut behind her. She had been in the store many times before to browse, but never actually bought a book. She was hoping old Mr. Brady
was open today, and quite relieved to see that he was. He was sure going to be pleased when she finally left with a book under her arm,
she thought, and eagerly anticipated the exchange that would no doubt follow:

"Thank you for your kind purchase young lady, I hope you find your selection satisfactory.

"You're quite welcome Mr. Brady. Top o' the mornin' to you!"

She took off her coat, and began stomping her feet on the musty old mat near the door.

"Good mornin' little Maggie!" Mr. Brady greeted her with surprise as she stomped her boots off at the door. He was a soft-spoken elderly gentleman from Ireland, whose thick Irish accent both impressed and intrigued Margaret. She was a very aware and precocious girl, and loved to bury her nose in books.

"Hi, Mr. Brady!" she replied, "I was hoping you would be here today."

She continued stomping her left foot, trying to dislodge a chunk of ice stuck to the heel.

"I'm surprised to be seeing you here on such a blustery day young lady!" Mr. Brady said, taking her coat and putting it on a wooden rack
by the door, "The only other soul I've seen today is a postal man darn near frozen to the marrow with his teeth chattering like the dickens,
and icicles hanging from his horse!"

"The library is closed today, and I don't have any new books to get me through the storm!" Margaret replied, "I think a little chill is a
small price to pay for new stories to read with my cocoa later this evening." She unraveled her scarf from her neck and put it on the rack
near her coat.

"A small price to pay indeed m'lady." Mr. Brady looked at Margaret with an amused smile on his layered, weathered face. The tip of his nose was
red, as were his cheeks, a feature that reminded Margaret of her Uncle Clemm, her momma's brother, who had no interest in books at all.

"You certainly are a rare child me Maggie," Mr. Brady laughed "no other I've ever known would peer a book on their own unless you glued it to
their hands!"

It was true that most kids Margaret knew didn't read much outside of their schoolbooks. The only things her girlfriends ever wanted to do was play hopscotch and dress-up and bat their eyes at the boys, all of which she did as well. But still she had no friend who shared her passion for books. It made her feel simultaneously isolated and
privileged. She never thought of herself as better or smarter than any of her friends, but wondered why the written word so often touched her
to the point of revelation, while her friends just didn't seem to understand.

"Don't you get it?" she said to her best friend Mildred one day "She hadn't really taken the poison!" She was trying to get it across to Mildred that day last semester in the schoolyard, but her friend just stared blankly at her.

"Mags, this Shakespeare guy just doesn't make sense to me, I don't even know why they make us read him." was all she could say, as Margaret stood, her mouth half open, and a small tattered book in her hand, its pages blowing back and forth with the leaves of the tree they sat under. Mildred was her best friend, and Margaret had been trying for some time to persuade her into reading some of her favorite stories, but even vague interest was rarely ever shown on her friend's part.

Mr. Brady's store was dark and dusty like an attic, with two windows by the door and a withered plant by the counter. The scent of time and freshly inked pages followed her as she strolled the aisles. She picked a book at random, opened it, and deeply inhaled the aroma of the pages. As she put it back, she felt renewed. Margaret secretly loved the scent of intellect.

She turned the corner to the next aisle and noticed a much smaller shelf of books she'd never seen before along the back wall of the store. They were old books, certainly older than she was by the looks of them, and she wondered why they never caught her attention until now. Margaret had spent enough time there to know quite well what Mr. Brady had in his stock, or at least where he kept it.

"Mr. Brady, have you always had these books here?" she shouted down the aisle, where she could see the old man look up and squint, trying to see what books she was talking about. He closed the magazine he had been reading, and shuffled down the aisle to where Margaret stood. He peered over the top of his glasses, and slowly nodded his head.

"Oh, the drop-offs," He said thoughtfully, "They were brought here a few days ago by a brash old chap, he said he needed a place to get rid of them. I offered him five dollars for the whole lot of them. I haven't given them much of a look yet, I don't have that much time on me hands!" Mr. Brady smiled up to his eyebrows and held out his hands to animate this point, and Margaret laughed and noticed how wrinkly they were, right down to his fingertips.

"You have a lot of time on your hands Mr. Brady!"

"Ah, you're a wit I see!" Brady laughed, getting her joke. She giggled and looked at him, hoping she hadn't disrespected the old man.

"They don't look like any of them go together, are they part of a set?" she asked, leaning down to sniff the pages of the book in her hands. She noticed that it smelled mustier and dustier than the bookstore itself, which she had always thought was the mustiest and dustiest
anything she'd ever seen.

"I don't know Maggie, the chap breezed in, said he had to unload the books because he needed a few dollars, said I could sell them for a profit if I'd like, and breezed out again. I figured fifty cents apiece should do me a good turn." A wind-blown woman entered the store and he
turned and shuffled back to the counter.

Margaret sat cross-legged on the floor by the shelf of old books and took out five of them, stacking them in a pile by her side and taking
the first one in her hands. It was a book about China, with a lot of maps to go along with the words. Margaret wasn't very interested in
China, but quickly skimmed enough of the book to learn that it was about the general history of the country, particularly the Ming Dynasty. She looked at the cover pages for the date...1828. That was eighty years ago, Margaret thought to herself, momma wasn't even born yet, neither was daddy and gran was just a baby. She held the book and tried to imagine it going through time, sitting on a shelf somewhere while so much went on around it. She felt inferior to the book, and
wished she could ask it questions.

She browsed the books mainly by topic, only looking at the copyright pages for the dates on most of them. There was a book on the Civil War,
one on the pyramids in Egypt, one on gardening, cooking, a couple of different Bibles.

Then Margaret's attention was drawn to a small red book with a hard cover, on which it was written in black 'Masterpieces of British
Literature'. Margaret became excited and opened to the cover page, almost ripping it off in the process. She loved the old writers from England and their love poems and stories. They mostly read Shakespeare in school, and some of John Keats and Percy Shelley, but hardly any of the names she saw here. It seemed to be a schoolbook of some kind to Margaret, and she looked for the date it was printed: 1895. This one was only thirteen years old, which she didn't think was very old at all. Maybe it was a University book that got thrown away, or lost, or stolen. Either way Margaret wanted it, and decided she would most certainly spend her fifty cents on it.

Anxious to go home and bundle up with her sort-of new book and her cocoa, Margaret put the other books she had been looking at back on the shelf and began to get up. As she was about to go, she noticed another small red book on the lower shelf that looked similar to the one she was going to buy. She knelt, leaning on one knee, and took the book from its place. Yes, it certainly was another copy of the same book, which Margaret thought a bit peculiar given the varied nature of the group of books they were in with. They were the only two literature books that appeared to be there, and certainly the newest of them all, if books thirteen years old could be called new. She flipped through the pages and skimmed them quickly with her eyes. Oh, so much poetry! She felt her chest ache and sighed as only a girl anticipating a romantic evening can sigh.

Then she had a thought: what if she got this second book for Mildred? Maybe her friend couldn't decipher Shakespeare, but surely Margaret
could turn her on to the old writers, the ones that weren't so difficult for Mildred to understand. Margaret realized suddenly how
desperate she was to have a friend who shared her interest, and could think of nobody better to share it with than her best friend, Mildred,
who was more like her very own sister than anything. If they each had the same book, they could read it together, even when they were away
from each other, like on weekends when they didn't usually see each other much. Margaret imagined it...

"Let's read page 102 on Saturday, and 126 on Sunday! Promise!" Margaret would suggest.

"Okay, and then Monday you can explain it to me." Mildred would reply.

And that Saturday night, she would read page 102 together with her friend even though they sat a mile apart. Margaret loved this idea, and
quietly gave herself a pat on the back. Mildred would love this kind of book, she just knew it. But she knew her fifty cents surely wouldn't be
enough for two books, and tried desperately to think of how she could acquire them both. She muddled over this dilemma for a solid half hour,
when once again in her adolescent mind of twelve there suddenly appeared an idea.

Bounding up to the counter in a near skip, Margaret placed one of the two books on the counter in front of Mr. Brady, having left the other one back on the shelf, very well hidden.

"I'd like to purchase this book please!" she beamed proudly, and anxiously awaited his response.

"Welllll, look here, the young lady is in business today eh!" Mr. Brady exclaimed, beaming just as much if not more than Margaret.

"How much does it cost?" she asked, crossing her toes inside her shoes where nobody could see.

"That would be fifty cents my dear."

"Oh good! That's what I wanted to spend, thank you Mr. Brady!" she said excitedly, and put her money on the counter with pride. He put the book
in a wrinkled brown bag and handed it to her, and walked to the rack to get her coat and scarf.

"Mr. Brady I was wondering," Margaret said, as he helped her on with her right sleeve, "would you consider letting me help you, maybe, clean
the store up a bit? Maybe after school this week?"

Mr. Brady at first looked shocked at the question, and then possibly receptive to it, and Margaret knew she had to attack while he was
vulnerable.

"Well I don't know Maggie, I've never had a helper before...don't suppose I've ever considered it, but..."

"But these shelves are very dusty Mr. Brady...you need lighter air in here that's not so musty and stuffy." Margaret was a child who told it as she saw it, and sometimes had trouble keeping her mouth shut. But this time she was not trying to keep it shut, she had a mission to accomplish: to recruit Mildred into the world of literature.

"Yes, that's true" Mr. Brady said, laughing, "I'm not the cleanest storekeeper in the world that's for sure!"

"Oh, the books look great!" Margaret said, "But they would look so much more...noble! Yes, noble! If the shelves could look great with them!"

"Indeed they would dear, indeed they would, but I'm not going to get out of this deal for free now eh? What does a lass get paid for dusting
shelves?" Mr. Brady lit a slender pipe, wafting an aroma that reminded Margaret of her grandpa Joe.

"I'll come here every day after school next week for ten cents a day! Is that too much Mr. Brady? That would be fifty cents at the end of the
week?"

"The lady doesn't work cheap!" Mr. Brady bellowed, with a smile on his face that told Margaret she was hired.