The Find

THE FIND / Margaret Edwards THREE BLOCKS FROM ELEANOR CONEY'S apartment was a basement store filled from floor to ceiling with used books. Stacked on wooden crates serving as shelves, piled in the narrow aisles, wedged into cardboard cartons and dumped into disorderly mounds, were mildewed National Geographies, incomplete sets of encyclopedias, frayed Victorian classics, out-of-date textbooks, and frightening legions of those modern novels no one remembers or perhaps ever heard of—hundreds of them—with titles like MyAunt in the Country, A Naughty Rose, and Sinister Farewell. The store had become a warehouse of books people had wisely thrown out. Yet sometimes "a find" appeared. Once Eleanor found a first edition of Arthur Rackham's illustrated Tales ofHans Christian Andersen. The book was protected by a slip case and had all ofits color plates intact, each covered by a film oftissue. Its ivory pages had given off that poignant vanilla smell of time and dust. The proprietor seemed to price books according to pounds and square inches, and because the Tales had a hard coverand was fairly large, he had charged his top figure of fifteen dollars. The book was worth well over a hundred. In the hope of finding more such beauties as bargains, Eleanor haunted the place. At least once a week, usually on her way home from work, she stepped down into the dim, crammed cellar to look through the Recent Acquisitions section of books unpriced and unsorted. One day, she noticed her own last name, Coney, stamped on a book's spine. She reached into the pile for it. To her amazement, on the book's front cover, then printed again on its title page, was a name so distinctive enough that she was sure only one person had it. There could be only one Stephan E. Coney—her father. Eleanor's father had been someone her mother called, sardonically, "the Great Enchanter," a burly man with prematurely greying hair, who had shuffled about the house in a soft pair of doeskin moccasins. He spent every day, all day, at home. He was a writer. His wife went out to work, and the dream they dreamed together was of his eventual fame and fortune when his book was published. Eleanor's earliest memories had to do with being told never, never to touch her father's books or papers. She had been more strictly warned of his desk than of the stove and the steep cellar stairs. Even after she had grown up to understand the rule rationally, she still associated her father's desk with danger, as if by contact with it she might fall, get scalded, be horribly scarred. Her father had not been a kind man. Most people, Eleanor felt, would concede that their tough, disciplinarian or distant fathers were considerate and caring at least sometimes. Never was Stephan Coney anything 235 · The Missouri Review but hard, and he had taken pride in his flinty, bitter, intensely silent shufflings about the house. He had had one interest, one passion, one goal: to put words on paper. If genius could have sprung from the sheer act of trying and from the sufferings of a wife and child, he would have had it. Whoever and whatever had gotten in the way of the writing had been ruthlessly thrust aside. He had never spared himself either. No pleasure was too alluring that he wouldn't deny it to himself or curtail it so as to get on with his work. He had been impressively cruel to his own person, not just to others. Great Artists were often neurotic—so Eleanor had learned from many biographies. But what of the Great Neurotics whose claim to artistry was dubious? Eleanor's flesh went cold and her knees, even though she was kneeling, felt suddenly loose. Her father had finished a novel? And it had been published? She had not seen him for a decade, nor had he sent her more than two Christmas cards (bearing printed greetings and a signature) in the past five years. He had never acknowledged, much less answered, her letters. But still it seemed as if he would have let her...