In The Basement

My sister-in-law Susie grew up in the house where I now live. It’s on a street busy enough that it’s sometimes hard to pull out of the driveway, but there is an acre of land, so wooded that deer have bounded through the backyard. Earlier in the summer we saw rabbits foraging in the unmowed grass. The house feels big because of the number of trees and the acreage, but because there are five, sometimes six of us (with a seventh on the way), and because my brother usually has at least one of his dance students staying here, and because there are often other houseguests, it feels small. Earlier this summer my brother and sister-in-law and I cleared out the downstairs basement. It was a period piece, that basement, with veneer paneling, a dropped acoustic ceiling, a built-in wet bar, and a fireplace. We cleaned everything out and carpeted the room, and I stayed there for a few weeks until the dance student living upstairs left for her summer study in Miami. The basement room is still sort of musty—the other half still needs cleaning and organizing—and now it’s become a kind of rumpus room for my two nieces and a place to go when the rest of the house, which lacks AC, is hot. Fortunately, it's been a mild summer here.
Right now there is a pile of about thirty boxes of books in the middle of the basement, which still leaves plenty of space for the girls to play. My five-year-old niece Nina and I “opened” an art gallery downstairs, with a crafts table and construction paper and glue sticks and safety scissors and glitter and paints and crayons. Nina, who will be six in a week, is a budding artist. She loves arts and crafts; I taught her how to fold origami cranes, and she folded them for at least a month. Camille will be three in December, and doesn’t have any interest in sitting still and making things. She likes to climb and run and move; I have to tell her to stop climbing on the boxes of books or she’ll get hurt. She listens, and instead decides to run from one end of the rumpus room to the other and back. She shouts, “Look at me! Look! At! Me!” When Nina and I finally look up from the arts-and-crafts-table, Camille charges across the carpet to the airbed on the floor and throws herself across it. And then she does it again. And again. And again.
The books in the thirty-or-so boxes all belonged to Susie’s father. He was an English professor at Buffalo State College for many years. In the other part of the basement there were already at least fifty boxes of books, packed away with slips of notebook paper listing the titles, but John still had another officeful of books that hadn’t been moved in years. I finally boxed them all up because Bill wants to redo the office for his own use. I’ve never sorted through books so fast in my book-loving life. I divided them into three general categories: books that had obvious value (first editions, backlist keepers); books that had potential resell value (the old Vintage mass markets—John even had Lionel Trilling’s Matthew Arnold in mass market paper!); and books that are too niche or have no value whatsoever (Magill annuals, French lit-crit). It was something else, going through that library. I really enjoyed throwing all the poststructuralist lit-crit in the third pile.
I only met John once, at my brother’s wedding. We chatted for what felt like five minutes, mostly about Diana Trilling. John was very interested by the fact that I’d worked for her and had known her so intimately. Unfortunately, he was stricken with illness not long after that, and passed within the year. Susie recently told me that the room where I’m now staying is the one where her father was right up to the end. Staying in the room where he spent his last days is a kind of contact; so was going through all of those books. I imagine he’d read in all of them at some point. I haven't decided what to do with them yet, but it's one of my projects for the months to come.