Relative Fortunes by Benn Marlowe

Author:Benn, Marlowe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

The brush of knuckles against her door woke Julia on the morning of her twenty-fifth birthday. Anticipated for years, the occasion now soured her throat even before she opened her eyes. She sat up, sending Mr. Arlen’s impossible novel to the floor for the absolute last time. Mrs. Cheadle knocked again and cracked open the door. At Julia’s mumble she placed a pot of coffee on the dressing table and returned a moment later with a dozen Claudius Pernet roses in a cut-crystal vase. The note relayed Philip’s good wishes and an invitation to meet him for champagne in the library at seven. Perfectly civil. As if his needless questions hadn’t already smashed her future to bits.

Julia had managed to avoid him since she’d confronted him on the terrace almost a week ago. That evening she’d found a note balanced on her bedroom doorknob. Philip was a benevolent conqueror. He promised Julia’s financial arrangements would remain unchanged until the lawyers drew up permanent papers. (How could that take more than ten seconds? Zero was simplicity itself.) He also reiterated his intention to take her to dinner and the theater on her birthday, a plan brokered last summer when it was clear Julia would have to celebrate the event in New York. The thought of such an outing now, when any celebrating would be his alone, was noxious, but he’d pressed the matter so relentlessly she’d finally agreed.

She spent the afternoon in a handsome but arctic library at the offices of the Pynson Printers on West Forty-Third Street. David had arranged a private showing of recent fine editions from the Californian private presses. The work of the Grabhorn brothers and John Henry Nash was stirring a buzz in London’s printerly circles, especially after Morison’s authoritative disdain, which had piqued Julia’s curiosity. The shop’s proprietor, Elmer Adler, met her with a correct but clipped welcome—clearly taking her for a tiresome female dilettante—and entrusted her to a solemn Miss Greenberg, who brought the volumes one at a time in silent progression. Miss Greenberg sat at a nearby table, ostensibly tending to catalog cards but in fact watching Julia’s every move for breaches of bibliophilic decorum. It took no more than five or six books, each unwrapped from glassine wrappers by this hovering high priestess, to convince Julia that Morison was right: there was something overreaching and tasteless (terrifying, Morison had said) in those heavily deckled pages strutting the printer’s initials. The color-besotted confections of neomedieval, or neorenaissance, or neorococo marzipan seemed more suited to a candy carnival than a library. After a second florid version of The Sermon on the Mount, she began to pray that Californian would not become synonymous with American in the realm of fine printing, or she would have to endure much teasing among her book friends at home. Surely there were printers in New York doing more interesting work, with their heads and hands in the twentieth century. Maybe Russell would know. She barely glanced at the

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