The Book of Air and Shadows

that brain working. I wish you’d go back to school.”
    “Ma, that’s what I’m doing. I’m saving money to go to school.”
    “I mean real school.”
    “Film school
is
real school, Ma.”
    Mrs. Crosetti said nothing, but her son could well imagine the expression on her face. That she herself had not settled down to what became her profession until she was years older than he was now did not signify. She would have helped him pay for serious grad school, but making movies? No, thank you! He sighed and she said, “I got to go. You’ll be home late?”
    “Maybe real late. We’re interleaving wet books.”
    “Really? Why don’t you use a vacuum? Or just send them to Andover?”
    “It’s complicated, Ma. Anyway, Carolyn’s in charge. I’m just the help.” He heard music faintly in the background and applause, and she said good-bye and hung up. It never failed to astonish him that a woman whose profession had given her an immense store of knowledge and who typically finished the
Times
Sunday crossword in twenty-two minutes could waste her time watching a celebrity gabfest and listen to a moderately talented comedian tell a skein of leaden topical jokes, but she never missed an evening. She said it made her feel less lonely at night, and he supposed that lonely people were in fact the main audience for such shows. He wondered if Rolly watched the
Tonight Show.
He had not seen a television in the place. Maybe vampires didn’t get lonely.
    Crosetti rose from the terrible chair and stretched. Now his back ached too. He checked his watch and walked the length of the loft to where Rolly was still bent over her tasks.
    “What?” she said as he drew near.
    “It’s time to change the blotter. What’re you doing?”
    “I’m putting the cover of volume four back together. I’m going to have to completely replace the covers on volumes one and two, but I think I can get the stains out of this one.”
    “What’re you using to replace the manuscript pages as backing?”
    “I have some contemporary folio scrap.”
    “Just happen to have it around, eh?”
    “Yes, as a matter of fact,” she snapped back. “There’s a lot of it available from books broken for their maps and plates. Who were you talking to on the phone?”
    “My mom. Look”-he gestured to the walls of bookcases-“do you happen to have a book about watermarks? I have a reference…” He reached for his wallet.
    “Well, I have Heawood, of course.”
    Unfolding the counterfoil and smiling: “Of course. How about Dawson and Kennedy-Skipton?”
    “That too.”
    “I thought you weren’t a paleographer.”
    “I’m not, but Sidney asked me to take a course on incunabula and early manuscripts and I did. Everyone in that field uses D & K-S.”
    “So you can read this stuff?”
    “A bit. It was some years ago.” Here again he heard a tone creep into her voice that discouraged probing.
    “Can I take a look at those books after we do the interleaving?”
    “Sure,” she said, “but early secretary hand is a bear. It’s like learning to read all over again.” They changed the blotters and then she extracted the two books from her shelves. She went back to work at her table and he sat down with the guidebooks at the spool table.
    It
was
a bear. As the foreword to D & K-S has it, “The Gothic cursive hands of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries in England and elsewhere in Europe are among the hardest to read of all the scripts normally considered by paleographers.” Crosetti learned that the contemporaries of Elizabeth and James I made no distinction between
n
and
u
, or
u
and
v
or
i
and
j
, nor did they dot their
is. S
appeared in two different forms, and
r
in four, and there were strange ligatures tying
h
and
s
and
t
to other letters, distorting the shapes of each. They punctuated and spelled as they pleased, and to save expensive parchment they had invented dozens of incomprehensible abbreviations, which had remained in common use even when paper came in. Doggedly, however, he applied himself to the exercises provided by the manual, starting with Sir Nicholas Bacon’s
An Exhortacion gyuen to the Serieaunts when they were sworne in the Chauncery in Anno domini
1559. By the time he had reached line three, checking nearly every word against the translation provided, it was well past midnight. Rolly was still at her task, and he thought that if he could just rest his eyes and his aching back for a few moments he would get a second