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" 'You can touch theer, if you're careful,' he tells me For two years, he had let me come and listen to his classical records, and we'd taken walks together But I was just becoh I didn't know it, and it's got nothing to do hat I have to say until later on

"He was on the phone talking to somebody about a ship in the harbour

"Within a few o on these ships all the ti All I re round table with all the crew, they were Dutch, I think, and so ine room, the map room, and the radio room I never tired of it I loved the ships The New Orleans wharves were active then, full of rats and hemp "

"I know "

"Do you re ropes that ran from the ships to the dock, how they had the round steel rat shields on them¡ªdisks of steel that the rats couldn't climb over?"

"I remember "

"We get ho to bed as I would have done, I beg him to let me come in and see those books I have to see them before he sells theone to bed

"Let houseI told you it was elegant, didn't I? You can is, heavy Renaissance revival, machine-made pieces, the kind that junked up mansions from the i88os on "

"Yes "

"The house has a glorious staircase, winding, set against a stained-glass , and at the foot of the stairs, in the crook of it, this masterpiece of a stairs of which Henry Howard must have been profoundly proud¡ªin the stairwell¡ªstood ine, and she'd sit there in theher hair! All I have to do is think of that and my head aches Or it used to when I was alive It was such a tragic i it every day; that a dressing table of ree, and an old wo in a formal hallway"

"And the boarders just took it in?" I asked

"Yes, because the house was gobbled up for this one and that one, Old Mister Bridey, living in what had once been a servants' porch, and Blind Miss Stanton in the little fainting room upstairs! And four apartments carved out of the servants' quarters in back I am keenly sensitive to disorder; you find around lected clutter of the place in which you killed me "

"I realize that "

"But if I were to inhabit that place againAh, this is not important

The point I' toI used to dream about it I wanted to be a saint, well, a sort of secular saint Let me return to the books "