1961 UNLITERATE IN NEW HAMPSHIRE
“We have a whole house full of books. My husband and our two kids are big readers.” This is what Josephine heard the woman say — the woman whose house this apparently was. And there was no reason to doubt her; half of the items for sale in the driveway or overflowing upon the lawn were either books or magazines. There were full sets of Childcraft and Colliers encyclopedias and the usual stacks of non-sequential National Geographics. Josephine, who was an amateur chef, was most interested in the small cache of cookbooks she discovered in a box that sat appropriately upon a child’s miniature play oven. The woman of the house casually leaned against the oven, almost touching Josephine with her shoulder as she and a female neighbor talked about the yard sale.
“Lyman said the beginning of May was too early in the season for a yard sale. He was afraid that people wouldn’t come out if the weather was nippy. But we really didn’t have a choice. It was either this or Goodwill. I think this is a good turnout, don’t you?”
The neighbor nodded. “I was thinking you might lose some customers from all the foofaraw about yesterday’s flight, but it doesn’t look like it’s kept too many people away.”
The two women weren’t the only ones talking about what Derry’s native son Alan Shepard had accomplished just the day before. There were two men, standing among boxes of tools and other hardware, who appeared to be discussing the details of Shepard’s historic flight into space. The younger of the two, whom Josephine assumed to be the husband of the first woman (he was drinking coffee from a kitchen cup and wearing bedroom slippers) was making arching gestures with the plane of his hand as if demonstrating the trajectory of the Mercury astronaut’s spacecraft.
The man’s wife noticed Josephine looking through the box of cookbooks. She pointed to the box and said, “Do you like to cook? I’m a terrible cook. I haven’t even opened half of these.”
“I do like to cook,” said Josephine. She picked up an early edition of The Joy of Cooking. “This could be a first edition,” she said.
“I couldn’t possibly care,” said the woman flippantly. “I just want them all out of here. Lyman and I are moving to Portsmouth. I refuse to cart all this stuff with us.”
Josephine nodded and smiled. “To quote Thoreau, you are ‘driving life into a corner and reducing it to its lowest terms.’”
“To quote who?”
Josephine’s guess that her purchase might be a rare first edition was confirmed a couple of days later. The book was actually quite valuable — one of only three thousand copies self-published by Irma S. Rombauer, a St. Louis mother and housewife, back in 1931. Mrs. Rombauer’s husband had committed suicide the year before and left her struggling to make ends meet. The author had taken the unusual publishing route of engaging the printing services of a company that made labels for Listerine mouthwash.
“I can’t believe that crazy woman would let this go for seventy-five cents,” Josephine said to her husband Quentin. “I know the right thing to do would be to take it back to her.”
Quentin looked up from the television. He was watching My Three Sons for personal reasons; like Fred MacMurray’s character Steve Douglas, Quentin used to be an aeronautical engineer. He had worked in St. Louis for the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, and small world that it was (though this fact would never be known to him) he and his wife, during their ten-year sojourn in “the Lou,” had lived not so very far from none other than Irma S. Rombauer herself.
“For once,” said Quentin over his shoulder, “don’t do the right thing. Didn’t you say the woman didn’t care if it was a first edition or not? Keep it. Do something nice for yourself for a change.”
“All right. I will. Don’t have a heart attack from the shock.”
Quentin laughed.
Josephine sat down at the dining room table where the light was good. She was almost as bad as the woman from whom she’d bought the book; she’d hardly even opened it herself, so busy was she visiting the local library and a couple of book dealers in Manchester and Nashua to try to figure out how much it was worth. Josephine already owned a later edition of the cookbook, published by the commercial printing house Bobbs-Merrill Company. It was the book dealer in Nashua who encouraged her to spend some time with the first edition. “It’s very conversational in tone, really quite quaint. My dear, there are recipes for preparing raccoon and squirrel in there. I kid you not.”
In looking for the raccoon and squirrel recipes, Josephine happened to open the book to the dessert section, specifically to a recipe for something called “Jelly Tots” (otherwise known as Hussar Balls, Jam Cookies, Thumbprint Cookies, Deep-Well Cookies, and Pits of Love). But she couldn’t give much of her attention to the recipe. Her gaze was drawn to a small envelope taped down upon the page.
The Scotch tape was old and had lost most of its stick; the envelope came up easily. On the outside was written in a delicate hand, “To my favorite niece: Surprise! And now you can make Jelly Tots just like your Aunt Sue. (Because this is where I got the recipe!) I hope that you’ll enjoy this cookbook in the first year of your marriage just as much as I’ve enjoyed it in the last years of mine. And there’s a little something else, which you’ll find inside the envelope. A wedding gift that should help you and Lyman build yourself a beautiful kitchen in that new dream house of yours. With love, Aunt Sue. March, 1946.”
Josephine opened the envelope.
“Quentin?”
“Just a minute, hon. Bub’s about to — I still can’t get used to seeing William Frawley without Vivian Vance. It’s like Ethel never existed.”
“Quentin, get over here. I want you to see this.”
Quentin pulled himself from his recliner and lumbered into the dining room. “See what?”
“It’s a check.”
“Where’d you find it?”
“In the book, Quentin. Where else would I find it?”
Josephine handed her husband the slightly yellowed check. He tipped up his glasses so his nearsighted eyes could give it a closer look. “It’s for fifteen hundred dollars.”
Josephine nodded.
“Who’s Bette Merkel?”
“She’s the woman I bought the book from. Merkel’s probably her maiden name. This check was a wedding present. She never cashed it.”
“Well, she probably didn’t cash it because she never saw it.”
“Because she never even opened the book. Now here’s what I think. Sit down.”
Quentin minded his wife; he pulled out one of the dining room chairs and sat down.
“I think this aunt must have made these — what are they — these Jelly Tots for her niece and now the niece is all grown up and about to get married and the aunt’s passing the recipe down to her. But it’s not some family secret — it’s in The Joy of Cooking. Anyway, the recipe was Aunt Sue’s way of surprising Bette with the fat check.”
“But how could Bette be surprised if she never saw it?” asked Quentin, scratching his chin.
“There’s a bigger question than that, honey. Why didn’t the aunt tell her the check was in there? I mean, after she didn’t figure it out on her own. That’s a lot of money.”
“Of course it’s a lot of money. Too much money to give to a niece who doesn’t appreciate you enough to even look inside a book you gave her, whether she liked to cook or not.”
“You think that’s it?”
“That would be my guess.”