The Apple Tree Book Shop
I was surprised when my boss pointed emphatically to the book shop table and told me to, “Sit there until you finish reading My Antonia!”
“Appalling!” huffed Eric Griffel, in his Polish accent, discovering that I was a Nebraska college student who had never read Willa Cather. “YOU should be paying ME to finish your education!” he drawled excitedly.
Bewildered, I did what I was told.
Eric hired me, he said, because when I walked into the Apple Tree Book Shop, a 19-year-old looking for a summer job, I didn’t make the fatal error of asking if he was hiring, but instead asked the more diffident, “May I fill out a job application?”
The devil was definitely in the details with Eric.
He was not a physically intimidating man – short, bald – but he was commanding all the same. From what little I knew, whispered to me by his other intimidated employees, Eric retired from the Foreign Service and, with his elegant wife, relocated to rural New Hampshire, where he purchased the oldest bookstore in Concord, on its oldest little street, happily catty-corner from the state’s oldest candy shop.
I was in heaven.
Like his well-curated book shop, Eric’s personality was rich and varied.
He was ahead of his time, in 1989 reimbursing customers one nickel if they declined to take a paper bag.
He was imperious, at one point renaming me.
“Your name doesn’t suit you so I SHALL RENAME you to Matilda Jane!” he declared.
And that was my name for the rest of the summer.
Eric did not suffer anything – or anyone – he didn’t want to suffer, and when he saw a particularly chatty woman coming toward the door, hurriedly ordered me to sit silently on a stack of cinder blocks in the back room and not to come out until she left.
“She talks too much and so do you,” he explained when I emerged from the closet. “You only make her stay longer.”
He was also greatly respected in the literary world, frequently drawing in passing authors and local New Hampshire writers, like the poet Donald Hall, and his wife Jane Kenyon. I bought every title Hall had ever published, for him to autograph, which he did, kindly.
Eric chided me for my excessive book spending, then told me he didn’t trust a young person who saved.
That was love.
He was also a wit. One slow day he ordered me to dust the massive ficus in the front window, directing me to wipe every leaf clean with milk, one at a time. I did so over the course of days, and in the days that followed, watched in horror as the ficus began to shed handfuls of leaves at a time, slowly – then rapidly – balding.
Every morning I’d arrive at work to find an incriminating pile of dead leaves on my desk. “But you TOLD ME to do it!” I would protest. Eric would only purse his lips, shake his head, and resume his reading.
The end of the summer came, and together with his other employees, I was sent off appreciatively with a cake and a gift of the only dictionary Eric trusted, by Random House. The rest were imposters.
Weeks later, in my dorm room at the University of Nebraska, I opened an envelope with a return address in Concord. There was no note, only three dead ficus leaves and a short headline clipped from a newspaper.
“Ill Wind from Nebraska.”