Grandpa's thirst for reading was always the source of much interest. He made daily trips to the post office in tiny Yellow Springs, Ohio, and was frequently rewarded with a new book wrapped in parchment. He had books in English, Italian, French, Spanish and even Flemish, Swedish, Portuguese. It was rumored that he spoke four languages, but I never heard him speak in any tongue but English.
My grandparents parked their car in the driveway because their garage was overflowing with newspapers. I once joked that the "Dewey Defeats Truman" paper was in their garage. Grandpa silently slipped away, and a few minutes later (after the topic had taken several turns and was on another road) he produced a yellowed paper from 1969 announcing the moon landing. I still think if he would have disappeared a bit longer he might have found the Truman paper.
One day, when I was 11 or 12 and taking a break from a neighborhood kick-the-can game, I began to look a bit more closely at his books held in giant cases that lined all four walls of the guest bedroom. Mostly dry scholarly tomes, travelogs, biographies and literary titles — nothing much to hold the interest of a preteen. Then I realized that there were so many books, that they were double-layered; if you looked behind one book, there was another hidden behind it.
It was then that I realized Grandpa was a far more interesting character than I'd suspected. He had a fascination with the bizarre: Neatly tucked away were books about torture, physical deformity, mysticism, paranormalism, fetishes, bestiality. Not that I knew what any of these topics were. Just the names conjured my imagination. I knew I had stumbled onto something big. I locked the door and began to take books out from shelves — first, one or two at a time, then by the handful — to look more closely.
Hidden in those shelves, I discovered porn. Behind grandpa's high-brow books on Shakespeare and Chaucer were raunchy magazines. Oh, yes, there were Playboys, but also Hustlers and Penthouses and hard-core biker mags, titles I've since forgotten or repressed. I recall seeing the glossy centerfold of Suzanne Somers, an actress who was then at the peak of her popularity. I gazed in amazement at the sight of her nudity, having never seen a woman so brazenly... well, naked. My fingers shook as I leafed through cheaper magazines with their thin pages that provided even more of a shock to my young girl's innocence. I could hardly look away from the sight of women with their legs askance, pulling their anatomy apart for the camera's probing eye.
I was not so much shocked that such things existed, but that they existed in the guest room of the little white house at the end of Whitehall Drive.
I'd been in the room for well over an hour, and I knew I'd be in trouble for snooping if caught. At first I had taken just a few magazines out, but I found I could more easily see what was behind the shelves by removing entire rows. There was a knock at the door. "Are you ready for lunch, Toni?" my grandma asked. "I'll be out in a minute," my shaky voice answered. I looked with dismay at the books and magazines scattered all around me. I tried to reshelve items where they had been. Did the Hustlers go behind the National Geographics or the Frommers map collection? Did "Sex Among the Hindus" go on this shelf or that? There was another knock: "Lunch is ready." I looked in panic at the books still not put away and pushed them under the bed. "Okay," I answered, feeling the flush rise in my face when I opened the door. I slipped by grandma without making eye contact.
After lunch I retreated to the room once again to try to reshelve the books. Try as I might, they wouldn't all fit. I did my best, but it was like I had forced pieces of a jigsaw into place. I just wanted to put everything back like it was before I found it. I wondered if my grandma knew about those books. She'd be so hurt.
Later that night, I became ill. My face was hot and a rash broke out on my hand. "It's probably from looking at books you shouldn't have been reading," my grandpa growled.
I looked at him. How did he know? And if those things were so wrong to look at, why did he have them?
My grandma laughed at my puzzlement. "Yeah, it's probably from reading grandpa's books."
I said nothing, just wrung my hand in remorse.