First Love

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of occasional essays on the joy of reading as part of The Times’ Reading by 9 initiative.

“What are you reading?” my grandmother used to inquire in exactly the tone I once heard a woman at a wedding reception ask seductively of another: “What are you drinking?”

My grandmother understood the voluptuousness of reading. Like her, I have loved--and lived--to read for as long as I can remember. Saul Bellow’s praise for Primo Levi’s “The Periodic Table”--”We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next”--describes the operating assumption of my family. The consequence in my childhood was a quotient of blurriness about daily life, as I read in the dark, down the stairs, during breakfast and through school about girl detectives or pioneer children, nurses, orphans, witches, maidens and--most alluring--siblings who accidentally enter other worlds.

Now I cannot so effortlessly find the books that elicit such abandon. But when I do, I return to being the girl who could not stop. In our house, the desirability of a book was measured by the degree of sleep deprivation one was willing to endure in order to reach the final page. I gave Jill Ker Conway’s “The Road From Coorain” to my mother and sisters with the supreme accolade: I had stayed up all night to finish it.

I know infallibly, often from the first sentence, if I am in the hands of a writer who will afford me that drowning delight. One holiday I opened Oliver Sacks’ “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” By the time I had turned a single page, the book felt as if it were glued to my palm. When guests arrived, I greeted them with appropriate enthusiasm but returned to my reading immediately. (My family’s idea of conversation was to look up every once in a while from an open volume in order to recite its most irresistible passages.) The guests were miffed.

In the heralded age of information, it is surprising how protective readers have to be about their ardor. Often I am asked, in a faintly accusatory tone, “When do you have time to read?” The question provokes an ancient shame about my needing books so badly; the gluttony of a passionate reader remains embarrassing.

After years of sublimation, of socializing myself not to read at the table or in front of people who are entitled to my entire attention, I have returned to my first love with the same shocked intensity with which others have affairs or quit their jobs. Again, I am staying up past midnight, the children asleep in their rooms and my husband asleep beside me, alone in the beloved universe of my childhood. Poised in my 40s between youth and mortality, I find in this reunion a secret solace for the imperfection of the world.

Lying in bed, propped on my elbows before a library book with its enticingly unstylish cover, I resume my vocation of reviving the dead. When I turn the pages of “As I Walked Out One Midsummer’s Morning,” I am back in a British village with Laurie Lee, saying goodbye to his mother as he departs for foreign climes and the Spanish Civil War. I want to tell his daughter, only a child on the flap copy, “Jesse, your father still lives.”

Consuming “Journey from the North,” I am startled by Storm Jameson’s grief-stricken account of the death of her young sister, Dorothy, by a lone German bomb in Reading, during the war. “Your mother has been gone for half a century,” I say to Dorothy’s daughter, “but I am crying as I picture the dollhouse she was furnishing for you.”

Famous in their day, these writers live again in my house, keeping me company with their passions and sorrows. Sometimes my trysts are interrupted by the cries of my new daughter. Juggling book and baby, I rock her back to sleep. She may grow up to say, as the older two already do, “Mom, why do you have to read so much?” More likely, she will lie on the couch for long afternoons, books in a rickety column beside her, so engrossed that she does not hear the call for dinner. This is the ideal I offer her brother and sister.

Despite their protests, my children love books. “Read to me,” they will plead before I’ve taken off my coat on my return from work. When I sit with them at bedtime, a cherished book in hand, I think of my grandmother’s pronouncing the words “Our Mutual Friend” with such affection; she read Dickens to my mother and her brothers.

In response to the children’s importuning, I will undertake the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, dutifully reading a chapter a night in homage to the way I raced through the series at their age. But in recollected bliss, I subtly steer them to E. B. White, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Edward Eager, C. S. Lewis or Madeleine L’Engle. Together, we have read them all, purchased from the school book club or borrowed from the library. Enchantment, not coercion, is my strategy to transmit the bequest.

At the end of the summer a year ago, I rented a houseboat with my mother, my uncle and aunt, and two of my children (the third afloat within me) to return to the summer landscapes of my childhood, observed with my grandmother in a small Canadian town. The cottage with the screened porch on which I devoured the Nancy Drews magically available in the town library (my city branch disdained them) was torn down long ago. But the lakes were as lyrical as I’d imagined, and the week spent traversing the waters as we slowly made our way to the town was the distillation of all the sweetness of my past.

The night before our arrival, I could not sleep. I lay on my bunk, reading with my flashlight until I could see dawn. Easing into the river, we passed the cottage’s dock, still intact, on which I had sprawled beneath the noon sun, mesmerized by “Random Harvest.” We passed the marina whose yachts had set me conjuring the far-off places I knew only from books and pulled up to moor directly in front of the library.

It seemed an omen. Inside, we took photographs of my uncle and mother in the room named for the librarian they had known as children. My son snapped me with a Nancy Drew book in hand. I took bookmarks as mementos, explaining our return to the elderly librarians whose face powder’s fragrance instantly evoked my grandmother.

And then we made our pilgrimage. Down the gravel road, past the turn--the dense summer smell of trees and river awakening me--to the place.

The house that stood in its stead bore no resemblance to the cottage; I had been forewarned by my cousins. The concrete bridge and pilings that dwarfed the dock were as ugly as I had expected. (The shadow they cast over the river had goaded my grandmother, reluctantly, to sell.) Yet when I looked into the water, I could see myself on the porch, rain speckling the screens, watching my grandmother reread “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” Rebecca West’s long-ago account of the Balkans.

What I wanted to do was walk down the back way, a series of winding paths toward a dim foresty trail that led to a lighthouse. Like the child who opens Virginia Woolf’s novel, I had to see the lighthouse by day’s end. But when we wandered past the bridge, we found a massive road with raw housing developments on either side. None of the footpaths and miniature cottages I remembered were there. It was hot and graceless, the children were tired, my aunt had repaired to a tea shop, and we agreed that it was pointless to continue.

As we trudged back to the boat, subdued and damp from the drizzle that had begun, the sky over the river was lit by a vast double rainbow, two dazzling, translucent arcs that miraculously lingered until twilight.

A sign. I will not see the lighthouse, but when I return to New York and the present--my grandmother dead for a decade, the cottage razed--I will take down, as I do each year, my copy of “To the Lighthouse.” Wrapped in my quilt, far from the autumn night beyond my window, I will read of a family dreaming through time of light and art and love, offering its trustworthy, unique consolation.