She considered herself a lover of words and of reading. But these books, these words, were so dry, so representative of hours wasted.
Look at you all, still going on about King Philip’s War. Jeffrey would really be proud of you.
KING PHILIP’S WAR BY ANKUR RAZDAN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 81
It was odd that a man with so many books did not include them in his will, when everything else was disposed of so specifically. His record collection and some bonds, both neglected for decades, went to his daughter, Laurel, still in college. To his sons, numerous as hairs out of a liver spot, his painstaking genealogical records, his golden heirlooms, and two handguns, never fired. An impressive collection of museum-worthy lead balls, arrow heads, and semi-fossilized leather straps rooted out of New England soil, was roughly aimed in the direction of his closest colleague, a Professor Winslow, though most of it remained boxed-up and unclaimed in the garage.
True, everything that he did not explicitly disperse was assumed to be held in common by his widow, Patricia. But even if the deed for the house did legally transfer from his name to hers, it was hard to see in what sense she could be bequeathed a building she had spent 30 years living in.
No, the only items left behind which you could say were not already hers to begin with were the contents of his personal library, entirely devoted to his scholarship. But what was she going to do with books like these? Read them? Come clean, darling, you must come clean, was her usual exclamation when she found a suggestion too ridiculous to be allowed. It just wasn’t going to happen.