An Imperfect Librarian (2 page)

T
HE LAST TIME WE VISITED
the campus cafeteria together was October 1999, one month after I moved to Newfoundland. We were scouting for a place to sit when we noticed some people from the library. One of them happened to be a young, pretty woman, fresh from graduate school.

“She's been giving me the eye,” Henry said as we walked towards her. “She's after me for sure. And why shouldn't she be?” He sauntered up to the table; you'd think he was James Bond. His cough was like a knock on a door. No one answered. We sat down anyway. He took the free chair by her side. I found a place across from him.

The man next to me introduced himself. “You're new here at the library, aren't you?”

I nodded.

“You'll be fine in no time,” he said, and turned back to the conversation. I noticed Henry sitting tall on the edge of his chair, hands in his lap, eyes glued to the face of the woman. A minute later, I glanced at him again and he was still staring. I
tried to kick at him under the table. I missed. The woman jerked upward in her chair then turned to face Henry.

“Will you come to a movie with me this Saturday?” he said without introduction or warning.

“Are you serious?”

“Dead,” he replied.

She slid her chair away from the table and slung her purse over her shoulder as she stood up. “Pick on someone your own size,” she said without a glance at him. He didn't take his eyes off her until she'd disappeared into the crowd.

As if the incident hadn't even occurred, Henry turned to face the conversation around the table. Someone was reminiscing about Christmas in the outports during the twenties and thirties. “If you found an orange under the tree, you were grateful. We didn't get spoiled back in them days,” the person said.

Up until that moment, I didn't think Henry was really paying attention. Then, out of nowhere, he said, “You think you had it bad? Sure, where I lived in Ireland, if you didn't wake up Christmas morning with a hard-on, you had nothing to play with.”

I was the only person who laughed. One by one, they rose from the table and pushed in their chairs. They dropped words behind them like crumbs:
vulgar, infantile, rude, juvenile, pig
. Henry heard them too, although he acted as if he hadn't. He smiled and drank his coffee with a my-it's-a-grand-day air about him. Not long after they'd gone, he looked at me with a halo of feigned wonder. “I was only telling the truth,” he said.

“I can't believe you would actually talk about hard-ons like that with those people.”

“Go on with ya, ya sissy.”

“The
pick on someone your own size
was a bit much.”

“She doesn't know what she's missing,” Henry said. “As
Chesterton wisely observed, better to have loved a short man than not at all.” He washed the comment down with a mouthful of coffee.

I don't have any experience with being short. I've always been in the ninetieth percentile for height. That means only ten percent of the population looks as out of place in a crowd as I do. It also means that, as a child, I was easy prey for school bullies. The earliest incident I can remember was during the first week of school. I believed them when they said that, if the bathroom door at the back of class was closed, someone was in there. The teacher was doing a lesson. “There are rivers, ponds, lakes, oceans, seas, streams,” she said. “Do we drink the water from the ocean or...”

I glanced over my shoulder while she talked about what we do when we're thirsty. The bathroom door was closed. Much later, while we practiced our printing with words like
gush, flow, dribble, drop
and
flood
, it was still closed. Later that day, I tried to explain all that to Papa. He didn't say anything except that, if it happened again, he'd make me sit in my wet pants until I went to bed.

“Will we have another apple flip and coffee or will we go back now to the library?” Henry said.

“It's already four and we'll be going home at six o'clock. It's two hours before supper and only three hours after lunch. If you consider lunch from the time it ends at two o'clock then that's only two hours ago. If you–”

“You're a sissy with a math problem,” he said. “Give me the abridged version next time.”

That evening, after work, Henry offered me a ride home. Along the way, we stopped at the supermarket. We were heading towards his car in the pelting rain when we spotted a frail old woman, hunched over with her plastic grocery bags in either hand. She was about to step off the curb into a deep puddle
between two parked cars. Henry hurried over to her, carrying his own bags. “Wait here!” he called above the howl of the wind. He grabbed her groceries, stepped into water up to his calves, waded to the taxi, then opened the door. A blast of loud rock music shot out from inside. He laid the bags on the floor, ordered the driver to move ahead, then closed the door. He splashed back through the puddle to the woman and led her along a dryer route.

After they drove off, I asked Henry where his bags were. We realized then what had happened to them. “All the better,” he said. “She'll be delighted with the bargain. They don't call it SaveEasy for no reason.”

Henry and I never went back to the cafeteria for coffee after that day. From then on, we met at 3:30 in my office. I doubt anyone missed us.

CHAPTER THREE

A
PPARENTLY, I DON'T LOOK LIKE
a Newfoundlander. Same reaction when I tell people my father's French and my mother Spanish. “You're too tall to be a Latin type,” they say. Sometimes, I'll respond with, “It was a vintage year.” They usually don't get it. I don't resemble a librarian either. “You're joking.” I've heard that response often enough when I tell people what I do for a living. One of these days, I'll experiment, grow a bun, borrow a pair of round-rimmed spectacles, a turtleneck, put a finger like an oboe reed to my lips for
shush
, wear a long skirt instead of a tie and see what happens. Not even my colleague Edith is that stereotypical, and if anyone looks like a librarian, it's her.

I told Papa I was planning to do a master's degree in library science after I finished my undergraduate degree in computer science. “Nonsense,” he said. “There's no science to checking in and out books. It's a woman's profession, always was, forever will be.”

It was worse when I told him what kind of librarian. He said he didn't raise me to be a technician. I wanted to say: You didn't raise me, period. Instead, I said: It's a science not a technique. He said: Don't hide behind fancy titles, and I wanted to say: Can't you pat me on the back for once? But I said: Digital Library Systems is the exact title, and he replied: Worse still.

I worked in a library shelving books throughout much of my first degree. Sometimes I miss those years. Mostly I miss the BC. There's no other library like it anywhere. It's where I used to spend my spare time. I had a surplus of it in those days. There was a group of us students working at the public library near campus. We used to play a game to see who could navigate the circulation system the fastest. Losers had to shelve a portion of the winner's books. It didn't take me long to master the system. If I saw the number 636.7, I knew the book was about dogs. A few details and I could rhyme off the catalogue number to the decimal. I won the game every time.

While someone else was shelving my books, I went to the basement stacks where they sent the overflow, oversized, underused, and damaged volumes. I spent every minute experimenting with different cataloguing systems – tall books over there, small here, books I fancy on those shelves, ones I'm not interested in on these and so on. After a while, everyone started calling it Brunet's Closet or the BC for short. I'd hear them say: “New shipment for the BC,” or “Send the volumes to the BC.”

I've had a relationship with libraries since I was little. When I was in the elementary grades, Papa had appointments on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On those afternoons, I stayed in the library when classes ended. I sat in the same chair each time. It was big enough for me to lie down on if I curled my legs. One afternoon, I read a storybook about a boy who rushes home from school every day to play with his best
friend Marcel. Marcel is a mutt. No cat, no bone, no fire hydrant ever gets his attention more than the boy. Likewise, the boy feeds him before he feeds himself. He rubs Marcel's belly so much the creature spends more time on his back than on his paws. The boy comes home early from school one afternoon when everyone is anxious to be sheltered from the rain and wind that's causing the river to flood, trees to fall and walls of old barns to cave in. The dog doesn't run to the door and bark the way he normally would. “Marcel,” the boy calls. He waits for him to appear from under a bed or from the bathroom where the dog sometimes steals a fresh drink out of the toilet. “Marcel.” He hollers, this time an order: “Marcel!”

Even a boy can be patient when it concerns a dog. He understands Marcel. He knows his friend can't help chasing after a cat or wandering off with another dog who's come visiting from the farm. It's when he goes to bed that the boy really misses him. He gets through the night because he knows he's going to find him the next day. In the morning, he cleans and shines the dog's bowl before he fills it with fresh water. He sprinkles some cheese on top of the dog food, the kind Marcel likes best. He rides his bike past the school all the way to the creek where they go swimming together on lazy summer afternoons. Later, he visits the town's main road where he sometimes brings Marcel on a leash, proud to show off the smartest dog in town.

He goes to bed again, this time convinced that Marcel will appear the next day. He knows he'll want to scold him for misbehaving, but he'll hug and scratch him behind the ears and Marcel won't run away anymore. In the morning, he opens a fresh tin of food then fills the bowl with an extra helping because Marcel will be hungry when he returns.

Then, one night when it's so cold the bedroom radiator is making popping noises, the boy reaches over to cuddle into the
dog. The cold, empty space that should be warm tells him what he doesn't want to know. If Marcel were there, he'd lick the boy's salty face and the pillow wouldn't be wet in the morning. The boy doesn't fill the dog's bowl that day. On his way to school, he decides that he'll never own another dog.

I never had a dog. I didn't even have any friends with one. But I felt better for the boy after I hid that storybook behind a shelf in the school's library so no one else would read it. I'm certain it was after that incident that I decided I wanted to be a librarian.

CHAPTER FOUR

H
ENRY STANDS UP TOO FAST
and triggers the nerve problem in his back. He winces, then limps over to the coffee stand in the corner of my office. He's wearing his red shirt with the built-in air-conditioning around the waist. He pours another cup, wobbles past my desk, then settles into his chair. He inhales the steam and sighs. “Imagine a library within a library, collections within collections,” he says. “Imagine centuries of maritime documents, correspondence, logs, journals, maps, letters, diaries. You should consider it a privilege to own an office overlooking the Reading Room, Carl. If it were mine, I'd do nothing but gaze down there all day long.”

“Some of us have work to do.”

“And others have more important things to do than work. Open your eyes, man! Look!” He jabs his arm upward like he's stabbing the air with a sword.

“It's the same every day.”

“That's where you're wrong. Always on Wednesday and Friday, always at 3:45, always in the same reading carrel, bag by
her left side every time. Watch her more closely. She just put something in her bag. She's up to something for sure.” Henry wipes his lips with his hands then pokes my shoulder like he's trying to tip me over. “I said she's up to something for sure. Are you listening, Carl?”

“More or less. I was half thinking about something else.”

“There's not much point in your company if there's only half of you in attendance. Not to mention your famine version of biscuits and coffee. I might as well go to the cafeteria. Watch. See how she slid something into the bag?”

“Maybe.”

“What you need is a pair of binoculars.”

My binoculars were a goodbye gift from friends who'd heard Newfoundland was an ideal location for spotting rare birds. “Look for the white tufts on their heads,” they told me.

I go home later that day and dig them out of a suitcase I haven't got round to unpacking yet. They're wrapped in a multi-coloured summer shirt that's too tropical for the Newfoundland climate. I bring them to the office the next morning where the plan is we'll take turns. We shut off the lights so we can't be noticed by anyone in the Room.

“That's enough, Henry. You're not even watching her. If anyone ever caught you, they'd hang you. Pass them to me.”

He pushes the binoculars into my hands without looking my way. He rises out of his chair, grabs his crotch then shakes it as if someone had dropped something into his trousers that he wants to dislodge. I lean forward in my chair and play with the focus.

“If I didn't know better, I'd think I was gazing into a Gothic cathedral.”

“It's Edwardian, not Gothic,” says Henry.

“Whatever. Why is the Room antique when the rest of the library is modern? Is it older?”

“It's Edwardian, not antique or Gothic. It's younger not
older. The Reading Room was added onto this side of the building ten years after the library first opened. Your office window once overlooked blinding sunlight on snow in April and capelin weather in June. The benefactor dictated the style: stained-glass windows, vaulted ceiling, hardwood floors, fake Persian rugs around the couches and chairs. All that's missing is the fireplace, chandeliers and marble staircase. It's not the Rose Reading Room in the New York Public Library, but it has grandeur and sophistication.”