by Lorraine Ray
The Good Librarian
Lorraine Ray
Copyright 2011 Lorraine Ray
Over the years, whenever you saw me looking at the grassy, burlap-covered book, snug in its own matching cardboard sleeve, you'd begin the odd story of how you had acquired that edition of Leaves of Grass. “That book is Walt Whitman’s reminder to me of Senator McCarthy,” you would say.
As a young teen, age thirteen or fourteen when I first heard your story, I disregarded the tale and considered it strange, and frankly embarrassing, that you, my very own dear mother, supposedly a well-educated woman and once a librarian in a small town on the Salomonie River in Indiana, didn’t know that Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, which I was fairly certain was not the McCarthy Era.
I attributed your mistake to a flawed early interest in schmaltzy books rather than really good literature. You confessed to me that you stayed awake nights fretting over the fate of Elnora Comstock in Gene Stratton-Porter's The Girl of the Limberlost Swamp. I thought you were silly for fearing that Elnora wouldn't sell enough moths and artifacts from the Limberlost to make a living, and when you took me to her log home I was deeply and sincerely unimpressed. A few years late, I realized that I was the one who was confused about your edition of Walt Whitman's poems; you weren't saying Leaves of Grass was written in the McCarthy Era, only that you got your copy in the early 1950s. And I respected Ms. Porter's early environmentalism.
Whitman’s leafy book in its fading green burlap sat on the bottom shelf of your glass and wrought-iron bookcase in its appointed slot between the King James Bible and Elliot Arnold’s Blood Brother. How you loved to tell about your brush with the celebrity author (not God, the prophets, or the apostles, but rather Elliot Arnold, who you worshipped along with Gene Stratton-Porter, though hardly anyone knew or cared about that book even then) and you used to brag that while you worked the desk at the Arizona Historical Society Library you had guarded Mr. Arnold briefcase every lunch while he took his well-earned break from researching the Apache chief named Cochise, Apache camp life and lore, and the career of Tom Jeffords, the Indian agent who befriended Cochise. But I was dubious of this story after I pulled that book off the glass shelf once and discovered it had been published in 1947. Hadn't you still been in the Women Marines in 1947, I wondered? I decided you were confused and when you saw Elliot Arnold, if you really did, he must have been writing a second Cochise novel or helping to research the acclaimed motion picture screenplay that was being written by someone else for a tall, dark, deeply tanned actor from Brooklyn who would portray Cochise.
Then, just when I was completely confused about the dates of Blood Brother, you’d leave Elliot Arnold and jump back to the story of how you had acquired Leaves of Grass, and you had an evolving tale, but you always ended by arguing in favor of your sister-in-law and her husband’s innate goodness. The only way I could explain your faith in their benevolence was to realize that you existed as a librarian first and foremost and were subject to the odd fancies of that profession; only the truly good, you claimed, would prevent the destruction of a copy of such a famous, important book. However, you never gave them back that book.
To me the whole story smacked of that sick era, the paranoia of the time a few years before I was born when a senator ran rampant, finding communists in pumpkin patches and in Hollywood movies and you had stopped guarding Elliot Arnold's briefcase long enough to marry Dad. You stood in the screen door of the white adobe out on Allen Road in your pleated paisley skirt with my older sister, a curly-haired toddler, riding on your hip while your sister-in-law and her husband lingered outside your home in the dirt yard so their kids could pet the plaster donkey--Dad must have bought one of those in Nogales along with the big, straw-covered rum demijohns that ruled his life in the evenings. This day was the last Sunday afternoon before Matty and Jacob left Arizona for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. In the late afternoon sunshine, which was so bright in the spring even though it filtered through a neighbor’s scrawny eucalyptus tree, Jacob turned away to squint through the screen door—it wasn’t the bright light or his cigarette smoke burning his eyes as you first thought--there was a nagging something he wanted to do about which he still remained uncertain.
It was that sick era, and the paranoia of the time, making him do what he really wasn’t sure he wanted to.
“Here he is! Our new lieutenant,” you called from behind the screen. They heard you clearly, yet they still gathered around the plaster donkey without approaching the door. “Don’t stand on ceremony, Jacob, Matty, please, come in,” you called. When you leaned against the screen door to push it open, Jacob hesitated, made his decision, and walked across the dirt yard and up the red concrete sidewalk to the steps at the threshold, and that was when you first noticed something held stiffly in his hands, something he thrust toward you awkwardly.
Since it was a paper bag, at first you thought it might be liquor he was giving you. He was a heavy drinker, heaven knows, or rather he was an alcoholic, the same as Dad. His excuse for his alcoholism arose from his earlier years; his Mormon father, of Dutch lineage, overcame his love of booze by beating his twelve children, and Jacob ran away from home for his senior year of high school and lived in a cave outside his little hometown in Utah. He liked to tell about some Ute relics, a broken clay pipe and some mysterious pottery chards, he had found in the cave and left there. A few days after Jacob's graduation his maternal grandfather who lived in Connecticut sent (to General Delivery) the train fare for a trip to the East Coast where Jacob worked as a yatchsman, and he could tell you how tycoons lived during the Depression. He could tell you all about it, and their lives in those mansions, and they had some strange morals, too, he knew all about that. After Pearl Harbor he joined the Air Force and that was where he found his real family. And he lived in England and flew B-52s which were bombing Dresden and later brought the holocaust victims to England on those same bombers. Sure, those memories of a plane full of starved men might have made him want to drink, but he probably started on those yachts in the harbors of Connecticut. I suspected the war trauma was an excuse.
You were hoping it wasn’t liquor because you didn’t want Dad drinking more than his share, more than the few rum and cokes you knew he would want. By then, you’d realized he’d come out of the Navy an alcoholic. Rum and coke was his favorite poison. You never drank at all and Benny, Jacob and Matty thought that was terrifically funny. The Marine, the Woman Marine librarian, didn’t drink, but you’d met Dad in a bar as you always said when you should have been studying for your art history final.
But then you noticed the bag was a flat one from a department store, the type you get for a man’s shirt, and this had something other than a shirt in it. Not liquor, definitely.
“You can keep this for us while we’re in Dayton,” said Jacob. “You’re just what we need. We’re going to use you as a librarian, Juney.” He was talking about you that way because they knew you worked in the little library across from your home in the small Indiana town on the Salamonie River. And they knew you were a librarian in the Marines at the hospital in Cherry Point, North Carolina. But those Marines mostly wanted magazines. And God's Little Acre.
“Hey, I think you’ve got that backwards, Jacob,” said Dad, handing him a rum and coke. “A librarian loans out books. She doesn't take them in.”
“Yes,” said Matty, “the librarian gives out books. Oh, but then, remember, the people return them." She was finally coming up the concrete steps.
“True,” said Dad.
You were surprised and bewildered by what your brother-in-law said, and surprised by being handed a brown paper bag the minute he came in. But maybe mor
e surprised by something stiff in Jacob's voice, just a hint of something awkward in his tone, the cough at the end, the way he stood apprehensively in the middle of your small living room. With his light blonde hair, shiny red cheeks, and ready smile, Jacob never stood uneasily when he was off-duty, never blushed, never apologized. He used to like to say "never be ashamed of a patch, only a hole." Who could have expected someone to begin a serious discussion of politics–Air Force politics mixed with the current national insanity–almost the moment you opened the door to them.
In your hands a medium-sized brown paper sack crackled, it was the type and size for a shirt from a department store, but instead there was something rectangular and heavy in it. You had my sister on one hip and this bag in your other hand and you lifted the bag up and down, squeezing it and measuring the heft playfully.
“Say, what is this? What’s this, Jacob? What’s this all about? Is it a joke?” You laughed nervously, too. “I don’t understand. Is it a gift for us?”
“Well, not exactly, Juney. It's what we just said. We just want you to keep it for us,” said Matty.
You were distracted. Behind Jacob, Sandy and Rikki walked in behind their mother. Rikki struggled up the step in his new silver leg braces. It had been a few years since they learned that he had Muscular Dystrophy.
“It’s nothing really, Juney, I guess we shouldn’t care, but with Senator McCarthy making all this trouble, you know, you can’t take a chance with a promotion on the line. At least, we can’t.”
“We have to think about Rikki,” said Matty, sitting on your sofa and adjusting the serape that was draped over a rip in the back. “If we were in a different situation we could buck the higher ups. When we're at Wright-Patterson we're going to take Rikki to Boston to some of the nation's best doctors. The Air Force will give Rikki tip-top care.”
“Well, I know that's true about the Air Force, but what is this?” you asked again. “What have you got in here?”
You measured the heft again and squeezed it. “So it’s a book?”
You rattled open the sack and glanced inside at the upside down title. “What is it? Walt Whitman? Oh, Leaves of Grass? Well, that's a wonderful book. Why are you giving me this? I don’t understand, wasn’t it yours? Wasn’t it something you liked? You sent away for it. It sure is a nice edition that you got.”
Jacob explained how it was for them. Of course, they’d liked it--without knowing much about it. They knew it was considered an American classic, and they had sent away for it in a series of great books every American ought to have in their home. The Library of America Series, it was called. Of course, who knew who picked the books in the series and they hadn’t had a hand in deciding which titles they would get, no, it wasn't any of their doing, certainly not. Jacob had always heard it was good poetry and it was something he had wanted to read before, something he probably would admire, but he hadn’t. Because he hadn’t had time to read it, well, there was so much to do in the last year or two as he rose to become a lieutenant. He hadn’t had time before someone high in the Air Force brass, higher up in the pecking order even than the commander at Dayton, Ohio, had made a list of authors whose books no Air Force personnel should have in their possession and this was passed on to another brass and on to another and maybe, they told you, at some bases it would be laughed at, but in Ohio, oh no, in Ohio it was going to be different. The top man, Jacob told you, believed in adhering to every command and made surprise inspections of base homes.
You expressed shock. You said that you hadn’t heard of such a thing as a list of banned books being prepared by the military and it ought to be on the news and many people in the country would find it shocking that they had been presented with such a thing as a list of books they couldn’t be allowed to own. You were shocked that they considered it ordinary, trivial, when the right to privacy was guaranteed in the United States Constitution.
“Oh, but that really doesn’t apply to the Air Force, Juney,” said Matty.
You laughed–the Constitution didn’t apply to the Air Force. “Well, that’s just funny. Of course the Constitution applies. Air Force or not, it’s part of America,” you said.
“No, not really.”
“What! What do you defend, if you don’t defend the constitution? That’s just silly. That’s a silly thing to say, you see,” you explained.
“Well, Juney, we’ve always been subject to search. It’s just something you get used to. You know from the Women Marines and Benny, you know from the Navy, that they can search your locker at any time.”
You agreed. That was quite true and you remembered it. Your locker had been searched when you were a Woman Marine at Cherry Point. But was it the same to search someone’s home? Oh, maybe if it was on the base, yes, maybe then it would be all right. Would it really be all right? It didn’t seem so in a way. It seemed wrong and maybe un-American. But a locker on the base, mightn’t that be different?
“Yes, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is one of them. One of them on the list. We didn’t have any books but the one,” said Jacob.
“The one. One book on the list. Well,” you said. "Well."
“So you see we can’t keep it,” Matty explained.
You frowned. “I don’t think that follows. You can keep it. I guess what you’re saying is you don’t want to–“
“No really. We can’t,” said Matty.
“But we don’t want to throw it away. It’s silly, but can you keep it?” asked Jacob.
Looking back on it, you always supposed guilt and shame made them try to brush off what they were doing by describing it as silly and trivial. They were only ridding themselves of one book, which they were at pains to explain they hadn’t read. Yes, they hadn't read it. Hadn't had the time and they hadn't picked it out themselves, of course.
That bothered you later, but not at the time with a baby on your hip and a chicken a la King over rice and an orange Jello with marshmallows to wobble over to our little linoleum-topped table. But later it bothered you that they were happy there was only one book that they owned and that they hadn’t read it. It bothered you that they kept repeating such a thing. Were they relieved that they didn’t have to be too suspicious of themselves? That there was only one thing wrong with them, made them less suspect and then, of course, they hadn’t ever read it.
Later, objections bubbled out of your head uncontrollably. Why give you the book? Why not simply hide it? Didn’t everyone have a closet that was private? Wasn’t a bedroom private enough and didn’t everyone have a small bookshelf there or couldn’t they simply have slid it under the bed? Surely, they didn’t really believe every inch of their home would be searched?
And you realized they seemed proud that they only had one book on the list.
No, the fact that the Air Force had put it on the list was enough for them to think that there was actually something about the book that was dangerous. They believed the argument that the book itself was un-American! They believed they might be changed, turned into a communist, by reading it or by simply keeping it around them. That was it! They had proved their own culpability, gullibility, by the fact that they had given the book to you.
When you thought of it several months later you always said it made you burn up inside. They should have been ashamed to own so few controversial books, instead they were relieved or even proud of their ordinariness and a little disturbed by being found to own something on the list, even if it was only one book by Walt Whitman.
Still, a year later, you reached a slightly different conclusion. You were more understanding and forgiving and you could sense something in them which rendered them unable to destroy Leaves of Grass. Whatever that was, it held them back from doing something so wrong. In a moment of happiness you reasoned that they had to be good because they hadn’t destroyed the book. You took it as a sign that they were fundamentally good people deep inside. There had to be respec
t in them for Walt Whitman, or else they would have tossed the controversial book away in the garbage the first day the list was mentioned. They didn’t have to give it to you for safekeeping; it would have been easy to dispose of it surreptitiously.
Or, was it simply Jacob's Dutch cheapness? And wasn’t that a mean stereotype--you got after yourself for saying it--even to me and yourself, but could it be true? Was that all there was to them wanting to keep Leaves of Grass? Well, well, you told yourself, thrift was a good in and of itself. And no doubt their respect for the written word was so high that they couldn’t destroy the book. Now that meant something, didn’t it?
But you had your doubts. They probably were only excited by the bindings, the trappings of the promise of erudition through the enrollment in the Library of America Series. One volume a month. The grassy green burlap cloth, scratchy and drier than the words inside it, a cover that went a little yellow on the edges over time. As I said at the beginning, the book in its grassy cover slid into a matching grassy green box. A tomb for Leaves of Grass. Although they had been purchasing the Library of America in installments you now thought they did not have the spirit of the librarian, American, or un-American.
You wondered slyly over the years if they realized that trusting you with the book was more evil than owning it in the first place. The evil lay in the fact that they couldn’t bring themselves to destroy the book. That act of preservation made them more suspect.
You thought they knew somewhere inside themselves that they should have been braver. How it must have hurt for a decorated Air Force lieutenant to be ashamed of not being courageous. It must have felt terrible, and to cover it up they had to make it seem comical later.
But they said they did it for Rikki and that part was reasonable, it placated you at the time. You agreed to that then and for years later. Surely, they made good sense. You agreed their son got better medical attention with his father in the Air Force, that part was sensible and what parent wouldn’t be afraid of losing their job. With a handicapped kid it might be worse, the fear of messing him up. That added a complication, makes it less cut-and-dry. What should they have done after all? Were they being reasonable about it? Was it unreasonable to ask more of them in the situation?
But you were making convoluted arguments. The whole thing was simple. They were too chicken to own it, to fess up to their violation. You thought later they should have displayed it proudly on their coffee table when the colonel came and challenged him to read it.
Years passed and you still had their copy of Leaves of Grass.
