The Paris Library

by Janet Skeslien Charles

  * * *

  TWO DAYS LATER, I helped Miss Reeder pack her belongings. Though I knew that her safety mattered more than anything, and that this was for the best, I moved slowly, wanting to keep her with us for as long as possible. In the drawer, a red address book teemed with cartes de visite from the likes of the Swedish ambassador and the Duchess of Windsor. I slid it into her briefcase.

  “What will you do in the States?” I asked.

  “Hug my family and hear about the moments I’ve missed. Beyond that, I haven’t given it much thought. Perhaps rejoin the Library of Congress, or apply to the Red Cross.”

  “I wish…”

  “I wish, too. It’s painful to leave. I’m so proud of the Library and the fact that we’ve remained open. But when you have no news of the outside world—not even from your own family…” Tears glinted, and she returned to packing her private collection—favorite books she’d brought from home, signed first editions from admirers, and several French volumes.

  There goes Rilke, there goes Colette, and when the books were boxed, there goes Miss Reeder. Watching her empty the shelves was painful, so I turned to the desk. In the bottom drawer was a cache of correspondence. I knew I shouldn’t snoop, not with Miss Reeder right there, but couldn’t resist when I saw her bold, curving script. It was a letter to “Mom & Dad.”

  One cannot plan more than a day in advance, so what the future holds, I do not know. I do, however, have the feeling that our Library will always continue. We’re doing a good piece of work, considering the handicaps. It’s not easy when you have to stand in line for food before going to work; when everything is extremely hard to get, including clothing, shoes, medical supplies, etc.; no heat and no hot water; and everything very expensive. Seeing the lines makes your heart sad. No soap—no tea—no nothing. The iron clamp is working—granted, in a very polite way—but hard—oh, very hard…

  But physical hardships seem small when compared to those of the heart. We at the Library had our share like all others, but somehow it touches more closely when it takes place in your own building among your own staff. Someday I hope to tell you the story.

  Love,

  Dorothy

  The missive reminded me of the ones I’d written to Rémy. Filled with the stark truth of the Occupation, I’d tucked those letters inside the musty classics on my bottom shelf. I wanted to shield him, the way Miss Reeder had her parents. There was so much we did not tell.

  “It’s been wonderful to work with you,” she said.

  “Truly?”

  “Just promise that you’ll think before you speak. You may have the Dewy Decimal system memorized, but if you can’t hold your tongue, that knowledge is wasted. Your words have power. Especially now, in such dangerous times.”

  “I promise.”

  When she finished packing, only the paper with Dr. Fuchs’s phone number remained. “He said we could call day or night. I hope you’ll never need to.”

  At the going-away party, the Countess had her servants proffer glasses of wine, but my habitués didn’t have the heart to partake.

  “Who will step into the Directress’s shoes?” Mr. Pryce-Jones asked.

  “Our Odile,” M. de Nerciat said.

  “She’s too young,” Mme. Simon said, dentures clinking. “The board of trustees will never allow it.”

  “Perhaps they’ll offer the job to Boris,” Mr. Pryce-Jones said.

  “A Russian at the helm of the American Library?” Mme. Simon said. “Face facts. The Library will close.”

  “Let’s have a toast,” the Countess said, to stop the mood from becoming morose.

  We raised our glasses.

  Though Miss Reeder was gaunt, her smile was radiant. “To all of you, it’s been an honor. The finest tribute would not begin to tell of my devotion, deep affection, and high regard.”

  “May you only remember the brightest days,” Boris said as he presented our gift, a snow globe with an Eiffel Tower inside. When she shook it, bits of gold foil twirled about.

  Standing off to the side, Margaret, Bitsi, and I watched subscribers bid the Directress farewell. Margaret pulled at her pearls. She hadn’t been able to contact her family in London and didn’t know how they fared in the Blitz. Bitsi clutched Emily Dickinson to her chest. With that German soldier billeted in her apartment, she couldn’t even escape the war at home.

  Tomorrow, Miss Reeder would make her way out of the Occupied Zone, cross through the Free Zone to Spain, then Portugal, where an ocean liner would sail her back to America. I thought of Rémy, of Bitsi’s brother Julien, and the other prisoners of war. Of cheery Miss Wedd, whose crime was being born British. Our Canadian cataloger, stern Mrs. Turnbull; Helen-and-Peter; and now Miss Reeder, a world away. 823. And Then There Were None.

  CHAPTER 26

  Lily

  FROID, MONTANA, AUGUST 1986

  EACH TIME I perused Odile’s shelves, a different book spoke to me. Some days, a title in bright letters beckoned; other times, a thick tome cried out to be read. This afternoon, Emily Dickinson called my name. Mom had liked one of her poems. The line I remembered was: “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” Inside the slim volume, the “American Library in Paris Inc, 1920” bookplate showed the sun rising over an open book, a horizon as wide as the world. The book lay on a rifle, almost burying it—knowledge slaying violence. As I flipped through the pages, a black-and-white photo stashed between them floated to the floor.

  Odile, back from getting the mail, picked it up. “That’s Maman, Papa, Rémy, and me.”

  Her father’s mustache dominated his face and made him seem stern. Her mother practically stood behind him, and I wondered if she was shy. Odile and her mother wore dresses, the men wore suits.

  “Was your dad a businessman?”

  “No, a police commissioner.”

  I grinned. “Does he know you stole a library book?”

  She didn’t smile back. “He knows I’m a thief.”

  I was dying to know what she meant, but just as I was going to ask, the phone rang. I knew it was Eleanor before I heard the shrill neediness. “Is Lily there? I sure could use some help…”

  “So much for today’s French lesson,” I said. Slipping the photo back into the book, I noticed there were a few other pictures, and I wished I could stay.

  “Is the baby still colicky?”

  “Mais oui.”

  For two months now, no one had been able to get any sleep. Worse, the baby wouldn’t suckle. The nurse said the tenser Eleanor was, the longer it would be for Benjy “to take.” With Dad always at work, I took care of Eleanor, patting her back, the way I did when I burped Joe.

  Barely a year apart, both boys wore cloth diapers under rubber pants. Eleanor had shown me how to change a diaper, then plunge the poopy one into the toilet before throwing it into the wash. I didn’t know why she insisted on using cloth when everyone else chose disposable. Maybe she thought more work was more love.

  I found Eleanor in the kitchen, which was ninety degrees. Sweat poured down her face, and Benjy was bawling in her arms.

  “Why won’t he stop? Is it my fault?” Eleanor wailed. She cried almost as much as the baby.

  “Have you eaten today?” I sniffed to see if I needed to change his diaper. He smelled fine. She didn’t. “Or showered?”

  Eleanor gawked at me like I was speaking Farsi. I scrambled three eggs with one hand and cradled Benjy in the other. While she scarfed down the omelet, I wiped his nose with his bib.

  When Dad got home, he did the only thing he could. He flipped on the fan and aimed it toward Eleanor. After listening to her fret, he called Grandma Pearl, who drove out the next day. “It stinks to high heaven in here,” she said, setting a cardboard box full of baby bottles and rubber nipples on the counter.

  “Bottle feeding?” Eleanor protested. “What will people think?”

  She told Eleanor to go rest. I hid my smile behind my book. When Grandma Pearl told you to rest, she need
ed a rest from you. Tightening the belt of her scruffy pink bathrobe, Eleanor shuffled into the living room. Grandma Pearl prepared the formula and screwed on a nipple. She marched in and thrust the bottle at Eleanor. “Now feed that child.”

  “But Brenda breastfed.”

  “Quit comparing yourself to a ghost!”

  “Mother!” Eleanor gestured toward me.

  Disparaître means to no longer be visible, to cease to exist. I wrapped French around me like a shawl and went to see Odile, who was rooting around in her garden. She rose and wiped her hands on her smock. “Bonjour, ma belle. Comment ça va?”

  She was the only adult who asked how I was. The others asked about my brothers.

  “How do you say ‘ghost’?”

  “Le fantôme.”

  “What about ‘sad’?” I’d learned the word a while back but needed it again now.

  “Triste.” She hugged me. “School starts tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. Mary Louise and I signed up for the same classes.”

  “It’s a gift to spend time with your best friend. I can’t tell you how much I miss mine.” She put the leeks she’d plucked from the ground into her basket. Her expression seemed triste.

  “Do you have time for a French lesson?” we said simultaneously.

  Airport, un aéroport. Plane, un avion. Plane window, un hublot. Flight attendant, une hôtesse de l’air. Hostess of the air. Side by side at our desk, Odile’s kitchen table, I wrote the vocabulary. Usually, we studied everyday words like “sidewalk,” “building,” “chair.”

  “Why are you teaching me travel vocabulary?”

  “Because, ma grande, I want you to fly.”

  At dinnertime, as Eleanor set the meatloaf on the table, Grandma Pearl followed, picking at her like a hen pecking at feed. “The whole world won’t stop if you take a nap. Don’t you have more than one shirt? When was the last time you washed your hair? Where’s your pride?”

  Eleanor slammed down the creamed corn. “Muuu-ther!”

  In moments like this, I remembered that Eleanor was only ten years older than me.

  “And where’re those friends of yours?” Grandma Pearl continued. “Why don’t they help?”

  “Lily said Brenda did everything on her own.”

  “How would she remember?”

  Eleanor turned on her mother. “Lily wouldn’t lie!”

  I felt my face redden. “Actua—”

  “I’m not saying she did,” Grandma Pearl said quickly. “But I’m telling you, a woman with three children needs a hand.”

  “I can do it myself.” Eleanor sounded as sullen as Mary Louise’s sister, Angel.

  As usual, Dad came home from work two minutes before dinnertime. We ate in silence, except for Benjy’s cries. Eleanor didn’t even say grace.

  While she and Grandma Pearl bathed the boys, I washed the dishes, picked up toys, folded the laundry, and counted the hours until school started.

  For a week, Grandma Pearl did the cooking and lectured Eleanor on how store-bought baby food never killed anyone. Before climbing into the Buick, she told Eleanor, “You lean on Lily a lot. Isn’t there someone else who could help? What about that nice Odile?”

  Eleanor crossed her arms. “I can do everything by myself. Besides, Lily is family.”

  She considered me family? Suddenly helping out didn’t seem like such a sacrifice. Yet I could hear Mary Louise’s voice as if she were standing beside me. “Eleanor keeps you slaving away. Is that how you’d treat a real daughter?”

  * * *

  IN GEOGRAPHY, we learned about China, where the government tells couples they can have only one child. Seeing how worn-out Eleanor was, it didn’t seem like a bad policy. “Girls don’t count in China. Parents want boys, who can work in the fields,” Ms. White rattled on, somehow never noticing that our farm community was the same.

  “Ever notice the only thing they teach about Communist countries is that they suck?” Mary Louise whispered.

  “Yeah, like Froid’s so great.”

  In China, I would have been enough. If I’d been a boy, Dad would have let me take driver’s ed. I’d already be driving. I’d already be gone. As the teacher droned on, I lay my head down for a minute, the desk cold against my cheek. My house was China. I imagined taking a bath, imagined my father and Eleanor seizing my shoulders and holding my body underwater, imagined the life seeping out of me.

  “Lil?” Mary Louise patted my back.

  I woke up. Everyone else was heading out the door.

  “Didn’t you hear the bell?”

  Yawning, I covered my mouth and felt a thread of saliva stitched to my chin.

  “Slobbering over Robby,” Tiffany Ivers said on her way out.

  I prayed, Please God, don’t let him have seen.

  “Ignore her,” Mary Louise said. “Want to come over?”

  “Eleanor needs me to babysit.”

  “What about Friday? Spend the night like you used to.”

  I wanted to. I really did. “Can’t.”

  I trudged home, where diapers would need to be changed and Weeble Wobbles were scattered over the linoleum like landmines. Bien sûr, Benjy screamed. At the kitchen table, in the scabby shirt she’d worn all week, Eleanor rocked him while Joe whimpered at her feet. I cuddled with him before attacking the dirty dishes that languished on the counter.

  “You don’t have to,” she protested weakly. Lily is family. I sterilized the things that need sterilizing. I rocked Benjy until he dozed off. Even in his sleep, he sniffled. Passing him to Eleanor, I ran to Odile’s for a quick lesson.

  Lord, I loved the calm there. No babies bawling. Not a thing out of place. Newspapers folded in the basket beside her chair. Our books arranged according to the Odile-Lily Decimal system. The small framed photos of her husband and son.

  “Tell me about Mr. Gustafson.”

  “Buck?” She squinted, as if she hadn’t thought about him in a long time and wasn’t sure who I meant. “A man’s man. Handsome in a rugged way, with stubble on those ruddy cheeks of his. He liked to hunt, which is how he got his nickname. He killed his first deer, a six-point buck, when he was ten. Its mangy carcass was our first fight. Buck wanted the head of that poor animal over the mantel; I wanted it nowhere near me.”

  “Who won?”

  “Well, ma grande, that was the first lesson I learned as a young wife.” She got up from the table and moved to the sink. “Sometimes, when you win, you lose. I got rid of the stuffed head—the garbage man picked it up when Buck was at work. But he was angry for a good long while.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh, indeed.” Her back to me, she tucked the plates on the dish rack into the cupboard.

  “What did you and Buck like to do together?”

  “We raised our son.”

  “And after he was grown?”

  She turned to me. “Buck and I didn’t have much in common. He loved attending football games; I preferred to read. But we both liked brisk walks. He was romantic. He never stopped holding doors open for me, never stopped holding my hand. At midnight, we sometimes went to the park and played on the swing set, like children.”

  It was the most she’d ever said about her life, and I stayed silent, hoping she’d continue.

  “After he died, I donated most of his things to charity—his tools, the truck. But I kept his rifle. I needed something important to him to remain.”

  The phone rang. Eleanor again. I headed home. After cooking dinner and cleaning up, I fell into bed still wearing my jeans, too tired to study. Anyway, calculus paled next to Odile’s lesson: Love is accepting someone, all parts of them, even the ones you don’t like or understand.

  * * *

  WHEN ELEANOR GOT home from the fall parent-teacher conference, she slammed the back door. “Lily?” she hollered. “Where are you?”

  In the living room, watching the boys, where else? On my lap, Joe tugged at my hair; lying on the blanket I knit for him, Benjy noticed his toes for the first time
.

  Eleanor strode in. “Miss White said you fall asleep in class. She made it sound like I was somehow at fault. I’m not a bad mother! Why don’t you get dinner going while I feed Benjy?”

  She hiked up her shirt over her sagging belly, past a spidery web of stretch marks. I fled to the kitchen before she undid her bra and released her chapped nipple. Seeing it once had been enough. I wished that Eleanor trusted me less. I wished she’d go back to the aerobics tapes and chatting with Odile, but she spent most of her time making homemade baby food and sobbing at the sink. “You’re a mother but also a woman,” Odile had told her. It seemed to me like Eleanor had given up on the woman she used to be.

  Little by little, I had stopped doing homework and hanging out with Mary Louise. Even French was fini. Eleanor needed me. Sometimes, she just sat and contemplated the wall. “Don’t you want to hold Benjy?” I’d say. Or, “Look, Eleanor, Joe’s teeth are coming in.” She would barely nod.

  When I got my report card, I realized how the situation had devolved. Math: C-. English: B-. Science: C-. History: C-. “What happened?” Mr. Moriarty wrote in red ink. I trudged home, afraid that like Eleanor, I’d given up on the girl I’d been.

  “Lily?” Odile said from her porch.

  I continued on.

  “Lily, what’s wrong?” She steered me into her house and pried the report card from me.

  “Oh, là là” she said.

  “I have to go, Eleanor needs my help.”

  The aroma of chocolate filled the air. Odile held out a tray of cookies. Hunkered on her couch, crumbs spilling onto my clothes, I gorged, not even tasting them.

  She watched sadly. “What’s going on at home?”

  “Rien. Nothing.” I didn’t want to complain.

  “You must stand up for yourself.”

  “Can’t you talk to them?” I asked.

  “In the long run that won’t help. You must learn the art of negotiation.”

  I snorted. “Like they’d listen to me.”

  “Talk to them.”