by T E. D Klein
Carol understood something of how he felt; she had seen it before. She had lived all but two of her twenty-two years in a drab little mill town up the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, and she knew what it was to be bored. She remembered her brother shooting endless solitary baskets at the hoop in their yard; and a neighbor's boy who spent each evening driving aimlessly up and down the highway; and her grandmother on her mother's side, solemn and alone in her room at the end of the hall, who'd told her why she always slept past ten: 'Because if I get up any earlier it makes the day too long.'
There'd been times, in her girlhood, when Carol had felt the same. But not often. Life had been too full of possibilities. She had been a princess from the fairy tales, blessed by an auspicious moon and accustomed to getting what she wanted. Inevitably a prince would come to marry her, and together they would accomplish great things. It was only a matter of time.
To this day she couldn't have said just how poor her family had been, but her years of girlhood in a tottering old two-family house near the railroad tracks had been comfortable ones, and she could recall nothing she'd really longed for which, while her father was alive, she hadn't received, save, perhaps, a milk-white stallion, a dragon's egg, and, at one brief stage, the habit of a nun.
Like her two older sisters, she had attended St Mary's, a large, well-to-do parochial school for girls in nearby Ambridge, though by Carol's turn the family had found it necessary to accept, not without shame, some aid with the tuition. The two youngest children ended up in public school; once again Carol counted herself lucky – or even, perhaps, blessed.
She'd survived the years at St Mary's with her confidence intact, though by then she'd come to think of it as 'faith.' God, or someone, would look after her; God, or someone, always had. Not once had she stopped to question what the future really held in store; she'd been far too busy flirting with more agreeable ideas – ballet lessons, a film career, a modern-day Saint Joan – and even, on occasion, with the school's youthful priest (who'd been surprised to find himself mistaken for a prince). She'd met few boys her own age except at functions with other schools or at home in her neighborhood, and the ones she'd met had seemed, without exception, ignorant and immature, their conversation limited to the local basketball standings and the cars they'd someday own. Besides, she hadn't had the sort of figure that attracted many of them; she'd reminded herself that the sophisticated beauties of the future, the girls who turned out to be the professional models and actresses, were frequently dismissed in their school days as awkward and skinny. Most of her crushes had been confined to older girls in the school, though she'd looked with interest at the boys her two older sisters brought home. The younger and more sexually active sister had brought home a lot. One of them, a slim, quiet boy with long eyelashes and poetic-looking long brown hair, had become, at a Halloween party more than a year later, the first person other than a doctor that Carol had allowed to touch her breasts. She had liked it so much she'd grown flushed and almost dizzy, but she'd been slow to repeat the experience, and hadn't allowed any touching below the waist; it wasn't hard to get. a reputation in a small Catholic town in Pennsylvania, even in the 1970s. She had heard the way people talked about her sister, who, parochial school notwithstanding, had lost her virginity by sixteen and had been known to go driving with men in their thirties. Carol was ashamed of this sister; it pleased her to be seen as the virtuous one.
' She had never quite relinquished the desire to dance, to act, to be a star, but in later years, as she dreamed her way through another St Mary's – college, this time – on a more-than-modest scholarship conveniently provided by the church, her world had grown more private and less physical. Her hours now were occupied by Thomas a Kempis and Tolkien, her mind by pastel visions: the Star of Bethlehem, Gandalf s resurrection, Jesus preaching to the hobbits. She'd known little of the doctors' bills and mounting debts at home, though that was where she still lived. Even when her father had been forced to quit his job, she'd been all but unaware of a change in their circumstances. Surely his condition would improve; perhaps it was a kind of test, such as so many of the faithful had endured. Having just completed a sophomore course in the Mystics, she wondered if she might not be one of them herself. She saw evidence of the Divine hand wherever she looked; all around her lay the City of God, with shining towers brighter than the sun. At times she half fancied she could see the angels who populated it, insubstantial creatures shimmering like snow. She sensed that she'd been chosen, though could not have said for what. But she knew if she was patient, God would tell her.
He had been curiously slow to speak. College had ended, the future was upon her, and nothing had changed. Her prince had not yet arrived; things, in fact, were growing worse. Her father was dying; her mother was being supported by relatives. The two older sisters had married – having a reputation hadn't mattered after all -and there was talk of selling the house. Carol realized that she'd been a fool; she had contributed nothing, she had cost her family much. How selfish she had been, and how blind!
One thing was certain: there was no place for her here. But perhaps there still was something she could do… Shaken, but with expectations undimmed, the fairy-tale princess had set off for New York.
The change, though, had not been a drastic one. For Carol it had simply meant replacing one saint for another, another set of walls, another world of earnest ceremonies and cheerful, well-scrubbed females. St Mary's, St Mary's, St Agnes's: a school, a college, a convent.
The move, it's true, had not been undertaken lightly; she'd known no one in the city but a few contacts her school had provided – sisters and clerks and administrators, a list of Catholic names without faces to go with them – and New York had seemed, in her imagination, a terrifying place. But then, as it had turned out, St Agnes's wasn't really part of New York, and there'd been little need to venture beyond its gates; she'd slipped quickly into the security of its daily routine as if she'd known it all her life.
And now even that was behind her. She was on her own at last, twenty-two years old and still lucky, happily ensconced in a new job without even having had to search for it. Clearly she was still among the blessed.
Yet in one respect she was worse off than ever, for she was almost totally without money; her pay, after taxes, was just $109.14 a week. And while a lifetime of poverty no doubt qualified one to walk the streets of heaven, it was depressing to think how many places in this earthly city were all but barred to her: the theaters, the clubs, the restaurants with their twenty-dollar meals, the dress shops where even a scarf or a belt was beyond her means. She was sick of avoiding such places, sick of abstaining from taxicabs, first-run movies, and hardcover books. Just once she'd have liked to be able to afford a good seat at the ballet; sitting in the back row no longer made her feel virtuous. Life was short, and she was getting too old for games like that.
Her job was less than fifteen minutes' walk, but the thought of those blazing sidewalks sapped her energy. Still, she was grateful for the work and knew how lucky she was to have gotten it, lucky that Sister Cecilia, God bless her, had phoned her when she did. Especially considering that she'd been out of St Agnes's so long…
Work was, for her, the position of 'junior assistant (part-time), circulation division,' at the Voorhis Foundation Library on West Twenty-Third Street. She had been employed here since the middle of May and arrived every day at noon. Voorhis was one of the shabbier of the city's many private libraries and, like most of them, predated the free public system that Carnegie had built. Though it had fallen on hard times, it still maintained an extensive collection of nineteenth-century British and European literature, as well as ample general holdings and children's sections upstairs. Dues were sixty dollars a year, but there were special rates for students, golden-agers, and others, so that few members paid the full amount.
The library itself occupied a staid old building on the south side of the street, less than a block from the old Chelsea Hotel, with slate-grey wall
s and a line of high vaulted windows along the lower story. White paint peeled in jagged strips from the ceiling; two square pillars, tall and thick as trees, cast oppressive shadows across the floor.
She spent the first part of the afternoon maneuvering an overladen book cart through the maze of cabinets, tables, and display racks that filled the ground floor. The work was slow, undemanding, and dull, and she could be alone with her thoughts. No one so much as glanced her way. By midafternoon, as usual, many of the available seats were taken by scholars of various sorts who frequented the special collections: serious, bespectacled young men with dirty hair and ill-fitting suits, young defeated-looking women as faded as the building's plaster walls – aging grad students, most of them, down from Columbia or Fordham or City College or up from NYU. Their briefcases had to be searched carefully when they left; in the past, there'd been a lot of thefts. The remaining seats were occupied by elderly residents of the neighborhood: widowers, retired union men, social security pensioners – people with little money and lots of time.
There were always a few of them, she'd heard, waiting outside the doors each morning for the library to open, pacing impatiently up and down the sidewalk or slouched coughing in the entranceway. Once inside they'd take a newspaper from the rack, or a thumb- smeared magazine in its clear plastic binder, and for the rest of the day they'd sit hunched over it with what seemed intense concentration, moving only to turn each page. Others would select some book at random from the nearest shelves; laying it open before them on the table, they would fall asleep, head on their arms, until closing time. The same ancient faces reappeared day after day, except in the poorest weather; they came and left without speaking a word to anyone, not even a good morning or good night.
Carol didn't mind these solitary souls; in fact, she rather liked them. People that age were comfortable to be around. Here within the walls of Voorhis, amid the dusty sunlight and drowsing old men, the city seemed far away. The place, in its very routine, seemed a kind of fortress.
She took particular comfort in certain familiar sights and sounds that marked her day: the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the pale figures sprawled silent and motionless over their reading, the reassuring feel of her book cart as she wheeled it down the aisle, and the books themselves, symbols of order on their backs – young adulthood reduced to 'YA,' mystery reduced to a tiny red skull.
When she forgot the miserable pay and put all dreams of the future from her mind, Voorhis filled her with something close to nostalgia – as if, despite the years, she had never really left school. The high ceiling and the faded green walls, the solidity of the dark brown wooden shelves, the potted plants gathering dust on the window ledge, the shades above them glowing yellow in the sun and billowing like ships' sails at the smallest breeze – all were touched with a kind of holiness. Nothing, they promised, had changed. All her life she had been hypnotized by the same great metal clock that ticked off the minutes at the front of the room. When she crowded into the little glassed-in office and pulled up a chair before her battered wooden desk, running her fingers along the pencil grooves, the places where the varnish was worn away, the ragged green blotter marked with ring stains from the coffee mug, she felt a sense of permanence that revived the years of her childhood. Only the nuns were missing, and the crucifix on the wall.
Occasionally it occurred to her that, far from being out on her own, she had merely traded the school and the convent for another set of walls. So much for the expectations she'd had on leaving St Agnes's
…
She had spent more than six months there, but in January she had moved out, convinced that her vocation, her destiny, lay elsewhere; she still believed – though some might have mocked such pretensions – that she had a destiny. Someday she would look back on her life and see the reason for it all, shining through it like a golden thread that would draw her, in the end, headlong toward some brave and wonderful purpose.
Her first steps in this direction, though, had been hesitant ones and had ended in a rent-controlled two-bedroom apartment on West End Avenue and Ninety-third Street, where, fresh from St Agnes's, she'd found work, of a sort, as live-in housekeeper and attendant to a tiny eighty-two-year-old Polish woman named Mrs Slavinsky. Carol's expenses, along with $120 a week, had been provided by the woman's divorced daughter, who lived on the East Side and appeared delighted to have found, in this day and age, a well-bred young white girl to look after her mother. The arrangement had been, at the time, equally convenient for Carol, since it had spared her the necessity of finding a place of her own. Less agreeable was the fact that, though the job had been advertised as that of 'companion,' the old woman was in no shape to appreciate companionship, having but slight command of English. Worse, her hearing was failing, and seemingly with it, her mind.
Thus had begun four months of preparing kosher food and washing two sets of dishes (an observance Carol still found exotic), of vacuuming the worn Persian carpets and dusting the soot from the Venetian blinds, of walking the old woman to the supermarket or the park or the toilet and remaining nearby while, through the winter and spring afternoons, she mumbled to herself or snored or squinted vaguely at the TV. The days had been monotonous. At least, Carol reflected, she'd had a bedroom and a TV of her own, luxuries she hadn't had at the convent; and two nights a week she had thrown herself into her modern dance class at a school twelve blocks south on Broadway, returning stiff and elated to the brightly lit apartment, usually to find Mrs Slavinsky and her daughter, who came to sit with her those nights, engaged in some fierce and incomprehensible argument in Yiddish. The daughter also visited on weekends, allowing Carol to take the days off; but with few acquaintances outside her dance class and no other place to call home, Carol often found herself remaining near the apartment. She searched the want ads for interesting prospects, wondering where her talents lay, and resolved, come summer, to look into a course or two in dance therapy.
The second week of May, however, she had received an unexpected phone call. It was Sister Cecilia, one of the administrators from St Agnes's; she had just heard about a job opening, assistant librarian at someplace downtown called the Voorhis Foundation, and, remembering how Carol had shown such a fondness for literature, always burying her head in a book, she had wondered if Carol might be tempted to apply. ..
Carol had been grateful, though somewhat puzzled; the sister had never shown this sort of interest in her back at St Agnes's. The next day, leaving the house shortly after noon as if to go shopping – it was understood that, from time to time, the old woman might be left alone for an hour| or two – Carol had taken the subway down to Voorhis.
The balding little desk clerk had raised his eyebrows with surprise. Why, yes, there was a job open m the circulation department, though it was rather strange to find someone already here inquiring about it, seeing as the officers of the library hadn't even agreed yet upon the wording of the ad they'd be sending to the Times.
'I heard about it from a friend,' said Carol.
'Hmmm.' The clerk had pursed his lips and eyed her skeptically. At last he'd given a little shrug and admitted that, since Carol had taken the trouble to come all the way down here, perhaps there were some people she might talk to. It was, he added, absolutely perfect timing on Carol's part; the boy who'd held the job till recently had simply not shown up one day last week, and even seemed to have disappeared from his apartment. All very mysterious. 'And a shame,' the clerk said wistfully. 'He was a very sweet boy.' He sighed; probably now he had no one to look nice for. 'But Mrs Tait seems to prefer a girl this time… ' With a pout he had sent Carol upstairs.
Mrs Tait was the circulation manager, and only one of the people who interviewed Carol that day; junior assistants were expected to fill in for any number of departments. Carol also talked to Mrs Schumann, the children's librarian, Mr Brown in acquisitions, and a sleepy-looking man in charge of maintenance. None of them seemed particularly curious about her background, or in making more than a few p
olite inquiries into her skills, and as the afternoon wore on it occurred to Carol that the job was hers if she wanted it; it was so lowly – only thirty hours a week, for the present, and paying even less than she made now – that the staff was obviously not inclined to waste time evaluating applicants. Besides, if they hired Carol, they wouldn't have to pay for an ad in the Times.
With all its drawbacks, Carol had felt inclined to take the job (surely it would lead to something better), and after the round of interviews it had, as expected, been offered. She'd realized, from the casualness with which the offer was made, that anyone who'd applied that day would probably have been hired; she'd simply had the luck to get there first. Once again she congratulated herself on her charmed life. But no sooner had Mrs Tait invited her to start work the following Monday than Carol had had second thoughts -doubts about the salary, the sudden necessity of finding an apartment of her own, but also misgivings, now that the decision was hers, about her eagerness to abandon old Mrs Slavinsky. She had requested, and been allowed, 'a day or two to think things over.'
