Whitechurch

by Chris Lynch

  “It’s just gonna be for Dizzy. He should have a service for that. I got more important things to do with my time. He brought me in to come up with killer ideas and imagination, like I’m doing right now. A hot knife through butter, I’m gonna be in this organization.”

  The more important things amount to talking. This Pauly can do with the best of them. He’s talking, right, about what he’s going to do with that house when he gets it, and what he’s going to do in and around that house when it’s just right, and which bedroom is going to be mine and the hundred and fifty million thousand things he can do in that house to make Lilly happy. But in Pauly’s view it all—the house, the business, the future, everything—revolves around the masterpiece that will be that kitchen. Lilly would die for a kitchen like that, he says.

  “You know, Oak,” Pauly says, and I can see the sincere dripping out of the corners of his eyes, sunglasses or no sunglasses, “I love to make her happy.”

  And like, what the hell. How could you ever tell him the truth?

  The phone rings again.

  “Pauly, what if it’s not for Dizzy? What if it is Dizzy?”

  It’s my own fault, but he pops off one of his awful instapoems, which he thinks are okay because he figures you get extra points for on-the-spotness, but I figure you don’t.

  Dizzy #1

  When opportunity rings

  you best take what it brings

  Don’t try to guess what is

  cause it might look

  like

  Diz

  It rings on, whether it is opportunity, Dizzy, or any combination thereof.

  “Willow,” Pauly calls, and she slides on over to us. “Willow, honey it’s for you.”

  She takes the phone. “It’s for me? Nobody ever calls for me. Damn.”

  I wish he would just play this one straight. “Cut it out Pauly, take the call.”

  “What? What? I can’t hardly understand you,” she says, wincing at the phone, pulling back and looking at it as if to understand it better. “Ya, he’s here. Where is here? Well here is the drugstore of course, where’d ya think? Hello? Hello?”

  She hands Pauly back the phone.

  “Was it Dizzy?” I ask, because Pauly is not concerned enough to do it. If he would only be concerned enough … so many times, so little effort, would save him so much trouble.

  “Two more Cokes please, Miss Willomena?” Paul asks.

  “Yes,” she says to Paul, then, “Yes,” to me. “I believe that’s who he said he was. And he said to keep your ass on that stool ’cause he’s on the way over.”

  “Cool,” Paul says. “Then make it three Cokes. We’ll do a deal over a couple of cold ones right here.”

  “Ah, maybe I better go,” I say. “You and your uncle might want to—”

  “Still no stomach for the fast lane, huh?” Pauly says as I give up my stool.

  Dizzy bursts in. He marches toward the counter so hard you can just about feel him pounding over the broad black-and-white tiles.

  Pauly opens his arms.

  Dizzy walks right up to him. Slaps him across the head. Not that hard, not punishing, but an attention-getter.

  I grab Dizzy’s arm and he turns a meaty dark glare on me that nearly makes me let go and run. I do neither, though. I look at Paul, with the glasses now hanging diagonally across his pale soft face, one gray eye exposed in all its sad disbelief.

  Willomena is placing two tall vase-shaped glasses on the counter. She backs quickly away.

  “I bought you a Coke,” Paul whispers.

  “I want to give you chances, Pauly,” he says, not unkindly but killer anyway, maybe because of the not-unkindness. “But you just don’t have a thing, nothing on the ball. I put you in charge for half a day, you disappear. You don’t answer the phone, book out of work, don’t do one single thing. Have I got it about right, Paul? Is this pretty much what you accomplished today?”

  I wish Dizzy had just silently beat him up instead.

  Pauly is nearly crying. “It’s not like that, Diz. I was working. I was doing some serious planning, designing, figuring….” He picks up off the counter a napkin on which he had been drawing while talking to me. I was not even aware that the talk and the drawing were related.

  “Good, Paul,” he says, “so you drank Coke and doodled. Big day.”

  Dizzy reaches out and practically decapitates his nephew with the chain as he takes back the sunglasses. “I’m sorry,” he says. “But, ah, no …”

  Paul’s still whispering. “Diz. My house—”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My house. You said we could work something. With the house. Do a deal. Then it would be my house.”

  Dizzy grabs Pauly’s face with his two hands and holds it there, talking slowly and directly into it. He is a surprisingly powerful man, but he holds Pauly’s face with great gentleness, restraint.

  “Pauly. Pauly. I was just talkin’. Don’t you understand? Don’t you know the difference? You’re a talker yourself, right, so you should know. You’re supposed to know the difference.”

  Pauly hands over the phone. Already Dizzy seems different, no longer all that angry, a little regretful. That’s Pauly’s life for you, right there.

  “Pauly, Pauly, Pauly. You’re just … dangerous, is what you are. You don’t think like the rest of us think. You’re a good kid with some nuts and bolts that just ain’t tightened all the way up.”

  With his phone and his glasses and not another word, Dizzy heads out.

  I expect drama. I expect now for Pauly to take a bite out of the Formica counter or remove his shoes and throw them through the plate-glass window. I think that’s what I would do. And if he wants me to help him damage something that isn’t himself, I believe I will.

  But he quietly sits back down in front of his drink. I sit in front of the other. He takes a big slurpy-sound drink, then grins. He has a beautiful smile, Paul does.

  “I’ve got your nuts and bolts right here, Dizzy,” he says, jingling the keys to the house.

  When Lilly comes by at ten that night, I’m already ready to go.

  “He never showed,” she says, in a voice I know pretty well.

  “Uh-huh,” I say. “You up for a walk? Probably take us an hour.”

  She sighs, takes my hand.

  The part I know is that we will find him in the house he thought would be his. And Lilly’s. And mine. The part I worry about is what kind of antics he will be up to when we get there.

  We find him in the kitchen. He’s eating a bowl of cereal. He sees us come in and pours, as if we are right on time, two more bowls.

  I pray that he has at least rinsed them out, because I will eat in this kitchen. The three of us eating in our kitchen.

  Bibliophilia

  MOST PLACES I GO, I want them with me. Or anyway I want at least one of them with me. Like, at the movies, I want either one of them with me and I don’t particularly care which one as long as it’s not both because together they talk too much. At the schoolyard basketball court it’s Pauly, and at loads of other places it’s Lilly. It all makes its own and of sense and we don’t for the most part need to question it too much. But then sometimes we do. Sometimes we need a place apart.

  The library is that place. The Whitechurch Library. If ever my friends cannot find me, that’s where they search, and that is where they usually succeed in locating me. The way an old dog finds his way back over miles and miles to his home when somebody tries to shove him off on a farm someplace, that is how I find my way back to the library. It’s my place, even more than my place is. Though I find myself spending less time here over time. As a kid I spent day and night in this building, warmed and entertained by it. Day, and night.

  “You are so boring, Oakley, you’re in a category all by yourself,” Lilly teases as the two of them come ambling through the door.

  “Good,” I say. “So get out of my category.”

  “Come with us,” Lilly says, taking my. hand and pull
ing gently, playfully. “You don’t even read. Why bother?”

  But I don’t want to play. “Am I bothering you?”

  She’s right, though. About the no reading. Didn’t use to be. But is.

  “As long as we’re here,” Pauly says, “why not let’s look him up?”

  I pay no attention as Paul trots off to get the dictionary and look me up. I am staring at Ophelia Lennon, the one and only librarian of the town of Whitechurch. There used to be two. She is tall, maybe five ten. And slim, with square shoulders that make her look like one fine column all the way to the floor, the line of her yellow-flowered brown dress unbroken by any hint of hip. All her dresses reach the floor, and that is part of the mystery of her—there could be anything under there. Her hair is in between brown and black, with generous splatters of gray all over. It is combed straight back to reveal a mighty forehead, and to rest in a gentle flip at the base of her neck. She moves deliberately, surely, but it seems she’s going at a speed one tick slower than the rest of us, like the Disney heroines always do. Grace, is what it is. And she wears perfectly round rimless spectacles that are exactly the same size as her eye sockets, giving her pale, nearly white eyes the ghostly look of ancient Greek statuary—which the library features in miniature in every cranny and cove. She looks very much in fact like a statuette in nonfiction called Aphrodite Victorious. Maybe not the body, exactly, but their faces are very much alike.

  “She looks like Buddy Holly,” Lilly says. “You ever see pictures of him?”

  “You know, Lilly,” I snarl, “that’s pretty sick, being opposed to books and libraries and librarians. Maybe you’re a category too. Bibliophobia. Look her up while you’re there, Pauly.”

  “Jealous?” Lilly laughs. But if I was wrong, she could do a lot better than that.

  “Here it is,” Pauly says, sitting down at our round oak table with a massive gold Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary.

  “You’re very proud of yourself for having taken only ten minutes to find a reference book in a one-room library,” I say.

  “Hey,” he points out, “one big room.”

  “Here,” Lilly says. “‘Bore: To weary by dullness.’” She slams the big book shut, making a road hollow thump that causes Ophelia Lennon to shoot us a look.

  This upsets me. “Dammit, Lilly, now look. Ophelia Lennon is angry.”

  “Stop wearying me with your dullness, will you, Oakley?” Lilly whispers.

  I point a finger at Lilly’s perfect pug nose. “You are just jealous.”

  “Of what?” Pauly wants to know, but doesn’t really want to know. He makes like he’s really caught up in the dictionary.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Lilly says, giving me a shut-up stare that her boyfriend cannot see. “I’m jealous that, because of whatever Oakley’s doing for the dusty old library lady, he gets to keep the last book he borrowed—like, ten years ago—without paying any fines.”

  “Cool,” Pauly says. “Maybe I’ll do it too.”

  “Right.” I snort. “First, you never even took out a library book …”

  “And second,” Lilly adds, “you never—”

  “That’s enough,” Pauly blurts, loudly.

  Ophelia Lennon throws us a look, because my friends clash with the library’s style. And they will get worse. The two of them save their poorest performances for the library. My library. I did better when I was five. When I was four.

  “Beat it, will ya, guys,” I say.

  “Well, he might be able to please your lady friend, but beat it?” says Lilly.

  “All right, that does it,” Paul says, even louder now. He rises from his seat and starts unbuckling his pants. We all laugh—except Paul, of course—at the threat the whole town has heard before. “I’ll show ya.”

  Even Ophelia Lennon laughs. She laughs like songbird.

  “She laughs like a donkey,” Lilly says. She doesn’t mean anything by it, really, she just forgets sometimes.

  “Shut up, Lilly,” I say. This is very, very not us. But none of us are us here. This building is not us. It is me. I understand Lilly, but I do not sympathize. “Shut up and go—I mean it.”

  “Sorry,” she says. “Um, you’re not coming with us, I take it.”

  “Catch you later,” I say, and they go without fight. Pauly never does show us.

  I’m alone with Ophelia Lennon. Almost. There is Teddy in his U.S. Postal Service uniform, sleeping at the newspaper rack. But he really doesn’t count. I’m alone with Ophelia Lennon.

  Not that I really do much about it. I watch her restack books. I watch her make herself her regular four-fifteen cup of banana tea, then watch her dunk her anisette toast into it. I watch her dust and sweep the room because, as I said, she is responsible for everything about the Whitechurch Library. On days when Ophelia Lennon is sick, the library doesn’t even open.

  There is no need for me to pretend to be reading or researching or doing a single damn useful thing with my time. Because nobody is watching. Nobody is watching, as the winter wind bounces off the thin windowpanes, trying to get in. Teddy is there, but he’s Dead Ted, and you couldn’t wake him if you drove a semi through the room pulling on that honky air horn.

  So nobody’s watching me watching Ophelia Lennon move her body through her day. Except Ophelia Lennon. She’s watching me watching, and it’s all right with her and it’s all right with me. Only if another somebody comes in does she make me get a magazine or something, so it all doesn’t look weird.

  Then there’s nothing left. It’s time to close up the library, and Ophelia Lennon does that. There’s a power to it, the way this building, this quiet smart domain of hers, bends, gives to her. She has the keys to the doors, she turns the heat down. And she turns the lights off, one at a time, when it’s five o’clock and very dark.

  By the time we have to wake Teddy and get him out, there are only two dull lights burning from the vaulted ceiling of the old mahogany room, the two lights Ophelia Lennon keeps on when she leaves. The glow from those small yellow bulbs seems to come from nowhere when it lights you up. Seems to come, rather, from inside you, inside your skin. When I approach Teddy, the light seems to come from under his denim-blue flap-hat. When Teddy is up and toddling out and I’m turned back looking at Ophelia Lennon again, the light is burning up from under her collar.

  “What?” she says, and tilts her head in a quizzical way that makes me worry what kind of look I’m giving her.

  “I didn’t say anything,” I say.

  Ophelia Lennon nods, then starts to gather up her stuff, her going-home ritual.

  “Can I help with anything?” I ask. “Books to reshelve, windows to close …”

  She sighs, comes close to me with her coat over her arm.

  “People are going to start to talk,” she says sweetly.

  “Cool,” I say in return.

  “Well, no. Oakley, when are you going to stop doing this? Hmm? This is not a good thing. You once spent a great many wonderful hours here, and now you spend too many pointless ones. Do you remember that you could recite big bites of Wordsworth by the age of seven? Do you remember that? ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o’er vales and hills,/When all at once I saw a crowd,/A host, of golden daffodils.’ Do you remember?”

  It is out of respect that I let her finish, though it is the sound of a car wreck to my ears.

  “And ‘The Raven.’” Ophelia Lennon is swept up in something now, nostalgia or mania or whatever. But she comes up, intimate-close, and pokes me lightly in the chest. “Every word, by the time you were nine. Oakley, I was absolutely certain you were going to be a poet like your mother.”

  You are not supposed to say that, Ophelia Lennon. Didn’t we understand, you and I, that you were not supposed to say that?

  Absolutely short-circuited. My wires are so frayed at this moment, I am powerless to keep from doing the most insane and inexplicable thing of my life. I lurch forward and try desperately to kiss Ophelia Lennon. And
this move is so far from what she, or any other sentient being, would have expected, I almost pull it off.

  For a moment she is confused—though not quite as much as I am. But she gets her hands up between us just in time.

  “What could you be thinking?” She is a little angry, but less than she has a right to be. I’ve got no answer, but I don’t think she really expected one. She shakes her head in wonder. “Listen, Oakley, I loved your mother more than anyone on this earth. Almost as much as you did, and that is a lot because I have still never seen anything in life to compare to the two of you. And it is one of the treasures of my existence, the memory of our days here in this place, the three of us … and I am warmed by the very thought of you….”

  “See,” I say because, apparently, I have not yet completed my descent into madness.

  “No, not ‘see.’ You give me a warm feeling, true enough. But so does Doctor Zhivago, and that has nothing to do with the realities of my life either. It is so clearly time for this to stop. I have watched you, and I have hoped for something else, something better, something bigger, something further, something different. So you will not be a poet. That is a pity, but not necessarily a tragedy. The troubling part is watching you pull inward, and backward. In time. In geography.

  “Turn around, son. Go the other way. Please.”

  The daffodils poem sounds remotely familiar, but it is probably just one of those things like, “I took the road less traveled by,” or “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” You know, stuff everybody picks up by osmosis just because there are teachers and librarians and just general jerks spitting it out at you throughout your life. She is exaggerating me as a kid, Ophelia Lennon is, and the only reason I don’t say she is outright lying is out of respect.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  She takes my shoulders firmly and turns me toward the exit. We head out, and the last thing is, she pulls on and buttons up her red cloth coat with the faux fur collar against the wind that has been waiting out there to bite at me and Ophelia Lennon.

  It is possible I remember that coat. I have another haywire urge, this time to bury my face in that collar, and to have the wearer wrap her arms around me. But it is a very very very different urge from the last urge. The opposite, in fact. I think, though, that I will get a grip in time. I will sort. But for now I’m thinking it will be enough to be near, near the coat and the wearer and the library.