Summer Hours at the Robbers Library

by Sue Halpern

  “You must be the first person to come to Riverton to seek his fortune!” the old-timer, Carl, said when Rusty admitted why he’d come there.

  “Not true,” said Rich the former executive, who was the group’s unofficial historian. “Albert Robers came here a hundred and sixty years ago, down from Montreal, and built the first mill, and then the second mill, and then the third mill, and then he got people coming off the boats in Boston and New York and lured them up here with all sorts of promises of a better life. Soon enough those mills were jam-packed with eager workers, and then he built the denim mill and the calico mill, and the girls came, and within thirty years the whole town was filled to the brim with people seeking their fortune. That’s what this place was, a city built on promises.”

  “True enough,” said Patrick. “Of course, we all know what happened next. What the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.”

  “He means that the mills all closed and the jobs disappeared,” Carl explained. “And it wasn’t like the streets of Riverton were paved with gold anyway,” he added.

  “And now they’re barely paved at all,” Rich the former taxi driver said. “And I should know.”

  They all laughed, even Kit, sitting at her desk, pretending not to be listening.

  “But you know,” Carl said, “you’ve got to hand it to Robers. He’s the guy who negotiated the deal with Carnegie and put up the rest of the money for this library. Look it up. When it was first built it was the Robers Library, but everyone called it the Robbers Library. Which tells you something about how people felt about him. The Robbers Library. Took his name off the building about three seconds after he died.”

  “The Robbers Library,” Rusty said. “I like it. Makes this place sound so dangerous.”

  “We are dangerous men, Rusty,” Carl said. “Best that you know that now. And women,” he added, nodding in Kit’s direction, and they all laughed.

  “Last time I checked, this was still a library,” Kit said, mostly to herself. The place was largely deserted. The Matz Brothers Circus had set up its big tent for two days on the edge of town and everyone who wasn’t in the library seemed to be there.

  “Why are you all laughing? I can hear you,” Evelyn called out.

  “Carl’s telling Rusty we are dangerous men,” Rich the driver yelled back.

  “Now that is good for a laugh,” Evelyn said, her voice carrying through the building. “You want to see dangerous men, Rusty, spend some time down at the station house with Jeffrey and Jack.”

  “Yeah, do that and you’ll want to get in that fancy car of yours and hightail it back to New York City,” Carl said, but softly enough that Evelyn didn’t hear.

  * * *

  Sunny/circus

  The first and only time I got to go to the circus was right before that night we left our apartment in Pennsylvania and moved to campsite #3, back when Steve was still in touch with his parents, before he cut off all communication with them and with all the other members of what he likes to call his “incidental family,” as opposed to our “intentional family,” which includes me and Willow, of course, and Rocco and Amelia and Bluebird (but probably not his girlfriend, Chandra, or her kids), and some other people we know from homeschooling/no-schooling and the Rainbow Gathering. Back then, my grandparents were visiting from Virginia, which they did two or three times a year, which was always fun because they would take me to Toys “R” Us and let me pick out something, which was nothing Steve or Willow would ever let me do because . . . plastic. They’d never take me to a circus, either, they explained, loudly, to Steve’s parents when we got back from our adventure and my fingers and face were sticky from cotton candy. Willow thinks sugar is poison for children, but that’s not why she and Steve were angry. The Cole Brothers’ big top was in the Toys “R” Us parking lot, so it was inevitable that I’d beg my grandparents to take me inside, but Steve said they should have known he and Willow wouldn’t approve. I remember Grandpa Joe saying something about how they were depriving me of a normal childhood, and Steve went ballistic and Willow was trying to calm him down, and Nana was crying and Grandpa Joe was completely silent. That’s what I remember most: Grandpa Joe’s silence. That must be how memory works: things that stand out get remembered even if they weren’t the most important thing, and when you remember those things, other things get remembered, too, though I picked up a book at the library called False Memory, about people being tricked into remembering things that didn’t happen. But this did happen for sure: my grandparents took me to the circus, and I saw elephants that could balance on their front legs doing handstands, and I thought it was the best thing ever, and my parents thought it was the worst. “Think about those animals, Sunny,” they said to me after my grandparents had packed their things and left. “Elephants are supposed to walk on all fours and live in the jungle, not in some cage. Think about that elephant and how sad her life must be,” and I went to bed in tears, and it was right after that that we moved.

  Steve and Willow must not have told anyone where we were—though it’s not like at #3 we had a real address—because I didn’t get a birthday card from anyone that year, even my grandparents, and we didn’t see Grandpa Joe again until his funeral, when I was eleven. Steve didn’t want to go, but Willow said it would bring him closure, so we drove down for the service, and Steve’s sisters were there, my aunts who are older and live in Germany because they are married to army officers. It was a military funeral, with an official twenty-one-gun salute and horses pulling the casket, and when they were ready to lower it into the ground, one of the soldiers gave a folded-up flag to Nana. The flag was too heavy for Nana to hold, and it got passed to Steve, who had to cradle it in his arms like a baby throughout the rest of the service, which Steve said was Grandpa Joe’s final “F you” to him and our alternative lifestyle. This was when we were in the car, driving away. “It’s all in the rearview mirror now,” Willow said, and Steve said, “Yeah,” and I said, “What about Nana?” She was my last remaining grandparent. Willow’s parents had disowned her when she quit school for the Rainbow Gathering, and now Grandpa Joe was gone, and Nana, whose eyes everyone used to say I had, was it.

  “It’s a values thing,” Willow said. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

  “I am older,” I said.

  “Even older,” Willow said, which pissed me off. I could feel my ears getting hot and my jaw clenching.

  “What if I grow up and decide that I don’t like your values?” I said.

  “Why wouldn’t you like our values?” Willow said. “We value the earth and all living things.” She sounded hurt, like I had just said she wasn’t a good mother.

  “That’s not the point,” I said. “Maybe when I grow up I won’t want to value the earth and all living things.”

  “Then you’d be a psychopath,” Steve said.

  “That’s not funny,” Willow said.

  “What’s a psychopath?” I said.

  “People who don’t honor the earth and all living things,” Willow said, cutting off Steve, who might have been saying “Grandpa,” but I couldn’t tell for sure.

  “Stop making fun of me!” I said.

  “We’re not making fun of you,” Willow said in a very Willowy way.

  “So what would you do if I grew up and wouldn’t see you anymore because I didn’t like your values?” I said. Again.

  “I’d be incredibly sad,” Willow said. “It would be tragic.”

  “I’d be okay with it,” Steve said. “It would be fine.”

  Willow and I both said, “What?” at the same time. And then Willow said, “Really?”

  “Sure,” Steve said. “If Sunny rejected our values, I really wouldn’t want to have anything to do with her. That’s the whole point of values—to live them.”

  Maybe my parents are right. Maybe this will make more sense to me when I’m older, but at the time it seemed really mean and stupid and it still does.

  “You’d better stop the car and let me
out,” I said. (I didn’t mean it. It was a dare.)

  “Why?” Willow said, as Steve eased the Subaru onto the shoulder of the highway and turned off the engine.

  “I know what she’s saying,” Steve said, and popped the locks.

  “Stay in the car, Sunny,” Willow said. She sounded a little panicky. “Start the car, Steve.” She also sounded mad. He started the car.

  “What was that all about?” she wanted to know when we were back on the road.

  “Do you want to tell her, or should I?” Steve said, looking at me in the rearview mirror.

  “I think what Steve said is stupid,” I said.

  “And?” Steve said.

  “And since I think it’s stupid, and he thinks it’s smart, we don’t share the same values, so we shouldn’t have anything to do with each other anymore. Like with Nana and Grandpa Joe,” I added.

  “You should be a lawyer,” Willow said.

  Steve laughed. “Don’t become a lawyer, Sunny. Then we really won’t share the same values,” he said. “It’s like that Willie Nelson song, ‘Mamas, don’t let your daughters grow up to be lawyers.’”

  “It’s cowboys,” Willow told him.

  “And babies,” I added.

  Chapter Seven

  7.19.10–7.25.10

  Who never lost, are unprepared / A Coronet to find!

  —Emily Dickinson

  The first time Rusty drove through Riverton, back in June, he was on the lookout for the building that drew him up north in the first place, the Riverton National Bank. His mother’s old passbook didn’t have an address, a feature that Rusty was certain spoke to the bank’s prominence in the city: Why waste ink when everyone knew where it was? And where it was, he figured, was smack in the middle of town. Just as malls had a Sears anchoring one end and a JCPenney anchoring the other, in Rusty’s experience towns were moored by the library, the church, and the bank. All he needed to do was find one and he’d find the others.

  And there was the library, straight ahead when he made the turn onto Main Street—so far, so good. And there was the church, a white clapboard rectangle of modest size topped by a stubby bell tower, with a light box sign out front that reminded Rusty of the Wheel of Fortune puzzle: ath_i_t: a pers_n with _o invisible m_ans of sup_ort.

  “That’s me!” Rusty said out loud on his second pass when he had solved it: “Atheist: a person with no invisible means of support.”

  Rusty parked the Mercedes near the library and began walking counterclockwise along the mostly empty sidewalk, looking for the bank. He passed Carl’s Barbershop, closed and for rent, its red, white, and blue barber pole still intact, and the old diner, also closed and for rent, and a pawnshop that used to be an appliance store, its window displaying a drum kit and a case of mismatched high school class rings. Fine’s Department Store, on the opposite side of the green from the library, was now a Dollar Tree, the newer store’s plastic green sign unable to mask the original, which had been hammered into the limestone facade and looked to Rusty like a grave marker. Someone had won $500 from a scratch ticket purchased here, and American Spirit cigarettes were on sale, and on a lark, Rusty pushed through the heavy beveled glass doors, surprising the cashier, who jumped a little, took a step back, and narrowed her eyes, which were ringed with bright blue eye shadow.

  “Hi,” Rusty said brightly, letting her know he was no threat.

  The girl—though she might not have been a girl; her age was indeterminate (the extensions in her hair ended in silver tips that reminded Rusty of shoelaces)—nodded.

  Rusty surveyed the candy rack, fingered a KitKat and put it back, and took a package of Polo mints and laid it on the counter. “How much?” he asked.

  “You know this is the Dollar Tree, right?” she said.

  “What about tax?”

  “What about it?”

  “Is it still a dollar?”

  “Like I said,” she said.

  Rusty counted out three quarters, two dimes, and a nickel and slid them toward her. “So where’s the bank?” he asked.

  “What bank?”

  “The Riverton bank. The national bank. Riverton National.”

  “The only bank I know is People’s out on Route 5.”

  “Route 5.”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s no Riverton National Bank?”

  “Nope. Just People’s.”

  “You’ve lived here all your life and there’s never been a Riverton National Bank?” Was he sounding desperate? He was feeling desperate. Had he made a mistake? Was he supposed to be in Kansas? Or Utah? Or Wyoming? Or back in Jersey?

  “No,” she said.

  “No, there was no Riverton bank, or no, you haven’t lived here all your life?”

  “No, I haven’t lived here all my life. We moved when I was two.”

  Rusty did a series of quick calculations. If she was twenty-five, which her clothes suggested she was, then she’d been here for twenty-three years, but she probably wouldn’t have been aware for a couple of years after that, so say twenty years back and no Riverton National Bank. But that was still forty years after that money had been deposited. Of course, if she was forty herself, which the lines on her face and the foundation she’d applied to hide them also suggested she could be, she would have been coming to consciousness around 1975, which was a gap of only twenty-five years. His head was spinning.

  “Okay, thanks,” he said, pocketing the mints and walking out the way he’d walked in, and as he did, an alarm sounded and the doors locked with a decisive click.

  “You can’t do that,” she said, nonplussed.

  “I can’t leave?” Rusty said.

  “Not that way. You have to go out the exit.”

  “Geez,” he said. “This is worse than New York.”

  “Whatever,” she said.

  Outside again, Rusty resumed his circumnavigation, passing the church, which could do with a fresh coat of paint, and nearly missing the two small bronze plaques affixed to lower corners of the squat, unassuming Riverton Municipal Services building: 1919, one of them said; riverton bank and trust, said the other. He read it again, and then another time, tracing the letters with his finger. riverton bank and trust, it said. Not Riverton National.

  He had gambled, and he had gambled wrong.

  “Fuck,” he said to the air.

  * * *

  The still point of the turning world.

  —T. S. Eliot

  Even after he began to pick the hive mind of the Four, Rusty spent his days at the Riverton library, reading old newspapers and poring over old copies of the Yellow Pages on a hunch, hoping to prove to himself that Riverton National Bank was in fact Riverton Bank and Trust and he had picked the right Riverton after all.

  “It’s not exactly the hero’s journey,” Kit said to him when he described his quest, but she was compliant and helpful, retrieving cardboard boxes from the basement when he couldn’t find what he was looking for on the shelves.

  “Behold our archives!” Kit said to him, dropping slightly damp, slightly moldy boxes on the table opposite her desk. Inside were newspaper clippings in file folders organized by year. He skimmed them diligently, reading about Riverton’s support during World War II of men and materials, and how, postwar, the shoe factory was losing out to cheaper manufacturers in Brazil. He read about union fights, contract disputes, high school wrestling, and a protracted debate over a municipal bond to fund the hospital. In the file folder from 1952, Rusty read a story about a cow that had wandered onto the field during a football game and blocked the wide receiver, and another about the death of King George VI in England, and one about Richard Nixon’s dog Checkers.

  “Nothing here,” Rusty told Kit, “but this clip is pretty funny.”

  He handed her the story about the football-playing cow, and when he did, he saw, on the other side, an ad for the bank, only now it was called the Riverton National Bank and Trust Company, RNBTC. “Wait,” he said before she could finish reading
, and took the paper out of her hand, turned it over, and placed it on the table. “Look!” He pointed to the ad.

  “It’s got a different name,” Kit said, stating the obvious.

  “Yes, but it’s got to be the same bank.”

  “Yes and no,” Kit said. “The national bank could have bought the trust company. Or the trust company could have bought the bank.”

  “Okay, fine,” Rusty said impatiently. “But the point is that at least in 1952, we know there is a bank in Riverton with the word ‘national’ in the title.”

  Kit nodded her head. “We.” He said “we.” That’s all she heard.

  Part III

  The Marriage Story

  Meeting Cal’s parents made me grateful for the cramped, estrogen-positive household I’d grown up in, with my eccentric grandma and overworked mother who had enough time, even so, to put funny notes in my lunch box when I was little and take me to Planned Parenthood in high school when I told her about Kyle and me—because of course I would tell her about my first. We had our differences, the three of us; with three generations of females living in tight quarters, that was inevitable. But I don’t think that anyone who stepped over the threshold into our house would have come away with any other impression than that we loved one another and also that the notion that women are the weaker sex is completely wrongheaded.

  Cal’s parents gave me the creeps. I pretended they didn’t and it worked, because Cal was so used to them and their idiosyncrasies he couldn’t see them. (The idiosyncrasies or, for that matter, his parents.) He thought our visit had gone well, and he was happy for it, and it felt cruel to try to disabuse him of that. Meeting the Sweeneys, though, convinced me that I didn’t want a fancy wedding at their country club, where his father could take the microphone and make inappropriate comments masked as a toast, and dance with my friends as he inched his hand slowly down the small of their backs, and I didn’t want a wedding where the Sweeneys’ money, and my family’s lack of it, would mean the Doctor and his wife would pay, and they would run the show, with my mother and me reduced to stock characters: the raggedy Joads moving up in the world.