Summer Hours at the Robbers Library

by Sue Halpern

  You might think that all this would have given me pause—that it would have encouraged me to step back and survey the situation and at least wonder how growing up with parents like his “influenced” Cal—and cause me to pull the emergency brake on our plans. Instead, I became protective. I wanted to shield Cal from his mom and dad. I wanted to throw a bag over his head and hustle him out of that family and bring him to a safe house where there was only warmth and love. And so, on a nondescript day in March, not sunny and not cloudy, not cold and not hot, we got up at seven as usual, ate our usual cereal breakfast, and skimmed the New York Times, each of us sequestered behind a curtain of newsprint. Then we washed the breakfast dishes, showered (separately), and at 9:30 went over to the county clerk’s office to get married. I had tipped off my mother, who drove through the dark to be there, and Cal asked the chipper, stuttering, unmarried head of his lab to be his best man, and for a few minutes that morning as the four of us stood before the justice of the peace, Cal in his navy-blue interview suit and me in a maroon, cowl-necked sweater dress I’d bought a few days before, with each of us flanked by an adult who wore their dress-up clothes with more authority than we wore ours, I harbored the fantasy that when Cal and I stepped up to what passed for an altar, the other two would look into each other’s eyes and fall madly in love. It was nutty, and the consequence of watching too many romantic comedies, but also an expression of my guilt: If I could find happiness with a man, why couldn’t my mother? I wasn’t discounting my father. I know she had been in love with him, but that was a long time ago. Yet happiness was not my dominant emotion. What I remember most from that morning was a deep feeling of contentment and the sense that now my life as it was supposed to be lived would really begin.

  Back at the apartment, our friends had gathered for a party, and there was knockoff champagne and an off-kilter chocolate layer cake with a plastic bride and groom on top who looked like they were about to be swept away in an avalanche of buttercream. A mixtape Cal’s lab mates made seemed to be on an infinite loop all afternoon, and people rolled up our throw rug and pushed the furniture toward the walls and danced until someone noticed it had been snowing, and we all went outside and threw snowballs at each other, forgetting, or maybe not caring, that we were wearing our good shoes. Our friends, who were twenty and twenty-one and twenty-two like us, had seen the future—Cal and I were the future—and their response was to behave like the children they still wanted to be and that they were.

  After everyone cleared out and my mother went back home, we called Cal’s parents and told them what we’d done. His mom said she was sorry we didn’t get married in a church, and the Doctor sounded pleased that we’d just gone out and “taken care of it,” like we were puppies doing what was necessary and getting spayed. A week or so later we got a card in the mail from them and a check for $1,000 made out to Mr. and Mrs. Calvin Fortune Sweeney (the Fortune, meant to suggest a family name, was completely made up and a way to distinguish young Cal from his father, Calvin Masters Sweeney). It was the first time our names were joined like that. Mr. and Mrs. That’s what we were. We were a Mr. and a Mrs. It was . . . jarring.

  But it wasn’t, really. Our wedding butted up against midterms, and Cal’s senior thesis was due soon, and within a day our “after” lives were the same as our “before” lives. I was out of school by then, working toward getting my teaching certificate and subbing whenever I got the call. When Cal wasn’t studying or working in the lab, he was flying around the country for medical school interviews, even though his first choice was staying right where we were and going to medical school at the university. I was alone a lot, which suited me, but it also gave me a lot of time to think about what I was doing. My mother was a teacher, so maybe it was natural that I gravitated toward the classroom, though how she could get up every morning and corral thirty nine-year-olds all day and not go crazy, or get mean or bored, seemed remarkable to me after spending a day or two here and there sitting at the teacher’s desk and trying to assert what little authority I had. And this was high school. High school, according to the other subs I met in my travels, was easier than elementary school—and forget middle school or junior high. Getting called for a middle school or a junior high was worthwhile only because it paid more. Jailer’s wages, they called it.

  The other thing I learned, sitting in those teachers’ lounges, was that high school English was a magnet for aspiring actors, published poets, screenwriters, and would-be novelists, who jockeyed to be assigned to all-day detention, where they could be paid to knock out a chapter or two. Most, like me, had studied literature of some sort in college. And most, like me, were drawn to the miracle of the blank page and how, when seeded with letters, it blossomed into words and sentences and paragraphs and stories. We understood that Genesis wasn’t the first story but, rather, that the creation of Genesis was. I’d go into the classroom prepared to discuss whatever book or poem or passage was on that day’s agenda, and sometimes, against all odds, those discussions were spirited and engaging, and they told me everything I needed to know about my future as a teacher: I had none. It was books I was drawn to—the smell of them, the feel of them, the way they invaded and captured me—not talking about books. I enrolled in library school and got a part-time job at a used-book store, taking orders over the phone.

  Cal, meanwhile, was into medical school. His father wanted him to go to Rush, in Chicago, his alma mater, and then accused his son of blowing the interview when Rush was one of the few places that didn’t accept him. Our university did, and with a substantial scholarship, which insulated us a bit from Cal’s parents, though we still needed their help. The first two years of medical school are in the classroom or studying, so our lives, Cal’s and mine, while largely parallel, would intersect in the library or at our dining room table, where Cal would have his biochemistry charts laid out at one end, and I’d be doing the reading for my “Organization of Information” class at the other. This was our life together, and despite the typical stresses and strains, it was calm and unremarkable.

  In June, Cal took his second-year board exams and I received my master’s, and to celebrate we decided to take the honeymoon we’d never had and go to San Francisco. We both had always wanted to go out west, so we took the $1,000 Cal’s parents had given us for our wedding and booked flights and found a room in what the travel books said was a funky hotel, even though no one would have described either of us as funky. In our three years of marriage, Cal had grown into his body without me noticing. It wasn’t that he was taller or more muscular or wore smart, rimless glasses, though all these were true. It was that he walked with confidence, and spoke with confidence, and projected confidence—all good things if you are going to listen to people’s hearts and tell them they need coronary bypass surgery, or cut into their brains, or tell parents that everything that could have been done for their child had been done. Cal was handsome now in an unassuming way. His wardrobe was as limited as ever, but clothes no longer hung off his body; instead, his body inhabited them. It had taken up residence. The doctor was in and he was attractive.

  No one had told us about the fog at that time of the year, or that it was shaping up to be one of the coldest summers in San Francisco history. The first morning when we opened the curtains, all we could see was a reflection of ourselves against a dull gray background. We fell back into the bed, and one thing led to another and we were taking turns looking at the other’s naked backside in the overhead mirror. (That turned out to be the funky part of our funky hotel.) At some point it came to our attention that the room was bathed in bright sunlight, and we stood at the window again and this time saw the ups and downs of the city, and the Bay Bridge off in the distance. So that became our routine: sex in the morning till the fog burned off, then the typical tourist stuff, including a trip out to the old prison on Alcatraz Island and a hike across the Golden Gate Bridge. We were just another out-of-town couple on vacation, walking hand in hand.

  The trouble didn
’t start until we were home for a few weeks. Cal had begun his first clinical rotation, in internal medicine, at the university hospital, and was spending nights and days there. I had taken my first real job, back at the library where Cal and I used to hang out when we were undergraduates, and where he’d come to see me during my work-study shifts. They put me in special collections, where my job was cataloging new acquisitions and making sure the scholars or students or whoever was in there poring over the letters of some World War I general or World War II POW or troop carrier manifest—because we specialized in military documents—was wearing the special white gloves we made them put on to keep the oils from their fingers from rubbing off on the originals. It was nice and cool down there, which is how I knew, on my eighth day of work, that there was something wrong with me. I was sweating like I was in the tropics, and when I wasn’t sweating I was shivering. My teeth were chattering so loudly that I had to stuff one of those gloves between them to dampen the noise.

  “Summer flu is the worst,” my kind and elderly boss said, when he told me to go home and get into bed. I could barely nod my head in agreement. And that’s where Cal found me, asleep, or maybe unconscious, in our bed. He was making one of his rare appearances there after a thirty-hour shift, and was so exhausted himself it hardly registered that there was something unusual that his wife was fully clothed and unmoving under the covers in the middle of the day. Cal crawled in beside me and snuggled up to my back, throwing his arm around my torso and pulling me tight. And then, in what must have been a nightmare for a sleep-deprived medical student coming off an endless day at the hospital, it was like he was right back at work, because as soon as he felt my damp clothes and heard my ragged breathing, his clinical brain kicked in and he pulled off the covers and saw that I was not only sweating profusely, I was bleeding, too. A bright red bloom was spreading beneath my thighs.

  “Oh no, oh no, oh crap!”

  I could actually hear Cal through my haze. “It’s okay,” I said, not opening my eyes.

  “It is not okay. It is not okay,” he said, reaching over me for the phone to call 911.

  I remember the words “my wife” and “I’m a doctor,” and how I said, “No, no,” and Cal said, “What? What’s the matter?” and though he sounded far away and underwater, he also sounded panicky and scared, and I said, “You’re not a doctor; you told them you were a doctor,” and the next thing I knew it was five days later and I was in the hospital, and a man in a white coat with a name stitched into the chest pocket that I could barely see (because I wasn’t wearing glasses and my eyes were not working well anyway) came into my room and congratulated me for having the foresight to end up in the same hospital where my husband was on rotation.

  “He’s got the best bed of anyone in his class,” this jerk said, pointing to the cot in the far corner of the room. Mulligatawny. That was his name. Like the soup.

  Cal arrived sometime later, I don’t know when, since time was a viscous liquid. He was wearing a white coat, too, and the brand-new bright blue stethoscope I’d given him as a present three weeks before was slung around the back of his neck. Someone must have told him I was awake because he was carrying flowers. Daisies. He stood there, two steps into the room, and stopped, arm outstretched, as if he’d been tapped in a game of freeze tag. A nurse came in then and he had to step away from the door, and she said, “Hello, Doctor,” to his back before she turned and saw he was a medical student and said “Oh.”

  “My wife,” he said, and she said “oh” again and came over to the bed and checked my chart, adjusted my lines, and switched out one IV bag with another.

  “Antibiotics,” Cal said, though I hadn’t asked. I hadn’t asked what was wrong with me, either. This may have been the drugs, or it may have been the fact that not knowing was the same in my mind as not happening.

  My mother, who had retired and was on a cruise along the Danube when all this was going on, arrived two days later and started asking questions, and that’s when I learned that one result of all those mornings watching ourselves go at it in that mirrored San Francisco hotel room was that we had made a baby. I was pregnant. I was still out of it enough not to note the tense being used: it was “was,” not “is.” Or, as my mother, ever the grammarian, said to my husband, who was having trouble saying what needed to be said, “For the sake of clarity, Cal, use the pluperfect. ‘Had been.’ You had been pregnant, Kit,” and that’s when the three of us began to cry.

  Cal pulled himself together first. And although I was inconsolable, he reminded me that I wasn’t supposed to get pregnant, by which he meant that I wasn’t supposed to be able to get pregnant, which was not just a verbal sleight of hand. What he meant, he said, slipping into physician mode, was that I wasn’t supposed to be able to get pregnant because for the past four years there was a sentry, locked and loaded, at the entrance to my cervix: the IUD his father had prescribed. “Every so often they get dislodged,” he was explaining, and I was wondering if it was the time I was on my knees and he was pounding me from behind, or if it was when we were trying out this crazy acrobatic move we saw on the pay-per-view. “Every so often they get dislodged and they migrate up into the uterus, or perforate the colon and—”

  “Enough!” my mother shouted. They must have heard her at the nurses’ station because, without being summoned, a woman in lavender scrubs poked her head in and the three of us waved her away.

  “No,” I said. “Tell me. Tell me what happened.”

  And Cal recounted, in clinical detail, the whole bloody mess, ending with finding me in our bed, febrile and hemorrhaging, and calling the ambulance and ending up in University Hospital.

  “And then what happened?” I asked, as if he were telling me a bedtime story.

  Cal exchanged looks with my mother.

  “What?” I said, alarmed.

  “Well, baby,” said my mother, who until that moment had always been so precise in her diction. “Sorry,” she said, coloring. “Bad choice of words,” and said no more.

  “The upshot is . . .” Cal started. “The basic thing is . . .” he said. “The upshot is—”

  “You said that already,” I said.

  And then in a rush of words I might have missed if I wasn’t listening very carefully: “We’re not going to be able to have kids.”

  There were tears running down my mother’s face, but all I felt was shock, which silenced me, and then doubt—was I really hearing this? was it really true?—and then more shock, and then an emotion that felt like fire and consumed me.

  “We’re not?” I said, the words flaming out of my throat.

  “Yes,” Cal said flatly. I knew, then, how he’d be with his patients: clear but careful, using as few words as possible so there would be as little confusion as possible.

  “No!” I said.

  “I’m afraid, hon, that it’s true,” he said, steady despite my anger. “We’re not.” He really was going to be a good doctor, but as for being a good husband, I was no longer sure.

  “No,” I said, seething. “Not we. Me. Not you. Me. I can’t have children. I. I can’t. My body. I. Me. My body.” As mantras go, it was remarkably focusing.

  * * *

  The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence . . .

  —Marianne Moore

  Rusty took the library steps two at a time, pushed open the heavy oak door, and bid a cheerful “good morning” to Evelyn, who had taken to calling him “our best customer,” even though he never took anything out. He made a beeline for the local history section and pulled a few books off the shelf and piled them on one of the long reading room tables, just as he did the day before and the day before that. This was his job now, reading about the rise and fall of Riverton, The City That Could, as one of the book titles declared, until it couldn’t.

  “It’s a fascinating story, a real American tragedy,” Kit heard Rusty say to the Four one day, who found it less fascinating, having lived it.

  “It’s not that interestin
g, trust me,” Carl said. And: “Let me bring in my shears, you’re starting to look like Meat Loaf.”

  “Eww. Disgusting,” Sunny chimed in. She had been standing off to the side, listening.

  “Meat Loaf is a musician, dear,” Carl explained. “Look him up.”

  And the next morning Carl took Rusty out in the alley behind the library, had him lean against a trash can, and cut his hair.

  “In New York, that would be one-fifty,” Rusty told him.

  “In Riverton, you pay for the view,” Carl said, tucking his comb and scissors into a black zippered case and spreading his arms wide to take in the row of trash cans and an overflowing Dumpster. “We call it atmosphere.”

  “The thing I don’t understand,” Rusty was saying as they walked back inside, as the other members of the Four whistled and catcalled, and Sunny said, “Good job, Carl,” and Evelyn blushed and so, to her chagrin, did Kit. “The thing I don’t understand,” Rusty said, ignoring them all, “is how a person from Duluth, my mother, ends up with a bankbook from here. It makes no sense.”

  “However it happened,” Carl said, “I doubt you’re going to find the answer in those books you’ve been reading.”

  “That’s for sure,” Rich the driver said.

  Still, Rusty kept pulling books off the shelf and turning the pages, and watching him, bent over an oversized volume of black-and-white photographs, his brown hair no longer spilling over his collar, it occurred to Kit that he liked it there in the Riverton Public Library, shabby as it was. He liked the routine. He liked the people. And the person he seemed to like best, to Kit’s surprise, was Sunny.

  They made an odd pair, Rusty in his Brooks Brothers khakis and Ralph Lauren polos, and the girl in her baggy T-shirts and high-top sneakers, but most days, when she wasn’t busy, Sunny would sit next to Rusty and they’d pass books back and forth, urging each other to read a particular passage or look at a particular image. Heads together, they’d giggle, or exclaim, or speak quietly, and sometimes, when she couldn’t hear what they were saying, Kit would feel a pang of jealousy and have to remind herself that it was better this way. As long as Rusty was going to come around, and as long as Sunny had to be there, it was better that they had each other, better that they left her alone.