Ex Libris Read online

  Blythe called her Bitsy, and Li’l Precious.

  Marian called her “the foundling,” or “That Child You Took In,” but did her share of cooing and clucking, just the same.

  When the child began to walk, Dorothy blocked the staircase with stacks of Comptons, which she felt was an inferior encyclopedia, and let her pull herself up on the bottom drawers of the card catalog. Anyone looking up Zithers or Zippers (see “Slide Fasteners”) soon found many of the cards fused together with grape jam. When she began to talk, they made a little bed nook next to the fireplace in the Children’s Room.

  It was high time for Olive to begin the child’s education.

  Olive had been the children’s librarian since before recorded time, or so it seemed. No one knew how old she was, but she vaguely remembered waving to President Coolidge. She still had all of her marbles, though every one of them was a bit odd and rolled asymmetrically.

  She slept on a daybed behind a reference shelf that held My First Encyclopedia and The Wonder Book of Trees, among others. Across the room, the child’s first “big-girl bed” was yellow, with decals of a fairy and a horse on the headboard, and a rocket ship at the foot, because they weren’t sure about her preferences.

  At the beginning of her career, Olive had been an ordinary-sized librarian, but by the time she began the child’s lessons, she was not much taller than her toddling charge. Not from osteoporosis or dowager’s hump or other old-lady maladies, but because she had tired of stooping over tiny chairs and bending to knee-high shelves. She had been a grown-up for so long that when the library closed she had decided it was time to grow down again, and was finding that much more comfortable.

  She had a remarkably cozy lap for a woman her size.

  The child quickly learned her alphabet, all the shapes and colors, the names of zoo animals, and fourteen different kinds of dinosaurs, all of whom were dead.

  By the time she was four, or thereabouts, she could sound out the letters for simple words—CUP and LAMP and STAIRS. And that’s how she came to name herself.

  Olive had fallen asleep over Make Way for Ducklings, and all the other librarians were busy somewhere else. The child was bored. She tiptoed out of the Children’s Room, hugging the shadows of the walls and shelves, crawling by the base of the Circulation Desk so that Marian wouldn’t see her, and made her way to the alcove that held the Card Catalogue. The heart of the library. Her favorite, most forbidden place to play.

  Usually she crawled underneath and tucked herself into the corner formed of oak cabinet, marble floor, and plaster walls. It was a fine place to play Hide and Seek, even if it was mostly just Hide. The corner was a cave, a bunk on a pirate ship, a cupboard in a magic wardrobe.

  But that afternoon she looked at the white cards on the fronts of the drawers, and her eyes widened in recognition. Letters! In her very own alphabet. Did they spell words? Maybe the drawers were all full of words, a huge wooden box of words. The idea almost made her dizzy.

  She walked to the other end of the cabinet and looked up, tilting her neck back until it crackled. Four drawers from top to bottom. Five drawers across. She sighed. She was only tall enough to reach the bottom row of drawers. She traced a gentle finger around the little brass frames, then very carefully pulled out the white cards inside, and laid them on the floor in a neat row:

  She squatted over them, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth in concentration, and tried to read.

  “Sound it out.” She could almost hear Olive’s voice, soft and patient. She took a deep breath.

  “Duh-in-s—” and then she stopped, because the last card had too many letters, and she didn’t know any words that had Xs in them. Well, xylophone. But the X was in the front, and that wasn’t the same. She tried anyway. “Duh-ins-zzzigh,” and frowned.

  She squatted lower, so low she could feel cold marble under her cotton pants, and put her hand on top of the last card. One finger covered the X and her pinky covered the Z (another letter that was useless for spelling ordinary things). That left Y. Y at the end was good. funnY. happY.

  “Duh-ins-see,” she said slowly. “Dinsy.”

  That felt very good to say, hard and soft sounds and hissing Ss mixing in her mouth, so she said it again, louder, which made her laugh so she said it again, very loud: “DINSY!”

  There is nothing quite like a loud voice in a library to get a lot of attention very fast. Within a minute, all seven of the librarians stood in the doorway of the alcove.

  “What on earth?” said Harriet.

  “Now what have you . . . ” said Marian.

  “What have you spelled, dear?” asked Olive in her soft little voice.

  “I made it myself,” the girl replied.

  “Just gibberish,” murmured Edith, though not unkindly. “It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  The child shook her head. “Does so. Olive,” she said pointing to Olive. “Do’thy, Edith, Harwiet, Bithe, Ruth.” She paused and rolled her eyes. “Mawian,” she added, a little less cheerfully. Then she pointed to herself. “And Dinsy.”

  “Oh, now Polly,” said Harriet.

  “Dinsy,” said Dinsy.

  “Bitsy?” Blythe tried hopefully.

  “Dinsy,” said Dinsy.

  And that was that.

  At three every afternoon, Dinsy and Olive made a two-person circle on the braided rug in front of the bay window, and had Story Time. Sometimes Olive read aloud from Beezus and Ramona and Half Magic, and sometimes Dinsy read to Olive, The King’s Stilts, and In the Night Kitchen and Winnie-the-Pooh. Dinsy liked that one especially, and took it to bed with her so many times that Edith had to repair the binding. Twice.

  That was when Dinsy first wished upon the Library.

  A note about the Library:

  Knowledge is not static; information must flow in order to live. Every so often one of the librarians would discover a new addition. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone appeared one rainy afternoon, Rowling shelved neatly between Rodgers and Saint-Exupery, as if it had always been there. Blythe found a book of Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings in the 294s one day while she was dusting, and Feynman’s lectures on physics showed up on Dorothy’s shelving cart after she’d gone to make a cup of tea.

  It didn’t happen often; the Library was selective about what it chose to add, rejecting flash-in-the-pan bestsellers, sifting for the long haul, looking for those voices that would stand the test of time next to Dickens and Tolkien, Woolf and Gould.

  The librarians took care of the books, and the Library watched over them in return.

  It occasionally left treats: A bowl of ripe tangerines on the Formica counter of the Common Room; a gold foil box of chocolate creams; seven small, stemmed glasses of sherry on the table one teatime. Their biscuit tin remained full, the cream in the Wedgwood jug stayed fresh, and the ink pad didn’t dry out. Even the little pencils stayed needle sharp, never whittling down to finger-cramping nubs.

  Some days the Library even hid Dinsy, when she had made a mess and didn’t want to be found, or when one of the librarians was in a dark mood. It rearranged itself, just a bit, so that in her wanderings she would find a new alcove or cubbyhole, and once a secret passage that led to a previously unknown balcony overlooking the Reading Room. When she went back a week later, she found only a blank wall.

  And so it was, one night when she was six-ish, that Dinsy first asked the Library for a boon. Lying in her tiny yellow bed, the fraying Pooh under her pillow, she wished for a bear to cuddle. Books were small comfort once the lights were out, and their hard, sharp corners made them awkward companions under the covers. She lay with one arm crooked around a soft, imaginary bear, and wished and wished until her eyelids fluttered into sleep.

  The next morning, while they were all having tea and toast with jam, Blythe came into the Common Room with a quizzical look on her face and her hands behind her back.

  “The strangest thing,” she said. “On my way up here I glanced over at the Lost and Found. C
ouldn’t tell you why. Nothing lost in ages. But this must have caught my eye.”

  She held out a small brown bear, one shoe button eye missing, bits of fur gone from its belly, as if it had been loved almost to pieces.

  “It seems to be yours,” she said with a smile, turning up one padded foot, where DINSY was written in faded laundry-marker black.

  Dinsy wrapped her whole self around the cotton-stuffed body and skipped for the rest of the morning. Later, after Olive gave her a snack—cocoa and a Lorna Doone—Dinsy cupped her hand and blew a kiss to the oak woodwork.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, and put half her cookie in a crack between two tiles on the Children’s Room fireplace when Olive wasn’t looking.

  Dinsy and Olive had a lovely time. One week they were pirates, raiding the Common Room for booty (and raisins). The next they were princesses, trapped in the turret with At the Back of the North Wind, and the week after that they were knights in shining armor, rescuing damsels in distress, a game Dinsy especially savored because it annoyed Marian to be rescued.

  But the year she turned seven-and-a-half, Dinsy stopped reading stories. Quite abruptly, on an afternoon that Olive said later had really felt like a Thursday.

  “Stories are for babies,” Dinsy said. “I want to read about real people.” Olive smiled a sad smile and pointed toward the far wall, because Dinsy was not the first child to make that same pronouncement, and she had known this phase would come.

  After that, Dinsy devoured biographies, starting with the orange ones, the Childhoods of Famous Americans: Thomas Edison, Young Inventor. She worked her way from Abigail Adams to John Peter Zenger, all along the west side of the Children’s Room, until one day she went around the corner, where Science and History began.

  She stood in the doorway, looking at the rows of grown-up books, when she felt Olive’s hand on her shoulder.

  “Do you think maybe it’s time you moved across the hall?” Olive asked softly.

  Dinsy bit her lip, then nodded. “I can come back to visit, can’t I? When I want to read stories again?”

  “For as long as you like, dear. Anytime at all.”

  So Dorothy came and gathered up the bear and the pillow and the yellow toothbrush. Dinsy kissed Olive on her papery cheek and, holding Blythe’s hand, moved across the hall, to the room where all the books had numbers.

  Blythe was plump and freckled and frizzled. She always looked a little flushed, as if she had just that moment dropped what she was doing to rush over and greet you. She wore rumpled tweed skirts and a shapeless cardigan whose original color was impossible to guess. She had bright, dark eyes like a spaniel’s, which Dinsy thought was appropriate, because Blythe lived to fetch books. She wore a locket with a small rotogravure picture of Melvil Dewey and kept a variety of sweets—sour balls and mints and Necco wafers—in her desk drawer.

  Dinsy had always liked her.

  She was not as sure about Dorothy.

  Over her desk, Dorothy had a small, framed medal on a royal-blue ribbon, won for “Excellence in Classification Studies.” She could operate the ancient black Remington typewriter with brisk efficiency, and even, on occasion, coax chalky gray prints out of the wheezing old copy machine.

  She was a tall, raw-boned woman with steely blue eyes, good posture, and even better penmanship. Dinsy was a little frightened of her, at first, because she seemed so stern, and because she looked like magazine pictures of the Wicked Witch of the West, or at least Margaret Hamilton.

  But that didn’t last long.

  “You should be very careful not to slip on the floor in here,” Dorothy said on their first morning. “Do you know why?”

  Dinsy shook her head.

  “Because now you’re in the non-friction room!” Dorothy’s angular face cracked into a wide grin.

  Dinsy groaned. “Okay,” she said after a minute. “How do you file marshmallows?”

  Dorothy cocked her head. “Shoot.”

  “By the Gooey Decimal System!”

  Dinsy heard Blythe tsk-tsk, but Dorothy laughed out loud, and from then on they were fast friends.

  The three of them used the large, sunny room as an arena for endless games of I Spy and Twenty Questions as Dinsy learned her way around the shelves. In the evenings, after supper, they played Authors and Scrabble, and (once) tried to keep a running rummy score in Base Eight.

  Dinsy sat at the court of Napoleon, roamed the jungles near Timbuktu, and was a frequent guest at the Round Table. She knew all the kings of England and the difference between a pergola and a folly. She knew the names of 112 breeds of sheep, and loved to say “Barbados Blackbelly” over and over, although it was difficult to work into conversations. When she affectionately, if misguidedly, referred to Blythe as a “Persian Fat-Rumped,” she was sent to bed without supper.

  A note about time:

  Time had become quite flexible inside the Library. (This is true of most places with interesting books. Sit down to read for twenty minutes, and suddenly it’s dark, with no clue as to where the hours have gone.)

  As a consequence, no one was really sure about the day of the week, and there was frequent disagreement about the month and year. As the keeper of the date stamp at the front desk, Marian was the arbiter of such things. (But she often had a cocktail after dinner, and many mornings she couldn’t recall if she’d already turned the little wheel, nor how often it had slipped her mind, so she frequently set it a day or two ahead—or back three—just to make up.)

  One afternoon, on a visit to Olive and the Children’s Room, Dinsy looked up from Little Town on the Prairie and said, “When’s my birthday?”

  Olive thought for a moment. Because of the irregularities of time, holidays were celebrated a bit haphazardly. “I’m not sure, dear. Why do you ask?”

  “Laura’s going to a birthday party, in this book,” she said, holding it up. “And it’s fun. So I thought maybe I could have one.”

  “I think that would be lovely,” Olive agreed. “We’ll talk to the others at supper.”

  “Your birthday?” said Harriet as she set the table a few hours later. “Let me see.” She began to count on her fingers. “You arrived in April, according to Marian’s stamp, and you were about nine months old, so—” She pursed her lips as she ticked off the months. “You must have been born in July!”

  “But when’s my birthday?” Dinsy asked impatiently.

  “Not sure,” said Edith, as she ladled out the soup.

  “No way to tell,” Olive agreed.

  “How does July fifth sound?” offered Blythe, as if it were a point of order to be voted on. Blythe counted best by fives.

  “Fourth,” said Dorothy. “Independence Day. Easy to remember?”

  Dinsy shrugged. “Okay.” It hadn’t seemed so complicated in the Little House book. “When is that? Is it soon?”

  “Probably,” Ruth nodded.

  So a few weeks later, the librarians threw her a birthday party.

  Harriet baked a spice cake with pink frosting, and wrote DINSY on top in red licorice laces, dotting the I with a lemon drop (which was rather stale). The others gave her gifts that were thoughtful and mostly handmade:

  ~ A set of Dewey Decimal flash cards from Blythe.

  ~ A book of logic puzzles (stamped DISCARD more than a dozen times, so Dinsy could write in it) from Dorothy.

  ~ A lumpy orange-and-green cardigan Ruth knitted for her.

  ~ A sno-globe from the 1939 World’s Fair from Olive.

  ~ A flashlight from Edith, so that Dinsy could find her way around at night and not knock over the wastebasket again.

  ~ A set of paper finger-puppets, made from blank card pockets, hand-painted by Marian. (They were literary figures, of course, all of them necessarily stout and squarish—Nero Wolfe and Friar Tuck, Santa Claus and Gertrude Stein.)

  But her favorite gift was the second boon she’d wished upon the Library: a box of crayons. (She had grown very tired of drawing gray pictures with the little pencils.)
It had produced Crayola crayons, in the familiar yellow-and-green box, labeled LIBRARY PACK. Inside were the colors of Dinsy’s world: Reference Maroon, Brown Leather, Peplum Beige, Reader’s Guide Green, World Book Red, Card Catalog Cream, Date Stamp Purple, and Palatino Black.

  It was a very special birthday, that fourth of July. Although Dinsy wondered about Marian’s calculations. As Harriet cut the first piece of cake that evening, she remarked that it was snowing rather heavily outside, which everyone agreed was lovely, but quite unusual for that time of year.

  Dinsy soon learned all the planets, and many of their moons. (She referred to herself as Umbriel for an entire month.) She puffed up her cheeks and blew onto stacks of scrap paper. “Sirocco,” she’d whisper. “Chinook. Mistral. Willy-Willy,” and rated her attempts on the Beaufort Scale. Dorothy put a halt to it after Hurricane Dinsy reshuffled a rather elaborate game of Patience.

  She dipped into fractals here, double dactyls there. When she tired of a subject—or found it just didn’t suit her—Blythe or Dorothy would smile and proffer the hat. It was a deep green felt that held 1000 slips of paper, numbered 001 to 999. Dinsy’d scrunch her eyes closed, pick one and, like a scavenger hunt, spend the morning (or the next three weeks) at the shelves indicated.

  Pangolins lived at 599 (point 31), and Pancakes at 641. Pencils were at 674 but Pens were a shelf away at 681, and Ink was across the aisle at 667. (Dinsy thought that was stupid, because you had to use them together.) Pluto the planet was at 523, but Pluto the Disney dog was at 791 (point 453), near Rock and Roll and Kazoos.

  It was all very useful information. But in Dinsy’s opinion, things could be a little too organized.

  The first time she straightened up the Common Room without anyone asking, she was very pleased with herself. She had lined up everyone’s teacup in a neat row on the shelf, with all the handles curving the same way, and arranged the spices in the little wooden rack: anise, bay leaves, chives, dill weed, peppercorns, salt, sesame seeds, sugar.