Ex Libris Read online

  “Look,” she said when Blythe came in to refresh her tea, “Order out of chaos.” It was one of Blythe’s favorite mottoes.

  Blythe smiled and looked over at the spice rack. Then her smile faded and she shook her head.

  “Is something wrong?” Dinsy asked. She had hoped for a compliment.

  “Well, you used the alphabet,” said Blythe, sighing. “I suppose it’s not your fault. You were with Olive for a good many years. But you’re a big girl now. You should learn the proper order.” She picked up the salt container. “We’ll start with Salt.” She wrote the word on the little chalkboard hanging by the icebox, followed by the number 553.632. “Five-five-three-point-six-three-two. Because—?”

  Dinsy thought for a moment. “Earth Sciences.”

  “Ex-actly.” Blythe beamed. “Because salt is a mineral. But, now, Chives. Chives are a garden crop, so they’re . . . ”

  Dinsy bit her lip in concentration. “Six-thirty-something.”

  “Very good.” Blythe smiled again and chalked CHIVES 635.26 on the board. “So you see, Chives should always be shelved after Salt, dear. A place for everything, and everything in its place.”

  Blythe turned and began to rearrange the eight ceramic jars. Behind her back, Dinsy silently rolled her eyes.

  Edith appeared in the doorway.

  “Oh, not again,” she said. “No wonder I can’t find a thing in this kitchen. If I’ve told you once, Blythe, I’ve told you a thousand times. Bay Leaf comes first. QK-four-nine—” She had worked at the university when she was younger.

  “Library of Congress, my fanny,” said Blythe, not quite under her breath. “We’re not that kind of library.”

  “That’s no excuse for imprecision,” Edith replied. They each grabbed a jar and stared at each other.

  Dinsy tiptoed away and hid in the 814s, where she read “Jabberwocky” until the others came in for supper and the coast was clear.

  But the kitchen remained a taxonomic battleground. At least once a week, Dinsy was amused by the indignant sputtering of someone who had just spooned dill weed, not sugar, into a cup of Earl Grey tea.

  Once she knew her way around, Dinsy was free to roam the library as she chose.

  “Anywhere?” she asked Blythe.

  “Anywhere you like, my sweet. Except the Stacks. You’re not quite old enough for the Stacks.”

  Dinsy frowned. “I am so,” she muttered. But the Stacks were locked, and there wasn’t much she could do.

  Some days she sat with Olive in the Children’s Room, revisiting old friends, or explored the maze of the Main Room. Other days she spent in the Reference Room, where Ruth and Harriet guarded the big important books that no one could ever, ever check out—not even when the library had been open.

  Ruth and Harriet were like a set of salt and pepper shakers from two different yard sales. Harriet had faded orange hair and a sharp, kind face. Small and pinched and pointed, a decade or two away from wizened. She had violet eyes and a mischievous, conspiratorial smile and wore rimless octagonal glasses, like stop signs. Dinsy had never seen an actual stop sign, but she’d looked at pictures.

  Ruth was Chinese. She wore wool jumpers in neon plaids and had cat’s-eye glasses on a beaded chain around her neck. She never put them all the way on, just lifted them to her eyes and peered through them without opening the bows.

  “Life is a treasure hunt,” said Harriet.

  “Knowledge is power,” said Ruth. “Knowing where to look is half the battle.”

  “Half the fun,” added Harriet. Ruth almost never got the last word.

  They introduced Dinsy to dictionaries and almanacs, encyclopedias and compendiums. They had been native guides through the country of the Dry Tomes for many years, but they agreed that Dinsy delved unusually deep.

  “Would you like to take a break, love?” Ruth asked one afternoon. “It’s nearly time for tea.”

  “I am fatigued,” Dinsy replied, looking up from Roget. “Fagged out, weary, a bit spent. Tea would be pleasant, agreeable—”

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” sighed Ruth.

  Dinsy read Bartlett’s as if it were a catalog of conversations, spouting lines from Tennyson, Mark Twain, and Dale Carnegie until even Harriet put her hands over her ears and began to hum “Stairway to Heaven.”

  One or two evenings a month, usually after Blythe had remarked “Well, she’s a spirited girl,” for the third time, they all took the night off, “For Library business.” Olive or Dorothy would tuck Dinsy in early and read from one of her favorites while Ruth made her a bedtime treat—a cup of spiced tea that tasted a little like cherries and a little like varnish, and which Dinsy somehow never remembered finishing.

  A list (written in diverse hands), tacked to the wall of the Common Room.

  10 Things to Remember When You Live in a Library

  1. We do not play shuffleboard on the Reading Room table.

  2. Books should not have “dog’s-ears.” Bookmarks make lovely presents.

  3. Do not write in books. Even in pencil. Puzzle collections and connect-the-dots are books.

  4. The shelving cart is not a scooter.

  5. Library paste is not food. [Marginal not in child’s hand: True. It tastes like Cream of Wrong Soup.]

  6. Do not use the date stamp to mark your banana.

  7. Shelves are not monkey bars.

  8. Do not play 982-pickup with the P-Q drawer (or any other).

  9. The dumbwaiter is only for books. It is not a carnival ride.

  10. Do not drop volumes of Britannica off the stairs to hear the echo.

  They were an odd, but contented family. There were rules, to be sure, but Dinsy never lacked for attention. With seven mothers, there was always someone to talk with, a hankie for tears, a lap or a shoulder to share a story.

  Most evenings, when Dorothy had made a fire in the Reading Room and the wooden shelves gleamed in the flickering light, they would all sit in companionable silence. Ruth knitted, Harriet muttered over an acrostic, Edith stirred the cocoa so it wouldn’t get a skin. Dinsy sat on the rug, her back against the knees of whoever was her favorite that week, and felt safe and warm and loved. “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world,” as Blythe would say.

  But as she watched the moon peep in and out of the clouds through the leaded-glass panes of the tall windows, Dinsy often wondered what it would be like to see the whole sky, all around her.

  First Olive and then Dorothy had been in charge of Dinsy’s thick dark hair, trimming it with the mending shears every few weeks when it began to obscure her eyes. But a few years into her second decade at the library, Dinsy began cutting it herself, leaving it as wild and spiky as the brambles outside the front door.

  That was not the only change.

  “We haven’t seen her at breakfast in weeks,” Harriet said as she buttered a scone one morning.

  “Months. And all she reads is Salinger. Or Sylvia Plath,” complained Dorothy. “I wouldn’t mind that so much, but she just leaves them on the table for me to reshelve.”

  “It’s not as bad as what she did to Olive,” Marian said. “The Golden Compass appeared last week, and she thought Dinsy would enjoy it. But not only did she turn up her nose, she had the gall to say to Olive, ‘Leave me alone. I can find my own books.’ Imagine. Poor Olive was beside herself.”

  “She used to be such a sweet child,” Blythe sighed. “What are we going to do?”

  “Now, now. She’s just at that age,” Edith said calmly. “She’s not really a child anymore. She needs some privacy, and some responsibility. I have an idea.”

  And so it was that Dinsy got her own room—with a door that shut—in a corner of the second floor. It had been a tiny cubbyhole of an office, but it had a set of slender curved stairs, wrought iron worked with lilies and twigs, which led up to the turret between the red-tiled eaves.

  The round tower was just wide enough for Dinsy’s bed, with windows all around. There had once been a view of the town
, but now trees and ivy allowed only jigsaw puzzle-shaped puddles of light to dapple the wooden floor. At night the puddles were luminous blue splotches of moonlight that hinted of magic beyond her reach.

  On the desk in the room below, centered in a pool of yellow lamplight, Edith had left a note: “Come visit me. There’s mending to be done,” and a worn brass key on a wooden paddle, stenciled with the single word: STACKS.

  The Stacks were in the basement, behind a locked gate at the foot of the metal spiral staircase that descended from the 600s. They had always reminded Dinsy of the steps down to the dungeon in The King’s Stilts. Darkness below hinted at danger, but adventure. Terra Incognita.

  Dinsy didn’t use her key the first day, or the second. Mending? Boring. But the afternoon of the third day, she ventured down the spiral stairs. She had been as far as the gate before, many times, because it was forbidden, to peer through the metal mesh at the dimly lighted shelves and imagine what treasures might be hidden there.

  She had thought that the Stacks would be damp and cold, strewn with odd bits of discarded library flotsam. Instead they were cool and dry, and smelled very different from upstairs. Dustier, with hints of mold and the tang of vintage leather, an undertone of vinegar stored in an old shoe.

  Unlike the main floor, with its polished wood and airy high ceilings, the Stacks were a low, cramped warren of gunmetal gray shelves that ran floor-to-ceiling in narrow aisles. Seven levels twisted behind the west wall of the library like a secret labyrinth that ran from below the ground to up under the eaves of the roof. Floor and steps were translucent glass brick and six-foot ceilings strung with pipes and ducts were lit by single-caged bulbs, two to an aisle.

  It was a windowless fortress of books. Upstairs the shelves were mosaics of all colors and sizes, but the Stacks were filled with geometric monochrome blocks of subdued colors: eight dozen forest-green bound volumes of Ladies Home Journal filled five rows of shelves, followed by an equally large block of identical dark red Lifes.

  Dinsy felt like she was in another world. She was not lost, but for the first time in her life, she was not easily found, and that suited her. She could sit, invisible, and listen to the sounds of library life going on around her. From Level Three she could hear Ruth humming in the Reference Room on the other side of the wall. Four feet away, and it felt like miles. She wandered and browsed for a month before she presented herself at Edith’s office.

  A frosted glass pane in the dark wood door said MENDING ROOM in chipping gold letters. The door was open a few inches, and Dinsy could see a long workbench strewn with sewn folios and bits of leather bindings, spools of thread and bottles of thick beige glue.

  “I gather you’re finding your way around,” Edith said without turning in her chair. “I haven’t had to send out a search party.”

  “Pretty much,” Dinsy replied. “I’ve been reading old magazines.” She flopped into a chair to the left of the door.

  “One of my favorite things,” Edith agreed. “It’s like time travel.” Edith was a tall, solid woman with long graying hair that she wove into elaborate buns and twisted braids, secured with number-two pencils and a single tortoiseshell comb. She wore blue jeans and vests in brightly muted colors—pale teal and lavender and dusky rose—and a strand of lapis lazuli beads cut in rough ovals.

  Edith repaired damaged books, a job that was less demanding now that nothing left the building. But some of the bound volumes of journals and abstracts and magazines went back as far as 1870, and their leather bindings were crumbling into dust. The first year, Dinsy’s job was to go through the aisles, level by level, and find the volumes that needed the most help. Edith gave her a clipboard and told her to check in now and then.

  Dinsy learned how to take apart old books and put them back together again. Her first mending project was the tattered 1877 volume of American Naturalist, with its articles on “Educated Fleas” and “Barnacles” and “The Cricket as Thermometer.” She sewed pages into signatures, trimmed leather and marbleized paper. Edith let her make whatever she wanted out of the scraps, and that year Dinsy gave everyone miniature replicas of their favorite volumes for Christmas.

  She liked the craft, liked doing something with her hands. It took patience and concentration, and that was oddly soothing. After supper, she and Edith often sat and talked for hours, late into the night, mugs of cocoa on their workbenches, the rest of the library dark and silent above them.

  “What’s it like outside?” Dinsy asked one night, while she was waiting for some glue to dry.

  Edith was silent for a long time, long enough that Dinsy wondered if she’d spoken too softly, and was about to repeat the question, when Edith replied.

  “Chaos.”

  That was not anything Dinsy had expected. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s noisy. It’s crowded. Everything’s always changing, and not in any way you can predict.”

  “That sounds kind of exciting,” Dinsy said.

  “Hmm.” Edith thought for a moment. “Yes, I suppose it could be.”

  Dinsy mulled that over and fiddled with a scrap of leather, twisting it in her fingers before she spoke again. “Do you ever miss it?”

  Edith turned on her stool and looked at Dinsy. “Not often,” she said slowly. “Not as often as I’d thought. But then I’m awfully fond of order. Fonder than most, I suppose. This is a better fit.”

  Dinsy nodded and took a sip of her cocoa.

  A few months later, she asked the Library for a third and final boon.

  The evening that everything changed, Dinsy sat in the armchair in her room, reading Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? (for the third time), imagining what it would be like to talk to Glencora, when a tentative knock sounded at the door.

  “Dinsy? Dinsy?” said a tiny familiar voice. “It’s Olive, dear.”

  Dinsy slid her READ! bookmark into chapter fourteen and closed the book. “It’s open,” she called.

  Olive padded in wearing a red flannel robe, her feet in worn carpet slippers. Dinsy expected her to proffer a book, but instead Olive said, “I’d like you to come with me, dear.” Her blue eyes shone with excitement.

  “What for?” They had all done a nice reading of As You Like It a few days before, but Dinsy didn’t remember any plans for that night. Maybe Olive just wanted company. Dinsy had been meaning to spend an evening in the Children’s Room, but hadn’t made it down there in months.

  But Olive surprised her. “It’s Library business,” she said, waggling her finger and smiling.

  Now, that was intriguing. For years, whenever the Librarians wanted an evening to themselves, they’d disappear down into the Stacks after supper, and would never tell her why. “It’s Library business,” was all they ever said. When she was younger, Dinsy had tried to follow them, but it’s hard to sneak in a quiet place. She was always caught and given that awful cherry tea. The next thing she knew it was morning.

  “Library business?” Dinsy said slowly. “And I’m invited?”

  “Yes, dear. You’re practically all grown up now. It’s high time you joined us.”

  “Great.” Dinsy shrugged, as if it were no big deal, trying to hide her excitement. And maybe it wasn’t a big deal. Maybe it was a meeting of the rules committee, or plans for moving the 340s to the other side of the window again. But what if it was something special . . . ? That was both exciting and a little scary.

  She wiggled her feet into her own slippers and stood up. Olive barely came to her knees. Dinsy touched the old woman’s white hair affectionately, remembering when she used to snuggle into that soft lap. Such a long time ago.

  A library at night is a still but resonant place. The only lights were the sconces along the walls, and Dinsy could hear the faint echo of each footfall on the stairs down to the foyer. They walked through the shadows of the shelves in the Main Room, back to the 600s, and down the metal stairs to the Stacks, footsteps ringing hollowly.

  The lower level was dark except for a single caged
bulb above the rows of National Geographics, their yellow bindings pale against the gloom. Olive turned to the left.

  “Where are we going?” Dinsy asked. It was so odd to be down there with Olive.

  “You’ll see,” Olive said. Dinsy could practically feel her smiling in the dark. “You’ll see.”

  She led Dinsy down an aisle of boring municipal reports and stopped at the far end, in front of the door to the janitorial closet set into the stone wall. She pulled a long, old-fashioned brass key from the pocket of her robe and handed it to Dinsy.

  “You open it, dear. The keyhole’s a bit high for me.”

  Dinsy stared at the key, at the door, back at the key. She’d been fantasizing about “Library Business” since she was little, imagining all sorts of scenarios, none of them involving cleaning supplies. A monthly poker game. A secret tunnel into town, where they all went dancing, like the twelve princesses. Or a book group, reading forbidden texts. And now they were inviting her in? What a letdown if it was just maintenance.

  She put the key in the lock. “Funny,” she said as she turned it. “I’ve always wondered what went on when you—” Her voice caught in her throat. The door opened, not onto the closet of mops and pails and bottles of Pine-Sol she expected, but onto a small room, paneled in wood the color of ancient honey. An Oriental rug in rich, deep reds lay on the parquet floor, and the room shone with the light of dozens of candles. There were no shelves, no books, just a small fireplace at one end where a log crackled in the hearth.

  “Surprise,” said Olive softly. She gently tugged Dinsy inside.

  All the others were waiting, dressed in flowing robes of different colors. Each of them stood in front of a Craftsman rocker, dark wood covered in soft brown leather.

  Edith stepped forward and took Dinsy’s hand. She gave it a gentle squeeze and said, under her breath, “Don’t worry.” Then she winked and led Dinsy to an empty rocker. “Stand here,” she said, and returned to her own seat.