Here at last is a brief account of the
Judson City Public Library, not the library of today, which is functioning
smoothly and serving the public well, but the library of yore, back before
computers and the Internet, when readers smudged their fingers turning the
pages of real books, and a series of library directors who failed to engage
with the staff encouraged certain deficiencies and even made room for small
scandals. (Don’t look for Judson City on
a map; the name is invented, since I have no wish to taint the reputation of
today’s library, located in a city in this general area.)
Among the staff of that era were Mrs.
Blaustein, whose lipstick preceded her through doorways, and whose ample bosom
was agleam with jewelry; she worked in Circulation and was one of the more
functioning employees.
Mr. Wu, a Chinese American, had been
shunted to the Catalog Department because his English was a flow of gibberish
that no one could understand. Years
later he was still in Catalog and his English was still gibberish.
Mr. Stevenson was a gentle, roundish man
of some years who, sometimes, presided over the Local History Room, whose stately
albeit somewhat musty confines were rarely penetrated by patrons. On the wall above his desk, squeezed in
incongruously among formal portraits of governors and mayors, was a photograph
of his mother, who smiled benignly down upon him as he toiled minimally. I say “minimally” because, alas, he was a bit
too fond of the grape and struggled manfully to get through the day, never
really drunk but not quite sober. One
Monday morning at five of nine, as other staff members strode briskly toward
the entrance of the monumental library building, Mr. Stevenson was seen looking
at the entrance with a wan, worn look.
Slowly he shook his head and sadly turned about and retraced his steps
toward home. He didn’t last much longer
at the library.
Amanda was a lady of middle years whose
job was to sort out material to be sent to the branches, but much of her time was
devoted to caring for stray cats that she plucked from the alleyways and
gutters of the city. With a caring heart
and no authorization whatsoever she nested them in boxes in unvisited nooks and
crannies in the stacks, feeding them generously and supplying them with ample
amounts of kitty litter. These
activities might have gone unnoticed, had not a subtle scent of cat food and
kitty poop spread throughout the stacks, provoking objections from
coworkers. Adamant in defending her
strays, she defied orders from superiors and continued to clutter up the
stacks. Finally, one day when she was
home nursing a cold, her supervisor recruited a team of coworkers to restore
the strays to the street, clean out the cans of stacked cat food and litter
boxes, and purify the air with scents.
When Amanda returned a few days later, she registered utter shock and
dismay, and defiantly began reaccumulating strays and cat food and litter
boxes. So formidable was her compassion
for felines that the staff gave up the fight in despair, and strange odors
continued to pervade the stacks.
The geography of the library building is
of interest, ranging as it did, vertically, from the sodden depths of the basement
to the airy heights of the Eaves. The
basement was the domain of the maintenance men, and a merry bunch they
were. Rarely seen above ground, where
they appeared reluctantly at times for repair work, they found those depths congenial,
for few of the upstairs staff ventured down there. Stored in the basement stacks were government
documents, tons of them – full Congressional records and quantities of
statistics from various bureaucracies – which practically no one ever felt the
need to consult. So there the documents sat, year
after year. Then one summer a torrential
rain flooded the basement, soaking some of the documents, which from then on
emitted, instead of a musty, dry odor, a soggy one further spiced by a subtle hint of alcohol, since the maintenance men, in
their splendid isolation, found frequent opportunities to imbibe.
Meanwhile up in the celestial heights of
the Eaves, the very top floor of the structure, two genteel elderly ladies
toiled diligently, pursuing some noble project, though no one below quite knew
what. It was a special program funded by
some benign foundation, perhaps to give useful employment and a sense of
purpose to seniors, and it somehow involved archives; the two ladies, as sweet
and silent as can be, sat at a table up there, quite alone, diligently copying
or recording something. So it went for
days, their gentle presence barely discernible to those below. Then one day one of them was absent, and the
other toiled on in solitude. Toward the
end of the day the staff realized that they hadn’t seen or heard her all day and went to
investigate. They found her lying on the
floor, no one knew for how long, pen clasped tight in her fingers, but quite
unconscious, a victim of some medical mishap.
An ambulance was called and she was rushed to a hospital, though word
never came of her ultimate fate. The
other daytime occupant of the Eaves, hearing of her companion’s fate, was so disheartened that she declined to continue the project, following which the lofty Eaves remained vacant for
years.
A new note was struck in the library with
the arrival of Maisie, the supervisors’ new secretary, who got the job through
some obscure political connection. She
was young, vibrant, outgoing, her make-up a bit too bold, her skirts a bit too
short, and from the moment she appeared, she added to the library atmosphere
the one element missing: sex.
The females of the staff eyed her with suspicion, while the males –
especially the younger ones – were smitten from the start. Though she proved to be an excellent
secretary, she was also an excellent gossip; with her on hand, few of the
staff’s secrets remained secret. Be that as it may, everything about her – her
expression, her clothes, the way she walked – was just plain flat-out sexy. Yet Maisie was no wanton: she tempted, but
never delivered; she enticed subtly, but remained maddeningly elusive. The high point of her brief library career
came at the annual winter holiday party, where she did a wild dance to savage
music (recorded) that elicited from the maintenance men wild outbursts of
cheers and applause. Soon after that she
left the library, no doubt in quest of further conquests elsewhere.
Without Maisie things were dull for a
while, but the Judson City Public Library system was never devoid of scandal,
and if not the hard core of it, at least a gentle whiff. No, I can’t offer the director deserting his
wife to run off with the assistant director – nothing so
spectacular; but scandal nonetheless, inspired by murky doings at the Foster
Street branch.
Presiding over the Foster Street branch
was Wendy Paterson, a diligent but slightly erratic librarian who served the
public adequately at the front desk in the rooms open to the public. But the library truck was parked nearby a
little too often, sparking rumors about what went on in the back room of the
library. The truck driver, a stud named
Joe, was charged with transporting books to and from the branches, but in the
course of these duties he found time for extracurricular activities, especially
at the Foster Street branch.
Hearing the rumors, the branch supervisor
visited the branch, found all in front quite proper, but investigated the back
room where the public never penetrated.
There, among the scant furnishings, was a large couch with plump
pillows, and in the air the faintest trace of Ms. Paterson’s vibrant
perfume. On that couch, christened the
Couch of Passion by gossipers, Wendy Paterson and Joe the truck driver were
said to have tangled rapturously on many an occasion. Of this there was no evidence, only the
persistent rumors. And in the very back
of the room in question, there was a door leading to the basement. When the supervisor opened it, he saw a stairway
leading down into darkness, but made out, on the floor below, a teeming,
writhing mass of waterbugs, outsized roaches so repellent in appearance, so
shocking, so frightening, that the supervisor shut the door at once, locked it, and
departed. Rarely, before then or after,
was the door opened, for the staff knew too well what lay behind it. The supervisor had confirmed, insofar as
possible, that in the nether back reaches of the Foster Street branch there was
indeed a surfeit of biology, human and otherwise, but there was nothing to be
done about it.
A lighter, albeit sadder note was provided
annually by Amelia Hudson, a spinsterish librarian who served diligently but
cheerlessly throughout the year, and at the annual holiday party in December,
by popular demand that became a little less fervent each year,
did her legendary comic performance of “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come
Home.” Throwing herself into the role of
a grieving woman pleading with her estranged boyfriend to return, Miss Hudson
pulled out all the stops, a little more each year, ending up kneeling on the
floor, arms outstretched, pleading with tearful resonance. Though she hammed it up
outrageously, hilarious laughter followed, tempered with the embarrassed
realization, a little more poignant every year, that this was her one chance to
let go a bit, to express a surge of bottled-up emotions, to do what she had
longed all her life to do: to be passionately human.
So much for the annals of the Judson City Public Library, proof indeed that life in a library can be anything but dull.
So much for the annals of the Judson City Public Library, proof indeed that life in a library can be anything but dull.
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The book: My selection of posts from this blog has won first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards. Sheri Hoyte, in the accompanying review, calls the book "a delightful treasure chest full of short stories about New York City…. I highly recommend it to all fans of entertaining short stories and lovers of New York City. It would also make an interesting travel guide for people who just want to learn more about the city that never sleeps." (The full review is also included in post #223 of March 27, 2016.) As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Coming soon: Computers Are Stupid. Also possible: little shops of New York; New York graffiti; construction in New York: ubiquitous and maddening, and won't it ever stop?
© 2016 Clifford Browder
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