“Refresher on what?”
“Vincent,” said Mom. “I was wondering if you could gather up some stuff about her life. You’ve read it all more recently than I have. Make me some notes?”
“Why do you need that?”
“A reporter’s coming. Don’t you see, Pearl—maybe if the word gets out about the statue, if there’s a story in the paper, if Vincent had a life that was . . . meaningful to us, our city, our library, in some way, some way that connects with people, let’s hear it. Then someone’ll see that head somewhere and get it back to us. We can’t do very well without it.”
“All it’s doing now is making more people come to the library to see a headless statue,” Pearl said darkly.
Mom just looked at her a second, then said, “Come to see a statue, stay to read a book?”
Pearl snorted, but Mom pointed to the stairs and tried again. “Listen, maybe they come for the crime, but they stay for Vincent. If she brings people to the library—one way or another—won’t that reverse the bad luck of her head going missing? And isn’t that worth a little bad press?”
(They say there’s no such thing as bad press. Debatable.)
So here Pearl was, up in the mezzanine above the circulation desk, running her fingers over the titles of nonfiction books in the 800s—books with plays, songs, and poetry, according to the Dewey Decimal System, which told you, with a numbered code, where to shelve every nonfiction, factual book, and had categories as tiny and specific as soup or hedgehogs or bass guitars1—to find books about Vincent. Not just Pearl’s favorites. She even brought down the thin book called The Princess Marries the Page,2 a somewhat sappy play Vincent had written about a girl with braids like Francine’s and some silly royal page boy. Pearl carried the stack down to her mother.
Mom stood at a file cabinet in the reference room, researching the statue in the library files. “I’m looking for how Vincent came to this building,” she said. She sat down with Pearl and showed her what she’d found—the faded copies of three newspaper stories from the long-ago days when the statue had been sculpted and then signed over to the library. There were photographs that showed the library back then, when it had been the Lancaster family home.
“What should I work on?” Pearl asked.
“Find me the basic facts of her life,” said Mom. Ramón pushed the box of old catalog cards and a little pencil toward Pearl, and she took them to her nook along with the books, to take notes on. She found Edna St. Vincent Millay’s birth and death dates, the names of her parents and siblings, and some of her most famous works. She tried to stick to the facts, but she got caught up in the tale of Vincent’s life—especially her early days in hardscrabble coastal Maine, struggling for survival and trying to make art. Just like Jo March, that girl in Little Women,3 thought Pearl.
A Sidebar About Statues
Before you go thinking Pearl was crazy for screaming about Vincent’s head being stolen, just hang on a minute there. Imagine you are making a statue of someone you love or admire because that someone is going to be gone sometime, and the someone is so loved that you want them never to be forgotten. If you are a realistic sculptor, not the kind who makes stuff out of other people’s trash like Francine’s granny, but the kind who uses stone and a chisel to show what somebody was like in their actual life, then the statue left behind should make people wonder. Because things that make you wonder sometimes make you love them.
Here came Vincent, striding along in stone, her book and pen in her hand, dreaming up stories and poems. Whatever else she did in her life, there was a statue of her that showed she was a writer.
What’s more, Vincent used to live here, right here where Pearl lived now, back when the library was shining and well-kept and full of readers, full of people who loved her. Because why would there be a statue of Vincent unless she had lots of friends who loved her? And that—the love of friends—was part of Pearl’s dream, too. The most secret part.
And now somebody had made off with Vincent’s head. It was enough to make any of us weep. So chew on that thought before you judge.
—M.A.M.
When she had delivered her notes to Mom, she went to the garden to look at poor, headless Vincent.
What was the statue of Vincent doing, with her hand outstretched, her expression utterly calm? It was a question of much debate. Mom always said Vincent was waiting for an idea for a new poem to drop into her hand. Bruce said she was checking for rain. Pearl had seen a baby raccoon, a kit from the nest in the pine, sit on Vincent’s stone palm to eat a peanut-butter-sandwich cracker Pearl had lodged there. The raccoon knew what Pearl knew: that Vincent remembered everyone who’d ever come to the library, even the raccoons in the trees. Pearl was convinced.
Later that day, she told Mr. Nichols all about Vincent’s life. “Peculiar,” he said, the way he always did. “But what really changes, now that she’s lost her head?” Nichols asked.
Now Vincent seemed to Pearl more like a real person, someone who had been robbed of her dignity. “Nothing will change,” she said stoutly. But it already had, a little.
Nichols didn’t say anything. He held the evening New York Moon4 newspaper closer to his face.
“You need better glasses, Mr. Nichols,” Pearl told him for the hundredth time. But, with his distance vision, Nichols had glimpsed someone arriving, and unfolded the newspaper to hide behind it.
Brisk footsteps came up the stairs from the street into the foyer. The double foyer doors burst open, someone making an entrance like in old Western movies. A thin young man in a slate-gray button-down shirt, wire-framed glasses, ironed jeans, and ready-for-anything hiking boots walked quickly over and stuck his hand out toward Mom, on her stool behind the circulation counter.
“Jonathan Yoiks!” he said. “From the Moon.”
“Yikes?” whispered Pearl.
Nichols tilted the paper toward Pearl, adjusted his glasses, and said, “Yoiks, not yikes. Looks like a go-getter.” He pointed to the byline on a Moon story about the city budget. “I’ll bet this library looks like small potatoes to him.” Nichols read all the papers every day: the Moon, the Star5, and the News6 (the city papers), the dailies from other cities nearby (Hackensack and Stamford and Albany), and The Wall Street Journal7.
Yoiks rocked on his toes and scanned his surroundings. Pearl could tell that wherever he was, he considered it His Surroundings. She could tell he didn’t see Mr. Nichols, just some faded guy reading the Moon. And he couldn’t see Pearl, out of view on the floor. He asked briskly, as if Mom was some receptionist wasting his time, “Which way to the statue that got beheaded?”
Pearl leaped to her feet and ran across the floor. “I’ll show you our statue,” she said, “but only if you’re considerate about it.”
“Considerate?” he repeated.
Yoiks wasn’t as cool as he thought he was. “Have you ever read any of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems?” Pearl asked.
“I have my master’s in journalism with a minor in English lit,” he said.
Pearl said, “That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Pearl, do please show the young man to Vincent,” said Mom.
“My editor may not have mentioned this, but I’m the author of the Unique New Yorkers column, and I’m considering—”
“Do people have to be grown-up to be Unique?” asked Pearl. “Because Vincent—”
Yoiks talked right over her words. “I’d appreciate it if someone knowledgeable could tell me more about the subject of the statue.”
“You’ll find you’re in good hands,” said Mom. “Pearl will escort you to the library garden.”
Yoiks had no choice but to open his pad, get out his pencil, and follow Pearl.
“This is the garden?” he asked. It was little more than a backyard, with scruffy pine trees that only partly blocked the view of a dumpster and a chain-link fence. Nothing special, you could see it in Jonathan Yoiks’s expression. But that just showed he’d never seen Vincent’s f
ace.
“So, somebody ordered a statue of Edna St. Vincent Millay after she died,” Pearl began. “But the customer who ordered the statue didn’t like how it came out. He was crazy in love with Vincent, and he said she was more beautiful than this.”
Jonathan Yoiks gazed up at Vincent’s empty neck. “I believe it.”
“She is so beautiful.” Pearl curled the fronts of her flip-flops under her feet. Again she noticed a small, toed paw print, drier now than the one she’d seen before. “She was, anyway.”
Yoiks turned away from Vincent with a disinterested air and looked at Pearl. “So? He didn’t like the statue, then what?”
“He even hired a lawyer to make the sculptor fix it,” said Pearl. “But a judge told the customer and his lawyer that they didn’t have a case. ‘Art is art,’ he said.” Pearl quoted the judge, holding one finger in the air.
Yoiks said, “I think we need to shorten this conversation, my young friend. You’re losing track of the point.”
“Maybe you don’t know how to tell a story,” said Pearl.
Yoiks sniffed and sighed. “Go on,” he said.
Pearl went on. “So then the customer said he’d take the statue the way it was, but the sculptor said that now he couldn’t have it.”
“Another lawsuit?”
“No. The sculptor had grown up on Lancaster Avenue, so she wanted the library to have it if the customer didn’t love it.”
“She? The sculptor was a she?” asked Yoiks.
“Yeah, well, even Vincent called herself by a boy’s name, which was a statement even way back then.”
“Wasn’t she brave?” Yoiks walked away, looking around, tapping his pencil on his pad.
Pearl said, “She was named after the hospital that used to be here. St. Vincent’s.”
“Hmm, her way of embracing the neighborhood?” Just like that, Yoiks zoomed back into the library without another word to Pearl, then came out again with Mom, Bruce, Ramón, Alice, and Simon.
“A few poses, please,” he said, waving them toward his camera. “Let’s have a few people gathered around the pedestal.” He posed Bruce at Vincent’s feet, and placed Mom next to him. But when he squeezed Pearl’s shoulders, she spun away.
“Come here, Pearl girl,” said Bruce. “Come stand by me.”
Any other time, she would have. A staff picture in the paper of her and her lovely mother and Bruce, standing next to Simon, with Alice’s hand on her shoulder, Ramón on the other side? Her whole family? Normally it would have been a definite yes.
But it wasn’t her whole family. “No!” said Pearl. “Not without Vincent’s head.”
“I’ll be in the picture!” said a voice, and that girl Francine, with the braids, from across Lancaster Avenue in the apartment over Gully’s store, came clopping—were those tap dancing shoes she was wearing?—up the stone path and into the picture. Click went the camera.
1 Soup—641.813 if it’s not specifically vegetarian, 641.5636 if it is; hedgehogs—599.33; bass guitars—787.87193.
2 The Princess Marries the Page: A Play in One Act by Edna St. Vincent Millay (Harper & Brothers, 1932).
3 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Roberts Brothers, 1868).
4 A made-up newspaper.
5 Another made-up newspaper.
6 There is a New York newspaper called The New York Daily News, but this one is meant to be made up.
7 There is a New York newspaper called The Wall Street Journal.
5: FICTION VS. NONFICTION
STILL AUG 29
Imagine Francine getting to be in the picture for the paper!
Pearl’s outrage—and fury at herself for letting it happen—was too much to bear. She gasped and ran from the garden, past the reading room, and through the circulation area, opened the book elevator, and curled herself into the bottom shelf of the book cart. She sat there fuming a while, until the feeling faded into thinking, into developing a theory that needed some information, a theory about how heavy Vincent’s head was and what kind of person it would take to move it. It couldn’t possibly have been whatever little animal had left those paw prints. It couldn’t have been an accident. It had to have been a crime.
There was a thud and a jolt, and the book elevator began to go up. Basement-breath damp air rose up the pitch-dark elevator shaft and cooled her. The elevator hummed and buzzed, lifting her to the second floor. Simon, who had climbed the stairs to meet her, pulled the cart from the elevator into the nonfiction stacks.
“Oof, Pearl,” Simon grunted. “You are one heavy volume.”
Pearl tumbled out of the cart and lay on the floor in a heap. “Simon, you’re pretty muscular.”
He laughed an embarrassed laugh. “So?”
“Could you lift Vincent’s head off her neck?”
“By myself? Maybe. But get it down a ladder and into a car? Only if I rolled it across the ground. And why would I?”
“But if someone did, don’t you think rolling would make a dent?”
He thought. “The grass would be flat like a bowling ball had been rolled across it.”
“I’m going to check,” said Pearl, and she went barreling down the spiral stairs.
Mom and Bruce were having an intense exchange in the garden. Their grim conversations had been going on a while, but since the theft of the head, they had grown even darker, more intense, more frequent, and more secret. Now the two were circling each other on the other side of the yew bush hedge, their voices hissing back and forth. Pearl tiptoed closer to the open door to spy.
“What are you doing about it?” Mom’s voice rose right over the hedge.
“Trish, it’s not a neighborhood hub anymore. People get their news and magazines online, and only the desperate few need computers as sluggish as ours.”
“Desperate? Dedicated, maybe. Dignified.”
“Desperate,” repeated Bruce. “And destitute.”
“It’s still important.” Mom’s fists were clenched at her sides.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t important to us. But to the city? There has to be a better reason for people to come than slow computers and wrinkled newspapers.”
“Are you giving up?”
“No, I’m not giving up,” said Bruce.
“At least write another proposal. Keep asking for more books. Fill out order forms. I don’t know—describe the specific audiences that need the books. The board has to see you’re making every effort.”
“It’s just busywork!” said Bruce. “I can’t ask to increase the collection again now. What reason would I give? They’ll just reject it again. The budget for books isn’t going to come if they won’t fix the building.”
“So you are giving up?” Mom asked again. Pearl felt the question like a thump in the chest.
“Is that what you want me to do, Patricia?”
“How can you ask me that?” demanded Mom.
It was Bruce’s voice that hurt Pearl’s heart. She dashed out the door and interrupted, “Of course she doesn’t. What would we do without you, Bruce?”
It took nerve, butting in like this. But the idea that Mom thought Bruce should resign, if he was just going to give up otherwise. No! Not on top of everything else. Mom said, “Pearl, we’re talking business, not personal life.”
“Are we?” asked Bruce.
Pearl couldn’t look at their faces. She got down on her hands and knees, her head turned to one side to put her eyes at the height of the grass, scanning for the kind of path a head might make, glad in the certainty that she was a distraction.
“What now, my love?” said Bruce tenderly. “Have you lost your marbles?”
Pearl said, “Don’t you think if Vincent’s head got rolled across the grass, it would have made a dent?” She wondered if Mom was crying. She couldn’t bear to look up to check.
But Mom said, with just a light sniff, “You think the head was rolled across the ground?”
“Well, there are no wheelbarrow tracks,” said Pearl. “But look
, Bruce.” There were a few more of those footprints with the long claws.
“If raccoons could talk,” said Bruce.
“Then we’d know it all, huh?” asked Pearl. She was sure he was the only library manager in the city who could tell raccoon prints from those of skunks and rats and opossums.
Bruce said, “If only.”
“Who says they can’t?” asked Mom.
That relieved Pearl. Mom was okay if she was on the subject of talking raccoons. As for Bruce, Pearl figured he’d rather talk about raccoons (like he did in his old job, and as a volunteer for a nature-watcher program called City Wildlife) than what he had to talk about to manage the library.
“If Mrs. Mallomar and her daughter Matilda could hear you, they’d be very insulted,” said Mom. She pointed to the trees and put a finger to her lips to hush them.
Bruce rolled his eyes over Mom and her wacky raccoon characters.
“Next you’ll be telling me we need to leave a bowl of milk for them,” he said.
Pearl said, “That’s baby stuff.” It had been at least three years since the last time Mom had convinced her to put out milk for the raccoons, or gotten her to leave them a letter, or told her a story about their bedrooms inside the pine trees.
“That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t appreciate it,” said Mom lightly.
Bruce snorted. “Sure,” he said.
Raccoons on her mind, Pearl went back up to the second floor, to nonfiction, to the 500s—science, facts, reality; Bruce’s side of the raccoon story. Five hundred ninety in the Dewey numbers, that was big books about animals. She figured Raccoons: A Natural History1 would have what she was looking for: a paw print. Before she went, a weird title caught her eye. Raccoons Are the Brightest People.2 The cover said the book was by the best-selling author of Rascal,3 so she went looking for that in the 599s. It was a memoir about a real raccoon, with a picture of a raccoon that sure looked like it would have been a bright person—enough to make the author write a special book about the whole species. Pearl grabbed them both.
A Girl, a Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon Page 3