I didn’t find anything out of place in the shoe section. There was a gap where a patron had borrowed a pair of size 12-D pumps, but I found a call slip for it on file.
Checking a row of platform shoes from Renaissance Venice, I turned the corner and was surprised to find Marc Merritt with a pair of brown work boots in his hand.
“Oh, so you are working on this stack today?” I said.
“No, I’m down in the Dungeon,” he said.
“What’s the Dungeon?”
“Stack 1.”
“So what are you doing up here, then?”
“Returning these.”
“Oh, okay. Want me to file your call slip?”
“No, I . . . I didn’t fill one out. I just borrowed them for a little while—my shoes got wet and my feet were cold. I figured nobody would notice they were gone. Don’t tell, okay?”
“Sure.” I wondered whether this was one of those suspicious requests Mr. Mauskopf wanted me to look out for. Surely not—after all, Mr. Mauskopf knew Marc himself and had recommended him for the job. He’d even said he was friends with Marc’s uncle. If anything suspicious was going on with Marc, he would surely know more about it than I would. Besides, this was Marc Merritt, asking me for a favor! How could I refuse?
“Thanks, Elizabeth.” Marc hurried off.
A few cabinets later I found a terrible jumble in a section of leggings and chaps. I started to sort them out, but I couldn’t figure out the documentation, so I bit back my pride and asked Aaron.
“Wow, this is pretty bad,” he said. “It looks like my brother’s room when he can’t find his sneakers. Let’s take this mess up front and sort it out where there’s better light.” He piled the tangle of garments on a hand truck and pushed it to the work area by the dumbwaiters.
“Try to find labels for these things,” he said. “I’m going to see who took these out last.” He started flipping through cards in the circulation file. He snorted. “Thought so!”
“What?” I asked.
“The last request for II T&G 391.4636 B37 was run by MM—Marc Merritt. Same with II T&G 391.413 A44.”
“That doesn’t mean he put them back wrong,” I pointed out. “They could have been returned weeks later.”
“Well, they weren’t. They were returned the same day.”
“Does it say who reshelved them?”
“No, we don’t record that.”
“Then why do you assume it was Marc?”
“Why do you assume it wasn’t? He was on this stack that day.”
“Somebody else could have been with him.”
“Could have been. There’s no evidence they were, though.”
“There’s no evidence they weren’t, either. And somebody could have scrambled the stuff later too. Who knows when it happened? Maybe it was that page who got fired.”
“The evidence points where the evidence points.”
“What do you have against Marc?”
“I don’t have anything against him personally. I just don’t get why everybody melts around him just because he’s a basketball star. It’s like you think he can’t do any wrong. You ignore all the squirrelly stuff he does.” Aaron was clearly getting upset.
Well, so was I. “What squirrelly stuff ? And who’s everybody? You mean Anjali?”
“No, I mean everybody! You girls are the worst, but the librarians are almost as bad. I don’t like the way he’s always sneaking around the Grimm Collection.”
“No?” I asked. “So what’s in the Grimm Collection?”
Aaron looked even more upset. “Forget I said that!” he snapped. “I should have kept my mouth shut. I’m taking my break now. Leave this stuff. I’ll get a librarian to come check it out.” He stalked off through the fire door.
I thought about what he’d said. In fact, the business with Marc and the boots had been kind of squirrelly. And if Marc had been careless about filling out a call slip for the boots, couldn’t he have been careless about reshelving the leggings and chaps too?
On the other hand, he’d brought the borrowed boots back right away, which was pretty responsible of him. Probably this was all about Aaron’s jealousy.
That was understandable. I would be jealous too if I were a guy.
But what was this Grimm Collection, and why was it making Aaron so upset?
The stack door opened and an unfamiliar librarian came in. She was tall and skinny, with glasses and hair in a bun; she looked like a stereotype of a librarian. She was the first one I’d ever seen who looked like that.
“Elizabeth, right? I’m Lucy Minnian,” she said. “Aaron tells me you have a mess to sort out.”
“Yes, I was sweeping the shelves and I found all this.”
She poked at the tangle, then whistled under her breath. “I’d better send Lee down,” she said. She went out.
After a while, Dr. Rust came in. “What’s the trouble here?”
“I found all this stuff misshelved.”
“Hm . . . looks like the work of that Zandra Blair. She left a trail of chaos wherever she went. It took us a while to figure out she was the one doing it—she was great at shifting the blame. I’m glad to have seen the last of her! Let’s see, were there any labels with these?”
“Not that I could find.”
Dr. Rust began sorting through the chaps, separating the tangled straps. “I wish we could use something more up-to-date, like radio tags. Then we wouldn’t lose things on the shelves for years when they get misshelved.”
“Why don’t you, then?” I asked. “Too expensive?”
“No, we could probably find the funds for it. But the board of governors is conservative about technology—they call it ‘modern magic.’”
“What’s wrong with that? Modern magic sounds good to me.”
“Me too. But they prefer the old kind.” Dr. Rust held a pair of leather leggings up to one ear with a hand, as if listening for a secret, then scribbled something on a white tag and tied it to a buckle. I looked carefully to see if I could catch the freckles moving, but it was too dark to make them out.
Dr. Rust seemed to listen to another pair of chaps, gave it a shake, and listened again.
“So, Dr. Rust, can I ask you a qu—,” I began, but stopped. I knew what the answer would be.
“Of course. Always ask qu’s.”
“What’s the Grimm Collection?”
Dr. Rust put down the last garment and looked at me seriously for a long time, then said at last, “Stan Mauskopf has never sent us a bad page.”
Was that supposed to be an answer? “I really appreciate his good opinion. I’ll do everything I can to live up to it,” I said.
“I’m sure you will. Yes, I really do think you will.” Dr. Rust took a deep breath. “The Grimm Collection is one of the Special Collections on Stack 1—probably the most special of the Special Collections. The original holdings came to the library in 1892 as a legacy from Friedhilde Hassenpflug, a grandniece of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.”
“I know who they are. I just wrote a paper about the Brothers Grimm for Mr. Mauskopf.”
“Of course. So you know about their collections of märchen—folk tales or fairy tales. But stories weren’t the only thing they collected. They also assembled a remarkable group of objects.”
“Oh, that’s cool! I knew the Brothers Grimm were historians, but I hadn’t heard they were interested in the history of—of objects, of stuff too.”
Dr. Rust nodded. “Yes, it’s called material culture. The study of how physical objects relate to society and history. It’s relatively new as an academic discipline, but in a sense it’s always been central to our mission at the repository. It didn’t exist per se at the time of the Grimms—they were visionaries in so many ways. We’re very fortunate to have the privilege of caring for their collection.”
“What kind of objects did they collect?”
“Things mentioned in the märchen.”
“What do you mean, like Cinderella’s slippers?
”
“Something like that.” Did I detect a trace of longing in Dr. Rust’s voice? “We don’t have Cinderella’s actual slippers, but that’s the idea.”
I was relieved to hear Dr. Rust wasn’t crazy enough to claim they had Cinderella’s actual slippers. That would be going a little too far. “What do you have, then?” I asked.
“Oh, spindles and straw and beans and tears. A glass coffin. A golden egg. A number of things. The Grimms were serious and thorough collectors, and of course we’ve added to the collection a great deal over the years, objects associated with other fairy-tale and folklore traditions. I’m especially proud of our French holdings—we have the best collection outside the Archives Extraordinaires in Paris. And there’s some important material related to the Arabian Nights in the Grimm Collection too.”
“I would love to see that.”
“One of these days, perhaps. We like to get to know our pages for a while before we let them work with the Special Collections. Some of those objects are quite . . . powerful.”
If these were really the objects that inspired the famous fairy tales, then powerful was a good word, I thought. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to touch the spindle that inspired the story of Sleeping Beauty. When I was six, my mother took me to see Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty at Lincoln Center—that’s when I fell in love with ballet and fairy tales. How I wished my mother were still alive! I would love to see the look on her face when I told her about the collection.
If only I’d known about the collection when I was writing my paper for Mr. Mauskopf’s class! I wondered what he thought about all this. I hoped I would get to see the collection soon. I would have to work hard and show Doc and the others that I was trustworthy.
“Well, that sounds amazing. I would love to work down there,” I said.
“Patience,” said Dr. Rust. “In the words of the Akan proverb, ‘One eats an elephant one bite at a time.’”
Chapter 5:
Peculiar patrons and boots that don’t work
I got my first paycheck two weeks later—enough to replace my sneakers and even a few clothes I’d missed after Hannah left for college. I was working three shifts a week, two after school and one on Saturday.
I spent the next few shifts on Stack 5 (V T: Tools), Stack 4 (IV M: Music), and Stack 7 (VII FA: Fine Arts). It was fun to roll out the racks of paintings and see the mosaic of styles side by side. Cubist portraits rubbed elbows with sentimental domestic scenes and heroic landscapes. The sculpture was very heavy, which made it harder to deal with. Fortunately, Ms. Callender assigned us to the stacks in pairs, so there was always someone to help me, usually Marc or a quiet, burly guy named Josh.
After a few weeks at the repository, I found myself looking at everything differently—ordinary things, like chairs and windows and hot dog stands. I noticed their shapes; I noticed what they were made of. I noticed how they worked. I noticed the different doors in my neighborhood, the carved oak doors on the brownstones and the lacy iron gates on the apartment buildings and the graffitied metal gates on the shops. Objects would remind me suddenly of other objects, often ones in the collection: the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel was like an egg cup on Stack 9, my father’s bicycle helmet had the same built-for-speed curves as a record player on Stack 4. I felt as if I had new eyes. My father himself still hadn’t found time to come visit. His loss, I told myself.
After I caught a potentially serious error on Stack 9—Josh was about to misshelve a lead-smelting cauldron from Stack 5 (V T: Tools) with the saucepans in the kitchenwares section on Stack 9 (IX HG: Household Goods)—Ms. Callender decided I was ready for the Main Examination Room, the MER.
My first shift there was on a cold, bright Saturday. I’d never been in the MER on a sunny day. When I opened the door from the dim hallway, I could hardly believe I was in the same building, or any building at all. Sunlight poured in all around me, filtered through leaves and blossoms and bare tree branches. It sparkled off streams and waterfalls and snowdrifts. It gleamed on wet rocks and the wings of blackbirds.
After a moment, I realized what I was looking at: not an enchanted grove, but the famous Tiffany windows. All four sides of the MER were paneled with forest scenes. To the north was winter, with frost-rimed rocks and black branches against a bright sky. To the east, spring: crocuses, the barest glimmer of green, blossoming trees dropping petals that seemed to twist and float. To the south, summer: layer upon layer of green, with birds peeking out here and there and a pair of deer stooping to drink from the mossy stream. And to the west, fall in all its blazing yellows and reds. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
After a minute I noticed Ms. Callender beckoning from the center of the room, where the dumbwaiters and pneumatic tubes came together behind the magnificent carved wood partition.
She smiled at my expression. “Pretty, aren’t they? I love it up here. Tiffany really knew what he was doing,” she said.
“It’s gorgeous.” I thought of my father again. His loss, that was for sure!
“Well, let’s get you to work. You can sit at the desk today to get the hang of things. You’ll be giving the patrons their items when the pages send them from the various stacks. And every half hour, you’ll do a collection round—take the cart through the room and pick up any items the patrons are done with.”
I expected a library hush in the MER, but it was fairly noisy, especially in the carved staging cage where we three pages were working. The radiators hissed like lovesick lizards, the dumbwaiters chimed when they arrived, and the pneums came thumping and banging into their baskets like baby meteorites, while all around us the windows shimmered and glowed. I kept staring at them and losing track of my work.
Sarah, a plump blond page, sat on a swivel stool by a long, knotted row of pneumatic pipes, at least a dozen of them. Whenever a pneum fell into the basket at her elbow, she would pop it into one of the pipes, scooting up and down the row on her wheeled stool to find the right pipe—each one led to a different stack. She worked so fast it made me dizzy to watch her. I was glad I didn’t have her job.
It was fascinating to see the patrons in person. I remembered some of their names from the call slips I’d run in the stacks downstairs. They all wore white cotton gloves, which made them look strangely formal.
The man from Dark on Monday Productions came to claim another doublet. He was shorter than I’d imagined.
In the back of the room, under the winter windows, a couple of homeless-looking people had settled in. One of them had half a dozen shopping bags and was dozing, head down at the table.
“Is sleeping allowed?” I asked Ms. Callender.
She glanced over. “It’s fine—that’s just Grace Farr. Sometimes people come in to get warm in the winter. You can let them sleep unless they’re snoring and bothering the other patrons. If you have any trouble, ask Anjali for help—or send me a pneum. I’ll be downstairs on Stack 6. But you won’t have trouble with Grace. She’s a friend.”
“That’s good,” I said. I was glad they had a place to get warm.
After half an hour, Anjali sent me out with a cart to collect the items the patrons had finished with. The rumbling woke the sleeping patron—Grace Farr—as I went past her. She looked up at me and I recognized her pale gray eyes. She was the woman with the shopping cart, the one I’d given my sneakers to! “Hello,” I said, startled.
“Hello again.” She winked. Then she put her head back down on the table, and I continued my rounds.
My favorite patrons were a pair of elderly men in threadbare but well-pressed suits. They requested a magnificent eighteenth-century Russian chess set, carved from walrus ivory, and took it to a corner table under the autumn windows, where they spent the rest of my shift playing an intense game.
One patron, a short man with a neatly cropped beard, was doing some sort of work with globes. He requested half a dozen and lined them up in the middle of one of the long tables under a lamp, where he twirled
them this way and that, peering at the continents through a magnifying glass and taking notes. He seemed at home in the MER. He would stop to exchange a word or two with the chess players on his way to retrieve a new globe. He kept looking over at Anjali.
“What’s with the globes? Is that guy a cartographer?” I asked her.
“He’s an antiques dealer. He kind of gives me the creeps, the way he’s always staring at me.”
“Yeah, I noticed that too. Creepy. What’s he doing with the globes?”
“Probably trying to figure out whether some antique globe he’s trying to sell is real, or where it’s from, or what to charge for it,” Anjali said.
The man kept looking over in our direction with a little thoughtful frown. Not quite like he was admiring Anjali the way guys so often did—more like he was evaluating a painting he was thinking about buying.
After I’d been working for an hour or so, a patron came to pick up a pair of boots that looked a lot like the ones Marc had borrowed the day his feet got wet. In fact, they looked so similar I thought they must be the same ones. I checked the call number, expecting it to be from Stack 2, Textiles and Garb, but it started with I *GC, a designation I hadn’t seen before.
Soon the patron brought them back. “Excuse me—you gave me the wrong boots.”
I checked the label, which was tied to the laces: I *GC 391.413 S94. “No,” I said. “The label matches the call number on your call slip.”
“Well, they must be mislabeled. They don’t work.”
“What do you mean they don’t work?” I said. “You mean they don’t fit?”
“They fit fine, they just don’t work.”
Polly Shulman Page 5