“About how people used to pay for books. That’s what you were saying.” That was Cassie, one of the sweetest young women ever to grace a desk. Not the sharpest, by a long shot, whose combo of sweet, trusting, and dim put her in my kids-to-worry-about category.
“Thank you,” Ms. Fisher said. “Yes. I was going to point out Dr. William Pepper, there.”
A bronze statue of an unsmiling man in judicial-looking robes sat at the top of the flight of stairs, on a landing that was lined on each side with another flight of stairs.
“He was provost of the University of Pennsylvania in the 1880s,” Ms. Fisher said, “and he convinced his uncle, Dr. George S. Pepper, to provide funds for a free library. His uncle bequeathed a hundred fifty thousand dollars plus some of his estate to establish a free library with no rental charges. As large a sum as that was, especially more than a century ago, Dr. Pepper knew it wasn’t enough to build the sort of institution he imagined, but he hoped it would encourage other Philadelphians to endow the place. And as you can see, that’s what happened.” She was back on track, chugging ahead too quickly with her memorized spiel.
My kids eyeballed me at the mention of those illustrious Peppers—those students, that is, who didn’t start humming the Dr Pepper jingle. I let them speculate about family ties between their English teacher and the Peppers who could toss around sums like that. Maybe they’d treat me with more respect if they believed I was an heiress, teaching for the sheer larkiness of it.
If only.
I allowed my thoughts to sidle back to Mother Bea Pepper’s amazing philanthropy. It was not good to set the idea free where it could spin around my brain the same way as it had all the previous night. I tried instead to listen to our guide, who was explaining that this impressive building was not the first home of the newly created Free Library, but that when it was built in the Twenties, it was the most modern library anywhere, and the most fireproof. “And now,” she said, “to the jewel of the holdings, a special place for all you book lovers.”
To whom did she think she was talking? Had she not noticed the glassy-eyed faces surrounding her? Wasn’t knowing we were from Philly Prep enough? Maybe the woman had a truly dry sense of humor.
We divided in half for the ride up in the surprisingly small elevators. “I love this part of the library most of all,” she said when we all emerged on a balcony on the third floor. It faced a twin balcony across the way, and between them, a long drop down to the wide staircase, stories below.
Ms. Fisher’s smile looked almost sincere. “There are true treasures here.”
“That why the place is sealed off?” That was Joey Nickles, who seemed always to be calculating the net worth of anything presented to him. “Like glass doors on the entryway. None of the other places have them.”
Ms. Fisher nodded. “Treasures,” she repeated.
Adam was wandering again, although there wasn’t much room or opportunity to go anywhere. Once you were off the elevator, you could walk into a wall in a sort of elevator vestibule, or you could go to the right, at which point you were on the balcony, with no exit except a return ride down the same elevators. What looked like it might once have been an alternate exit had an enormous wrought-iron gate sealing it off.
Ms. Fisher buzzed us in, and once we were inside, her speech resumed its hurried, nervous tempo, again sounding rehearsed. “This is a special place,” she began, shepherding us past closed cases filled with luxuriously bound books, and a case displaying etchings. I wanted to ask about the grandfather clocks positioned at each end of the entry hall, but she moved too quickly. “We have a priceless collection of books going back to 3000 B.C.,” she said, and then she paused, waiting for a reaction. I could have told her she’d get none, but she handled it by behaving as if she had. “Ah, yes,” she said, guiding us toward a cabinet, “you are of course skeptical of a book from 3000 B.C., but that’s because they don’t look like the books you read today. Such as these records, which are in cuneiform.” She unlocked a narrow drawer and lifted out a pinkish-yellow disk. “These are clay tablets with symbols pressed into them.” The students were shown a variety of tablets, some coin-sized, others fragments of larger pieces.
Adam stayed on the fringes of our group, now and then checking out what we were watching. I looked at him as he edged down the passageway, heading toward a chic—and possibly myopic—woman studying the contents of a display case. She bent over it so closely, her necklace was on the glass. When she became aware of Adam, she straightened up, looked at him, possibly caught a whiff of him, and backed off. Her fear seemed palpable. Her skin looked particularly pale against her black silk shirt, the black and gold scarf she wore dramatically slung over one shoulder—something I’ve always wanted to do, but can’t bring myself to dare. But before I could discreetly get to either one of them, she turned and made a rapid exit. I was sure she hadn’t been staff—she’d looked too elegant, with her hair pulled back like a Spanish dancer, and jewelry I immediately coveted—chunky gold earrings and the necklace that was intertwined with the scarf—a long gold chain interset with gold-edged black stones.
Adam had driven out a library patron. I sighed. I’d probably have run, too, if I’d seen him staring at me in his intense yet disoriented style.
He continued to hover at the fringes of the group as we went into a room lined with glass shelves and a few books on display on a table. Ms. Fisher showed us a stunning illuminated manuscript that royalty or an extremely wealthy family had owned.
Most of the class, except for the terminally bored, looked sufficiently intrigued, catching a sense of the history of a different time and place through the manuscript, perhaps even of how rare, valuable, and treasured books bid once been.
Except for Adam, who stood apart, head tilted as if listening to a separate source of sound, frowning. It was hard not to think about Adam, yet thinking about him caused pain. I couldn’t help him and he couldn’t help me. Still, he seemed stranger than ever, dully agitated. I wondered if his parents had compounded matters by overreacting to our meeting the day before.
“Young man!” Ms. Fisher’s voice was painfully sharp. “You!”
Adam didn’t respond.
“Adam,” I said softly. “Adam.” He turned.
“Please stay with your class! You’re not permitted to go off on your own.”
“That lady did,” he said. “That lady was alone.”
Our guide frowned. “I don’t know who you’re talking about, but if someone was alone, she had permission. You don’t.” She turned back to the group, thereby missing Adam’s furious scowl. She spoke again, missing as well Adam’s growled mutters.
From that point on he never strayed and never stopped glaring at her.
“Our holdings include a collection of over eight hundred incunabula,” she told the group. “Anybody know what that means?”
“Demons,” somebody suggested.
Sounded right to me.
“Books printed before the year 1501.” She showed the class one that included ornate illustrations, mostly, it appeared, of naked young women politely covering their private parts. I didn’t have a chance to ask why they were naked in the first place or what the book was about. I was too preoccupied with willing myself away. From the Rare Book Department and Adam’s nonstop glower. From my students. From being their teacher.
Ms. Fisher introduced another librarian, a large, pleasantly shambling man whom it was easy to imagine hunkering down in a room filled with ancient volumes. He was bespectacled and well dressed but rumpled. I knew without looking that his tie would have a stain on it.
The new speaker, introduced as Mr. Labordeaux, thanked her, and as she tagged along behind him he launched into a description of the special room we were about to enter, William Elkins’ library. Not just its contents, but the library itself—walls, floor, ceiling, and furnishings—had been relocated to this place. I’d been here before and remembered the astounding paneled Georgian room.
It had
, in fact, given me an idea for Mackenzie’s birthday gift. He was such an avid student of history that I thought I’d search for a (less) rare book of American history for him. Start his version of the Elkins Library, I suppose. The Mackenzie Library. So far it had turned out to be a bad idea, since I couldn’t find anything both aesthetically and financially acceptable. A price tag of a few thousand dollars was not in my league.
“This room is over sixty feet long,” he said, and once again I wondered what the rest of Elkins’ house had looked like if this enormous room was his library.
“About these books you’re showing us,” Linda Saylor said. She was one of our brighter students, although her forte was math and science, not books. I was momentarily delighted that she’d been sufficiently involved to ask a question. “Are they valuable?”
Labordeaux took on a grave expression, and Ms. Fisher watched him intently. Their reverential air made it clear these books were obviously worth a fortune. I could see my students’ collective interest level rise.
“All our holdings are valuable in one way or another, because they are rare and unusual. And of course they vary, depending on just how rare they are, their condition, the fame of their authors, whether they are inscribed, if they have historical significance—lots of factors.”
“Like what? Like what are they worth?” Linda had been born with a twenty-first-century mind, and high tech was as natural to her as breathing. I could imagine her deciding how best to sell off the contents of the room and replace them with on-line versions.
“These books aren’t for sale,” Ms. Fisher said sharply.
Labordeaux was silent a beat too long, as if waiting to see if she was going to interrupt again, then he took a deep breath and continued. “They’re not for sale, so all this is hypothetical,” he said, “but currently, in the auction market, a single volume of Poe can sell for a hundred thousand dollars. And in fact, one page of the Gutenberg Bible—one single page—sells for fifteen thousand. If that doesn’t impress you enough, then consider this: There is a copy of Chaucer’s tales published by Caxon that is for sale now for three to four million dollars. In short, you are surrounded by irreplaceable works of artistic or historical significance.”
My kids nodded approval. At least they understood that somebody somewhere valued these books. Imagine the worth of these rooms!
Ms. Fisher, on the other hand, scowled. She and Adam could pair up and become the inappropriate-expression twins. I had theories about what was wrong with Adam, but why was that woman miserable looking? So sharp in her responses, so tense? Was she jealous that Labordeaux had taken the reins as they entered the room most likely to engage visitors? How petty that seemed.
But of course she’d looked stressed by the man in the flannel shirt and by Adam, who hadn’t been all that much out of line. Even with the man on the staircase, who’d done nothing whatsoever. The woman had problems.
“…collection of Dickens’ works, some in their original serial form, plus about a thousand letters of his.” Labordeaux took a box out of a glass-fronted cabinet and withdrew pamphlets from its back. The original Pickwick Papers. I was impressed. I don’t think I can say the same for the kids, although they did perk up at the sight of the manuscript of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Maybe they were Poe fans, or more likely they remembered that Labordeaux had mentioned Poe’s very high worth. As for me, the Luddite, I thrilled at the sight of a handwritten anything in this computer era. What would future collectors save—printouts? Floppy backup disks?
Once we were out of the Elkins Library, the baton passed back to Ms. Fisher, who resumed her rundown of the collections, with reliable names like Shakespeare and the Magna Carta and George Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain and even an enormous stuffed raven that had been Dickens’, in its pre-stuffed incarnation, and which may have inspired Poe’s famous poem.
So far so good. I speculated about what might emerge from this. Perhaps the cuneiform tablets would have struck a spark and we’d be pitched a film about a Babylonian shepherd. Someone would be fired up by the children’s book where the frontispiece that had been printed with GOD BLESS GEORGE III had been edited by a patriotic young hand to read, instead, GOD BLESS GEORGE WASHINGTON.
And cows—aside from those on my wall at home—might fly.
We regrouped outside the Rare Book Department, on the balcony. Troy Bloester—of course his classmates called him Blister—declaimed Juliet’s speech from the balcony until I shushed him, mainly because he hadn’t even gotten the words right. Not that anyone was on the balcony across from us, although it held desks and looked as if it was often occupied. And not that I thought anyone below would hear us. They couldn’t see us, either.
It looked to be two or three normal stories till the next landing, and I saw only a statue of a reader nestled in an impressionistic tree. No annoyed living readers. I remembered coming here when I was small, when the area below was a smoking lounge, and the big kids—the ones in high school—took study breaks in clouds of blue exhalations. Today the area was pristine.
Ms. Fisher led us back onto the elevators up to the fourth floor, although not yet for lunch in the cafeteria. At this point we were allowed a quick peek at the theater collection, squirreled away in a narrow vertical space, and then we rode down again to the collections on the second, first, and ground floors. I straggled along, trying to make small talk with Ms. Fisher. It seemed what civilized women did in this situation. “Must be a pleasure to work here,” I said.
She nodded. “Mostly. Of course, I’m new. Fairly new. And only part-time so far, but I do love working in the Rare Book Department.”
“Oh,” I said. “I thought perhaps you were a docent.”
She shook her head. “No docent program yet, but they’re hoping to. But not me.”
“So then, your title is…?”
“Library assistant. I have my degree, but they didn’t have a full-time opening or a librarian’s opening. Someday. I’m taking courses, starting with one on computers. A lot has changed, moved forward.”
She was good enough about answering questions, but each answer was a closed end with nowhere else to go, and she didn’t offer anything on her own. Didn’t ask me anything, either.
“So, ah, what kind of things do you do up there?” Maybe library science would be my next field.
“Whatever they need. Like this. Help with inventorying—a lot of the collection hasn’t been inventoried yet, help with the special exhibits, things like that.”
“Must be hard caring for such old books. I guess there’s lots of work for the bindery.”
She stopped in midstride and looked at me as if I’d crawled out from a rare book I’d chewed. “We do not rebind rare books,” she said. “They are rare, you see. We don’t change anything about them.”
As soon as she began her answer I realized how dim my question had been. Of course you wouldn’t repackage an illuminated manuscript. Not even a leather-bound book from the last century. You wouldn’t remake a historical object. But she didn’t have to have brimstone coming out of her nostrils. I’d been trying to make conversation.
“We conserve our books,” she said, resuming her brisk pace. “Special, highly trained people who know all sorts of things about paper chemistry work to conserve what is there, not to replace it.”
Damned if I’d try any further communication. She was a boorish woman who didn’t understand the social norm. As in normal.
Normal. That word was appearing in my vocabulary too often lately. I was defining it too often as well. For me, this was not at all normal.
In any case, from then on the two of us made neither large nor small talk. She retreated inside herself and left me to resume my personal and varied worries.
I bided my time until after lunch, when the students would be let loose and I would skim Lia’s annotations on Henry James, then find out what I could about grad schools. It wouldn’t hurt to browse, to check out requirements—even though I still didn’t know
what I wanted to be when I grew up.
Ultimately my students, from whom I could almost physically feel myself dissociating, were wandering and burrowing all over the building in a fine imitation of scholars, and I was on my own, too, in the Education, Philosophy and Religion Department, browsing through the ultimate smorgasbord—a guide to 1,600 institutions with graduate programs.
“What are you interested in studying?” the librarian had asked when I made inquiries about finding information.
“Well, that’s just it,” I’d whispered, ashamed of myself. “I don’t know. Is there anything that lists everything?”
There was, so I speculated and dreamed my way through programs in the humanities, and, in another volume, business, information science, law, social work… I also periodically checked up on Adam, who was across the room.
Libraries being no longer silent, I sat cocooned in the soft buzz of voices. Time blurred pleasantly, grew soft around the edges; and I wandered in my future.
Until all daydreams and sense of security were shattered by a shrieking—an electronic, intense alarm that pierced the skull and left shrapnel in the brain. I looked around at the other people looking around, as if we were all searching for a leader.
Finding none, and no explanation, deafened by the screaming alarm, we stood, scraping chairs and feet, and headed for the exit
Adam was no longer among us. I had no idea when he’d left.
I broke into a run, trying not to imagine what had caused the alarm to ring. What had happened. To whom. And I hoped—I hoped so desperately I could taste it—that I didn’t know, couldn’t name, whoever’d caused this outrage.
Five
I ran down a wide hallway, around a corner, past a bank of computers, and joined the crush of people converging outside the social sciences room, at the top of the broad, divided stairway. Voices blurred, piled one on the other, all asking what was going on and what we were supposed to do.
Adam and Evil (An Amanda Pepper Mystery) Page 5