by Paula Guran
Everyone knows she isn’t mine. I don’t mind.
We read to her on winter nights. She likes stories.
Death and the Librarian
Esther M. Friesner
In an October dusk that smelled of smoke and apples, a lady in a black duster coat and a broad-brimmed hat, heavily veiled, called at Rainey’s Emporium in Foster’s Glen, New York. She descended from the driver’s seat of a black Packard, drawing the eye of every man who lounged on the wooden steps of the crossroads store and attracting a second murmuring throng of idlers from Alvin Vernier’s barber shop across the way. The men of Foster’s Glen had seen a Packard automobile only in the illustrated weeklies, but to see a woman driving such a dream-chariot—!
However, by the time the lady reached the steps of Rainey’s and said, “I beg your pardon; I am seeking the home of Miss Louisa Foster,” she had become a middle-aged man in a plain black broadcloth suit, a drummer with sample case in hand and a gleaming derby perched on his head, so that was all right.
“Miss Foster?” Jim Patton raised one eyebrow and tipped back his straw hat as he rubbed his right temple. “Say, you wouldn’t be a Pinkerton, now would you?” And the other men on Rainey’s steps all laughed, because Jim was reckoned a wit as wits went in Foster’s Glen, New York.
The gentleman in black smiled politely, and a trim mustache sprouted across his upper lip to give him a more dapper, roguish air. (This at the expense of his drummer’s case, which vanished). “Yes, she’s in trouble with the law again,” he replied, turning the jape back to its source and stealing Jim’s audience along with his thunder. “Lolling on the throne of an opium empire, I’m told, or was it a straightforward charge of breaking and entering?” He patted the pockets of his vest. “I’m useless without my notes.” The idlers laughed louder, leaving poor Jim no hope but to drop the cap-and-bells and try the knight’s helm on for size instead.
“That’s a scandalous thing to say about a lady!” Jim snapped. “And about a lady like Miss Foster—! I can’t begin to tell you all she’s done hereabouts: church work, the Ladies’ Aid, visiting the sick. . . . Why, she’s even turned the east wing of the judge’s house into a library for the town!”
“Is that so?” The stranger shot his crisp celluloid cuffs and adjusted a fat ring, pearl and silver, on his lefthand littlest finger. It twinkled into diamond and gold.
His remark was only a remark, but Jim Patton took it for a challenge to his honesty. “Yes, that’s so,” he blustered. “And she’s even set aside the money to make the judge’s house over to the town for use as a library entire after she’s gone.”
“What does the judge have to say to all this?”
“What does—?” Jim gaped. “Why, you scoundrel, old Judge Foster’s been dead these twenty years! What’s your business with his daughter but mischief if you don’t even know that much about the family?”
“That would be business that concerns only Miss Foster and me,” the stranger replied, and he grew a little in height and breadth of chest so that when Jim Patton stood up to face him they were an even match.
Still, Jim bellowed, “I’ll make it my business to know!” and offered fists the size of small pumpkins for inspection. He was farm-bred and raised, born to a father fresh and legless returned from Gettysburg. Caleb Patton knew the value of begetting muscular sons to follow the plow he could no longer master, and Jim was his sire’s pride.
The stranger only smiled and let his own muscles double in size until his right hand could cup Jim Patton’s skull without too much strain on the fingers. But all he said was, “I am a friend of the family and I have been away.” And then he was an old man, dressed in a rusty uniform of the Grand Old Army of the Republic, even though by rights the thick cloth should have been deep navy blue instead of black as the abyss.
The Packard snorted and became a plump, slightly frowzy looking pony hitched to a dogcart. It took a few mincing steps forward, sending the Emporium idlers into a panic to seize its bridle and hold it steady until the gaffer could retake his seat and the reins. Most solicitous of all was Jim Patton, who helped the doddering veteran into the cart and even begged the privilege of leading him to Miss Foster’s gate personally.
“That’s mighty kind of you, sonny,” the old man in black wheezed. “But I think I can find my way there right enough now.”
“No trouble, sir; none at all,” Jim pressed. “When your business with Miss Foster’s done, I’d be honored if you’d ask the way to our farm after. My daddy’d be happy to meet up with a fellow soldier and talk over old times. Were you at Antietam?”
The old man’s tears were lost in the twilight. “Son, I was there too.” And he became a maiden wrapped in sables against the nipping air. She leaned over the edge of the dogcart to give Jim a kiss that was frost and lilacs. “Tell Davey to hug the earth of the Somme and he’ll come home,” she said. She drove off leaving Jim entranced and bewildered, for his Davey was a toddler sleeping in his trundle-bed at home and the Somme was as meaningless to his world of crops and livestock as the Milky Way.
The lady drove her pony hard, following the directions Jim and the rest had given. Her sable wraps whipped out behind her in the icy wind of her passage. The breath of a thousand stars sheared them to tattered wings that streamed from her shoulders like smoke. Her pony ran at a pace to burst the barrels of the finest English thoroughbreds, and his hooves carved the dirt road with prints like the smiling cut of a sword. They raced over distance and beyond, driving time before them with a buggywhip, hastening the moon toward the highpoint of the heavens and the appointed hour.
At length the road Jim Patton had shown her ended at the iron gates of a mansion at the westernmost edge of the town. By the standards of Boston or New York it was only a very fine house, but in this rural setting it was a palace to hold a princess. Within and without the grounds trees shielded it from any harm, even to the insinuating dagger of curious whispers. The judge himself had ordered the building of this fortification on the borders of his good name, and the strain of shoring up his innumerable proprieties had aged wood and stone and slate before their time.
The maiden stepped out of the dogcart and shook out her silvery hair. The black kitten mewed where the pony had stood and sniffed the small leather portmanteau that was the only tiding or trace of the dogcart.
The elderly woman gathered up portmanteau and kitten, pressing both to the soft fastness of her black alpaca-sheathed bosom with the karakul muff that warmed her hands. She glanced through the fence’s tormented iron curlicues and her bright eyes met only darkened windows. She had ridden into town with the twilight, but now she stood on the hour before the clocks called up a new day.
“None awake? Well, I am not in the least surprised,” she commented to the kitten. “At her age, quite a few of them grow tired at this hour. It’s almost midnight. Let us try to conclude our business before then. I have a horror of cheap dramatics.”
Then she caught sight of a glimmer of lamplight from a window on the eastern side of the house. “Ah!” she exclaimed, and her breath swung back the iron gates as she sailed through them and up the long white gravel drive.
The front doors with their glass lilies deferred to her without the hint of a squeak from latch or hinges. She took a moment in the entryway to arrange herself more presentably. Her black-plumed hat she left on a porcelain peg beside a far more modest confection of gray felt and ivory veils, then studied her reflection in the oak-framed glass the hat-pegs adorned.
“Mmmmmm.” She laid soft pink fingers to her lips, evaluating the dimpled, dumpling face and all its studied benevolence. “Mmmmno,” she concluded, and the black kitten mewed once more as the handsome young man in gallant’s garb took final stock of every black-clad, splendid inch of his romantic immanence. He opened the portmanteau out upon itself, and it turned into an onyx orb. He felt that when a woman spent so much of her life circumscribed by domesticity and filial attentiveness, she at least deserved to depart in more dashing company than
that of a fuddy-duddy refugee from a church bazaar. He sighed over the glowing orb before he knelt to touch the kitten’s tail. Was that a purr he heard from the heart of the black sword he raised in the silent hall?
He passed through corridors where clutter reigned but dust was chastened out of existence. His gaze swept the house for life and saw the cook snoring in her room below the rooftree, the maids more decorously asleep in their narrow iron beds. A proper housecat patrolled the kitchen, the pantry and the cellar, hunting heedless mice, dreaming oceans of cream. He noted each of them and sent his whispers into minds that slept or wakened:
“If you love him, tell him not to leave the farm for that factory job in New York City or the machines will have him.”
“She must be born in the hospital, no matter how loudly your mother claims that hospitals are only for the dying, or she’s as good as never born at all.”
“Let the silly bird fly across the road; don’t chase it there! The delivery man cannot rein back a motor-driven van in time and he does not know that you are a queen.”
In certain times, in certain cases, he was allowed this much discretion: he might give them the means to forestall him, if they only had the wit to heed. Would he call it kindness? Ah, but in the end there were no whispered cautions that would avail. He could not change the fact he embodied, merely the time of its fruition. The grand black swan’s wings he called into being as a final touch were neither grand nor black enough to hide him from the inevitability of himself.
Still, he thought she would appreciate the wings, and the way he made the black sword shine and sing. He came to the east wing, to the door past which the library lay. He knew the room beyond. Every wall of it was armored with bookshelves, except tor the interruption of a massively manteled fireplace and where a pair of heavy French doors framed a view of the hill sloping down to the town. He had entered that room twenty years ago, wearing somber juridical robes and a bulldog’s grim, resigned expression as he informed Judge Foster of the verdict sans appeal. Then his hands had been blunt as the words he had spoken. Now his fingers were long and pale as he touched the orb to the doorknob and let himself in.
She looked up from the book she was reading. “Hello,” she said, closing the buff-colored volume and laying it aside on the great desk of rosewood and brass. A snowy wealth of hair crowned her finely featured face. Lamplight overlaid with a dappled pattern of roses shone on the fair hands she folded in the lap of her moire dress, a gown so lapped in shades and meanings of black that it left his own dark livery looking shabby by comparison. Her expression held recognition without fear.
“Were you expecting me?” he asked, rather taken aback by the calm she wore draped so gracefully around her.
“Eventually,” she replied. Her smile still had the power to devastate. “Isn’t that the way it is supposed to be?” She rose from the high backed chair and the bottle-green leather moaned softly to give her up from its embrace. “Father always told me I’d go to Hell, though he’d beat me black and blue if I so much as pronounced the word. Now that I’ve said it, I assume that’s my destination.” Her eyes twinkled, and in the air before them fluttered the ghost of a long-vanished fan. “Is it?”
The swan’s wings slumped, then trickled away entirely. The gallant’s costume diminished to the weedy suiting of a country parson. The sword lingered only long enough for him to realize it was still in his hands, an embarrassment. It shrank posthaste to become a raven that hopped onto the parson’s shoulder and croaked its outrage at being transformed into so inappropriate an accessory. At least the orb had possessed the good taste to become a well-thumbed copy of Scripture.
“I—ah—do not discuss destinations.”
“Not even to tell me whether it will be all that much of a change from Foster’s Glen?” She owned the miraculous ability to be arch without descending to kittenishness.
“I am—er—I am not at liberty to say,” he replied, polishing the lozenges of his pince-nez with a decidedly unclerical red kerchief he yanked from a trouser pocket.
“What are you at liberty to do, then?” she asked. “Collect the dead?”
“Er—ah—souls, yes. In specific, souls.” He settled the lenses back on the bridge of his nose. “One does one’s duty.”
“One does it poorly, then,” she said, and there was a great deal of bite to the lady’s words.
Her vehemence startled him so that he did a little jump in place and bleated, “Eh?”
She was happy to explain. “If souls are what you gather, I said you do a shoddy job of work. You could have had mine twenty-five years ago. I had no further use for it. But to come now—! Hmph.” Her small nose twitched with a disdainful sniff that had once broken aspiring hearts.
“Twenty-five years a—?” He made the pages of his Bible flutter as he searched them with a whirlwind’s speed. His eyes remained blank as he looked up again and inquired, “I am addressing Miss Louisa Foster?”
The lady sighed and moved toward the nearest wall. From floor to ceiling it was a single, continuous tidal wave of books. The musty smell of aging ink and paper, the peculiarly enchanting blend of scents from cloth and leather bindings, sewn spines, and the telltale traces of all the human hands that had turned those pages enveloped her like a sacred cloud of incense as she took a single volume down.
“So it is true,” she said, looking at the text in her hands instead of at him. “Death does mistake himself sometimes.”
“But you are—?” he insisted.
“Yes, of course I am!” She waved away his queries impatiently.
“Louisa Jane Foster, Judge Theophilus Foster’s only child, sure to make a brilliant marriage or Father would know the reason why. A brilliant marriage or none. Father gave me as few choices as you do.”
She replaced the book and took down a second one, a cuckoo among the flock of fine leather-fledged falcons. It was only bound in yellowing pasteboards, but when she opened it a scattering of scentless flower petals sprinkled the library carpet. The laugh she managed as she paged through the crumbling leaves trembled almost as much as her smile.
“Have you ever heard of a man named Asher Weiss? More than just in the way of business, I mean. Did you know he was a poet?” She did not look disappointed when her caller admitted he did not. “I didn’t think so.” Her eyes blinked rapidly. “And the rest of the world is now as ignorant as you.
“There is a poem in here called ‘For L.,’ ” she said. “I don’t think seven people alive today ever read it. But I was one who did. He wrote it and I followed a trail of words into his heart, like Gretel seeking a way out of the darkling wood by following trails of pebbles and breadcrumbs.” She stopped to gather up the petals in her palm and slip them back between the pages. “Not very brilliant, as matches go; nothing his faith or mine would willingly consecrate, so we made do without consecration. We two—we three soon learned how hard it is to live on pebbles and breadcrumbs.” She slid the booklet back onto the shelf.
“May I?” He helped himself to the poet’s pasteboard gravestone and read the dead man’s name. “But this man died more than twenty-five years since!” he protested.
“And did I ever protest when you took him?” she countered. “At least you left me . . . the other.” Her mouth hardened. She snatched the booklet from him and jammed it back between its more reputable kin. “A consolation, I imagined; living proof that God did not solely listen to Father’s thundered threats. For a while I dreamed I saw the face of a god of love, not retribution, every time I looked down into his laughing eyes, so like his father’s. Oh, what a fine joke!” She plucked a random volume from the shelf and flipped it open so that when she spoke, she seemed to take her words from the printed lines before her. “With all the best jokes, timing is everything.”
She held the timorous parson’s gaze without mercy. “Is sickness your purview too? Is hunger? Is fever? Or are you only there to settle their affairs in the end? That time—crouching by the bed, holding his hand�
��I wanted it to be me you took, not him. God knows how he would have gotten on without me—maybe Father’s heart would have softened to an orphan’s plight . . . ” Her smile was bitter as she shook her head. “No. I only read fairy tales. It is for the children to believe in them.”
She looked up. “Do you like children, Death?”
Before he could answer, she folded the book shut. “I know,” she said. “Ask no questions. Bow your head. Accept.” She jabbed the book at the judge’s portrait above the fireplace and her voice plunged to a baritone roar: “Your choices will be made for you, girl! When I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you!” She clapped the book between her hands and laughed. “You would think I would have learned my lessons better than that by now, living with the voice of God Almighty. Almighty . . . whose word remakes the world according to his desires. You know, I never had a Jewish lover, never had a bastard child. When I did not return with Father from New York City, all those years that I was gone from Foster’s Glen, I was studying music abroad, living with a maiden aunt in Paris. So I was told. The townsfolk still think I am a lady.”
“But you are!” he exclaimed, and the raven sprang from his shoulder to flit beneath the plaster sunbursts on the ceiling.
“You are as happily gulled as they, I see.” She extended her hand and the bird came to rest upon it. “I am sorry,” she told it. “We have no bust of Pallas for your comfort here, birdie. Father viewed all pagan art as disgraceful, because like my Asher, so few of its subjects seemed able to afford a decent suit of clothes.”
“Well, ah—” The parson took a breath and let it out after he had comfortably become a gentleman in evening dress offering his arm and the tribute of a rose. “Shall we go?”
“No.” The lady laughed and kissed the bird’s gleaming plumage. “Not yet.”
“Not—? But I thought—?” He cleared his throat and adjusted the starched bosom of his shirt. “From the warmth of your initial greeting, Miss Foster, I assumed you were quite willing to accept me as your escort tonight.”