“Ah, yes, Elizabeth. Stan said you would be calling. I’m glad to hear from you.”
Stan? So Mr. Mauskopf had a first name?
“Can you come in for an interview next Thursday after school?”
“All right. Where do I go?” I asked.
Dr. Rust gave me an address not far from my school, east of Central Park. “Ask for me at the front desk; they’ll send you up.”
The discreet brass plaque beside the door said The New-York Circulating Material Repository. From the outside, it looked like a standard Manhattan brownstone, the last in a long row. Next door was a big old mansion, the kind that are now mostly consulates or museums. That place would have made an impressive library, I thought as I walked up the steps to the repository and pulled open the heavy doors. It was just the sort of place I used to go to with my father, before he met Cathy. We used to spend every rainy weekend in museums and libraries. Especially the less f amous ones, like the Museum of the City of New York and the New-York Historical Society, with their odd collections of things—old china and tinsmiths’ tools and models of what the city looked like before the Revolution. We would play a game: pick out which painting (or clock, or chair, or photograph, or whatever) would have been Mom’s favorite.
I hadn’t been to a museum with my dad in years, but when I opened the doors, the slightly dusty smell brought it all flooding back. I felt as if I’d stepped back through time into a place that was once my home.
Through some trick of geometry, the entrance opened out into a large rectangular room apparently wider than the building that held it. At the far end was a massive desk, elaborately carved in dark wood.
A guy my age was sitting behind it.
But not just any guy—Marc Merritt, the tallest, coolest, best forward our basketball team had ever known. I had once seen him sink an apple core into the wastebasket in the teachers’ lounge from his seat across the corridor in study hall, with both doors partly closed. He looked like a taller, African American version of Jet Li, and he moved like him too, with the same acrobatic quickness. He was in Mr. Mauskopf’s other social studies section, and we had health ed together. Most of the girls at Fisher had crushes on him. I would too, if I didn’t think it would be presumptuous . . . Well, to be honest, I did anyway. I was pretty sure he had no idea who I was.
“Hi, I’m here to see Dr. Rust?” I said.
“All right. Who should I say is here?”
“Elizabeth Rew.”
Marc Merritt picked up the receiver of an old-fashioned telephone, the kind with a dial. “Elizabeth Rew here to see you, Doc. . . . Sure. . . . No, till six today. . . . All right.” He pointed a long arm—longer than Mr. Mauskopf’s, even—toward a fancy brass elevator door. “Fifth floor, take a left, through the arch. You’ll see it.”
When I stepped out of the elevator, corridors branched away in three directions. I couldn’t imagine how they fit it all in one narrow brownstone. I went down three steps through an arch to a small, book-lined room.
Dr. Rust was slight and wiry, with thick, shaggy hair just on the brown side of red and a billion freckles.
“Elizabeth. I’m glad to meet you.” We shook hands. “Please, have a seat. How is Stan?”
Strict but fair. Stern-looking, but with an underlying twinkle in his eye. Oddly dressed. “Fine,” I said.
“Still keeping that great beast in that tiny apartment, is he?”
“I guess? I’ve never been to his apartment.”
“Well. Let’s see, you’re in Stan’s European history class, yes?”
“That’s right.”
“Good, good. Stan’s never sent us a bad page. He says you’re hardworking and warmhearted, with an independent mind—which is high praise from Stan, believe me. So this is really a formality, but just to be thorough, do you do the dishes at home?”
What kind of a question was that? “Yes, most of the time.” One more bad thing about my stepsisters going away to college—I was the only kid left to do chores.
“About how often?”
“Most days. Five or six times a week, probably.”
“And how many have you broken this year?”
“Dishes?”
“Yes, dishes, glasses, that sort of thing.”
“None. Why?”
“Oh, we can never be too careful. When was the last time you lost your keys?”
“I never lose my keys.”
“Excellent. All right, sort these, please.” Dr. Rust handed me a box of buttons.
“Sort them? Sort them how?”
“Well, that’s up to you, isn’t it?”
This had to be the strangest interview I’d ever heard of. Was I going to lose the job because Dr. Rust didn’t like the way I sorted buttons?
I poured them out on the desk and turned them all faceup. There were large wooden disks and tiny pearls, shiny square buttons made of red or blue or yellow plastic, sparkly star-shaped ones with rhinestones that looked as if they would shred their buttonholes, little knots of rope, a set of silver buttons each engraved with a different flower, tiny rabbits carved from coral, plain transparent plastic buttons for inside waistbands, big glass things like mini doorknobs, a heavy gold button studded with what looked like real diamonds.
I grouped them by material: metal; wood and other plant products; bone, shell, and other animal parts; stone; plastic and other man-made materials, including glass. Then I divided each category into subgroups, also by material. Within the subgroups, I ranked them by weight.
“I see. Where would you put this?” Dr. Rust handed me a metal button, the kind with a loop on the back rather than holes. The front part had a piece of woven cloth of some sort, set behind glass.
I hesitated. Should it go in metals, in man-made materials for the glass, or in plants for the cloth? Maybe the cloth was wool, though, which would put it in animal parts. “Am I allowed to ask a question?” I said.
“Of course. Always ask questions. As the Akan proverb says, ‘The one who asks questions does not lose his way.’”
“Where’s Akan?”
“The Akan people are from west Africa. They have a remarkably rich proverb tradition. Perhaps because they believe in asking questions.”
“Oh. Okay—what’s the button made of?”
“Excellent question. Gold, rock crystal, and human hair.”
Not man-made materials, then; maybe stone. Other than that, the answer didn’t help me much. By weight, the button was mostly gold, so maybe it should go in with the metals? But I had put the diamond-looking one in stone, not metal. I decided to classify the new button by its weirdest component and put it in the animal pile.
“Interesting,” said Dr. Rust. “Sort them again.”
I scrambled them and resorted, making an elaborate grid of size and color. It started with red at the top and ran through the rainbow down to violet at the bottom, with extra rows for black and white. From left to right, it started with tiny collar buttons and finished with vast badges.
“Where would you put this?” Dr. Rust handed me a zipper.
A zipper! “Why didn’t you give me this the last time?” I said in dismay. “I could have put it with the metals.”
Was it my imagination, or had Dr. Rust’s freckles moved? Hadn’t the large one over the left eye been over the right eye earlier?
I scrambled the buttons again and started over. This time I sorted them by shape. I put the zipper with the toggles and a rectangular button carved with zigzags. I didn’t like that solution, but it was better than nothing.
Dr. Rust raised an eyebrow (no large freckle anywhere near now) and asked, “Which do you think is the most valuable?”
I considered the diamond one but picked an enameled peacock with blue gems in its tail. Dr. Rust seemed pleased.
“The oldest?”
I had no idea. I picked one of the silver ones.
“The most beautiful?”
I was getting a little impatient with all this. I picked one of t
he plastic ones, in a lovely shade of green. Dr. Rust didn’t seem quite to believe me. “The most powerful?”
“How can a button be powerful?”
“Oh, I think you’ll find over time that every object here has its own unique qualities. You’ll find that the materials in our collections speak to you.”
Did that mean I’d gotten the job?
Still, some of the buttons did seem to draw me more than others. I chose a black glass button with a disturbing geometry. Dr. Rust picked it up and examined it closely for a long time while I watched the freckles, trying to catch them moving. Wasn’t that butterfly shape of freckles on the left side just a minute ago?
“Well, Elizabeth, this has been most illuminating, but we both have a lot of work waiting,” said Dr. Rust at last, as if I had been the one staring endlessly at a button. “Can you start next week? Here, I think you’d better have this.”
Someone opened the door just as Dr. Rust handed me one last button. It matched the buttons on my coat—it might have been my missing top button.
“And here’s Marc, right on time.”
Chapter 2:
The New-York Circulating Material Repository
Marc stood in the doorway.
“You two know each other, right?” said Dr. Rust.
“Yeah, we met downstairs,” said Marc.
“Actually, we’re in health ed together,” I said. “With Ms. Reider.”
Marc had the grace to look embarrassed.
“Good,” said Dr. Rust. “Take Elizabeth up to Stack 9 and show her the ropes.”
“But the ropes are on Stack 2.”
“I meant metaphorically.”
Could it be possible—did Marc wink at me? The great and famous Marc Merritt winking at me? If so, he did it very quickly.
“And send Martha Callender a pneum,” continued Dr. Rust. “She’ll want to do her orientation thing and work out the schedules. Glad to have you with us, Elizabeth. We’ve been shorthanded lately—we can really use the help. If you have any questions, you know where to find me.”
I had a billion questions, in fact, but I followed Marc down the hallway and through a door marked Staff Only.
“What’s a stack?” I asked.
“A floor where the holdings are stored.”
“And what’s a pneum?”
“Pneumatic tube carrier,” said Marc.
“Okay, what’s a pneumatic tube carrier, then?”
“You’ll see. Watch your head here.”
We went through a low door—Marc had to duck, but my head was in no danger—and up a staircase, flight after flight after flight. The brownstone couldn’t possibly have so many floors—we must have gone way past the roof, into some sort of penthouse addition. I was panting hard, but Marc looked as cool as ever, like the black king in my chess set.
At last he opened a door marked Stack 9. We stepped out into the middle of a long room with rows of cabinets stretching away on both sides. Near the door was a pair of desks facing a trio of elevators: a tiny one the size of a microwave, another the size of a dishwasher, and a third the size of a small refrigerator. Beyond them thick pipes snaked off in several directions. These were painted white, black, and red, and each had a small oblong door at elbow height. One of the pipes ended like a bathtub faucet over a wire basket.
“The staging area is basically headquarters on each floor,” said Marc. “You can hang up your coat over there.” He took a white slip of paper from a tray of different-colored slips, wrote something on it, and folded it in half.
As I stood looking around, one of the pipes began to cough and thump, as if a tiny elephant were panicking inside. Something hurtled out of the open end of the pipe and landed with a thud in the wire basket beneath. Marc held it up to show me: a transparent plastic tube like a skinny soda can, with thick felt padding on both ends.
“See? A pneum.”
The pneum had a sliding panel in its side. Marc slid it open, reached into the pneum, extracted a piece of paper, and replaced it with the note he’d written. He pulled open a door in one of the pipes. I heard a soft roaring, like a wind in a canyon. He slipped in the pneum and let the door clap shut. The pipe banged as the pneum shot through it.
“Where did it go?” I asked.
“Upstairs to the pneum routing station.”
“How does it work?”
“The pipes are full of pressurized air. It’s like a tiny hurricane inside the pipe. The air pushes the pneums through the pipes, all around the building.”
“So you could send that pneum anywhere?”
“It goes where the pipe takes it. You have to pick a pipe that’s going where you want to send the pneum. I better run that call slip,” he said. “Wait here. If Ms. Callender shows up, tell her I’ll be right back.” He headed off down a row of file cabinets.
I hung up my coat, wandered over to a cabinet stenciled with letters and numbers, and peeked in. Inside I saw shelves of tea-cups. The next cabinet had shelves of coffee mugs. From time to time I heard a pneum gallop through the pipes in the ceiling.
Soon Marc came back with a pair of packages each the size of a shoe box. He put the first one in the smallest elevator, shut the door, and pressed a button.
“Was that a book?” I asked.
“What? No, it’s a chocolate pot. Sorry, I should have showed you. The patron requested a hot-chocolate set. Here’s the cream and sugar.” He opened the second box and showed me a fancy, swirly cream pitcher and sugar bowl packed in fluffy stuff, like cotton. He delicately tucked the fluff back around the set.
“Can I ask you a question?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. Like Doc says, ‘The one who asks questions does not lose his way,’” he answered in a credible imitation of Dr. Rust’s high-low voice.
“Okay, so this job. What am I supposed to be doing? Am I like a dishwasher?”
“A dishwasher!” He hooted with laughter. “Why would you be a dishwasher?”
I bristled. Being laughed at was bad enough—being laughed at by Marc Merritt felt doubly bad. Besides, it didn’t seem like such an unreasonable question to me. “Well, Dr. Rust asked me how often I do the dishes and if I break a lot of china. And there’s all this china around. What is the job, if I’m not washing dishes?”
“You’re a page.”
That made less sense than a dishwasher. Was he making fun of me? “You mean a medieval page, like an entry-level knight? Are there swords and dragons hidden away in some of these cabinets?”
He hooted again, but I didn’t feel as bad. At least this time you could argue he was laughing at my joke. “A library page,” he said. “When a call slip comes, you go get the item the patron requested. Did you ever use the reference library on Forty-second Street? You know how they keep the books locked up and bring them to you when you request them? Did you ever wonder who gets the books? That’s the pages.”
“Okay, so if this is a library, where are all the books?”
“Books? There’s some on Stack 6. Most of them are in the Document Room or the Reference Room. And, you know, here and there.”
Not many books? “What kind of a library is this?”
Before he could answer, the staircase door opened and a woman walked in. “Hi, Marc,” she said. “Elizabeth, right? I’m Martha Callender.” She tucked a lock of straight brown hair behind a little round ear. Everything about her, in fact, was round: her cheeks, her figure, her collar, the big buttons on her jacket, even her haircut, which roundly framed her round face and kept getting in her round eyes.
“Welcome, welcome! It’s great to have you here,” she told me. “We’ve been very shorthanded—we lost two pages in the last two months—and Stan told Dr. Rust you’re a hard worker.”
“I love his class. It’s worth working hard in,” I said, flattered.
“I bet he’s a great teacher. How is he doing? And the Beast?”
“Mr. Mauskopf is fine. I’ve never, um, met the Beast.”
“No? Well, that
’s something for you to look forward to.” She beamed at me. “Did Marc give you the grand tour?”
“Not yet, I was running a call slip,” said Marc.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll show you around, then. Did you have any questions to begin with?”
“Yes,” I said. “What is this place?”
“I’m not sure what you mean—which place? Stack 9? The Stack 9 staging area?”
“No, I mean the whole institution, the repository.”
I didn’t expect a real answer. Whatever this place was, it seemed to be full of people who told you to ask questions and then declined to answer them.
But Ms. Callender took a breath and began. “The New-York Circulating Material Repository is the oldest subscription library of its kind in the country. We’ve existed in one form or another since 1745, when three clock makers began sharing some of their more specialized tools. That collection became the core of the repository in 1837, when a group of amateur astronomers pooled their resources and opened shop. Our first home was on St. John’s Park, near Greenwich Street, but we moved uptown to East Twenty-fourth Street in 1852 and to our current location in 1921. Of course, we’ve expanded into the adjoining buildings since then. In fact, most of the stacks are part of the 1958 expansion. Lee’s office is in the original 1921 bequest, though.”
Informative, but not very enlightening. “Are the subscribers the people who come here to borrow books or whatever?” I asked.
“Books?” She looked taken aback. “No, not really. There are plenty of other libraries for that. I hope you’re not going to be disappointed, honey—if it’s books you’re after, I can put you in touch with Jill Kaufmann at the Lion Library. They can always use pages.”
Was I imagining things, or was Marc smirking a little?
“No, it’s just—Mr. Mauskopf said there was a job at a library, so I just assumed, you know, I would be working with books. If it’s not books, what is it?”
“What? Objects, of course. We’re just like a circulating book library but with far more varied collections.”
“What kind of collections? Collections of what?”
The Grimm Legacy Page 2