The Librarianist

Across Bob’s first year in service, Miss Ogilvie slowly and by degrees took him into her complex confidences. She spoke to Bob of the days of her apprenticeship when she had been allowed, even encouraged, to strike problematic children. During the Second World War, and with so many fathers gone away, there was a laxity of discipline in the home. With no threat of the strap lingering in the minds of the youth, then did they give in to their animal selves. The women of America came together to discuss the issue; a growing faction warmed to the idea of corrective force. “Violence was for men only,” Miss Ogilvie said. “They assumed it as a burden, thinking we were lucky to be apart from the fray. Little did they know there were some among us, and not a small number, either, who had long wished to take part.”

“You were for it,” Bob said.

“Oh yes. And I assumed a role of leadership that was quite a surprise to myself and my colleagues both. It was a case of my not knowing I felt so strongly about something when all at once I was shouting my demands from the podium at the union hall.” She sat up straight. “Do you know what I like most in life, Bob? Practicality. A child is unruly. The child is struck. The child is no longer unruly. Mathematics of the heart. Oh, it was a fine tool. But they’ve taken so many of our tools away from us, and now our youngsters grow ever more blunt, ever more pointless, ever more coarse. The thing I don’t understand is, why should it come down to us to teach them manners? Why should it come down to me?”

Miss Ogilvie and Bob had no common ground aesthetically or intellectually but Bob, always mindful of Sandy Anderson’s advice, was supportive of her quest for soundlessness, and did not attempt to bend her will toward a more moderate environment. She was wrongheaded, perhaps a little bit insane; she was also two years past the traditional point of retirement. Soon enough and she would be gone; in the meantime, Bob was learning his craft.

The work itself was not ever difficult, at least not for Bob. He felt uncomplicated love for such things as paper, and pencils, and pencils writing on paper, and erasers and scissors and staples, paper clips, the scent of books, and the words on the pages of the books. Sometimes he thought of the women and men who’d composed these documents sitting at their desks and aiming for the elusive bull’s-eye and almost always missing but sometimes not, and Bob was certain that a room filled with printed matter was a room that needed nothing. His colleagues weren’t unfriendly, but vague in the face, and with not much to say. Some among them complained of the tedium of the profession, and Bob always expressed his sympathies, but really he had no comprehension of the sentiment. He understood that the people who knew boredom in the role of librarian were simply in the wrong profession. He didn’t judge them for it but felt a relief at not being like them.

As the newcomer, and lowest on the pole, he was given the morning shift, which was considered undesirable owing to its hours, but for Bob it achieved a lifestyle ideal. Every morning his alarm sounded at 5:00 a.m., and he came downstairs in his pajamas to light the fire he’d assembled the night before. As the fire took shape, Bob went back upstairs to shower and dress for the day. He owned two suits and alternated one to the other, going casual each third day: tieless, white button-down shirt under a dark V-neck, black slacks, black socks, black penny loafers. Dressed, his naked face stinging with aftershave, Bob returned to the living room to find the fire crackling and throwing its shifting light across the floor and walls. He ate his breakfast, then prepared and packed his lunch. If it was a particularly cold morning he would start the Chevy and leave it idling in the driveway while he washed the dishes.

As a child and teenager, Bob had been afraid of becoming an adult, this in response to an idea his mother had unwittingly instilled in him, which was that life and work both were states of unhappiness and compromise. But Bob’s mother had never understood the pleasures of efficiency, the potential for grace in the achievement of creature comforts. She cooked but hated cooking. She cleaned and felt cheated. Bob didn’t feel this way; the actions he performed each morning were needed, and each one fit into the next. He drove over empty, rain-wet streets and across the river to work. The parking lot was empty, the library silent as he crossed the carpeted front room and to his desk, where he turned on his green-shaded lamp and smoked a cigarette and read the library’s newspaper. After, he set up for the day, turned on all the lights, unlocked the doors, and then came the workday proper. At the commencement of his career he was uncomfortable in his dealings with the public but his shyness passed when he recognized they were not addressing him as a human being but using him as a tool, a mechanism of the library machinery.