Whitechurch (18 page)

I help Chellie into her long wool coat. The three of us exit together quietly, walking tentatively across the room after Chellie kills all the lights. We stand on the sidewalk out front for an extra minute, looking at the breath misting out of each other.

“See that,” Chellie says to Adam Everly, pointing across the street at Missus Minnever’s Bed and Breakfast, which has been closed for the two years that Missus Minnever has been dead.

“I see it,” Adam Everly says.

“Everybody sees it,” I add. “How could you miss it? Biggest eyesore in town.”

“I hear it’s coming up for auction,” she says, winking at Adam Everly. “Prime location. Massive possibilities, for the right syndicate …”

Adam Everly turns away from Ms. King, toward Missus Minnever’s again, then back once more to Ms. King. He winks. I am certain it is the first time he has ever attempted this maneuver. He rubs his eye.

“We’ll talk,” Chellie King says. “We’ll lunch on it….”

I start tugging her down the sidewalk as Adam Everly waves excitedly, visions of B&B success dancing in his head.

“Well, then, good night,” I say, heading off with Chellie, east. Adam Everly continues walking backward, west.

“See, this is the thing,” Chellie says as she lifts my arm and wraps it like a stole around herself. She leans hard against me, so that I have to lean equally hard to keep us balanced as we walk. “The thing, the thing is …”

I wait, walk listen and wait. But that is it, Chellie is finished. Which is just as well. It’s late. We pass the Laundromat, which is unlighted, which means nobody is fondling Whitechurch’s unmentionables unless it’s going on in the darkness. We pass the empty coffee shop beneath my apartment. Chellie looks up while I look straight ahead. We pass Chuck’s International Auto Parts and Holly’s House of Fine which is a beauty parlor and the library and the town hall and the Texaco which looks like a modern big-time gas station because Texaco forced Jason Gilmartin to build that twenty-foot-high lighted hooded island for the pumps or lose his franchise, so he built it and now it looks like Whitechurch’s little piece of Vegas, screaming yellow light over the town center through the night.

We pass the burger place and the pie place and the donut place. “It’s a good thing,” I say, finding myself now giving Chellie a tight squeeze, then backing off, “that all these places sell only one item apiece. ’Cause if it was just one normal-size joint instead of all chopped up like this, Whitechurch would be an awfully dull place. Couldn’t have
that
now, could we?”

“Christ!” Chellie roars at the thought. With the dead stop of the town this late, the sound of it rings, rolls, back west, down the main street, up the rise outbound at the far end of town. You could hear it come to a stop,
pong
, in the bell tower of First Unitarian.

We have stopped to listen to it. She smiles. She stops smiling. I do it this time. “Christ!”

We can still hear it just slightly as we walk the walk to Chellie King’s sky-blue clapboard house, on the easternmost lip of the bowl that is Whitechurch. We stand on her spongy bowed rotting porch, which Mr. King will fix when he retires or when Edgar the mail carrier steps through and breaks his leg.

“My room is right there,” she says, pointing at a spot right above us. “Right at the top of the stairs, away from anybody else.”

“Ah,” I say, nodding, looking up at the spot as if I’m a building inspector.

“You want to come up and trade stories of wishes, hopes, and desires?”

For a minute, I am thinking about it. I like Chellie King a lot. I like her dress a lot too. Liking her and considering what I might do about that, this is not a new thought for me. And now she’s liking me too. And we have the cider in us, which covers a lot of the rough edges that would appear, tonight and tomorrow.

But I am a good guy. Sounds like crap, don’t it? Sounds like crap to me too, but that still doesn’t change the fact that it is, despite the occasional spasm, true. And there are probably a good fistful of reasons why a good guy would at do this, if he looked at it closely.

I don’t much want to look at it closely, though.

“Now’s the part, you know, Oakley, where you come in and make me forget all about the bad and the boring stuff. Y’know, like that.”

Ah, Chellie King. There you go, Chellie King, you went and did it. There was something proposed a minute ago that I maybe could have one. This, though, is something I can’t.

I step as close as I can to her—without touching her, because as I am finding out the gulf between being a good guy and being a real good guy is a mighty gaping gulf, oh boy.

“You know what?” I say, with a loaded wet sigh. “I can’t make that trade. I’d be ripping you off.”

She gives me a quizzical look, but she probably understands better than that. In fact, I’m sure she knows. I back away over the soft surface of the porch.

“Go inside now,” I say. “A gentleman isn’t supposed to leave a girl out in the nighttime.”

“I can’t believe, of all the rats around here, I had to pick the gent.”

I like that, even if it isn’t totally true. Especially because it isn’t totally true. I wave her into the house anyway. I wait while she fumbles around in her coat pockets, pulling out crumpled Kleenex, dropping it onto the porch, pulling out a half pack of Hall’s Mentholyptus, dropping it on the porch, pulling out the house keys. The door is open.

“Hey,” she says, “all you did was confirm my faith in this dump anyway. So there.” Chellie is waving, blowing a soft undramatic kiss that I’m sure I can feel land on the tip of my chin.

The door shuts, and I quick-step away, shaking my head.

Some people are hopeless.

E
VERYONE HAS TURNED OUT
. That’s what they say, isn’t it? Everyone’s turned out for the funeral. She was such a fantastically well-regarded person that the whole town is turned out, plus relatives and pen pals and college chums from all over. Because that’s what people do, I suppose, is they turn out. For funerals. Especially here. They turn out in droves here, tribes and columns and gangs here, because we do beautiful funerals, for beautiful librarians, in Whitechurch.

But the truth is I wouldn’t know who has turned out for the funeral of Ophelia Lennon and wouldn’t give a shit who has either. Don’t notice. Don’t care.

The library has been closed for four days leading up to and including the burial day itself, Saturday. Today. Would have been closed today anyway because it never opens on Saturday but if it did open Saturdays it wouldn’t open on this one. Because Ophelia Lennon’s not here. Ophelia Lennon was the library.

She was other things too. Right, everybody is other things too. Mr. King is the owner of the diner and he’s Chellie’s dad. The Reverend is the Reverend, god’s assistant and all that and he’s also father of that kid Lilly minds who can sometimes be a brat. And the Rev is a gun aficionado. And like that, so really everybody is more than they are, aren’t they.

They should have opened it anyway, I think. The library is really the nicest place in town, and what better place to sit and think and pay, like, a tribute to Ophelia Lennon than the library? The funeral home? Chomskys’ Funeral Parlor? Right, where the brothers Chomsky can follow you around and look sad because looking sad and asking if there’s anything they can do is their job so you can be sure if you ask one of the professionally sad Chomsky brothers to do something seeing as they feel so bad and all they will do it for you and put it on your fucking tab. We are one big extended family here in town after all.

Or the church. The famous white Whitechurch church. Ophelia Lennon was never comforted by the place, so why would her fans be?

No, the library makes sense. That’s a thing, isn’t it, making
sense
of death? Aren’t people always going on about “making sense” of death, or coping with “senseless” deaths? Well the library would do that. Open up the beautiful mahogany-crammed warm open-plan reading room where every single person was always comfortable and welcome before, where you could just sit and do nothing or nap or browse or write and you didn’t have to know books or even like looks or even know how to read in order to
get it
about the whole library thing. I heard it myself plenty of times, Ophelia Lennon sitting there reading to somebody too blind or lost or lonely to do it for himself. The only building in town where grown adults could get themselves read to, other than the church. And at the library you didn’t have to be read to about the blackness of our soul.

Could’ve just opened it up and not worried about it at all, left the windows up and the lights on and I would just bet you that not a single person would cause trouble, that all the books would be refiled according to the Dewey decimal system or at least to the best of Whitechurch’s ability—which was always fine enough for Ophelia Lennon who I think enjoyed the challenge of not only filing books properly, but of unfiling what we had done.

That would be the extent of the filing. No filing past the casket to view the body. No filing somberly into and out of church, no file of cars with orange flags following each other to the cemetery, as if we couldn’t every one of us find our way there privately. What we would do that would make more sense would be to enter the library, browse, pick out an old favorite like
Winesburg, Ohio
or
Leaves of Grass,
read a short passage, and then be on our way. Would that not be a fair tribute to a librarian? Would that not make a librarian happy?

And I would bet everything that in four days nobody would have to shush anybody else in the Whitechurch Library.

But they did not open up the library for the occasion. Those kind of things don’t happen. They did Chomskys’ and the church, and everybody’s by now turned out for at least part of it. Except me.

“Yo,” Pauly says, standing at the wall of glass that takes up so much of the library’s face.

“Yo,” I say from the other side of the glass.

“I want you to let me in,” he says.

“I don’t want to let you in.”

“Then I want you to come out.”

“If I wanted to be out, I wouldn’t have gotten in.”

“Anyway, how’d you do that?”

“Let myself in,” I say. “Have my own set of keys.” A sudden maybe perverse but maybe not wave of pride comes over me. I say it again. “I have my own set of keys. Like I own the place. Did you know that, Pauly? Had ’em for years. What do you think of that?”

There is a pause, then a nod from Pauly. “I think that’s great, Oak. I think that’s the balls.”

There is a pause, from me. “Ya, isn’t it.”

“Come on, Oakley, let me in. I swear I won’t do a thing I’m not supposed to, once you tell me what I’m not supposed to. I just think I should, you know, hang around with you.”

I go quiet like I’m thinking about it, only I’m not thinking about it. “Sorry. Our hours are posted on the front door. Please come back during regular library hours.” I pull closed the semi-sheer curtain between us.

“Come on, Oakley, you know I understand. I’m a poet, remember?”

I whip the curtain back open again, and point my finger at his face. “Don’t. Don’t you dare, Pauly. Not today.”

“Maybe you’ll like it. In fact, I know you’ll—”

“Go away,” I snap. I close the curtain and march away from the window. He is tapping and tapping away at it, but I cannot return, not right now.

I have barely reached the little room Ophelia Lennon called “the snug” when I hear more tapping. The snug is the coziest of reading rooms, with six upholstered tub chairs randomly placed around an oval teak coffee table. The snug was used for book discussion groups and meetings, for preschool story hour and after-school study hall. But mostly all anybody did was make up some nonsense excuse to get in there because more than anything else the snug was just like it sounds. Snug. More than any place you could imagine, this was snug. Kids have been known to seep into the snug and not come out for whole days. Fact.

There is a tall thin sofa table along one wall as you enter, and it was used for the coffeemaker and scones and the like when there was a group in there. When you were alone, it was the place where a certain strong scent would cause you to look up and find that a cup of banana tea and a piece of anisette toast had appeared out of nowhere. The room still smells like banana tea and anisette toast.

Still the knocking. One of the things that help the snug be snug is that there is but one window, and it is miniature and way high up. Like a basement window. So nobody could ever be looking in on you. And if they even wanted to knock they had to find a tree branch to do it. Like now.

“Leave me alone, Lilly.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Ya, you will.”

“Ah, no, I won’t.”

“I have a gun in here.”

“You do like hell have a gun in there.”

“Lilly, really, please just leave me be. Okay?”

“No, I don’t understand, Oakley.”

“You don’t have to understand. You just have to fuck off.”

That was a mistake. I know that was a mistake. I knew it was a mistake before I said it, but I said it anyway. Might say it again too, if she wants to keep this up.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Besides fucking off, is there anything else I can do?”

“No. That’ll be enough. Thanks, Lil.”

I listen for what goes on out there, and there is nothing. Which is good. If she were pretending to leave I’d hear something, like her throwing down the stick or the exaggerated shuffling of the feet. Lilly does the right thing. Of course.

As do I. I go for a browse.

I walk first, just for the exercise. I go a lap, and a lap feels good so I go another lap. As I do the second lap of the periphery of the big room, I get a little bolder touching things, running my finger along small statues and shelves and spines of books and if you think this is a dusty old library, that Ophelia Lennon maintained a library that had one speck of dust settled anywhere near her titles, then you are wrong. My finger is cleaner after I swipe it over books than before.

Third lap I can stop. I can select titles. I can pull any one, I am sure, and she will have told me something about what is in there. I pull out
Tender Is the Night.
“The dew was still on her” comes to mind even though I never read it. She loved that one like nuts, said it every chance. I gently replace
Tender Is the Night
. It will not have to be refiled.