“Pearl, that’s not true.” Harry looked up at Laura for confirmation.
“You don’t have to worry about that.” Laura pocketed the tooth in her apron. “Now go get cleaned up before your father comes home.”
She cut up the roast beef and potatoes from the other night, glad to not have to turn on the stove in this heat, and was slicing apples for dessert just as Jack came in.
Jack yanked at his tie and looked wildly around the tiny room. “I don’t have time for dinner, the payroll still needs to be done.”
This wasn’t the right time for her news. She gave him a quick kiss, then turned and slid the letter that she’d left out on the worktable back into the pocket of her apron.
“Of course you have time for dinner, it’s still early.”
But she knew what he meant. He meant that if he skipped dinner, he would have time to do both the payroll and work on his manuscript. The book he’d started several years ago and was so close to finally completing.
“Can I take it into my study?” He shifted the payroll file to his left hand and grabbed a slice of apple. “I can do the numbers for payroll and eat at the same time.”
His beseeching eyes reminded her of their son’s. She made a plate and carried it into the extra bedroom, where he’d pushed one of the library desks up against the window. It was all out of proportion to the room, like a huge wooden barge squeezed into a tiny boathouse.
He was already working his way down the rows of the ledger, filling in each one with the name, position, and monthly salary of the eighty people under his employ at the New York Public Library. She looked over his shoulder at the list: attendants, porters, elevator runners, carpenters, steam fitters, electricians, stack runners, janitors, coal passers. And at the very top, Jack Lyons, superintendent.
When he’d been offered the job, back when they still lived at the Meadows, Laura had been reluctant to return to the city. Reluctant to give up the sunshine and fresh air that living sixty miles north of New York provided the children, as well as the kind community of fellow workers who lived within the perimeter of the ramshackle estate where Jack oversaw the grounds. The decision to move out to the country in the first place hadn’t been her idea, either, but the position had offered them an escape of sorts: a way for Laura to avoid the worst of her father’s wrath and disapproval at being an expecting bride. Together, she and Jack had decided to forgo the city lights for a quieter life, where Jack diligently oversaw the estate during the day and wrote at night. Every winter, Harry and Pearl marched out to sled down the big hill behind the owners’ mansion after the first snowfall, and every spring, they picked daffodils from their cottage garden and presented them to Laura as if they were made of spun gold.
But then the wealthy old couple who owned the estate died, and their grown children decided to sell off the land, sending the employees packing.
Laura, Jack, and the children had moved into the library just before it opened to the public. Laura’s view of the giant oak tree outside the caretaker’s cottage window had been replaced with the harsh whiteness of twelve-inch-thick blocks of marble. Not a speck of green to be seen. The walnut paneling in the salon and the modern kitchen had appealed to her at first, as did the idea of living within the walls of the most beautiful building in Manhattan, but the isolation had eventually worn her down. While the library had lived up to its founders’ expectations as the largest marble building in the world, an inspired example of classical design that took sixteen years to complete, Laura hadn’t realized how remote their lives inside the white fortress would be. There were no neighbors to wave hello to each morning, as there had been at the brownstone where she grew up, nor picnics down by the river with the other families, as at the Meadows. Instead, just an endless parade of anonymous visitors who came in to see if the building lived up to its reputation for grandeur and beauty (the answer was always a resounding yes), or those who simply wanted to pull up a chair in the Main Reading Room.
Jack swaggered about the building as if it were his own castle, which, in some ways, it was. He knew all the secrets, every nook and cranny. He bragged about the place to the children so often that they easily parroted back his statistics: thousands of visitors a day, eighty-eight miles of stacks holding one million books.
And in the very middle of it all, their small family, tucked behind a hidden stairway.
She couldn’t wait any longer. Once he started in on his manuscript, her interruption would be even less welcome. She thought of the beggar woman squinting in the harsh sunlight, one bare hand lifted. That would never be her.
Slowly, she withdrew the envelope from her pocket and slid the letter out, the only noise the scratch of Jack’s fountain pen.
“I heard back,” she finally said.
He placed his pen down on the desk without looking up. “Is that right?”
She waited.
“And?”
“I’ve been accepted.”
* * *
The Main Reading Room on the third floor was the best place for a good late-night cry. Laura had discovered this soon after they’d moved in. She’d always been easily moved to tears, and the vastness of the space, with its fifty-foot ceilings adorned with puffy clouds, was as close as she could get to the fields behind the upstate cottage where she’d retreat when her emotions overcame her. During the day, the room’s gleaming tables, punctuated with desk lamps, were flanked by the curved backs of patrons, reading or making notes with the quiet scratch of a pen. Laura often imagined what it would look like if all their thoughts became visible, the enormous cavern above their heads suddenly crammed with words and phrases, floating in the expanse like bubbles.
Tonight, though, the room was the repository for only her own wretched musings.
She cried not for herself but for how upset Jack had been to not be able to grant her that one wish: to go to Columbia Journalism School. They simply couldn’t afford it. He had such a pleasant face—open and quick to smile—that to see him distraught made her twice as disappointed in herself for bringing him pain.
When she’d first brought up the idea with Jack earlier that year, he’d approached it with his usual meticulousness. Together, they’d made a list of advantages and disadvantages, and decided that it would be feasible only if she received a full scholarship. Which she had not. As a matter of fact, she hadn’t even been accepted, only wait-listed. Until today.
She hadn’t considered the idea of going back to school until several months ago, when the assistant director of the library, Dr. Anderson, had heard her joke about her life raising children within the library’s walls and suggested she write a piece on the subject for the employees’ monthly newsletter. She’d dashed off a silly article about the difficulty of keeping Pearl and Harry quiet during the day, especially in the summer, when they weren’t in school, and how she’d come up with the idea of a ten-minute “stomp” every evening, after the patrons had drained into the streets and the administrative offices had emptied. At her signal, the three of them would leap about the hallways, dancing and singing, Harry running laps and Pearl practicing her yodel, bringing the night watchman sprinting to the second floor to find out what on earth was going on. He’d stood there, panting, hands on his knees, and Laura had worried he might collapse from the fright. After that first time, though, he’d gotten used to the idea, sometimes even joining in, offering up a yowl that echoed down the stairwells and probably frightened the rats rooting around in the basement.