When I stepped into her room, she was sitting up, wide awake, her bed inclined. A book and her high-magnified reading glasses were on her tray table. As usual, the television in the room wasn’t on. She wore a new nightgown, silk, bright yellow, ruffled, expensive—a wholly different garment from her usual plain cottons, which she called “old-fashioned nightshirts for ladies.”
You would think from her expression I had done something criminal enough to consider calling the police. Or I had betrayed her by picking another patient for my first stop.
But I saw that under her glaring, she was feeling something else. A fragility was all over her, new to me.
And there was fear. She was scared, and I knew it, and it was coming from somewhere deep.
“Hi,” I said. “I was paged for kind of an emergency. I love the new nightgown. Who bought it for you?”
Well. She let go of whatever she’d planned to greet me with. Her eyes opened wider; she was seizing the moment. She hated this nightgown! She only put it on because a niece of hers, the one who sent it, wanted a photo, which a nurse had taken on her phone, and the fuss was all too much! She wasn’t one for frou-frous! What was the point of spending money on something real silk, when you can’t wear it, in an assisted living place, anywhere outside your own room? The color was awful! It made her feel like a human daffodil! All her life she’d been allergic to that flower!
Yet I felt sure she loved wearing it. I sat down in the bedside chair, waiting for the ice between us to finish being broken. I looked at the deep dark brown of her skin, the cap of her closely trimmed old-woman hair, gray and silver, sparse here and there, dotted with tiny fuzzy clusters of black, like peppercorns. I looked at the hand taped and needled to her drip. I looked at her immobility. I knew how much she minded being stuck like this.
I waited a long minute once she made herself calm, and another, another, another. In the silence, it seemed the two of us were listening for the sounds of her clot breaking up, being vanquished.
Then she was ready to talk. And out it came about the broken submarine.
She will show me her soul as if holding it up in the hand unattached to her drug. I will see it’s broken too.
And I will be sitting there, bowing my head, with nothing to say.
Nine
This was when the librarian worked in Reference.
One afternoon, the author of a book about sea vessels for spying and war came to the library to give a talk. He was a military historian. Ordinarily such events were not well attended, but the audience was large, with retired people who were mostly men, mostly ex-military, and mostly Black too. There were all sorts of college kids as well, having been ordered to come for some class, and a group of Black ladies who were top-level patrons and frequently lunched together.
Those ladies had seen his publicity photos. They could not believe he had not gone to Hollywood to be a star. That’s how good-looking he was, and he was broad in the shoulders and tight in his middle, and as dignified in his bearing as if he wore the uniform of an admiral, not jeans and a tweed jacket.
The librarian was not supposed to leave the desk unattended, but she thought she might as well step into the lecture hall to find out if he could talk as well as he could walk and be handsome. Which he could. His voice was so potent, he didn’t need the microphone.
She found the audience enraptured. He was nearing the end of his talk; then he invited questions. Someone asked him about a chapter in his book that described training manuals for living and working on a submarine. According to his bio, he earned money in graduate school by becoming a part-time civilian employee of the navy.
Not in the bio was a piece of information he shared with that audience.
Why he even brought it up, the librarian didn’t know. The book was his first. He might not have been experienced at being such a center of attention, all of it quite radiant. He might not have stopped to consider the effect his words would have on people who were never in armed services. Or people who had never given much thought to the subject of submarines, as one didn’t think of astronauts in way-outer space being possibly marooned, when the only vehicle capable of rescuing them was the one they were in. Or if, during the famous moon landing, say, all the fuel they needed to come home leaked out onto rocks and gray dust.
One of the author’s navy projects was putting together information about how to escape a new type of submarine, reaching depths that had not been reached before. In a particular scenario he had to describe for the manual, the submarine had lost the ability to communicate its position. It had gone off the radar, and very quickly became no longer operable. All its systems were shutting down, when it was very much closer to the bottom of the ocean than the top.
“Now that,” said the author, as the librarian stood alone at the rear, pressing herself against the wall, for she suddenly felt weak in the legs, “now that was something to give me some nightmares.”
He described his paragraphs about emergency protocols, escape hatches, diving gear. One of the ladies, in the front row, put up her hand. She was not the type of person who speaks up, but she was obviously feeling the need to, perhaps for the first time ever.
“Oh, come on now,” she said to the author. “Are you telling us the navy has air tanks big enough for someone to go from the bottom of the sea to the top? And like the pressure wouldn’t do a thing to them, swimming their way up?”
The librarian felt suddenly chilled. She had no idea of the normal temperature inside a submarine, but she knew to be thinking, cold.
And she knew to be thinking, dark.
And silent.
The afraidness that began to take her over was something bigger and stronger than any bad feeling she’d ever felt. She was feeling it in her soul. What if everything everyone ever said about the everlasting life of a soul was the same as information in a training manual about escaping somewhere that cannot be escaped from?
“I think I know what he’s talking about,” said a man in the middle of the audience, to the patron who spoke up. This man was possibly a minister, perhaps a former military chaplain. He might have been wearing a collar that could only be seen from the front.
“I think he’s talking about the necessity of giving hope,” the maybe minister declared.
That emboldened a college boy. His voice sounded full of disappointment.
“I think he’s talking about written-down delusions,” he said, like the author wasn’t even there anymore, and the librarian pulled herself away from the wall. She rushed away on wobbly legs and went outside for a cigarette, as she smoked then. She had three in a row, lighting off ends of two, which she had never done before.
Then she had to deal with a line of complainers in Reference because no one was in her seat. Somehow, she became absorbed again in working.
Many, many years went by. She thought about the author and his talk no more, until the evening she was sitting with a small crowd in the main parlor of her assisted living place, watching a movie. She usually didn’t go to such events. She could not understand how her fellow residents enjoyed what the movie committee kept selecting, all that gore and fast action and guns and explosions, or otherwise the men would not show up. But in the parlor was a new wide-screen television. She was promised no violence and nothing disgusting.
It turned out that the movie was about a submarine, and she had to get out of there.