2
1942–1960
BOB CAME TO READING IN HIS YOUTH. IT WAS THE OLD STORY OF AN isolated child finding solace in the school library while his peers shrieked their joys and agonies up from the playground. Books led Bob to libraries which led to librarians which led to his becoming one. His first librarian was Miss Middleton. She was gentle to the level of docility, and she enjoyed Bob, and so was kind to him. From time to time she would silently cross the room and set a peeled orange on the table beside him, a cup of water. She did not smile, exactly, but she did give Bob the occasional softish sideways grin, which he took as proof of her fondness for him, and it was proof.
He read adventure stories exclusively and with the pure and thorough commitment of the narcotics addict up until the onset of adolescence, at which point he discovered the dependable literary themes of loss, death, heartbreak, and abject alienation. It was in his senior year of high school that Bob began to think of becoming a librarian, a consideration borne by a friendship or kinship with a man named Sandy Anderson, a middle-aged autodidact and closeted homosexual who happened to be the librarian at Bob’s alma mater. Sandy came to know Bob and soon understood the depth of his literary interests; he started sharing obscurer works with Bob, who was glad for the guidance and pleased that he had been singled out as the one granted access to Sandy’s private syllabus.
One day Bob asked, “How did you become a librarian?”
Sandy went back in his mind. “It seems to me I went to school for it, but that might just be a nightmare I once had.” He had a seen-it-all attitude and treated everything under the sun or moon as a joke; sincere declaration of any type was mocked without mercy. At the start of Bob’s interest in what Sandy called librarianism, he refused to answer the earnest young man’s questions directly. “It’s a nice idea, Bob, but as with so many specialty careers, librarianism doesn’t hold up in our society’s real time.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a job whose usefulness has gone away. The language-based life of the mind was a needed thing in the syrup-slow era of our elders, but who has time for it now? There aren’t any metalsmiths anymore, and soon there’ll be no authors, publishers, booksellers — the entire industry will topple into the sea, like Atlantis; and the librarianists will be buried most deeply in the silt.”
But Bob would not be deterred, and Sandy said he couldn’t deny the sickness of enduring desire in Bob’s eyes. At last he brought in a stack of pamphlets, information about schools where he might attain the needed degree. Bob received these with a Christmas morning fervor while Sandy looked on, shaking his head. “You’re breaking my heart. You’re supposed to be out there getting girls you don’t love pregnant.”
“These are just the thing.”
“You should be in a gang, Bob. You should be getting into knife fights.”
Bob brought the pamphlets home to his mother. She touched the top pamphlet with the tip of her index finger and made a questioning face. Bob told her, “I’m going to be a librarian.”
“Are you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Can I ask why?”
“I don’t know. Why not?”
His mother frowned. “I think you’re too young to start asking yourself that question, don’t you?” Bob shrugged and she said, “What I mean is, once you start asking yourself that question, it’s not so easy to stop. And then, before you know how it’s even come to pass, you’ve given it all away.” She looked into Bob’s face as though she were looking around a corner. “Isn’t there something else you’d rather do with your life?”
“Like what?” Bob asked. Here and he had located a respectable position, suited to his interests and strengths, and it didn’t feel like a compromise in any way. What more did his mother expect from him? Sandy Anderson’s apparent dislike of the field was personal and related to his ongoing life-disappointment; but Bob could never understand his mother’s lack of enthusiasm at his career choice.
He graduated high school with an A average and not a close friend, on campus or off. And why? There is such a thing as charisma, which is the ability to inveigle the devotion of others to benefit your personal cause; the inverse of charisma is horribleness, which is the phenomenon of fouling the mood of a room by simply being. Bob was neither one of these, and neither was he set at a midpoint between the extremes. He was to the side, out of the race completely. From an early age he had a gift for invisibility; he was not tormented by his peers because his peers did not see him, his school teachers prone to forgetting and reforgetting his name. He would have been a highly successful bank robber; he could have stood in a hundred line-ups and walked free from every one. Of course, he’d had instances of minor camaraderie, even romance, through his school years; but none of these achieved any definition or meaning to Bob. The truth was that people made him tired.
After high school he went straight into Portland State to study library sciences, not bothering even to pause for summer break. The course was meant to be three years but Bob managed it in under two. He had a particular life fixed in his mind, like a set on a stage waiting for the play to begin; and while he could not ever be mistaken for ambitious, he was steadfastly driven, that the life he’d pictured and hoped for should commence.