“Water’s fine.”
“Are you kidding me? You don’t drink water on a day like today.” He raised his hand and began snapping his fingers in the air.
Bob said, “It’s all right. I don’t want a drink.”
Mr. Baker-Bailey’s hand came down slowly to rest on the table. “Why don’t you drink?”
“I do drink, only I don’t want one now.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t want to feel that way.”
It took a moment for Mr. Baker-Bailey to accept this; it seemed he thought Bob was being a poor sport. But eventually he shrugged it off and said, “Well, I’ll tell you what, that priest was top shelf. He didn’t come cheap, but I figure he was worth it. It was as important as hell to your mother that she get that particular priest, and I made a promise, so there you go. It costs what it costs, no point grousing about it now, is there? Did you know that she and I worked together for more than twenty years?”
“Yes.”
“Twenty years! That’s a long time, after all.” He paused, and said, “It’s funny, isn’t it, that it took you and me this long to meet?”
“I guess it is,” said Bob. “Though, actually, I did see you once before this.”
“Oh yeah? And when was that?”
“I was eleven years old and you were slow dancing with my mother in our living room.”
A little flash of panic came over Mr. Baker-Bailey, and he finished his bourbon in a long swallow. Looking at the ice cubes in his glass, he began to rattle them around, then raised up his head and called across the restaurant, “What did I tell you?” The waiter came hurrying over with a fresh drink and took away the empty. Mr. Baker-Bailey glared at the waiter’s back in retreat. He told Bob, “I’m upset. Do you know what I mean by that?”
“You’re upset,” said Bob. He was starting to wonder how he might get away without causing a fuss or disruption.
Mr. Baker-Bailey took another long drink. “So what’s your line these days?”
“I’m just starting out as a librarian.”
“That’s good, good. That’s a functional position.” He held his finger in the air, as if checking wind direction. “Somebody wants a book but they don’t know if they want to buy it. Well, here you go, pal, take it home and read the hell out of it. And free of charge to boot. I support the practice. I mean, you’re never going to get rich, but I guess that’s not the point, is it?”
“I guess it’s not.”
“You must have got the book thing from your mother, huh?”
“I must have,” said Bob, though he’d not known his mother to read anything other than magazines and newspapers.
Mr. Baker-Bailey went back to his sidewalk people-watching, speaking to Bob but not looking at him, performing his grief for him: “Your mother? She was my good right hand and then some. And the two of us together? There was nothing we couldn’t do, not a problem we couldn’t solve. Because I knew her. I knew that woman. I knew her better than my own wife!” He chuckled to himself. “Christ, she was just a kid when she started out. We were both kids, really. Young and dumb and full of beans and baloney, baloney and beans.” He finished his drink and another appeared, along with the two identical meals. Mr. Baker-Bailey was heartened by the arrival of the food, glad as he commenced sawing at his steak; but soon and something turned inside him, some unpleasant notion spoiling his mood. “Anyway,” he said, “I figure she made out all right by me.” Bob said nothing; Mr. Baker-Bailey added, “By which I mean I think she could have done worse.” Bob looked at Mr. Baker-Bailey, and something in the look prompted Mr. Baker-Bailey to ask, “Who do you think bought her that house?”
“I thought she bought it.”
“Fine, but where’d she get the money to do that?”
“I thought she earned it.”
Mr. Baker-Bailey sat watching Bob. There was a blockage in his nasal passage and a miniature whistle occurred each time he exhaled. “You got something you want to get off your chest?” he said. “Because I’m here, and I’m all ears.”
Bob thought about it, then shook his head. “I can’t say anything to you.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t have the words.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Just that there are no words for you.”
Mr. Baker-Bailey blinked at Bob, then returned to his meal. It was disturbing to watch him eat because his head was the same color as the steak. He was pushing red meat into his red mouth, and his head was red, and it was like witnessing an animal consuming itself. “Good steak,” he said, mouth filled.
“Okay,” said Bob.
“Why aren’t you eating?”
“I am sickened.”
“Eat your steak, you’ll feel better.”
But Bob couldn’t eat, and didn’t try to. When Mr. Baker-Bailey was done he snapped for the waiter to take the plates away. After, he lit a cigarette, peering up at the smoke as it rose up over their heads. “You know what though?” he asked — and here his composure fell away, and he began crying, and not the modest weeping of the funeral but a hard, loud bawling. All in the restaurant, diners and staff, stopped to stare and wonder; Bob folded his napkin on the table and stood to leave, passing the waiter on his way to the door. The waiter had been walking over to deliver another bourbon, but now he stood by watching the crying man and wondering whether he should bring the drink or not bring it. Bob felt a sympathy for the waiter’s position; the point could be argued both for and against bringing a crying man another drink, and the impasse was almost certainly unprecedented to the waiter’s experience.
NEVER HAS THERE BEEN A LIBRARIAN LESS INCLINED, LESS SUITABLE to represent the limitless glory of the language arts than Miss Ogilvie. She cared not at all for literacy or the perpetuation of any one school or author, and Bob never once saw her take up a book for pleasure. Her function, as she saw it, was to maintain the sacred nonnoise of the library environment. “What these people do with the silence is beyond my purview,” Miss Ogilvie told Bob. “But silence they shall have.” The human voice, when presented above the level of whisper, invigorated her with what could be named a plain hate; as such, her branch was the quietest in the city of Portland and likely the state of Oregon.
For all her strictness of standards, Miss Ogilvie was not beyond reason, and she took things on a case-by-case basis. The homeless population, at least the saner individuals of that group, were for the most part spared the rod. If you kept your mouth shut and your odors were not so flamboyant and you read or believably pretended to read a book or magazine, then yes, you were welcome to come in from the rain of an afternoon. Students of the high school and college age were filled with life, or overfilled with it, Miss Ogilvie believed; they had an inclination to noise-make, but for all their spirit were easily put down. Young children were the real problem, the pinpoint of Miss Ogilvie’s ire, and she saved up all her best and finest venom for them. She spoke of a world without children in the same way others spoke of a world without hunger or disease. Put them all on an island, was her thought, an island far away and surrounded by icy, deadly swells and rocks so sharp and jagged even seabirds could never light upon them. Here the children might make all the noise they wanted or needed to; and here they would be no bother to those who’d had enough noise and chatter to last out their days.
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.”