Where Pearl could be bossy, Harry was sweet, if sometimes dim when it came to the vagaries of human nature. When Laura dropped off the children at the school on Forty-Second and Second Avenue for the first time two years ago, Pearl had taken a moment to analyze the groups of schoolgirls arrayed around the playground, figuring out the best approach, while Harry had recklessly stumbled over to some boys playing marbles, accidentally kicking several with his foot in the process, which resulted in a hard shove and a quick rejection.
Harry, at eleven, was older by four years, but Pearl was wiser, faster. Laura and Jack had discarded the original name they’d picked for their daughter—Beatrice—after she showed up with a white frost of fine hair covering her head, more like a little old lady than a baby girl. Her eyes weren’t the vivid blue of Laura’s but more a gray, and her features and coloring gave her an ethereal appearance. “Pearl,” Laura had said, and Jack had agreed, tears in his eyes. “Pearl.”
The last school year had been tough for Harry, who, unlike his sister, never brought friends home to play or got invited to birthday parties. Laura hoped this year would be different and he’d gain some confidence, especially since, if everything went according to plan, she wouldn’t be around as much.
Pearl ushered her brother into the kitchen. “Show her the tooth, Harry.”
He opened his palm, where a baby tooth sat like a rare jewel. Laura took it and held it to the light. “It’s a beauty, let’s see your gap.”
He smiled wide, showing off the space where one of his canines had been. “It didn’t hurt at all, I was playing with it with my tongue, and suddenly, pop, it was gone.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t choke on it,” said Pearl. “I know a girl who did and she died.”
“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.