Grace was. She reached to the turkey platter and plucked up the wishbone. “See this, you pair of busybodies?” Snap, and she brandished the wish-fulfilling piece of the bone at the supposedly retired miners. “There, now, I’ve asked that you not get your old fool heads broken on a picket line.”
“Aw, Mrs. Faraday, it maybe won’t come to that.” Griff sounded as if he was trying to convince himself along with her.
Something Hoop had said stuck with me, and I turned to him. “If the men do go on strike, why would any of them frequent the library just mornings?”
“Speakeasies don’t open until noon.”
IN MYTHOLOGY, Atlas alone has the world on his shoulders, but in real life the globe of concerns rests on each of us at any given time. After that suppertime discussion, what weighed on me when I settled into bed as usual with a lovingly done book from the library-The Education of Henry Adams, in this instance-was the gravity of the times. The immeasurable shadow of the 1914-1918 war still lay over the affairs of nations; Europe’s old jealously held boundaries were being torn up and rewritten, for better or worse, at the Paris peace conference. Russia already had shaken the political firmament by doing away with the Czar and yielding to the new fist of the Bolsheviks. America’s habit of throwing a fit to ward off contagion was at high pitch; activists with a leftist tinge were being hounded by government agents, even jailed or deported. Alongside that, the laboring class started at a deep disadvantage whenever it challenged the masters of capital. Strikes were its only effective tool, the way things were, but the powers that be resisted those with force if necessary. It added up to a jittery period of history, did it not? I knew enough of life to understand that every era has a set of afflictions, yet 1919 seemed to be a double dose. The pages in front of me, stylishly written, did little to dispel such heavy thoughts. Henry Adams, descendant of two presidents and with as much blue blood in his veins as there is in America, confessed at length in his autobiographical Education to a life contradictorily adrift on oceans of ignorance. Adams had not lived to see the turbulent aftermath of the Great War, but even so he professed little hope of ever finding “a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder.”
I closed the book on that sentence. There was no point in reading about timid natures in Butte.
THE EDUCATION OF MORRIS MORGAN had a new chapter waiting the next day. It began in the Reading Room, where I was poring over the subscription list with Smithers, the young librarian on the periodicals desk, to see how we might squeeze more magazines into the budget we had. I felt a tap on the shoulder and turned around to an angular woman dressed in old-fashioned style, gray and gaunt as a duchess in a Goya etching. “You are the person,” she enunciated to me so loudly and clearly that every head in the room snapped up from reading, “in charge of evening groups, I believe? I wish to speak with you.”
I looked hopefully toward the mezzanine, but for once, Sandison was not on hand to roar “Quiet!” at the offender. Peculiar characters are drawn to a library like bees to a flower garden, so I turned to this one with the most authoritative air I could, and, indicating I was nearly finished with what I was at, murmured, “If you’ll wait in the foyer, ma’am, I’ll be with you in just a minute.”
“Hsst!” The warning hiss from Smithers came a little late. In an ingratiating tone, he was saying: “How are you today, Mrs. Sandison? ”
“Ah. Actually, we can finish this later,” I told Smithers, and quickly ushered the visiting personage into the mineralogy section, the nearest room not in use.
Now that we had privacy, Dora Sandison paused to study me, which did not take her long. Even her eyes were gray, and they were the sort that did not miss a trick. She was as tall as her husband, and acted taller. I had heard the library staff refer to the Sandisons as the grandee and the grandora, and could understand why. “I regret taking you away from your other task,” she said, her expression indicating nothing of the sort. “However, the evening group of which I am a member has a most pressing need.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I responded warily, trying to imagine which of the clubs that met in the basement auditorium would attract such a personality. The Theosophists, to unravel the mysteries of the Divinity? The League of Nations supporters, to correct the habits of governments?
She surprised me with a conspiratorial smile. “We require music stands.”
“Music-? ”
“The Gilbert and Sullivan Libretto Study Group is not provided with music stands, if you can believe that.”
“I see.” A sense of caution grew in me. “Surely this is the kind of request that your husband has dealt with, up until now?”
“Oh, horsefeathers,” she brushed away my concern. “You know how Sandy is about such things.”
Now I really did see. I could just about recite what Sandison’s response to a request solely on behalf of Gilbert and Sullivan aficionados would have been. “Don’t they have hands? Holding a piece of sheet music in front of their noses shouldn’t strain them too much.”
“My husband, bless his soul,” she went on in a confiding tone, “sometimes carries matters too far. He takes the ridiculous view that answering the needs of a group I coincidentally am a member of would constitute preferential treatment, can you imagine?”
I chuckled nervously. “There is the point, Mrs. Sandison, that no other group has seen the need for such, um, equipment.”
She snorted, very much like Sandison himself. “That is their failing rather than ours, then,” she instructed me with a glint in her eye that wouldn’t be argued with. “We sorely lack such equipment, as you call it, to hold our libretto sheets when the member whose turn it is takes our group through the intricacies of the lyrics of the chosen operetta. For example, ‘Strike the concertina’s melancholy string! Blow the spirit-stirring harp like anything! Let the piano’s martial blast rouse the echoes of the past! ’ ” During this demonstration she waved her arms in my face as vigorously as a semaphore flagger.
She paused and caught her breath. “You can surely understand,” she said as if I’d better, “the presenter needs to be free to gesture, or the spirit of Gilbert and Sullivan is lost.”
Sometimes it is wise to bend before the gale. “I’ll see what can be done about music stands.”
She smiled slyly again. “I’m so glad Sandy put a reasonable person in charge of such matters.”
With that, Dora Sandison departed in as grand a fashion as she had arrived, and I was left with the equipment problem. I searched the building high and low, but the marvelous holdings of the Butte Public Library did not include music stands. Somehow a purchase would have to be made, and I groaned at what was ahead of me, knowing how tight Sandison was with a dollar when the purchase of anything other than a book was involved.
“Sandy? If I could have a minute of your time?” Grumpily he left off reading a rare books catalogue and creaked around in his desk chair to face me. “Spit it out, Morgan.”
“We have a request from an evening group for some freestanding smallish reading racks to hold the sheets of paper they work from, and-”
“Hah. You’ve been hearing from the Giblet and Mulligan Society about those damn music stands. My wife is in that group, and I’ve told her the same thing I’ll tell you: the library can’t show favoritism to any one bunch.”
“Naturally not. But those rather modest implements would be of use to other groups as well.”
“What for? Don’t they have-”
“-they do have hands, but there are occasions when they would welcome some kind of device to hold certain items.” I groped for some sort of example. “The Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Literary and Social Circle, for instance, when they wish to have photo displays to go with their discussion of the works of Robert Louis Stevenson. The mystical castle in Edinburgh.” My fingers conjured that citadel in the air. “The sinister backstreets of London where Jekyll transmogrifies into Hyde.” I turned my hands into claws and made a grotesque face.