immature, their conversation limited to the local basketball standings and the cars they'd someday own. Besides, she hadn't had the sort of figure that attracted many of them; she'd reminded herself that the sophisticated beauties of the future, the girls who turned out to be the professional models and actresses, were frequently dismissed in their school days as awkward and skinny. Most of her crushes had been confined to older girls in the school, though she'd looked with interest at the boys her two older sisters brought home. The younger and more sexually active sister had brought home a lot. One of them, a slim, quiet boy with long eyelashes and poetic-looking long brown hair, had become, at a Halloween party more than a year later, the first person other than a doctor that Carol had allowed to touch her breasts. She had liked it so much she'd grown flushed and almost dizzy, but she'd been slow to repeat the experience, and hadn't allowed any touching below the waist; it wasn't hard to get. a reputation in a small Catholic town in Pennsylvania, even in the 1970s. She had heard the way people talked about her sister, who, parochial school notwithstanding, had lost her virginity by sixteen and had been known to go driving with men in their thirties. Carol was ashamed of this sister; it pleased her to be seen as the virtuous one.
' She had never quite relinquished the desire to dance, to act, to be a star, but in later years, as she dreamed her way through another St Mary's – college, this time – on a more-than-modest scholarship conveniently provided by the church, her world had grown more private and less physical. Her hours now were occupied by Thomas a Kempis and Tolkien, her mind by pastel visions: the Star of Bethlehem, Gandalf s resurrection, Jesus preaching to the hobbits. She'd known little of the doctors' bills and mounting debts at home, though that was where she still lived. Even when her father had been forced to quit his job, she'd been all but unaware of a change in their circumstances. Surely his condition would improve; perhaps it was a kind of test, such as so many of the faithful had endured. Having just completed a sophomore course in the Mystics, she wondered if she might not be one of them herself. She saw evidence of the Divine hand wherever she looked; all around her lay the City of God, with shining towers brighter than the sun. At times she half fancied she could see the angels who populated it, insubstantial creatures shimmering like snow. She sensed that she'd been chosen, though could not have said for what. But she knew if she was patient, God would tell her.
He had been curiously slow to speak. College had ended, the future was upon her, and nothing had changed. Her prince had not yet arrived; things, in fact, were growing worse. Her father was dying; her mother was being supported by relatives. The two older sisters had married – having a reputation hadn't mattered after all -and there was talk of selling the house. Carol realized that she'd been a fool; she had contributed nothing, she had cost her family much. How selfish she had been, and how blind!
One thing was certain: there was no place for her here. But perhaps there still was something she could do… Shaken, but with expectations undimmed, the fairy-tale princess had set off for New York.
The change, though, had not been a drastic one. For Carol it had simply meant replacing one saint for another, another set of walls, another world of earnest ceremonies and cheerful, well-scrubbed females. St Mary's, St Mary's, St Agnes's: a school, a college, a convent.
The move, it's true, had not been undertaken lightly; she'd known no one in the city but a few contacts her school had provided – sisters and clerks and administrators, a list of Catholic names without faces to go with them – and New York had seemed, in her imagination, a terrifying place. But then, as it had turned out, St Agnes's wasn't really part of New York, and there'd been little need to venture beyond its gates; she'd slipped quickly into the security of its daily routine as if she'd known it all her life.
And now even that was behind her. She was on her own at last, twenty-two years old and still lucky, happily ensconced in a new job without even having had to search for it. Clearly she was still among the blessed.
Yet in one respect she was worse off than ever, for she was almost totally without money; her pay, after taxes, was just $109.14 a week. And while a lifetime of poverty no doubt qualified one to walk the streets of heaven, it was depressing to think how many places in this earthly city were all but barred to her: the theaters, the clubs, the restaurants with their twenty-dollar meals, the dress shops where even a scarf or a belt was beyond her means. She was sick of avoiding such places, sick of abstaining from taxicabs, first-run movies, and hardcover books. Just once she'd have liked to be able to afford a good seat at the ballet; sitting in the back row no longer made her feel virtuous. Life was short, and she was getting too old for games like that.
Her job was less than fifteen minutes' walk, but the thought of those blazing sidewalks sapped her energy. Still, she was grateful for the work and knew how lucky she was to have gotten it, lucky that Sister Cecilia, God bless her, had phoned her when she did. Especially considering that she'd been out of St Agnes's so long…
Work was, for her, the position of 'junior assistant (part-time), circulation division,' at the Voorhis Foundation Library on West Twenty-Third Street. She had been employed here since the middle of May and arrived every day at noon. Voorhis was one of the shabbier of the city's many private libraries and, like most of them, predated the free public system that Carnegie had built. Though it had fallen on hard times, it still maintained an extensive collection of nineteenth-century British and European literature, as well as ample general holdings and children's sections upstairs. Dues were sixty dollars a year, but there were special rates for students, golden-agers, and others, so that few members paid the full amount.
The library itself occupied a staid old building on the south side of the street, less than a block from the old Chelsea Hotel, with slate-grey walls and a line of high vaulted windows along the lower story. White paint peeled in jagged strips from the ceiling; two square pillars, tall and thick as trees, cast oppressive shadows across the floor.
She spent the first part of the afternoon maneuvering an overladen book cart through the maze of cabinets, tables, and display racks that filled the ground floor. The work was slow, undemanding, and dull, and she could be alone with her thoughts. No one so much as glanced her way. By midafternoon, as usual, many of the available seats were taken by scholars of various sorts who frequented the special collections: serious, bespectacled young men with dirty hair and ill-fitting suits, young defeated-looking women as faded as the building's plaster walls – aging grad students, most of them, down from Columbia or Fordham or City College or up from NYU. Their briefcases had to be searched carefully when they left; in the past, there'd been a lot of thefts. The remaining seats were occupied by elderly residents of the neighborhood: widowers, retired union men, social security pensioners – people with little money and lots of time.
There were always a few of them, she'd heard, waiting outside the doors each morning for the library to open, pacing impatiently up and down the sidewalk or slouched coughing in the entranceway. Once inside they'd take a newspaper from the rack, or a thumb- smeared magazine in its clear plastic binder, and for the rest of the day they'd sit hunched over it with what seemed intense concentration, moving only to turn each page. Others would select some book at random from the nearest shelves; laying it open before them on the table, they would fall asleep, head on their arms, until closing time. The same ancient faces reappeared day after day, except in the poorest weather; they came and left without speaking a word to anyone, not even a good morning or good night.
Carol didn't mind these solitary souls; in fact, she rather liked them. People that age were comfortable to be around. Here within the walls of Voorhis, amid the dusty sunlight and drowsing old men, the city seemed far away. The place, in its very routine, seemed a kind of fortress.
She took particular comfort in certain familiar sights and sounds that marked her day: the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the pale figures sprawled silent and motionless over their reading, the reassuring feel of her book cart as she wheeled it down the aisle, and the books themselves, symbols of order on their backs – young adulthood reduced to 'YA,' mystery reduced to a tiny red skull.
When she forgot the miserable pay and put all dreams of the future from her mind, Voorhis filled her with something close to nostalgia – as if, despite the years, she had never really left school. The high ceiling and the faded green walls, the solidity of the dark brown wooden shelves, the potted plants gathering dust on the window ledge, the shades above them glowing yellow in the sun and billowing like ships' sails at the smallest breeze – all were touched with a kind of holiness. Nothing, they promised, had changed. All her life she had been hypnotized by the same great metal clock that ticked off the minutes at the front of the room. When she crowded into the little glassed-in office and pulled up a chair before her battered wooden desk, running her fingers along the pencil grooves, the places where the varnish was worn away, the ragged green blotter marked with ring stains from the coffee mug, she felt a sense of permanence that revived the years of her childhood. Only the nuns were missing, and the crucifix on the wall.
Occasionally it occurred to her that, far from being out on her own, she had merely traded the school and the convent for another set of walls. So much for the expectations she'd had on leaving St Agnes's
…
