stretched above such a picture of nocturnal industry. Marcie, having a sweet, clear voice, joined a madrigal group that met on Thursdays and a political workshop that met on Mondays. Once she made herself available, she was sought as a committeewoman, although it was hard to say why; she almost never opened her mouth. She finally accepted a position on the Village Council, in the third month of Charlie’s absence, mostly to keep herself occupied.
Virtuousness, reason, civic zeal, and loneliness all contributed to poor Marcie’s trouble. Charlie, far away in Torino, could imagine her well enough standing in their lighted doorway on the evening of his return, but could he imagine her groping under the bed for the children’s shoes or pouring bacon fat into an old soup can? “Daddy has to stay in Italy in order to make the money to buy the things we need,” she told the children. But when Charlie called her from abroad, as he did once a week, he always seemed to have been drinking. Regard this sweet woman, then, singing “Hodie Christus Natus Est,” studying Karl Marx, and sitting on a hard chair at meetings of the Village Council.
If there was anything really wrong with Shady Hill, anything that you could put your finger on, it was the fact that the village had no public library?no foxed copies of Pascal, smelling of cabbage; no broken sets of Dostoevski and George Eliot; no Galsworthy, even; no Barrie and no Bennett. This was the chief concern of the Village Council during Marcie’s term. The library partisans were mostly newcomers to the village; the opposition whip was Mrs. Selfredge, a member of the Council and a very decorous woman, with blue eyes of astonishing brilliance and inexpressiveness. Mrs. Selfredge often spoke of the chosen quietness of their life. “We never go out,” she would say, but in such a way that she seemed to be expressing not some choice but a deep vein of loneliness. She was married to a wealthy man much older than herself, and they had no children; indeed, the most indirect mention of sexual fact brought a deep color to Mrs. Selfredge’s face. She took the position that a library belonged in that category of public service that might make Shady Hill attractive to a development. This was not blind prejudice. Carsen Park, the next village, had let a development inside its boundaries, with disastrous results to the people already living there. Their taxes had been doubled, their schools had been ruined. That there was any connection between reading and real estate was disputed by the partisans of the library, until a horrible murder?three murders, in fact?took place in one of the cheese-box houses in the Carsen Park development, and the library project was buried with the victims.
From the terraces of the Superga you can see all of Torino and the snow-covered mountains around, and a man drinking wine there might not think of his wife attending a meeting of the Village Council. This was a board of ten men and two women, headed by the Mayor, who screened the projects that came before them. The Council met in the Civic Center, an old mansion that had been picked up for back taxes. The board room had been the parlor. Easter eggs had been hidden here, children had pinned paper tails on paper donkeys, fires had burned on the hearth, and a Christmas tree had stood in the corner; but once the house had become the property of the village, a conscientious effort seems to have been made to exorcise these gentle ghosts. Raphael’s self-portrait and the pictures of the Broken Bridge at Avignon and the Avon at Stratford were taken down and the walls were painted a depressing shade of green. The fireplace remained, but the flue was sealed up and the bricks were spread with green paint. A track of fluorescent tubing across the ceiling threw a withering light down into the faces of the Village Council members and made them all look haggard and tired. The room made Marcie uncomfortable. In its harsh light her sweetness was unavailing, and she felt not only bored but somehow painfully estranged.
On this particular night they discussed water taxes and parking meters, and then the Mayor brought up the public library for the last time. “Of course, the issue is closed,” he said, “but we’ve heard everyone all along, on both sides. There’s one more man who wants to speak to us, and I think we ought to hear him. He comes from Maple Dell.” Then he opened the door from the board room into the corridor and let Noel Mackham in.
Now, the neighborhood of Maple Dell was more like a development than anything else in Shady Hill. It was the kind of place where the houses stand cheek by jowl, all of them white frame, all of them built twenty years ago, and parked beside each was a car that seemed more substantial than the house itself, as if this were a fragment of some nomadic culture. And it was a kind of spawning ground, a place for bearing and raising the young and for nothing else?for who would ever come back to Maple Dell? Who, in the darkest night, would ever think with longing of the three upstairs bedrooms and the leaky toilet and the sour-smelling halls? Who would ever come back to the little living room where you couldn’t swing a cat around without knocking down the colored photograph of Mount Rainier? Who would ever come back to the chair that bit you in the bum and the obsolete TV set and the bent ashtray with its pressed-steel statue of a naked woman doing a scarf dance?
“I understand that the business is closed,” Mackham said, “but I just wanted to go on record as being in favor of a public library. It’s been on my conscience.”
He was not much of an advocate for anything. He was tall. His hair had begun an erratic recession, leaving him with some sparse fluff to comb over his bald brow. His features were angular; his skin was bad. There were no deep notes to his voice. Its range seemed confined to a delicate hoarseness?a monotonous and laryngitic sound that aroused in Marcie, as if it had been some kind of Hungarian music, feelings of irritable melancholy. “I just wanted to say a few words in favor of a public library,” he rasped. “When I was a kid we were poor. There wasn’t much good about the way we lived, but there was this Carnegie Library. I started going there when I was about eight. I guess I went there regularly for ten years. I read everything?philosophy, novels, technical books, poetry, ships’ logs. I even read a cookbook. For me, this library amounted to the difference between success and failure. When I remember the thrill I used to get out of cracking a good book, I just hate to think of bringing my kids up in a place where there isn’t any library.”
“Well, of course, we know what you mean,” Mayor Simmons said. “But I don’t think that’s quite the question. The question is not one of denying books to children. Most of us in Shady Hill have libraries of our own.”
Mark Barrett got to his feet. “And I’d like to throw in a word about poor boys and reading, if I might,” he said, in a voice so full of color and virility that everyone smiled. “I was a poor boy myself,” he said cheerfully, “and I’m not ashamed to say so, and I’d just like to throw in?for what it’s worth?that I never put my nose inside a public library, except to get out of the rain, or maybe follow a pretty girl. I just don’t want anybody to be left with the impression that a public library is the road to success.”
“I didn’t say that a public library was the road to?”
“Well, you implied it!” Barrett shouted, and he seated himself with a big stir. His chair creaked, and by bulging his muscles a little he made his garters, braces, and shoes all sound.
“I only wanted to say?” Mackham began again.
