She looked at him sternly.
‘I myself have never seen any of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. I have never heard an Ozzy Osbourne record and have no desire to do so, nor to read a novel by Robert McCammon, Stephen King, or V. C. Andrews. Do you see what I’m getting at, Sam?’
‘I suppose. You’re saying it wouldn’t be fair to . He needed a word, groped for it, and found it. ‘ . . . to usurp the children’s tastes.’
She smiled radiantly – everything but the eyes, which seemed to have nickels in them again.
‘That’s part of it, but that’s not all of it. The posters in the Children’s Library -both the nice, uncontroversial ones and the ones which put you off – came to us from the Iowa Library Association. The ILA is a member of the Midwest Library Association, and that is, in turn, a member of The National Library Association, which gets the majority of its funding from tax money. From John Q. Public -which is to say from me. And you.’
Sam shifted from one foot to the other. He didn’t want to spend the afternoon listening to a lecture on How Your Library Works for You, but hadn’t he invited it? He supposed so. The only thing he was absolutely sure of was that he was liking Ardelia Lortz less and less all the time.
‘The Iowa Library Association sends us a sheet every other month, with reproductions of about forty posters,’ Ms Lortz continued relentlessly. ‘We can pick any five free; extras cost three dollars each. I see you’re getting restless, Sam, but you do deserve an explanation, and we are finally reaching the nub of the matter.’
‘Me? I’m not restless,’ Sam said restlessly.
She smiled at him, revealing teeth too even to be anything but dentures. ‘We have a Children’s Library Committee,’ she said. ‘Who is on it? Why, children, of course! Nine of them. Four high-school students, three middleschool students, and two grammar-school students. Each child has to have an overall B average in his schoolwork to qualify. They pick some of the new books we order, they picked the new drapes and tables when we redecorated last fall … and, of course, they pick the posters. That is, as one of our younger Committeemen once put it, “the funnest part.” Now do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ Sam said. ‘The kids picked out Little Red Riding Hood, and Simple Simon, and the Library Policeman. They like them because they’re scary.’
‘Correct!’ she beamed.
Suddenly he’d had enough. It was something about the Library. Not the posters, not the librarian, exactly, but the Library itself. Suddenly the Library was like an aggravating, infuriating splinter jammed deep in one buttock. Whatever it was, it was … enough.
‘Ms Lortz, do you keep a videotape of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 5 in the Children’s Library? Or a selection of albums by Guns n Roses and Ozzy Osbourne?’
‘Sam, you miss the point,’ she began patiently.
‘What about Peyton Place? Do you keep a copy of that in the Children’s Library just because some of the kids have read it?’
Even as he was speaking, he thought, Does ANYBODY still read that old thing?
‘No,’ she said, and he saw that an ill-tempered flush was rising in her cheeks. This was not a woman who was used to having her judgments called into question. ‘But we do keep stories about housebreaking, parental abuse, and burglary. I am speaking, of course, of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,”
“Hansel and Gretel”, and “Jack and the Beanstalk.” I expected a man such as yourself to be a little more understanding, Sam.’
A man you helped out in a pinch is what you mean, Sam thought, but what the hell, lady – isn’t that what the town pays you to do?
Then he got hold of himself. He didn’t know exactly what she meant by la man such as himself,’ wasn’t sure he wanted to know, but he did understand that this discussion was on the edge of getting out of hand – of becoming an argument. He had come in here to find a little tenderizer to sprinkle over his speech, not to get in a hassle about the Children’s Library with the head librarian.
‘I apologize if I’ve said anything to offend you,’ he said, ‘and I really ought to be going.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think you ought.’ Your apology is not accepted, her eyes telegraphed. It is not accepted at all.
‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that I’m a little nervous about my speaking debut. And I was up late last night working on this.’ He smiled his old good-natured Sam Peebles smile and hoisted the briefcase.
She stood down – a little – but her eyes were still snapping. ‘That’s understandable. We are here to serve, and, of course, we’re always interested in constructive criticism from the taxpayers.’ She accented the word constructive ever so slightly, to let him know, he supposed, that his had been anything but.
Now that it was over, he had an urge – almost a need – to make it all over, to smooth it down like the coverlet on a well-made bed. And this was also part of the businessman’s habit, he supposed . . . or the businessman’s protective coloration. An odd thought occurred to him – that what he should really talk about tonight was his encounter with Ardelia Lortz. It said more about the small-town heart and spirit than his whole written speech. Not all of it was flattering, but it surely wasn’t dry. And it would offer a sound rarely heard during Friday-night Rotary speeches: the unmistakable ring of truth.
‘Well, we got a little feisty there for a second or two,’ he heard himself saying, and saw his hand go out. ‘I expect I overstepped my bounds. I hope there are no hard feelings.’
She touched his hand. It was a brief, token touch. Cool, smooth flesh. Unpleasant, somehow. Like shaking hands with an umbrella stand. ‘None at all,’ she said, but her eyes continued to tell a different story.
‘Well then . . . I’ll be getting along.’
‘Yes. Remember – one week on those, Sam.’ She lifted a finger. Pointed a well-manicured nail at the books he was holding. And smiled. Sam found something extremely disturbing about that smile, but he could not for the life of him have said exactly what it was. ‘I wouldn’t want to have to send the Library Cop after you.’
‘No,’ Sam agreed. ‘I wouldn’t want that, either.’
‘That’s right,’ said Ardelia Lortz, still smiling. ‘You wouldn’t.’
5
Halfway down the walk, the face of that screaming child
(Simple Simon, the kids call him Simple Simon I think that’s very healthy, don’t you) recurred to him, and with it came a thought – one simple enough and practical enough to stop him in his tracks. It was this: given a chance to pick such a poster, a jury of kids might very well do so … but would any Library Association, whether from Iowa, the Midwest, or the country as a whole, actually send one out?
Sam Peebles thought of the pleading hands plastered against the obdurate, imprisoning glass, the screaming, agonized mouth, and suddenly found that more than difficult to believe. He found it impossible to believe.
And Peyton Place. What about that? He guessed that most of the adults who used the Library had forgotten about it. Did he really believe that some of their children – the ones young enough to use the Children’s Library – had rediscovered that old relic?
I don’t believe that one, either.
He had no wish to incur a second dose of Ardelia Lortz’s anger – the first had been enough, and he’d had a feeling her dial hadn’t been turned up to anything near full volume – but these thoughts were strong enough to cause him to turn around.
She was gone.
The library doors stood shut, a vertical slot of mouth in that brooding granite face.
Sam stood where he was a moment longer, then hurried down to where his car was parked at the curb.
CHAPTER 3
Sam’s Speech
It was a rousing success.
He began with his own adaptations of two anecdotes from the ‘Easing Them In’ section of The Speaker’s Companion – one was about a farmer who tried to wholesale his own produce and the other was about selling frozen dinners to Eskimos – and used a third in the middle (which really was pretty arid). He found another good one in the subsection titled ‘Finishing Them Off,’ started to pencil it in, then remembered Ardelia Lortz and Best Loved Poems of the American People. You’re apt to find your listeners will
remember a well-chosen verse even if they forget everything else, she had said, and Sam found a good short poem in the ‘Inspiration’ section, just as she had told him he might.