Read Goodbye, Columbus for Free Online

McKee, who was only twenty-one but wore elastic bands around his sleeves, would march starchily down the stairs to work assiduously at stamping books in and out. John McRubberbands was in his last year at Newark State Teachers College where he was studying at the Dewey Decimal System in preparation for his lifework. The library was not going to be my lif ework, I knew it. Yet, there had been some talk—from Mr. Scapello, an old eunuch who had learned somehow to disguise his voice as a man’s—that when I returned from my summer vacation I would be put in charge of the Reference Room, a position that had been empty ever since that morning when Martha Winney had fallen off a high stool in the Encyclopedia Room and shattered all those frail bones that come together to form what in a woman half her age we would call the hips.

    I had strange fellows at the library and, in truth, there were many hours when I never quite knew how I’d gotten there or why I stayed. But I did stay and after a while waited patiently for that day when I would go into the men’s room on the main floor for a cigarette and, studying myself as I expelled smoke into the mirror, would see that at some moment during the morning I had gone pale, and that under my skin, as under McKee’s and Scapello’s and Miss Winney’s, there was a thin cushion of air separating the blood from the flesh. Someone had pumped it there while I was stamping out a book, and so life from now on would be not a throwing off, as it was for Aunt Gladys, and not a gathering in, as it was for Brenda, but a bouncing off a numbness I began to fear this, and yet, in my muscleless devotion to my work seemed edging towards it, silently as Miss Winney used to edge up to the
Britannica
. Her stool was empty now and awaited me.
    Just before lunch the lion tamer came wide-eyed into the library. He stood still for a moment, only his fingers moving, as though he were counting the number of marble stairs before him. Then he walked creepily about on the marble floor, snickering at the clink of his taps and the way his little noise swelled up to the vaulted ceiling. Otto, the guard at the door, told him to make less noise with his shoes, but that did not seem to bother the little boy. He clacked on his tiptoes, high, secretively, delighted at the opportunity Otto had given him to practice this posture. He tiptoed up to me.
    “Hey,” he said, “where’s the heart section?”
    “The what?” I said.
    “The heart section. Ain’t you got no heart section?”

    He had the thickest sort of southern Negro dialect and the only word that came clear to me was the one that sounded like heart.
    “How do you spell it?” I said.
    “
Heart.
Man, pictures. Drawing books. Where you got them?”
    “You mean art books? Reproductions?”
    He took my polysyllabic word for it. “Yea, they’s them.”
    “In a couple places,” I told him. “Which artist are you interested in?”
    The boy’s eyes narrowed so that his whole face seemed black. He started backing away, as he had from the lion. “All of them …” he mumbled.
    “That’s okay,” I said. “You go look at whichever ones you want. The next flight up. Follow the arrow to where it says Stack Three. You remember that? Stack Three. Ask somebody upstairs.”
    He did not move; he seemed to be taking my curiosity about his taste as a kind of poll-tax investigation. “Go ahead,” I said, slashing my face with a smile, “right up there …”
    And like a shot he was scuffling and tapping up towards the heart section.
    After lunch I came back to the in-and-out desk and there was John McKee, waiting, in his pale blue slacks, his black shoes, his barber-cloth shirt with the elastic bands, and a great knit tie, green, wrapped into a Windsor knot, that was huge and jumped when he talked. His breath smelled of hair oil and his hair of breath and when he spoke, spittle cobwebbed the comers of his mouth. I did not like him and at times had the urge to