The Librarian of Burned Books, page 21
By the time Viv finished reading, her hand had flown to her mouth. She met Charlotte’s grim eyes. “It’s begun.”
Those were the only two words they spoke to each other as they headed toward the kitchen, flipped on the wireless, and sat on the stools for the next three hours listening to every report they could find.
Eventually, though, Viv’s skin went tight and itchy, her legs restless. “We can’t sit here all day.”
Charlotte nodded once. “You’re right. Church first, though.”
Again in silence, they parted ways to dress. Viv didn’t take any extra time, simply pinned her hair back from her face, shrugged into a simple white shirt and gray skirt, and smudged on lipstick, smearing some of the color into her cheeks so she didn’t appear deathly pale.
She paused only when she went to step into her shoes, eyeing her dresser drawers. If today wasn’t a special occasion, what was?
In two strides she crossed the room and found her precious silk stockings. She dug out her garters, and then methodically went through the familiar motions of putting them on. The swish of nylon against skin not only soothed her but hinted at a future she hadn’t dared think about since the moment she’d read that headline.
When she and Charlotte stepped out into the street, at first it seemed like any other day.
Then Viv looked closer.
The same strange tangle of grief and elation that Viv had been grappling with all morning was reflected in the face of every passerby; people were gathering in groups in front of stores as men stood on soapboxes reading the news straight from the paper; stories-high American flags flapped against building fronts; men, women, and children wandered the streets, aimless, but, like Viv and Charlotte, too antsy to stay inside.
When they reached the church, a new sign beckoned them inside: INVASION DAY: Come In and Pray for Allied Victory.
There was only enough space to stand, and Viv found herself pressed tight to strangers who didn’t feel like strangers at the moment. She wrapped an arm around the woman next to her, whose mascara had smeared down her cheeks, held Charlotte’s hand with her own free one, and closed her eyes.
The priest wasn’t giving mass, but simply leading the congregation in prayer, the words a balm against the sour wound that had opened with the knowledge that thousands of men would be slaughtered today. Had been slaughtered already. Even if the Allies emerged victorious, there could be no celebrating that kind of death. There could only be celebrating the possible end to such violence.
Bodies continued to pour into the church and Viv squeezed Charlotte’s hand. They had been there long enough that Viv thought they should make room for others. Charlotte nodded once.
“Times Square,” Charlotte muttered after they stumbled outside. It was getting hard to maneuver on the sidewalk outside St. Vincente’s.
A few blocks later, they passed a synagogue offering twenty-four-hour service, and Viv thought of the librarian in Brooklyn. Wondered how she’d woken up to the news. Wondered if she had someone to hold her today, to offer her comfort.
Viv hoped she did.
It wouldn’t be fair to say Times Square had come to a standstill, but it almost seemed that way. Everyone was turned in one direction, their faces tilted up toward the New York Times ticker that read simply: ALLIED ARMIES INVADE EUROPE. Taxis blared their horns to get people to move, but they were all caught in some sort of stasis.
“Viv,” someone cried from the crowd, and Viv turned to see Bernice Westwood from the council weaving her way toward her and Charlotte.
When Bernice caught up to them, Viv hugged her tight. “Are you alone?”
“No,” Bernice sighed out, pulling back just enough to talk. “My boy’s home on leave for a broken arm, if you can imagine.”
Her laugh came out watery, and Viv knew she must be guilt-ridden at the relief she felt over her lover’s luck.
Squeezing the girl’s arms fiercely, Viv said, “I’m so glad.”
“The mayor is holding an event in Madison Square if you’d like to join.”
Viv silently checked in with Charlotte, who had torn her eyes from the ticker to watch the exchange. They had been walking for a long time now, and Viv could barely feel her own feet. She couldn’t imagine how exhausted Charlotte must be.
But Charlotte simply nodded, and who was Viv to doubt her resilience?
“We’ll come, of course,” Viv said.
Signs urging victory and American flags flapped above the heads of the crowd. A man bearing a tuba and playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” barreled past Viv, the metal of his horn knocking into her elbow. Toddlers dressed in garb designed to mimic American uniforms sat on fathers’ shoulders, squealing in delight, their enthusiasm undampened by the tension that kept the adults restrained.
“Good news for the ASEs,” Bernice managed to yell into Viv’s ear as they neared Madison Square. It was getting tough to move as those behind them pressed ever forward into a space that could hold only so many people.
Viv fought the urge to slap back at Bernice for thinking of such petty things right now, knowing she didn’t actually deserve it. Viv’s own mind had tracked a similar path back in Mr. Stern’s office when she first realized what an invasion would mean for her own plans. “Yes, I think it might be.”
Charlotte seemed to sense her distress, though, and gave her a discreet tug. It was enough to separate her from Bernice, and quickly three women rushed into the opening they’d created.
A makeshift stage had been set up at one end of the square, with a band flanked by American flags. A man with a film-reel camera stood perched on the hood of a car a few feet over from Viv, capturing the scene.
Only a few minutes later, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia took the stage in front of a bank of microphones rigged to speakers so that even the furthest person back could hear his nasally voice. After a squeal of audio had the crowd flinching in unison, La Guardia led those gathered in prayer and urged them to hold tight to their faith.
“We, the people of the City of New York, humbly petition Him to bring total victory to your arms in the great and valiant struggle for the liberation of the world from tyranny,” he cried out, the tubas breaking into song at his feet.
Viv and Charlotte lost themselves in the momentum of the day. Singers came onstage following La Guardia’s address, as did more speakers. The crowd ebbed and flowed, a man started selling bottles of Coke on the corner nearest them, another began handing out signs proclaiming support for Roosevelt and the troops, music erupted from various points in the audience, men saluted, and over it all American flags presided.
Eventually, Charlotte slipped an arm around Viv’s waist. “I think it’s time to go home.”
The streets became more subdued as they made their way north. Charlotte was limping after only a few blocks, so Viv directed her toward the subway, which she wasn’t sure Charlotte had ever ridden in her life. Taxis were jamming the streets, though, unable to maneuver around the crowds spilling off the sidewalks.
In the subway car they chose, three men played fiddles for a sad Irish song that a woman seated next to them crooned out in Gaelic. Beside Viv, Charlotte wept silently.
“Seven months,” she managed, and Viv knew she was talking about Edward, knew she was wondering why God couldn’t have spared him just to make it to the end of the war.
Viv had no platitudes to offer. They’d both heard them all.
When they got home, Viv realized neither of them had eaten since a quick breakfast that morning. She nudged Charlotte onto a kitchen stool and then plucked the apron off the pantry hook and tied it around her own waist.
“Pancakes,” Viv decided.
“For dinner?” Charlotte asked, her eyes still red but the tears dried up.
Viv didn’t mention how they were Edward’s favorite. Instead, she winked. “We’re adventurous women. Why not?”
“This adventurous woman needs some port to go along with those,” Charlotte said, groaning as she climbed to her feet once more. She managed to hobble to the drink cart to pour them both a generous dose, sliding Viv’s glass across the counter as she climbed back onto the stool with a moan. “I won’t be able to walk for a week, I don’t think.”
Cracking a precious egg into a bowl, Viv smiled. “We’ll hire men to carry you like Cleopatra.”
“I like how you think, my dear.” Charlotte raised her glass to Viv.
They talked as Viv worked, but not about the invasion, not about the day. There was too much to worry about, so, in silent agreement, they both pretended it was a normal evening.
They got away with it, too, until Charlotte turned the wireless on just in time to catch the introduction for the president. Viv could all but hear the hum of a thousand radios tuned in to one message.
Roosevelt’s voice rang clear and true in the kitchen. “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.
“Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.”
Viv tossed back the remainder of her port.
It was going to be a long, dark few months ahead.
Chapter 32
Paris
December 1936
Althea’s last letter arrived on the first day of winter.
At the time, Hannah didn’t realize it would be the last, though as the weeks passed without any more, she thought of it, hidden away beneath the Alice in Wonderland just like the rest of the mail Althea had sent.
On the back of the envelope was a message in delicate cursive:
Important! Don’t be stubborn.
Hannah actually considered opening it. It was bulkier than most of the previous ones. She also considered tossing it in the fire out of spite. This was the first one that had arrived after Hannah had learned about Adam’s death, and somehow that made it harder to keep.
But a little voice niggled at her, the curious and practical part of her outweighing the stubborn one that Althea had warned her about.
So Hannah got out her box, slid the letter in place with the rest of them, and then took out the battered copy of Alice.
Althea had published another novel, Hannah knew. It was hard to avoid, considering Hannah ran in literary circles and the book had been praised to high heavens by the international press. Althea was the apple of America’s eye at the moment, and Hannah wondered if the Nazis had forced shops to stock the book.
Reading the thing had never crossed Hannah’s mind. Or it had, for a heartbeat, but the immediate headache that had followed the thought dissuaded her from the foolish idea.
Hannah wondered why Althea still wrote to her, if it was guilt or some other misplaced emotion. They had known each other only a few months, even before it had all ended in disaster. She was neither blind nor oblivious and knew Althea had been interested enough in her that the woman’s eyes tended to linger in soft, intimate places. Hannah’s lips, her breasts, her hips.
That didn’t mean Althea had even realized what was brewing between them up until that night, that one night, which must have sent her into a panic.
In the deepest, darkest part of her, Hannah could sometimes admit that she might have been able to fall in love with Althea. Her earnest eyes, her optimism, the humor that peeked out at the oddest moments. The way she blushed and the way she walked through tulip gardens, how she touched books with reverent fingertips and spoke of language like it was a good friend of hers.
They were different from each other in all the right ways, and the same in the places that mattered.
Or so Hannah had thought.
If Hannah had had to guess, she would have predicted that she would never hear from Althea James once the woman had fled Berlin like a coward after everything had come crashing down.
When Althea’s first letter had arrived at Hannah’s Paris apartment, her initial reaction had been paranoia. She’d wondered if she should pack up and move that very night, wondered if Nazis would be waiting at the foot of her stairs. But then she realized Althea must still talk with Deveraux Charles, one of the limited handful of people who knew Hannah’s exact address.
After that, the messages had come once every few weeks or so.
Hannah had never opened a single one, let alone replied to any. Yet Althea kept writing.
Maybe one day soon, Hannah’s curiosity would get the better of her.
That day was not today, though.
She stashed the box back beneath the floorboard in the closet and got ready for work.
There was nothing to be gained from living in the past and wishing for a different future. Her present was what she had, and, for now, it was enough. It had to be.
Chapter 33
New York City
June 1944
The invasion had the effect of a dam rupturing. Where for weeks, months, years, Americans had buckled down and put their best faces forward, now Viv found girls crying in the hallways at all times of day, strangers on the subway ended up in brawls, men poured out of the bars in the wee hours of the morning sobbing and singing in equal measures.
The war might be over soon. But it was going to be a brutal trudge to get there, full of unimaginable loss and sorrow.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s daily column in the newspaper addressed the invasion the day after it happened, and Viv couldn’t get the First Lady’s words out of her head.
“Curiously enough, I have no sense of excitement whatsoever,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote. “It seems as though we have been waiting for this day for weeks, and dreading it, and now all emotion is drained away.”
Now all emotion is drained away. In the weeks following the fateful day, Viv woke up, made her commute, answered letters from soldiers, worked on planning her event for Taft, went home, slept, and did it all over again. There was a fog through which she moved, though. It dragged at her limbs, clouded her thinking, made her lethargic yet too anxious to sleep.
Eleven days into the invasion, more than three thousand Americans had died, another nearly thirteen thousand were reported wounded.
It was too much for a nation to bear, let alone a single person.
So Viv focused on what she could control: the Armed Services Editions.
As reports started to trickle in about D-Day itself, everything Viv heard only solidified her belief that although this personal fight of hers might look small from the outside, what she was doing was important. War correspondents wrote to her that the soldiers had been allowed to bring only the most essential items onto the beaches—and for many that included their lightweight paperbacks.
On July 9, a little over a month since the invasion, Betty Smith, one of the most popular authors in the Armed Services Editions project, published an essay. In it she spoke of boys they all knew, the ones who went door to door asking to mow neighbors’ lawns to earn some money to spend on candy; of boys who rode bikes and delivered newspapers; of boys whose mothers loved them more than anything in the world. Betty ended with a call to the nation for every person not on those beaches to do their part, whatever that part may be.
Viv found the essay in a newspaper, clipped it out, and sent it to Senator Taft, along with letters diligently copied from originals pouring in from servicemen stationed around the globe. Men who were watching the invasion from afar, aghast and disheartened that they weren’t fighting alongside their brothers. The ASEs provided them an escape from the feelings that they, just like the rest of the world, didn’t know what to do with. Books gave them an excuse to cry, a reason to laugh, a place to put their relief that they weren’t the ones being slaughtered, a place to put the guilt that they weren’t the ones being slaughtered.
She also had her hands full keeping track of the letters to the editor, opinion pieces, and articles flooding newspapers across the country. The council’s formal resolution against the Taft amendment meant Viv was no longer waging a personal crusade against the senator, that she no longer had to scrape together foot soldiers from nervous publishing houses or overtaxed libraries. An army had risen up, incensed by the far-reaching amendment.
Several papers had obtained—from Viv, but that was no one’s business—a list of titles that had been affected by the policy. Journalists had painstakingly gone through each book, searching for anything that might be political, and reported that they’d found nothing.
Undoubtedly, the public was on the council’s side. Yet Taft still refused to budge.
A gentle rap on Viv’s office door startled her out of her thoughts. Edith stood there, her bag in hand.
“Don’t forget to sleep, doll,” Edith said, with a jerk of her chin toward the clock. Viv blinked at it until the numbers came into focus. It was nearly eight at night.
She ran a tired hand over her face. “Just one or two things to wrap up.”
“You want me to wait?” Edith asked, her brows drawn in concern. “You’ll have to walk to the subway in the dark.”
Viv waved her away. “It’s only a few blocks. Thank you, though.”
“If you’re sure,” Edith said, hesitant. But Edith wasn’t one to baby her friends. “Good night, then. Don’t stay too late.”
“I’m right on your heels,” Viv promised. She finished snipping out two articles from local papers in Texas of all places, and then slipped them into the envelope she was planning to send to Taft in the morning. It wouldn’t do any good, but she had to keep the pressure on him.
The one thing she could hold on to, though, was that Hale seemed to think Taft would indeed show his face at the event, if only to appear magnanimous.
While that outcome was one Viv had been counting on, she still wished she had Althea James in the bag. Instead, it was looking more and more likely that Viv would have to find someone else to close out the event.
Her thoughts shifted toward her Brooklyn librarian. Viv was convinced that the woman was only slightly less private than Althea James, but at least she could make her case in person.
