The Book Borrower

THE BOOK BORROWER

A NOVEL

ALICE MATTISON

Dedication

For Susan Bingham and Sandi Kahn Shelton and in memory of Jane Kenyon

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

 

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Acknowledgments

 

About the Author

Also by Alice Mattison

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

T
HOUGH
she was pushing a baby carriage, Toby Ruben began to read a book

 

 

On a gray evening in late November 1920

 

 

and the wheel of the carriage—a big, skeletal but once elegant Perego she'd found in somebody's trash—rolled into a broken place in the sidewalk. The baby, tightly wrapped in a white receiving blanket, glided compactly from carriage to sidewalk. He didn't cry. Like his mother, the baby would be troubled more by missed human connections than by practical problems; also the three-second rule held: as if he were a fallen slice of bread, Ruben snatched him up and ate him. Kissed him passionately and all over, dropping the wicked book into the carriage. She put the baby back where he belonged and picked up the book, but she didn't read for at least a block. Then she did read.

 

 

On a gray evening in late November 1920, an observer who happened to be making his way up the hill from Dressler's Mills to the streetcar line that ran to the principal square of Boynton, Massachusetts, might have noticed a sturdy young woman hurrying through the mill's gates. The air was full of cinders, which must have been why she reached up to tie a veil over her face, though she did so with a gesture so casual, so obviously

 

 

Ruben had to cross a street. She closed the book. It was thin, with black covers, not new.

—Want a book? a woman in the park had said.

The woman wore a blue-and-white-checked dress like a pioneer's, but sleeveless. A wide neckline bared her freckled chest; with good posture she chased serious, muddy daughters in pink pinafores. Ruben's baby, Squirrel, was three months old.

—Go, Squirrel, go, Ruben shouted, just so the woman, sweeping by, would speak.

—What? Sunny hair rose and settled.

—He's trying to put his thumb in his mouth.

The woman leaned over to look, her hair over her face, and Squirrel found his thumb for the first time. Excellent, said the woman, Deborah Laidlaw, straightening, then giving a push to the small of her back. She left her hand there. When their conversation, skipping some subjects, arrived at sex and husbands, Deborah said, Jeremiah has intercourse only to music.

—Any music?

—Folk songs.

It was 1975.

—Fuck songs! Ruben was surprised to have said that. Her hair was dark red but thin, and she was shorter than this impressive Deborah. In the songs, Ruben supposed, people built dams, harpooned whales, or cut down trees, while Jeremiah penetrated his wife.

—History. He'll read any book about history, said Deborah, but mostly trolleys.

—Trolleys?

—Streetcars. He's obsessed with the interurbans. But there aren't any songs about trolleys.

—Clang, clang, clang went the trolley! sang Ruben, flat— who never sang for anyone but the baby.

—Doesn't count. Want a book?

Jeremiah had found it in a used bookstore. He had begged Deborah to read it, but she only carried it back and forth to the park in a striped yellow-and-white cotton tote bag.

—I am not interested in trolleys, said Deborah. Jeremiah has a theory about the person in the book. I don't care.

—It's history?

—A woman writing about her early life. About her sister.

—It sounds interesting, said Ruben politely.

—Good. You read it.

Ruben took the book:
Trolley Girl,
by Miriam James.

—You can't
keep
it, said Deborah; Ruben was embarrassed—but they'd meet again. The daughters were Jill, who talked, and Rose, a big baby. Jill collected sticks and demanded to throw them into the river, a narrow glinty stream visible through trees. So Deborah carried Rose on her hip, striding away from Ruben, down a wooded slope where the carriage couldn't follow. Ruben watched: the back of a muscular woman walking in sandals, her dress disheveled by a child on her hip, and an earnest child running carefully, turning every few feet—this way!—as if only she knew where to find the river. Ruben had never been in this park, though she'd lived in the city for most of a year, busy being pregnant. Forever she would have to remind herself that Deborah hadn't made the river.

She pushed her glasses up her nose and started for home. How snug and well-outfitted she would be when the Squirrel could ride on her hip, leaning confidently against her arm— one short leg in front and one behind her—pointing like Rose, who used her mother as a friendly conveyance. Now he was only a package. At the sidewalk she opened the book. Then came—terrible to think about—the broken place, and then, when she'd just begun the book again, the street to cross, and a dog she looked at. But now.

 

 

reached up to tie a veil over her face, although she did so with a gesture so casual, so obviously ineffectual, that the observer—if he had any reason to watch her at all—might have wondered what occupied her mind enough to distract her from the imminent risk of a cinder in the eye. Perhaps she was afraid of missing her trolley. She walked steadily and energetically uphill, though her skirt—modestly long for a woman in that experimental year—was twisted around her legs by the wind at each step. The girl yanked it free and hurried toward the main street.

When she reached it she turned the corner, and if our on-looker has kept up he would now notice another girl leave the shelter of a shop entrance—a milliner's, closed for the night—and hurry toward her. “Goosie, your hat's crooked,” said the newcomer, looking irritated. Under the light of a gas lamp she reached up to untie and retie the other's errant veil.

“Goosie”
said the other girl, a little contemptuously.

“I've called you that since I was a baby.”

“I know. But we're not babies now, Miriam Lipkin.”

 

 

Jewish? thought Ruben.

 

 

“I wish we were babies.” They weren't beautiful. They looked like a pair of nicely brought up Jewish sisters. Our onlooker, even in Boynton, even in 1920, could discover business more rewarding than the scrutiny of these two—and since their streetcar is approaching anyway—let's forget the observer. I'm going to follow them onto the trolley myself. I'm Miriam, who forty-four years ago was the girl in the doorway of the milliner's, and the one climbing the hill is my sister Jessie, or Gussie, or Goosie—names were fluid in those immigrant days—a clerk at the mill. She's now facing me with her back to the hill she's just climbed, like a cutout figure in front of a complex diagram: triangles upon triangles, trapezoids here and there. The sloping mill roofs, in shades of gray and black, are grouped behind her as if she's an icon of American labor. And she's climbing onto the trolley. Trolley girl, someone called her, not many months after this moment. The name makes her sound like an ingenue in a gay straw hat taking the streetcar to the fair, but Jessie was frivolous only as a joke. On the cindery day in November I'm recalling, Jessie had been a member of an anarchist cell for several years. She'd once had urine thrown at her while she made a speech on the Boynton common.