The Risk Pool

said.

19
    When school got out for the summer, I had a lot more time on my hands, what with my father working on the road every day. Mornings I liked to spend at the Mohawk Free Library, an old stone building with a nice circular dome you could stand beneath and look up into. In the big archways just above the second floor were stained glass windows, and in the mornings the sun streamed through the eastern ones giving the stacks below a churchlike atmosphere, though the tall narrow windows along the first floor reduced the effect with a more natural light. All of the books were on the first floor, which also housed the loan desk, the children’s room, and the general reading room, where a few white-haired men gathered to talk loudly every morning over the
Schenectady Gazette
, which filled them in on events ignored by the
Mohawk Republican
. These were fierce, belligerent old men who wouldn’t stand for any shushing, and the librarians ignored the occasional complaint lodged against them, though an identical QUIET PLEASE sign posted in the children’s room was strictly enforced.
    The library itself was oddly shaped, as if the architect had followed the curve of the land, ducking around boulders and trees rather than removing them. Even the rows of shelves inside meandered, each a different length and height, sometimes stopping abruptly to accommodate a floor register or green pipe jutting out of the wall. My favorite place was a tiny, out-of-the-way alcove where a small oak desk and chair had been placed, one of half a dozen such scattered throughout the stacks. There I could take off my shoes and rest my bare feet on the cool slate floor and read for hours, uninterrupted by the low, confidential whispers of the librarians at the nearby circulation desk, the whirring of the large rotating fan near the front door, the distant barking of the old men in the reading room. If there was a new librarian, she might come check on me, suspicious of a disappearing teenager (I’d proudly turned thirteen that May and was worthy of the accolade), but the rest of the staff knew me, expected me, ignored me.
    They never even minded when I opened the little unscreened window in the alcove, which provided a nice breeze until midday, just enough to lift the pages of whatever I happened to be reading. Until noon, even on the hottest days, my alcove was the coolest place in town. After that, the whole library became close and hot, and by midafternoon even the rotating fan did little to disturb the dead, heavy air. Both I and the bickering old men were gone by then, leaving one or two librarians there all by themselves until six when the library closed.
    I read some good books that summer, along with a great many bad ones, and I liked them all. Off in my own retreat and my own world, I learned some important things. Sometimes I would take any book off any shelf and start reading, as much as twenty or thirty pages without understanding so much as a word, or imagining I didn’t, only to discover that if I came back to the same book and passage a few weeks later what it said would make sense and I’d realize I’d understood more than I thought. If I was feeling energetic, I’d look up words I didn’t know, but more often I’d be content to wait for the word to crop up again in another context, and by its second or third appearance I’d know what it meant. I began to develop a firm conviction that most efforts to teach people things were wasted. All they needed was to go off some place quiet and read.
    Around noon, or shortly thereafter, I’d hop on my bike andhead over to the diner, where lots of times there would be something going on. The place would get busy and Harry would let me wash dishes for an hour or so, then feed me. On Friday he’d slip me a five or ten, depending on how much I’d worked and eaten. He had a good mind for figuring out what I had coming. I saw lots of people I knew. Untemeyer was in between two-thirty and three, a dead time when Harry didn’t mind him sitting at the end of the counter and taking some action. Having him was good for business then, because the men who wandered in off the street to get a number down probably wouldn’t have otherwise, and sometimes they’d stay for coffee or a piece of pie if they thought it hadn’t been sitting in the case too long. Tree came in all the time too, though he never spoke to me unless I was with my father. My guess was he didn’t recognize me otherwise.