The Story Collector--A New York Public Library Book Read online

  “And this stamp,” Mr. Smyth said, cradling a tray like a baby. He pointed his pinkie at a fancy bearded fellow. “This was the last stamp ever printed in the country of Montenegro. After the Great War, that country doesn’t even exist anymore.”

  “Wow,” Viviani said. “Do all these belong to you?”

  Mr. Smyth smiled. It was a gentle smile, like the soft glow of a candle. “They do. I’m one lucky fellow.”

  “And we’re one lucky library, for you to share your collection with us.” Dr. Anderson clamped his hand on Mr. Smyth’s shoulder. “That’s a ten-thousand-dollar stamp collection right there, kids.”

  Mr. Smyth flushed red. He obviously didn’t think of his collection in terms of dollars, but in a different way entirely: he collected the stories behind the stamps. In a way, he too was a story collector! Viviani knew one when she spotted one.

  There were stamps of fancy ladies wearing high, itchy-looking collars. A stamp with the Liberty Bell. Stamps featuring colorful blooming flowers—those were Mama’s favorites. A stamp of a hand gripping a sword—that one was Edouard’s preference. Viviani considered the fact that this tiny slip of paper, licked and slapped on an envelope, could carry important words and messages and stories to the other side of the world. It seemed so far-fetched when you thought about it—spit on your thoughts, and someone would deliver them worldwide. Magic!

  Viviani could see why Mr. Smyth loved his stamps so much. When he handled them, he handled them boldly but gently, with great care. When he spoke of them, his sharpness softened. His paper-airplane edges unfolded and relaxed, like a single smooth page.

  “And this one,” Mr. Smyth said, showing his last tray of stamps to Edouard and Viviani. He pointed at the one in the very center, of a blue airplane. “This one’s my prize stamp.”

  “The airplane is upside down!” Viviani exclaimed.

  Mr. Smyth beamed. “Exactly. It’s called an Inverted Jenny. In the first batch of stamps, they accidently printed the airplane upside down. But the red frame”—he swept his pinkie fingernail around the edge of the stamp—“was printed right side up. It’s a mistake. And after they fixed it, the wrong ones became very valuable.”

  As Mr. Smyth slid the last tray into the case and Dr. Anderson locked it shut, Viviani’s heart swelled. “Oh, wait’ll Eva sees this! She’ll love it!”

  Viviani rushed through the rest of the chores so she could come back to the Stuart Room. She hung on the case, fingerprints smudging the glass, breath fogging the display, and she didn’t care because after everyone else left the library for the day, it was just her and these magical slips of paper that deliver words to the world.

  The Inverted Jenny was her favorite because it was a mistake. A cherished mistake. If Viviani’s many mistakes could be cherished—playing in the workshop, her envious thoughts toward Merit, her note about Mr. Green—why, imagine how appreciated and admired she’d be!

  CHAPTER NINE

  Rites and Ceremonies,

  Dewey Decimal 394.21

  SEE ALSO: manners and customs, exhibitions

  The stamp exhibit opened to the public two days later. On the front steps of the library, four postmen in uniform sang barbershop quartet ditties into a large, square metal microphone with the call letters WJZ emblazoned on it, the official library radio station. Cigarette ladies strolled through the crowd, hawking candy and mints. John Jr. followed their lead and tried to sell sticky cups of lemonade to the waiting crowd, but it being a cold November day, he had little success. The men wore fine, gentlemanly hats, and the women wore leather gloves and sharp coats over smart, fringy dresses. Mama made Viviani and the boys dress up for the occasion, too. Viviani was so uncomfortable she thought her dress might very well be made of sandpaper and sawdust, and her shoes fashioned from vise grips from Papa’s workshop. She tugged at her starched dress collar and grumbled at her saggy stockings.

  The Doughnut Sisters were back, too. Gladys and Irene McIntyre were out on the steps ringing their tiny bells, peddling doughnuts to the crowds.

  “You! There! The one about to buy the—”

  “—candy! Buy doughnuts instead! Help a cause instead of just—”

  “—gaining weight for naught!”

  Dr. Anderson welcomed the postmaster of New York City, John J. Kiely, at the top of the wide library steps, between the two center pillars.

  “And these stamps are stunning, folks,” Dr. Anderson was saying into the WJZ microphone. Viviani could picture listeners as far away as Jersey City tuning in to the station on their boxy home radios. “Stunning. And so rare, the collection is estimated to be worth over ten thousand dollars! Can you imagine?”

  The crowd oohed and aahed for a moment as Dr. Anderson and Postmaster Kiely cut a big red ribbon with a fake pair of oversized scissors. (That was one of the first major disappointments in Viviani’s life, finding out that those big scissors were fake and that the ribbon was held together with a dab of glue. Oh, imagine what fun she could have with giant scissors!)

  The singing postmen burst into song, and a crowd of several hundred patrons flooded into the building. All these people entering the library, entering Viviani’s home. Her chest swelled with pride.

  Newspaper flashes popped and smoked, and a reporter approached Viviani. He wore a terrible coat, the color of split pea soup. Split pea soup tasted like mowed grass to Viviani, so she immediately found this fellow distasteful, too.

  “Excuse me, miss,” he said. “I’d like to hear more about why you’re here today.”

  “I’m here every day.”

  The reporter looked confused but chuckled. “I mean, I’d like to interview you about this exhibit. What interests you about stamps? I want to hear your story.”

  Friend, here’s where Viviani Fedeler simply froze. Eva had an interesting story to share about her parents escaping Armenia. And Merit could talk about Giza and climbing the pyramids. But Viviani’s story?

  If this reporter had asked for a story about stamps or had requested facts about the stamps themselves, why, there wouldn’t have been enough newsprint in all of New York to publish Viviani’s thoughts. But instead, he wanted to know about her, and her story. For a split second, Viviani wondered, amid all this glamour and glitz and showmanship, if her part of the story was even worth sharing.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Errors,

  Dewey Decimal 153.4

  SEE ALSO: common fallacies, fallibility, conspiracy theories

  That night, Viviani couldn’t sleep. After flopping and flipping and further embellishing her wallpaper, she decided to tiptoe from the apartment and enter the Board of Trustees room directly across the wide hall on the second floor, next door to the administrative offices. It was a quiet room, close enough to the apartment to not truly be considered “wandering,” but different enough to distract her buzzy brain. She turned the ornate brass doorknob and slipped inside.

  The Board of Trustees room was small by this library’s standards, with a low, elaborate ceiling and a carved marble fireplace. Dotting the room were marble busts of people Viviani had to assume were famous.

  CRASH!

  A clatter from somewhere in the library made Viviani practically leap out of her skin. It sounded like shattering glass.

  She snuck back across the hall into the apartment and peeked into John Jr. and Edouard’s room; most crashes and clatters seemed to begin with those two. But, no: stinky and dark. She tiptoed to the end of the hallway—her parents both lightly snored in harmony. How was no one else awakened by that noise?

  She thought of waking up Papa but could hear his teasing now: “’Twas your imagination—only this and nothing more,” he’d say, putting his spin on Poe’s famous poem “The Raven.”

  Viviani creaked open the door of the apartment again—eeeeEEEEeeee—and cocked her ear into the silent tomb of a library.

  Her heart raced. But no other sound filled the cold, dark building.

  Viviani thought of her new commitment to explor
ation and adventure, then thought of a favorite literary hero, Robert from Five Children and It. He and his siblings found a Psammead, and the Sand-fairy granted them all sorts of wonky wishes. Would Robert go back to bed? Or would he explore?

  He would most certainly explore.

  Viviani placed one slippered foot in front of another, sliding down the hallway without a sound.

  The library was silent. Not even Mr. Eames or his jangling keys. If he’d heard something, there would be a huge commotion, right?

  Swoosh. Swoosh. Swoosh. She was as quiet as a—

  A ghost! Viviani clapped her hand to her mouth.

  What if that noise had been Big Red? Papa had said he made up the story, but John Jr. said it was real. Viviani was torn.

  Just as the thought of Big Red entered her mind, she heard the tiniest sound: Tap. Tap. Tap.

  Big Red’s hammer!

  She peered slowly, cautiously, over the second-story balcony into the massive lobby below. Her heart pounded; her throat was dry. Her eyes adjusted to the dim evening light.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  A long, stretching shadow floated across the floor.

  Viviani squeaked, holding in a scream, and skidded and slid all the way back into her apartment—eeeeEEEEeeee, went the door—and she ran down the hall and into her room and leapt under her covers, until her heart caught up with her at last and landed back inside her heaving chest.

  * * *

  The next morning before school, Viviani went back and forth, trying to decide if she should tell Papa and the others what she’d heard, what she’d seen. Was it worth the teasing she’d have to endure from John Jr. and Edouard? Finally, she decided it was.

  She scurried all over the library, poking her head around corners and bookstacks. “Papa? Papa?” Her voice echoed in many of the rooms, hollow.

  Viviani had checked both the third and second floors. As she hopped down the stairs to the first floor, a chill raced over her skin. She got gooseflesh and shivered.

  This wasn’t uncommon, these unexplained cold spots in the library. They happened all the time, and the administrative staff swore they’d all catch their death because of them. But this sensation, which made her blood run positively cold, was particularly chilling after last night’s adventure.

  “Papa!” Viviani yelled.

  Two librarians passing by below shushed her, out of habit mostly, because the library wasn’t even open yet.

  Papa must’ve heard her, though, because he whistled the two-note whistle he had made up for just these moments, when the family needed to find him in this cavernous building: Twee-TWEE! Twee-TWEE!

  She followed the whistle until she found him near the main entrance. Papa and Mr. Green were bent over the large brass book return where patrons could drop off their books while the library was closed. When Papa straightened, he held a shard of glass, which he placed in a bucket with others. Mr. Green poked open the tiny brass door of the book return to peer outside, and a bright white shaft of sunlight slid in. He dropped the door and turned, scowling when he spotted Viviani. Viviani’s stomach flopped. She scowled back. He was the reason she was loaded down with chores lately.

  A burning smell stung Viviani’s nose, her eyes. The book return stank like kerosene. “What happened?”

  Papa shook his head. “Some ne’er-do-well dropped a bottle of moonshine in the book return last night. Ruined thirteen books! I’ve not seen the librarians this angry in quite some time. Come not between the dragon and her books!”

  That had to have been the clatter she heard last night—a glass bottle smashing against the metal of the book return. Viviani exhaled for the first time all morning.

  Thank heavens! She smiled and headed back upstairs to ready herself for school. But as she padded up the wide staircase, a troubling thought occurred to her: the crash was now explained away.

  But the shadow on the floor and that tapping noise were not.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Truthfulness & Falsehood,

  Dewey Decimal 177.3

  SEE ALSO: deception, honesty

  On their morning walk to school, Eva said, “I’m ready for your punishment to be over. I’m so bored after school! I told you we shouldn’t play in your dad’s workshop. And we never even got in touch with Martians.”

  “Oh, sure we did,” Viviani said, her words disappearing like ghosts into the gray December sky. She grasped Eva’s mittened hand with her own. “I talked to them later. They’ll be here in January. They’ve hitched their horses to their spaceships and are headed this way. They’ll be trotting past the moon next week.”

  Eva laughed.

  Viviani winked. “And oh! Just you wait until recess. I’ve got a spine chiller of a story to tell today! You’ll be terrified!”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Sure you do,” Viviani said as she took Eva’s hand. She firmly believed that fears were best fought head-on. Courage being fear stuffed with hope and whatnot.

  * * *

  Viviani was convinced that the clocks in her school ran slower than the clocks anywhere else on earth. Geography dragged into spelling dragged into handwriting practice: AAAAAaaaaa. BBBBBbbbbb. CCCCCccccc. But at last, at last, Miss Hutch said, “Outside, pupils! March, march, march!” Miss Hutch ran her classroom with military precision.

  There was a small, dusty yard behind Public School 27, bordering Forty-First Street. The schoolyard was sandwiched between two elevated train stations and was a block and a half from the Edison power houses lining the East River. So it was a noisy yard, full of echoing rumbles and electrical hums and odd, angled shadows. In Viviani’s mind, it was the perfect backdrop for her stories.

  Viviani had fully intended on sharing her late-night library adventure, the story of the clattering, clanging noise that had woken her up and sent her patrolling the nighttime halls. But throughout the day, the more she thought of that shadow, that tapping sound, and that red-whiskered ghost wandering the halls with his hammer, seeking out mischief and things to smash, the more scared she became. Just the thought of Big Red sent shivers down her spine. And so, peering at the faces gathered before her, awaiting today’s tale, she wrung her mittened hands and decided to spin a different yarn.

  “Today, friends,” she shouted over the sound of a nearby train to the twelve or so kids crowded around, “I want to tell you about the underground river that snakes eerily through the basement of the library, deep below the stacks. If you listen closely when you’re in the children’s room, you can hear water winding its way to it: Drip. Drip. Drip.”

  The kids huddled in their overcoats, huffed on their cold hands, and smiled in anticipation. Nobody told a story like Viviani Joffre Fedeler.

  “It is a long, slimy river, and some say that a massive, snarling sea monster dwells in its murky depths. And this river—it’s growing. It gets higher and higher and higher, thanks to a special water source available only to the library: Drip. Drip. Drip.”

  “How would you know?” came a British-chiseled voice at the edge of the crowd.

  The group of kids turned and parted so that Viviani could see who had asked the question: Merit Mubarak. Merit’s golden earrings peeked out from under her knitted cap, and Viviani still thought her pierced ears were maybe the most sophisticated thing this side of the Met.

  “I know everything about the library!” Viviani beamed. She hadn’t yet had the chance to talk to Merit about being the third musketeer; now was her chance to show her what great friends they’d be.

  “But how?” Merit asked again, not quite rudely but with plenty of oomph.

  “Viviani lives in the library,” Eva said.

  Merit’s forehead wrinkled in disbelief. “What? No one lives in a library.”

  “I do too live in the library!”

  Viv’s other classmates nodded as well.

  “She does,” Laurel Rudolph chimed in.

  “Second floor.”

  “Eight whole rooms—I’ve seen them! H
er and her family.”

  Merit eyed Viviani, and Viviani felt like one of those bugs pinned to a piece of paper in the library’s insect collection. Viviani expected Merit’s face to flash a hint of something that said I’m impressed or The library—wow! but instead, it stayed locked on to No way.

  “Still,” Merit said. “There is no river in the basement.”

  “There is!” Viviani declared, because there could be.

  Viviani was getting flustered because Merit obviously didn’t understand how stories work. Their truth was in their fun, not in their facts. Viviani watched as the other kids began to mutter to each other. Some of them shifted as if ready to walk away.

  Viviani thought quickly. That constant dripping sound had to lead to something, didn’t it? It had even been a reservoir once. Water once filled up her papa’s workshop.

  Her papa’s workshop! That must go in the story.

  “Next to the river,” Viviani continued, “are the dungeons.”

  “Dungeons?” a kid asked.

  Eva hid her grin behind her mitten. She was picturing the workshop, too. Viviani was sure of it.

  “Yes, the dungeons. They’re used by those spiteful librarians and filled with, with—tools!”

  “Tools?” Merit arched an eyebrow.

  “Tools!” Viviani declared, finger aloft. She was really spinning a good yarn now. “Saws and drills and clamps! The librarians save them for the cheats who don’t return their library books on time, or for those scoundrels who dog-ear the pages, or for the toddlers who draw in books! They become prisoners, all of them!”

  Viviani almost cracked herself up. Babies were cuddled like cherubs by every librarian in the building during story time, and the collected late fees paid for some nice things for the library. But those wouldn’t make for a very fun story. Viviani could see that she had won the crowd again.

  “So if you have body parts that can be sawed or drilled or clamped”—she pointed to her audience, some of whom giggled, some of whom shivered—“you’d best return your books on time. Because you know why there’s a slimy, long underground river?”