An Imperfect Librarian - Elizabeth Murphy [1]
My office is one of those if-you’ve-seen-one-you’ve-seen-them-all kinds of spaces: metal filing cabinet, bookcase, desk and chair, two monitors, keyboard, mouse, electronic stylus, picture of my wife Elsa, two chairs facing the window, one for Henry, one for me, and finally, a makeshift coffee stand that I clean after his messy visits. The whole lot is sandwiched between fluorescent ceiling lights and wall-to-wall, grey industrial carpet that doesn’t hide the stains. Opposite the door is the view down into the Special Collections Reading Room of King Edward University Library.
The best part about the office is that view. Henry can describe it better than me. I’ve heard him call it sublime – as in the LAB’s the ridiculous, the Room’s the sublime or a house of worship: “What’s happening in the house of worship today, Carl?” It’s not only the architecture that he raves about. “The rest of this library is a desert – a wasteland of floor after floor, stack after stack, book after book, page after page, word after word, letter after letter of volumes that have never been borrowed, never been read or noticed. You’re looking straight down onto an oasis with some of the rarest, most precious manuscripts and volumes in the country.”
When Henry comes by in the mid afternoon, he eyes the happenings in the Room so intensely you’d swear he’d forked out a fortune on a scalped ticket for the privilege. Occasionally, he’ll overstay his welcome and I have to ration the cookies to get him to leave. He stuffs them into his mouth with assembly-line precision using his right hand then washes them down with coffee using his left. He doesn’t hesitate to make himself at home. “How’s the spectacle today, Carl? Any new developments? Move your chair. Stop hogging the view.”
I never was much of a Winnie-the-Pooh reader as a child, but I remember the image of the short, stocky, wobbly bear with the shrunken red shirt only half covering his belly. Henry reminds me of him, especially when he wears that red polo shirt he’s surely had in his wardrobe for the last century. It passes for respectable from the chest up. The problem is around the waist. Between the top of his trousers and the bottom of his shirt is a too-generous view of a hairy stomach with a navel as round and deep as an artesian well.
I don’t visit his office often, but I’ve seen the photo of his three grown sons on his desk. They’re posed in descending order of height with Henry on the low end. All four have their arms crossed and are wearing matching red and black sweaters. The photo reminds me of a set of those wooden Russian dolls, more broad than tall, that nest inside each other. Henry would know what they’re called.
I joked with him once that people might assume he was pregnant with twins if he didn’t cover up with a longer shirt.
“The Irish famine ended more than a hundred years ago,” he said. “Where’ve you been?” He sized me up toe to crown. “There’s more meat on Good Friday. Bugger off or I might give birth to the twins on your grimy office floor.”
Henry has a stash of parting lines stored I-don’t-know-where. He drops one whenever he exits my office, like an actor walking off stage to thundering applause. That time, I could only make out the words “giant with a dwarf’s prick.”
I’d heard variations on that line in the schoolyard when I was a boy. Comments about my height don’t bother me anymore, especially not from Henry. He’d be starved without an audience and I crave the diversion.
CHAPTER TWO
the abridged version
THE LAST TIME WE VISITED the campus cafeteria together was October 1999, one month after I moved to Newfoundland. We were scouting for a place to sit when we noticed some people from the library. One of them happened to be a young, pretty woman, fresh from graduate school.
“She’s been giving me the eye,” Henry said as we walked towards her. “She’s after me for sure. And why shouldn’t she be?” He sauntered up to the table; you’d think he was James Bond. His cough was like a knock on a door. No one answered. We