The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [116]
“Oh dear,” she said sadly at the end, shaking her head. “I’m afraid it’s a cut and dried case. You’re a runaway. The worst kind. Underage. Our rules are especially strict for underage runaways. We simply hold on to them and wire the Traveler’s Aid in the town they’ve run away from, and they provide the fare for the return and get it back later from the parents or guardians —but listen, don’t go!” she called out to me suddenly as I started backing away. “I’d like to help you, I really would,” she said. She leaned over the counter. “Why shouldn’t you be a bullfighter if you want to be? I’m sick to death of standing here day after day sending people back to places they hate, places they’ve run away from. I just can’t bear it any longer. I mean who are we to know what’s what anyway? Look, here’s a dollar. Go over to the soda fountain and have something to eat. I’ll check the timetables of the trains going West from Union Station and we’ll figure out your next move when you get back.”
When I returned she said, “Quick. Here’s fifteen dollars, it’s all I’ve got on me. Your train leaves in half an hour from Union Station and you’ve just got time to make it. I’ll help you get a taxi. We’ve got a priority and they let us jump the line.”
She left the booth and went over to pick up my bag. Then I saw what it was. She was lame. She had an ugly brace on her leg and she hobbled badly. I looked at it and looked away quickly. But not quickly enough.
“The blind leading the blind,” she said casually, acknowledging the fact, as I followed the grotesquely hobbling figure out of the station.
“But I don’t even know your name,” I said suddenly, leaning forward in the taxi. “How shall I pay you back?”
“You don’t have to pay me back,” she answered. “Good luck to you. You’re running for my life.” She slammed the cab door shut and, turning swiftly, hobbled away.
And that was why they didn’t pick me up until Albuquerque.
I stood still in the middle of the station and made the porter put down my bags. So now I’d got to the bottom of it. I’d come the full circle and suddenly I lost my space urge. The dash to California seemed so utterly puerile now. Now called for something entirely different. Now called for something drastically un-running away. Now called for—what? Suddenly I had it. Now called for becoming a librarian! In that way I would be laying the ghost once and for all.
Yes. I would go back to New York (surely there were more libraries there than any other place in America) and, yes, I would actually become a librarian.
SIX
NOW HERE’S THE heavy irony. So I went back to New York to become a librarian. To actually seek out this thing I’ve been fleeing all my life. And (here it comes): a librarian is just not that easy to become. I’d taken my lamb by the hand to the slaughter and nobody even wanted it. Apparently there’s a whole filing system and annotating system and stamping system and God knows what you have to learn before you qualify. So I finally found a little out-of-the-way, off-the-beaten-track library downtown and they let me put the books away.
So I felt I was accomplishing something.
I wrote to my mother and father explaining what had become of my passport and all, and told them not to worry if they happened to see my name mentioned in a vice trial. I said I was studying to become a librarian (not strictly true) and that I had moved into an all-girls hotel (terribly true),