The Most Vivacious Girl at the Dance
The sub-basement level wasn’t nearly as nicely decorated, in Maureen’s opinion, as the upper, public floors of the library. The librarian led them from the elevator to a locked glass door, and a tiny woman with very short hair buzzed them in. The tiny woman insisted that the librarian lean forward, so she could carefully inspect the name tag hanging from a lanyard around her neck. Then the tiny woman turned to Maureen and Miss 3.92, the ones who were causing this fuss, the ones who wanted to tour the archive.
She made them both sign into a book, and show their IDs.
Miss 3.92’s Rosary College student ID was apparently acceptable, but Maureen’s old staff ID badge from Edgewood College was not.
“It’s a Dominican college,” said Maureen. “In Madison. The Sinsinawa Dominicans, just like Rosary.”
“This is almost 3 years old,” said the woman. “Fall semester, 1990.”
And so Maureen had to dig out her Wisconsin driver’s license, which thank goodness was not expired. A middle-aged man in the uniform of a private security agency sat silently watching the whole process from a desk a few feet behind the tiny strong-willed woman. Maureen wondered why they needed them both. Was the woman not large enough to deter potential thieves and vandals? Was the man not verbal enough, not determined enough, to ensure that all visitors signed in correctly?
When every detail from her license had been carefully recorded, taking up three full lines in the book, Maureen turned toward her left, where the librarian and Miss 3.92 were waiting. Miss 3.92 smiled. The librarian looked impatient. Behind them, Maureen saw a long row of space-saving archival shelving. The invitation had made it sound as if Sister Eunice’s papers would be kept in their own special room, but Maureen couldn’t believe there would be so much....
“Is this all… all this… for my sister?”
“Oh no,” said the librarian. “Of course not. This is our entire archive. Sr. Martin’s papers are part of it.”
There was a long row of empty library tables, each with four solid chairs, in the corridor outside the shelving. The librarian led Maureen and Miss 3.92 to the third such table, and told them to take a seat. The shelving units here were all crammed close together, but each had a three-pronged crank, for moving it side to side. The librarian went to the nearest opening, and began turning the crank of the unit next to it. The security guard stood up and began walking toward them, but the librarian waved him off. She was a tall, strong woman, and the shelving unit moved smoothly, if slowly. When she had successfully moved one unit, closing one aisle and creating a new one, she moved on to the next unit, and began spinning its crank.
Maureen looked at Miss 3.92. The movement of the shelving was making just enough noise to cover a whisper.
“Well they obviously didn’t expect anyone to take the tour,” said Maureen, and she saw the girl suppress a laugh. Her comment hadn’t been real-world funny, just library funny, and it brought back girlhood memories of giggling fits in libraries, caused by the silliest, slightest things.
“You must be one of Sr. Martin’s family,” said Miss 3.92. “My name’s Melissa.”
Maureen felt relieved that the girl wasn’t a humorless grind after all, and began to tell her about the Larkin sisters from Dubuque, Iowa, about the narrow frame house where the nine girls had grown up, and how—
“Here we are,” said the librarian, interrupting Maureen’s whisper in a somewhat assertive tone. She had moved three shelving units, so that there was now an opening next to the table where Maureen and Melissa were seated. With the gesture of a tour guide, the librarian indicated the newly created aisle.
“The Sr. Martin de Porres (Eunice Larkin) Archive is on the two lower shelves on the left,” she said. On the upper of those shelves she found two report binders, and handed them to Maureen and Melissa. “These are the indexes of the archive. They’re both the same. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get to daycare by four o’clock. The archive staff will help you from here on out.”
And with that, the assistant director of the library departed, and the tiny, short-haired woman walked toward them, with vigilant eyes.
Maureen’s opinion of the librarian had risen several notches, partly because she seemed to have a child in daycare, which made her hurried manner much more understandable, but mostly because she hadn’t used the word “indices,” the way the alumni director at Edgewood would have.
Maureen opened her copy of the index, which consisted of two sheets of computer printouts, the old style, where you could see the dots that formed the letters and the little nubs along the top and bottom of the pages, from being torn out of the long tractor-feed roll. It was the kind of computer printout Maureen had gotten very used to in her last ten years of working as a registrar. These pages—the cheapest kind of paper, not nearly good enough to print a student transcript, official or unofficial—were bound in heavy gray-green cardboard covers and absurdly over-secured with steel-pronged fasteners. Well, it’s only the index, Maureen thought, explaining to herself why the library had decided to put cheap paper in archival binders.
In any case, it was the index of her famous sister’s life work. Maureen was very grateful that someone had gone to the trouble. Most of the text on the two pages was in Italian, or in the numbers and abbreviations of libraries, which as far as Maureen was concerned was also a foreign language. Maureen scanned the list, looking for something she might be able to understand. One section caught her eye: Pre-Dominican life, Dubuque, Iowa.
Well that might be interesting, thought Maureen. Miss 3.92 must have found something as well, for they both stood up at the same time.
“You go first,” said Miss 3.92. “Please.”
“Thank you, Melissa,” said Maureen.
Maureen took her index with her into the narrow aisle, that temporary pathway, just barely wide enough for one person. So my sister’s archive is on the bottom two shelves on the left-hand side. Maureen couldn’t help but feel a little bit disappointed, but she told herself, it’s an archive, they need to save space. The shelves were about two-thirds full, mostly filled with storage boxes made of the same heavy gray-green cardboard as the index binder. The boxes didn’t have titles, just catalog numbers. Maureen checked her index, which was very difficult to read in this light, and saw that she was looking for SRMARP 008-014. Would that be one box? Or six? Or seven? Maureen wasn’t sure.
On one shelf there was a row of books, like a regular library shelf, and periodicals boxes, the kind with notches cut in one corner. It looked like the magazines were all in Italian, and in black and white. Normally Maureen loved magazines, but these looked, well, boring.
Next to one of the periodicals boxes was a copy of Warrior, Daughter, Saint. Maureen hesitated for a long moment, then pulled it out, and opened it. This is that first edition, she thought, looking at the opening pages, the one that doesn’t mention Nora Eunice’s involvement. She felt a twinge of something, whatever it is that people feel when they know the real story, and the official story doesn’t match, but then she saw that there was another copy of Warrior, Daughter, Saint on the next shelf—and that one had the more colorful dust jacket of the later editions. Have the librarians noticed the difference? Did it matter to them? In the book in her hand, Maureen read a dedication to the “loving community” at the Sinsinawa Motherhouse, with a special mention of Sr. Inez, “who so tenderly cared for this book.” It was signed by Sr. Eunice Larkin, with her old name, Sr. Martin de Porres, in parentheses. Maureen thought for a moment. Eunice must have written this in 1974, during her visit home for Mother’s funeral.
Maureen closed the book and put it back on the shelf.
After a little bit of looking, Maureen found SRMARP 008-014, which turned out to be a single box. She located the metal handles on the side and began to pull the box toward her, but a voice interrupted.
“No, no! We’ll take care of that!”
It was the tiny woman, the guardian of the archive, who had apparently been watching Maureen’s every move from the end of the aisle. The woman raised one hand, to summon the security guard, and with the other gestured to Maureen to get out of the way. Maureen obediently stepped out of the shelving system, and saw the guard lumbering toward them. The tiny woman led him into the aisle, pointed to the box, and watched as he picked it up. From having pulled the box an inch or two, Maureen knew that it wasn’t all that heavy, but the man, with his prominent belly, looked as if he might have a heart attack carrying it. He placed it on the nearest library table—Miss 3.92 had already stood up to give him room—and then the tiny woman came over and solemnly took the lid off the box.
“If you need any help with the contents, just raise your hand.”
Maureen thanked both of them, very warmly she thought, and then waited for a few moments, smiling. After the man had turned and begun walking back to his desk and the woman had finally stepped a few feet away, Maureen reached inside the box.
The first thing she found was a diploma from a high school graduation. Mazzuchelli High School for Girls. 1927. Maureen didn’t recognize the name. Was there a Catholic high school for girls in Dubuque in the twenties? Maureen had heard something about a room in the old convent, next to the cathedral. Eunice must have been a scholarship girl. The Larkin family could never have afforded tuition, however absurdly small it might seem today, not with eight younger sisters at home. Well, seven, when Eunice would have started high school. And then I came along.
Miss 3.92 came out of the shelving, carrying three books and a couple of magazines, which apparently she was allowed to carry herself. She sat down at the opposite corner of the table.
Maureen reached back into her box, hoping to find more treasures from that vanished Dubuque, maybe something about her grandparents, of whom she knew very little, but all she found was a stack of composition books. Maureen pulled the stack out, which left the box completely empty. That seemed wrong, as if it were somehow a negation, a wiping away of Eunice’s early life. A negation, that is, of the few things that Eunice herself had not wiped away on her own, by living for more than sixty years a life of renunciation. Maureen quickly found the diploma, in its dark leather case, and put it back into the depths of the box. Just so something would be there.
Then she turned her attention to the bundle before her.
Eleven matching composition books, tied together with twine. The twine seemed to be of a more recent vintage than the books themselves. Maureen undid the knot, and picked up the top composition book. She opened the book and saw page after page of perfect cursive handwriting. There were a few fountain pen splotches, almost artistic in their delicacy, but most pages were marred by the presence of another pen, another hand: a red ballpoint that had annotated, underlined, and drawn boxes and arrows all over the place. Maureen had only to open three of the eleven composition books to be certain of what she had found: the story of the life of Matilda of Canossa, as written by her oldest sister, the teenage Eunice Larkin, in the 1920s, and prepared for publication by her daughter, Nora Eunice Magliano, in the 1970s. Published without permission. Stolen, that’s what Maureen would have called it, though Eunice had chosen to deal with the situation in a different way.
Well, thought Maureen, if someone wanted to, they could compare these composition books with the text they published, and figure out exactly who wrote what. And then she thought: Who would want to do that? Certainly not me. She had never liked the story, not even when her daughter had been so excited—far too excited—after its initial publication. Later, when her daughter had been revealed to be a co-author, or something…. Oh, it made Maureen weary to think of what she had felt then.
She turned a composition book over, and looked at the store name, stamped on the back, in faded gold letters, the way nobody does anymore: O’Toole Stationers, 1042 Main Street, Dubuque, Iowa. There had been an O’Toole in her class in high school—Margaret, wasn’t it? Or Ruth? Was that the same family? Did they still have a stationery shop?
Maureen looked over toward the aisle, the open gap in the shelving. There was something wrong with that book, Warrior, Daughter Saint, the Story of St. Matilda of Canossa, by Sr. Martin de Porres, O.P., that book with two copies on the shelves over there. That’s what Maureen had thought when she first read it—when was that? 1973? 74? Almost twenty years ago, now. She hadn’t been an English major, and she couldn’t have told you what was wrong, but she had known, right away, that something was off. And the same thing was probably off in the hand-written story in those composition books. Whether the off-ness, the wrongness, lived mostly in the perfect blue-black fountain pen script, or in the aggressive red ball-point, Maureen didn’t know, but she had a pretty good idea.
There had been so many things off-kilter in her daughter’s life. Maureen opened the top composition book and flipped to a random page. She looked at a passage underlined in red, with the words “Emphasize! Expand!” scrawled in the margins. She tried to imagine Nora Eunice, in one of the old bedrooms in Mother’s house in Dubuque, attacking the manuscript as if it were her own. Beginning her literary career. Maureen tried to feel close to her daughter in that imagined moment, but she felt herself pushed away.
Maybe, thought Maureen, it’s what I deserve. Of the many things that didn’t fit right in that poor girl’s life, you had to start with the lack of a father. The stories about Bombardier Magliano and his heroic death over the South Pacific were no substitute for a real man in the house. But that was war. That’s what she had told Nora Eunice when she had grown old enough to question the fairness of her father’s death: That’s war. Some men come back and others don’t. It’s not fair. But we have to make our life, the two of us.
What do you call that? Maureen wondered. When you say something that’s true, in general, perfectly true, as far as it goes, but completely false in that moment, in that conversation—a betrayal, when you get right down to it, of the relationship. She supposed there was only one word for it: a lie.
Would it have been better if the stories had been true?
Well there still would have been no man in the house, and they still would have had to make their own life, the two of them, and war would have still been war, and death still death, but…. Yes, of course, it would have been better if the stories had been true.
And the stories weren’t entirely false. There really had been a Lieutenant Magliano, and he really was a Bombardier, and Maureen really had kissed him, one night at a USO dance in Chicago. I was the most vivacious girl at the dance, Maureen had told her daughter, and Lieutenant Magliano was the most handsome soldier. Even those things were true, as true as memory can be. And it was true that the dashing bombardier had died somewhere in the Pacific Theater. Maureen didn’t know whether it was in battle or in some random accident, but she was quite sure that Lieutenant Magliano had died, and that his next of kin was an old uncle in San Francisco. She had spent the last two years of the war working in a Navy records office in Chicago, and she had checked quite carefully before taking his name.
It was all legal: when her daughter was born, the birth certificate said “Nora Eunice Magliano.” There were some blank lines on the certificate, but you couldn’t blame those poor people at the hospital. They were so overworked.
There was a war going on.
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