I am proud of myself for the way I handled Mrs. Crandall. I kept my anger in the icebox until I was ready to confront her face to face. After I let it out, I did not allow it to deter me from my goal of bringing McCabe back. It helped that Mrs. Crandall had tapped an old and boring reservoir of hatred, one that I had wallowed in even before I learned to read and write. This is what the tattered scrolls mired at the bottom of that fecal pit proclaimed: White people despise us. No exceptions: homo and hetero, Rapturous Evangelicals and Malthusian fanatics, resettlement camp bait and fortified city dwellers, sympathetic elites and xenophobic white trash, and every white piece of shit within and between them, whether true whites or honorary whites, including but not limited to Beulah-ish spics, gooks, niggers, and chinks; white-nosing heebs, yids, and kikes; gyros, polacks, russkies, guineas, and Kosovars and their Serbian torturers fresh off the boat after their third genocidal war in a century, thankful to America for this gift of a common ground, at last. There are epithelial and stylistic differences among them, but their contempt for us is one and indivisible. We, the other people, reciprocate with bitterness, wrath, disdain, delusion (pretending the cabrones del coño de su puta madre don’t exist), melancholia, murder, suicide (drugs, alcohol, holding up a 7-Eleven in plain daylight), circling the raza wagons so tightly that we asphyxiate, wearing ridiculous and spurious folkloric rags, and so on. We are not nice, we, the other people. We know it, and that makes us even more choleric. We would like to be nice like Mrs. Crandall. Hatred eats you. Repressing hatred, however, eats you twice as fast. I am only skimming the reservoir that Mrs. Crandall stirred, just to give an idea of how deep and old it is. At a moment like this, I think of sly, hypocritical Petrona and her five-hundred-year-old bilious cesspool. Am I her Mrs. Crandall?
I went looking for Mrs. Crandall, not to avenge a slight, but to find McCabe. (The slight I was willing to stuff in the bottomless reservoir for future use. It is important to clarify this in view of how things turned out.) I spent the rest of that week teaching myself how to walk again, aided by two of the Judge’s walking sticks. It was sweaty and painful. Relearning to stand on my own two feet took several hours. I wore the Judge’s wonderfully padded slippers over two pairs of soft socks. In between rehab sessions, which lasted seconds at first, then minutes, I slapped on my feet everything I could find in McCabe’s nurse’s bag, trying not to remember the way she narrowed her eyes in ferocious concentration while she changed my bandages. My knees also had begun to heal. They were still swollen and oozing, but I did not have to walk on them. I congratulated myself for my stoicism. I had been a stoic child. Then I had lost that quality under the indulgent gaze of scores of girlfriends. Perhaps it was coming back. At the end of the week, my feet were more or less functional, though they remained paler and flatter, their shape hesitating between foot and stump. I was never again able to walk without pain. Later, as my body began to change, stump became the predominant shape. But that was still in the future.
I was exultant when I actually managed to get myself into the cab that would take me to the Elmira library. McCabe had been gone for seven days. I was dressed as myself, my real self, the one McCabe saw at dinner every evening. Señora Mirtila was dead and buried, wig, scarf, and rosary, in the same grave as the Fujianese mathematician. It was madness to have thought that with all their ingenious machines, State Security could be fooled by amateur disguises. As the cab spiraled down Round Point at top speed, I glanced back at myself with the eyes of the newly sane. I had been mad. For months, maybe even two or three years, perhaps longer. The search for McCabe had sharpened and cured my mind.
Mrs. Crandall was behind the library counter when I arrived. She was wearing a severe ensemble, which clung salaciously to her body: a navy blue, knitted skirt, just long enough to cover the knees, a white, long-sleeved silk blouse with a discreet bow on the round collar, and a short jacket matching the skirt. In her black pumps, she was almost a foot taller than me. She did not recognize me at first. When she did, she jumped a little. I pretended not to notice, to give her a chance to rebound. She flashed her kindest smile. I returned Fathers and Sons and asked to be taken to the Turgenev cache in the basement. Not in all those words: “I want more,” is what I said, poking the returned book. I spoke uncertainly, not as badly as Mirtila, yet not as well as myself. I wanted Mrs. Crandall to transition from Mirtila to me without a shriek of horror. Not that she would have shrieked. She was tougher than I thought. Mrs. Crandall hesitated. “I am alone here today,” she enunciated with a sweeping gesture of her open arms that lifted her breasts and caused her blouse to open, revealing sumptuous cleavage. She caught my eye, but did not immediately re-button her blouse. I took a few steps toward the basement stairs, then looked back at her and said, in my own voice, “Please… It won’t take long.” Mrs. Crandall thought about this for a moment, then sighed loudly and locked the library’s front door, after hanging a Back Soon sign. When she rejoined me to lead the way downstairs, I noticed her blouse was again tightly buttoned.
The library basement was lit like an old church, with large pools of darkness and half-shadows. Mrs. Crandall switched on a tiny lamp clamped to the nineteenth-century fiction shelf, and a soft golden light bathed the leather-bound spines of the books. We held our breath together, transfixed. Mrs. Crandall was the first to return to the valley of the dead. She crouched in front of the bottom shelf, where the Turgenevs lived. Running a finger slowly over the embossed titles, she read each of them in a whisper. I stood next to her, unable to tear myself away from the seductive golden glow, the murmur of the millions of perfumed and brittle pages, the trillions of words—oh, sweet Arcadia, why would anyone want to leave you? Mrs. Crandall extracted a book. “You haven’t taken this out yet,” she said, handing it to me. It was Home of the Gentry, the theme book for my unrequited love of Bebe. In a vicious one-two punch, Mrs. Crandall had yanked me out of my beloved Arcadia and punctured poor Mirtila. Did she know about Bebe? Was this the knockout jab? I crouched next to her, to better gauge her answer. “Have you read it?” I asked. “No,” she said, “I haven’t read any of these books.” We were inches apart. I could see beads of sweat forming above her upper lip, her blouse sticking to a tiny wet patch above her left breast. It was hot in the basement, but not that hot. “You should,” I said. Mrs. Crandall studied the book’s spine for a long time, sliding her gaze up and down the golden curlicues. Then she grabbed my right hand by the wrist, gently but firmly, and pulled it under her skirt. Her cunt was as delicious as expected. You can fill in the details on your own, or aided by any jerk-off book on the market. I have no time, or inclination, to offer you Mrs. Crandall’s cunt on a silver platter, rhetorically speaking. We did it until my hand, wrist, arm and shoulder hurt, until I drew blood, until we heard footsteps above on the main library floor. I picked up Home of the Gentry with my dry left hand. Mrs. Crandall disappeared into the basement toilet. When she reappeared, she was again her voluptuously starched public self. She showed me the basement emergency exit, a metal plate with a safety lock that could be opened only from the inside. It led to a narrow, little-used alley sandwiched between the back wall of the library and a high evergreen hedge. “Will I see you again?” she said. She was at the bottom of the stairs that would take her back to the main floor. “Where’s McCabe?” I snapped. She looked at me as if I was naming an exotic shellfish. “Miss McCabe. My employer. Where did she go?” There was a crash upstairs, more footsteps, and laughter. Mrs. Crandall crossed her index finger over her lips. “Tomorrow morning at eight, I’ll leave the back entrance unlocked,” she whispered and ran upstairs. I scrubbed my hands in the sink and left through the alley. Waiting for the cab by the corner pay phone, I found what I was looking for in Turgenev’s book: “Her image rose most vividly before him; he seemed to feel the traces of her presence round him; but his grief for her was crushing, not easy to bear: it had none of that serenity which comes from death.”