Canadians didn't shout, or not very much. One surefire way to tell Yanks in Canada was by how much noise they made. Mary didn't just want to shout. She wanted to scream. "We ought to be shouting for ourselves. We're just as much a country as the United States are."
"I suppose we could be, if-" Mort began.
Alec interrupted: "More smoke rings, Daddy!"
But Mort stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray. "Next time I light up, sport," he told the little boy, and turned back to Mary. "I suppose we could be, if they let us," he said, picking up where he'd left off. "But they aren't going to let us, and there's nobody who can make them let us. We're stuck. We might as well get used to it. If we do, maybe they'll ease up on us a little more."
Mary had never imagined hating her husband. She came unpleasantly close to it now. Mort wasn't a collaborator. Mary never would have had anything to do with him if he were, no matter how he stirred her. But he was- what would you call somebody like him?-an accommodator, that was it. He knew he was a Canadian. He even liked being a Canadian, and was proud of it. He didn't think staying a Canadian was worth a big fight, though. All he wanted to do was get along from one day to the next.
More and more Canadians seemed to be accommodators these days. That made Mary want to scream, too. Accommodate enough, accommodate long enough, and you weren't a Canadian any more, were you? Not as far as she could see. Didn't you turn into a pale imitation of a Yank instead?
"You want to go to the cinema Saturday night?" Mort asked. "The new film about Roosevelt's Unauthorized Regiment is supposed to be good. And they say Marion Morrison makes a first-rate TR."
"I don't think so," Mary said tightly, fighting hard against despair. Mort already sounded like a pale imitation of a Yank. He would have denied it if she'd called him on it. She didn't. She didn't want a fight. Life was too short, wasn't it?
If you don't fight, aren't you giving up, too? she asked herself. She supposed that was partly true, but only partly. She still cared about the wrongs the Americans had committed in occupying her country. She didn't, she wouldn't, forget.
"Oh," Mort said. "Almost slipped my mind."
"What?" Mary asked.
"You know Freddy Halliday?" Mort said. That was a silly question; Rosenfeld wasn't such a big town that everybody didn't know everybody else. Mary nodded impatiently. Her husband went on, "He says the public library really will open in two weeks. He says, 'Cross my heart and hope to die.' "
"Do you think it will happen?" Mary asked. Freddy Halliday had been trying to bring a public library to Rosenfeld for years. He hadn't had much luck till lately. Now he actually had a building a few doors down from the general store. He had it because the pharmacist who was supposed to come up from Minneapolis had got cold feet, but he did have it. Whether he had anything besides the building was a subject of much speculation in town.
"He says he has a permit from the occupying authorities in Winnipeg and a budget and books," Mort answered. "I don't know if he really does. If he doesn't, we ought to ride him out of town on a rail, to teach him not to get our hopes up."
"My hopes are up," Mary said. "You can have as much fun in a library as you can at the cinema, and it doesn't cost you anything." She turned to Alec. "I wonder if it'll have any children's books for you."
"Read me a story?" Alec asked, cued by the word books.
"After supper," Mary said. That made Alec shovel food into his mouth like a stoker fueling a fast freight. Mary hoped most stokers had better aim than her little boy did.
It began to look as if Freddy Halliday had all the things he claimed he had. A brass plaque that said rosenfeld public library went up above the door to the forsaken pharmacy. A formidably stout maiden lady, a Miss Montague, moved into a ground-floor flat in the Pomeroys' block of flats and began spending all her waking hours in the building. A large truck brought crates of something to the place. If those crates didn't hold books, what was in them?
The promised opening day came… and went. Everybody in town joked about it-everybody except Freddy Halliday, who remained resolutely upbeat. A week later, the Rosenfeld Public Library did in fact open its doors.
Mary wasn't there for the opening. Alec came down with a cold, which meant he had to stay home, which meant she had to stay home, too. She didn't get to the library for another week. It was a bright spring day, the sky a deep, almost painful, blue overhead. The few white clouds dappling it only made the glorious color deeper. Out on the farms beyond the edge of town, people would be taking advantage of this glorious weather to plant. Mary could just enjoy it. Walking along with Alec's little hand in hers, she felt guilty about not doing more.
In the library, Miss Montague sat behind a large wooden desk and under an almost equally large quiet, please! sign. She did smile at Alec, and pointed to, sure enough, the children's section. She didn't even breathe fire when Alec whooped with delight at finding books he hadn't seen before.
Mary arranged to get a library card for herself and one for Mort. She stole brief glimpses of novels and nonfiction books, encyclopedias and magazines and newspapers. "Look at all the telephone books," she said, trying to keep Alec interested so she could go on looking around. "You can find out the telephone number of anybody in Canada or the United States." She refused even to name the Republic of Quebec, stolen from her country as Kentucky and Houston had been stolen from the CSA.
"Why?" Alec asked her.
"So you can call them if you want to."
"But we don't got a telephone."
"Don't have a telephone. But if we did, we could."
"Why?" Alec asked again.
That string of questions could go on all day. Knowing as much, Mary said, "And here's a book of maps of the whole world." The big, colorful atlas distracted Alec.
It also distracted Mary, but only for a little while. If I could call anybody, who would it be? What would I say? The thought was enough to make her dizzy. She'd used a telephone only a handful of times in her life. The diner had one, but the flat didn't, and of course there hadn't been one on the farm. If she had a telephone, and if the farm had one, too, she supposed she would talk to her mother whenever she got the chance. She couldn't think of anyone else except her sister Julia she wanted to call. The people she knew in Rosenfeld she could visit whenever she pleased, while no telephone would ever let her talk with her brother or her father.
But even if she didn't have a telephone, lots of people in Canada and even more in the USA did. The telephone book for Toronto, for instance, had to be an inch and a half thick. Mary pulled it off the shelf-she didn't care even to open a telephone book from the United States. The first name she looked for was McGregor, the one she'd been born with. She found almost a page of McGregors, each name with not only a telephone number but also an address beside it. That must be handy, she thought, especially in a big city where you don't know where everybody else lives. After the McGregors, she checked the Pomeroys. There weren't so many of them-only a little more than a column's worth. She smiled at the obvious superiority of her own birth name. But then, when she saw the seven pages of Smiths, she decided quantity didn't make quality.
Alec got impatient watching his mother flip pages back and forth. "Want to go home," he said.
"Hush," Mary told him. "Don't talk loud in the library."
"Want to go home." Alec didn't care where he was, and knew where he wanted to be.
"All right," Mary said. She was ready to go, too. But then, as they were on their way out, she suddenly stopped. Alec tugged at the pleats of her skirt. "Wait a second," she told him, and went over to the librarian's desk. "Excuse me, Miss Montague, but could I borrow a pencil and a little piece of paper?"