Doris Lane

“I no worry,” the shoeshine man muttered, leaving a small cloud of vapor on the glass of the lobby door. The library entry had a columned Tuscan portico. The shoeshine man was himself Tuscan. “I no worry,” he breathed on the glass door.

The little library built in 1905 was one of sixty-seven built for the City of New York with steel capital donated by Andrew Carnegie. The architects Carrere & Hastings also designed the main library on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, but there the similarity ended.

Two blocks from the waterfront and south of the railroad overpass, the one-story library was petite and brick-walled with white adobe arched over huge windows. The Port Richmond Library served the northwest corner of Staten Island, an area of salt marshes, shipyards, factories, and graceful nineteenth century homes.

The library overlooked the village park this gray October day in 1944 and every day.

An old woman with a collapsed face, with hair the color of raw iron bristling out the edges of a watch cap, pushed at the door. The shoeshine man was shoved to the green wall. His head went crack, but it seemed to wake him up.

“Outta my way!” the woman barked. “Whaddya blind now as well as foreign, Frank?” She wrinkled her nose. “Smells like a goddamn smokestack in here. Here comes that spy-catcher. You better watch your bee-hind.”

“I no worry nothing. I’m good American.” Frank’s dark eyes flashed indignation as the corners of his thin mouth turned down.

The old bat cackled and went inside, her thick stockings drooping around her thick ankles.

Frank lit a smoke off the one he’d been smoking. He took a soft cloth out of a cabinet. He began buffing the wood of his shoeshine stand. A man wearing a trench coat and a brushed fedora came in. He sat down in the stall. Frank wordlessly handed him a Daily Mirror and took the coin. The man hid his face behind the tabloid.

“The Thin Man Goes Home. I think I’ll go to the pictures.”

Frank grunted.

“Dashiell Hammett. He’s in the army now.”

“Who he is?”

“You work in a library and you don’t know Dashiell Hammett?”

“Who he is?” Frank demanded.

The man finished reading the article before answering. “A famous drunkard and a Red. Writers can be counted on to be pinkos; it’s a fact of nature.”

Frank snapped his rag one last time on the brown shoe. He allowed the long ash from the cigarette hanging from his lip to fall on the man’s pinstriped pant leg. He stood. He said, “You finish.”

“Just remember, you shine any pinko shoes, I wanna hear about it. Capice?”

“I no worry,” Frank said.

“Yeah, you no worry,” the man said and left.

Frank watched the federal agent walk to the corner and turn where the bookmobile was parked. The bookmobile was a 1937 Ford left over from the WPA that resembled a fruit and vegetable truck. It was painted green as a pepper.

Frank had not been required to carry an enemy alien card for the past two years, but Frank remained afraid. His uncle had been an anarchist in the 1910s. Was he supposed to put the old man in the street for his baloney about Sacco and Vanzetti?

Long after the man was out of sight, Frank stared at the painted words along the side of the bookmobile: ALL ROADS LEAD TO THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY. Frank didn’t have a lot of English and he couldn’t read, but he had figured out those particular words over time.

“I no go, Miss Deck,” Frank said at the reference desk.

“What do you mean, you no go? I mean, won’t go. What’s wrong?”

Patricia Decker could smell tobacco coming off in waves from Frank’s shabby pea coat. She was dying for a smoke. She pulled on her spare cardigan and followed Frank to the lobby. She took a hand-rolled cigarette from her pocket. She lit it with a match. She closed her eyes and blew smoke through her red lips.

Frank was all but collapsed against the glass door. What ailed the man? Frank was a small man with a child-like body. He looked undernourished in his bulky clothes, but Patricia had never known him to be ill.

Patricia glanced into the main room to be sure nobody was looking for her. There were only a few readers inside, most huddled near the fireplaces with newspapers. A sailor off one of the ships in dry dock was selecting paperbacks from a rack she’d wheeled out from behind the circulation desk.

The air in the lobby was raw and she drew her sweater closer around her waist. “We can’t not go, Frank.” He ignored her. “What about the children waiting for their books?”

“No gas, Miss Deck.”

The bookmobile had been idle the past two weeks, missing its weekly rounds because of the gasoline the old truck gobbled through its rations. Frank earned extra money by driving the traveling library. Patricia could probably drive the truck, but it was against regulations for her to go alone. Some of the areas the bookmobile served were desolate and some were rough.

“Frank, I know there has to be gas.”

Patricia noticed his pallor was off, the planes of his face shadowed, his black eyes fevered with anxiety. It was almost noon. Patricia decided to give him time to change his mind.

She went inside to the circulation desk. She waited for the relief librarian to come up from the stacks in the basement. On a sunny day the library’s enormous windows brightened the rooms, but on a day like today every second green-shaded lamp was lit. She glanced out the window and saw Frank was filling the gasoline tank of the bookmobile.
Old Mrs. Henson returned the Mirror and took the Advance.

“You look peaked, girlie. Need some codliverl, maybe.”

Patricia blushed and passed the pulp novels she’d been checking out for the blue-eyed sailor. She wished she had on her high-heeled, ankle strapped lizard pumps instead of crepe-soled flats. The sailor had a puzzled look on his face.

“Cod liver oil,” Patricia explained, patting her rolled black hair.

He flashed white teeth in a smile and tipped his white hat forward over his brow.

Patricia pushed The Dark Tunnel across the counter. “Try this one. Written by a Navy man. His first book and it’s a humdinger.”

He took his books and winked at her. “Eat lunch?”

“Usually.”

He had a melting drawl to his speech and a lazy eye on the front of her blouse. “Where you go eat?”

“The diner on the Square.”

“All alone?”

“Not anymore,” Patricia smiled slowly.

“Oh, you kid,” Mrs. Henson said, watching the broad shoulders of the sailor move out the door.

Patricia had to laugh. Mrs. Henson was known to have been quite the man-killer before the turn of the century. You could still hear stories: She danced on tables as late as 1930 in the basement speakeasy in the hotel Aaron Burr died in on Port Richmond Square.

“You seen that feeb out there before with Frank? Frank better watch his bee-hind.”

“Mrs. Henson, just because Frank is Italian does not make him a spy. You could get him in trouble. Think of his family.”

Patricia had seen the federal agent having his shoes shined. The library staff was on alert for spies and saboteurs along with the rest of the waterfront.

“You’d think he’d go about in disguise. Everybody knows who he is.”

“Well, how else would we know whom to tell?”

“Whom? Well, hoity-toity, pardon my back.” Mrs. Henson sashayed over to the side of the fire.

Mrs. Henson’s prejudices had not kept her from helping to feed Frank’s five children during the Depression. Frank had broken his leg and was out of work. Patricia knew she was a good-hearted woman.

Thank God wood is plentiful, Patricia thought, as she put on her coat. They’d had to turn in anything metal for the war effort, but the library kept its fine furniture and kept its patrons warm.

Frank was arguing with the sailor in the lobby. He was looking at the floor and holding his hands palm out. “No pay.”

“He never charges servicemen,” Patricia said, taking his arm. Looking at Frank, she said, “You be here when I get back.”

But Frank had not been there when Patricia returned from lunch. It was a little scary at first, but she had gotten the hang of the truck after about ten minutes. Her first concern was not to be seen by a member of the library board. Her second concern was leaving work on time. She had to get home and dress for her date with the sailor from Alabama. They were going dancing at the Log Cabin. She would have to meet him there; her father was cool to sailors.

Now Patricia was doling out books outside the playground on Harbor Road. The four o’clock whistle had blown from the shipyard. The men started up the hill in their grease-heavy work clothes. The children lost interest in the bookmobile and ran to meet their fathers. A man in a baggy brown suit stood against the playground fence smoking a pipe. Patricia realized he had been there a while and gave him a sharp look. In response, he walked over to her.

“Where is the Italian?” he wanted to know.

Patricia detected an accent, German she thought. She took note of brown eyes behind his spectacles and a small scar that broke his beard toward his left ear.

“The bootblack,” he added.

“Frank?”

“Where is he?”

“What’s it to you?”

Patricia did not like this man. He had a shifty look about him. She tried not to think about Mrs. Henson and her doubts over Frank’s patriotism. She drew the covers closed over the window without waiting for his answer. She was glad she had thought to lock the truck’s doors. She glanced through the rear windshield and saw the man hurrying down the street. Patricia’s heart was thudding. She waited a moment before starting the truck back to the library.

Frank was in the lobby and came outside when she pulled up. Patricia saw that he was nervous, but she didn’t much care. “Abandoning your post is a serious matter,” she told him.

“Mr. Benedict will have to hear about this. You had better go home now, Frank.”

She said nothing further and went inside. The head librarian was in Washington for the duration, but Patricia would have to write him of Frank’s dereliction. The library was closed evenings since the war began. Frank was gone when she came out.

The train made fewer stops than the Red Mike trolley and would get her home a bit sooner. Patricia hurried down Bennett Street toward the station. It had been a gloomy day. Darkness was falling uncommonly fast. She had changed into her high heels. The clicking sound of her own footsteps followed her in the twilight.

The tracks ran quite high above street level. Large concrete stanchions stained orange by weather supported the overpass. The sidewalk to the stairway ran between the stanchions. It was a dark walkway smelling of damp and closed in by the blank rear walls of buildings on two side streets. One or two of the overhead light bulbs were typically burned out.

Patricia felt the chill of fear she always felt when she stepped into the gloomy passage. She knew she would feel relief only once she had climbed the steep staircase and reached the open platform. She could see the lights of stores on Richmond Avenue at the other end. They seemed very far away.

She heard a scrape on the ground from her left and turned to see the man from the bookmobile. His upper face was very white over his shoulder pressed against a concrete column. She couldn’t see anything past his bulk, but heard, “Run, Miss Deck! Run!”

The man whipped around still grasping Frank by the neck. He dragged the smaller man on his knees along the pavement.

“Run, Miss Deck!”

“What are you doing there?” Patricia demanded in her sternest librarian’s tone. “Leave him alone!”

The man dropped Frank and came after Patricia. Frank shot forward low and tackled the other man. His face bloodied from scraping the concrete, the man jerked himself upward from the waist and took hold of Frank’s ears. Frank held fast to the man’s legs, flopping around like a fish on the line. Patricia ground the heel of her shoe into the man’s kidney, screaming the only thing she could think of: “Raaaaaaaaape!”

Footsteps pounded along the walkway. Suddenly there was a crowd. The federal agent broke through and in the dim light put a gun to Frank’s head. Patricia shoved the agent’s arm.

“Not him, stupid. The other guy.”

“Who are you calling stupid, Miss Decker?” he said, but he turned his gun in the appropriate direction. “Well, well, look who we have here.”

Patricia helped Frank to his feet. He was shaking like a leaf. Patricia thought he might fold. She put her arm around his back and held him upright. The agent had handcuffed the German.

“Frank comes with me,” he said. “He has to be interviewed.”

“Then I’m coming, too. This man has been following Frank. I’m a witness.”

A witness to what exactly, she wasn’t sure, but she believed in Frank’s decency. She was not about to abandon him.

“Calm yourself, sister. Frank’s a witness, too. Good job, Frank.”

The shoeshine man shrugged. “I no worry.”