When Women Were Dragons(93)

I found out later that she commissioned the construction of a prefabricated airplane hangar in the empty lot next to the library, for the dragons who hadn’t been welcomed back by their families and didn’t have anywhere to go, and then installed elephant doors at the western entrance so they could come and go freely. She converted the auditorium into a classroom of sorts. She put up a sign by the front door that said THIS LIBRARY IS FOR EVERYONE, and dared the anti-dragon campaigners to tell her otherwise (and god help them if they did). She was known to clock the occasional protester on the library steps with a swift swing of her very heavy purse. That’s the thing about Mrs. Gyzinska: she could sneak up on a person.

I told her about Beatrice and her new school. I told her that it was already November and she hadn’t gotten into trouble even once—a personal record. I told her about the books that Beatrice had been reading lately, and that she had been learning to paint and to build complex metal sculptures that turned in the wind, and was recently dabbling in fired ceramics. I didn’t mention how she had access to things like metal forges or high-temperature kilns or how on earth such things were safe for a child of her age. But Mrs. Gyzinska didn’t ask about any of that.

“Well,” she said. “Beatrice is the sort of little girl who will always have an outsized presence in the world. I, myself, have always expected tremendous things from her. And how is . . .” She paused for a long time. “How is the rest of your household, my dear? Your . . . larger members.”

Goddamned librarians, I thought. How on earth can she have known?

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Of course she knew. She was Mrs. Gyzinska, after all. I sighed.

“Fine,” I said. “They’re all . . . I mean. We’re still getting used to one another. They are extremely helpful, actually. But it has been an adjustment.” I grimaced slightly. “Or, I mean to say that it’s been an adjustment for me, mostly. Beatrice, of course, is thrilled. But for me . . . after everything that’s happened. It’s still a lot for me to take in.” Was I too ambivalent? Did I sound too uncomfortable? Biased, even? Probably. These still weren’t easy things to talk about. I took a slow breath. “It’s strange. After I was so desperate for so long raising Beatrice on my own with no help, now that I have help—and honestly I have so much help. I have help coming out of my ears, and, well, sometimes flying overhead . . . And I know they mean well, I do. It’s just sometimes too much help can feel”—I searched for the word—“irksome.” I was being mean. I knew I was. And ungrateful. I was suddenly horrified that Mrs. Gyzinska might judge me for it. “That’s the wrong word. It’s just a lot. Does that make sense?”

Instead, she chuckled, low and gravelly, followed by a series of dry coughs.

“Indeed,” she said. Again she coughed, hard, covering the receiver with her hand to block out its severity, but I heard it all the same. My father coughed in the exact same way. “Sorry about that. It’s cold season. Not like a little cold could stop me.”

She could not have known—and neither could I—that a little cold would actually stop her, a little over a year after that conversation. What would start as a cold would become pneumonia, which would end her life on Christmas Day, 1965. The memory of what was to come and the memory of what was actually said that day are now, for me, inextricably linked. A memory inside a memory. The sharp and the soft coexisting in the same small space. Now, where I am, in this moment, I can’t think about that conversation without wanting to cry.

I told her about the diploma—graduated with highest honors.

“Yes, I know,” she said, coughing again. “I wish your mother could have seen it. I know she and I had our differences in the end. But I cared about her deeply. I know what your education meant to her, and what she was willing to do to ensure that it could persist. She would have been very proud of you, Alex. On some plane of existence, I feel confident that she is, even now.”

All of a sudden, I couldn’t look at the diploma. I missed my mother so much, I could barely trust myself to speak. I held my breath to stop myself from collapsing.

“Mrs. Gyzinska,” I managed. “I just. I mean. Thank you. For all of it.”

She coughed again. “Well. What I did was nothing and remains nothing. The only thing that matters is what happens next. And I suspect it will be fairly interesting. Don’t you?”

We exchanged a few small pleasantries—what I was studying, which professors were terrible, and some books she had read recently. And then we said goodbye. We exchanged letters after that, but this was the last time I ever spoke to her.

I went to the roof of my building where we had set up a little open-air living room, with an old, elements-resistant rug. Several ratty chairs and a couple very sturdy benches surrounded a large brick fire pit. I gathered sticks from the kindling bin and newspaper from the paper bin and assembled it into a workable shape and lit it. I had a good blaze fairly quickly. I stared at the diploma for a long time, thinking about my mother, her body reduced to paper and husk and wind. And my father, disappeared into work, then disappeared into a bottle, and then into nothing. I thought about our house, so meticulously maintained by my mother, now disappeared in a bright moment of heat and smoke and flame.

“Here you go, Mom,” I said. I pressed the diploma to my heart and then put it in the fire pit and watched it burn. “Here at the quiet limit of the world,” I recited, “A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream The ever-silent spaces of the East Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.”