The Excellent Lombards(14)

“Francie, my goodness,” Mrs. Lombard called to me. But she wasn’t going to pay real attention until every single Bushberger book had been scanned and neatly stacked in the six baskets, each child talking about the plot of the book she loved best, Mrs. Lombard somehow listening to all of them at the same time.

Here is the reason my mother was a favorite person, children and adults, men and women flocking to speak to her: Mrs. Lombard was on the board of the American Library Association, headquartered in Chicago, the representative of rural libraries, and furthermore she’d won the Outstanding Librarian Award (for Populations Under Five Thousand) in 1991. But even if she hadn’t been a nationally famous librarian you wanted to loll around in her company because of her very form, her skinny legs and broad hips, her nice, midsize plush bosom, the gap between her two long front teeth, comic and also glamorous, and in addition to those pleasant encouragements her brown eyes were soft with what seemed like sincerity. You wanted to be with her in the cozy library that was filled with only the good books. She was no beauty by any standards, she once told us, but she said in her la-di-da voice and trailing a moth-eaten scarf that beauty was unimportant as long as a person was captivating. We knew she had something, whatever you wanted to call it, because our father with his tremendous shock of straw-colored hair was famous among his apple-selling haunts, his smile, his beamy, white straight teeth a radiance. Every woman apple customer surely was in love with him, and in fact there wasn’t one person we knew of, besides Sherwood, who didn’t think the world of him.

When at last the Bushbergers were gone I burst out with it, I cried, “What is this about Mrs. Kraselnik? Teaching us, me and Amanda? I’m not going to be in the same class as Amanda. I’m not.”

The librarian of the year usually knew exactly what to say. In this circumstance, however, she was not her usual quick-witted, award-winning personality. I reinforced my position. “Mrs. KWaselnik,” I spit.

My mother coughed a little. “That will be a tough one,” she had to admit.

Mrs. Lombard didn’t try to assure me that competing with my genius cousin would be perfectly all right, and she didn’t predict that I’d change my mind, nor did she insist on the situation. She said, “I wonder what she’s like, the doctor’s wife. They’re moving in this week sometime. We’ll have to go up to greet them.”

Another patron came to the desk, cutting me off, and another, my complaint strung out for quite some time.

That very night the new neighbor herself came to our door. My future teacher on the porch, knocking. I was in the middle of telling William that under no circumstances was I going to be in the same class as Amanda when the rapping started. My intuition told me: Mrs. Kraselnik. We slunk into the living room, waiting for my mother to be the greeter.

It’s hard to say when I first knew I adored her. Certainly in our hall, in that glimpse, I noted her loveliness. She was slender, her features delicate, her hands graceful, her clavicle, her wrists, every part of her a bony elegance. Later, when she leaned on her desk in the classroom, her hip settling on the edge there, you thought flank, the horsewoman’s firm flank on display. Her silky brown hair was always in a ponytail, bound by a grosgrain ribbon, and she had a little mole near her nose, the first real beauty mark I’d ever seen.

“Where’s the doctor?” I whispered to William.

“Doctors are never home.” He somehow knew this.

In a very backward welcome Mrs. Kraselnik had brought us cookies and a plant, my mother going berserk about how wrong this was, thrusting the goods back into Barbara’s—that was her name—into Barbara’s hands. They were laughing, and before we knew it the equestrian was in the kitchen, and my father was there, too, all of them sitting at the table. Never before had there been a teacher in our house drinking a cup of tea. Jim Lombard offered up every kind of country living help he could think of: machinery, books, advice, his own strength.

When my mother called us in from the living room, as we approached the table Mrs. Kraselnik said, “Mary Frances Lombard. My heavens. It is…it is you.” She didn’t smile. Her voice was surprisingly low, her diction a little severe and in truth somewhat frightening. “A face for a name. This is always a thrilling moment, when the list becomes real. The real girl right here.”

I looked at my mother. And back to the woman with the thin, pliant lips in a fresh light-plum shade, the tenderly etched lines by her large blue eyes, her softly glowing skin, the peach tones. There was sweetness itself, but sweetness tempered by the tang of her voice and her erect bearing, Mrs. Kraselnik the horsewoman of summer fruits. “William,” my teacher said, “I’m very sorry you’re too old for me.”

My parents laughed. “I’m sorry, too,” William said sincerely.

There was no further discussion at home about the four–five split, my objection forgotten. Both Amanda and I, even before the first day of school, were determined to make Mrs. Kraselnik love us best, both of us full of Mrs. Kraselnik lore. “Her name,” I told Amanda, “is Barbara.”

“Befowah she mayweed huh name was Bawbawa Baker.”

“The doctor is bald and he looks a little black.” I added knowledgably, “That’s because he’s an Ashkenazi Jew.”

“He’s a wadiologist.”

“Her horse is Suzie. Not Chief.”