CHAPTER ONE
Baseball,
Dewey Decimal 796.357
SEE ALSO: sports, World Series
Some people are story collectors. While others collect seashells, or stuffed animals, or stamps, story collectors wrap themselves in words, surround themselves with sentences, and play with participles, even those pesky, perky dangling ones. They climb over Cs and mount Ms and lounge in Ls. Soon enough they land in the land of homonyms, then, wham! They stumble into onomatopoeia, that lovely creaking, booming bit of wordplay—and that, Dear Friend, is where our story begins:
Crack!
The bat swung over Viviani Fedeler’s left shoulder, then clattered to the terra-cotta tile floor of the New York Public Library. She shrieked and ran, red hair flying, nothing short of a firework whizzing about the bases.
“First!” she shouted as her foot landed squarely on the pages of The Lost Princess of Oz.
Viviani’s older brother John Jr. muttered something unsavory as the ball sailed over his head. John’s best pal, Carroll Case, scrambled across the floor, slipping and sliding around the massive carved oak tables until he finally spotted the ball. It was rolling neatly down the aisle between stacks of Modern Priscilla magazine and Whisper.
As the children of the building superintendent, the Fedelers had played baseball in many rooms of the library, but the Periodical Reading Room was their favorite. It was a perfect square, and if you squinted, the red tile floor looked just like the clay in a baseball diamond.
“Second!” Viviani yelled as she toed The Bobbsey Twins on Blueberry Island.
Outside these thick marble walls, a horse-and-buggy trotted alongside clanking trolleys and honking automobiles, over rumbling subways. And on a clear day, if you leaned just right, you could see the gleaming white spire of the Woolworth Building, the tallest building in the world, from this spot at Fifth and Forty-Second.
This room had ample light from multiple windows, and Viviani imagined the trees fluttering in the wind just outside as a stadium full of fans, cheering her on:
Go, Viv! You can do it! She could hear them screaming now: Head for home, Viviani! Head for home! She could make it. She knew she could make it. She rounded third (a copy of Once on a Time) and plowed toward home plate.
Carroll scooped up the ball and hurled it with a grunt. The ball whizzed past Viviani and flew directly at one of the two-story lead-glass windows. A window with frilly woodwork around the sides and thick iron grilles holding the glass in place. An expensive window. One that wouldn’t fare well on the wrong end of a speeding baseball.
At the last moment, John Jr. leapt into the air and thunk! The ball nestled into his leather glove.
John Jr. touched the base at the exact moment Viviani shouted “HOME!” She slammed into him, and the two toppled over the copy of The House at Pooh Corner that served as home plate.
“Out,” declared John.
“Am not,” said Viviani.
“Are too.”
“Am not am not am not!”
“Strong argument,” Carroll said. “But you are out, Red.”
Viviani stuck out her tongue at Carroll and whirled to her teammate and best friend. “Tell them, Eva. Tell them I’m in.”
Eva twirled a lock of dark hair about her finger, straightening and releasing a perfect pin curl. “She’s in. I’m pretty sure she’s in.”
Viviani and John Jr. turned to the umpire. “Ump?” said John.
But it was readily apparent that this umpire would be of no use. At least, not where baseball was concerned. The middle Fedeler child, Edouard, sat reading on an overturned garbage can, the ones with the brass lion knockers specially made for the library. His nose was buried deep in first base.
“Fact,” Edouard said into the book, which he’d lifted off the baseball diamond as soon as Viviani had toed it. “The national anthem in Oz is ‘The Oz Spangled Banner.’”
“Edouard!” Viv and Junior shouted.
“Out,” Edouard declared without even bothering to look up.
Viviani cleared her throat and prepared to deliver her protest. She’d start with an appeal to Edouard’s finer points: his studiousness, his quiet strength. Then she’d appeal to his vast logical side: she’d explain how it was impossible for John Jr. to have leapt that high, only to have landed at just the right time in just the right place to tag her at home plate. Finally, she’d nail her argument with this: John Jr. must’ve instead tagged a library goblin, not her. Their father often told stories of the goblins, helpful little creatures that crept around the library stacks at night when all the patrons had gone home. Edouard couldn’t resist the one-two punch of a compliment plus a mythical creature.
Then, if all else failed, she would yell at him.
Before Viviani could open her mouth, the children’s librarian, Miss Alice Keats O’Conner, entered the room.
With a patron.
“Killjoy,” Viviani muttered. Unfortunately, in such a large, high-ceilinged, echoing room, her words were magnified. Viviani cringed. Eva shrank.
“It’s not what it looks like,” Viviani said weakly.
The keen eyes of Miss O’Conner flew from the panting children to her precious books scattered about the room. A thunderous frown darkened her brow. Her nostrils flared. Her glasses slipped to the tip of her nose, and she crammed them against her eyebrows with a firm finger.
Miss O’Conner puffed up like a balloon. “You were playing baseball. In the Periodical Reading Room.”
“Okay, it’s exactly what it looks like,” Viviani said.
Carroll sputtered a laugh and caught an elbow in the ribs from John Jr.
“You were playing baseball?” Miss O’Conner repeated. “In the Periodical Reading Room? And oh—you mangled Pooh!”
She lifted home base and examined the book in the sunlight glinting through the thank-goodness-she-hadn’t-seen-it-nearly-get-smashed window. The book had gotten a tad rumpled. A few pages were bent, and a large, dusty footprint graced the back cover.
Copyright © 2018 by the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
