Abbe,
George. Voices in the Square
(New York: Coward-McCann, 1938) 333 p.
A
boy comes of age in a small town. Sometimes he hangs out at the
library.
Miss
Bunce's eyes were the first thing anyone saw on entering the library.
She stood behind a semi-circular arrangement of perpendicular wooden
bars through which the books were passed. She was a huge, imposing
woman with a heavy, red, disagreeable face, hairs on chin and upper
lip. Her eyes, fierce and always penetrating, lifted from whatever
she was doing and knifed the person entering. Chuck never remembered
a single time that he a swung open the library door without
encountering that deadly glance, that lowered head, those beetling
brows, focused on him from beyond those bars, waiting there,
inspecting him tautly, like an animal inside its cage. For a long
time he had dreaded the moment of entrance into the library because
of that baleful stare, that brooding malevolence that more than once
had reminded him of the Harpies settling on their meat. She might be
stamping a book when he entered but she would pause, clutching the
handle of the stamp, her melon-like breasts standing out vengefully;
she stood there scowling, the rubber stamp lifted, like a judge ready
to strike the death sentence on a criminal's indictment, like
Rhadamanthus or a dark goddess of the lower world, watching him,
every step, until he had opened the gate and gone past her. (p. 70).
Miss
Bunce catches Chuck drawing obscene pictures in a book and he is
banned from the library.
