Ashley walked to the old stone fireplace in the reading room with her name badge swinging, tilted her head back, and read the carved oak sign aloud in a voice that grew smaller with every word. “The Harold and Edna Vance Reading Room. Given in 1998 so that no one in Des Moines would ever have to read the news in the cold.” She turned very slowly. I am Harold Vance, eighty years old, and I sat at the long table in my sweater vest with the Des Moines Register open in front of me, and my silver pin of an open book resting where it always rests, just over my heart.
When Edna and I sold her mother farm in Madison County in 1997, we had no children and no use for the money. I drove a snowplow for the city, and she kept house, and we had spent forty years warming our hands at the radiator of this very library on the coldest afternoons. We gave it a million dollars. The only condition was the sign above the fireplace and a seat on the board, which I held for twenty one years. The pin was the gift of the trustees when I stepped down, and I have never worn it to anything but this room.
The old librarian who had come out of the back office, Dorothy Mays, sixty eight years old, walked to the table and laid her hand on my shoulder. “Harold,” she said, “we have been trying to call you for three weeks. The heat in your building is out, and the city says it will be another month. We wanted to offer you a room at the senior residence.” She looked at Ashley, and her voice softened. “It is not a mistake you made on purpose, dear. You are the new girl. Nobody ever told you.”
A newspaper taken from an old man hands gave one retired snowplow driver the morning to bring a young librarian back to her own heart in Des Moines.
I gave my terms to Ashley in the voice I use for grandchildren. “Young lady, I am not going to complain to anyone. You took the paper out of my hands because you were afraid of what you did not understand, and that is a very old human thing. I would like only this. I would like you to put the paper back where it was, and to put a pot of coffee on the table beside it, the way Edna did in the winter of 1971. And I would like it to be a rule of this room that no one is ever asked to leave because they came in out of the cold.”
Ashley was crying by then, plainly, and trying to wipe her glasses on the sleeve of her cardigan. “Mr. Vance, my own grandfather lives in a trailer outside of Ankeny,” she said. “I send him money for the heat. I do not know why I thought you were different. I looked at your coat and decided who you were.” The teenager with the headphones, who had pulled them down around his neck, quietly turned off his music. The man at the computer had stopped typing a long time before.
But the security guard, a big man named Rod, who had arrived at the call of Ashley and had been hovering by the door with his thumbs in his belt, could not seem to stop what he had started. He strode to the table, snatched the silver pin off my sweater vest, and hurried toward the board room, saying over his shoulder that the thing had to be logged. He had taken four steps when the teenage boy stepped into the aisle with a loaded book cart and parked it across the path. Dorothy came up from the other side and folded her arms.
Rod stopped with the pin in his fist. Dorothy held out her hand for it. “Rodney,” she said, sweetly, “I hired you in 2011, and you are about to make a mistake.” The teenager, whose name was Marcus, put one foot on the wheel of the cart, as though he were holding the brake of a very small train. Rod looked at the pin. He looked at the sign over the fireplace. His big shoulders sagged, and he walked back and pinned it on my vest himself, with an apology so clumsy that it made me love him.
The consequences were practical and kind. The library opened a warming room in the reading room that very week and posted a notice that no one would be asked for a card or a reason. The city sent a crew to restore the heat in my building within the day, after a phone call from Dorothy that I am told was memorable. Ashley now keeps a pot of coffee on the table beside the fireplace, and she has put up a small card that says, Come in out of the cold.
In the name of my wife Edna, who passed in 2012, I started the Edna Vance Fund. It pays for warming rooms in public libraries and for library cards and book bags for children whose families cannot afford them, in Polk, Dallas and Warren counties. In the first year we opened nine warming rooms and gave out nine hundred book bags. One was a boy from Altoona who had never owned a book and who now has a shelf of forty and reads to his little sister every night.
On a Monday in January, with the wind howling at nine below, I came in through the doors of the library, shaking snow off my cap, and Ashley met me at the table with a cup of coffee and the Register, folded to the crossword. “Mr. Vance,” she said, “your seat is warm.” I sat down in it. The fireplace glowed, a real one, which Dorothy had lit in my honor. I read the paper from the first page to the last, slowly, and nobody asked me to leave.
