THALIA SELZ
375
Farm
or
Salvation Nell
when the manager wanted "something
with real dramatic interpretation," and Hartford would dream
Rebecca or Nell, "the saved girl of the slums" with the "look of
dawn" and her "voice of spring." (He read the reviews.) Some–
times he put himself in the dream; sometimes he didn't. He
might be Mr. Aladdin, turning up at the last moment to rescue
darling Rebecca, or he might watch dainty Nell being brutalized
in a barroom. Miss Taylor began yelling at him or sending him
downstairs to the principal's office. The little girls in his class
tossed their pigtails and called him "dummy." Then he
couldn't
speak.
It
had dried up inside him. His parents pulled him out of
school.
Hartford hid in the library. There was always a town li–
brary wherever there was a playhouse, and the boy had been
using libraries since he was six. He had taught himself to read at
three with the books and magazines lying around hotel lobbies,
and he could coach his parents in their lines by the time he was
five. So he was used to books, and he liked them. They didn't ask
questions; they answered them, and Hartford had a lot of ques–
tions. The books told him about Shakespeare and crystalline
structure and metempsychosis, about the Children's Crusade and
the paradox frog and La Dore's Bust Food.
The librarian-it was always a middle-aged female in a
green or brown baize walking skirt with hair the color of tree
bark and the marks already upon her of old maidhood-would
come clicking up to him as he sat reading at a library table. "Lit–
tle boy, why aren't you in school?"
No answer. Hartford stared at the
book-Hallam's Middle
Ages-held upright upon the table before him.
"Where is your mother?"
No answer. Hartford couldn't have answered, anyway, be–
cause he was holding his breath for fear of disturbing the very
delicate equilibrium which had allowed him to enter the library
and remove from its shelves this mysterious book with its stiff,
powdery brown binding, its end-papers patterned like birds '
wings in red, yellow and blue, its foxed flyleaf upon which
someone had written in brown ink what looked like "E. Moff"
but was actually "E. Moss" and underneath the signature "Oct
br
21.1853." How incredibly ancient E. Moss must have been in
1853-the year after the book was printed-to have written his or
