A Moment of Grace by Susan Van Kirk

 

I write mysteries that center around the influence of history in the Midwest town where I grew up. Galesburg, Illinois, a town of 38,000 in the early 1950s, was where I discovered reading. Each week I walked to the Galesburg Public Library with my mother, an avid reader herself. It was built in 1901—a Carnegie library—and it had a massive, double-wide marble staircase you faced when you walked in the front door. Part of the floor in the second story was made of glass cubes that intrigued my seven-year-old imagination.

 But the best part of “my library” was the children’s room, holding marvelous wonders, including a doll house filled with miniature furniture and people. It drew me like a magnet. The front was made of glass so I could only look. Simply peering in at the various tiny miniatures each week was magical. Eventually, my mother would come in and we’d talk about the intriguing details. I was in heaven. My mother had to pry me away every visit.

 In those days, my father was managing the Drive-In Theatre several miles west of town. Our family spent blissful evenings there in the summer, but one very not blissful night was unforgettable: May 9, 1958. We were near the end of the movie, and people began getting out of their cars and looking back toward the East. Eleven years old, I had no idea what was happening. But then, in the inky darkness, I saw fire lighting up the night sky.

 

Immediately, we drove to town where we watched my beloved library, my cherished second home, engulfed in flames. Hundreds of people were milling behind barricades watching the firemen struggling valiantly to save the building. The hushed crowd stared in disbelief. Hardly anyone spoke, tears streaming down their faces. The roof collapsed onto the second floor, and eventually the astonishing second floor—filled with books and glass squares—fell into the ground floor.

 They later discovered an exhaust fan in the attic had caught fire. While 40,000 books were salvaged—many water-damaged—the city lost 200,000 books worth half a million dollars. But the most devastating losses of all were four letters signed by Abraham Lincoln and valuable items from the history of the city and the genealogy data of local families.

 

Currently, Galesburg has raised the funds to build a huge new library that will be open in 2024, and it’s a joy to watch it rise every time I drive past. In between 1958 and now, the town built a temporary library, a modern but not distinguished one-story structure sitting on the same site as my old Carnegie building. Last week, I stopped in to speak to one of the librarians. On a whim, I wandered into the children’s room to see what it looked like these days. In the middle of the room sat a dollhouse. It seemed familiar. The librarian told me it was the original dollhouse, one of the few things they had saved from the fire that night sixty-five years ago. I think I may have gasped.

 

I checked it out, fascinated. I saw the tiny rooms just as I remembered them, with the children’s bedroom upstairs, their faithful rocking horse awaiting them. I gazed in wonder, thinking about how my eyes had peered into these same tiny rooms so long ago, decades before I grew up and had children and grandchildren of my own. I touched the glass, the same invisible wall I had touched when I was five or six, and suddenly I was back there in that library with my mom, and we were looking at the perfect reproduction of a well-loved farm home of the 1950s and pointing out the marvelous miniatures we liked. I could almost hear my mother’s voice though she’s been gone since I was twenty-six.

 

It brought back a tumbling jumble of happiness reliving those Saturday mornings when my parents were still alive, my world was smaller, and my eyes were filled with wonder.

 

A very special moment of grace, indeed.