"She what?"
"Well, the authors sure aren't here to collect the money, so we figured that the owners might as well. Publishers are absolutely grabbing for them. The only thing was to decide how to share it out. We decided that anyone who had the only copy of a title got to sell it; for the rest, we put as many titles on the table at each meeting as there are women in the club and draw straws for who gets to sell which one."
"You gals are in absolutely no position to call anyone else crazy, no matter what they do. Does the cabinet know about this? Has the committee on foreign currency exchange approved this?"
"None of their business." Maxine returned to the topic at hand. "We've decided to do something about Mrs. Richter, though. Next week, we'll sacrifice our discussion group meeting. We're going to the city council meeting instead. Someone has to speak out about this."
"You and who else?"
"Well, Darlene. Jenny. The rest of them didn't really want to come."
"You and your sisters, in other words? What did Keith say about . . . this?" Anita managed not to say, "about this latest nitwit fit and start of yours."
"Well, I haven't told him. He has so much on his mind, you know. I think I ought to spare him my own troubles if I can possibly bear them alone." Maxine looked virtuous.
Anita thought, You dwork! The only thing besides hunting that Keith ever had on his mind was his hair, and that's gotten pretty thin on top.
* * *
The entire Monday Evening Book Discussion Club was sitting around the table in the conference room, looking rather defensive. "Maxine," said Melissa Mailey. "Would you please just explain. You don't have to justify it. Just explain it."
"We've got a right. When they came around to collect for the National Library, or whatever the fancy name is now, they just laughed at our books and said we could keep them—a bunch of intellectual snobs, that's what all of you are out here at the high school."
"What on earth gave you the idea for selling the publication rights to them?" Melissa looked around the room and fixed her eye on a club member who had once been in her classes. "Kelley." Having undergone conditioning, Kelley scrambled.
"Ms. Mailey, it was when that guy from Amsterdam came to talk to Dr. Abrabanel. You know Susie Castalanni here. She has a complete set of first edition Betty Neels—real collectibles, valuable—all the ones about English nurses who marry Dutch doctors, more than forty titles, I think. Susie's awfully proud of it. She invited him to come see it. He was real happy to find out that in three hundred fifty years the Dutch and the English would still have their countries and their languages and their churches and live in peace and have good hospitals and not be harried by the Spanish Inquisition like the remnants of the Waldensians. Susie hasn't found out what a Waldensian was yet, but whatever happened to them, it wasn't good."
Kelley was forced to pause for breath. Maxine interrupted. "They're real respectable classics, too—not like some of the newer ones. No sex at all until the nurse and doctor get married and not very much after they do. Lots of descriptions of houses and furniture and landscapes. Shopping trips for new clothes. Pictures of ancestors on the wall. Being nice to your stepchildren. He thought that the Calvinist preachers would OK them just fine."
Kelley regained the initiative. "When he went back to Holland, a publisher up there sent a guy down to copy her whole set. They're going to publish them in English for export to London and translate them into Dutch. So we thought, if Susie can sell those, why can't we sell the rest of them? And we did. To the highest bidder. That's all there is to it."
"We reported it on our taxes, too," added Susie. Then, looking at the expressions of her fellow club members, she added in a more doubtful tone of voice. "Well, at least I did. You can look it up."
* * *
Nobody blamed Anita Barnes, of course, for dropping the news to everybody she met that Maxine was going to make a fuss about the day care center at the next city council meeting. She hadn't campaigned about it or said anything that a person could call criticism of another teacher. There sure was a big crowd, though—as city council meetings went. All the chairs around the sides of the room were full, with SRO in the back.
"Face it, there's no one in this town over forty whose grandma didn't say something of the sort to them. We all turned out all right." Karen Reading finished her thirty seconds at the microphone. Darryl McCarthy turned to the man next to him and whispered, "Hell, there's probably no one in this town over twenty whose grandma didn't say something of the sort to them."