The Movement of Stars by Amy Brill Page A

Price.” He was less than a yard away. The low hum of his voice barely broke the surface of the room; he didn’t even have to whisper.
“Can you see well enough?” she asked, then winced. The man spent his life upon a whaleship. Of course his vision was adequate for a walk around a dim room.
“I am seeing,” he said.
Hannah wished he could come in daylight, then wondered if he might; she wasn’t sure if he could become a member or not. A library should be open to all people, regardless of race, and New Guinea didn’t have a library of its own, the way it now had its own school. Even if it did, she was sure the quality of the collection would be poor, just as the new “African” school mixed all the ages of its students together instead of dividing them into appropriate groups the way the other schools did, for proper learning.
The crowds who’d come to listen to Frederick Douglass speak at the Atheneum a few years ago had been mixed, Hannah remembered, black and white together. She turned to the rows of shiny spines that lined each wall, enveloping the room with possibility, and was comforted. Did it matter whether he could borrow books? He was here now; she could see to it that he had the materials he needed. With that thought, she dismissed the troubling idea that the people beside whom she worshipped each week in silence might deny this man his schoolbooks as they’d denied the colored children access to the school they’d happily attended for years.
“Hutton, Hutton . . .” She ran a finger across the familiar volumes on a low shelf not far from her desk, whose leather bindings she waxed, dusted, and otherwise prevented from being loved to death by borrowers. She knew the collection as well as she knew the contours of her own kitchen, from Homer’s Iliad to Humboldt’s Cosmos , The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott , Choffin’s fables in French, and Plato in Greek. Books about the English seaside huddled in the southwest corner; Goethe and the philosophers nestled against the east wall. Hannah’s finger halted its run on what she knew was a dark green spine with faded gold letters: A Course of Mathematics .
She slipped the volume from the shelf, and untucked the card from its pocket at the back as she made her way over to her desk. Edward always joked that her work-space at the Atheneum was the evil twin of her table in the garret. This one was free of clutter, always clear when she arrived and left. In the years she’d worked at the Atheneum, there was no task she hadn’t completed in the amount of time allotted for it, no archive left unsorted or late-return gone unnoticed.
Hannah Price, she inscribed upon the card, and dated it.
“Mr. Martin,” she whispered again.
This time Isaac didn’t answer, and she peered into the room.
“Mr. Martin?” Hannah couldn’t see him anywhere, but he hadn’t gone out, either: she would have heard the door.
“Here . ” His voice was coming from one of the benches, but she still couldn’t see him.
She walked over and peered down one row, then another, until she realized she was standing over him. He was lying down upon the bench, beneath the highest part of the roof, his arms tucked beneath his head.
“What are you doing?” she whispered. “Are you unwell?”
“This space,” he said, making no move to get up. “It has a greatness of air.”
His boots were on the bench. She meant to ask him to remove them, but her brain hit the wall of his sentence and stopped there. A greatness of air. She lowered herself onto the bench a few inches away from where his feet ended, and tipped her head back so she could see what he was looking at.
The ceiling soared above them to a neat peak. It was yet dark outside, but Hannah could make out the contours of the vast space. There was no ornamentation upon the ceiling, no worldly depictions of spiritual matters or colored glass windows to tint a worshipper’s revelations. She felt at home here, as she once had at