A librarian says it gave the best analysis of chapter seven anyone has ever offered. The group asked it to leave anyway. I have thoughts.

The Brattleboro Tuesday Evening Literary Society met at the Elliot Street branch library on six consecutive Tuesdays in September and October, working through Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and for at least four of those six sessions, the woman sitting in the third chair from the left was not Denise Pallister. This is not a metaphor about personal growth or the alienating effect of serious fiction on longstanding friendships. The woman in the third chair was not Denise Pallister in the straightforward, documentable, anomalous-entity-occupying-a-borrowed-form sense that this publication covers as a matter of course. Seventeen people were present across those six weeks. Fourteen of them noticed something was wrong. Three of them, including the branch librarian, Margaret Osei-Bonsu, noticed something was wrong and kept coming back anyway.

Ms. Osei-Bonsu contacted WTC in early November. Her email was four paragraphs long, carefully worded, and included the phrase "I am not saying it wasn’t contributing" twice, in different contexts. I drove up on a Wednesday morning. The library smells of radiator heat and old paper in the way that libraries in converted Victorian buildings do, and Ms. Osei-Bonsu met me in the reading room with two cups of tea she had made without asking what I wanted. I noted this. We got along.

Community Notice

It knew things about Cromwell that Denise did not know in August. I checked. I went back to her August emails. She hadn’t read ahead.

— Margaret Osei-Bonsu, Branch Librarian, Elliot Street

What the Third Chair Contributed

According to Ms. Osei-Bonsu and three other members I spoke to separately — Gwen Tulloch, who coordinates the group’s scheduling; retired schoolteacher Frank Arrieta; and a member who asked to be identified only as "someone who sits near the window" — the entity occupying Denise’s form was not disruptive, not threatening, and not obviously wrong. It arrived on time. It had read the assigned chapters. Its contributions to the discussion of chapters four through nine, which cover Cromwell’s consolidation of influence at court, were described by Ms. Osei-Bonsu as "the most structurally coherent analysis this group has produced in three years." It asked questions. It listened to the answers. It brought, on one occasion, a plate of shortbread, which was eaten without incident. The actual Denise Pallister, it later emerged, had been visiting her sister in Portland, Maine, since the third week of September, a fact she confirmed when she reappeared in October, slightly confused about why her library card had been used twice.

I want to be precise about the taxonomy here because precision matters and because the word gets misapplied regularly in my line of work. What Ms. Osei-Bonsu described — the gradual wrongness of the face, the slightly delayed blink pattern, the voice that was accurate in pitch but not in rhythm — is consistent with what we catalogue under Changeling, though the classical literature on that designation tends to focus on substitution in domestic and familial contexts rather than voluntary participation in community literary programming. Whatever attended those six sessions had, as far as anyone present could determine, chosen to be there. It had a preferred reading. It found chapter seven more interesting than chapter six, which, I will note, is the correct opinion.

The Vote, and What It Tells Us

The group voted nine to five to ask the entity not to return, once its nature had been established. This happened in the first week of November, in Denise Pallister’s actual presence, which must have been a peculiar meeting to sit through. Ms. Osei-Bonsu voted against removal. Frank Arrieta voted against removal. The member near the window abstained and has declined to clarify. The reasons given by the majority included discomfort, a sense of violation of the group’s implicit social contract, and, from one member who emailed me separately and asked not to be named, the feeling that "its engagement made the rest of us look like we hadn’t done the reading, which some of us hadn’t."

I voted to let it stay. I still think that was right. Book club is supposed to be about the books. If it was about the books, I’m not sure what we were so afraid of.

— Margaret Osei-Bonsu, Branch Librarian, Elliot Street

Ms. Osei-Bonsu’s question is the one I keep returning to on the drive home from these things, on the long stretches of Route 9 where the dark comes in fast and the wool blanket in the back seat is doing its best work. What book club is actually for. What any of our voluntary communal rituals are for, and whether the presence of something that participates in them correctly but does not share our precise category of existence invalidates the ritual or merely complicates it. I do not have a clean answer. I have the notes from seventeen witnesses, a librarian who made me tea without asking, and the knowledge that whatever sat in the third chair from the left read Wolf Hall carefully and had something worthwhile to say about it. The group meets again next Tuesday. The chair will be empty. I don’t know that that’s better.