Doris Thorne

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Doris Thorne was born in 1947 in San Francisco, California, and is living today in San Francisco, where she has spent her working life as a librarian and her spare time as the archivist of the western pages of the White Ledger. She is the elder child of the telegraph operator James Proctor Thorne and the schoolteacher Edna Bishop, and the sister of Clifford Thorne, who is also living. She is a daughter of the House of Thorne and of the Proctor bloodline, descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and she has never been called. She has no alias, archetype or craft. What she has is a fine hand, a good memory and a talent for a card index, and the family regards her as the person who knows where everything is. She was born on a foggy morning in February at a hospital in the Mission, a few months after her father, who had spent the war on the western wire and in a signal unit in the Pacific, had come home to the telegraph office and a flat in the Sunset district. The family moved a year later to a small house in the suburbs south of the city, near the airport, in the first row of the new streets that the postwar boom had laid over the sand. Her mother taught the third grade at a school three blocks away, and her father worked the long lines at the telephone company. She was a thin, fair, solemn child who was given a library card at five and read her way along the children's shelves at the branch library like a person following a river to its mouth. The house on the south side was a house of codes. Her father tapped out the alphabet on the arm of his chair when he wanted the salt, and her mother taught the children their letters with flash cards that she made from the backs of old report cards, and Doris, who learned both, found by seven that she preferred the cards. She liked a thing to be written down. She liked an index, a list, a shelf marked with a number. She told her brother at nine that the whole world could be put in order if people would only agree on what to call things, and he said that she would make a good librarian or a terrible dictator. She was told what the family was at sixteen, by her father, on a walk along the shore. It was a bright, cold afternoon, the fog was coming in, and he said it in a flat voice, as one reads a telegram, and she asked, after a minute, who kept the file. The question has been quoted in the family ever since. Her father, who had been waiting for a reply to the effect that she wanted to know more, laughed for a quarter of an hour, and then said that nobody kept the file, and that a great many hands had written in it. She took the matter under advisement. She went to San Francisco State, where she took a degree in history in 1969, and went to the library school at Berkeley, which she found cold, ill-lit and exactly right. She took her professional degree in 1971 and a post at the city's main library, in the old building at the Civic Center, where she remained for thirty-three years. It was a high, cold, magnificent building, with a marble staircase, a reading room under a great skylight and a basement full of newspapers. She worked, in the Vietnam years, in the periodicals room, where young men on leave and old men without homes sat at the long tables reading the papers, and she learned to do two things at once. She helped the reader, and she watched the room. It was a habit that she had caught from her father, who said that an operator should be able to tell, from the sound of the key, who was at the other end. She did not, by her own account, spy on anyone. She noticed. She noticed, in the course of fifteen years, a small number of people who took out unusual combinations of books, and who read the obituary columns for a particular quarter of the city, and she kept a file. She did not know what it meant. She gave it to her father, who passed it by the old wire to the cousins on the western circuit, and a retired detective of the Ledger in Oakland wrote back that it was the best piece of western intelligence that the book had received in a decade. It was that detective who suggested the archive. The western pages of the White Ledger had been kept for years in the backs of drawers and the tops of cupboards, in six hands and two languages, and had been indexed, so far as they were indexed at all, by a sequence of cousins' memories. Doris, who was in her thirties, took them in hand over a winter. She devised a card system, with a number for each entry, a colour for each decade and a cross-reference, in small neat capitals, to every cousin's name. It took her nine years. She kept the cards in six oak cabinets in a rented room above a bookshop in the Haight, and she called it, in the manner of her trade, the Thorne Index, because she had been told that a catalogue needs a name. She transferred it, in the nineties, to a computer, and then to a second computer, and each time lost no more than a card. She worked through the earthquake of 1989, when the stacks of the main library shook and the old building, which had been condemned, was finally emptied, and she carried, with a crew of volunteers, eleven hundred boxes of local newspapers to a new building across the plaza. The new library opened in 1996. She worked there until 2004, as a senior librarian in the history and archives department, and then in the private collection of a small historical society, and retired in the spring of 2012. Her mother Edna lived until 2010, and her father James, who had died in 2000, had left her the sounder, which sits on her desk. She was a regular, on the quiet days, at the Sunday service at a church in the Sunset district, and she was, for decades, a delight to every cousin who came through the city, because she would drive them anywhere, show them anything and give them a bed. The attacks of September 2001 shook her more than she showed. She was working in the library that morning, and the staff gathered in the reading room around a small television, and she is remembered, by those who were there, for the fact that she went on stamping books. She did not mention the Ledger. But she took down the western pages that evening, in the flat above the bookshop, and she re-indexed, in a single night, every warning that had been entered since 1865, on the theory that an unusual day deserved a thorough one. She says that she found nothing, and she says that it was worth doing. She is living today in San Francisco, in an apartment in the Sunset district, with the fog at the window and a table of boxes in the hall. Doris Thorne is remembered in the Thorne family as the librarian of the Western Ledger, the cousin who wrote the index and who asked, at sixteen, who kept the file. In the Slayerverse she stands for the archivists of the White Ledger, the unhunting Thorne kin who gave the hunters a memory, and whose neat capitals and cross-references kept a century of western warnings from being lost.