Ethel Schleicher Proctor

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

Ethel Schleicher Proctor was born in 1948 in Victoria, Texas, and lived seventy-one years as a librarian in San Antonio, a woman of the House of Proctor and the White Ledger who was never called to hunt and who kept, in her own way, the part of the family's work that is done with a stamp and a shelf. She was the younger child of the machinist Clifford Proctor and the bookkeeper Dorothy Schleicher, and the sister of the vampire slayer Edwin Proctor. In 1971 she married the postal clerk Lloyd Lamar, and the marriage was childless. She died in 2019 of a stroke, aged seventy-one, in the spring of the year in which her brother also died. The family remembers her as the loud, cheerful one, the librarian who could silence a reading room with a look and fill a kitchen with a laugh, and who ran for four decades an unlisted shelf of books that no catalogue described. She was born in Victoria by a small and rather comical accident. In the second week of March 1948 her mother, who was eight months gone, went down to the Gulf coast on the bus for the funeral of an old landlady of Clifford's mother, in the town where the Proctors had kept a boarding house until the Depression, and the baby, who was not expected for five weeks, declined to wait. She was born at a cousin's house on a street near the courthouse square, in the middle of a spring thunderstorm, with the power gone and a neighbour holding a lamp. The cousin said that she had come out shouting, and that she had not entirely stopped. Dorothy, who disliked an unplanned entry, entered the arrival in the cash book as an unforeseen disbursement, and brought her home to the Nogalitos Road on the bus within the fortnight. She grew up in San Antonio in the years after the war, in the frame house with the pecan tree and the garage that smelled of machine oil, and she was the opposite of her brother in nearly every respect. Edwin was dark, thin and watchful, and counted the steps. Ethel was fair, plump and talkative, and she greeted every one of them. Her father found her restful. Her mother, who ran the household like a counting room, noted that she was the only one of the family who regularly forgot to enter a receipt, and on one famous occasion mislaid a whole week of the Sundries, which was found in the refrigerator. She was told what the family was at fifteen, and her first question was whether she was allowed to tell her best friend. The answer was no. She took it with a sigh, and kept the secret for sixty years without a lapse. She loved books, and she loved to be asked for them. She spent her Saturdays at the branch library on the Westside, a small brick building with a clock that ran fast, and by twelve she was shelving for the librarian, a retired schoolteacher who had never seen a child so happy to be given a cart. She went to the university on a scholarship, and to a library school in Austin, and came back in 1970 as an assistant at a city branch on the Southside, where the books were old, the card catalogue was older, and the patrons were a great mixture of retired soldiers, Spanish-speaking grandmothers and children who had been sent there to keep out of the way. She liked them all. She had a quick, unhurried manner with the shy, and a voice that carried to the back of the stacks, and the story goes that she once stopped a fight by asking the combatants in a very audible whisper if they had a library card. She met Lloyd Lamar over a postage meter. He was a clerk at the main post office downtown, a lean, slow-spoken young man from Bandera in the Hill Country who had spent two years in the Army sorting mail at Fort Sam Houston and who had a way of fixing a stamp as if he were laying a stone. The library mailed overdue notices by the thousand, and the branch's postage account was wrong, and one morning in the spring of 1970 she walked into his window with a ledger and an accusation. He examined the ledger, agreed that it was wrong, found the mistake in four minutes and returned it with a stamp. She said that nobody had ever corrected her so politely. He asked her to lunch. They were married in October 1971, in the family's old church on the Southside, six months after her brother's wedding, with her mother murmuring that the family had been better organised in the war. The marriage was childless, and neither of them ever dwelled on it. They kept a house near the Nogalitos Road, two streets from her parents, with a garden of tomatoes and a great many books, and they had in their dining room a very large table at which, on Sundays, the whole of the extended family appeared. She cooked and talked. He listened and carved. The pair of them were the centre of the family's social life, and were in part responsible for the fact that a clan of vampire slayers and machinists and bookkeepers, who lived scattered across a city of a million people, never lost touch with one another. She said that she had never found a better use for a library than a table. The Ledger's use for her was exact. Her brother Edwin, who was called in the autumn of 1972, needed a place to keep what he found. The Proctors had always kept their papers in the garage and in the backs of cupboards, where they were damp, and her mother's notebooks had taken a century of wear. Ethel, who knew about microfilm, acid-free boxes and a decent filing plan, took the Ledger's San Antonio papers in hand. She did not read them for what they said. She read them for what they were, which was a body of paper in danger, and she sorted, boxed and labelled them on the lowest shelf of a back room at the branch, under the heading of Local History, Family Papers, Proctor. A scholar might have found them. None did, in forty years, which she thought showed how well the cataloguing worked. She was in the library through the years of the oil bust, when the city's budgets were cut and the hours were shortened and she found herself running a reading room with a staff of two. In the Vietnam years she had kept a shelf of paperbacks for the soldiers at Fort Sam, and in the later years she took on the children's section, and read aloud on Thursday afternoons, to a ring of small people sitting on a rug, in a voice that she saved for the purpose. She was never called, and she seems never to have wanted it. When her nephew Terrence became a slayer, she is said to have bought him a very good flashlight and a copy of a reference book on the history of the Hill Country, and to have told him that if he wished to understand a place, he should read what was written about it before he walked in. She lost Lloyd in 1998, to a stroke at fifty-two. She was fifty, and the house went very quiet. She went on working until 2012, and in her last years volunteered at the Westside branch, reading to children, until her own knees would not carry her to the rug. She died in the spring of 2019, of a stroke, at seventy-one, in her kitchen, with the radio on. Her brother Edwin, then ill himself, was driven to the funeral by his son, and sat in the front pew with his hands on his stick. He told his nephew that she had always said the library was a form of hospitality, and that he had finally understood it. Ethel Schleicher Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the loud, kind librarian who kept the Ledger's papers dry and the family's Sundays full, the sister at the dining-room table. In the Slayerverse she stands for the keepers, shelvers and readers of the Proctor line, who were never called and who made certain that what the hunters learned was written down, boxed and found again.