chapter one
The lunch hour in the coworkers’ cafeteria at Frankenberg’s had reached
its peak.
There was no room left at any of the long tables, and more and more
people were arriving to wait back of the wooden barricades by the cash
register. People who had already got their trays of food wandered about
between the tables in search of a spot they could squeeze into, or a
place that somebody was about to leave, but there was no place. The roar
of dishes, chairs, voices, shuffling feet, and the bra-a-ack of the
turnstiles in the bare-walled room was like the din of a single huge
machine.
Therese ate nervously, with the “Welcome to Frankenberg’s” booklet
propped up in front of her against a sugar container. She had read the
thick booklet through last week, in the first day of training class, but
she had nothing else with her to read, and in the coworkers’ cafeteria,
she felt it necessary to concentrate on something. So she read again
about vacation benefits, the three weeks’ vacation given to people who
had worked fifteen years at Frankenberg’s, she ate the hot plate special
of the day—a grayish slice of roast beef with a ball of mashed potatoes
covered with brown gravy, a heap of peas, and a tiny paper cup of
horseradish. She tried to imagine what it would be like to have worked
fifteen years in Frankenberg’s department store, and she found she was
unable to. “Twenty-five Yearers” got four weeks’ vacation, the booklet
said. Frankenberg’s also provided a camp for summer and winter
vacationers. They should have a church, too, she thought, and a hospital
for the birth of babies. The store was organized so much like a prison,
it frightened her now and then to realize she was a part of it.
She turned the page quickly, and saw in big black script across two
pages: “_Are You Frankenberg Material?_”
She glanced across the room at the windows and tried to think of
something else. Of the beautiful black and red Norwegian sweater she had
seen at Saks and might buy for Richard for Christmas, if she couldn’t
find a better-looking wallet than the ones she had seen for twenty
dollars. Of the possibility of driving with the Kellys next Sunday up to
West Point to see a hockey game. The great square window across the room
looked like a painting by—Who was it? Mondrian. The little square
section of window in the corner open to a white sky. And no bird to fly
in or out. What kind of a set would one make for a play that took place
in a department store? She was back again.
But it’s so different with you, Terry, Richard had said to her. You’ve
got an absolute conviction you’ll be out of it in a few weeks and the
others haven’t. Richard said she could be in France next summer. Would
be. Richard wanted her to go with him, and there was really nothing that
stood in the way of her going with him. And Richard’s friend Phil
McElroy had written him that he might be able to get her a job with a
theatre group next month. Therese had not met Phil yet, but she had very
little faith that he could get her a job. She had combed New York since
September, gone back and combed it a few times more, and she hadn’t
found anything. Who gave a job in the middle of the winter to a stage
designer apprentice just beginning to be an apprentice? It didn’t seem
real either that she might be in Europe with Richard next summer,
sitting with him in sidewalk cafés, walking with him in Arles, finding
the places Van Gogh had painted, she and Richard choosing towns to stop
in for a while and paint. It seemed less real these last few days since
she had been working at the store.
She knew what bothered her at the store. It was the sort of thing she
wouldn’t try to tell Richard. It was that the store intensified things
that had always bothered her, as long as she could remember. It was the
waste actions, the meaningless chores that seemed to keep her from doing
what she wanted to do, might have done—and here it was the complicated
procedures with money bags, coat checkings, and time clocks that kept
people even from serving the store as efficiently as they might—the
sense that everyone was incommunicado with everyone else and living on
an entirely wrong plane, so that the meaning, the message, the love, or
whatever it was that each life contained, never could find its
expression. It reminded her of conversations at tables, on sofas, with
people whose words seemed to hover over dead, unstirrable things, who
never touched a string that played. And when one tried to touch a live
string, looked at one with faces as masked as ever, making a remark so
perfect in its banality that one could not even believe it might be
subterfuge. And the loneliness, augmented by the fact one saw within the
store the same faces day after day, the few faces one might have spoken
to and never did, or never could. Not like the face on the passing bus
that seems to speak, that is seen once and at least is gone forever.
She would wonder, standing in the time-clock queue in the basement every
morning, her eyes sorting out unconsciously the regular employees from
the temporary ones, just how she had happened to land here—she had
answered an ad, of course, but that didn’t explain fate—and what was
coming next instead of a stage designing job. Her life was a series of
zigzags. At nineteen, she was anxious.
“You must learn to trust people, Therese. Remember that,” Sister Alicia
had often told her. And often, quite often, Therese tried to apply it.
“Sister Alicia,” Therese whispered carefully, the sibilant syllables
comforting her.
Therese sat up again and picked up her fork, because the cleanup boy was
working in her direction.
She could see Sister Alicia’s face, bony and reddish like pink stone
when the sunlight was on it, and the starched blue billow of her bosom.
Sister Alicia’s big bony figure coming around a corner in a hall,
between the white enamel tables in the refectory, Sister Alicia in a
thousand places, her small blue eyes always finding her out among the
other girls, seeing her differently, Therese knew, from all the other
girls, yet the thin pink lips always set in the same straight line. She
could see Sister Alicia handing her the knitted green gloves wrapped in
tissue, not smiling, only presenting them to her directly, with hardly a
word, on her eighth birthday. Sister Alicia telling her with the same
straight mouth that she must pass her arithmetic. Who else had cared if
she passed her arithmetic? Therese had kept the green gloves at the
bottom of her tin locker at school, for years after Sister Alicia had
gone away to California. The white tissue had become limp and
crackleless like ancient cloth, and still she had not worn the gloves.
Finally, they were too small to wear.
Someone moved the sugar container, and the propped booklet fell flat.
Therese looked at the pair of hands across from her, a woman’s plump,
aging hands, stirring her coffee, breaking a roll now with a trembling
eagerness, daubing half the roll greedily into the brown gravy of the
plate that was identical with Therese’s. The hands were chapped, there
was dirt in the parallel creases of the knuckles, but the right hand
bore a conspicuous silver filigree ring set with a clear green stone,
the left a gold wedding ring, and there were traces of red polish in the
corners of the nails. Therese watched the hand carry a forkful of peas
upward, and she did not have to look at the face to know what it would
be like. It would be like all the fifty-year-old faces of women who
worked at Frankenberg’s, stricken with an ever-lasting exhaustion and
terror, the eyes distorted behind glasses that enlarged or made smaller,
the cheeks splotched with rouge that did not brighten the grayness
underneath. Therese could not look.
“You’re a new girl, aren’t you?” The voice was shrill and clear in the
din, almost a sweet voice.
“Yes,” Therese said, and looked up. She remembered the face. It was the
face whose exhaustion had made her see all the other faces. It was the
woman Therese had seen creeping down the marble stairs from the
mezzanine at about six thirty one evening when the store was empty,
sliding her hands down the broad marble banister to take some of the
weight from her bunioned feet. Therese had thought: she is not ill, she
is not a beggar, she simply works here.
“Are you getting along all right?”
And here was the woman smiling at her, with the same terrible creases
under her eyes and around her mouth. Her eyes were actually alive now,
and rather affectionate.
“Are you getting along all right?” the woman repeated, for there was a
great clatter of voices and dishes all around them.
Therese moistened her lips. “Yes, thank you.”
“Do you like it here?”
Therese nodded.
“Finished?” A young man in a white apron gripped the woman’s plate with
an imperative thumb.
The woman made a tremulous, dismissing gesture. She pulled her saucer of
canned sliced peaches toward her. The peaches, like slimy little orange
fishes, slithered over the edge of the spoon each time the spoon lifted,
all except one which the woman would eat.
“I’m on the third floor in the sweater department. If you want to ask me
anything”—the woman said with nervous uncertainty, as if she were trying
to deliver a message before they would be cut off or separated—“come up
and talk to me sometime. My name is Mrs. Robichek, Mrs. Ruby Robichek,
five forty-four.”
“Thank you very much,” Therese said. And suddenly the woman’s ugliness
disappeared, because her reddish-brown eyes behind the glasses were
gentle, and interested in her. Therese could feel her heart beating, as
if it had come to life. She watched the woman get up from the table, and
watched her short, thick figure move away until it was lost in the crowd
that waited behind the barricade.
Therese did not visit Mrs. Robichek, but she looked for her every
morning when the employees trickled into the building around a quarter
to nine, and she looked for her in the elevators and in the cafeteria.
She never saw her, but it was pleasant to have someone to look for in
the store. It made all the difference in the world.
Nearly every morning when she came to work on the seventh floor, Therese
would stop for a moment to watch a certain toy train. The train was on a
table by itself near the elevators. It was not a big fine train like the
one that ran on the floor at the back of the toy department, but there
was a fury in its tiny pumping pistons that the bigger trains did not
possess. Its wrath and frustration on the closed oval track held Therese
spellbound.
Awrr rr rr rrgh! it said as it hurled itself blindly into the
papier-mâché tunnel. And Urr rr rr rrgh! as it emerged.
The little train was always running when she stepped out of the elevator
in the morning, and when she finished work in the evening. She felt it
cursed the hand that threw its switch each day. In the jerk of its nose
around the curves, in its wild dashes down the straight lengths of
track, she could see a frenzied and futile pursuit of a tyrannical
master. It drew three Pullman cars in which minuscule human figures
showed flinty profiles at the windows, behind these an open boxcar of
real miniature lumber, a boxcar of coal that was not real, and a caboose
that snapped round the curves and clung to the fleeing train like a
child to its mother’s skirts. It was like something gone mad in
imprisonment, something already dead that would never wear out, like the
dainty, springy-footed foxes in the Central Park Zoo, whose complex
footwork repeated and repeated as they circled their cages.
This morning, Therese turned away quickly from the train, and went on
toward the doll department where she worked.
At five past nine, the great block-square toy department was coming to
life. Green cloths were being pulled back from the long tables.
Mechanical toys began to toss balls into the air and catch them,
shooting galleries popped and their targets rotated. The table of
barnyard animals squawked, cackled, and brayed. Behind Therese, a weary
rat-tat-tat—tat-tat had started up, the drumbeats of the giant tin
soldier who militantly faced the elevators and drummed all day. The arts
and handicrafts table gave out a smell of fresh modeling clay,
reminiscent of the art room at school when she was very small, and also
of a kind of vault on the school grounds, rumored to be the real tomb of
someone, that she had used to stick her nose into through iron bars.
Mrs. Hendrickson, section manager of the doll department, was dragging
dolls from the stock shelves and seating them, splay legged, atop the
glass counters.
Therese said hello to Miss Martucci, who stood at the counter counting
the bills and coins from her moneybag with such concentration she could
give Therese only a deeper nod of her rhythmically nodding head. Therese
counted twenty-eight fifty from her own moneybag, recorded it on a slip
of white paper for the sales receipts envelope, and transferred the
money by denominations into her drawer in the cash register.
By now, the first customers were emerging from the elevators, hesitating
a moment with the bewildered, somewhat startled expressions that people
always had on finding themselves in the toy department, then starting
off on weaving courses.
“Do you have the dolls that wet?” a woman asked her.
“I’d like this doll, but with a yellow dress,” a woman said, pushing a
doll toward her, and Therese turned and got the doll she wanted out of a
stock shelf.
The woman had a mouth and cheeks like her mother’s, Therese noticed,
slightly pocked cheeks under dark-pink rouge, separated by a thin red
mouth full of vertical lines.
“Are the Drinksy-Wetsy dolls all this size?”
There was no need of salesmanship. People wanted a doll, any doll, to
give for Christmas. It was a matter of stooping, pulling out boxes in
search of a doll with brown eyes instead of blue, calling Mrs.
Hendrickson to open a showcase window with her key, which she did
grudgingly if she were convinced the particular doll could not be found
in stock, a matter of sidling down the aisle behind the counter to
deposit a purchased doll on the mountain of boxes on the wrapping
counter that was always growing, always toppling, no matter how often
the stock boys came to take the packages away. Almost no children came
to the counter. Santa Claus was supposed to bring the dolls, Santa Claus
represented by the frantic faces and the clawing hands. Yet there must
be a certain good will in all of them, Therese thought, even behind the
cool, powdered faces of the women in mink and sable, who were generally
the most arrogant, who hastily bought the biggest and most expensive
dolls, the dolls with real hair and changes of clothing. There was
surely love in the poor people, who waited their turn and asked quietly
how much a certain doll cost, and shook their heads regretfully and
turned away. Thirteen dollars and fifty cents for a doll only ten inches
high.
“Take it,” Therese wanted to say to them. “It really is too expensive,
but I’ll give it to you. Frankenberg’s won’t miss it.”
But the women in the cheap cloth coats, the timid men huddled inside
shabby mufflers would be gone, wistfully glancing at other counters as
they made their way back to the elevators. If people came for a doll,
they didn’t want anything else. A doll was a special kind of Christmas
gift, practically alive, the next thing to a baby.
There were almost never any children, but now and again one would come
up, generally a little girl, very rarely a little boy, her hand held
firmly by a parent. Therese would show her the dolls she thought the
child might like. She would be patient, and finally a certain doll would
bring that metamorphosis in the child’s face, that response to
make-believe that was the purpose of all of it, and usually that was the
doll the child went away with.
Then one evening after work, Therese saw Mrs. Robichek in the coffee and
doughnut shop across the street. Therese often stopped in the doughnut
shop to get a cup of coffee before going home. Mrs. Robichek was at the
back of the shop, at the end of the long curving counter, dabbling a
doughnut into her mug of coffee.
Therese pushed and thrust herself toward her, through the press of girls
and coffee mugs and doughnuts. Arriving at Mrs. Robichek’s elbow, she
gasped, “Hello,” and turned to the counter, as if a cup of coffee had
been her only objective.
“Hello,” said Mrs. Robichek, so indifferently that Therese was crushed.
Therese did not dare look at Mrs. Robichek again. And yet their
shoulders were actually pressed together! Therese was half finished with
her coffee, when Mrs. Robichek said dully, “I’m going to take the
Independent subway. I wonder if we’ll ever get out of here.” Her voice
was dreary, not as it had been the day in the cafeteria. Now she was
like the hunched old woman Therese had seen creeping down the stairs.
“We’ll get out,” Therese said reassuringly.
Therese forced a path for both of them to the door. Therese was taking
the Independent subway, too. She and Mrs. Robichek edged into the
sluggish mob at the entrance of the subway, and were sucked gradually
and inevitably down the stairs, like bits of floating waste down a
drain. They found they both got off at the Lexington Avenue stop, too,
though Mrs. Robichek lived on Fifty-fifth Street, just east of Third
Avenue. Therese went with Mrs. Robichek into the delicatessen where she
was going to buy something for her dinner. Therese might have bought
something for her own dinner, but somehow she couldn’t in Mrs.
Robichek’s presence.
“Do you have food at home?”
“No, I’m going to buy something later.”
“Why don’t you come and eat with me? I’m all alone. Come on.” Mrs.
Robichek finished with a shrug, as if that were less effort than a
smile.
Therese’s impulse to protest politely lasted only a moment. “Thank you.
I’d like to come.” Then she saw a cellophane wrapped cake on the
counter, a fruit cake like a big brown brick topped with red cherries,
and she bought it to give to Mrs. Robichek.
It was a house like the one Therese lived in, only brownstone and much
darker and gloomier. There were no lights at all in the halls, and when
Mrs. Robichek put on the light in the third-floor hall, Therese saw that
the house was not very clean. Mrs. Robichek’s room was not very clean
either, and the bed was unmade. Did she get up as tired as she went to
bed, Therese wondered. Therese was left standing in the middle of the
room while Mrs. Robichek moved on dragging feet toward the kitchenette,
carrying the bag of groceries she had taken from Therese’s hands. Now
that she was home, Therese felt, where no one could see her, she allowed
herself to look as tired as she really was.
Therese could never remember how it began. She could not remember the
conversation just before and the conversation didn’t matter, of course.
What happened was that Mrs. Robichek edged away from her, strangely, as
if she were in a trance, suddenly murmuring instead of talking, and lay
down flat on her back on the unmade bed. It was the continued murmuring,
the faint smile of apology, and the terrible, shocking ugliness of the
short, heavy body with the bulging abdomen, and the apologetically
tilted head still politely looking at her, that she could not make
herself listen.
“I used to have my own dress shop in Queens. Oh, a fine big one,” Mrs.
Robichek said, and Therese caught the note of boasting and began to
listen despite herself, hating it. “You know, the dresses with the V at
the waist and the little buttons running up. You know, three, five years
ago—” Mrs. Robichek spread her stiff hands inarticulately across her
waist. The short hands did not nearly span the front half of herself.
She looked very old in the dim lamplight that made the shadows under her
eyes black. “They called them Caterina dresses. You remember? I designed
them. They come out of my shop in Queens. They famous, all right!”
Mrs. Robichek got up from the bed and went to a small trunk that stood
against the wall. She opened it, talking all the while, and began to
drag out dresses of dark, heavy looking material, which she let fall on
the floor. Mrs. Robichek held up a garnet-red velvet dress with a white
collar and tiny white buttons that came to a V down the front of the
narrow bodice.
“See, I got lots of them. I made them. Other stores copied.” Above the
white collar of the dress, which she gripped with her chin, Mrs.
Robichek’s ugly head was tilted grotesquely. “You like this? I give you
one. Come here. Come here, try one on.”
Therese was repelled by the thought of trying one on. She wished Mrs.
Robichek would lie down and rest again, but obediently Therese got up,
as if she had no will of her own, and came toward her.
Mrs. Robichek pressed a black velvet dress upon Therese with trembling
and importunate hands, and Therese suddenly knew how she would wait on
people in the store, thrusting sweaters upon them helter skelter, for
she could not have performed the same action in any other way. For four
years, Therese remembered, Mrs. Robichek had said she had worked at
Frankenberg’s.
“You like the green one better? Try it on.” And in the instant Therese
hesitated, she dropped it and picked up another, the dark-red one. “I
sell five of them to girls at the store, but you I give one. Left over,
but they still in style. You like this one better?”
Therese liked the red better. She liked red, especially garnet-red, and
she loved red velvet. Mrs. Robichek pressed her toward a corner where
she could take off her clothing and lay it on an armchair. But she did
not want the dress, did not want to be given it. It reminded her of
being given clothing at the Home, hand-me-downs, because she was
considered practically as one of the orphan girls, who made up half the
school, who never got packages from outside. Therese pulled off her
sweater and felt completely naked. She gripped her arms above the elbow,
and her flesh there felt cold and sensationless.
“I sewed,” Mrs. Robichek was saying ecstatically to herself, “how I
sewed, morning to night! I managed four girls. But my eyes got bad. One
blind, this one. Put the dress on.” She told Therese about the operation
on the eye. It was not blind, only partially blind. But it was very
painful. Glaucoma. It still gave her pain. That and her back. And her
feet. Bunions.
Therese realized she was relating all her troubles and her bad luck so
that she, Therese, would understand why she had sunk so low as to work
in a department store.
“It fits?” Mrs. Robichek asked confidently.
Therese looked in the mirror in the wardrobe door. It showed a long thin
figure with a narrowish head that seemed ablaze at the outline, bright
yellow fire running down to the bright red bar on either shoulder. The
dress hung in straight draped folds down almost to her ankles. It was
the dress of queens in fairy tales, of a red deeper than blood. She
stepped back, and pulled in the looseness of the dress behind her, so it
fitted her ribs and her waist, and she looked back at her own dark-hazel
eyes in the mirror. Herself meeting herself. This was she, not the girl
in the dull plaid skirt and the beige sweater, not the girl who worked
in the doll department at Frankenberg’s.
“Do you like it?” Mrs. Robichek asked.
Therese studied the surprisingly tranquil mouth, whose modeling she
could see distinctly, though she wore no more lipstick than she might if
someone had kissed her. She wished she could kiss the person in the
mirror and make her come to life, yet she stood perfectly still, like a
painted portrait.
“If you like it, take it,” Mrs. Robichek urged impatiently, watching
from a distance, lurking against the wardrobe as saleswomen lurk while
women try on coats and dresses in front of mirrors in department stores.
But it wouldn’t last, Therese knew. She would move, and it would be
gone. Even if she kept the dress, it would be gone, because it was a
thing of a minute, this minute. She didn’t want the dress. She tried to
imagine the dress in her closet at home, among her other clothing, and
she couldn’t. She began to unbutton the buttons, to unfasten the collar.
“You like it, yes?” Mrs. Robichek asked as confidently as ever.
“Yes,” Therese said firmly, admitting it.
She couldn’t get the hook and eye unfastened at the back of the collar.
Mrs. Robichek had to help her, and she could hardly wait. She felt as if
she were being strangled. What was she doing here? How did she happen to
have put on a dress like this? Suddenly Mrs. Robichek and her apartment
were like a horrible dream that she had just realized she was dreaming.
Mrs. Robichek was the hunchbacked keeper of the dungeon. And she had
been brought here to be tantalized.
“What’s the matter? A pin stick you?”
Therese’s lips opened to speak, but her mind was too far away. Her mind
was at a distant point, at a distant vortex that opened on the scene in
the dimly lighted, terrifying room where the two of them seemed to stand
in desperate combat. And at the point of the vortex where her mind was,
she knew it was the hopelessness that terrified her and nothing else. It
was the hopelessness of Mrs. Robichek’s ailing body and her job at the
store, of her stack of dresses in the trunk, of her ugliness, the
hopelessness of which the end of her life was entirely composed. And the
hopelessness of herself, of ever being the person she wanted to be and
of doing the things that person would do. Had all her life been nothing
but a dream, and was _this_ real? It was the terror of this hopelessness
that made her want to shed the dress and flee before it was too late,
before the chains fell around her and locked.
It might already be too late. As in a nightmare, Therese stood in the
room in her white slip, shivering, unable to move.
“What’s the matter? You cold? It’s hot.”
It was hot. The radiator hissed. The room smelled of garlic and the
fustiness of old age, of medicines, and of the peculiar metallic smell
that was Mrs. Robichek’s own. Therese wanted to collapse in the chair
where her skirt and sweater lay. Perhaps if she lay on her own clothing,
she thought, it wouldn’t matter. But she shouldn’t lie down at all. If
she did, she was lost. The chains would lock, and she would be one with
the hunchback.
Therese trembled violently. She was suddenly out of control. It was a
chill, not merely fright or tiredness.
“Sit down,” Mrs. Robichek’s voice said from a distance, and with
shocking unconcern and boredom, as if she were quite used to girls
feeling faint in her room, and from a distance, too, her dry,
rough-tipped fingers pressed against Therese’s arms.
Therese struggled against the chair, knowing she was going to succumb to
it, and even aware that she was attracted to it for that reason. She
dropped into the chair, felt Mrs. Robichek tugging at her skirt to pull
it from under her, but she couldn’t make herself move. She was still at
the same point of consciousness, however, still had the same freedom to
think, even though the dark arms of the chair rose about her.
Mrs. Robichek was saying, “You stand up too much at the store. It’s hard
these Christmases. I seen four of them. You got to learn how to save
yourself a little.”
Creeping down the stairs clinging to the banister. Save herself by
eating lunch in the cafeteria. Taking shoes off bunioned feet like the
row of women perched on the radiator in the women’s room, fighting for a
bit of the radiator to put a newspaper on and sit for five minutes.
Therese’s mind worked very clearly. It was astonishing how clearly it
worked, though she knew she was simply staring into space in front of
her, and that she could not have moved if she had wanted to.
“You just tired, you baby,” Mrs. Robichek said, tucking a woolen blanket
about her shoulders in the chair. “You need to rest, standing up all day
and standing up tonight, too.”
A line from Richard’s Eliot came to Therese. _That is not what I meant
at all. That is not it, at all._ She wanted to say it, but she could not
make her lips move. Something sweet and burning was in her mouth. Mrs.
Robichek was standing in front of her, spooning something from a bottle,
and pushing the spoon between her lips. Therese swallowed it obediently,
not caring if it were poison. She could have moved her lips now, could
have gotten up from the chair, but she didn’t want to move. Finally, she
lay back in the chair, and let Mrs. Robichek cover her with the blanket,
and she pretended to go to sleep. But all the while she watched the
humpbacked figure moving about the room, putting away the things from
the table, undressing for bed. She watched Mrs. Robichek remove a big
laced corset and then a strap device that passed around her shoulders
and partially down her back. Therese closed her eyes then in horror,
pressed them tight shut, until the creaking of a spring and a long
groaning sigh told her that Mrs. Robichek had gone to bed. But that was
not all. Mrs. Robichek reached for the alarm clock and wound it, and
without lifting her head from the pillow, groped with the clock for the
straight chair beside the bed. In the dark, Therese could barely see her
arm rise and fall four times before the clock found the chair.
I shall wait fifteen minutes until she is asleep and then go, Therese
thought.
And because she was tired, she tensed herself to hold back that spasm,
that sudden seizure that was like falling, that came every night long
before sleep, yet heralded sleep. It did not come. So after what she
thought was fifteen minutes, Therese dressed herself and went out the
door silently. It was easy, after all, simply to open the door and
escape. It was easy, she thought, because she was not really escaping at
all.
chapter two
“Terry, remember that fellow Phil McElroy I told you about? The one with
the stock company? Well, he’s in town, and he says you’ve got a job in a
couple of weeks.”
“A real job? Where?”
“A show in the Village. Phil wants to see us tonight. I’ll tell you
about it when I see you. I’ll be over in about twenty minutes. I’m just
leaving school now.”
Therese ran up the three flights of stairs to her room. She was in the
middle of washing up, and the soap had dried on her face. She stared
down at the orange washcloth in the basin.
“A job!” she whispered to herself. The magic word.
She changed into a dress, and hung a short silver chain with a St.
Christopher medallion, a birthday present from Richard, around her neck,
and combed her hair with a little water so it would look neater. Then
she set some loose sketches and cardboard models just inside the closet
where she could reach them easily when Phil McElroy asked to see them.
No, I haven’t had much actual experience, she would have to say, and she
felt a sink of failure. She hadn’t even an apprentice’s job behind her,
except that two-day job in Montclair, making the cardboard model that
the amateur group had finally used, if that could be called a job. She
had taken two courses in scenic design in New York, and she had read a
lot of books. She could hear Phil McElroy—an intense and very busy young
man, probably, a little annoyed at having come to see her for
nothing—saying regretfully that she wouldn’t do after all. But with
Richard present, Therese thought, it wouldn’t be quite as crushing as if
she were alone. Richard had quit or been fired from about five jobs
since she had known him. Nothing bothered Richard less than losing and
finding jobs. Therese remembered being fired from the Pelican Press a
month ago, and she winced. They hadn’t even given her notice, and the
only reason she had been fired, she supposed, was that her particular
research assignment had been finished. When she had gone in to speak to
Mr. Nussbaum, the president, about not being given notice, he had not
known, or had pretended not to know, what the term meant. “Notiz?—Wuss?”
he had said indifferently, and she had turned and fled, afraid of
bursting into tears in his office. It was easy for Richard, living at
home with a family to keep him cheerful. It was easier for him to save
money. He had saved about two thousand in a two-year hitch in the Navy,
and a thousand more in the year since. And how long would it take her to
save the fifteen hundred dollars that a junior membership in the stage
designers’ union cost? After nearly two years in New York, she had only
about five hundred dollars of it.
“Pray for me,” she said to the wooden Madonna on the bookshelf. It was
the one beautiful thing in her apartment, the wooden Madonna she had
bought the first month she had been in New York. She wished there were a
better place for it in the room than on the ugly bookshelf. The
bookshelf was like a lot of fruit crates stacked up and painted red. She
longed for a bookshelf of natural-colored wood, smooth to the touch and
sleek with wax.
She went down to the delicatessen and bought six cans of beer and some
blue cheese. Then when she came upstairs, she remembered the original
purpose of her going to the store, to buy some meat for dinner. She and
Richard had planned to have dinner in tonight. That might be changed
now, but she didn’t like to take it on her own initiative to alter plans
where Richard was concerned, and she was about to run down again for the
meat when Richard’s long ring sounded. She pressed the release button.
Richard came up the steps at a run, smiling. “Did Phil call?”
“No,” she said.
“Good. That means he’s coming.”
“When?”
“In a few minutes, I guess. He probably won’t stay long.”
“Does it really sound like a definite job?”
“Phil says so.”
“Do you know what kind of play it is?”
“I don’t know anything except they need somebody for sets, and why not
you?” Richard looked her over critically, smiling. “You look swell
tonight. Don’t be nervous, will you? It’s just a little company in the
Village, and you’ve probably got more talent than all the rest of them
put together.”
She took the overcoat he had dropped on a chair and hung it in the
closet. Under the overcoat was a roll of charcoal paper he had brought
from art school. “Did you do something good today?” she asked.
“Soso. That’s something I want to work on at home,” he said carelessly.
“We had that redheaded model today, the one I like.”
Therese wanted to see his sketch, but she knew Richard probably didn’t
think it good enough. Some of his first paintings were good, like the
lighthouse in blues and blacks that hung over her bed, that he had done
when he was in the Navy and just starting to paint. But his life drawing
was not good yet, and Therese doubted that it ever would be. There was a
new charcoal smudge all over one knee of his tan cotton trousers. He
wore a shirt inside the red and black checked shirt, and buckskin
moccasins that made his big feet look like shapeless bear paws. He was
more like a lumberjack or a professional athlete of some sort, Therese
thought, than anything else. She could more easily imagine him with an
ax in his hand than a paintbrush. She had seen him with an ax once,
cutting wood in the yard back of his house in Brooklyn. If he didn’t
prove to his family that he was making some progress in his painting, he
would probably have to go into his father’s bottled gas business this
summer, and open the branch in Long Island that his father wanted him
to.
“Will you have to work this Saturday?” she asked, still afraid to talk
about the job.
“Hope not. Are you free?”
She remembered now, she was not. “I’m free Friday,” she said resignedly.
“Saturday’s a late day.”
Richard smiled. “It’s a conspiracy.” He took her hands and drew her arms
around his waist, his restless prowling of the room at an end. “Maybe
Sunday? The family asked if you could come out for dinner, but we don’t
have to stay long. I could borrow a truck and we could drive somewhere
in the afternoon.”
“All right.” She liked that and so did Richard, sitting up in front of
the big empty gas tank, and driving anywhere, as free as if they rode a
butterfly. She took her arms from around Richard. It made her feel
self-conscious and foolish, as if she stood embracing the stem of a
tree, to have her arms around Richard. “I did buy a steak for tonight,
but they stole it at the store.”
“Stole it? From where?”
“Off the shelf where we keep our handbags. The people they hire for
Christmas don’t get any regular lockers.” She smiled at it now, but this
afternoon, she had almost wept. Wolves, she had thought, a pack of
wolves, stealing a bloody bag of meat just because it was food, a free
meal. She had asked all the salesgirls if they had seen it, and they had
all denied it. Bringing meat into the store wasn’t allowed, Mrs.
Hendrickson had said indignantly. But what was one to do, if all the
meat stores closed at six o’clock?
Richard lay back on the studio couch. His mouth was thin and its line
uneven, half of it downward slanting, giving an ambiguity to his
expression, a look sometimes of humor, sometimes of bitterness, a
contradiction that his rather blank and frank blue eyes did nothing to
clarify. He said slowly and mockingly, “Did you go down to the lost and
found? Lost, one pound of beefsteak. Answers to the name Meatball.”
Therese smiled, looking over the shelves in her kitchenette. “Do you
think you’re joking? Mrs. Hendrickson did tell me to go down to the lost
and found.”
Richard gave a hooting laugh and stood up.
“There’s a can of corn here and I’ve got lettuce for a salad. And
there’s bread and butter. Shall I go get some frozen pork chops?”
Richard reached a long arm over her shoulder and took the square of
pumpernickel bread from the shelf. “You call that bread? It’s fungus.
Look at it, blue as a mandrill’s behind. Why don’t you eat bread once
you buy it?”
“I use that to see in the dark with. But since you don’t like it—” She
took it from him and dropped it into the garbage bag. “That wasn’t the
bread I meant anyway.”
“Show me the bread you meant.”
The doorbell shrieked right beside the refrigerator, and she jumped for
the button.
“That’s them,” Richard said.
There were two young men. Richard introduced them as Phil McElroy and
his brother, Dannie. Phil was not at all what Therese had expected. He
did not look intense or serious or even particularly intelligent. And he
scarcely glanced at her when they were introduced.
Dannie stood with his coat over his arm until Therese took it from him.
She could not find an extra hanger for Phil’s coat, and Phil took it
back and tossed it onto a chair, half on the floor. It was an old dirty
polo coat. Therese served the beer and cheese and crackers, listening
all the while for Phil and Richard’s conversation to turn to the job.
But they were talking about things that had happened since they had seen
each other last in Kingston, New York. Richard had worked for two weeks
last summer on some murals in a roadhouse there, where Phil had had a
job as a waiter.
“Are you in the theatre, too?” she asked Dannie.
“No, I’m not,” Dannie said. He seemed shy, or perhaps bored and
impatient to leave. He was older than Phil and a little more heavily
built. His dark-brown eyes moved thoughtfully from object to object in
the room.
“They haven’t got anything yet but a director and three actors,” Phil
said to Richard, leaning back on the couch. “A fellow I worked with in
Philly once is directing. Raymond Cortes. If I recommend you, it’s a
cinch you’ll get in,” he said with a glance at Therese. “He promised me
the part of the second brother in the play. It’s called _Small Rain_.”
“A comedy?” Therese asked.
“Comedy. Three acts. Have you done any sets so far by yourself?”
“How many sets will it take?” Richard asked, just as she was about to
answer.
“Two at the most, and they’ll probably get by on one. Georgia Halloran
has the lead. Did you happen to see that Sartre thing they did in the
fall down there? She was in that.”
“Georgia?” Richard smiled. “Whatever happened with her and Rudy?”
Disappointedly, Therese heard their conversation settling down on
Georgia and Rudy and other people she didn’t know. Georgia might have
been one of the girls Richard had had an affair with, Therese supposed.
He had once mentioned about five. She couldn’t remember any of their
names except Celia.
“Is this one of your sets?” Dannie asked her, looking at the cardboard
model that hung on the wall, and when she nodded, he got up to see it.
And now, Richard and Phil were talking about a man who owed Richard
money from somewhere. Phil said he had seen the man last night in the
San Remo bar. Phil’s elongated face and his clipped hair was like an El
Greco, Therese thought, yet the same features in his brother looked like
an American Indian. And the way Phil talked completely destroyed the
illusion of El Greco. He talked like any of the people one saw in
Village bars, young people who were supposed to be writers or actors,
and who usually did nothing.
“It’s very attractive,” Dannie said, peering behind one of the little
suspended figures.
“It’s a model for _Petrushka_. The fair scene,” she said, wondering if
he would know the ballet. He might be a lawyer, she thought, or even a
doctor. There were yellowish stains on his fingers, not the stains of
cigarettes.
Richard said something about being hungry, and Phil said he was
starving, but neither of them ate any of the cheese that was in front of
them.
“We’re due in half an hour, Phil,” Dannie repeated.
Then a moment later, they were all standing up, putting on their coats.
“Let’s eat out somewhere, Terry,” Richard said. “How about the Czech
place up on Second?”
“All right,” she said, trying to sound agreeable. This was the end of
it, she supposed, and nothing was definite. She had an impulse to ask
Phil a crucial question, but she didn’t.
And on the street, they began to walk downtown instead of up. Richard
walked with Phil, and only glanced back once or twice at her, as if to
see if she were still there. Dannie held her arm at the curbs, and
across the patches of dirty slippery stuff, neither snow nor ice, that
were the remains of a snowfall three weeks ago.
“Are you a doctor?” she asked Dannie.
“Physicist,” Dannie replied. “I’m taking graduate courses at N.Y.U.
now.” He smiled at her, but the conversation stopped there for a while.
Then he said, “That’s a long way from stage designing, isn’t it.”
She nodded. “Quite a long way.” She started to ask him if he intended to
do any work pertaining to the atom bomb, but she didn’t, because what
would it matter if he did or didn’t? “Do you know where we’re going?”
she asked.
He smiled broadly, showing square white teeth. “Yes. To the subway. But
Phil wants a bite somewhere first.”
They were walking down Third Avenue. And Richard was talking to Phil
about their going to Europe next summer. Therese felt a throb of
embarrassment as she walked along behind Richard, like a dangling
appendage, because Phil and Dannie would naturally think she was
Richard’s mistress. She wasn’t his mistress, and Richard didn’t expect
her to be in Europe. It was a strange relationship, she supposed, and
who would believe it? Because from what she had seen in New York,
everybody slept with everybody they had dates with more than once or
twice. And the two people she had gone out with before Richard—Angelo
and Harry—had certainly dropped her when they discovered she didn’t care
for an affair with them. She had tried to have an affair with Richard
three or four times in the year she had known him, though with negative
results; Richard said he preferred to wait. He meant wait until she
cared more for him. Richard wanted to marry her, and she was the first
girl he had ever proposed to, he said. She knew he would ask her again
before they left for Europe, but she didn’t love him enough to marry
him. And yet she would be accepting most of the money for the trip from
him, she thought with a familiar sense of guilt. Then the image of Mrs.
Semco, Richard’s mother, came before her, smiling approval on them, on
their marrying, and Therese involuntarily shook her head.
“What’s the matter?” Dannie asked.
“Nothing.”
“Are you cold?”
“No. Not at all.”
But he tucked her arm closer anyway. She was cold, and felt rather
miserable in general. It was the half dangling, half cemented
relationship with Richard, she knew. They saw more and more of each
other, without actually growing closer. She still wasn’t in love with
him, not after ten months, and maybe she never could be, though the fact
remained that she liked him better than any one person she had ever
known, certainly any man. Sometimes she thought she was in love with
him, waking up in the morning and looking blankly at the ceiling,
remembering suddenly that she knew him, remembering suddenly his face
shining with affection for her because of some gesture of affection on
her part, before her sleepy emptiness had time to fill up with the
realization of what time it was, what day, what she had to do, the
solider substance that made up one’s life. But the feeling bore no
resemblance to what she had read about love. Love was supposed to be a
kind of blissful insanity. Richard didn’t act blissfully insane either,
in fact.
“Oh, everything’s called St. Germain-des-Près!” Phil shouted with a wave
of his hand. “I’ll give you some addresses before you go. How long do
you think you’ll be there?”
A truck with rattling, slapping chains turned in front of them, and
Therese couldn’t hear Richard’s answer. Phil went into the Riker’s shop
on the corner of Fifty-third Street.
“We don’t have to eat here. Phil just wants to stop a minute.” Richard
squeezed her shoulder as they went in the door. “It’s a great day, isn’t
it, Terry? Don’t you feel it? It’s your first real job!”
Richard was convinced, and Therese tried hard to realize it might be a
great moment. But she couldn’t recapture even the certainty she
remembered when she had looked at the orange washcloth in the basin
after Richard’s telephone call. She leaned against the stool next to
Phil’s, and Richard stood beside her, still talking to him. The glaring
white light on the white tile walls and the floor seemed brighter than
sunlight, for here there were no shadows. She could see every shiny
black hair in Phil’s eyebrows, and the rough and smooth spots on the
pipe Dannie held in his hand, unlighted. She could see the details of
Richard’s hand that hung limply out of his overcoat sleeve, and she was
conscious again of their incongruity with his limber, long-boned body.
They were thick, even plump looking hands, and they moved in the same
inarticulate, blind way if they picked up a salt shaker or the handle of
a suitcase. Or stroked her hair, she thought. The insides of his hands
were extremely soft, like a girl’s, and a little moist. Worst of all, he
generally forgot to clean his nails, even when he took the trouble to
dress up. Therese had said something about it a couple of times to him,
but she felt now that she couldn’t say anything more without irritating
him.
Dannie was watching her. She was held by his thoughtful eyes for a
moment, then she looked down. Suddenly she knew why she couldn’t
recapture the feeling she had before: she simply didn’t believe Phil
McElroy could get her a job on his recommendation.
“Are you worried about that job?” Dannie was standing beside her.
“No.”
“Don’t be. Phil can give you some tips.” He poked his pipe stem between
his lips, and seemed to be about to say something else, but he turned
away.
She half listened to Phil’s conversation with Richard. They were talking
about boat reservations.
Dannie said, “By the way, the Black Cat Theatre’s only a couple of
blocks from Morton Street where I live. Phil’s staying with me, too.
Come and have lunch with us, will you?”
“Thanks very much. I’d like to.” It probably wouldn’t be, she thought,
but it was nice of him to ask her.
“What do you think, Terry?” Richard said. “Is March too soon to go to
Europe? It’s better to go early than wait till everything’s so crowded
over there.”
“March sounds all right,” she said.
“There’s nothing to stop us, is there? I don’t care if I don’t finish
the winter term at school.”
“No, there’s nothing to stop us.” It was easy to say. It was easy to
believe all of it, and just as easy not to believe any of it. But if it
were all true, if the job were real, the play a success, and she could
go to France with at least a single achievement behind her—Suddenly,
Therese reached out for Richard’s arm, slid her hand down it to his
fingers. Richard was so surprised, he stopped in the middle of a
sentence.
The next afternoon, Therese called the Watkins number that Phil had
given her. A very efficient sounding girl answered. Mr. Cortes was not
there, but they had heard about her through Phil McElroy. The job was
hers, and she would start work December twenty-eighth at fifty dollars a
week. She could come in beforehand and show Mr. Cortes some of her work,
if she wanted to, but it wasn’t necessary, not if Mr. McElroy had
recommended her so highly.
Therese called up Phil to thank him, but nobody answered the telephone.
She wrote him a note, in care of the Black Cat Theatre.
chapter three
Roberta Walls, the youngest D.S. in the toy department, paused just long
enough in her midmorning flurry to whisper to Therese, “If we don’t sell
this twenty-four ninety-five suitcase today, it’ll be marked down Monday
and the department’ll take a two-dollar loss!” Roberta nodded at the
brown pasteboard suitcase on the counter, thrust her load of gray boxes
into Miss Martucci’s hands, and hurried on.
Down the long aisle, Therese watched the salesgirls make way for
Roberta. Roberta flew up and down counters and from one corner of the
floor to the other, from nine in the morning until six at night. Therese
had heard that Roberta was trying for another promotion. She wore red
harlequin glasses, and unlike the other girls, always pushed the sleeves
of her green smock up above her elbows. Therese saw her flit across an
aisle and stop Mrs. Hendrickson with an excited message delivered with
gestures. Mrs. Hendrickson nodded agreement, Roberta touched her
shoulder familiarly, and Therese felt a small start of jealousy.
Jealousy, though she didn’t care in the least for Mrs. Hendrickson, even
disliked her.
“Do you have a doll made of cloth that cries?”
Therese didn’t know of such a doll in stock, but the woman was positive
Frankenberg’s had it, because she had seen it advertised. Therese pulled
out another box, from the last spot it might possibly be, and it wasn’t.
“Wotcha lookin’ fuh?” Miss Santini asked her. Miss Santini had a cold.
“A doll made of cloth that cries,” Therese said. Miss Santini had been
especially courteous to her lately. Therese remembered the stolen meat.
But now Miss Santini only lifted her eyebrows, stuck out her bright red
underlip with a shrug, and went on.
“Made of cloth? With pigtails?” Miss Martucci, a lean, straggly haired
Italian girl with a long nose like a wolf’s looked at Therese. “Don’t
let Roberta hear you,” Miss Martucci said with a glance around her.
“Don’t let anybody hear you, but those dolls are in the basement.”
“Oh.” The upstairs toy department was at war with the basement toy
department. The tactics were to force the customer into buying on the
seventh floor, where everything was more expensive. Therese told the
woman the dolls were in the basement.
“Try and sell this today,” Miss Davis said to her as she sidled past,
slapping the battered imitation alligator suitcase with her red-nailed
hand.
Therese nodded.
“Do you have any stiff-legged dolls? One that stands up?”
Therese looked at the middle-aged woman with the crutches that thrust
her shoulders high. Her face was different from all the other faces
across the counter, gentle, with a certain cognizance in the eyes as if
they actually saw what they looked at.
“That’s a little bigger than I wanted,” the woman said when Therese
showed her a doll. “I’m sorry. Do you have a smaller one?”
“I think so.” Therese went farther down the aisle, and was aware that
the woman followed her on her crutches, circling the press of people at
the counter, so as to save Therese walking back with the doll. Suddenly
Therese wanted to take infinite pains, wanted to find exactly the doll
the woman was looking for. But the next doll wasn’t quite right, either.
The doll didn’t have real hair. Therese tried in another place and found
the same doll with real hair. It even cried when it bent over. It was
exactly what the woman wanted. Therese laid the doll down carefully in
fresh tissue in a new box.
“That’s just perfect,” the woman repeated. “I’m sending this to a friend
in Australia who’s a nurse. She graduated from nursing school with me,
so I made a little uniform like ours to dress a doll in. Thank you so
much. And I wish you a merry Christmas!”
“Merry Christmas to you!” Therese said, smiling. It was the first merry
Christmas she had heard from a customer.
“Have you had your relief yet, Miss Belivet?” Mrs. Hendrickson asked
her, as sharply as if she reproached her.
Therese hadn’t had it. She got her pocketbook and the novel she was
reading from the shelf under the wrapping counter. The novel was Joyce’s
_Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_, which Richard was anxious for
her to read. How anyone could have read Gertrude Stein without reading
any Joyce, Richard said, he didn’t know. She felt a bit inferior when
Richard talked with her about books. She had browsed all over the
bookshelves at school, but the library assembled by the Order of St.
Margaret had been far from catholic, she realized now, though it had
included such unexpected writers as Gertrude Stein.
The hall to the employees’ rest rooms was blocked by big shipping carts
piled high with boxes. Therese waited to get through.
“Pixie!” one of the shipping cart boys shouted to her.
Therese smiled a little because it was silly. Even down in the cloakroom
in the basement, they yelled “Pixie!” at her morning and night.
“Pixie, waiting for me?” the raw-edged voice roared again, over the
crash and bump of the stock carts.
She got through, and dodged a shipping cart that hurtled toward her with
a clerk aboard.
“No smoking here!” shouted a man’s voice, the very growly voice of an
executive, and the girls ahead of Therese who had lighted cigarettes
blew their smoke in the air and said loudly in chorus just before they
reached the refuge of the women’s room, “Who does he think _he_ is, Mr.
Frankenberg?”
“Yoo-hoo! Pixie!”
“Ah’m juss bahdin mah tahm, Pixie!”
A shipping cart skidded in front of her, and she struck her leg against
its metal corner. She went on without looking down at her leg, though
pain began to blossom there, like a slow explosion. She went on into the
different chaos of women’s voices, women’s figures, and the smell of
disinfectant. Blood was running to her shoe, and her stocking was torn
in a jagged hole. She pushed some skin back into place, and feeling
sickened, leaned against the wall and held to a water pipe. She stayed
there a few seconds, listening to the confusion of voices among the
girls at the mirror. Then she wet toilet paper and daubed until the red
was gone from her stocking, but the red kept coming.
“It’s all right, thanks,” she said to a girl who bent over her for a
moment, and the girl went away.
Finally, there was nothing to do but buy a sanitary napkin from the slot
machine. She used a little of the cotton from inside it, and tied it on
her leg with the gauze. And then it was time to go back to the counter.
Their eyes met at the same instant, Therese glancing up from a box she
was opening, and the woman just turning her head so she looked directly
at Therese. She was tall and fair, her long figure graceful in the loose
fur coat that she held open with a hand on her waist. Her eyes were
gray, colorless, yet dominant as light or fire, and caught by them,
Therese could not look away. She heard the customer in front of her
repeat a question, and Therese stood there, mute. The woman was looking
at Therese, too, with a preoccupied expression as if half her mind were
on whatever it was she meant to buy here, and though there were a number
of salesgirls between them, Therese felt sure the woman would come to
her. Then Therese saw her walk slowly toward the counter, heard her
heart stumble to catch up with the moment it had let pass, and felt her
face grow hot as the woman came nearer and nearer.
“May I see one of those valises?” the woman asked, and leaned on the
counter, looking down through the glass top.
The damaged valise lay only a yard away. Therese turned around and got a
box from the bottom of a stack, a box that had never been opened. When
she stood up, the woman was looking at her with the calm gray eyes that
Therese could neither quite face nor look away from.
“That’s the one I like, but I don’t suppose I can have it, can I?” she
said, nodding toward the brown valise in the show window behind Therese.
Her eyebrows were blond, curving around the bend of her forehead. Her
mouth was as wise as her eyes, Therese thought, and her voice was like
her coat, rich and supple, and somehow full of secrets.
“Yes,” Therese said.
Therese went back to the stockroom for the key. The key hung just inside
the door on a nail, and no one was allowed to touch it but Mrs.
Hendrickson.
Miss Davis saw her and gasped, but Therese said, “I need it,” and went
out.
She opened the show window and took the suitcase down and laid it on the
counter.
“You’re giving me the one on display?” She smiled as if she understood.
She said casually, leaning both forearms on the counter, studying the
contents of the valise, “They’ll have a fit, won’t they?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Therese said.
“All right. I’d like this. That’s C.O.D. And what about clothes? Do
these come with it?”
There were cellophane wrapped clothes in the lid of the suitcase, with a
price tag on them. Therese said, “No, they’re separate. If you want doll
clothes—these aren’t as good as the clothes in the dolls’ clothing
department across the aisle.”
“Oh! Will this get to New Jersey before Christmas?”
“Yes, it’ll arrive Monday.” If it didn’t, Therese thought, she would
deliver it herself.
“Mrs. H. F. Aird,” the woman’s soft, distinct voice said, and Therese
began to print it on the green C.O.D. slip.
The name, the address, the town appeared beneath the pencil point like a
secret Therese would never forget, like something stamping itself in her
memory forever.
“You won’t make any mistakes, will you?” the woman’s voice asked.
Therese noticed the woman’s perfume for the first time, and instead of
replying, could only shake her head. She looked down at the slip to
which she was laboriously adding the necessary figures, and wished with
all her power to wish anything, that the woman would simply continue her
last words and say, “Are you really so glad to have met me? Then why
can’t we see each other again? Why can’t we even have lunch together
today?” Her voice was so casual, and she might have said it so easily.
But nothing came after the “will you?” nothing to relieve the shame of
having been recognized as a new salesgirl, hired for the Christmas rush,
inexperienced and liable to make mistakes. Therese slid the book toward
her for her signature.
Then the woman picked up her gloves from the counter, and turned, and
slowly went away, and Therese watched the distance widen and widen. Her
ankles below the fur of the coat were pale and thin. She wore plain
black suede shoes with high heels.
“That’s a C.O.D. order?”
Therese looked into Mrs. Hendrickson’s ugly, meaningless face. “Yes,
Mrs. Hendrickson.”
“Don’t you know you’re supposed to give the customer the strip at the
top? How do you expect them to claim the purchase when it comes? Where’s
the customer? Can you catch her?”
“Yes.” She was only ten feet away, across the aisle at the dolls’
clothing counter. And with the green slip in her hand, she hesitated a
moment, then carried it around the counter, forcing herself to advance,
because she was suddenly abashed by her appearance, the old blue skirt,
the cotton blouse—whoever assigned the green smocks had missed her—and
the humiliating flat shoes. And the horrible bandage through which the
blood was probably showing again.
“I’m supposed to give you this,” she said, laying the miserable little
scrap beside the hand on the edge of the counter, and turning away.
Behind the counter again, Therese faced the stock boxes, sliding them
thoughtfully out and back, as if she were looking for something. Therese
waited until the woman must have finished at the counter and gone away.
She was conscious of the moments passing like irrevocable time,
irrevocable happiness, for in these last seconds, she might turn and see
the face she would never see again. She was conscious, too, dimly now
and with a different horror, of the old, unceasing voices of customers
at the counter calling for assistance, calling to her, and of the low,
humming rrrrr of the little train, part of the storm that was closing in
and separating her from the woman.
But when she turned finally, she looked directly into the gray eyes
again. The woman was walking toward her, and as if time had turned back,
she leaned on the counter again and gestured to a doll and asked to see
it.
Therese got the doll and dropped it with a clatter on the glass counter,
and the woman glanced at her.
“Sounds unbreakable,” the woman said.
Therese smiled.
“Yes, I’ll get this, too,” she said in the quiet slow voice that made a
pool of silence in the tumult around them. She gave her name and address
again, and Therese took it slowly from her lips, as if she did not
already know it by heart. “That really will arrive before Christmas?”
“It’ll come Monday at the latest. That’s two days before Christmas.”
“Good. I don’t mean to make you nervous.”
Therese tightened the knot in the string she had put around the doll
box, and the knot mysteriously came open. “No,” she said. In an
embarrassment so profound there was nothing left to defend, she got the
knot tied under the woman’s eyes.
“It’s a rotten job, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Therese folded the C.O.D. slips around the white string, and
fastened them with a pin.
“So forgive me for complaining.”
Therese glanced at her, and the sensation returned that she knew her
from somewhere, that the woman was about to reveal herself, and they
would both laugh then, and understand. “You’re not complaining. But I
know it’ll get there.” Therese looked across the aisle, where the woman
had stood before, and saw the tiny slip of green paper still on the
counter. “You really are supposed to keep that C.O.D. slip.”
Her eyes changed with her smile now, brightened with a gray, colorless
fire that Therese almost knew, almost could place. “I’ve gotten things
before without them. I always lose them.” She bent to sign the second
C.O.D. slip.
Therese watched her go away with a step as slow as when she had come,
saw her look at another counter as she passed it, and slap her black
gloves across her palm twice, three times. Then she disappeared into an
elevator.
And Therese turned to the next customer. She worked with an
indefatigable patience, but her figures on the sales slips bore faint
tails where the pencil jerked convulsively. She went to Mr. Logan’s
office, which seemed to take hours, but when she looked at the clock,
only fifteen minutes had passed, and now it was time to wash up for
lunch. She stood stiffly in front of the rotating towel, drying her
hands, feeling unattached to anything or anyone, isolated. Mr. Logan had
asked her if she wanted to stay on after Christmas. She could have a job
downstairs in the cosmetic department. Therese had said no.
In the middle of the afternoon, she went down to the first floor and
bought a card in the greeting-card department. It was not a very
interesting card, but at least it was simple, in plain blue and gold.
She stood with the pen poised over the card, thinking of what she might
have written—“You are magnificent” or even “I love you”—finally writing
quickly the excruciatingly dull and impersonal: “Special salutations
from Frankenberg’s.” She added her number 645-A in lieu of a signature.
Then she went down to the post office in the basement, hesitated at the
letter drop, losing her nerve suddenly at the sight of her hand holding
the letter half in the slot. What would happen? She was going to leave
the store in a few days, anyway. What would Mrs. H. F. Aird care? The
blond eyebrows would perhaps lift a little, she would look at the card a
moment, then forget it. Therese dropped it.
On the way home, an idea came to her for a stage set, a house interior
with more depth than breadth, with a kind of vortex down the center,
from which rooms would go off on either side. She wanted to begin the
cardboard model that night, but at last she only elaborated on her
pencil sketch of it. She wanted to see someone—not Richard, not Jack or
Alice Kelly downstairs, maybe Stella, Stella Overton, the stage designer
she had met during her first weeks in New York. Therese had not seen
her, she realized, since she had come to the cocktail party Therese had
given before she left her other apartment. Stella was one of the people
who didn’t know where she lived now. Therese was on her way down to the
telephone in the hall, when she heard the short quick rings of her
doorbell that meant there was a call for her.
“Thank you,” Therese called down to Mrs. Osborne.
It was Richard’s usual call around nine o’clock. Richard wanted to know
if she felt like seeing a movie tomorrow night. It was the movie at the
Sutton they still hadn’t seen. Therese said she wasn’t doing anything,
but she wanted to finish a pillow cover. Alice Kelly had said she could
come down and use her sewing machine tomorrow night. And besides, she
had to wash her hair.
“Wash it tonight and see me tomorrow night,” Richard said.
“It’s too late. I can’t sleep if my head’s wet.”
“I’ll wash it tomorrow night. We won’t use the tub, just a couple of
buckets.”
She smiled. “I think we’d better not.” She had fallen into the tub the
time Richard had washed her hair. Richard had been imitating the tub
drain with writhings and gluggings, and she had laughed so hard, her
feet slipped on the floor.
“Well, what about that art show Saturday? It’s open Saturday afternoon.”
“But Saturday’s the day I have to work to nine. I can’t get away till
nine thirty.”
“Oh. Well, I’ll stay around school and meet you on the corner about nine
thirty. Forty-fourth and Fifth. All right?”