by Susan Isaacs
Somehow, Anna felt Mr. Charles was wrong about her job. She could not imagine this woman—with her obedient short hairdo with its upswirled bangs, her thrust-back shoulders, her rather heavy arms held close to her body—standing patiently behind a department store counter and smiling while a customer chose between capeskin or leather gloves. No. Not her.
Anna examined her own yellowed nails and recalled a line from a movie she had seen years before, a line she had tried to apply to herself but which never really fit: “An admirable woman, that Lady Veronica.” Admirable. Anna had to admire this woman. A lady. You could tell by the way she paid her bill, extracting dollars from her purse with delicacy and a little distaste—with just the tips of her thumb and middle finger. A real lady. Unlike most career girls, she neither smoked nor chewed gum. She had a way about her that made everybody, but everybody, fall all over themselves, trying to please her. But she was never loud or pushy. She just said exactly what she wanted: “No spit curls” or “Don’t cut the cuticles today, just push them back.” And people nodded and smiled and bent over her, trying to accommodate her, because she had that way about her.
Of course, Anna didn’t think she was perfect. The woman only said “please” and “thank you” to Mr. Wayne, as if assuming the rest of the people in the beauty shop were servants. Also, unlike Lady Veronica in that movie, the woman was no great beauty. In fact, she was utterly average, with an ordinary figure—except for her arms and legs, which were a little thick and unshapely. But she had a way about her. Yes, indeed.
Mr. Charles slid the final bobby pin across the last pin curl, placed the cotton over Anna’s ears, and tied the net in the middle of her forehead. As she stood to go to the dryer, Anna again glanced into the mirror. The woman was looking straight at her. Anna felt her cheeks burn and was about to turn away so the woman wouldn’t think she was staring, when, right there in the mirror, the woman gave her a warm, welcoming smile.
Dorothy Rhodes was not free with her smiles, for, as she well knew, a person in her position could not afford to be. Just a simple “good morning” and they’d expect a full refund. A smile and they’d probably insist on double their money back. She was the most competent Assistant Adjustments Manager in the history of McAlpin’s department store, and she was certain that if Mr. Pugh hadn’t recovered from his heart attack, she would be sitting at his big desk in the rear of the office, conversing with head buyers, attending Tuesday afternoon meetings, making only the most arduous adjustments.
Not that she didn’t have enough responsibility. Her desk stood between Mr. Pugh and chaos, where she could supervise the work of three other employees and handle the daily on-slaught of difficult customers, the men and women—mainly women—trying to put something over on McAlpin’s.
The simple cases—the dresses with tags still on, the still-cellophaned fruitcake returned January 2—went to Miss DeBord or Mrs. Wigglesworth or Mr. Uhl, and all they really had to do, unless they suspected foul play with the sales slip, was say, “Shall we credit your account or would you prefer scrip?” Dorothy’s work required real skill.
“The toaster isn’t working,” one of them would whine. Without a word, Dorothy would turn on her high-wattage desk lamp and examine the toaster, looking to see if the cord had been chewed by animals or if the interior was coated with black grease, a sure sign that someone had tried to toast buttered bread or a sweet roll. Ninety seconds after her examination had begun, most of them were squirming, trying to small-talk her to distraction. “Durned thing burnt up the last slice of my raisin loaf.” They gave themselves away.
“Did you touch the element with a knife?” she’d demand suddenly, her first words to them.
“Please?” But she didn’t repeat the question. “Well, I had to put a knife in there because the toast was burning. The thing wasn’t working right in the first place. But I—”
“I’m sorry. You can’t expect a refund, not if you yourself damaged the element.”
“But I didn’t—”
“If you would care to speak with Mr. Pugh, the Adjustments Manager, you may take a chair out in the hallway and you will be called as soon as he’s free.” Nine out of ten took their toasters and slunk away. And if they tried again, if they came back with slippers with scuffed soles which they swore they hadn’t walked in or with blouses with stains they said they never saw in the store—well, they’d take one look at Dorothy and give up. Just with her card file on chronic returners, she saved McAlpin’s thousands each year.
She was intelligent, so even though she did her best to be pleasant she knew many people thought her heartless. But, as she told her parents, they didn’t go through what she went through: having to listen to a Roman Catholic priest lie to her, telling her he hadn’t even tried on the undershirt when in fact it had perspiration odor under the arms; looking at a pillow alive with lice that a woman swore came from McAlpin’s; listening to bluffers and cheaters call her Sourpuss or Old Maid and worse. It’s not that she didn’t recognize there were legitimate returns, she explained; of course there were. But somehow you could always tell a real lady who was disconcerted over a pulled thread in a linen handkerchief, just as you could spot a sly, coarse housewife who got grease stains on a tablecloth and blamed them on the Napery Department. It was Dorothy’s job, and she was good at it. She worked from ten until six, Mondays through Saturdays, taking only a half hour for lunch—which she ate with her father—alternating liverwurst, American cheese, and ham sandwiches that her mother prepared each morning. She was entitled to a forty-five-minute lunch hour but never took it. She was too dedicated.
McAlpin’s was a family tradition. Her father, Fred, started as a stock boy and eventually found his niche in haberdashery. “I’ve got an eye for the tie,” he was fond of saying. He became the senior salesman in Better Suits.
Six days a week Dorothy waited for the bus beside Fred in high heels, a hat, a leather handbag, and, always, a pair of pristine gloves, dressed exactly, if less expensively, like the ladies she admired. On the seventh she went to a movie.
The Rhodeses were each other’s best friends. “Everybody else is gravy,” Dorothy’s mother, Wanda, often remarked. They would have been content with the rhythm of their lives—the Sunday pancakes and sausage, the annual two-week car trip to visit relatives in Kentucky and Tennessee—but the day before Thanksgiving, 1942, Wanda was told she had tuberculosis. The doctor said to rest and Wanda did. Suddenly Dorothy was spreading mayonnaise on the ham sandwiches, sometimes ripping the bread with the knife, and Fred was dropping into Curtsinger’s Delicatessen after work to buy head cheese and potato salad for the dinner Wanda was too weary to prepare. The rhythm had changed.
Dorothy sensed it. For her birthday the following August, she bought herself a tube of lipstick and a bottle of Jasmine Nights. She could not stay in the ocher brick house in Walnut Hills forever. At thirty-six, with thick legs, thin hair, pale lips, but a nice McAlpin’s wardrobe, Dorothy Rhodes was ready to take on a man.
She tried several that fall: Mr. Hardee in Notions returned her smile once but not the second, third, or fourth time; Mr. Kingham in Accounts Payable was polite but kept adjusting a photograph on his desk—it was of a glamorous young woman, and Dorothy, who at first assumed the picture had come with the frame, discovered it was his wife; Mr. Klein in Personnel, who hummed arias in the elevator, gave a curt “no thanks” when she offered him the extra opera ticket she happened to have; and the bus driver, with whom she tried to chat, asked her to move toward the rear. Naturally, she did not tell her parents she was seeking a way out of their house. Nor did she recite her litany of failures.
It was Wanda who first heard about the Heissenhubers. Her physician, Dr. Neumann, said inhale, exhale, and then told her about Sally’s death, a day after it happened. “My, my, my,” Wanda had said to him. To Dorothy and Fred she’d said, “Dead as a doornail in less than five minutes. She wasn’t a Cincinnati girl, you know.”
On the bus the next morning, Fred
recalled actually meeting Richard. “The girl that died from the bee bite? Heissenhuber. The name just won’t leave my mind. You know something? I sold her husband his wedding suit. How do you like that. I remember he gave the address and I said, ‘You live in Walnut Hills? Well, I’ll be! Small world.’ It was a gray worsted, thirty-eight long, if I recall correc-a-tickly. Handsome ong legs.”
And then Saturday, at Milady’s, Mr. Wayne had murmured, “That big woman, just getting up from the shampoo sink? The bee lady’s mother-in-law. You heard about it, Miss Rhodes? Just buzz, buzz, buzz, and like they say, the rest is silence.”
It was armed with this knowledge that, several months later, Dorothy finally caught Anna in the mirror and overcame her with a smile.
Richard was frightened. Dorothy expected him to marry her, and he couldn’t think of a way to say no. But he barely knew her. They were introduced when Anna had phoned him at home, ordering him with uncharacteristic imperiousness to come and escort her home from the beauty parlor. “Miss Rhodes, this is my son, Richard.”
“Hello.” He had replied automatically, not really noticing her. She looked like a strict teacher. But then he felt his mother’s foot pressing against his, the way she had when, as a boy, she reminded him to say please and thank you. “How are you?” he asked the woman. She looked older than he, but he couldn’t tell how much.
“Fine, thank you. How thoughtful of you to ask. And you?”
That evening, Anna thrust a slip of paper into his hand as he was sitting feet up, eyes closed, in a chair, listening to the war news. “She’s a very high-grade person,” Anna said as he opened his eyes. “You’ll be doing yourself a favor.”
A week later, the first week in December, he took her to a movie about a Nazi spy posing as a milkman in New York City who is exposed by a clever young war widow, and then out for ice cream. She’d let her strawberry ice cream melt into pink mush while she listened to his résumé and had him relate, twice, the details behind his dismissal at the bank.
“Don’t you like your ice cream?” he had asked, running his spoon in a spiral path down his mound of chocolate, like a mountain road. He was afraid to look at her. Her eyes were plain brown, but each time he looked into them he gave something away.
“It’s fine,” Dorothy said, although her spoon remained on her napkin. “Now, let’s go over this one more time. Do you mind? I’m interested. Your college grades were good. Your work at the bank was satisfactory.”
“Well, I thought so, but—”
“It wasn’t?”
“It was. And the clients seemed to like me. I mean—”
“Excuse me for just a second, Richard. I hate to interrupt, but it seems to me your real problems began after your wife’s first introduction to your associates at that New Year’s party. Now, was there anything she said or did—”
“Really,” said Richard. “I don’t think we should discuss this. I mean, it happened…I mean, she only passed on in July.”
“Fine,” said Dorothy. Her hands remained in her lap. The forest green sleeves of her knit dress fit like stockings over her heavy arms. The bright lights of the ice-cream parlor reflected off the tile floor and white walls and lit up her face. Her skin was smooth except for tiny lines perpendicular to her lips, like the eighth-inch marks of a ruler; her color was pale and on her left cheek there was an oblong of red, where she had not blended her rouge properly.
“Uh,” Richard stammered, “would you like another flavor? The chocolate’s good.”
“No. Thank you, though.”
“I just think—well, some things are very personal. Anyway, I don’t think my wife had anything to do with—with whatever.”
“Then it must be something you did. Or didn’t do.”
“No, really.”
“Well, I may not have gone to college, but it seems simple enough. You were asked to leave. Now, there’s a war on and I know at McAlpin’s we treasure the men we have, even if they’re half-baked. So why, when Queen City Trust is so fortunate to have a B-plus UC graduate who is 4-F with some minor kidney problem, why would they up and fire him when there’s really no one to fill his shoes?”
“But they said they have someone. That’s why—”
“Now, Richard. You’re just too kindhearted. You can’t believe anyone wouldn’t be as nice as you. But something went wrong. Don’t you think so? Don’t you feel it? You’re a college graduate. You should be on top of the world.”
Richard swallowed his last dab of ice cream and looked up into her eyes. “My wife,” he began.
“Well?”
“She had been in show business.” Dorothy’s lips pursed and she leaned forward, nodding a little. “You see,” Richard continued, now eagerly, “there was something about her that she always had to be in the limelight. I mean, that day she met all the execs, she was wearing this tight white dress. A very bright white. And, you know, all the other wives were wearing—well, not white.”
“You’re so nice. You don’t have the heart to say she was—well, flashy. That’s how show business people are. I don’t mean to take away from her personally. I’m sure she was very nice. But try to remember the details. Did your wife actually talk about being in show business in front of all those people?”
“I don’t remember,” Richard said softly. “She may have.”
“I hate to say this, Richard, but she probably did. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but bankers are a conservative group. Not that I have to tell you that.”
“I guess so….”
He asked her out to dinner a couple of times. “You like her!” Anna said one night, helping him on with his overcoat. Actually he didn’t like her. But he didn’t not like her. Mainly he found her fascination with him intriguing. She was like a devoted, uncritical maiden aunt. But she wasn’t his aunt.
She would say, “Now, Richard, tell me all about college. From your first day.” Or, “You actually did the accounting work on Mr. Paul Buchhorst’s estate? Did you meet Mrs. Buchhorst? She’s a very famous equestrienne. What did she look like?” Or, “When did you first begin to sense your wife wasn’t up to the demands your position imposed? Hmmm. But you never considered divorce? Oh, no. I agree with you totally.”
The fifth time he saw Dorothy was at her parents’ house. She had called and said, “I know you must be deluged with invitations, but my mother and father—well, we’d all be pleased if you could join us for Christmas dinner.” Anna had insisted he go, saying he’d have all day with Jane and by dinner she would be cranky anyway. So he had shown up in a suit and tie, with a Whitman’s sampler for her mother.
“Gee, Richard, it sure is good having you here!” Fred boomed, as smoothly as if he’d been meeting his daughter’s boyfriends each week. Fred wore a red and green plaid bow tie and a red handkerchief in his breast pocket. His cheeks were red too, as if recognizing the importance of color coordination. When Dorothy told him about her invitation he had gaped. “A man for dinner?” Wanda had been so flustered she began to wheeze; Dorothy had helped her up to bed. “A little more cornbread dressing?” Fred urged. “Wanda’s famous for her dressing.” Wanda smiled and coughed. “How about the other drumstick? Come on. A big fella like you needs to keep up his strength. Dorothy, pass the turkey to Richard. Don’t want him saying he didn’t get a proper Christmas dinner at the Rhodeses. No siree bob.”
After dinner, Fred and Wanda shut the kitchen door behind them, and nothing more was heard from them except the clatter of dishes. Richard sat beside Dorothy on the sofa, which was covered in dark red velvet; its feet were wood lion’s paws.
“Nice dinner,” he said. “Very nice.”
“Have you done anything about a new job?”
“Well—”
“You said you were going to start applying right away.”
“I am. But what with last-minute Christmas shopping and all—I promised my little girl a sled.”
“How long does it take to buy a sled?”
Richa
rd shrugged and ran his hand back and forth over the velvet.
“All right,” Dorothy said. “You probably need a little push in the right direction. I can tell. You need—You’re an accountant. You can go all the way to the top if you want to. You just need a little help. Do you want me to help you? Do you?”
“Yes,” Richard said. “Please.”
Dorothy went to a small table and extracted a pad and pencil from a drawer. She returned and sat closer to Richard than she had before. “All right. Let’s make a list of possible jobs. Wait. Before you start talking, listen to me. Not just with banks. You’re an accountant; think of other places. Stockbrokers. Is that a possibility, Richard?” He nodded. “Let’s see. The Internal Revenue? A tax examiner?”
“Well, I think I would rather be in private enterprise. You see, there’s only so far a person can go with—”
“Of course. That’s a dead-end job. Let’s cross it off. How about the big companies? They must need accountants. Procter and Gamble. Cincinnati Gas and Electric. All right?”
“Yes. Oh, I heard—”
“Well?”
“There’s an employment agency that specializes in young executives.”
“Good. You can go there first thing Monday morning.”
“They’ll probably be closed. I mean, between Christmas and New Year’s nothing much is happening.”
“Richard, if you don’t want me to help, all you have to do is say so.”
Of course he told her he wanted her help, and by their sixth date, four days after the Christmas dinner, she had a typed list of businesses with their addresses, telephone numbers, and, in most cases, the names of their personnel managers. She handed it to him across the checkered tablecloth. They were in a restaurant called Gino’s, which had candles burning on the table and a mural of Venice but, except for spaghetti, served no dish even remotely Italian. “Careful,” she said. “You’re holding the list too close to the candle.”