“I CAN understand that,” said Mr. McCreary sadly. “It’s been a long time since a girl’s eyes kindled upon looking at me. I’m not married myself,” he added. “For some reason, most people here aren’t. It’s usually the lonely ones that start tampering with the lives of those around them because they have nothing better to do.”
He stood up and smiled shyly. “It’s been nice being with you. Good night.”
He was almost to the door when her voice halted him. “Mr. McCreary.”
“Yes?”
“Please tell me why I’m here.”
“I’m sorry, my dear—” the words seemed to slip out without his realizing it—“but I can’t. If I did, they’d give me a special refresher course.” He wiggled his lower jaw reflectively. “I don’t know whether I could take it.”
As he shut the door behind him, Aunt Hester sat staring blankly after him, the words my dear ringing pleasantly in her ears.
“Perhaps,” she whispered to herself, “perhaps after all these lonely years . . .”
But when she thought of her long horse-face and her jutting beak of a nose, the words turned flat and cold. Sighing wearily, she undressed and crawled into bed.
At seven, she was awakened by the buzz of her telephone.
“Yes?” she said sleepily.
“Mr. Higgens and Mr. Montgombery will be up in twenty minutes to give you your lesson. They have a very tight schedule today, and the management would appreciate it if you would be as cooperative as possible.”
The next quarter-hour was the longest and worst she had ever known. She thought again of flight, but knew it was hopeless—there was no lock on the door and no place to hide.
When they finally came in, she didn’t fight them. She lay back on her bed and closed her eyes.
“That’s good, ma’am,” said Mr. Montgombery encouragingly. “It’ll all be over in a minute.”
Mr. Higgens took hold of her long nose with his strong right hand, braced himself against the bed, and then, with a sudden wrench, ripped it off her face. It was worse than the day before, because she knew what was coming. She screamed, though she had resolved not to—and by the time Mr. Montgombery had completed his work of reassembly, she was almost unconscious.
It was several minutes after they left before she realized that she was alone—that the lesson for the day was over.
Five minutes later, her memory suddenly came back.
SHE found Mr. McCreary on the veranda.
He rose to his feet with a look of honest pleasure on his face, and held out his hands to her. Without thinking, she took them.
“It’s good to see you,” he said.
“It’s good to see you, too,” she answered. Then, suddenly aware that she was still holding his hands, she dropped them in embarrassment.
“How was the lesson?” he asked.
“Horrible,” she said, “horrible.”
“So was mine. But no more so than usual.”
He led her over to a chair and they both sat in silence, looking out across the bright green grass to the gate that led to . . . someplace. The haze along the wall rippled and danced like heat-waves. There was heavy traffic on the highway beyond, traffic that moved both ways; but it was seen merely as a series of wavering blurs.
“I don’t know,” he said at last, in response to her unspoken question. “I can guess where they are going, but I have no way of checking on it. All I can say is that if by some weird chance you should discover a way to get through the gate, when you get on the road turn right.”
A faint sound of marching feet came from the other side of the wall, and a faint murmur as if voices were counting cadence. Aunt Hester strained her eyes, but the haze in front of the gate seemed to thicken and she could see nothing.
“They sound like soldiers,” she said.
“They are,” said Mr. McCreary soberly. “They pass every day now. And every night, too. Sometimes they glow in the dark.”
There was another moment of silence and then Aunt Hester said, “Mr. McCreary.”
“Why don’t you call me Henry?” he said shyly, his eyes fixed on the worn wooden floor of the veranda.
“All right, Henry; if you’ll call me Hester.”
She paused.
“Henry.”
“Yes, Hester?”
“I remember now . . . the haze inside my head is all gone.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” She nodded.
“Tell me.”
“Well,” she began, “Muriel and I were setting the table for supper, and I was arguing with her. I had invited Mr. Keeler for dinner, and I was planning to go out afterward and leave them alone. From the hints he’d dropped that day, I knew he was ready to propose. I was trying to persuade Muriel to say yes, and she was being stubborn—she had always been a very dutiful child, Henry, but now her head was so filled with that young writer that I couldn’t seem to get anyplace with her. Then I’m afraid I lost my temper.” She hesitated. “It’s not very pleasant now that I look back on it . . .”
“Go ahead,” said Mr. McCreary sympathetically. “Sometimes it’s better to talk things out.”
“I told her,” said Aunt Hester in a subdued voice, “that I’d given up my whole life for her—that I’d passed up chances to marry and have a home and children of my own, just so that I could raise her properly. Then I asked her if all those years meant nothing. Her face went white and all the resistance rushed out of her. I told her to pick up the phone and call her young man and tell him that she was getting married and could never see him again. She stood like a dead person, and I picked up the phone and closed her fingers over it. She started to dial his number . . . and then suddenly the whole room vanished, and I found myself standing in the hotel lobby. Did something like that happen to you?”
“Yes,” said Henry. “Just about. Everybody here has a story something like that. I’ve always talked too much, and sometimes the things I say hurt people. I don’t intend to, but things just slip out. It kept getting worse and worse.
“You see,” he said, “I haven’t any family, and ever since I’ve been in Allentown I’ve lived down at the Athletic Club. I’ve always been afraid of women, and sitting around the lounge talking is one of the only ways I have of fighting off loneliness. I guess you could call me an old gossip. I had no life of my own, so I gained a sort of vicarious excitement by talking about the lives of others.”
As he talked, his hand crept over and touched hers. She shivered, but didn’t pull away.
“I live in Allentown, too,” she said.
IT was two weeks later, after a most difficult lesson, that Mr. Montgombery paused at the door of her room and said: “Mr. McCreary is leaving us today, ma’am. I thought you might like to know.” She felt the old familiar loneliness start to grow within her again. “Can I say good-by to him?”
Mr. Montgombery nodded. “You’d better hurry, ma’am. He’s waiting for you out on the veranda.”
She ran down the stairs and out to him.
“Henry,” she said, and her voice choked. “I—I . . .” She stopped, annoyed at her sudden inarticulateness. All her life she had prided herself on her ability to call a spade a spade, and now she found herself blushing and stuttering like a schoolgirl. “I’m very glad for you,” she finished lamely.
“Is that all?” he asked.
She started to say “no” but she couldn’t form the word. There was a moment of awkward silence.
“Well,” he said finally, “I guess I’ve finally learned to keep my big mouth shut.” He fingered his chronically swollen jaw. “After thirty-seven hundred disassemblies, I should have.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Any minute now.” He, too, seemed to be having trouble with his vocal cords. He swallowed twice and then said: “Hester . . .”
“Yes, Henry?”
“When you come back, could I come and see you sometime?”
“Of course, Henry. Mine is a big house and an
empty one. With Muriel gone, I’ll be lonely.” Mutely, he reached out his arms as if to draw her to him. She shut her eyes and waited, her pulse throbbing in her throat. She felt suddenly young again. Then, just as suddenly, the warm feeling vanished, and she felt worn and tired and alone.
She opened her eyes to the empty veranda. Henry had been taken back.
DRY-EYED she went back to her room and picked up the telephone beside her bed.
“Desk.”
“I want to see the man in charge of this place at once.”
“He’s terribly busy,” said the clerk uncertainly.
Something had happened to Aunt Hester. Instead of snapping back, she said humbly, “I know, but this is terribly important.” There was a moment of silence at the other end of the wire and then he said, “He’ll be right up.” Two minutes later, the blond young desk clerk walked into her room. Aunt Hester looked past him expectantly, waiting for somebody to follow him in. Nobody did.
“Isn’t he coming?” she said finally.
The young man chuckled. “He did. I’m him. In addition to running the elevator, I also run the whole place. I wasn’t kidding when I said we were short-handed. Now, what can I do for you?”
“I’ve got to get back,” said Aunt Hester quietly. “I’m needed.”
“Yes?”
“I want to triple my lesson load.”
The young man looked suddenly grave. “I suppose you have a special reason?”
“A very special one.”
“Mr. McCreary?”
Aunt Hester laughed mirthlessly and pointed at the mirror. “With a nose like that, what chance do you think I stand. No, it’s my niece—she’s about to make a stupid marriage, and I’ve got to get back in time to stop it.”
“But Mr. McCreary seemed most attentive to you while he was with us.”
“He was just lonely,” said Aunt Hester sadly. “He won’t be any more, once he gets back with his friends. Can I take the extra lessons?”
“Increasing the number doesn’t necessarily mean shortening your stay, you know,” warned the young man. “And once you’ve contracted for them, it is forbidden to cancel. Most of our students are barely able to keep going with one a day. Nobody has ever tried to take three.”
“In that case, I’ll be the first,” said Aunt Hester grimly. “My mind’s made up!”
“It may take you years yet.”
“I know.”
He picked up the phone and spoke softly into it. “In that case, we will begin at once,” he said, turning back to her. “Mr. Montgombery and Mr. Higgens will be up in a minute.”
He sat down in one of the straight-backed chairs and lit a cigarette. “Have you figured out where you are yet?”
SHE shook her head. “I know it isn’t Hell, because people can return. And if there is anything to what I’ve heard in church all my life, this certainly isn’t Heaven.”
“It’s under the same central management, though. This is my baby,” he said proudly, “and I’ve got a private hunch that within another hundred years Hell will be running at less than twenty per cent of its rated capacity.
“I got the idea from watching Pavlov’s experiments on conditioned reflexes in dogs. If it works on animals, I thought, why shouldn’t it work on humans? It was a tough fight to get permission to set this place up—the older group, with all their ideas about hellfire and damnation, have more power than you might think. But when I pointed out that after ail these millennia of running Hell at full blast, the damnation rate has never dropped by a single per cent, they had to give in.
“ ‘Reform’s the ticket,’ I said. ‘Catch them before they’ve damned themselves and recondition them. What’s the point in locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen?’ They finally agreed to let me set up an experimental operation. I have a ridiculously small budget, and my teaching and research staff is only half the size it should be, but in spite of that I’ve had a redemption rate of one hundred per cent since I first started operations.
“Redemption through reconditioning! It’s a simple matter of managerial common sense: Catch them when they first start to slip off the straight and narrow, correct the slight moral defect that’s causing the difficulty, and you’ve got no more trouble after that. I remember the case of a decent enough fellow whose only fault was that he’d talk the leg off anybody who came near him. He just wanted to be sociable, but it got so that people started shunning him. This just made matters worse, and he started to grow sour inside. Then one night he cornered some poor fellow at a party and . . .”
Aunt Hester never did find out what happened then, because Mr. Montgombery and Mr. Higgens made a sudden entrance.
“This is your last chance to change your mind,” said the young man sternly. “Remember, it may be years before you will be permitted to leave here.”
Aunt Hester shook her head and stretched out on the bed. “I’m ready,” she said grimly, and shut her eyes.
There was a moment of whispered conversation among the three men, and then she felt Mr. Higgens’ strong fingers taking hold of her nose. She clenched her teeth and waited. When it came, the pain was not as severe as it usually was.
“What’ll I do with it?” said the voice of Mr. Higgens.
“Throw it in the wastebasket,” said the voice of Mr. Montgombery.
Aunt Hester heard a dull thud as something thunked into the metal container.
SHE bit down on her lower lip and waited. She felt Mr. Montgombery’s fingers working over the place where her nose had been. Wherever they touched, a blessed numbness took place of the searing pain. He seemed to be twisting and molding something.
At last he stepped back with a grunt of satisfaction.
“Mr. Montgombery,” said Mr. Higgens in tones of awe, “you are a proboscitory Rembrandt.”
“You may open your eyes now, Miss Winston,” said the young man.
She did. The great beak that had cleft the air between her mouth and her eyes for the last forty-eight years was gone. She looked over at the wastebasket.
“It wasn’t a thing of beauty,” she said, “but it was the only nose I had. I’m going to miss it—especially when I have a cold.”
The three men grinned at her.
“You haven’t been ruined,” the young man said. “Go look in the mirror.”
She did. She blinked as if she couldn’t believe her eyes, and then let out a whimper of delight. Mr. Higgens had merely removed the end, and Mr. Montgombery had reassembled what was left into a lovely little retrousse nose that any Hollywood starlet would be proud to present to the critical eye of the camera. And the nose wasn’t all that had changed: with its new shape, the heavy bones of her face that had formerly seemed harsh and ugly now seemed instead strong and interesting.
“If you can break away from the mirror long enough to answer a simple question, we will now conduct the final examination,” said the young man.
“The what?” gasped Aunt Hester.
“The final examination. Be careful how you answer. If you don’t pass, your new nose will be taken away from you and you’ll be sent back to the bottom of the class.”
Aunt Hester’s courage suddenly deserted her. “Can’t I wait until tomorrow?” she faltered.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then . . . can I have just a few minutes to think about it?”
He shook his head. “I’ve got to get back to the desk. I’ve got three hand cases waiting to check in.”
“What kind?” asked Mr. Montgombery with professional interest.
“The usual. One chap who always has his hand in somebody else’s pocket, another who never lets his right hand know what his left hand is doing, and a third who always has his fingers in half-a-dozen pies at the same time.”
“Give the last to somebody else,” said Mr. Higgens. “Six separate disassemblies each lesson period is too much.”
“Well?” said the young man to Aunt Hester.
“I’m ready,” she
said quietly. “What have you learned since you’ve been here?”
She told him.
THERE was a horrible moment of waiting, and then the look on his face told her that she had passed. She ran over and gave Mr. Higgens and Mr. Montgombery each a kiss so long and fervent that she left them breathless and blushing. She was starting toward the young man to do the same to him when suddenly, without warning, and with no period of transition, the hotel room vanished and she found herself standing by her own dining room table with three forks in her hand. Across from her stood a pretty young girl, her face set and stubborn and her hands clenched.
“I don’t care how much money he has!” the girl stormed. “He’s old and he’s fat and he’s nasty and—” her voice broke and she started to wail—“and I love Alan.” Aunt Hester went over to her and gave her a little hug. “Look at me, child.”
Muriel looked—and then looked again. “Aunt Hester! Your nose! What happened!”
“I had it taken care of, honey. You’re just so used to me that you probably haven’t taken a good look at me in years.”
“But . . . you’re beautiful!”
The older woman looked complacently into the mirror over the sideboard. “Stuff and nonsense,” she said, and started removing one place setting from the table.
Muriel watched her in surprise. “Isn’t Mr. Keeler coming?” she said hopefully.
“There’s been a change of plans.”
The girl let out a tremendous sigh of relief. “Then we can have dinner alone, just like always.”
“Oh, no, we won’t. You go find your young man and tell him to buy you a hot dog or something.” Her fingers went up and caressed the pert snubness of her new nose lovingly. “And, Muriel, if you ever catch me sticking my nose into somebody else’s business again, give me a good kick where it will do the most good. I’ve learned my lesson the hard way, and I’d hate to have to go back for a refresher course.”
Collected Fiction Page 25