Bernice’s mouth twisted bitterly. Let other people chant about capability. Thick breasts straining at a cotton sweater, that counted. A simpering smile. Eyes a man could look into and get a pleasing reflection from—not the distorted fun-house view that you got from Bernice’s thick lenses. It was six months before Bernice got a job at Brennan’s. This was an outsized import-export clearing house. Bernice was lost among dozens of stenographers. Her looks were practically unimportant. Practically.
Wait, Mr. Findlay, Bernice thought, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it began at Brennan’s. At least, that’s where Bernice learned to hate. She’d learned about tears and slights and hurts before. But at Brennan’s she learned cold, hardknotted hatred.
She had been there three years, and was still in the outer office. She was in charge of the stenographers. But that didn’t matter. It was the inner office that counted. The jobs in there paid good salaries, and there was a chance for advancement. You could go places at Brennan’s once you were working inside those magic doors. How many times had they skipped her? You’d laugh, Mr. Findlay. You wouldn’t even believe it. She tried to get another job. She wasn’t getting what she wanted at Brennan’s. But there was nothing else that paid as well as the job she had. So she stayed. And learned to hate.
One day she was working on a detailed report. It was such exacting work that it had been kicked down to Bernice. She kept working even when she was aware someone was standing before her desk.
The man before her desk coughed. She glanced up from the report she was transcribing. Then she saw that it was Al Brennan himself, and that another man stood slightly behind him. She flushed, feeling her face go hot. She sat back in her chair, punching at the bridge of her glasses to set them straight on her nose.
Brennan was a handsome man. He was almost fifty. Except that his blond hair was thinning out some, it had remained almost unchanged for the past thirty years. He wore loud clothes and liked to believe that no one thought him a day past thirty-five. That was the magic age to Al Brennan. Before that a man is uncouth, immature. But at thirty-five, if he’s used his brain, he should know the facts of life. He should be sophisticated, disillusioned, and charming. Al Brennan would have used all those adjectives to describe himself.
“Bernice, this is Mr. Deerman. Mr. Lloyd Deerman, Bernice Harper.”
Bernice looked at Deerman. A big athletic man with graying hair, high forehead, and full jowls, he dwarfed the dapper Brennan. He had a smile that made him look like a friendly St. Bernard.
Bernice smiled and nodded, putting out her hand. Brennan’s mouth pulled down and he shook his head meaningly, motioning with his head at Deerman’s dark glasses.
Bernice realized that the big man was blind.
“Mr. Deerman is an importer, Bernice. Deerman and Sanders. I know you’ve heard of them. We’ve handled their account for a good many years. We find we’re being robbed, Bernice. Mr. Deerman has consented to leave his firm and make a confidential investigation for us. While he’s doing it, he’s going to have a suite of offices with us. He’ll need a private secretary. We’ve given the matter a lot of thought, Bernice, and we’ve chosen you.”
Some of the core of hatred dissolved in Bernice. It hadn’t been wasted, she thought, all these years. They’ve known I’m here, after all. They have seen that I can do the work and know the business.
“I’m sure we’ll get along very well, Miss Harper,” Lloyd Deerman said. He had a well-modulated voice.
“Oh, I’m sure you will,” Brennan said. “Only, call her Bernice. Isn’t that right, Bernice? And, Lloyd, not only can she do the work, but she’s a real looker.” He grinned and winked at Bernice. Such a wonderful joke between them. A joke on the blind man. “Right, Bernice?”
Bernice went cold. All the blood seeped out of her face, leaving it pale and taut. Her legs felt too weak to support her. And she knew how bitterly she hated Al Brennan.
And she hated herself. She hated herself because it was a joke to pawn her off as a looker on a man who couldn’t see her!
Looking up, her eyes distended behind her glasses, she hated Lloyd Deerman, too. She hated him because he was blind, because he had come to Brennan’s, because they made a joke of her before him. It was cruel enough to overlook the quality of her work. But she was used to that. She could stand it. But to be made the butt of a crude joke before a man who need never know whether she was lovely or plain was tactless and unnecessary.
Her voice trembled a little. She fought to control it. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I couldn’t do the work.”
“Nonsense,” Brennan said. “Of course you can do it.”
“I’m sure you can,” Deerman said, smiling beneath his dark glasses. “I’ve heard glowing reports about you. We’ll get along famously. Working for a blind boss is like working for any other, Miss Harper, except that he isn’t watching you every minute.”
Laughter seemed indicated. Brennan laughed as though that were as good repartee as he’d ever encountered. And Bernice managed a sound for the blind man. A dry laugh.
They gave Lloyd Deerman a plush office, and Bernice had her own cubbyhole adjoining it.
They worked together well. But she didn’t get over hating him. She never got over that tactless joke of Al Brennan’s. Bernice wasn’t one to forget or forgive her hurts. The longer they stayed in her mind, the more they became magnified. She couldn’t forget that Lloyd Deerman had precipitated that latest hurt. She had to admit it probably was the last thing he would have done if he’d known. But that didn’t make it any better. She spoke to him only when he asked her a direct question. She was sharp and curt with her answers.
Bernice made a discovery. In spite of the fact that he smiled easily, had amazing poise, and got around well even in strange surroundings, Lloyd Deerman lived in his own private hell. Life for him had always been dangerous and lonely. This didn’t draw her toward him in the least. It made her hate him all the more. A leper doesn’t welcome another leper in the world of the well.
On the afternoon of the third day, Deerman called her into his office and told her to sit down. She unfolded her stenographic pad and laid it on her knee.
“I suppose there’s a lot going on in the outer offices, Miss Harper?” he said. She watched his mouth pull into his friendly smile.
“I suppose so.”
“It must be like being in a convent, being in here while the world roars past in the outer offices, eh?”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, I know you don’t like it in here, Miss Harper. A young and lovely girl, you want to be out there with young people like yourself.”
“I’m not young and lovely.” Spots of color appeared in Bernice’s cheeks. A tiny muscle made a ridge along the side of her taut chin.
He smiled, his large mouth showing even white teeth.
“All right,” he teased. “You’re old and ugly and decrepit.”
“I’m perfectly pleased, working in here,” she told him.
He smiled again. “Well, you certainly had me fooled. Is that what you were trying to do? Were you holding out for an increased salary?”
“No.”
“I’ll see if I can’t get it for you. You’re worth anything you can hold them up for. I’ll see that you get it before I leave here. Is that better?”
“Thank you.”
“All right, Bernice. It’s just that I wanted to be friends with you. I’m not really so bad when you get to know me. Perhaps it’s just that I’m strange to you. Why don’t we talk it over? Let’s clear out of here and go to some nice place for dinner and music, eh?”
I should be your seeing-eye dog now, Bernice thought bitterly. I’m bitch enough, but not for that. If she had other dates from the office, it might not be so bad. She wasn’t going to have them smiling when she went out with a blind man.
“No. No, thank you,” she said coldly.
“Is it another engagement?” Deerman said, smiling. “If that’s it, why, maybe some
other night?”
“No. It’s no other engagement. I just cannot go. I’m sorry.”
“Do you mind my asking why?”
“Yes. I mind.”
He laughed. “You’re a difficult girl to get to know, Bernice. But I like you. You do your work. And you keep me in my place. That’s all, my dear. Good night.”
He said nothing more about her going out with him for another week, and Bernice said as little to him as she could. It was bad enough to go to the washroom and have the simpering little beauties titter and ask her whether Mr. Deerman chased her around the office himself, or did he just send his seeing-eye dog and let him retrieve her?
Work piled up. They sent in extra stenographers. Deerman refused to deal with any of them except through Bernice. Now she did nothing but take his dictation and deal with the personnel. Even so, her days were twelve hours long.
It was ten o’clock one night before he finished dictating. He stood up, stretched, and yawned.
“I’ve some news for you, Bernice,” he said. “I found out what your pay was. I was astonished. Shocked. Not only that you could live on that amount, but that you would continue working here for such a salary. You don’t have to worry. When you get your pay check, you’re going to find it has been doubled. And it’ll stay that way even after I leave here.”
Bernice looked at him, her mouth twisting. You want to bet? She managed to thank him. But she hated him. Would he have done this for her if he could have seen her? Brennan’s had increased her pay not because of her at all, but because Lloyd had insisted.
“Now,” he said, “I think I’m entitled to a slight reward.”
“Do you?”
He turned toward her. His thick brows raised above the rims of his dark glasses. “Don’t you? Aren’t you going out to supper with me, after that? Don’t you want to hear the sad story of my life? How I was born barefoot? I was a year old before I ever wore anything but knitted shoes. Why, I don’t think I had a pair of leather shoes until I was two years old. Come on, Bernice. Smile at me. Let’s go out and celebrate. What if I’m not Prince Charming? Suppose I do carry a cane with a white tip? I’m a big guy, Bernice. I tower over most men. I don’t have to see them to know that. I can feel it.”
“I suppose you can.”
“All right, then. Come on, Bernice. Pretend. Pretend for one night that I’m charming and handsome.”
“You are handsome.” Her voice was flat.
“I know. People have told me so. My mother has told me. I want you to meet my mother sometime. She thinks I’m handsome. So, we’ll go out. Two beautiful people. I know a place, Bernice. Supper for two.”
“I’d rather not. Really, I have a headache.”
“You don’t like me, Bernice. You find me distasteful?”
I hate you, she thought. I can’t help it. It isn’t your fault. It isn’t even my fault. It’s just what you are, and what I am. And what the world is.
“No. Really. I tell you, it’s only a headache.”
“No, that won’t do. Not this time. I’m a sensitive man, Bernice. With sight I might have been a heavyweight boxer, a star football player, a sea captain. Now, I speak before Congress, and at luncheons all over the country. But I know. They aren’t even listening to what I say. They’re thinking, My God, the poor beggar is blind. I wonder how he even finds the toilet. It’s got so that I shrink from people. But not from you, Bernice. Some chemistry, some alchemy makes itself felt inside me, and I know we are sympathetic—in some unexplainable way, attracted. It isn’t just that I’m asking you to supper with me. If you don’t go, I won’t ask anyone else. Certainly, there are hundreds of simpering little fools who’ll go out with me because I have money, no matter what I am. I don’t want that. You’re my kind, Bernice, and I want to be friends with you.”
Will that do for a beginning, Mr. Findlay? Bernice thought.
The dinner had looked delicious and expensive. Bernice sat stiffly across the table from Deerman. She was unable to eat. She could feel the eyes on them, the pitying stares directed at Lloyd. She kept her gaze fixed on the lustrous white tablecloth.
Deerman handled himself so well it was difficult to believe he couldn’t see the food on the plate before him. He liked to talk to Bernice and he kept up a steady attempt to amuse her. It was twenty minutes before her cold unresponsiveness dampened his high spirits. He had started out this evening pleased and excited at being with her. But now her silence became his silence. He ate silently and ordered Scotch. He began to drink before he’d finished his entree.
After supper, fortified by the Scotch, he tried again. His spirits soared and he didn’t want to let the evening with Bernice end. He insisted that she go with him to a night club.
In the taxi he reached for her hand and told her that he was afraid he’d find a typewriter in it, or a shorthand pad.
Bernice tried to laugh so that he could hear her. But all she could think was that she hated him. Al Brennan’s smiling face loomed between them, and Al Brennan’s sweet voice laughed at them in the cab. “Call her Bernice, Lloyd. She’s a real looker. She’s a real looker. Call her Bernice, Lloyd...”
The evening was a flop and by the time Lloyd took her home he was drunk. And the hell of it was, he told her, that when he had started out with her he hadn’t even wanted to drink at all.
Of course, Deerman didn’t arrive at work the next day. But Bernice was surprised when he didn’t show up the following morning, either. Al Brennan called her into his office.
“You’ve handled this whole situation beautifully, Miss Harper,” he told her. “You’ve shown us that you can handle the tough assignments. There ought to be a step up for you when Deerman leaves. Yes, there should indeed.” He rambled on for a few minutes, then said, “You know, Miss McMillan retires on the twentieth. Somebody is going to replace her, Harper. Somebody is going to step into a mighty fine position. Some woman who has proved herself with the tough ones.”
He smiled at her, a handsome man of fifty who liked to believe he was a handsome man of thirty-five. An irresistible man being nice because he wanted something from her. Bernice discovered at once what it was he wanted.
“We won’t say any more about that job now, Bernice. Can’t, as a matter of fact. Something has come up. Deerman is at home. Just plain under the weather. We want you to get over there, Bernice, and try to get him out of it. See if you can get some of the detail work done there at his place. You know what I want. I don’t think anyone but you would be able to handle it, Bernice.” He smiled at her again.
He gave her the address of the big old house where Lloyd Deerman lived alone up on the East Side. She went there in a taxi. The first thing she wondered when she saw the old building, lost among the shining new ones around it, was why they didn’t demolish it. Age had only outmoded it.
She went inside. The dark lower corridor smelled musty, and her eyes jerked up the high, sharp-angled stairs with Deerman’s guide railings along the wall and the inner side of the banisters.
Dr. Talbot Mundy met her in the library. He smiled.
“He’s just drunk,” Mundy said. “He goes along fine until something happens to hurt him—and he can take a lot! More than almost any other man I know. But when the hurts pile up, he starts drinking to forget. He’s a man who shouldn’t drink at all. And he’s a man who’ll walk across broken glass barefoot for one more drink after he has started. We try to keep liquor away from him. Even the servants destroy it when they find it in the house. When he gets started with it, he has to run his cycle.”
Bernice stayed until they got Deerman sobered up and through the shakes and the sickness that followed. All the time she was thinking that maybe Deerman would leave Brennan’s soon and return to his own firm. Then she would get the promotion she deserved.
The next day Deerman returned to his office at Brennan’s. He told her that he was winding up his job here and was returning to his own business.
“I want to take you along with me,” he
told her. “I’ll double your new salary here, Bernice. I’m going to speak to Brennan. But I wanted to talk it over with you first.”
Bernice shuddered. She would never make double her present salary even in the job Miss McMillan was vacating on the twentieth. But she wanted to see the last of Lloyd Deerman. Being nice to Lloyd was like tending an invalid. Sure, it was plain he was crazy about her. But he wasn’t what she wanted. Maybe once she got Miss McMillan’s job, Brennan’s would appreciate her.
“Don’t speak to Mr. Brennan,” she told Lloyd. “I don’t want you to.”
“Why not?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Deerman. I’d rather stay here.”
He faced her, frowning. Finally he said, “If it’s because I drink, Bernice, forget that part of it. Sure I drink. It’s not pleasant to live as I have to, Bernice. And sometimes it gets the best of me. Sometimes I have to drink. It’s my own damn business! I’m offering you almost two hundred a week, Bernice. How in God’s name can you refuse that?”
“It’s easy,” she said. “I just don’t want it.”
She couldn’t tell him that she wanted to be appreciated by people who could see her. She couldn’t tell him about the pretty, stupid little bitches who had been promoted over her head in the last three years. It would mean something to her to have Miss McMillan’s job. She would at last be where she should have been for a long time now. In a job like that, maybe she would meet the kind of man she wanted.
Bernice was in the washroom when Rita Baehrs came in. Rita was slender and willowy. She had full breasts for such a slender girl, and she wore dresses that displayed her bosom ideally.
Rita smiled at Bernice’s reflection wearily, exaggerating a yawn. She’d been born out West, she’d told Bernice, and had come East to get away from horses and men who smelled like horses, laughed like horses, and danced like horses. She’d been married twice. She was planning to start a national Divorcees Anonymous. “There must be some way that we can curb these foolish mistakes we women keep making,” she told Bernice. Now, she sank down before the mirrors on the narrow bench. Her pretty shoulders slumped round. “You’d think I’d been out snatching a new husband, wouldn’t you?” she said.
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