The Operator

by Gretchen Berg

  Dedication

  For Elaine Gladys McAnaney Stoddard, Grandma

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  December 15, 1952

  Vivian Dalton’s worn old ankle boots crunched over the packed snow in front of Freedlander’s, the bright lights of the department store spilling right out onto the sidewalk and mixing with the glow of the streetlamps. Vivian gave a quick, polite wave of a gloved hand to Betty Miller, who’d caught her eye through the flocked glass of the main display window. Freedlander’s fancied itself right up for the holidays with the lights and the bells and whatever it was they put on the window to make it look like it snowed inside.

  Vivian had heard it called flocked glass but couldn’t tell you what flocked was. She might’ve guessed something to do with geese. Flock, flocked. Who knew? Vivian just knew she would’ve liked to be inside the bright store, on the other side of that flocked glass, herself, all nice and toasty, instead of out freezing her toes off walking to work in the boots that might as well’ve been made of Saran Wrap, for all the good they were doing.

  Betty Miller didn’t have to work, did she? No, she was nice and toasty inside the department store with her two youngest, Little Bitty and Charles Junior, waiting in the long line to see Santa Claus, and that didn’t surprise Vivian one bit. This year’s Santa was a pretty good one, Vivian had to admit. Fat, jolly, and sober, at least, so the Millers were there, and the lines were much longer than they had been last year. Last year, Jimmy Hixson had said Santa’s breath smelled like the Sunoco filling station. Jimmy’s older brother Albert worked at the filling station, so he would know.

  When she’d heard what Jimmy Hixson said, Betty Miller had been the first mother to boycott the Santa line and the other mothers quickly followed her lead, like they always did. She hadn’t bothered with a courtesy phone call, politely explaining to Freedlander’s with all her over-enunciated consonants, “Your San-ta Claus seems to be fright-fully ahem em-balmed.” That would’ve taken up too much of her time. Vivian didn’t know exactly what it was Betty did with her time, but she knew Betty thought her time was more precious than anyone else’s. Betty Miller knew the boycott would work, and the other mothers knew it, and soon Freedlander’s knew they’d better get themselves a new Santa Claus. No matter what Little Bitty and Charles Junior said to Sober Santa, up there on his shiny red North Pole throne, Vivian Dalton knew the Millers were going to have a marvelous Christmas this year. The Millers had a marvelous Christmas every year.

  That was the thing about small towns. Everyone knew everyone else’s business. Vivian certainly knew everyone else’s business, but more important, she knew people. Vivian Dalton knew people, that was for certain, and she’d be the first to tell you that. She’d say it was more from intuition than from eavesdropping on people’s telephone calls, but her daughter, Charlotte, would say, “No, it’s from the eavesdropping.”

  Charlotte joked with her friends, putting on airs for amusement, saying her mother was privy to myriad conversations among the good people of Wooster. Now, “privy” and “myriad” were two words Vivian would’ve used if she’d known what they meant. She wasn’t stupid, but her schooling hadn’t gone any further than grade eight at Bowman Street School. Vivian never would’ve seen “privy” and “myriad” printed next to the splashy photos in her fashion and movie magazines. Charlotte had to roll her eyes and sigh as she explained to her friends, “My mother doesn’t trust people who read books.”

  It was a shame Vivian didn’t know words like “privy” and “myriad,” because she would’ve loved them. They sounded fancy and expensive. They sounded like words the four-flushers on the north side of Wooster probably used all the time, even at Buehler’s when they were buying whatever it was they bought there. Their prime rib and lobster claws and bushels of caviar or whatnot. Vivian eavesdropped, and also did her share of peering into people’s shopping carts at the grocery store. Yes, people like the Millers probably used words like “privy” and “myriad” at Buehler’s. All four of their rich kids probably privyed and myriaded all over the place. Little Bitty and Charles Junior probably used those words when they were talking to Sober Santa at Freedlander’s.

  Vivian wasn’t thinking about the words she didn’t know as she crunched along on her way to work, blowing out little frozen clouds as she exhaled. She was thinking about how glad she was that Betty Miller had seen her wearing her new hat. There’d only been one left at Beulah Bechtel’s that afternoon, and Vivian had set it on the counter next to the cash register with shaky guilty fingers that really should’ve been pushing the hat money across the counter to the bank teller to put into her savings account instead. She’d seen Betty hovering near the fur coats, eyeing the hat hungrily. Looking at it like she’d almost eat it for lunch if she could, with her pointy little white teeth. Betty Miller’s teeth weren’t really pointy, that’s just how Vivian imagined them. Pointy teeth in a vicious mouth that seemed just as likely to tear the very flesh from your bones as it was to smile and comment on the weather.

  Vivian had saved for months to buy that hat. Just that one hat. The beautiful hat that she knew hadn’t really been made for someone like her, but maybe, if she bought that hat for herself, she’d feel a little bit of what the four-flushers felt. Worthy of something nice. Boy, if she’d told Edward how much it cost, he would have put her in the lunatic asylum. Betty Miller probably could’ve bought four or five of those hats that day, right there. If they’d had any more, that is. “You’re lucky,” the salesgirl (Doris, maybe?) had said to Vivian as she wrapped the hat in lavender tissue paper. “This is our last one.”

  Vivian, in her worn-out ankle boots but fancy new hat, stepped out of the frigid night air and into the brick building, pulling the door closed behind her with a “Brrrr!” before making her way to the cloakroom. She shrugged out of her coat and then carefully removed the beautiful new hat. Doris at Beulah Bechtel’s had said it was “Prussian-blue,” but Vivian didn’t know what that was. She thought it looked more like a dark navy. Beulah hired girls from the college and Doris probably went there to study Prussian or something. Either way, the blue c
omplemented Vivian’s eyes, and she especially liked how the hat dipped low over her right eyebrow on the one side. Chic, she’d read in her fashion magazines, pronouncing it “chick” in her head. She carefully balanced the hat on top of her old winter coat on one of the hooks in the cloakroom, and then trod over the worn wooden floors into the switchboard room, pulled out her rolling chair, and rolled herself back up to the counter to put on her headset.

  “Who takes a wife?” she asked Dorothy Hoffman, who was already seated, and probably had been for fifteen minutes.

  “What?” Dorothy pushed the earpiece into her hair behind her ear, turning to face Vivian.

  “Who takes a wife, in ‘Farmer in the Dell,’ who takes a wife? Is it the sheep?”

  “The sheep?” Dorothy’s penciled eyebrows furrowed into a jagged M on her pale forehead.

  “No?” Vivian asked, studying Dorothy’s eyebrows. She should’ve been using brown eyebrow pencil instead of black. Black made her look angry, and Dorothy was probably just a little annoyed, like she always was when Vivian was a little late and then talked about nursery rhymes.

  “Why would the sheep take a wife?”

  “I don’t know. For some reason that’s what stuck in my head. Something about the eee sound.” She turned back to the blank board in front of her and studied it, head tilted to the side. “The eeee takes a wife . . .”

  “It’s the farmer who takes a wife,” Dorothy said, because even though she was annoyed she couldn’t let Vivian think the sheep took a wife.

  “The farmer? Are you sure?” Vivian turned back to Dorothy, the doubt plain on her face. It was a nursery rhyme, for chrissakes. Why couldn’t the sheep take a wife?

  “I don’t even think there is a sheep in the rhyme. You’re probably thinking of ‘the cheese.’”

  “The cheese?”

  “Yes, honey, the cheese.”

  Vivian turned her attention back to the board, giving a vigorous shake to the dark barrel curls she’d carefully arranged to look like Bette Davis’s in All About Eve.

  “Well, the goddamned cheese wouldn’t take a wife,” she muttered, then started to giggle at the image of two wedges of cheese in front of a pastor. One wearing a veil.

  “It doesn’t.” Dorothy looked skyward for help, like she did sometimes. “The cheese stands alone. The cheese stands alone, the cheese stands alone.” Dorothy sang the words as she held her hand over the mouthpiece.

  Every once in a while there’d be a short in the wiring circuits and even if the operator remembered to flip the muting switch, you could still hear her voice over the active line. Dorothy had learned her lesson about the wire glitches the hard way and was now extra-careful to flip the muting switch and cover her mouthpiece when talking to the other girls in the switchboard room. Wooster’s very own mayor had overheard her say the f-word, and that’d gotten her suspended for two weeks without pay. Vivian never said the f-word, but she said all the other ones, and was careful to keep her hand over the mouthpiece when she talked to the other girls in the room.

  Vivian frowned at the board for a moment, back to thinking of that cheese standing alone. She could see it. A wedge of holey Swiss cheese lit up by a stage spotlight, all by itself in the middle of her dining room table. Alone cheese. Spinster cheese. Suddenly one of the board’s lights blinked before her. She quickly plugged the rear key cord into the jack, flipped the switch, and adjusted her own mouthpiece.

  “Number, please.”

  Vivian was a little bothered by the cheese standing alone in its spotlight, so she connected the call and flipped the mute switch. If she hadn’t been distracted, she’d have listened in.

  “You can learn a lot that way,” she’d told Edward on one of their first dates.

  Even though they weren’t supposed to, Vivian and the other girls who sat at the switchboards of Ohio Bell on East Liberty Street listened in on the telephone calls. Each and every day they plugged their cords into the jacks, flipped their switches, and leaned into their headsets to find out what was going on around Wooster. You might say they were the ears of the town. If it were up to Vivian they’d be a lot more than just that.

  She’d tell you she had a real sharp understanding of people and their personalities, and listening in at Bell only helped that along. She could tell you plenty about situations based on just a few details. For example, when Ray Barnes telephoned his mother from New York City to say he had a big surprise in store for her, Vivian knew that big surprise was a new fiancée, and she also knew that Mrs. Barnes wasn’t going to like that one bit. Probably with good reason, if she were honest with you; that fiancée was likely a no-good slut. The good girls went to New York City from the small towns, not the other way around.

  Ruth Craven had listened in the day Ray Barnes’s mother called her sister in Mansfield to complain about the “fast New York City girl Raymond brought home,” and how she was corrupting her “poor, innocent boy.” “The Negro music he listens to now!” Ruth was good enough to tell the other switchboard girls all about it, and remind them about what Vivian had said. Some of them liked to tease her when she talked about knowing people, but they all looked at her with just a little more respect after that call.

  “You don’t need some fancy college degree, or even a regular old high school diploma, to know people,” she’d say.

  Lately, there’d been almost nothing to know about anyone, and Vivian had just about fallen asleep at the console a few times. The townspeople of Wooster were talking about the dullest things you could imagine. Take this week. On Monday, Mrs. Butler complained to Mrs. Young that her daughter, Maxine, never called anymore, and even after she’d sent Maxine that beautiful windmill star quilt she’d worked so hard on. On Tuesday, Earl Archer called his wife, Dora, from the ticket office at the railroad depot because he’d left his wallet on their kitchen counter again, and wanted her to please get on the bus and bring it to him. On Wednesday, Clyde Walsh called Ginny Frazier to ask if she’d go to the A&W with him that afternoon after he finished shoveling the sidewalk in front of his mother’s house, and Ginny Frazier (for the umpteenth time) said no.

  Vivian had connected all these calls, and, although they were dull, she’d listened in and made up her mind about them. She thought Mrs. Butler should drive herself down to Columbus, break into Maxine’s house, and take that quilt back. She thought Earl should hustle his wrinkled old ass back to the house, rather than making Dora take the bus in this cold weather just because he was a careless, absentminded idiot. And she thought Ginny Frazier might want to think long and hard about her chances of doing better than Clyde Walsh. If he could overlook that frying pan face of hers, he was worth a hamburger and root beer float at the A&W. How many boys his age still shoveled the walk for their mothers? And she’d overheard enough of Clyde’s calls to Ginny to know he meant business. Vivian felt that sort of romantic devotion should be rewarded. But Mrs. Butler, Earl, and Ginny would never hear Vivian’s advice, and they’d be all the poorer for it.

  Vivian didn’t always recognize the voices of the callers, or the telephone numbers they gave her. Wooster was small, but it wasn’t that small. If the voice or number was unfamiliar, it was impossible to know who was there on the other end of the line, but Vivian could still come up with solutions for their problems. There were days when she thought maybe the callers should know she could hear them, and maybe instead of just listening she could chime in and give them that good advice she knew they needed. They’d be all the better for it, that was for certain. But she couldn’t do that. The telephone operators weren’t supposed to listen in on the calls. Vivian couldn’t tell you if that was a specific rule or just something that was frowned upon; it’d been so long since she’d read the rules. If confronted, she would’ve scoffed and said there wasn’t anything worth listening to anyhow. Quilts and forgotten wallets and the A&W. Christ.

  The calls that got the girls’ hearts pounding and pulses racing were the ones for the hospital or the police station or fire departme
nt. Vivian had the good sense to put those calls through immediately. Although, yes, she’d sometimes listen in, if only to make sure the call wasn’t coming from her own house. For, as clever as she was, Charlotte could be careless with the stove, and she’d gotten into the habit of making popcorn after school, and Lord knew Edward was bound to cut off one of his arms with one of those sharp tools in the shed, or hammer his hand to the workbench in the basement one of these days.

  What she’d really like to hear was something scandalous. Something out-of-the-ordinary. Something like the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg business that Edward had told her about. Soviet spies! The intrigue was international news, but Vivian was mainly interested in the story because the spies had been a married couple. Now, that was intrigue. And if she’d eavesdropped on a call between Julius and Ethel, you can bet your bottom dollar she’d have had some advice to give them.

  Based on what Vivian overheard when she was at the switchboard, there was no spying going on in Wooster. No, what was happening in Wooster was that Mrs. Butler had wasted her time making a quilt for an ungrateful daughter, Earl Archer was an absentminded idiot who took his wife for granted, and Ginny Frazier thought she could snag somebody better than Clyde Walsh. Also, it was cold outside, Christmas was a few weeks away, and Freedlander’s had a nice, sober Santa Claus to remind everyone of that fact.

  Vivian still had hopes for something more exciting on that cold December night as she sat at the switchboard. Restless, bored, humming nursery rhymes in her head, and halfway hoping to discover spies, or at least a scandal about a married couple, in their little Ohio town. If she’d been able to push aside the farmer, his dell, the lonely spinster cheese, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, she might’ve heard the voice of her dead granny saying what she used to say when you were asking for something that might get you into trouble. Be careful what you wish for.

  Chapter 2

  The switchboard stayed dark for a few minutes, and Vivian pushed up her mouthpiece and rested her chin in her hand as she thought about spies in Wooster. Not too likely, if you asked her, but Wooster’d had its share of excitement. There had been happenings. The kinds of happenings that stuck in the minds of the townspeople, and made them wonder to themselves in their spare, lonely moments. Got them talking to each other, you know, from time to time, long after the happenings had happened.