The Operator

by Gretchen Berg

  “There, there.” Betty stroked Little Bitty’s hamburger hair and kissed her forehead. “Why don’t we go back upstairs, and I’ll read Ginger Pye to you until you fall asleep?”

  Little Bitty didn’t answer, but Betty could feel her head nodding. She shifted the little girl’s weight to her left hip and mounted the stairs up to the pink frilled bedroom, tucked Little Bitty snugly under the covers, and settled onto the bedspread beside her. She only needed to get through two pages before Little Bitty finally fell asleep again.

  Betty placed a hand on her sleeping daughter’s torso, and then resumed her imaginings of the delighted smiles and gentle praise for her perfect Christmas party cuisine. Soon she began to worry her way through ideas for the perfect holiday music. Twenty minutes after that, she was pacing in her closet, her thoughts turned to the perfect holiday wardrobe.

  Betty had quickly forgotten all about Ginger Pye finding the school where her owner Jerry went, Little Bitty’s bad dream and hamburger hair, and Vivian Dalton and the phone call. The Christmas party had consumed her thoughts again. She was particularly concerned with finding just the right dress. It really was the most important aspect of the event. The dress had to be just right. She had been thinking about it the day before, but had been distracted by Charles Junior’s frightening episode on the swing set in the backyard. It was, of course, too cold and snowy for swinging, but leave it to Charles Junior to discover the second most dangerous activity for a seven-year-old. It had been quickly remedied with a glass of warm water poured over his tongue to disengage it from the metal bar, but Charles Junior’s awkward screams had disturbed her train of thought.

  But, the dress. The dress was what she needed to focus on. Something tasteful, but still a bit tantalizing. Charles sometimes needed reminders of how good he had it, and it wouldn’t hurt to show some of the other husbands how good Charles had it, either. She had been scouring Beulah Bechtel’s for the past two weeks, but hadn’t seen anything remotely close to what she wanted. She might have to make a trip up to Akron.

  Shrimp turnovers! Betty thought as she sat in her peach satin nightgown, brushing out her hair in front of her vanity mirror while Charles snored in bed. Shrimp turnovers were just the thing.

  Chapter 5

  “Daddy, I have just the thing for you,” had been the forceful, over-enunciated, and breathless greeting from his doorstep back in June, just after his personal disaster. J. Ellis had had to take a moment to process that, instead of the hordes of photographers with their infernal flashbulbs popping like cap guns, his daughter Betty was standing unaccompanied on the expansive fan of bricks. Purposeful, businesslike, and holding an ivory enameled cake carrier.

  Now he rubbed both eyes with the heels of his hands, as if trying to rub out the memory of June altogether. The den was dark and quiet as he preferred it, with only the glow of the desk lamp illuminating the items resting in front of him on the smooth leather ink blotter. He reached for his fountain pen, scrawled his signature on the check for Phil Stanley and then did the same on the Christmas card for Betty, Charles, and the children. The one Florence had picked out for them.

  J. Ellis Reed was one of the most respected men in Wooster. Depending on whom you talked to. He was definitely one of the wealthiest, if you could ignore the fact that his bank had been robbed of $250,000 six months ago. It had been all over the newspapers that week, and the town had refused to talk of anything else. “Quite a withdrawal Gilbert Ogden made there, eh, Ellis?” He had been furious and shaken, Wooster had been in a grand uproar, and then Betty had shown up to make everything all right with some sort of cake.

  J. Ellis’s children were a source of unending pride for him. Never a misstep with either of them. Johnston Reed, Junior, and Elizabeth Reed Miller were both college graduates who had married well, procreated well, and were known as highly respected, upstanding citizens of Wooster. Important pillars of their community. J. Ellis would never have admitted favoritism, but it was Betty. Betty was her father’s daughter.

  “Daddy, I know I said it before, but I simp-ly can-not believe it.” She’d bypassed his outstretched hands and marched the cake carrier straight to the maple credenza in the dining room, placing it firmly on the lace runner. “How dare someone do this to you!”

  She had brushed her white gloves together before tugging them off, one finger at a time, and set them on the dining room table, then with hands on hips demanded to know where the plates and the cake knife were. Oh, and the forks. The dessert forks.

  J. Ellis had feared he might not have the energy for that particular visit from his favorite child and had leaned slightly into the front door he’d still held open. It had been a relief to let the sunlight in, since the photographers weren’t there anymore.

  “You know, if you’d hire someone like Dolly,” Betty had scolded, “you wouldn’t have to do all this yourself.”

  He knew. It was a conversation they’d had before, and J. Ellis would not be entertaining it again, particularly not when he had the bank business to worry about. He was simply not comfortable with hiring a colored woman to clean and cook for him. He had argued that he wanted Betty’s mother to feel useful. She had a tendency toward depression when she didn’t have enough to do (that was true). And, she had been named after Florence Nightingale, for Christ’s sake. It was her job to take care of him.

  “Where’s Mother?” she said, as if reading his mind. “MOTHER?”

  Betty had marched over to the foot of the stairs and shouted in the direction of her parents’ bedroom, where Florence had been resting her eyes and her mouth. They’d had an argument about how J. Ellis was considering handling the aftermath of the robbery. J. Ellis had shaken his head at his daughter and finally closed the front door.

  “Well, Betts, what do you have for us, then?” he’d asked, heading for the credenza.

  His head had been throbbing for at least two days as he’d tried to wrap his mind around the robbery and what to do about it. He’d hoped whatever she’d brought would go well with a stiff drink.

  “I won’t try to take credit for it,” Betty had chirped from the landing in front of the stairs. “You know how I hate the kitchen. Dolly made it, but I read the recipe to her from the Home Comfort Cookbook. I knew it was just the thing!”

  Of course, J. Ellis had thought to himself.

  “It’s a pineapple upside-down cake,” she’d gone on. “Because that is what those rot-ten thieves have done to our town, turned it right upside-down. I can-not be-lieve the gall!”

  J. Ellis had noticed that his daughter was wearing a smart short-sleeved yellow and white suit, and he suspected she’d deliberately coordinated her outfit to the cake she’d brought.

  “MOTHER!” Betty had shouted again.

  J. Ellis had taken several long strides over to the liquor cabinet and reached for the Myers’s rum.

  “Elizabeth, dear, do stop shouting,” the voice had floated down the stairwell.

  J. Ellis hadn’t needed to look over his shoulder to see the fallen expression, the barely perceptible slump in her shoulders. He’d seen it often enough. The visible dampening of Betty’s high spirits that always accompanied each and every correction from her mother. “Stop shouting,” “Speak distinctly,” “Stand up straight,” “Stop flaunting your bosom.” Florence had missed her calling as an elegant, contradictory drill sergeant.

  Florence Reed had descended the stairs in much the same way she’d walked down the aisle on their wedding day. Slowly, gracefully, and with a gleaming, forced smile. It was also the way she had modeled enormous ribbon-and-feather-festooned hats in Ladies’ Fashions at the department store in Syracuse, where J. Ellis had first seen her. He and his fraternity brothers used to drive up to Syracuse from Colgate, just over an hour’s drive in the motorcar, to watch the football game and “sample the local culture.” The local culture was sometimes found in Ladies’ Fashions at Dey Brothers.

  J. Ellis had settled on Colgate after being rejected by Cornell, which
he’d planned to settle on after his rejections from the Big Three (Harvard, Yale, and Princeton), and he still almost couldn’t utter their names without spitting in bitter disgust. After Cornell’s rejection, he’d chosen the next-best option, in his opinion, and closest both alphabetically and geographically. And then he’d just hoped it wouldn’t make too much of a difference to Wall Street. Florence hadn’t minded that he wasn’t a Harvard man. She’d been a fine arts major. The fine art of husband-hunting, the fellows would snort as they tooted on their flasks of Old Highland, smoked their cigars, and waved their triangle flags.

  He’d sighed. Colgate, Syracuse, and Florence. The triumvirate of his misery. Those Wall Street bastards had rejected him, presumably due to his not-quite-up-to-snuff background. He had to admit he’d dodged a bullet with the ’29 crash, there, but things had eventually shaped up afterward, hadn’t they, yes they had. Ohio banking had made quite an impact, hadn’t it, yes it had. Those fat cats could take their Big Three graduates and their money and shove it right up their asses.

  “Did your father tell you what he’s going to do with our money?”

  J. Ellis had stared intently as the rum poured into the glass tumbler, but he had felt Betty’s eyes on him.

  “What do you mean?”

  J. Ellis had taken a large swallow from the tumbler as his wife reached the bottom step of the staircase. She’d kept one hand on the newel post as she leaned toward Betty’s cheek for a kiss.

  “How are you, dear.”

  It had been a statement more than a question, and Florence hadn’t paused for a response.

  “His plan is to reimburse the good people of the Wayne Building & Loan. With our money.”

  His eyes had closed as he tried to enjoy the feeling of the dark liquid coating his throat and sliding a warm path down to his stomach.

  “Daddy!”

  J. Ellis had run a hand over his pomaded hair and walked back to the credenza to inspect the pineapple upside-down cake.

  “This is a beauty. How long did it take Dolly to make this?”

  “Daddy.” Betty’s voice had sounded a warning.

  This was not going to become a family exercise, he’d decided. It had been a mistake to even mention it to Florence, but the atmosphere had been sheer insanity. With the telephone’s relentless ringing and the throngs of photographers outside the house. He’d started a verbal downward spiral about the whole thing, and at the end of the rant it had come out. He was going to use his own money to reimburse the Wayne Building & Loan customers. Or at least most of them. Of course the fellows from the club, that was just common sense. His son, John, had made a particular plea that he reimburse the Dalton family, which was easy enough. They hadn’t had much to reimburse. And then J. Ellis would, naturally, repay the people who could potentially make trouble for him. The loudest complainers. If somebody like Phil Stanley didn’t get his money back, J. Ellis would never hear the end of it.

  He’d built up a majestic mountain of a reputation for himself over the years and he wasn’t going to allow the lingering bank robbery nonsense to topple it. When you were as big a man as J. Ellis Reed, you had a responsibility to maintain a certain standing in your community. And if that meant spending some of your own hard-earned money, then that was what it meant. (His father might have punctuated this with a “By gum!” but he had been more of an Eagle Scout than J. Ellis.) When you were J. Ellis Reed of Wooster, everyone knew who you were. Everyone cared what you did and how you did it.

  Chapter 6

  1931

  “Oh, as if anyone cares what you do,” Vera’d mocked when Vivian had a near-fainting spell over Pawpy’s McGinty boardinghouse suggestion.

  By April of 1931 the Brinkerhoffs next door had started letting two of their rooms to renters, a couple of men who’d lost their factory jobs in Cleveland and had moved to Wooster to find cheaper rent and, hopefully, work. Sixteen-year-old Vivian would watch in a curious panic, her breath fogging the panes of her bedroom window, as the strange men came and went from the Brinkerhoffs’, day in and day out over the next year. When Pawpy suggested the McGintys open their doors as well, to earn a little money (“We’ll call it McGintys’ Come-On Inn!”), she’d twisted her hands almost bloody around her handkerchief at the thought of strange men from Cleveland knowing any of the intimate details of her life.

  “Intimate details?” Vera had scoffed. “Where’d you even hear that? Did you read it in one of your magazines?”

  As a matter of fact, yes, she’d read it in her Motion Picture magazine in either the Bebe Daniels story or the Carole Lombard story. She knew Vera had read it, too, but pretended she hadn’t. Vera thought she was the only one in the family doing anything worth talking about, which may or may not have had something to do with one of the Brinkerhoffs’ lodgers. Vivian overheard Mrs. Brinkerhoff talking about it with Mrs. Kessler.

  The glass-pressed-on-wall trick wasn’t practical for eavesdropping in all situations, but when Mrs. Kessler and Mrs. Brinkerhoff sat out in the sturdy wooden rockers on the Brinkerhoffs’ front porch in the mornings, she didn’t need it. Their voices carried up to the open window of Vivian’s bedroom. Sometimes it was dull, but Vivian would still pull a chair up and just sit and listen. Boy, did those old ladies like to talk about their neighbors. Vivian was real interested in hearing about Geraldine Sigler, who lived across the street, and apparently suffered from the same troubling condition as Apple Creek’s own Sylvia Emerich.

  That’d been it. The other reason Sylvia Emerich had to leave high school. Having to leave school because you were carrying some farm boy’s bastard was sure different than having to leave school because the country’s economy collapsed and you had to go to work to help keep food on the table. It was enough to drive a person to curse.

  As time wore on, Vivian grew to hate that goddamned Sylvia Emerich for what she represented. Vivian’s lost opportunities, that’s what. If Sylvia hadn’t gotten herself into trouble, she could’ve finished high school, couldn’t she? And maybe even gone to Wooster College to get a degree in something?

  It wasn’t Vivian’s fault the country had collapsed into some great big depression, and she resented having school yanked out from under her, like all the other common folk who had to give up their dreams to scrape around for crummy jobs just to get by. What really burned her up was that Vera and Cousin Ruby got to go through all four years of high school before ever having to worry that Pawpy or Uncle Frank might need some help feeding their families. And they didn’t even seem to care.

  Cousin Opal made it through her sophomore year before she had to quit to work on the farm in Apple Creek, but Opal’d never been too smart anyway. Vivian once caught her French-kissing a honey jar that had a bee caught in it. Opal would only say that she’d been “practicing.” The bee, probably scared out of its wits, had stung Opal’s tongue and Opal spent a week whining for everyone to “gob gaffing” at her because the sting “iggy urg.” She was lucky Alonzo Halstead married her, so she didn’t have to do too much of her own thinking anymore. Or any more practicing. She had a baby the next year.

  Mouths to feed and bills to pay. It didn’t matter that the McGintys hadn’t had any money invested. The stock market crash just knocked the first domino right into the rest of them. The crash sent everyone across America scrambling for ways to do things cheaper. Everybody loved the novelty of the automobile, but it cut right into the business of the railroad lines. With the automobiles came the trucks, and with the trucks came cheaper shipping, and the railroads started cutting jobs. Paddy McGinty’s job was cut, and that was where they were in 1931.

  The McGinty Come-On Inn suggestion had been swiftly slapped down by Vivian’s mother, who was more worried that those strange men who needed room and board were part of the criminal element that was seeping into central Ohio during that time. Like a mudslide flowing from New England and New York State, itinerant men of all ages oozed into Pennsylvania and Ohio, riding the rails and following the rumors of cheap ren
t and fair wages.

  “It’s becoming a safe haven for criminals,” Mrs. McGinty grumbled, as she shooed her children out the door to look for work themselves, while at the same time grumbling that they’d probably all just end up starving anyway.

  Instead of starving, Violet and Will ended up pulling wagons full of discarded ashes from the coal-burning stoves up and down the streets and alleys of Wooster. They’d show up at the dinner table still smudged all over with soot, and then there’d be Henry and Pawpy, covered in paint splatters from sprucing up the houses on the north side of town, and Vera’d be covered in whatever the Dean and Thompson kids had wiped or thrown up on her when she took care of them that day. Turned out four-flusher kids were just as messy as any other kids. Vivian and her mother were the only ones in the house who showed up to dinner about as clean as they had for breakfast. Just after her birthday in June of that year Vivian had gotten herself a job at the switchboards at Ohio Bell, and there was no comparing a glass pressed against a wall to a headset plugged into the switchboard.

  Years of being told what to do and when to do it, by father, mother, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, and now, at just seventeen, she had a grown-up job with regular hours and steady wages and only had to answer to one person, and her supervisor, Leona, was more of a watcher than a lecturer. She watched the operators, and you’d only hear from her if you messed something up. Vivian’s job at Bell puffed her right up with importance. She was part of something certain, in a world suddenly full of uncertainty. Flashing lights, plug-in cords, flip switches, and total strangers counting on her to connect them to one another. She had responsibilities outside the McGinty household, and those responsibilities allowed her to help provide for the household. She’d never felt prouder than the day she handed her Pawpy a small stack of bills with a beaming smile. She’d faltered when she’d seen the tears shining in his eyes, and her heartbeat caught a bit when he rasped, “Proud of you, Vivy.” The emotion made her uncomfortable, but the warmth of it felt good.