The switchboard job also gave her a tingly feeling of independence and possibility, and her first taste of power. For someone like Vivian, that was exhilarating, although “exhilarating” was a word she never would have used. She just would’ve said it was “crazy.”
Vivian could hardly believe that people were counting on her to get their calls through. Little ole her, Vivian McGinty. Middle child. She followed the rules to a T in her first few months. But, once she was trusted to perform on her own, she began to stretch her authority.
“Number, please,” she’d say.
“Gimme MAson-8812, sister, and make it snappy.”
If the caller was like that? All brash and rude, without a “please,” and with a “make it snappy”? Not on your life. Vivian’d flip the switch and yank the cord to break the connection, leaving the caller listening to dead air as she moved on to the next blinking light.
“Number, please.”
“Yes, could you please connect me with GArden-3662?”
Now, that was more like it. A pleasant tone and a “please” meant Vivian would nod, flip the switch back, plug in the cord connecting the call, and then move on to the next blinking light.
Once, when Leona was on her lunch break, Vivian had felt a sudden urge as she looked at the mangled octopus of cords plugged into the board. Ooh, that urge’d been strong. She’d flexed her hands and thought, You really shouldn’t, you know. But then the urge had overtaken her. She’d stood up from her chair and raised her eyebrows at the other girls. She’d bent her left arm and swept it under all the cords in one swift movement, unplugging all those calls at the same time and disconnecting the people of Wooster. Pluck, pluck, pluck, pluckity-pluck, pluck went the cords.
“Hey!”
“Hey, what . . .”
“What’s the idea?”
“Hey!”
The other operators had sounded just like the cords being plucked out of their sockets. Vivian had felt a rush of excitement as the cords popped out and dropped with a clatter over the countertop. The accusing faces had turned to her all sourpusses and surprised Os, and a few with genuine anger. One (Mary Fletcher, that rat fink) had gone straight to Leona and told her what Vivian had done.
She might’ve been fired if Leona hadn’t liked her so much. If it’d been up to Mary Fletcher, Vivian would’ve been out on her can. But Leona’d just taken her off the schedule for the next week, and Vivian’d felt horrible and full of remorse, mostly because of the lost wages.
What that little experiment had proved, though (Tattletale Rat Fink Fletcher aside) was that Vivian finally had some control. Never before in her life had she had such a sense of control. She couldn’t have predicted that, some twenty-odd years later, that sense of control would be suddenly doused, like a flaming match dropped into a glass of water, with one late-night phone call.
Chapter 7
Vivian’s sense of control at the switchboard had disappeared in about forty-five seconds of eavesdropping on that one call to Betty Miller, and had been replaced by blinking disbelief at what she’d just heard. When both women had said their goodbyes in her ear, Vivian realized she needed to disconnect the call. She flipped the switch, pulled the cord, and then stared, unseeing, at the darkened board as her disbelief bloated into anxiety and fear. The kind of anxiety and fear she used to feel when she’d worried about her Uncle Hugh being in an accident out on the road on his highway patrol motorcycle, but this was much, much worse.
Moving from habit, she unplugged her headset and wrapped it into a bundle. She pushed in her rolling chair, and mutely followed Dorothy and the others who finished at eleven as they slid into their coats and pulled their hats snugly over their ears. She did the same, without thinking, and without hearing any of the “good-night”s that sang out around her. It wasn’t until the icy wind hit her full force in the face as she stepped out onto East Liberty Street that the anxiety and fear froze in place, and from under that bubbled something hot. A roiling boil of hot anger. The churning lava flow of dark, horrible emotions coursed through her body as her worn, old ankle boots crunched back over the snow, retracing the steps she’d taken to get to work.
The temperature had dropped, but with her blood boiling the way it was, she hardly noticed. Vivian knew what rage felt like on the inside, and she also knew what it looked like from the outside. It looked like lifelong Democrat Roy Patterson when Herbert Hoover was elected president, and Jacob Starlin, when somebody stole his wheelbarrow from out of his backyard, and rage looked like poor Bill Parker, the day he found out about his wife leaving town with Gilbert Ogden after robbing the Wayne Building & Loan. Absconding.
Bill’s neighbors said they could swear he had smoke coming out of his nose and ears and the top of his head, and Vivian could practically feel the smoke charring the inside of her Beulah Bechtel hat.
“It was genuine smoke!” his neighbors had insisted.
Bill’d slammed open the screen door and flown out of the house, shotgun in one hand, hat in the other. The tires of his car had burned over the pavement so badly, you’d still be able to see the black marks from the rubber, if they weren’t covered with snow right now. Bill Parker’s rage. That was the kind of rage Vivian was feeling, with her fingernails cutting into the lining of her gloves as her fists clenched inside her coat pockets.
The anger propelled her breath out into the freezing night air in short bursts. She stopped in front of Freedlander’s window, now darkened and still, with no sign of all the festive holiday cheer she’d seen just a few short hours earlier, and no sign of that rich bitch Betty Miller, who was now sitting somewhere in her expensive house on Wooster’s north side, with some dangerous new knowledge she shouldn’t have. The woman in the reflection who looked back at Vivian was wearing her lovely blue hat, but was old and wretched, decades beyond her thirty-eight years. If everything under her feet hadn’t been covered in a hard pack of icy snow, she would’ve reached down for a loose brick in the sidewalk and then launched it through that window, splintering the stupid flocked glass and shattering the image of the old wretched woman she didn’t recognize.
The porch light was on outside, just like Edward said it would be; the rest of the house was dark. But not quite as dark as Vivian’s mood. Her mind was a frenzy of confusion. Barely contained rage bumped up against a wall of disbelief and somewhere between standing in front of the window at Freedlander’s and arriving at her own front porch a dull thudding headache had erupted in Vivian’s head. Her body was tired and chilled to the bones. She trudged up the porch steps, which were mostly cleared of the snow, and grasped the doorknob, turning it and listening as the latch clicked and released from the jamb. Her limbs felt heavy, like they were made of wood and she was trying to pull them through water.
Once inside, she gave a sharp yank on the floor lamp’s chain and watched the room brighten. She looked around at the furniture that had been familiar when she left the house earlier, but now seemed very strange, almost like it, too, was underwater. The wing chairs, the television set, the sofa; they all looked like they were floating. The side table, on which the telephone sat, also appeared to be bobbing on unseen waves. Vivian leaned back against the door and took a deep breath, willing the dizziness to pass.
They’d gotten it, their first telephone, just last year. A heavy black base with the handset resting in the cradle on top, and the thin cord winding its way down and along the floor to the outlet. There was no dial with numbers, like some of the phones she’d seen in movies. You picked up the handset and an operator would say, “Number, please,” just like Vivian did, over and over, day in and day out.
Funny how she’d worked at Bell all these years, but the Daltons had only recently had a telephone installed in their own house. Edward’s parents had had a telephone for years now. One of the old ones that hung on the wall; a great wooden box with one cone you spoke into, and the other you lifted to your ear. Vivian wondered what kinds of things Edward’s mother heard through her telephon
e.
She reached down and slipped off the old worn ankle boots, losing two inches in height as her stockinged feet met the thin carpet. The big toe of her left foot had poked its way through the nylon fabric. She unbuttoned her coat and shrugged out of it, still standing at the front door, and still staring at the telephone.
Vivian climbed the stairs, counting them as she had when they first moved into the house. Thirteen steps. Thirteen was an unlucky number any way you looked at it, not to mention quite a fall if someone were to lose his balance.
The door to Charlotte’s room was closed, as it always was by that time of night. No light shone in the crack at the bottom. Sometimes, but not always, Charlotte liked to stay up late reading. Books, not magazines, which, for the life of her, Vivian couldn’t understand.
Edward was already sound asleep and snoring when Vivian entered their bedroom, the light from the hallway behind her outlining her silhouette in the doorframe. The room was filled with his deep, even, vibrating nasal growl. She flipped off the hall light, then waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark before stepping delicately over the rug. She stood on his side of the bed, watching his torso rise and fall in time with the snores.
She used to watch him sleep like this when they were first married. When she couldn’t believe her luck in finding a guy like him. He, naturally, fell asleep immediately after their lovemaking, and Vivian would prop herself up on her elbow and gaze at the details of his face. His dark, wild eyebrows, the straight, proud nose that ended in just the cutest point. She’d sometimes take the tip of her index finger and lightly tap the point of his nose, making him snort and snuffle before settling back into his rhythmic snore.
She now studied the eyebrows that had grown wilder and started to sprout grays here and there, and the lines that had deepened in his cheeks and around the corners of his mouth, and the lips, which were looking thinner beneath the coarse mustache. Her eyes roamed around the hairline, which had stretched itself from a sexy widow’s peak into a sharp V over the last decade, and then to his bulging Adam’s apple, vibrating on and off with the snoring.
The alarm clock fit neatly in her hand as she slid it from the bedside table. The smooth face rounded against her palm, the glass sticking to her skin as her fingers curled around the metal edges. The light ticking of the clock matched the pounding in her head. Tick, tick, tick, tick, pound, pound, pound, pound. She watched the vulnerable Adam’s apple and weighed the clock, the way a professional baseball pitcher might weigh the baseball in his hand before winding up, lightly raising and dropping it in a slow, measured bounce.
Chapter 8
1936
Vivian couldn’t keep all her parts from jiggling and bouncing as the Model A jiggled and bounced its way down Henrietta Street that mild winter afternoon. “It’s the Roadster,” Edward boasted loudly above the engine. “Got it for a song.” That was no surprise, really, since newer models had come out from Ford and most people were more interested in having the latest thing. Edward’s car was only five years old, but he drove it a lot and it tended to rattle. “Was that song ‘Pennies from Heaven’?” she asked with an eyebrow arched, thinking that paying more than a few cents for this jalopy was nuts. A quick scramble to cover up the criticism, she tilted her head toward him with a winning grin. Edward smirked at the slight, unfazed. “It’s got a rumble seat,” he said, waggling his eyebrows up and down.
Vivian was grateful for Vera’s hand-me-down wool coat (not the latest thing, either) that kept some, if not all, of her jiggling and bouncing at least a little under control. “Vivian, don’t wiggle around like a whore,” her mother had snapped once, surprising Vivian with the harsh words. She usually just huffed and grumbled her discontent. Either way, Vivian tried to ignore her. Every one of those little criticisms left chips in Vivian’s self-esteem. By the time she was old enough to be considered a grown-up, her self-esteem, if she could’ve seen it, might’ve looked a little like a wedge of Swiss cheese.
The car was really jiggling around, though, and Vivian folded her arms across her breasts, afraid they’d jump right out of her dress and the coat, and she wanted to keep a little mystery where Edward was concerned. Mystery was an important part of romance, if you believed everything you read in McClure’s. Still, she hadn’t thought the car would be so small. She could smell his hair pomade, they were sitting so close. Something sweet, but she couldn’t place the smell. A deep flush bloomed up and over her neck and face, and goose bumps popped up everywhere else. She cast a few shy glances from his hands on the steering wheel up to his profile, and the straight nose that tapered off to an adorable point, as he faced forward, keeping his eyes trained on the road in front of them.
A slight smile had crept into the corners of Edward’s mouth as he steered the car with casual confidence over the uneven bricks of Henrietta Street. At one point he began to whistle, and Vivian stifled a giggle as she turned her head away from him and looked out the window, the brim of her hat shielding her face. She tried to focus her attention on the houses they passed, the Gerbers’ and the Sawyers’ and a few she didn’t know, and then later the clusters of bare trees and bushes now dripping with melting snow. It was just perfect, the things that created the scenery of their own little private world inside the traveling tin can, sitting pretty on that tufted bench seat and breathing the shared air together as Vivian grew more and more aware of the tingling in her skin. She hummed “Pennies from Heaven” lightly under her breath.
By the time Edward pulled the car up to the curb in front of the McGintys’ house the temperature had dropped back down into the numbers more usual for the month of December.
“They don’t make heaters for cars,” he said with an apologetic shrug. “But they should, shouldn’t they?”
Although her parts had stopped jiggling and bouncing, she was starting to shiver and her teeth had begun to chatter. Edward cranked the gears into the park position.
“Go on, get in there,” he urged, still with that big grin on his face. “I don’t want you to freeze to death out here. They’d try me for murdering the prettiest girl in Ohio.”
Vivian might’ve rolled her eyes if it’d just been cheap flattering, but her eyes were dancing as she looked down at her gloved hands in her lap and then out the fogging windshield in front of her. Cold as she was, she’d rather stay there in the car with Edward than go back into the McGinty house with all the noise and all the people. She wondered what it would be like to freeze to death right there next to him. The chill had crept in through the secondhand coat, and was working toward the top layer of skin, but her heart and the rest of her insides stayed glowing warm.
It might’ve been because she just kept sitting there, not moving, just looking at the dashboard because the windshield had now been completely fogged over by their breath. But, whatever it was, Edward finally remembered his manners and jumped out of the car and ran around to her side to escort her out and up the steps to her front door. Finally, she thought.
Vivian was ready to be worshipped. Like Douglas Fairbanks did Mary Pickford, or King Edward did Wallis Simpson. She’d seen the two of them in one of the magazines she liked to buy after she collected her wages from Bell. It was probably Life, because that was the one that mentioned international things, and if she were being honest she’d tell you she wouldn’t have been too interested except the tabloid photographs of one Mrs. Wallis Simpson with King Edward VIII of England on a yacht were scandalous and Vivian couldn’t resist a good scandal. The word “illicit” was dropped a number of times throughout the article, and Vivian declared to her younger sister, Violet, that Mrs. Simpson was nothing better than a home-wrecking whore.
“Mrs. Simpson,” she hissed, pointing at the words on the page. “She’s already married! She’s wrecking her own home, for chrissakes.”
“Vivy!” Violet was shocked by Vivian’s language, but also secretly impressed. “Do all the switchboard girls talk like that?”
Vivian had shrugged. She and Violet fol
lowed the story of Edward and Wallis and when the King of England stepped away from his title and his crown in order to marry Mrs. Simpson, boy, oh, boy, did Vivian change her tune. All that illicit whorish home wrecking was forgotten the moment Mrs. Simpson divorced her husband and accepted Edward’s marriage proposal.
Vivian found herself in a deep swoon over the romance of it all. A king who’d give up his kingdom for the woman he loved! It made Vivian dizzy, flushed and tingly in the places a decent girl didn’t talk about. Oh, sure, there were a couple of boys in Wooster who came close to that kind of adoring devotion, because Vivian McGinty was a lively girl, and kept her lipstick fresh and her seams straight. She was “hotsy-totsy,” as they said, and had more than her fair share of attention from the opposite sex, which went a little ways toward filling some of those Swiss cheese holes. But it was Edward Dalton’s invitation to go out driving that came on the same day as the tabloid reports of the Wallis and Edward engagement. In her dreamy, dizzy frame of mind, Vivian had quickly accepted. It was as if the stars had aligned to create that perfect romantic afternoon drive down bumpy Henrietta Street in Edward’s crummy Model A Deluxe Roadster. The Model A was a jalopy all right, but it might’ve been the closest thing Wooster had to a yacht, as far as Vivian was concerned.
She’d paid attention to the cautionary tales of Apple Creek’s Sylvia Emerich, having to leave school and whatnot, and her neighbor Geraldine Sigler, as well as the other stories passed in whispers around town. Stories of girls who’d been baking their illegitimate buns in their ovens months, even weeks, before they married their husbands (or didn’t!). It was all hushed up, though, and never, ever admitted publicly, but the whispers and rumors floated around town, sometimes through the telephone lines and switchboards at Bell, and wore away at the respectability of the brides-to-be. Vivian had even heard something about four-flusher Betty Reed, who’d seemed in an awful hurry to marry Charlie Miller. That rumor had never really gone anywhere, though, and since Betty and Charlie were both four-flushers no one batted an eye at their wedding. The Betty Reed rumor made Vivian feel almost smug about her romance with Edward. Even with the rumble seat in the Roadster, Vivian was better than that, and she knew Edward was better than that. She couldn’t take full credit, it was really Pawpy’s words ringing in her ears every time she greeted her dates at the front door: “If you get knocked up, you’re out of here.” He never said it mean, just matter-of-fact. So, No, sir, Vivian had thought, before she’d even gone on that first car ride, that won’t be me, if I can help it. The people of Wooster would have to find someone else to gossip about.
The Operator Page 5