The Operator

by Gretchen Berg

  “Charlotte,” Vivian singsonged. “If you don’t come out, we’ll have six more weeks of winter.”

  No response.

  “Fine, then.” Vivian’s tone dropped back to normal, because it wasn’t her fault their family was in this mess, and she didn’t have time to go out of her way to entertain Charlotte. “I’ll telephone them and let them know you’re sick.”

  Another grunt from under the covers.

  “Since you’re staying home, I want you to clean up your room.”

  Vivian’s rage had been personal and private, but now that the story was out in the open for all to see, the rage had melted and cooled a little into a hardened shell of shame and humiliation. She couldn’t let all of Wooster see her as the angry wife (newlywed!) because it would send the message that she hadn’t really known about the first marriage before everyone else did. She’d made sure Harry Sweeney made it damned clear in his article that she knew everything. I know people.

  Vivian, much as she wanted to, could not stay curled up under the covers of her bed like Charlotte. She was not a child anymore. She cooked up a pot of oatmeal, slid one bowl in front of Edward and the other in front of herself. They ate their oatmeal in silence, the newlywed Daltons: Edward with his nose in the paper, Vivian with her nose still very far out of joint.

  As she stood on the bathroom tiles, holding her dentures in her palm and brushing over them with a toothbrush, she gave herself a little pep talk. We’re going to figure this out, all right. After inserting her teeth and patting her mouth dry with a hand towel, she swiped the Fire & Ice lipstick all around her lips, and blew herself a forceful kiss in the mirror. She then descended the thirteen steps to the hall closet, which Edward had left open in his hurry to leave the house before her, and pulled her wool coat from the hanger. She fastened the buttons at the front door, tilted the brim on her Prussian-blue Beulah Bechtel hat, and held her head high as she walked to work. Heaven help the first bitch to give her a pity stare, because Vivian Dalton was not in the mood today.

  Charlotte had ignored her growling stomach until she heard the front door close twice. The first time was her father heading to work, the second was her mother. Since her father had already left the house, the second door-closing had just been a snug pump. For the latter half of December, and all of January, if her mother left for work first, the door would be slammed so fiercely it rang through the house, peeling paint off the frame and sending a shudder through the windows, rattling them in their sashes, and now Charlotte finally understood why.

  Two slices of buttered toast and a large glass of orange juice calmed the growling of her stomach, and gave her a little energy to face her reality. She glanced over at the cookie jar, which was full to the brim with the Nestlé Toll House Congo Squares Mother had baked the day before. “Baking calms me down!” For some reason she’d made them with butterscotch chips instead of chocolate, which made Charlotte wonder if the government was suddenly rationing chocolate. She hadn’t seen or smelled any in the house in weeks.

  Charlotte now considered the sheer volume of baked goods that had been produced in the Daltons’ small kitchen over the past month and a half. Her mother had run through her full arsenal at least twice. Nestlé Toll House Congo Squares, sour cream cookies, seven-layer bars, peanut butter cookies with the forked crisscrosses, the Christmas fruitcakes. She’d also made divinity fudge before Christmas, and Charlotte idly wondered if that counted.

  All in all, there had been a lot of “calming” going on in the kitchen that Charlotte would’ve said was more delicious than it was effective. Her mother was nowhere near calm.

  Left hand sliding up the banister and right hand brushing bits of Congo Square crumbs from her lips, Charlotte slumped back upstairs to the bathroom. Her reflection in the mirror stared dully back at her as she guided the toothbrush over her teeth in careful arcs. This is what a bastard looks like. Baaaastaaaard, baaaastaaaard. She poked the bristles between her teeth in an effort to dislodge the walnut pieces. That’s really what you are, but you should stop feeling sorry for yourself, bastard. She said the word “bastard” repeatedly in her head as she rinsed the paste from her teeth, and the more she thought about it, the less meaning it had.

  She wandered into her parents’ room and stared at the bed, with its white chenille bedspread pulled perfectly taut over the surface, like the smile her mother had been showing everyone since December. That frightening, tight, angry smile in Revlon Fire & Ice.

  Charlotte picked up a tube of lipstick from the dresser and circled it around her lips. It was a bright pink that her mother never wore anymore. Pink Champagne was what the faded label said. She went and opened the closet and lightly skipped her fingers over the dresses and shirts on hangers, releasing the smell of her mother’s perfume, which hung with the clothing. Lily of the valley. She dropped to her knees and reached for the boxes behind the three pairs of carefully lined-up shoes. The boxes were full of photographs of their family. Charlotte in the backyard, dressed in her Easter bonnet and flouncy dress, smiling. Charlotte and Mother next to the towering sunflowers in the garden. Mother and Dad on the dock at Little Sodus Bay in their bathing suits, smiling. Mother and Dad standing next to his old Model A Ford, smiling. Smiling, smiling, smiling. Appearances had always been most important to Vivian Dalton. Charlotte had been surprised her mother let her stay home today. She only did that when Charlotte was actually sick. She didn’t want people wondering what was wrong with her daughter if she was absent from school too often or for too many days in a row. Appearances were everything to her. How people perceived her family. Her family.

  Charlotte popped off the lid of a hatbox that sat on the floor of the closet, and there, instead of a hat, sat a half-used pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes and a little brown notebook. She crossed her legs, slid one of the cigarettes from the pack, and held it between her lips. It did not taste good, but she liked the way it felt. She tucked another cigarette behind her ear, then reached for the little brown notebook and opened to the first page. It was blank. She flipped to the second page, which was also blank. As was the next page, and the next page. She leaned forward and flipped faster until she reached a marked page. The first fifty pages of the little notebook had been left blank, and then when her mother started writing, on page fifty-one, it appeared to be notes on the family background. Hard facts. Birth, marriage, and death dates for parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles. Some were people Charlotte had never heard of. Charlotte skimmed through the information and turned the pages until she found this:

  29 Inquiries

  Churches

  Syracuse.

  James Street Methodist

  3027 James Street, Syracuse, N.Y.

  *Plymouth Congregational Church

  232 East Onondaga Street, Syracuse

  Records for September 14, 1922, show membership for George and Letty Dalton 224 W. Yates St., Syracuse.

  George and Letty Dalton. Charlotte’s grandparents, whom her mother hated.

  No membership what so ever, for an Edward G. Dalton (OR John Edward)

  No Mrs. Mildred Fischer Dalton, either!

  Her mother had written twenty-nine letters to churches in the Syracuse area. The cigarette dropped from Charlotte’s lips and she blew a low whistle and pulled her legs back under her as she rocked forward on her knees, her head brushing the bottoms of her dad’s shirts. Her eyes were starting to hurt from all the squinting at the notebook, but she couldn’t stop.

  The notes weren’t only research and family history, although there was a section labeled “Geneology,” which Charlotte noted was misspelled. Beyond the Dalton family vital statistics, and beyond the addresses of churches and transcribed legal notifications and details about life insurance, there were a handful of quotes, such as:

  Love is the emblem of eternity;

  it confounds all notion of time;

  effaces all memory of a beginning,

  all fear of an end.

  Madame de Staël

>   Then there were pages and pages where her mother had written titles of popular songs from earlier times.

  1924

  “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby”

  “It’s Three O’Clock in the Morning”

  “No One but You”

  “Margie”

  There were more. And there was a page for 1925, and one for 1926, all the way through 1934 (although for that year there was only one song, “Stars Fell on Alabama”). Scribbled in the corners of some of those pages were bizarre random facts.

  “Slang: ‘So’s your old man,’” “Portable radios introduced,” “also ‘Car heaters!’”

  Charlotte barked out an involuntary laugh at “Car heaters!” because it just sounded so absurd. Why the exclamation point? And, speaking of points, what was the point of all this? Was her mother reliving her own youth? The good old days, before she met Dad? Was she bemoaning the loss of her love affair with Dad? Was she trying to reconstruct the love affair between him and his first wife? If there had even been one?

  Charlotte felt a wave of nausea wash over her, as if she had just eaten a whole pan of Nestlé Tollhouse Congo Squares in one sitting. She briefly gagged at the memory of the seven-layer bars in the toilet bowl after her mother had told her the news. She placed the notebook on the carpeted floor of the closet. She felt ill. She worried that her mother was ill. She looked tired all the time, like she hadn’t slept in a year, and now she was smoking and keeping a secret crazy little brown notebook.

  Why can’t my family be normal? Like “Ozzie & Harriet”? Or “My Little Margie”?

  The little brown notebook was like a window into her mother’s mind, and the more Charlotte read it, the more she wanted to pull the curtains closed on that window. Pull them closed and sew them up with a zipper that she could lock. She could see the change in her mother’s temperament from page to page. The handwriting betrayed her frame of mind. When her mother wrote in cursive script, it was really quite pretty. She had beautiful, flowing penmanship, even if not everything was spelled correctly. But Charlotte could see, in the transition from cursive to print, the anger pouring out into the book. The more inflammatory passages were highlighted by aggressive pen marks that almost ripped the page. Exclamation points and underlined words filled the lines in front of her as she read through details that seemed to be nothing at first, but obviously weren’t “nothing” to her mother.

  Letter dated January 27, 1953, from Leahy, Mills, Vickery & Ahern states that the writer (and signed as such by Mr. Ahern) has no record, nor the knowledge of any application for an annulment proceeding, or Divorce proceeding which is said to have been contemplated by Edward George Dalton, or John Edward Dalton. Neither did he have any record nor knowledge of same by a Mildred Rose Fischer Dalton or by the father of the groom, Mr. George W. Dalton. Adding that he had handled all legal matters for both men since 1922.

  Her mother had borrowed her dictionary recently. Maybe for “contemplated.” Contemplating was something Charlotte had been doing a lot of in the past few days. Contemplating her family’s scandal, contemplating never returning to high school, contemplating the likelihood of graduating from high school if she never went back. Where does someone in a small town go to escape public scrutiny and scorn? She wondered where Gilbert Ogden and Flora Parker had gone, if they were still in the business of robbing banks, and if they had need of a young, hardworking accomplice. Charlotte was wondering what would drive someone to rob a bank as she placed the pack of Lucky Strikes and the little brown notebook back into the hatbox, and noticed the envelope of money taped to the underside of the hatbox’s lid.

  Chapter 26

  U.S. dollars to Canadian dollars. Gilbert Ogden kept a close watch on the fluctuation of the exchange rate, and would try to time his bank trips to maximize their funds. Never the same bank twice. His and Flora’s top priority, as bank robbers on the lam, was to avoid suspicion. Blending in with, as well as keeping their distance from, the rest of their Toronto neighborhood was another priority.

  They had spent significant amounts of time sitting in the window seat on the main level of the house, just behind the heavy crimson damask curtain, observing the comings and goings of the neighbors, and making notes of regularities in schedules, and deciding on the safest, low-activity times to leave the house.

  “Does anyone live in that big house?” someone visiting their neighbors might ask. “Well,” the neighbors would answer, “we haven’t seen them yet, but there’s usually smoke coming out of the chimney.”

  Flora had bought some French language books from the bookstore a few doors down from the third bank Gilbert visited to exchange money. She liked to curl up in the overstuffed chair by the fireplace and read.

  “Just like Bonnie and Clyde used to do,” she’d say to Gilbert with a curt nod followed by a laugh.

  Flora Parker and Gilbert Ogden had to be the dullest outlaws in history. Playing Scrabble and chess, reading Chekhov and Austen, and practicing their bonjours and au revoirs, just in case.

  Flora had read good things about Quebec. If it got too hairy for them in Toronto, if suspicions were raised about the pleasant, quiet, seemingly invisible people who had moved into the neighborhood just a couple of months ago, they could go farther north, Although not Montreal, Flora thought. Too big. Heading north would really probably be their only option. They couldn’t go back now.

  Flora called “checkmate” after two hours of intense play, and Gilbert sighed and leaned back in his chair, cleaning the lenses of his glasses with a handkerchief while shaking his head.

  “You’re obviously cheating,” he said. “But I haven’t figured out how.”

  He hadn’t beaten her yet.

  “That’s me,” Flora admitted. “Big cheater. I’m just trying to make you a better loser. You’re such a baby about losing.”

  Gilbert tucked the handkerchief back into his breast pocket and considered this for a moment before giving her a quizzical look.

  “Why didn’t you and Bill ever have any children?”

  Flora’s expression changed from cheeky grin, the triumphant, possibly cheating winner of the chess game. All the muscles in her face that had been holding up the cheeky grin went slack, the dimples disappearing completely. She picked up the queen and knocked over one pawn, then watched it roll back and forth on the polished surface of the board. A full minute passed before she spoke.

  “We tried.”

  Gilbert said nothing, but quickly pushed himself up from his chair and went to her. He stood behind her and gently wrapped his arms around her shoulders, bending his forehead down until it touched her crown.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

  Flora let just a few tears roll down her cheeks before wiping them away with the back of her hand. She was never one to wallow. Things had finally gone their way, and she wouldn’t let the past ruin it. Together they had achieved the impossible, and managed to disappear from Wooster without a trace. Gilbert and Flora were now independent, financially secure, and grateful that neither one would have to struggle and scrape for money, or suffer petty humiliations at the hands of ignorant, undeserving fools.

  But an even greater goal had been achieved through the clandestine, carefully orchestrated embezzlement of the Wayne Building & Loan. It was one the newspapers hadn’t guessed at, and likely never would. It was something that was always in the back of Gilbert’s and Flora’s minds, a small nugget of truth sitting quiet and undisturbed, as it was at the tender moment the two were sharing in front of the chessboard. It was at that very moment that Flora’s husband, Bill Parker, the Bill Parker of the rage and the shotgun and the scorched tire marks, appeared in the doorway.

  Chapter 27

  Bill Parker had met Flora Jacobs in New York City not too long after the Depression, in the sawdust-strewn backstage basement room where Madame Ososki held her acting classes on Monday and Wednesday mornings. Bill had fallen for Flora instantly, like he had with a number of women. But he told himself t
his one was different. He’d told himself that with all of them. Flora, with her smooth skin, quiet elegance, and the pronounced dimples in her cheeks that appeared when she smiled, and also when she put on what Bill called her “disapproving face.” Although she mainly used that one during scenes. At least he was pretty sure it was just for scenes. Yes, Flora was different. Flora really was the one for Bill. He was at least eighty percent sure this time. Seventy-five at the very least. You couldn’t blame him, though. It was hard to be sure with actresses.

  Flora hadn’t paid any attention to Bill Parker except when they had to rehearse scenes together, and she’d give the politest of smiles and then disappear into her character. There were around thirty people in the class, and even though there were maybe two other girls Bill thought he could be crazy about (or three, okay, maybe three, but Rita didn’t always show up), he was always angling to be chosen for a scene with Flora.

  In the years following the Depression, many in the New York City theater community had headed out west, looking for opportunity and dough in Hollywood, but some eager hopefuls still went to New York to try to make it big on the stage. Some of the Broadway theaters had dropped admission prices all the way down to a quarter to try to keep drawing crowds, and repertory productions were sprouting up all over the Theater District to try to keep actors and directors working. Bill and Flora faced each other, or at least watched each other, two mornings a week in class, and over time (twenty-four classes to be exact, Bill counted) they became friends.

  Flora was, like him, from a small town, and had arrived in the city around the same time. “Are you also from Nebraska?” Bill had asked her. “Nebraska” was where Madame Ososki insisted every small-town student of hers was from. Her very first small-town student had been from Nebraska, possibly from Broken Bow, or maybe Wahoo or Ogallala, but Madame Ososki was far too busy and creative to trouble herself with the minute details, so he was simply “from Nebraska.” In the same way that students from Los Angeles or San Francisco were simply “from California.” But Nebraska held a special place in Madame Ososki’s heart because of that student, and she also loved to hear herself say, “Nebraska!” with the romantic rolling of the r, and the clean break of the ska! So, at any given time, Madame Ososki’s acting class was made up of students from New York, Chicago, California, or Nebraska, and no one dared argue with her about it.