Wednesday

by William Tenn

  “You still look a little frayed,” he told her. “When we get back, don’t bother going to your desk. Go right in to Mr. Osborne and finish taking dictation. No point in giving the other girls something to talk about. I’ll sign in for you.”

  She inclined her head submissively and continued to sip from the tiny glass.

  “What was that last comment you made in the restaurant—I’m certain you don’t mind discussing it, now—about not being born, but being made? That was an odd thing to say.”

  Wednesday sighed. “It isn’t my own idea. It’s Dr. Lorington’s. Years ago, when he was examining me, he said that I looked as if I’d been made—by an amateur. By someone who didn’t have all the blueprints, or didn’t understand them, or wasn’t concentrating hard enough.”

  “Hm.” He stared at her, absolutely intrigued. She looked normal enough. Better than normal, in fact. And yet—

  Later that afternoon, he telephoned Jim Rudd and made an appointment for right after work. Jim Rudd had been his roommate in college and was now a doctor: he would be able to tell him a little more about this.

  But Jim Rudd wasn’t able to help him very much. He listened patiently to Fabian’s story about “a girl I’ve just met” and, at the end of it, leaned back in the new upholstered swivel chair and pursed his lips at his diploma, neatly framed and hung on the opposite wall.

  “You sure do go in for weirdies, Fabe. For a superficially well-adjusted, well-organized guy with a real talent for the mundane things of life, you pick the damndest women I ever heard of. But that’s your business. Maybe it’s your way of adding a necessary pinch of the exotic to the grim daily round. Or maybe you’re making up for the drabness of your father’s grocery store.”

  “This girl is not a weirdie,” Fabian insisted angrily. “She’s a very simple little secretary, prettier than most, but that’s about all.”

  “Have it your own way. To me, she’s a weirdie. To me, there’s not a hell of a lot of difference—from your description—between her and that crazy White Russian dame you were running around with back in our junior year. You know the one I mean—what was her name?”

  “Sandra? Oh, Jim, what’s the matter with you? Sandra was a bollixed-up box of dynamite who was always blowing up in my face. This kid turns pale and dies if I so much as raise my voice. Besides, I had a real puppy-love crush on Sandra; this other girl is somebody I just met, like I told you, and I don’t feel anything for her, one way or the other.”

  The young doctor grinned. “So you come up to my office and have a consultation about her! Well, it’s your funeral. What do you want to know?”

  “What causes all these—these physical peculiarities?”

  Dr. Rudd got up and sat on the edge of his desk. “First,” he said, “whether you want to recognize it or not, she’s a highly disturbed person. The hysterics in the restaurant point to it, and the fantastic nonsense she told you about her body points to it. So right there, you have something. If only one percent of what she told you is true—and even that I would say is pretty high—it makes sense in terms of psychosomatic imbalance. Medicine doesn’t yet know quite how it works, but one thing seems certain: anyone badly mixed up mentally is going to be at least a little mixed up physically, too.”

  Fabian thought about that for a while. “Jim, you don’t know what it means to those little secretaries in the pool to tell lies to the office manager! A fib or two about why they were absent the day before, yes, but not stories like this, not to me”

  A shrug. “I don’t know what you look like to them: I don’t work for you, Fabe. But none of what you say would hold true for a psycho. And a psycho is what I have to consider her. Look, some of that stuff she told you is impossible, some of it has occurred in medical literature. There have been well-authenticated cases of people, for example, who have grown several sets of teeth in their lifetime. These are biological sports, one-in-a-million individuals. But the rest of it? And all the rest of it happening to one person? Please.”

  “I saw some of it. I saw the hairs on her fingernails.”

  “You saw something on her fingernails. It could be any one of a dozen different possibilities. I’m sure of one thing; it wasn’t hair. Right there she gave herself away as phony. Goddammit, man, hair and nails are the same organs essentially. One doesn’t grow on the other!”

  “And the navel? The missing navel?”

  Jim Rudd dropped to his feet and strode rapidly about the office. “I wish I knew why I’m wasting so much time with you,” he complained. “A human being without a navel, or any mammal without a navel, is as possible as an insect with a body temperature of ninety-eight degrees. It just can’t be. It does not exist.”

  He seemed to get more and more upset as he considered it. He kept shaking his head negatively as he walked.

  Fabian suggested: “Suppose I brought her to your office. And suppose you examined her and found no navel. Now just consider that for a moment. What would you say then?”

  “I’d say plastic surgery,” the doctor said instantly. “Mind you, I’m positive she’d never submit to such an examination, but if she did, and there was no navel, plastic surgery would be the only answer.”

  “Why would anyone want to do plastic surgery on a navel?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t the vaguest idea. Maybe an accident. Maybe a disfiguring birthmark in that place. But there will be scars, let me tell you. She had to be born with a navel”

  Rudd went back to his desk. He picked up a prescription pad. “Let me give you the name of a good psychiatrist, Fabe. I’ve thought ever since that Sandra business that you’ve had some personal problems that might get out of hand one day. This man is one of the finest—”

  Fabian left.

  She was obviously in a flutter when he called to pick her up that night, so much more of a flutter than a date-with-the-boss would account for, that Fabian was puzzled. But he waited and gave her an ostentatious and expensive good time. Afterward, after dinner and after the theater, when they were sitting in the corner of a small night club over their drinks, he asked her about it.

  “You don’t date much, do you, Wednesday?”

  “No, I don’t, Mr. Balik—I mean, Fabian,” she said, smiling shyly as she remembered the first-name privilege she had been accorded for the evening. “I usually just go out with girl friends, not with men. I usually turn down dates.”

  “Why? You’re not going to find a husband that way. You want to get married, don’t you?”

  Wednesday shook her head slowly. “I don’t think so. I—I’m afraid to. Not of marriage. Of babies. I don’t think a person like me ought to have a baby.”

  “Nonsense! Is there any scientific reason why you shouldn’t? What are you afraid of—it’ll be a monster?”

  “I’m afraid it might be… anything. I think with my body being as—as funny as it is, I shouldn’t take chances with a child. Dr. Lorington thinks so too. Besides, there’s the poem.”

  Fabian put down his drink. “Poem? What poem?”

  “You know, the one about the days of the week. I learned it when I was a little girl, and it frightened me even then. It goes:

  Monday’s child is fair of face,

  Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

  Wednesday’s child is full of woe,

  Thursday’s child has far to go,

  Friday’s child is loving and giving—

  And so on. When I was a little girl in the orphanage, I used to say to myself, ‘I’m Wednesday. I’m different from all other little girls in all kinds of strange ways. And my child—’ ”

  “Who gave you that name?”

  “I was left at the foundling home just after New Year’s Eve—Wednesday morning. So they didn’t know what else to call me, especially when they found I didn’t have a navel. And then, like I told you, after the Greshams adopted me, I took their last name.”

  He reached for her hand and grasped it firmly with both of his. He noted with triumphant pleasu
re that her fingernails were hairy. “You’re a very pretty girl, Wednesday Gresham.”

  When she saw that he meant it, she blushed and looked down at the tablecloth.

  “And you really don’t have a navel?”

  “No, I don’t. Really.”

  “What else about you is different?” Fabian asked. “I mean, besides the things you told me.”

  “Well,” she considered. “There’s that business about my blood pressure.”

  “Tell me about it,” he urged. She told him.

  Two dates later, she informed Fabian that Dr. Lorington wanted to see him. Alone.

  He went all the way uptown to the old-fashioned brownstone, chewing his knuckles in excitement. He had so many questions to ask!

  Dr. Lorington was a tall, aged man with pale skin and absolutely white hair. He moved very slowly as he gestured his visitor to a chair, but his eyes rested intent and anxious on Fabian’s face.

  “Wednesday tells me you’ve been seeing a good deal of her, Mr. Balik. May I ask why?”

  Fabian shrugged. “I like the girl. I’m interested in her.”

  “Interested, how? Interested clinically—as in a specimen?”

  “What a way to put it, Doctor! She’s a pretty girl, she’s a nice girl, why should I be interested in her as a specimen?”

  The doctor stroked an invisible beard on his chin, still watching Fabian very closely. “She’s a pretty girl,” he agreed, “but there are many pretty girls. You’re a young man obviously on his way up in the world, and you’re also obviously far out of Wednesday’s class. From what she’s told me—and mind you, it’s been all on the positive side—I’ve gotten a definite impression that you look on her as a specimen, but a specimen, let us say, about which you feel a substantial collector’s itch. Why you should feel this way, I don’t know enough about you to say. But no matter how she rhapsodizes about you, I continue to feel strongly that you have no conventional, expected emotional interest in her. And now that I’ve seen you, I’m positive that this is so.”

  “Glad to hear she rhapsodizes about me.” Fabian tried to squeeze out a bashful-type grin. “You have nothing to worry about, Doctor.”

  “I think there’s quite a bit to worry about, quite a bit. Frankly, Mr. Balik, your appearance has confirmed my previous impressions: I am quite certain I don’t like you. Furthermore, I don’t like you for Wednesday.”

  Fabian thought for a moment, then shrugged. “That’s too bad. But I don’t think she’ll listen to you. She’s gone without male companionship too long, and she’s too flattered by my going after her.”

  “I’m terribly afraid you’re right. Listen to me, Mr. Balik. I’m very fond of Wednesday and I know how unguarded she is. I ask you, almost as a father, to leave her alone. I’ve taken care of her since she arrived at the foundling home. I was responsible for keeping her case out of the medical journals so that she might have some chance for a normal life. At the moment, I’m retired from practice. Wednesday Gresham is my only regular patient. Couldn’t you find it in your heart to be kind and have nothing more to do with her?”

  “What’s this about her being made, not born?” Fabian countered. “She says it was your idea.”

  The old man sighed and shook his head over his desktop for a long moment. “It’s the only explanation that makes sense,” he said at last, dispiritedly. “Considering the somatic inaccuracies and ambivalences.”

  Fabian clasped his hands and rubbed his elbows thoughtfully on the arms of his chair. “Did you ever think there might be another explanation? She might be a mutant, a new kind of human evolution, or the offspring of creatures from another world, say, who happened to be stranded on this planet.”

  “Highly unlikely,” Dr. Lorington said. “None of these physical modifications is especially useful in any conceivable environment, with the possible exception of the constantly renewing teeth. Nor are the modifications fatal. They tend to be just—inconvenient. As a physician who has examined many human beings in my life, I would say that Wednesday is thoroughly, indisputably human. She is just a little—well, the word is amateurish.”

  The doctor sat up straight. “There is something else, Mr. Balik. I think it extremely inadvisable for people like Wednesday to have children of their own.”

  Fabian’s eyes lit up in fascination. “Why? What would the children be like?”

  “They might be like anything imaginable—or unimaginable. With so much disarrangement of the normal physical system, the modification in the reproductive functions must be enormous too. That’s why I ask you, Mr. Balik, not to go on seeing Wednesday, not to go on stimulating her to thoughts of marriage. Because this is one girl that I am certain should not have babies!”

  “We’ll see.” Fabian rose and offered his hand. “Thank you very much for your time and trouble, Doctor.”

  Dr. Lorington cocked his head and stared up at him. Then, without shaking the hand, he said in a quiet, even voice, “You are welcome. Goodbye, Mr. Balik.”

  Wednesday was naturally miserable over the antagonism between the two men. But there was very little doubt where her loyalties would lie in a crisis. All those years of determined emotional starvation had resulted in a frantic voracity. Once she allowed herself to think of Fabian romantically, she was done for. She told him that she did her work at the office—from which their developing affair had so far been successfully screened—in a daze at the thought that he liked her.

  Fabian found her homage delicious. Most women he had known began to treat him with a gradually sharpening edge of contempt as time went on. Wednesday became daily more admiring, more agreeable, more compliant.

  True, she was by no means brilliant, but she was, he told himself, extremely pretty, and therefore quite presentable. Just to be on the safe side, he found an opportunity to confer with Mr. Slaughter, the senior partner of the firm, ostensibly on personnel matters. He mentioned in passing that he was slightly interested in one of the girls in the secretarial pool. Would there be any high-echelon objection to that?

  “Interested to the extent of perhaps marrying the girl?” Mr. Slaughter asked, studying him from under a pair of enormously thick eyebrows.

  “Possibly. It might very well come to that, sir. If you have no ob—”

  “No objection at all, my boy, no objection at all. I don’t like executives flim-flamming around with their file-clerks as a general rule, but if it’s handled quietly and ends in matrimony, it could be an excellent thing for the office. I’d like to see you married, and steadied down. It might give the other single people in the place some sensible ideas for a change. But mind you, Balik, no flim-flam. No hanky-panky, especially on office time!”

  Satisfied, Fabian now devoted himself to separating Wednesday from Dr. Lorington. He pointed out to her that the old man couldn’t live much longer and she needed a regular doctor who was young enough to be able to help her with the physical complexities she faced for the rest of her life. A young doctor like Jim Rudd, for example.

  Wednesday wept, but was completely incapable of fighting him for long. In the end, she made only one condition—that Dr. Rudd preserve the secrecy that Lorington had initiated. She didn’t want to become a medical journal freak or a newspaper sob story.

  The reasons why Fabian agreed had only a little to do with magnanimity. He wanted to have her oddities for himself alone. Sandra he had worn on his breast, like a flashing jewel hung from a pendant. Wednesday he would keep in a tiny chamois bag, examining her from time to time in a self-satisfied, miserly fashion.

  And, after a while, he might have another, smaller jewel…

  Jim Rudd accepted his conditions. And was astounded.

  “There is no navel at all!” he ejaculated when he had rejoined Fabian in his study, after the first examination. “I’ve palpated the skin for scar tissue, but there’s not the slightest hint of it. And that’s not the half of it! She has no discernible systole and diastole. Man, do you know what that means?”

  “
I’m not interested right now,” Fabian told him. “Later, maybe. Do you think you can help her with these physical problems when they come up?”

  “Oh, sure. At least as well as that old fellow.”

  “What about children? Can she have them?”

  Rudd spread his hands. “I don’t see why not. For all her peculiarities, she’s a remarkably healthy young woman. And we have no reason to believe that this condition—whatever you want to call it—is hereditary. Of course, some part of it might be, in some strange way or other, but on the evidence.

  They were married, just before the start of Fabian’s vacation, at City Hall. They came back to the office after lunch and told everyone about it. Fabian had already hired a new secretary to replace his wife.

  Two months later, Fabian had managed to get her pregnant.

  He was amazed at how upset she became, considering the meekness he had induced in her from the beginning of their marriage. He tried to be stern and to tell her he would have none of this nonsense, Dr. Rudd had said there was every reason to expect that she would have a normal baby, and that was that. But it didn’t work. He tried gentle humor, cajolery. He even took her in his arms and told her he loved her too much not to want to have a little girl like her. But that didn’t work either.

  “Fabian, darling,” she moaned, “don’t you understand? I’m not supposed to have a child. I’m not like other women.”

  He finally used something he had been saving as a last resort for this emergency. He took a book from the shelf and flipped it open. “I understand,” he said. “It’s half Dr. Lorington and his nineteenth-century superstitious twaddle, and half a silly little folk poem you read when you were a girl and that made a terrifying impression on you. Well, I can’t do anything about Dr. Lorington at this point in your life, but I can do something about that poem. Here. Read this.”

  She read:

  Birthdays, by B.L. Farjeon

  Monday’s child is fair of face,

  Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

  Wednesday’s child is loving and giving,