by Lee Harris
The street door was open and I climbed a steep flight of stairs to the second floor and walked inside. People were dressed in jeans instead of the more formal attire of a quarter century ago. One woman in a skirt and blouse asked if she could help me, and I said I was looking for a Mr. Jackman if he was still working there.
“Sure he’s here. Can I ask you what your business is?”
“It’s more personal than business. My father worked here for a long time.”
“Come on in. He’ll be glad to see you. I think he’s having lunch at his desk today.”
I had forgotten lunch, not unusual for me when I’m working on something. I considered leaving and coming back in half an hour, but she was already far ahead of me and I ran a couple of steps to catch up.
The office was the kind I remembered, windowed so you could see into it from the inside. But the man eating a sandwich at his desk was far too young to have been working here when my father had.
“Go on in. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
“No, thanks.” I went in and he stood and looked at me.
“Do I know you?”
“I think your father knew my father. I’m Eddie Bennett’s daughter.”
“Eddie Bennett, I remember the name. My dad used to talk about him.”
“I met your father a few times when I was a little girl. I’m Chris.” I offered my hand and we shook.
“Pleased to meet you. What brings you down here today?”
“A couple of memories. I wonder if you could check something for me. I think there was a woman who worked here who lived on the west side in the Lincoln Center area that we used to meet when we went to the Thanksgiving Day parade. I don’t remember her name, but I wanted to see her again.”
“How old do you think she’d be?”
“I’d guess between sixty and seventy. I met her when I was five or six and not a very good judge of age.”
“You want to wait while I ask?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Be right back.” He picked up the rest of his sandwich and left the office.
I went to the outside window and looked out onto the street. Places that don’t change fascinate me. It must have something to do with the comfort of finding one’s way, the way you do in a house you’ve lived in for years. Night or day, you know the position of every piece of furniture, every door, every board that creaks and rug that trips you up. I have heard people complain about returning to scenes of their childhood or their most memorable experiences and being overwhelmed with disappointment. Buildings are gone, replaced with steel and glass, not the substances of mortal memory. But here time had stopped. Perhaps in another twenty-five years and a huge input of money, this area might become gentrified, replaced, converted into a park. I would not think about that today.
“Got it,” a voice behind me said, and I turned to see Mr. Jackman with a piece of paper in his hand.
“You do? Really?”
“Here she is, Betty Campbell. Name ring a bell?”
“I’m not sure.”
He handed me the address. “Amsterdam Avenue, right near Lincoln Center.”
“That’s exactly what I thought.” Well, not exactly, but one of the possibilities.
“Well, I hope you find her. She’s retired, lives by herself, I think. Nice woman. Worked here a long time. Your father died quite suddenly, didn’t he?”
“That’s what I remember. I think they came for me at school one day. It was a heart attack.”
“Shame. He was not only a nice guy, he was the kind of salesman everybody loves, customers and us. Man with the kind of sense of honor you don’t find in a lot of young people nowadays. He was a gem.”
“Thank you.”
“Is your mother still alive?”
“Unfortunately no. She died a few years after he did.”
“Well, you come from a nice family, Chris. You can be proud of them.”
We reminisced for a few minutes more and then I left One of the women came out of her office as I passed and said something about my father. She had known him only a couple of years but remembered him well. As I walked to the west side subway, I felt closer to my father than I had for years. Imagine a woman coming out to say a good word. It was a kindness I really appreciated, one that would stay with me.
I went down into the subway and rode uptown to find Betty Campbell.
—
I got off at Sixty-sixth Street, right under Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and made my way to the street level, not certain where I wanted to be. Once outside, I took my bearings and walked a block west to Amsterdam Avenue. On the west side of the street a group of redbrick apartment houses ran the length of several blocks, although no street went through them. They’d been dressed up with greenery, that is, trees that would be green in the spring. So much of New York is concrete and brick that it always makes me feel good to see vegetation in brown earth.
With a little difficulty I found the entrance with Betty Campbell’s number and rang her bell. She answered in seconds with a loud “Hello?”
“Ms. Campbell, it’s Christine Bennett. May I come up for a minute?” I find that a woman who gives her name is frequently welcome even without an explanation.
“Oh yes, they said you’d be coming.” Then she buzzed.
I pushed the door open, realizing someone had called—rather intelligently, I thought—to say I might be on my way. The elevator was waiting and I rode up to the fourth floor. A door was open and a woman was looking out. “I’m Chris,” I said as I walked toward her, keeping my disappointment out of my voice. As dim as my memory was, as unreliable as a child’s perceptions may be, this could not have been the woman at the parade. She was too short even to be a finalist in the nonexistent competition, and age or disease had crippled her, hunching her shoulders.
“Come right in. They said you were Eddie Bennett’s daughter. Nice man, Eddie Bennett. I remember you when you were little, all dressed up to see your daddy’s office.” She turned two locks and shuffled, using a cane, to the kitchen.
I followed, my heart feeling heavy at this woman’s pain. “These look like nice apartments,” I said.
“They’re nice enough. Gotta watch yourself at night, though.”
“That’s true everywhere.”
“Times have changed, haven’t they? Cup of coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
“Then let’s sit in the living room.” She shuffled her way there and sat in a big, worn chair, hooking the cane on the arm. “Sad when Eddie died. You must’ve been no more than a child.”
“I was about eight.”
“What a tragedy. Man taken away from his family like that.”
“He left a good legacy, a lot of happy memories.”
“Can’t ask for more than that. Have a mint.” She extended a glass dish of flat round chocolates toward me. They had sat on the little table next to her chair, her daily treat.
I took one and let it melt in my mouth, two images passing before my eyes, one the young Proust dipping his madeleines, the second an older Proust tasting them to bring back the past. It was as though I were visiting Dad again at the office in my new dress. “Have you lived here long?” I asked.
“Almost fifteen years. I was on the list before that. In New York, you wait for someone to die and hope your name comes up.” She laughed. “I guess there are folks out there waiting for me to kick the bucket, but they’ve got a while to go. I feel real good.”
“You sound good,” I said honestly. “You sound like an energetic person.”
“Well, I’ve always been that. Broke my hip last year but haven’t let it keep me down.”
“Where did you live before?”
“Oh, way uptown on the west side. It’s all changed. I used to like to walk in Riverside Park when I was younger, but you wouldn’t catch me going there now. Here I’ve got the subway close by and buses right outside.”
“It’s very convenient,” I ag
reed. “When did you start working for Mr. Jackman?”
“Maybe thirty-five years ago. Probably more. I knew your father for a long time. He’d come in in the morning with a big smile and a nice word for everybody. ‘How’re you doin’ today, Betty?’ Always nice to see him.”
It was as if each small addition to my archive of memories fleshed him out that much more. I could hear his voice saying the words, see the grin. “I want to ask you something kind of silly, Betty. Did you used to go to the Thanksgiving Day parade when my dad worked for Mr. Jackman?”
“Haven’t been to the parade since I was a child. I watch it on the TV now. I don’t like crowds. There’s a mess of crowds for that parade.”
“Tell me something. Did you know anyone who worked for Mr. Jackman who lived around here when my father worked there?”
“Who lived here? Let me see.” She looked down at the worn carpet at her feet. Her hair, which was black with deeply encroaching gray, was long and pulled back behind her head, gathered in a black velvet band. Her face was jowly and lined, bare of the slightest color. “A lot of them came from Brooklyn because you could take the old BMT into Manhattan in those days. That’s gone now, you know. All those trains have letters on ’em, never know where you’re going anymore. I used to come down on the Broadway line, same as what’s at Lincoln Center. Where did Gloria live?” she asked, as though the answer would come from the air around us. “I’m wrong,” she said, as though correcting a statement unspoken. “Gloria was this young, cute girl, but now I think of it, she lived in the Village. Dressed like she lived in the Village, too, long hair and those exotic clothes. She left maybe around the time Eddie died. Got another job.”
“What color hair did she have?” I asked, although I knew the woman of my memory didn’t look Villagey in any sense.
“Black as coal. Gloria, can’t remember her last name.”
“So you don’t think anyone who worked there lived up on the west side.”
“I don’t think so, honey.”
“What about old Mr. Jackman?”
“Oh, he always lived out in Queens, had a beautiful house, I heard.” She made the adjective long and drawn out.
“Well, I guess that answers all my questions.”
“Oh, don’t go,” she said. “Stay a while. It’s good to have company, nice to have a young person to talk to. Tell me about yourself, what you’re doing now.”
I sat back in the chair and talked to her for the next half hour. Her eyes sparkled as we exchanged reminiscences and brought each other up to date on our lives. I had no recollection of ever meeting this woman before, but when I left she was someone who fitted into my life. After about half an hour and two more mints, I said good-bye, went back downtown to retrieve my car, and drove home.
—
“Thanks for calling,” Sandy Gordon said. “I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”
“I expect I’ve gotten all I can from Hopkins and Jewell, and while there are some intriguing things, I don’t see where they lead.”
“Like what?”
“Did you know the documents in Natalie’s personnel file were stolen or misplaced?”
“The detective said they didn’t have much from before the time she worked for them. He saw her evaluations, which he said were very flattering.”
“They are. But that’s all there is. Whatever letter she wrote answering their ad, whatever references she sent or high school transcripts, they’re all missing and no one has any idea who took them or why.”
“Did they talk to Natalie about it?”
“Yes and she was upset.”
“So what do you think?”
“I think there may have been some bad feelings between Arlene Hopkins and Natalie.”
“Anything special make you feel that way?”
“Hopkins didn’t want me talking to anyone except her. She had me steered to the word-processing pool, where only one person knew Natalie and he hadn’t been there from the beginning.”
“So you think they’re keeping something from you.”
“I think they tried. I probably found out more than Hopkins wanted me to know, but I don’t know if I’ve got everything. And if I don’t, I really don’t know where else to look, except for Natalie’s old apartment.”
“When will you go there?”
“I teach tomorrow. It’ll have to wait for Wednesday.”
“You’re doing fine, Chris. I mean that. I’m sure you’re on to something and you’re a digger, I can see that. You’ll find her. Need any more money?”
“Good heavens no. All it’s going for is parking.”
“Let me know when you run out.”
—
I dropped a note to Arnold telling him about Hopkins and Jewell, my visit to my father’s office, and what I intended to do next. If he had urgent work, I’d be glad to do it, but otherwise I seemed to have enough to occupy all my time.
13
We are both early risers and we do a lot more talking of substance in the morning when we’re fresh than in the evening when Jack is exhausted from school and driving and my metabolism is running on empty. He didn’t need to ask anything as we sat down to breakfast on Tuesday morning. I told him.
“So anyone who walked into this woman Wormy’s office when she wasn’t there could have stolen the stuff in the file,” he said.
“Essentially yes. And she must have gone out to lunch sometimes, no matter how dedicated she was. If a person goes out to lunch, she’ll be gone at least twenty minutes, and that’s really cutting it short.”
“But someone with a key could stay late and be safely alone.”
“And both principals have keys, along with Wormy.”
“What’s the motivation for Arlene Hopkins to take the papers?”
“How’s this? Natalie finds out something about Arlene that Arlene would like to keep quiet. Maybe she knows Natalie overheard a conversation she had with someone in her office or on the phone, or maybe Natalie fielded a call to Arlene that Arlene wished she hadn’t. So she takes the documents one day looking for something in them she can use as a kind of blackmail.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“It’s even possible she didn’t mean to keep them. She may only have wanted to look at them in the privacy of her office or at home. She takes them, planning to make copies or just look at them and return them, and by coincidence, in the short time they’re gone, Wormy opens the file to put Natalie’s first evaluation in it and finds it almost empty.”
“Makes sense. Once Wormy lets others know there are papers missing, Arlene, or whoever took them, can’t put them back.”
“Right.”
“But they’re just as gone for your purposes as if they were taken to be destroyed.”
“I know. And even if Arlene admitted she took them, what good would it do? They were probably destroyed four years ago or more.”
“Sounds like you’ve got problems, sweetheart. I haven’t had a course yet in rematerializing destroyed documents.”
“Gosh,” I said, “and I was really counting on you.”
“You intend to push this woman a little?”
“I don’t think I can. I found it a little hard to relate to her. She was wearing a pin-striped suit and hair out to here.”
“That kind of woman used to do something to me.”
I laughed. “Don’t tell me what.”
“So you’re telling me it’s a dead end.”
“I still have Natalie’s old apartment house to visit. Of course, she hasn’t lived there for a couple of years. I’ll go in tomorrow.”
“Where did she live?”
I went to the dining room where I’d left my notes. “Looks like Greenwich Avenue.”
“Ah, the Village. Narrow streets, old buildings, the artsy crowd. Gets a little rowdy down there on weekends now, but it’s nice during the day. Pretty. Find yourself a nice little restaurant and have lunch at Sandy’s expense. Bet you haven’t been doing t
hat.”
I thought with some embarrassment of my lunchless day yesterday. “I haven’t.”
“That’s what an expense account is for. I know you have a problem with being paid for your services, but you shouldn’t be carrying soggy tuna fish sandwiches when you’re working for Sandy. Lunch is definitely a necessary perk.”
I didn’t argue. What I’ve learned since leaving St. Stephen’s is that it’s a lot harder to spend someone else’s money than my own, and spending almost anything on nonessentials is hardest of all.
Jack left first to get to the Sixty-fifth by ten A.M. I left a little while later to get to the college well before my class began. Just before I scooted out, Mel called and asked if I wanted to meet her for lunch. I made a quick decision. Having missed a meal yesterday, I could afford a nicer lunch today and I looked forward to sharing it with Mel. She told me where to meet her and I hung up and ran.
—
I was brought up in the suburbs, not far from where I live now, so I have had no experience of living in New York. For me it was always a special place, the place where Daddy worked, where you went for parades and a trip to Radio City or the zoo, a place for a good time. I’ve been to New York many more times in the last year and a half than in the first thirty years of my life altogether, and although my opinion of the city has changed—as the city has—it’s still a place that holds fascinations for me.