The Baxter Letters

by Dolores Hitchens

  In the lobby, Mr. Keeley touched the greasy beak of his cap. “’Morning, Mrs. Burch.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Keeley.”

  No sharp look from me to him. And why should there be?

  She stopped at the mailbox; it was empty.

  At ten minutes past eleven the head stenographer called her on the squawkbox to take a personal call on the phone. Standing there beside Miss Vonn’s busy typewriter, she heard Tom’s voice.

  “Your Mr. Shima worked at the United Nations, Jeff, up until a couple of months ago. He was a translator, Oriental languages. His first name—on the envelope there’s just the initial—his name is Bartholomew. Bartholomew Shima. I talked to a very pleasant guy at the U.N. who knew Shima, and he thinks he might live on West Sixty-Eighth, near the Lincoln Center, some apartment hotel off Broadway but not far off. So, it turns out, the telephone operator tells me a Mr. Shima has a phone and he’s in the right area. He’s not in the phone book but the number’s not an unlisted one. And here it is. Ready to copy?”

  “Hold on a minute.” She dashed back to her desk for pencil and notebook. Tom gave her the number and she jotted it down.

  “You can call him during your lunch hour,” Tom told her. “And I’ve got another idea, Jeff. About that three hundred. You know how hampered I’ve been without a good tape-recorder. This thing of mine is on its last wheezes. There have been a million ideas, fugitive stuff that came to me in odd moments, that I didn’t bother to write down, and lost. And things Sean has told me, criticism and suggestions, that were lost because we didn’t have a good tape machine between us. So I’m thinking—”

  The whole three hundred? Her throat was suddenly as dry as dust. “Aren’t they … isn’t a good one awfully expensive?”

  “Yes, and what I thought—use two hundred for a down payment. Put the rest on credit.”

  She tried to say something, to put in something about the bills already waiting to be paid, but he went on. “If I looked around I ought to find one for around four hundred. Maybe less. I guess it’s something I’m going to have to have if the play is ever going to be completed, Jeff.”

  He stopped talking and there was just the rattle of the office. But a kind of cloud was dimming the day, or there was getting to be a great big obstacle she had to climb over, and it was hard to keep in mind those wonderful things she had told herself in the bathroom. It was a hard feeling to pin down. But one thing had been agreed on long ago. The play came first. Absolutely. The play had come to dominate Tom’s life and Jennifer had agreed that it must dominate her life also. You couldn’t build a loving relationship on discord, on separate viewpoints, on different goals. If you became one, you became one completely, and that was it. Don’t get tender now, she told herself fiercely. “In that case, Tom—start looking.”

  “My girl. And you know something? If Bax is so damned eager to get his mail delivered, maybe he’d advance another payment. Since we have to play it by ear, as it were, and might end up delivering all three—”

  “I wouldn’t know where to write him. And really, Tom, I think three hundred is plenty for just taking a letter to someone.”

  “Oh? Okay, see you tonight.” She heard him yawn, a long yawning breath, and she thought of the gloomy apartment and the cold floors that no scrubbing nor waxing could make smooth, and the ratty make-do furniture in every room but the living room, and the cranky old kitchen range and the stained sink and the smell of years-gone cabbage soup—

  “I love you so much,” she said softly into the receiver.

  “Good girl. Call Shima at noon, and if you can make a date with him for today, plead your headache and take off.”

  “The letter’s in my purse. I’ll type a new envelope here, before I go to lunch.”

  “All neat as a pin, however the hell neat that is,” he said, and the phone went dead.

  She had to hunt to find an envelope that didn’t have the firm’s name and return address on it, but Miss Vonn finally produced what she needed. She typed on the envelope, very simply,

  Mr. Bartholomew Shima

  Formerly, United Nations

  New York City

  This would be the last she would see of that other envelope, the one with Uncle Bax’s writing on it. She turned it over, examining it from both sides … all that tape, she thought, glued on in a great big blotch as if she or someone would go prying into it, as if what was inside was a … a secret.

  A secret, she thought, the word taking hold of her thoughts. I’m delivering some kind of secret. Mr. Shima will no doubt know what it is. I wonder if he’ll tell me …

  She met Mr. Shima in front of the Lincoln Center at two o’clock. The sun was out. The buildings, the plantings in the courtyard were bright and beautiful. Mr. Shima turned out to be a small, stocky man, shorter even than Jennifer. He had a vaguely Oriental face, a pronounced bulbous forehead and eyes as pale as shot-silk. When Jennifer came up to him, he lifted his hat and made a short jerky motion like a bow, a bow that didn’t quite get past the instinct stage, and he said in a strange falsetto kind of voice, “Yes, Madame?”

  “I’m Mrs. Burch. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more definite on the phone, Mr. Shima, but I’m supposed to make sure—before I give you this letter—that you really are the Mr. Shima it belongs to.”

  “I see. Very well. I shall produce identification.” He didn’t say that this was a funny kind of thing and that he wasn’t used to getting mail this way. He began to search through his inside coat pockets and all of the time she could see how closely he was staring at her. “You live here in New York?” he asked politely.

  “Yes.” How much was she supposed to say to him? Why hadn’t Uncle Bax explained this part of it? The covering envelope seemed to suggest that Uncle Bax didn’t want the recipient to know, right away, what was being delivered. Uncle Bax wanted his handwriting covered up. As if the sight of it might cause the letter to be refused, perhaps. Did this mean that she musn’t mention his name?

  “But you aren’t a native New Yorker,” Mr. Shima was saying in his squeaky voice. “You have a certain … uh … freshness—excuse me if I presume—that goes oddly with the smoke and dirt of this city.”

  “I came from the country. But I’ve been here a year.”

  “I too am from the country,” he told her. He had a folder out now. He opened it and took something out, and handed it to her, and she realized that he had given her a passport.

  “I’m afraid I can’t read the language.”

  “No, but you can see that the picture is of me,” he told her patiently. “And here is my name. You can read that.”

  “Yes. Do you … do you drive? Do you have a driver’s license?”

  His gaze flickered. “Not with me. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, I’m sure that this is enough.” She in her turn handed him his passport with Uncle Bax’s letter. The strangest look came into his eyes, she thought. He had expected something else.

  “Excuse me, please.” He tore off the end of the white envelope and peered inside. For an instant Jennifer thought that there was an expression of fright, rage and astonishment, and that he quivered with the force of these emotions, quivered and shook inside the neat dark suit; but then he turned his eyes up at her and there was nothing in them, no expression at all; they were like the surface of water in which you see only the reflection of yourself.

  A chill blew across her; she didn’t know what to say to him. “Is it … is everything all right?”

  “Where is he?”

  “Where is who?”

  “Where is the man who gave you this letter?”

  “I really don’t know where he is now,” she said. “He was in Mexico City. I mean, he said he was in Mexico City when he wrote, but the postmark on the letter was something different.”

  “It was—what?”

  Did Uncle Bax want Mr. Shima to know where he was?

  He hadn’t said that she mustn’t tell anyone. And anyway, she re-membered with a sense of
relief, Uncle Bax wasn’t there any longer. He was in El Paso, or on his way to it.

  “The first part of the name was Nueva…. Then there was another word which was indistinct.”

  “May I see the letter?”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t have it with me.” Like you with your driver’s license, she thought wryly. “Perhaps if you open his letter to you, it will tell you where he is.”

  He ignored this suggestion. He stood frowning, his head bent so that she couldn’t see his pale eyes. “Do I dare to ask how well you know this man?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t really know him very well. He’s my … he’s a relative. I haven’t seen him for almost a year. It was a big surprise when he wrote me from Mexico and asked me to deliver this to you.” In her own turn she hesitated. “Is the letter important?”

  Play it by ear—

  His face smoothed out under her eyes like a sheet of paper being ironed from the other side, and he said, “I’m not even sure that it concerns me at all.” He pursed his mouth after the words were out, his gaze on some point in the distance.

  If it’s not the right letter,” she stammered, “I’d better have it back.”

  “Naturally it is the right letter,” he answered, watching her. “It has my name on it. Isn’t this what you mean?”

  “Not exactly.” Timidly, she put out her hand.

  His face went on being smooth and indifferent, politely indifferent, but under the surface a lot of thinking was going on. “Mrs. Burch,” he said softly, almost kindly, “do you mean that there are other letters? The letter to me isn’t the only one?”

  “It has to be important,” she pleaded, “or I shouldn’t deliver it.”

  “But you have delivered it.”

  Was he mocking her behind that mask of a face? Were his eyes glinting with satisfaction? She couldn’t tell.

  I shouldn’t have done a thing, she told herself, until I got it all straight with Uncle Bax. I acted too hastily. I let Tom talk me into—No, I won’t blame it on Tom.

  Mr. Shima was lifting his hat to her, putting the envelope into a breast pocket of his coat; he was turning away, his eyes were already busy with the traffic as if looking for a way to cross the street, or for a taxi, and there in fact right now a cab was at the curb, discharging a passenger, and Mr. Shima’s hand was up and the driver saw him and waited.

  “Mr. Shima—”

  He was gone and—for better or for worse—he had taken Uncle Bax’s letter with him.

  Chapter 4

  A couple of nights later, after dinner, Tom suddenly cut off the melody pouring from the new tape machine, something soft and aching by Schubert, and said without warning, “Jeff, what did that guy Shima look like?”

  She had been working on the checkbook, trying to wring more out of the account than had really ever been put into it, trying to find an error in that inexorable arithmetic that matched from stub to stub and was never enough. His question only half-caught her attention. “Oh, I don’t know. Short, stocky. Ordinary.”

  “Was he kind of Oriental-looking?”

  She nodded, still not looking up. “Yes, kind of.”

  “Jeff, listen to me. Really listen. Did he have a big bulge of a forehead?” When she nodded, Tom went on, “What sort of eyes did he have?”

  “They made you feel funny.”

  “That’s no answer. Describe them.”

  “Oh, pale … fishy. Like water when you lean over to look in, only there’s just your own face staring at you. Like two very unpleasant little milky mirrors—”

  He kept a hand on the knob of the big machine but he didn’t turn the sound up again. “I think Mr. Shima was down in the lobby this afternoon looking at the mailboxes. He seemed quite nervous, as if he were a ghost thinking of haunting the place. And when I showed up he waited long enough to take a good look at me and then he skedaddled.”

  She lifted her eyes now, stared in disbelief. “But he couldn’t! How would he know the address? All he had was my name—Mrs. Burch. I told him that. But he wouldn’t know if it was a Burch with a U or a Burch with an I. Or whether I’d even given him my right name. And in the New York telephone directory there must be thousands—”

  “It has to be simpler than that,” Tom said. “You thought he drove off and left you after you’d given him the letter. But instead he followed you to the office, waited around, inspecting everyone who left, and then in the crush when everyone went home he followed you here. You were tired, you weren’t expecting a tail, you didn’t look behind you. Maybe he didn’t follow you right into this building, but he got close enough to know pretty well which one it was.”

  “I don’t like Mr. Shima knowing where I live,” she decided. “He isn’t exactly the neighborly type.”

  “From what I saw of him, that single quick impression, I’m inclined to agree. He looks like a damned funny shifty little guy. And still, he held down a job at the U.N. For a while, anyway. The fellow I talked to there, the one who knew where I might reach him, sounded perfectly normal when he mentioned Shima’s name. No hesitation about telling me where Shima might be found.” Tom let the music come on again, but softly, and sat humming along with it and thinking about Mr. Shima.

  “There is one thing,” she told him after a minute. “Mr. Shima took a wild guess. He guessed that there were other letters.”

  “Oh? And he seemed interested?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  The music filled the room and then died into silence as the Schubert piece whispered to an end. “You didn’t happen to tell him the names on those letters?”

  “Of course I didn’t!” She was aware of a flash of anger that he could think her so stupid. “I didn’t even admit there were any. He guessed, that was all.”

  Tom nodded. “So he can’t know for sure, if that’s what’s got him interested. Jeff, if you run into him, if he comes up to you in the lobby or on the street, if he opens his chops even long enough to speak your name, you make damned sure that he understands that your job for your uncle was to deliver that letter, nothing more, and that in any further business he might have with Bax, he can deal direct.”

  “Of course I’ll tell him—exactly that.”

  But she didn’t run into Mr. Shima, and when several days had passed she began to forget about him.

  On Friday evening they went out to a play. It was a new, experimental play written by a man Tom knew, staged on the bare boards of a loft, the audience on benches, with the remnants of somebody’s pants-manufacturing concern stacked in the corners. During the play Tom explained that the man who had made pants had put money in the play. He had lost a lot being a pants-manufacturer and this was his last gamble, his last hope, this play about four men involved in a relationship that Jennifer couldn’t keep straight. At one point two of the men appeared on opposite sides of the single stage prop, a bed, in the nude. Jennifer tried to be nonchalant. After all, Tom had nude scenes in his play. But she knew that she blushed. And those years of living out among the rabbits and the soybeans must have left some silly scruples that wouldn’t go away. She was just a hick from the sticks—hayseed in her hair—and would never be anything else.

  When the play was over the lights came up in the main part of the loft and the audience and the actors mingled, and there was a big battered coffee-making machine on a trestle table, giving off steam, and somebody put out some rather stale doughnuts. Jennifer stood around and waited for Tom. Tom got into a ferocious argument with the play’s author and the principal backer, the man who had made pants, and the argument went on it seemed forever. Jennifer finally sat down in a corner on some bolts of cloth, and went to sleep.

  When they got home the lobby had people in it, and an air of excitement and gossip. As Jennifer stumbled through toward the elevator, bone-tired and dying for sleep, she caught some remarks about a man having collapsed there in the lobby, a man had staggered in off the street, or darted in off the street, or crawled in off the street—she got disjointed
scraps of different versions—and had passed out right there in the lobby in front of some people who had just come in from the delicatessen.

  The ambulance had just taken him away.

  He’d had a heart attack, or a stroke, or something had given him a fit.

  He’d tried to say something but nobody could make sense of what he got out.

  Tom paused, dragging at her, to ask a question, but Jennifer plunged on, refusing to stop. The elevator stood open, biliously lit, empty, even the scuffy places in the linoleum looking good.

  “If I can just make it to bed—”

  “Wait a minute. For God’s sake, Jeff….”

  “I’m sorry. I’m beat. Just let me get into bed, then you can come back down here—”

  “I don’t care that much. It’s just some poor devil with a seizure, flopped in here to collapse. Just seems queer, that’s all.”

  In the bedroom she threw her clothes at the rickety chair and fell into the spongy mattress, wearing the new slip. Her last nightgown had split down the back the night before.

  Just before sleep closed down, there was a flashback of that day’s scene in Mr. Dunavan’s office, and she sighed with pleasure.

  During the morning’s dictation Mr. Dunavan hadn’t seemed bored nor moody once, not even for a minute, but just very pleasant, calm, friendly, and then when she had closed the notebook and had stood up to leave, he’d said, “I might as well tell you now and get it over—they’re giving me a boost to a better job, and I’ll have a secretary of my own, and if you want the job—I’ll see that there’s a nice raise for you—and if you think you can stand me, it’s yours. Just think it over.”

  She had wanted to cry, What’s to think about? She’d wanted to clutch his hands and kiss them, maybe even grovel a little—a lot of crazy stuff had spun through her head, making her laugh, and there was a funny floating feeling all through her middle as if somebody had just blown up a balloon in there. “If you’ll give me a chance,” she had said at last, “I’ll do my very best. I really will, Mr. Dunavan.”