Jennifer said, “But anyone could tell the difference between ordinary tea and this …”
“Take the sugar back, Sara,” Mr. Fallon said gently.
Sara withdrew the sugarbowl in a series of little jerks, her arm retreating unwillingly toward the cart, her face still perplexed as she looked at Mr. Fallon.
“The bowl and creamer are a pair she picked up in Milan,” Mr. Fallon explained.
“They’re lovely.”
“Sara, are you going to forget me entirely?”
“Oh, sorry.” Sara came to life, poured Mr. Fallon’s tea, handed it over, didn’t offer him sugar. She seemed in a rush now, her face taking on a pink look, a strand of hair escaping from the bun on her neck; she could be almost pretty in a subdued way, Jennifer thought, if she weren’t so smoothed into drabness.
When three cups had been filled with tea, Sara offered tiny canapes and miniature cakes. Jennifer allowed herself one of each; she mustn’t appear greedy.
Over his second pink-frosted tart, Mr. Fallon said, “Where is your uncle now, Miss Hamilton?”
“When I last heard from him he was in Mexico. I couldn’t make out the postmark completely. It was Buena—something.”
“That would cover quite a few towns down there, I guess.” He shrugged it off with a smile. “Buena Vista, of course. Good view. A million of them around. Buena Tierra, if you want to farm. Buena Hierba, if you’re grazing cattle—and so on.” He drank some of his tea. “Sara, why don’t you brew Miss Hamilton a cup of the rose tea? That new box. She’d like that.”
Sara’s head came up, rigidly attentive.
Was she, like Mr. Dunavan, listening for something that wasn’t there? She was listening damned hard, Jennifer thought, and no mistake about that.
“Since she does appreciate—”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Fallon. I’m on my lunch break, believe it or not, and I’d better get back if I’m to have a job tomorrow. Thank you so much for being so thoughtful, but I’ve imposed enough already.”
Was he really looking at her purse, at the baggy and shabby monstrosity on the arm of her chair? Or was she imagining this? To herself she made a promise, this is the last letter I’m going to deliver for Uncle Bax. Money or no money. There is something here in this room, something going on between these two, this craggy English squire and his downtrodden … whatever she is … that gives me the willies.
“Won’t you come back some day soon, then?”
Sara murmured her own invitation, looking quite distressed, as if the chance to brew rose tea for Miss Hamilton would have made her day, would have made her week, even. Would have climaxed her life.
“You’re very kind.” Jennifer set the cup and saucer on the cart, picked up the purse, turned to the door.
There was the dog, bigger than before.
But Jennifer didn’t hesitate. It wasn’t a moment in which to show the least hesitation, the least fear. She didn’t know how she understood this, but it was true. In front of Mr. Fallon there must be only sureness, the even composure of innocence.
She walked with even step to the door. The dog didn’t move; she put a hand on his head, let it slide down to cup his chin, and said, “Hi, Baron. What a goodlooking guy you are!” The dog’s eyes lifted to meet her own, intelligent, friendly, and behind her Mr. Fallon, coming to usher her out, said, “Move, Baron. Let Miss Hamilton pass.”
She turned to glance at Sara, who remained standing beside the teacart. “Thank you so much, Miss Fallon. Thank you for a lovely tea.”
Sara stuttered something. She was reddening, shrinking in on herself, and her misery bespoke that she was not Miss Fallon at all; she must be Miss Something-else. Neither she nor Mr. Fallon had bothered to mention her last name, as though it wasn’t very important. Now she was embarrassed.
Tough on you, Sara Something-else.
The subway felt warm, stuffy, more like summer than autumn, and the smell of oil and rust and churned flying litter made Jennifer’s stomach turn over. She thought of phoning in, saying she really felt ill and was going on home; but then, Mr. Dunavan must be waiting to tell her what he had found out about Mr. Shima.
At the entry to the building Jennifer paused, savoring a last moment of delay in getting back to the grind, and half-turned and so faced briefly into the coming crowd. She thought that in the near distance a woman ducked suddenly out of sight into a knot of people, a knot that swiftly unravelled to show nothing. But then, wasn’t a woman, that same woman or another, ducking into a doorway? And didn’t that single fugitive glimpse make her think of Sara? Mr. Fallon’s Sara?
Absurd, of course.
Something squawking from a tree….
The country boob scared to death in the city—
Goodbye, Sara Whoever-you-are, at home clearing up the tea things, listening to Mr. Fallon bemoan the fact that Miss Hamilton didn’t wait to try the new tea. And goodbye, lookalike Sara ducking out of sight. Uncle Bax has me seeing double.
Chapter 7
Mr. Dunavan finally came for her around four o’clock. He had had a series of conferences, she knew, and suspected that he was being briefed about his new job. She wondered if he was going to be moved to a different office, one perhaps on the floor above; in which case she would be in entirely new country and completely away from the steno pool. The offices upstairs, she had heard, were pretty luxurious. All of them carpeted, and some furnished in the manner of living rooms, desks banished, secretary and typewriter concealed in their own lavish niche. Couches, cocktail tables, complete bars, hidden refrigerators, stereo, television, exercise equipment behind concealed panels in the walls—you name it, they had it. Up there.
Mr. Dunavan pulled a chair for her close to the desk and she sat down. He sat down facing her. “I tried to be as nonchalant as I could, but it seems I’ve opened a hornet’s nest. My detective friend got quite curious as to why I should be interested in Mr. Shima. The subject of Mr. Shima is presently quite fascinating to the police. All over town and not just in the precinct where he died. Since it seems Mr. Shima had activities all over town. And has had the cops’ eyes on him for quite a spell. It’s going to break in the papers, by the way. The man of mystery, all that kind of thing.”
“He didn’t really seem so mysterious. Well, to meet him, he did. But he’d had a job with the U.N. Surely that’s respectable—”
“Well, it seems that Mr. Shima was two people. Or maybe three. He was kind of nefarious. And in spite of his Oriental appearance he was a native of some Central American country, some small dim dot of American country, some small dim dot of a place where there are three or four immensely rich families and about two hundred thousand peons. The kind of place where you have very ugly revolutions, when one does get going. Somewhere east of Suez—” He broke off with a wry grimace. “Sorry. Couldn’t help it. Those places never seem quite real to me. But I don’t really want it to sound funny. It’s not funny when someone dies.”
“No. Did Mr. Shima use other names?”
“Yes. I don’t know what they were. And there is a suspicion that he could have used his job at the U.N. to cover and advance his other activities. The U.N. people aren’t saying anything, of course, but he was fired. For very private reasons, whatever they were. I couldn’t come right out and demand to know what the cops think, but my guess is, Mr. Shima might have been a blackmailer.”
“Was he stabbed, as Mr. Keeley said he was? Is that how he died?”
“Yes. A small thin blade which was thrust in, then worked around … practically no outward wound, but inside—”
“I understand.” The tea and those two appetizers hadn’t been enough. She was empty enough to float, and the thought of what had been done to Mr. Shima was doing unpleasant things to her tummy.
“But no sign of mugging, no attempt to get his billfold. He had several hundred on him. My police friend wants to know why I want to know, and I just told him that I was acquainted with somebody who had known Mr. Shima slightly … I tried t
o pass it off in a casual way. But if you are going to be interviewed, if they come to you anyway because of your living there where Shima died, I’d better offer my cop friend your name ahead of time.”
“All right.”
What name?
She was as bad as Mr. Shima—
“Let me know, will you, if the cops are going to talk to you there? And I can call my friend. I guess you’ll have to use your own judgement about how much to tell them. Your uncle, and all that. Actually if Shima was what the cops think he was, any one of a couple of dozen people might have done him in.”
“Yes, it seems they might. Do you know which Central American country?”
“One of the smallest. A banana republic—republic in name only, of course. No, I can’t remember the country but for some reason I remember the name of the principal city. My cop friend mentioned it.”
“And what was that?”
“Nueva Brisa. A new wind.”
“Buena Brisa.”
“No. Nueva Bree... sah.”
Something was wrong. Her head hurt. It had to be Buena, because … because she had told Mr. Fallon it was. What on earth had made her tongue slip like that, give him a totally irrelevant and wrong piece of information? I know better; I know enough Spanish to distinguish between good and new—
“Nueva Brisa—”
“Did you take Spanish in highschool, too?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“It’s not bad, having had it isn’t bad, if you’re going to travel south of the border. I was in Mexico a couple of years ago, and believe it or not—they flinched of course—but I got by, I ordered food and kept my pants pressed and even told the street peddlers I didn’t want any. What the peddlers said back I preferred not to translate.”
She laughed with him. She wanted to ask him a dozen things—where had he gone to school, where had his home been, where was his family … but these were personal items and none of her business.
“It’s a good thing that your Spanish wasn’t too good—”
“That’s right. Do you think you’ll be happy working upstairs? I understand the surroundings are pretty rich up there.”
“Is that where—”
“Oh, yes, it goes with the promotion. Did you know that there is a third floor, one even higher than the one on top of us? Only the topdogs up there. Old man Sampson keeps his Picassos up there, figures they’re safer than they would be at home. If I get a chance, I’ll show you the art gallery. I’ve only been there a couple of times myself. But maybe now—”
In spite of the headache, something dazzlingly happy seemed to fill her, a sense of newness, of fun. It was going to be fun to go upstairs with Mr. Dunavan.
“Have you told Miss Vonn?”
“Oh, I told her before I told you. I didn’t want her after me with her little hatchet.”
“Is that why she’s been … she’s been rather decent about letting me off to run errands? I thought she seemed kind of thawed out—”
“The frost is off the surface, no doubt.”
“I … I wanted to ask you. About clothes.” She stumbled to a halt. Was she supposed to ask Mr. Dunavan a thing like this, ask him about a personal thing like a wardrobe? “I don’t want to look shabby. Not when you’ve—”
Well, whether she was supposed to ask about such things or not, this time she had certainly pleased him. She couldn’t mistake the leap of pleasure in his eyes. For a moment there was something electric, quickly mounting and almost scary, in the air between them, and she had the crazy impression that he was about to reach for her. But then he laughed, a kind of short embarrassed laugh, and said, “You really do care, don’t you?”
“About your being sent up there? I … I can’t say how I feel, Mr. Dunavan. It’s terribly exciting, and I’m so glad for you, and that’s just trying to say it. And I mustn’t be the shabby cat you’ve brought along—”
“A shabby cat?” He laughed again. “You? You think that you’re shabby?” And then he got very serious and without looking at her, fooling with something on the desk, he said, “Don’t change. Please don’t change in any way at all.”
“I could … get my hair done.”
I could quit washing it in the sink and letting it dry any which way.
“For God’s sake,” he said, “you mean to have it done in one of those towering frizzed monstrosities all stiffened with varnish? No. I forbid it utterly!”
They laughed together then, but she thought, I’m not going to look stylish like the other executive secretaries, and though Mr. Dunavan couldn’t see the mended and faded stuff under the dress, those other women would sense it, and they’d even sense that she slept in her slip and didn’t own a nightgown. Tonight, she promised herself, I’ll buy a gown in Gimbel’s before I go home. This I must. I won’t make any drastic changes, nothing Mr. Dunavan will notice, but there will have to be enough money for me to buy a couple of dresses. Very quiet, nice dresses. Tom will have to let me get them.
She remembered then that she still had some of Uncle Bax’s money. What was left of the second payment. All of that first windfall had gone for the recording machine and for tapes to play on it when it wasn’t being used for dictation, and for a couple of debts Tom had owed for a long time.
The nightgown wasn’t bad, pink knit rayon with scallops of lace across the neck. She bought another bra, too, and some hose. She looked longingly at all of the new cosmetics, especially the eyeshadow. Miss Vonn wore green, which brought out the pale water-sparkle of her eyes, eyes you wouldn’t notice at all otherwise. Finally Jennifer indulged in a lipstick. Her old one was almost gone.
Crushed in the subway mass, breathing dust and the smells of sweat and tiredness, she shut her eyes and clung to the plastic grip from the rod above her head, and tried to remember what she had planned to cook for dinner. Held immobile, drowsing, she became aware of a hand that had come out of nowhere, a hand she couldn’t see but could feel, a progress across her ribs at the back as sinuous as a snake’s, and this anonymous hand crept in under her arm toward her bosom. Just for a moment, the hand said, hold still and let me have my fun. She controlled a shudder. The hand got as far as under her arm, the corner of the old purse, and she let go of the plastic grip and with the freed hand she punched the purse back, a quick and savage jab, and the hard old leather must have caught the unguarded fingers ends-on and just right because there was a muffled yelp of pain as the hand was jerked away.
The queerest of all was that the cry sounded astonishingly like that of a woman.
Jennifer had heard of people like that, of course, and in fact quite a few of the new experimental plays that she and Tom attended explored the lives, conflicts and desires of deviant people. But … on the subway?
Gripping the purse and her bag of purchases, she pushed her way to the door. She didn’t look into any faces, didn’t meet any eyes. Tomorrow I start riding the bus, she promised herself. It takes a little longer but I’m tired of the subway.
For some reason just then, packed into the mob that waited for the door to open, she thought of her dad; she thought of him as he was—as he still was—there on the farm where he struggled to grow potatoes. He had given up the rabbits long ago, except for a few he kept for pets. The rabbits with their pink eyes and toppling ears had defeated him. He finally got to the point where he said, you don’t eat a friend, and that had been the end of the rabbits. In the subway, packed among strangers, she had a sudden ache and a stinging of tears. All of the happy excitement she had felt in Mr. Dunavan’s office had drained away and there was nothing now, for the moment, but this lonely lostness and the yearning for home.
I’ve felt this way before.
The feeling goes away.
The train clawed to a halt, the door opened, the mob made its jungle dash for the stairs. She lagged behind a pillar to wipe her eyes. This had been a crazy, patchwork day, she told herself—it had gotten off to a miserable start with her finding that half of Uncle Bax’s latest g
ift was missing. And then that awful conversation on the phone with Tom….
Mr. Dunavan had been standing almost within earshot near the end of it. Hadn’t he wondered to whom she was talking? He must have.
A roommate, she thought instinctively. He thinks I share an apartment.
The strangest part of the day, though, the thing that had somehow cast a shadow of unreality over everything that had come later, had been the visit to Mr. Fallon. The dog, Baron: so gentle on the surface. Was he actually a guard?
He was.
Tea served by Sara, Sara the anonymous, the timid, the nearly mute. Sara, who listened to Mr. Fallon’s every word as if she wished her ears had antennas in them. No respect nor affection had been shown by Mr. Fallon toward Sara; he hadn’t even given her a last name. Mr. Fallon worked majestically in his study-library and Sara sat with her Tiffany lamp, when she wasn’t busy answering the door or serving tea.
Sara is a slave.
Funny, now, where that idea could have come from.
But she is. She’s Mr. Fallon’s slave, and if he chose to tell her to go jump off the Empire State Building, she’d do it.
The tears were dried now. Jennifer tucked purse and packages firmly under an arm. She remembered that when she got home she was supposed to go see Mr. Keeley and find out what he had told the cops.
Chapter 8
The lobby seemed gloomier and shabbier than ever. There was a thick, stale odor of smoke in the air, apparently from a leak in the building’s incinerator. She had seen Mr. Keeley mopping that very morning, but now there were muddy heel marks on the marble tile, and in the corners rolls of dusty fuzz. The battered canister filled with sand, beside the elevator doors, had sprouted a mushroom-patch of bent cigarette butts. Clusters of lights in the high ceilings showed blanks where bulbs had burnt out.
Maybe Mr. Keeley isn’t too much to blame. Maybe there’s more to do than one man can handle.
She started to punch the button for her floor, but then again remembered her errand with Mr. Keeley.
The Baxter Letters Page 6