Follow Me

by Joanna Scott

  Indeed, it was something, but not enough to change much. She’d keep her job, and the two of them would settle into a comfortable, professional relationship. He’d take to calling her Sally; she’d call him Arnie. His wife, a cipher behind her dark glasses, would stop in occasionally, and she’d give Sally expensive hand-me-downs — Chanel purses and Mr. John hats, along with clothes for Penelope that her own children had outgrown.

  Through the next year, Arnie would rouse the firm from stagnancy, steadily luring back clients, adding an attorney, then another attorney, and then a fourth, plus a secretary for each man, so by the summer of 1963 all the rooms would be bustling with activity, the phones would ring constantly, and Sally, as Arnie’s personal secretary and the main receptionist, would be at the hub of it all, forwarding calls, sorting correspondence, and greeting every visitor with a smile that conveyed her dedicated pride. She was proud to be working for Kennedy, Kennedy and Caddeau, proud to play an essential part in the firm, and proud, most of all, to see how Arnie would blush when he dictated a letter, or maybe he’d forget his hat on his way out or trip as he entered the office, proving that no matter how hard he tried to hide it he couldn’t get used to her presence, and just the sight of Sally, day after day, month after month, was enough to fluster him.

  NOVEMBER 22, 1963.

  There they were, the both of them, thirty-three years old, impossible!, Sally posing inside the mirror, and Sally on the outside, observing.

  Good morning to me.

  Good morning to you.

  Touch of eyeliner on the top lid, curling up, like this, whiskery tip at the edge, and mascara, then puff-puff of rouge over the foundation, coat of hair spray, that’s nice, lipstick on pouting lips, mmm, slip on that plaid kilt, white blouse, a Mr. John hat in pink felt wired into a narrow dome and topped by an ivory button. Flash a smile, that’s good, and tug on the chain to turn off the light.

  “Come on, Miss Penelope Bliss, we have to go!”

  “I’m not ready.”

  “Well, get ready!”

  “You get ready.”

  “I am ready. Now hurry up, you’re going to make us late.”

  “Just stop bugging me.”

  Of all the young girls she’d ever met, she’d never known one to be as hotheaded and stubborn as her own daughter. Tap, tap, tap, one minute, two, five minutes… finally, now scurry along, hurry up, hop-hop down the steps and rush the seven blocks through the cold drizzle to Penelope’s school, but the doors were already closed, she’d have to sign her daughter in again and come up with a new excuse, the second time this week they were late. And then she missed the 8:11 bus and had to wait in the cold.

  Damn that bus. Damn the rain. Damn time for passing too fast for her to keep up with it.

  She resigned herself: it was going to be one of those days. As she spun through the revolving doors into the lobby of the Terminal Building, she imagined the onslaught of fresh inconveniences awaiting her. She heard the echo of her own heels clacking over the marble tiles as an annoyance, and she was so absorbed by her irritation that she forgot to say hello to Freddy Balin, the Terminal’s janitor, passing in wordless concentration right beneath his outstretched arm as he fluffed a feather duster across the elevator’s dial.

  Good morning, you’ve reached the offices of —

  Say Kennedy, Kennedy and Caddeau five times fast, and it becomes Kendycandyc’doo.

  And how may I direct your call?

  She fielded a call for Arnie from an executive at the Union Trust. The name of the bank reminded her that she was two days late with her rent. Funny how she had more money than she’d ever had in her life, and it wasn’t enough. The more she had, the more she saved, and the more she wanted to spend. She wished she had enough money to make both her offspring rich — the daughter she was raising and the son she’d left behind. And she wouldn’t mind earning extra cash to spend as she pleased. At the same time, she wished she’d never revealed to Mr. Griffin Marcus that Bennett Patterson was her daughter’s father.

  The phone was ringing. The newest associate, Mr. Lipton, was standing at her desk. His own secretary had called in sick, so could Sally type a letter for him? Could Sally make the coffee? Could Sally find the report that the other associate, Mr. Tweet, had mislaid? Yes and yes and yes, Sally could do lots of things. But goddamn it, would you look at that! The carbon paper ripped when she pulled it from the typewriter, and she had to type the letter all over again. And then the paper wore through beneath the pressure of the eraser’s wheel. And then it was lunch break, rain beat against the windows, and the two other girls in the office both had appointments, so instead of fighting the weather and going alone to one of the diners along Court Street, Sally ordered a pastrami sandwich and ate it at her desk, paging through an old copy of Life,pausing over the travel ads with their photographs of white sandy beaches fringed by palms.

  Wouldn’t it be nice to spend a week in the sun with a darling beau? She was thirty-three years old, an old hag with missing teeth, men didn’t even look twice at her anymore, construction workers didn’t whistle, and she hadn’t been on a date for so long she’d lost track of how much time had passed. Poor Sally. Lonely Sally. How did she come up with that stupid name Bliss anyway? For a moment she couldn’t remember. Was it even worth remembering? Her own insignificance felt immense right then. She was notable for her high-speed typing, for ripping the carbon paper when she lifted it from the typewriter, for making coffee that others found weak. She was one of a kind — hardly. Obviously, she was replaceable. Even her daughter, now that she had a doting father, could have managed without her. And her son, wherever he was — to him she would never be more than the absent benefactor who kept adding to his college fund. Did he have a college fund? It was unbearably sad not to know what her son was doing with the money she sent him regularly. Everything was unbearably sad — the unforgiving light of the ceiling bulb, the rain beating against the windows, the greasy pastrami, the crumpled paper in the wastebasket representing all the dull letters she’d had to type twice.

  How sorry for herself she felt. And wasn’t self-pity a comfort in itself? Just to think about how she deserved more than she had — this was something. She’d been through it, that’s right, ever since way back when Georgie of Fishkill Notch had told the truth about her. But who would have guessed that having a baby and running away from home was only the beginning, and the story would go on and on, until she couldn’t take it anymore, and then —

  And then?

  Then she would humbly beseech the Lord to comfort her and pardon her iniquity and bring good tidings and subject her not to diverse temptations in all Thy grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ. Amen.

  Whatever that all meant.

  It meant Sally was looking for love.

  Sally was looking for a man. A nice man. Mr. Right.

  There he was.

  But that wasn’t Mr. Right. That was just Mr. Caddeau returning from a late lunch —

  Coming through the door, rushing rain-drenched and red-faced, slurring, stuttering, mashing words into a pulp of garble as he tried to say, he was trying to say, to tell Sally, to convey the news with the correct words, simple words, just say it: “They’ve shot Kennedy!”

  Kennedy? As in Kendycandyc’doo? That’s all Sally could think of right then: Arnie was announcing that ancient Mr. Kennedy, son of the firm’s founder, had been shot. But wait a second — wasn’t Mr. Kennedy already dead?

  “What did you say?”

  It would be understood only as a simple declaration: “President Kennedy has been shot!”

  President Kennedy, the perfect lover of Sally Bliss’s dreams, shot on a Dallas street and soon to be declared deceased over national news. What did it mean? It meant, didn’t it, that the Soviet armada was afloat, the Cubans were angry, and missile silos all over the world were opening their hatches to the sky? Stop! Say it’s not so. Please, hold Sally, take her in your arms, let her indulge in the luxury of fear
for a moment.

  “That beautiful man. It’s unbelievable,” Sally whispered. Yes, Arnie agreed. It was unbelievable. There was a tremor in his voice, and even as he blotted the tear on her cheek with his thumb, she saw the swell of tears in his eyes. He had never seemed nobler than at that moment. Despite his shock, he was steady enough to support her as she folded all her weight against him. What a comfort he was, this good man, her boss, offering solace that was more affectionate than Sally would have ever allowed herself to expect, offering a hint of intimacy as if it were a natural response, brushing his lips against hers, pressing his lips more firmly in an effort to tell her that it would be all right, they’d get through it, the nation would recover from the blow and the two of them, why, they’d have each other from here on in, so kiss him back, Sally, go ahead, lock your mouth to his and become familiar with the taste, to savor later.

  After the others had returned to the office bearing the news that the president’s injuries were catastrophic, after it was agreed that they should all go home early and Sally had started walking to the bus stop, she thought about the meaning of that kiss. The crackling from a transistor radio at a corner newsstand was the sound of chaos. The president was dead. What the consequences of the assassination would be for the country and the world, Sally didn’t want to contemplate. On the other hand, she was sure that she could predict what would follow from the moment her lips touched the lips of Arnie Caddeau.

  There had been more to it than his attempt to comfort her. She’d understood this in a vague way even as she had clung to him, and she experienced a more expansive realization as she walked along Court Street. She pictured how he’d come rushing into the office; as she rehearsed the memory, it seemed that he’d chosen her to hear the awful news. He’d plunged breathlessly through the door and toward her as though, at that moment, she was the only one who mattered to him. And now, because of the subtlest communication they had shared in each other’s arms, they were in agreement about something that they didn’t dare put into words.

  Oh, but look at her crossing the Court Street Bridge in the drizzle, floating more than walking, not noticing the sidewalk stained with mud, the flattened cigarillo holder on the curb like the crushed carcass of a white beetle, or the river flowing below with a deceptive sluggishness toward the lip of the falls, its surface rust-tinged, as though there were a powerful flame burning in its depths. Strange to think that this same dirty, dreary river that she had followed from its source had led her to the place where she finally belonged. After all the false starts and losses and mistakes of her youth, she was embarking on a new beginning, one paradoxically generated by that awful ending recorded with fresh blood and brain on a convertible Lincoln Continental in Dallas.

  The president was dead. The fixed certainty of that fact stood in contrast with her evolving impressions of the man who had been her boss for two years. Mr. Arnold Caddeau. She never would have guessed he was such a romantic. It was terribly wrong to think of him this way at such a time, when the country was in shock. But she couldn’t stop from imagining the next encounter that would follow from the first. The touch of his lips on hers, the scent of lavender on his skin, his silky sideburns, his peppermint teeth. She knew she should proceed cautiously, since she really couldn’t be sure that her interpretation of the moment was absolutely correct. Had they really experienced something crucial together? Well, she knew what she’d felt. She didn’t doubt that she found him alluring. He wasn’t the kind of man that other women would have identified as irresistibly attractive, and yet she was finally ready to admit to herself that she’d been attracted to him for months. Maybe she had sensed, without quite being conscious of it, that he was attracted to her. Maybe they’d been looking for an excuse to move beyond their routine formalities. Any intimacy could be only hurtful to others, dangerous to themselves. But maybe they couldn’t help it and were already in love.

  The president was dead, long live the president. Who killed JFK? Hum, buzz, whisper of conspiracies. It was the Reds, people said. It was the CIA. It was the Mob’s own Murder Inc. Once ignited, the lust for revenge is an eternal flame. A great man’s death deserves to be honored by another great man’s death, so the story goes. That and the concoction of poisons mixed in fifty-gallon tubs and deposited in the empty carcasses of B-52s, to be dispensed when the need arises. The world is too much with us. Who can blame those tender souls who stop buying newspapers because the headlines are just too damn depressing!

  Sally registered the news items as a set of symptoms that could be ameliorated with love. In the midst of the country’s turmoil, she felt as though she’d discovered that she had a secret ability to walk on water. And as if in an effort to record her happiness, she took to saving the receipts for all the bills paid by Arnold Caddeau on her behalf. Twenty dollars and change for a whole night’s stay at the Cadillac Hotel, though the room was used only for two hours on the frosty afternoon of December 10, 1963. Thirty-two dollars for a silver bracelet purchased from Foster’s Boutique. Sixteen dollars for an elegant lunch at the Bonville up by the lake. Another twenty for a second stay at the Cadillac Hotel, paid in full January 15, 1964. Twelve dollars for a rhinestone chameleon brooch purchased at the Art Gallery, March 3, 1964, intended as a birthday present for her daughter, with happy birthday wishes from her mother’s boss.

  A present for Penelope from Mr. Caddeau? Really? From that disgusting man? Penelope, age eleven, wiser than her years, knew up from down. She may not have clearly understood the nature of the affair and didn’t suspect that her mother occasionally took an extra hour for lunch in order to strip off her clothes and climb into bed with Arnold Caddeau. But Penelope was sharp enough to guess that her mother’s boss was responsible for her mother’s happiness, and her mother’s happiness was making her flighty and selfish. Sally didn’t bother to prepare a proper dinner. Either they’d go out, or she’d bring home a bucket of fried chicken. Sally didn’t bother to come watch Penelope play shortstop in the girls’ softball league on Saturday afternoons. Sally missed the teacher-parent midyear conference simply because she forgot. She forgot everything that mattered, all because her head was stuffed with thoughts of her lovey-dove boss. That disgusting man. Penelope had no use for his gift of a rhinestone-studded chameleon. Into the wastebasket it went.

  “Baby, don’t do that!”

  “Leave me alone!”

  Sally’s darling child, her purpose in life, her little princess — she hadn’t been brought up to become a spoiled little brat. But who was really the spoiled brat! Go look in the mirror, Sally Bliss.

  All right, she’d look. There she was, lashes extended with a fancy new mascara, lips a nice ripe ruby red, no wrinkles yet other than the laugh lines at the corners of her twinkling eyes. She looked better than she had in years, as long as she didn’t open her mouth wide enough to display her broken teeth. She couldn’t help it if she was happy. She who had lost so much through her first three decades of life had finally found a point of stability. Too bad that Arnie was already married and would stay married, not because he loved his wife but because he was a good man who honored his commitments. And consider that the poor woman had been diagnosed with some terrible degenerative eye disease. There was nothing to be done about it, no prevention or cure. Arnie and his wife had decided to keep the matter to themselves. Not even their children knew about it. But Sally knew. After their first rendezvous at the Cadillac Hotel, Arnie revealed to her that his wife was going blind. He loved Sally, he really did, but she couldn’t expect him to leave a wife who was going blind.

  Of course not. He loved her, and she loved him. She didn’t think of herself as his mistress; rather, their relationship was a secret treasure to protect, for others would covet it. Sally deserved Arnie, Arnie deserved Sally, and they never ceased to be grateful for the affection they shared.

  Over the course of several months they established a comfortable routine. They learned to communicate their intentions through glances and scribbled no
tes (meet me at…) and took delicious pleasure in the subterfuge. They made sure to give no reason for anyone in the office to suspect what they were up to. In public, they were convincingly indifferent to each other. But oh how that man adored her, he couldn’t contain himself, whenever they were alone he grabbed her, spun her toward him, kissed her, told her she was beautiful. This woman who stared back from the mirror: this woman was beautiful, and she stirred in Sally a distracting pride.

  Who could blame her for forgetting the conference with her daughter’s teacher? She tried to make it up to Penelope by ordering a banana split for them to share.

  But Penelope hated bananas.

  Since when did she hate bananas?

  Ever since right now.

  Ever since she was eleven years old and one week. At eleven years and six months, she still hated bananas and would not forgive her mother for forgetting to pick up fresh milk at the store. By her twelfth birthday, she was even angrier. Sally kept trying to pretend that she was a devoted mother, though she was always late coming home and when she was home she was either vacant-eyed or absorbed by some soap opera magazine, leaving her daughter to sit in front of the TV watching show after show — that’s if Penelope wasn’t banging on the top of the old black-and-white RCA, trying to stop the spill of horizontal lines that kept filling the screen. Nothing worked properly anymore; her mother couldn’t be bothered to repair anything that broke because her head was stuffed with thoughts of her lovey-dove boss, who wouldn’t marry her or even come visit her at home. And now and then there were those embarrassing nights when Sally couldn’t stand being alone in her bed. She’d go out with her girlfriends and come home drunk and belt out those syrupy songs for all the world to hear. Such a foolish mother was hard to endure month after month, year after year, and by the time she was thirteen, in the summer of 1966, Penelope Bliss announced that she couldn’t stand it anymore and was moving to Litchfield, Prospect County, to live with her father.