The other occupant of the room was an auburn-haired girl with chubby cheeks and dimpled knees who was close to me in age. She was called Helen—a name, I fear, that may have gone to her head, for she frequently acted as though she had confused herself with Helen of Troy. Perhaps that is cruel of me to say. It’s just that I have encountered a number of cockatoos, but have met very few humans who preen quite as much as Helen did. She was constantly before the mirror, angling her face this way and that, feigning looks of surprise and rapture. With her fleshy face it was a bit like watching a soft lump of dough being molded into a series of baker’s forms, and she was only moderately convincing in these expressions. She never admitted as much, but I suspected she was secretly harboring aspirations to one day take to the stage. At the time of our cohabitation she was a shopgirl, a profession she felt was infinitely superior to my own. She made no secret about what she thought of my job as a typist at the precinct. Don’t fret, Rose, she often remarked to me, unsolicited. You won’t have to work in that ghastly place forever. I’m sure something better is bound to come along. And when it does, I’ll help you replace those mannish clothes of yours and we’ll find you some lovely, tasteful things. Helen was fond of using the word tasteful, but I came to understand, during our time together, that it didn’t mean quite the same thing to her as it did to me.
When I took up residence at the boarding-house, Helen had already occupied the room for some time, and had consequently selected its more advantageous half—which is to say, the side farthest from the hallway door. Having no reason to pass through Helen’s side of the room, I generally left her to her privacy. But on her way in and out of the bedroom, teleology dictated she was obliged to pass through my side, and she had no qualms about making a ruckus or leaving her shoes and stockings on the floor in my half of the room. I also suspect she rearranged things before I moved in so that all the most prized pieces of furniture resided solely on her side of the room. But I suppose that’s just human nature. Who’s to say I wouldn’t have done the same, had I been the first to move in myself?
In any case, during that particular week, Helen had been making a fuss about a gentleman caller she was to receive on Friday evening, so my apprehensions about work and Odalie were quickly consumed by Helen’s theatrics the moment I got home that day. Of course, on the sojourn home I had no idea how thoroughly I would be made to play a role in Helen’s social engagement. This latter discovery lay like a bear trap waiting to spring on me at the conclusion of my commute.
On my way home from the precinct, I ride the streetcar over the Brooklyn Bridge and finish the remainder of my journey on foot. Despite the passing automobiles and their intermittent low wail of Klaxon horns and nattering of engines, I have come to regard this process as a relaxing ritual, one that allows me to think over the events of the day. On that particular Friday, several abnormalities occurred at the precinct that had me especially preoccupied. In the morning we had taken the confessional statement of a man who seemed, at the first, quite sober, but who turned out to be extremely inebriated and perhaps not altogether sane.
I went into the interview room with the Lieutenant Detective and began taking dictation of the suspect’s statement in the usual way. At first, things seemed quite normal—just your run-of-the-mill husband and wife kitchen knife stabbing. An accidental crime of passion is always how the lawyers describe crimes like that later on in the courts. Not that I always attend the trials, but I do like to sit in from time to time, and I have always found the pairing of the words accidental and passion to be an odd turn of phrase—as if the accident were loving someone, not killing them. In any case, the man’s story was a very familiar one, and I took down everything he said with an automatic reflexivity.
But much to our surprise, ten minutes into the confession the suspect quite abruptly began describing a different crime altogether—something about drowning a man in the East River. Confused, I caught the Lieutenant Detective’s eye, and we exchanged a hesitant look. The Lieutenant Detective shrugged, and his eyes seemed to say, Well, if the chap wants to confess to two murders and not just one, let him hang himself. Keeping all traces of urgency out of his voice, the Lieutenant Detective dropped his line of questioning about the man’s wife and began to ask instead about this mystery drowning. He changed gears ever so gently, I noticed, and took a casual tack. The mood in the room significantly shifted, and it was suddenly as if the Lieutenant Detective was talking to a friend and discussing something as inconsequential as the weather. On instinct I felt my touch on the stenotype grow lighter and my presence recede into the wall, and it was as if they were alone. Finally, the man leaned over and dropped his voice to a whisper. The mayor had told him to do it, the man said; he was only following orders. I looked again at the Lieutenant Detective. I could tell by his external demeanor that he was struggling to maintain an unimpressed skepticism, but he had flinched at the mention of Mayor Hylan’s name, and the corners of his mouth had gone taut with an involuntary tension.
“And why,” the Lieutenant Detective asked in a condescending voice that clearly implied he was humoring our suspect, “would the mayor want you to attack this man?”
“Because,” our suspect said, “he was part of the invisible government! The corrupt one!” It was then, as the man shouted, that I began to detect a premiere whiff of bathtub gin on the man’s breath. He began to hiccup loudly. His mention of “the invisible government” was, I believe, a reference to a controversial speech Mayor Hylan had given, accusing men like Rockefeller of having too much control over politics. I realized we were hearing the mayor’s speech repeated through a filter of booze and possible insanity. The Lieutenant Detective struggled to reclaim order over the situation and reorient his line of questioning, but before he could successfully accomplish this aim, the suspect began to hiccup more loudly and worked himself into a state of extreme agitation. He began shouting again. “The mayor told me to do it! I’m a soldier of righteousness, I tell you, a soldier!”
Just then, the Sergeant poked his head in the door to see what all the commotion was about. Our suspect took one look at the Sergeant and leapt out of his chair. He snapped his hand to his forehead in a salute.
“Reporting for duty, Mr. Mayor, sir!”
The Sergeant blinked at the man saluting him, utterly stupefied. The scar on the Lieutenant Detective’s forehead rolled into a series of S’s, configured by the deep furrows of his concerned brow. It took us all a few minutes to realize we were witnessing an absurd case of mistaken identity. Suddenly the suspect spun around in a frenzy, vomited with a startling ferocity, and finally ended his spasms by passing out cold on the floor, his cheek pressed against the tile and his tongue lolling thickly out of his mouth. The whole room filled with the wretched smell of rancid, partially digested alcohol. The Sergeant looked at us, unamused.
“Get him out of here” was all the Sergeant said, and disappeared. We sat there, stunned for a few seconds, until the Lieutenant Detective shook himself, sighed, and got up from his seat. He leaned out the doorway of the interrogation room and called to a couple of deputies to help remove the drunken man now snoring loudly on the floor. I set about tidying up the stenographer’s desk and removing the used paper from the shorthand machine. What I’d been typing was likely useless. You couldn’t take a drunk man’s words down as testimony—at least not a man so drunk as to be incomprehensible. The suspect had become as inanimate as a sack of potatoes and barely opened his eyes as he was lifted and hauled away.
“I thought for certain that man was sober,” the Lieutenant Detective murmured, more to himself, it seemed, than to me.
“I did as well,” I said. “Couldn’t smell a drop on him, and he was so lucid at the start. Guess he had us both fooled.” The Lieutenant Detective looked up, surprised. This perhaps was the lengthiest exchange we’d shared in months. He regarded me for a few seconds. A strangely appreciative smile spread over his face, but it made me uncom
fortable, and I was forced to look away. We went back to putting the room in order, both of us carefully tiptoeing around the puddle of vomit in the middle as we did so.
“He sort of does, you know,” the Lieutenant Detective said.
“Who? Does what?”
“The Sarge. Look like Mayor Hylan.”
I bristled. “How rude! Although I can’t say I’m surprised by your disrespect, really.” My voice came out sounding shrill, uncontrolled. I was vaguely horrified. I adopted a brisker pace in gathering together a stack of files and headed for the door.
“It’s not an insult,” the Lieutenant Detective said, his eyes widening in surprise. This proved to be too much for me. Almost to the door, I whirled about on him.
“Mayor Hylan has been called a communist, and as you very well know, the Sergeant is not some sort of dirty Bolshevik. He is a good man.” I hesitated before adding, “You would no doubt be vastly improved if you were only half the man . . .”
I trailed off in this lecture, remembering my place and, more importantly, my desire to remain employed. Young and disrespectful though he might be, the Lieutenant Detective technically outranked both the Sergeant and myself. It wouldn’t do to dress him down too severely, so I halted and waited to be reprimanded in return. But he only gazed at me for several seconds, a solemn, pitying expression creeping into his eyes. “I stand corrected,” he said. This was unexpected, and I stood blinking and dumbstruck for the space of a full minute. Then, having no desire to stay and attempt to determine the sincerity of this comment, I simply turned on my heel and left the room.
It was all a lot to absorb. My job is often full of unruly men doing unruly things, but there was an air of absurdity—of dark absurdity—about the events of that Friday. And that exchange with the Lieutenant Detective! I felt humiliated, somehow, to have been brought down to such a level.
I got off the streetcar on the Brooklyn side of the bridge and began making my way home, absorbed in thought, still possessed by images of the crazy man who may or may not have drowned a man in the East River, of the Lieutenant Detective and his solemn expressions, of the new typist who had come in for an interview (the name of that latter individual playing musically in my head, tripping along to the pace of my own steps like a child’s song: Oh-dah-lee, Oh-dah-lee, Oh-dah-lee . . .). I thought of the brooch and what the Sergeant would say if he knew it was tucked away in the back of my desk drawer. I mused on the fact that, secretly, I rather agreed with the Lieutenant Detective about the Sergeant’s resemblance to Mayor Hylan. All of these thoughts and more skirted the edges of my reverie as I walked home automatically and with unseeing eyes.
Preoccupied thus, I wasn’t at all prepared for the ambush that awaited me back at the boarding-house. When I walked in, the first thing I encountered was a blast of thick stew-scented air. This first part, at least, was typical. The house generally smelled of bones boiling in water on the stove—mostly all chicken, but sometimes also beef. It was such a pervasive odor throughout the boarding-house, I often wondered if this meant I carried the smell of beef stock and chicken stock around with me in my clothes and my hair, unwittingly trailing it about the precinct and among my coworkers, who were too polite to remark upon it. But today when I walked in the house I instantly noticed there were a few additional fragrances wafting in the atmosphere: the scent of coffee brewing and of cologne. And cigarettes—it smelled very strongly of cigarettes.
I peered into the parlor and was greeted by a dense fug of cigarette smoke. The chalky cloud appeared even more opaque where it drifted under the weak light of the overhead electric bulb—and this, too, I spotted as being unusual, as Dotty did not often allow us to turn on the electric lights during the day. I blinked, and as my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting and stinging smoke, I made out the figures of two men perched side by side on the sofa, each casually arranged so that his legs were crossed with one ankle resting on the opposite knee. I thought, at first, that the smoke had affected my vision, but presently I realized this was not the case. I was not seeing double, but rather a pair of identical twins, even dressed and groomed in a similar manner.
“You must be Rose,” the one on the right said. Neither man got up from the sofa—a gesture that would have only been polite—and so I simply stood in silence, blinking at them. I noticed they were wearing similarly patterned but different-colored plaid jackets, complemented by identical boat shoes and straw boater hats. Somehow, though, I very much doubted the existence of an actual boat, as otherwise implied by their attire. There were ink stains on the thumb and forefinger of each man’s right hand. Clerks or accountants, I guessed.
The silence was broken as Dotty and Helen burst into the sitting room, each carrying a tray full of coffee things, the cups chattering against the saucers like teeth in the cold.
“There you are,” Helen exclaimed, as if my presence in the room was something they had long anticipated. Helen set her tray down next to Dotty’s, and Dotty began pouring out slightly burnt-smelling coffee from a very tarnished silver carafe. “You’re just in time to meet Bernard Crenshaw, my beau,” she said, pronouncing his name Burr-nerd. “And Leonard Crenshaw, his brother,” she finished, with a slight flourish of her hand. Bernard and Leonard. They had clearly fallen victim to the somewhat silly tradition of naming twins in a vaguely rhyming way, as if twins were not individual humans but rather two variations on the same theme. I knew there were lots of mothers who failed to resist this cozy habit.
“Actually, we mostly go by Benny and Lenny,” the one on the right said. In an attempt to be amicable, I repressed the snort that rose reactively to the back of my throat. Even more ridiculous than the almost-rhyme of their given names was the rhyme of their preferred sobriquets, but it would be rude to laugh outright. I did not approve of rude behavior in others, and I couldn’t very well permit myself a different standard. I regarded the twins again, trying to determine which one was Benny, Helen’s “beau.” Leave it to Helen to use a word like that. In addition to the faces she made in the mirror, there were times when her speech sounded inexplicably affected. My people are from the South, I once heard her drawl to an inquiring stranger. I knew that this was only true insofar as Sheepshead Bay could be considered the South, as her “people” were all Brooklynites, going back several generations.
Meanwhile, Dotty was flitting around with the distracted, burdened air of someone deeply inconvenienced by a surprise guest—and in this case, a guest who had inconsiderately duplicated himself. But I knew her too well; she was secretly delighting in the opportunity to entertain two young men, not to mention the pleasure she took in playing the martyred host. “Please forgive this old coffee service,” she said, meaning the silver carafe. “I didn’t know youse two would be staying for coffee or I woulda polished this ratty thing up.” I think she meant to extract a compliment, but failed in this mission. She addressed mainly the twin on the right, whose plaid jacket was predominantly red.
I decided Benny must be the one on the right, the one who had spoken up to introduce their nicknames.
“We were just saying how, since Benny brought Lenny along, I should find a girl-friend to bring along, too,” Helen remarked. There was a brittle, stretched quality to the cheerful tone of her voice, and suddenly her desperation was transparent—these were the strings that came along with Benny; wherever he went, his brother also needed to be entertained, a fact for which she had not been prepared. Suddenly Helen whirled in my direction. “Don’t you look smart today,” she said, the rhetorical comment echoing with emptiness. In an attempt to come up with a more specific compliment, she looked me over, her eyes traveling from my head to my toes. It did not appear they could wholly endorse what they found there. “You look . . . ,” she began, still casting about wildly for something she might find pleasing about my person. “You look so . . . healthy!”
“Helen!” Dotty chastised.
“What? I’m paying her a complime
nt. Normally she looks so drawn and pale. But look, dear”—she turned back to me—“look how your complexion is just perfectly rosy! You’d be a fool not to come out with us.
“And of course you can borrow some of my things,” she added quickly, making it clear that no matter how “healthy” I looked, she didn’t want me stepping into public with her dressed in the suit I’d worn to work and still had on now.
“I would go if I could,” Dotty interjected. “But of course, who would take care of the children?”
I suppose this was my cue to volunteer. Neither prospect seemed very appealing. At least with Helen and the twins I might get a nice meal. Dotty waited, and as the seconds ticked by, the look she gave me became increasingly laced with arsenic. In addition to Helen and myself, there were five other boarders, but they were all somewhat elderly, and none of them was reasonably equipped to babysit four small children. One of the oldest men who boarded at the house, a pensioner named Willoughby who had milky-blue eyes and who wore a copious amount of some sort of exotic, sickly-sweet cologne, would be all too happy to be left alone with the children, and I knew Dotty was guarding them from such an occurrence.
I looked from Dotty’s genuinely miserable face to Helen’s agitated, nervous expression and realized I had won this coveted invitation merely by default.
After a cup of coffee, my acquiescence was assumed, and I found myself whisked upstairs and forced to try on several rather frilly and ill-fitting dresses until one finally met with Helen’s approval. Eventually we came back downstairs with Helen’s dress fitted precariously to my admittedly scrawny frame by means of several black satin ribbons tied in strategic places. The quieter of the twins, the one in the blue plaid jacket—Lenny, I’d guessed by that time—made a halfhearted attempt to compliment me on the dress, a tactic I found somewhat offensive, as it had been made plain not more than fifteen minutes earlier that the dress was not something I could take credit for. A stickler for good manners, though, I mumbled a thank-you. Then we all said farewell to Dotty, who was tidying up the coffee dishes and doing absolutely nothing to conceal her disgruntled misery, and before I knew it we were out the door.
The Other Typist Page 3