The Other Typist

by Rindell, Suzanne

  The agenda for the evening was dinner and dancing. At first I was inwardly curious about the dinner part—I envisioned the kind of restaurant I had never been to, one with creamy white tablecloths and napkins and exciting things on the menu I had never tasted, like oysters Rockefeller. But the meal turned out to be diner food at a greasy spoon owned by a friend’s second cousin. The twins proudly informed us they received 20 percent off the total bill every time they dined.

  The conversation, I’m afraid to report, was rather inane throughout most of the evening. The twins were both the quiet sort—so quiet, in fact, there was something a bit unnerving and unnatural about their silence. Always happy to assume center stage, Helen tried to fill most of the dead space with chatter, but despite the fact she had a number of memorized lines and embellishing accents at her disposal, I could tell she was running thin on material after only thirty minutes of the twins’ stoniness. She was wearing an old-fashioned and rather fussy frock, and when she reached across the table her sleeve accidentally got caught in the puddle of murky gravy on her plate. The result was an extremely unbecoming brown stain running the length of her blousy forearm. She bemoaned this tragedy with great dramatic flare, and hinted—not too subtly, I might add—that as a gentleman Benny might think to assist her in the dress’s replacement. Benny either did not catch on to her insinuations or else did an excellent job of appearing not to. After dinner, we piled into a taxi-cab and gave the driver the address of some sort of dance hall to which the twins claimed to have been specifically invited.

  As had been the case with the restaurant, the dance hall was not as I’d (very optimistically, I now realize) pictured. The dance, they’d explained during the taxi-cab ride, was being put on by their club. Upon hearing this disclosure, Helen had turned to me, the delighted gleam of bragging in her eyes, and had hissed, That’s right, Rose; they belong to a social club! The words social club loomed large in the air. Involuntarily, I pictured the lush oak-paneled rooms I had so often glimpsed through a high open window here and there while walking the city blocks near Grand Central. Behind those oak-paneled rooms I imagined marbled hallways and thickly carpeted sitting rooms and—with any luck—a swell ballroom with decadent refreshments and young couples dancing. And perhaps all these imaginings are what lies behind the oak-paneled rooms, but I cannot claim to be able to verify that, for the place we were destined to go was a cheaply lit café near Broadway as it crossed over Sixth Avenue and plunged deeper into the West Side. The “social club” in question turned out to be a volunteer sporting league, whose central organization was based in Hell’s Kitchen.

  Inside the café, there was a small elevated platform meant to serve as a grandstand for the orchestra. Four musicians were all that made up the entire “orchestra,” but they played with tremendous enthusiasm, perhaps in part to make up for their lack of greater numbers. We found a table in a corner and sat down to take in the scene. A quick survey revealed a pathetic but sincere effort on behalf of the dance’s organizers. Someone had draped black oilcloths over the café tables and set out mason jars that had been first scrubbed clean and then outfitted with little white candles that were now alight and burning brightly. The same someone had probably also hung the long strands of colored crepe paper that were draped in awkward abortive swags high up along the walls. There were only two couples dancing to the music in the middle of the room, and they were dancing a conservative and dowdy foxtrot. Even in my premature state of spinsterhood, I was aware this dance was beginning to go out of fashion. I peered over at Helen in an attempt to gauge her dismay, but her face showed a sort of haughty, imperial delight. I felt a strange inkling of pity for her. But like an evening chill, this sympathy passed through me and announced itself with the brevity of a shiver. After only a minute or two of sitting at the table, she insisted we take to the dance floor straightaway, and so we did.

  It will come as no surprise when I say Leonard and I were a bit of an awkward abomination on the dance floor together. After three songs’ worth of strained shuffling and tripping over each other’s toes, I was dripping with perspiration from the effort and could no longer take Helen’s mirthful shrieks and jibes whenever she and Bernard clipped close to us on the dance floor. I suggested to Leonard we sit it out for a bit. Ever silent, he nodded sternly and did not attempt to feign any great disappointment. We sat back down at the same table in the corner. There was a wilted carnation in the lapel of his plaid jacket I hadn’t noticed previously. I commented on the “pretty” flower (it wasn’t—I was merely trying to make conversation), and he very mechanically extracted it and handed it to me.

  “Oh—no,” I said. “I wasn’t hinting.”

  “Take it. It’ll have gotten crummy by morning anyway.”

  “All right.”

  I took the flower, but didn’t know what to do with it. It didn’t belong in my hair (carnations aren’t really that sort of flower, are they?). After several minutes, I managed to get the thing tucked into one of the black satin ribbons tied about my torso.

  “Thanks.”

  “S’all right.”

  The four-piece “orchestra” changed to a waltz, and we watched Helen and Bernard change their movements accordingly. A sweaty sheen was beginning to break out over Helen’s fleshy brow, and her rouge had begun to run in ruddy rivulets down her cheeks, but her face bore a look of fierce determination that suggested all who witnessed her fatigue would do well not to comment on it. As we observed the couple’s enthusiasm for dance tip slightly toward obstinacy and then back again, Leonard drummed his fingers on the table. I believe if Leonard and I shared anything that night, it was an acute awareness of being there solely to serve as chaperones for Helen and Bernard.

  “What do you do, Leonard?”

  “Benny and I are clerks over at McNab’s.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “S’all right.”

  “Been there long?”

  “Going on four years.”

  “I see.”

  And so forth. I won’t repeat the entire sum of idle chatter that Leonard and I occupied ourselves with that evening, as I’m afraid most of it was interchangeable and utterly unremarkable. It would seem this is the gift modernity has bestowed upon our generation: the practice of “dating,” an awkward procedure where a man and a woman find themselves talking rot to each other in a darkened room. If it were up to me, I would say modernity can keep it, as I want no part.

  When Helen and I crawled into our beds later that same night, we were both exhausted—she from the efforts of dancing and me from the efforts of making conversation with a man who if he were any duller might be declared catatonic by those in the medical profession. I could hear her sighing happily behind her side of the sheet that divided our room. I knew there was a sort of code to these sighs—Helen wasn’t given the rush by boys very often. She was absolutely desperate to be given the sort of rush the female protagonists were always getting in the stories she pored over in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post.

  “Thank you, Rose,” she murmured in a very sleepy, pleasant voice. I have always known Helen to be an overly expressive person, but I realized this moment was the first time I had ever heard her express a sentiment of gratitude. For the second time that evening, I felt a tiny inkling of warmth toward her. She only wanted to be liked, after all—and this was something I could tolerate, even if Helen’s primary desire was to be liked by boys as lowly and as dull as Bernard Crenshaw.

  “Oh, but I meant to ask . . . you didn’t go and blab about your job to Lenny, did you, Rose?”

  “No,” I replied cautiously. I knew where this tack was going. The friendly feeling I’d had just seconds before was already passing, as though a tiny sun had come out to warm my skin and was now tucking itself back away behind some clouds, leaving me colder than before.

  “Good. You can’t expect to charm a fella much by talking about typing in a police
precinct! You might bend his ear a bit with the gruesome bits, but it’s not exactly feminine, you know, all that business. Gotta always remember to guard your feminine mystique, or what have you.” She paused as if deciding to hold her tongue, but the desire to restrain herself crumbled away quickly (as it so often did for Helen), and she pressed on with the terrible tirade of what she often liked to call kind-spirited advice. “And I wouldn’t take it personally if Lenny didn’t fancy you; his brother says he’s very particular. Likes his girls to look like Mae Murray and all that.” I heard her sigh again and roll over. “Don’t worry, Rose. You’re a sweet girl, and I’m sure there’s plentya fellas that go for that sorta line, too.” I knew she was succumbing to sleep as her true Brooklyn accent—an accent I rarely heard—was beginning to present itself. Her face went into the pillow and the next part was a bit muffled, but I think it was, “Next time we’ll just have to gussy you up good an’ right.”

  My only reply to Helen was an indignant silence that she utterly failed to register as she dropped almost instantly into a deep sleep and began snoring with surprising guttural force. The warm feeling I’d had toward Helen was definitely gone, along with any trace notion of sisterhood that still lingered stupidly in my head. Of course, it was easy to have thought as much at the time. By that very next Monday Odalie had arrived in my life, swathed in all her fashionable clothes and dark mystery. And unlike Helen, Odalie’s influence turned out to be much more difficult to get out from under.

  3

  Our precinct is located in a very dank and humid old brick building. I am told that it is one of a small handful of buildings still standing in Manhattan that date from the time of the Dutch settlement and was originally intended to serve as some sort of storehouse for grain and cattle. I do not know whether this alleged architectural history of the building is accurate, but I do know that the brick walls are often wet with condensation and it is filled with the kind of humidity that does very little to keep a body warm. None of its windows receive the benefit of direct sunlight; instead they are filled with the kind of steady indirect light particular to dense urban spaces. As a result, the whole precinct is filled all day long with a somewhat eerie greenish glow, deepening the initial impression that you are either immersed in one great fish tank or else caught between several walls of them.

  There is also a distinctly heady, air-thickening odor that pervades the place. In all my time working at the precinct and observing its characteristics, I have arrived at the conclusion that this odor is the scent of alcohol perspiring through the body’s many pores. There is something very unique about the smell of whiskey or gin or whatnot souring on a person’s breath, hair, and skin. You would think, perhaps, that this odor would come and go along with the varieties and quantities of men who import it, like a tide washing in and out. And indeed, the potency of the scent does wax and wane to some extent, but there is always a certain trace of it—however faint—that remains in our presence on a permanent basis.

  Don’t misunderstand me. I am actually quite fond of my job, and I have come to develop a sense of familiarity and loyalty for the precinct’s environs. But usually when an outsider arrives, we are, all of us—the Sergeant, the Lieutenant Detective, the officers, the patrolmen, Iris, Marie, and myself—spurred by some native instinct to apologize for what we perceive to be its deficiencies, and this was certainly the case when Odalie arrived for her first day on the job.

  On that particular morning, we were all crowded around Marie’s desk having an impromptu meeting when Odalie walked in the door. The topic of discussion was our new status as a special crackdown unit, and how we all had an important part to play in the organization of each and every raid if we were to successfully shut down the neighborhood’s speakeasies. The Sergeant seemed rather impassioned by the subject; he spoke to us in tones of measured emphasis and with a sense of great command, and I daresay the men seemed considerably motivated by his efforts. Earlier that month a rumor had made its way through the grapevine that if we successfully pulled off five or more raids in the coming weeks, we’d have our picture taken for the papers and the Commissioner would make a special visit to our precinct to shake everybody’s hand. Naturally we were all very excited and nervous about this prospect; I looked around at all the eager faces and couldn’t help but notice that the promise of our little precinct making the headlines had even lured the Chief Inspector out of his office.

  Usually the Lieutenant Detective is the highest-ranking officer hanging about the office—although, to be honest, we all respected the Sergeant as the true overseer of the office, on account of the Sergeant’s years of experience as compared to the Lieutenant Detective’s youth and immature attitude. But that morning even the Lieutenant Detective’s supervisor—our precinct’s chief inspector—was there, hovering around Marie’s desk with the rest of us. The Chief Inspector is an elderly, long-limbed man who has always preferred to deal with the paperwork generated by the Lieutenant Detective and the Sergeant from within the confines of his private office. His most notable features are his milky gaze and white beard, and in my opinion there is something faintly wraithlike about him. This impression possibly stems from the fact that most days, the only evidence of the Chief Inspector’s existence is the thin, sweetish aroma of his pipe tobacco emanating in slender wisps from the crack under his office door.

  The meeting, as informal as it was, lurched to an awkward halt when Odalie entered the precinct. The door banged shut. We all turned to find Odalie standing in front of the threshold, peering at us with her wide blue eyes and a faint smile on her lips. Her sudden apparition and elegant countenance were utterly incongruous with her surroundings. We were struck. Even the intermittent coughing and the rustling of papers that had thrummed along throughout our meeting as a backdrop of white noise suddenly died down, deflating like a wind sock abruptly abandoned by the breeze. Odalie, to her credit, appeared absolutely unperturbed. She calmly unpinned her hat (a tidy little velveteen toque hat, pinned over her as-yet-unbobbed chignon) and removed her gloves. The Lieutenant Detective hurried over and helped her off with her winter coat. She seemed to own, as I may have already mentioned, a lot of very nice things.

  “Welcome, welcome. Glad you could make it,” I heard the Lieutenant Detective say somewhat absurdly as he held her coat. It was as though Odalie had come for a dinner party rather than to take up her post as a typist. Odalie laughed in her free, easy, musical way.

  “All right, boys, that’s that,” the Sergeant finally proclaimed, snapping our attention back to the matter at hand. “Let’s all get to work now.” He clapped his hands together twice, as though we were something dirty he was dusting off his palms. The meeting was over. The Sergeant knew a crumbling audience when he saw one. We scattered, each of us pantomiming immediate purpose in the hope that feigning rapt busyness would lead to actually being busy. Once again the Chief Inspector retreated back into his office, evaporating into his cloud of pipe tobacco and easing his nerves as well as our own. Slowly but surely, the pace of activity began to settle into its familiar clip—with one exception.

  I unabashedly observed Odalie move through her first day at the precinct. After the Lieutenant Detective showed her to the coatrack and hung her coat for her (a billowing wrapover number, lilac in color; I believe it was cashmere, though I wasn’t close enough to it to be sure), he escorted her in a promenade-like circle around the main office, introducing her by turns to each officer and staff member the two of them encountered along the way. Odalie, I noticed, was polite to all but modified her demeanor ever so slightly to accommodate each. With the Sergeant she was ladylike, formal. With Marie she was chummy; they laughed loudly together over a few familiar remarks. With Iris she turned a mirror to Iris’s own aloofness—a professional distance, I know, Iris probably appreciated.

  The Lieutenant Detective also introduced her to several of the patrolmen before they went out to walk their routes, or beats, as they liked to call them
, short for beaten paths. I looked on as she extended a flirtatious hand to O’Neill, causing him to color slightly about the cheeks and lower his dark lashes shyly over his sleepy blue eyes. With Harley she allowed herself to chuckle indulgently at his suggestion they plot to play a prank on the Lieutenant Detective (the Lieutenant Detective looked less amused by this prospect). With Arp she nodded intently as he gestured nervously with his small hands and communicated to her in an instructive tone the importance of typing up a booking sheet with the utmost accuracy. With Grayben she shook hands firmly, looked him in the eye, and did not smile at his lewd jokes—instinctively knowing, somehow, that it was best to stake her ground with him straightaway.

  And then, before I knew it, the Lieutenant Detective and Odalie were standing in front of my desk. I glanced up from the paperwork I had been proofreading and adjusted my expression to one of polite, detached interest.

  “And last but not least, the lovely Miss Baker,” the Lieutenant Detective said. I winced. I am no deluded fool, you see, and I have long since come to comprehend that lovely is not the adjective most people would use to describe me. To be blunt: I am plain. Hair the color of a common field mouse. Eyes the same. Regular features, average height. Clothes that attest rather frankly to my class and profession. I am so plain, in fact, that I am almost remarkably so. Having been in the police business for a couple of years now and knowing something about the nature of eyewitness reports, I am fairly confident that I could commit any number of crimes and get off scot-free, simply by virtue of being utterly unmemorable to a witness. My plainness was a fact, and a fact of which I’m certain the Lieutenant Detective was well aware. And so, wounded that the Lieutenant Detective was willing to mock me in front of an entirely new addition to our office staff just to settle an old score, I shot him an acid look. But Odalie took my hand in hers and instantly smoothed the air of discord.