The Other Typist

by Rindell, Suzanne

  Today O telephoned to a friend and stayed on the ’phone for several minutes discussing evening plans. Caught me looking at her when she was hanging up the receiver and began to ask me a question, but was interrupted by the Lieutenant Detective, who wanted me to go take dictation of a suspect’s statement in the interrogation room. I think she was getting ready to ask me to go along with her and her friend that evening. Am almost sure of it.

  Left her handbag behind when she went to lunch today. Saw a carton of cigarettes peeking out from inside. The carton had the name Gauloises written on it. Never heard of the brand before, sounds foreign. But then, never smoked a cigarette before, either. Took advantage of a moment when no one was looking and slipped one cigarette out of the carton. Went outside to the alley to smoke it, but realized too late I had no match or Wonderlite to light it. Put cigarette in drawer next to O’s brooch. Hope she won’t notice one cigarette missing. She shouldn’t be smoking anyway. Sends the wrong idea. Doing her a favor. If she only knew what a good friend I could be. Has all the makings of a true lady; just needs someone with a sharp eye to keep her from being too foolish.

  O took Iris to lunch today! Over me. Old, expressionless Iris, with her mannish little neckties. When they came back I was sweet as pie and asked all sorts of polite questions about their lunch, which O answered as if the whole situation had nothing to do with me. Would be offended, but can’t be bothered to care. Clearly I have overestimated O. She and Iris can have each other.

  O came in a full twelve minutes late today. Did not apologize. The Sergeant said something to her about the time. Think she made a joke about it, but her voice was too low for me to hear from across the room. She laughed, and then to my horror the Sergeant chuckled a little, too. Am beginning to dread her arrivals in the mornings, for all the silly blustering that comes in the door along with her.

  • • •

  I ALWAYS ASSUMED my notes were patchy and sporadic at best, but reviewing them now, I see I was quite thorough. There are a great many more entries in my notebook—as I said, the ones I’ve included here only represent a sampling. But there is no great anomaly in my interest, only in my methods. From the very start Odalie was charming, and she could be very friendly and persuasive when she wanted. The false assumption that Odalie was what one might call a people person was an easy one to make. But in those early weeks, I uncovered a small truth: If one observed Odalie more closely, with a more careful eye (as I was wont to do), one might intuit that Odalie—for all her charm—did not care for most people. When people approached her desk, a very fine yet perceptible tension knit itself around the corners of her mouth, always preceding the wide smile she eventually spread superficially upon her face with the distracted, detached ease of someone spreading butter on toast.

  And of course people always wanted to talk to her. If they couldn’t talk to her, they settled for talking about her. The gossip began one lunchtime while a bunch of us were standing around the pushcarts that sold pierogi wrapped in newspaper and little paper cones of watered-down coffee on the street outside our precinct, and entered an immediate and vigorous repeated cycle that often went something like:

  “I heard she went out to California with a fella, but he showed her all about how he had a right hook like Jack Delaney. So she stole his money and ran away.”

  “I heard she was in a moving picture once. She danced on top o’ the table with Clara Bow.”

  “Oh yeah? How come we never seen the movie, then?”

  “Will H. Hays got his meathooks on it and got it banned. Said it was too racy to be showed in public. Wasn’t decent, if ya get my meaning.”

  “Well, that’s convenient.”

  “What’re ya tryin’ to say?”

  “I’m just saying I’ll believe it when I see the picture.”

  “And I’m just saying I heard what I heard.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear. I think she’s a nice girl.”

  “I agree. She’s elegant!”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. I heard she was a gangster’s girl. Yeah, see, that’s how come she’s got all that fancy loot—it’s from him. They planted her here to get the lowdown on the bootlegging racket. You know how those gangsters are—always trying to plant someone on the inside.”

  “Careful, now,” frequently interjected whichever good-hearted individual had conscientiously elected himself to serve as the Voice of Reason. “That’s no laughing matter. You’re potentially besmirching someone’s reputation.”

  “I ain’t sayin’ it’s true, I’m just sayin’ I heard it. . . .”

  It went on like that most of the time. Once started, it was like a steady chorus humming in the background that wouldn’t—couldn’t—stop. No one ever took credit for having started the rumors, but almost everyone was utterly unapologetic about passing them on. I suppose most of us at the precinct had gotten a little bored with the winos, the rapists, and the bootleggers. Odalie had become our sole source of entertainment, and the fabricators of these rumors (Grayben, Marie, and Harley, mostly) had let their romantic imaginations run off with them; they were trying to fit Odalie into the papers’ latest headlines. Clara Bow, William H. Hays—it was all too recent. Just as with the paternity of my landlady’s youngest child, the time-line surrounding these claims made their feasibility dubious at best.

  If Odalie was aware of the rumors swirling around her, she did not show it. Her charm was like an electric switch she could flick on and off at will, and the rumors did not appear to have any effect on its flow. But despite having an abundance of charisma constantly at the ready, the surprising truth about Odalie was that she was not an open book and purposely seemed to avoid intimacies. Or so I intuited in the study I’d made of her behavior to that point.

  When Marie deposited the week’s reports to be typed on Odalie’s desk, she always tried to strike up a conversation. Odalie was polite, but she rarely elaborated on her answers, and never asked Marie questions of her own—which kind of galled Marie, I think. I suppose on some level, being a bit reticent and choosy about company myself, I secretly approved of this. That is, I approved of it until she showed her utter lack of discretion and taste and invited Iris to be her very first lunch date. Perhaps it would’ve been more disappointing if it had been Marie, but oh—Iris! Harelipped, buttoned-up, flavorless Iris. I know I appear awfully plain on the outside, but Iris is one of those people who appears awfully plain on the inside. She said to me once, Only children should have hobbies, and she herself has none. No passions, not even any reading habits I know of—she reads only the newspaper, and she is even boring in her approach to this, for she reads it straight through from first page to last page, skipping nothing—not even the advertisements or obituaries or anything. And after she is done reading, she comments on one thing only: the weather. I might be the least authorized person to say so, but even I know Iris is a bit of a snore.

  I don’t go in for gossip much myself, and it’s not as if I approve of Marie’s nosy conduct and busybody chatter, but one thing I personally cannot tolerate is someone who makes you feel terrible for being interested in the business of others. After all, it is only human to be curious about others, and only a prude would deny it. But Iris is one such prude. Once, when I noted that the Sergeant had not brought in his lunch tin for more than a week and wondered aloud if there was trouble brewing between him and his wife, Iris was quick to quip, Now, Rose, that’s not called for. Best to mind your own business, else people might get the wrong idea about you and the Sergeant. Don’t tell me they neglected to impart a proper sense of professionalism to you at the typing school . . . I dislike gossips, but one thing I hate more than gossips are people who masquerade as though they are somehow above it all and have earned the right to condescend to the rest of us.

  After Odalie and Iris came back from their lunch, I made some polite, perfunctory conversation and then returned my attention to the report I
was typing. Of course I told myself my exclusion from their lunch didn’t bother me a bit, but something was nagging at me. I was agitated, irritable. Perhaps I had drunk too much coffee that day, for my fingers jittered over the typewriter keys in the worst way. I accidentally hit several of the wrong keys, ripped the report page from the rollers and threw it away, inserted a fresh sheet, and promptly made the same hurried mistake all over again. Seething with annoyance, I decided to give it up. I put on my gloves, took the cigarette from my desk drawer, and slipped the contraband down the wrist of my left glove. It turned out the gloves concealed the stolen cigarette quite neatly. No one so much as looked up when I excused myself and walked outside.

  I wandered several blocks to the alley I’d visited the first time I’d tried to smoke the blasted thing. This time I did not forget to bring along something to light it. The Lieutenant Detective had been chewing on the end of a wooden matchstick all morning (a habit he was prone to when he could not find a toothpick), and when he left it unattended on his desk I took the liberty of adding it to the small collection of bric-a-brac gathering in the back of my desk drawer. (I’d like to take this moment to note: This makes it sound as though I am by regular habit a thief, and I assure you I am not. One can hardly own a matchstick—they are made to be used by whoever might have need for them. And I have already said my peace about the brooch being more of a found item insofar as I only picked it up from the floor where it had dropped.)

  When I got to the alley, I glanced around furtively. I was acutely aware of how I must’ve looked. With a trembling hand, I struck the sulfur tip of the match against a brick wall. It flared up with a hiss. I’d never smoked, but I’d seen men do it plenty of times in cafés. I held the flame to one end of the cigarette and sucked in my cheeks slightly. Instantly my lungs felt a dry, hot, crackling sensation come over them. I coughed very ungracefully and shot a wild glance around the alley, still trying to make certain no one was watching me.

  The cigarette seemed to be taking effect. My head began to spin and felt a little like it had turned into a balloon and had begun to lift away from my body. I wondered if this was what Odalie felt like when she smoked her cigarettes. Did she smoke them in cafés? At parties? Was she so bold? I thought of her and tried to hold the cigarette like she might do. My head got even lighter. I took several long, luxurious puffs on the cigarette, watching the butt smolder like a tiny red-hot coal as I drew in breath after breath. I felt quite relaxed until, very abruptly, someone thrust open a window in one of the apartments high above me. Startled, I threw the cigarette into a murky puddle and bolted down the alley as quickly as I was able. The sound of my heels hitting the pavement urged me on with a loud clapping that served to terrify me further. I didn’t slow down until I neared the precinct. As I walked in the door and crossed the main floor, I tried to calm myself and put myself back together.

  Luckily, my entrance was treated with just as much disinterest as my departure had initially generated—that is to say, no one even bothered to look up at me. I made an effort to catch my breath, squared off my shoulders, and calmly began to cross the room back to my desk. My thoughts raced with my new secret. I’ve been smoking! I am a wild, smoking woman—just think of that! The Lieutenant Detective would be so surprised to know, I thought with some satisfaction. The Sergeant . . . well . . . that was a less satisfying thought. I pushed it aside.

  “Rose.” I heard someone say my name softly. I flinched and turned to see Odalie looking at me, a faint smile of curiosity twisting her lips. “Is everything all right?”

  “Oh! Fine,” I said. “It’s fine—all fine . . . I’m quite all right.”

  She cocked her head at me. “You looked startled just now,” she said. She sniffed the air, and her smile twisted a little further as the curiosity died out of it and a hint of knowing trickled in. Then she shrugged as if to let me off the hook and let the matter go. “Only checking,” she said. Her eyes lingered on mine for a second before she finally turned away and walked back to her desk. It was then that I turned my head and noticed the scent of cigarette smoke I was now carrying about in my hair. The scent was like the train of a gown, following me everywhere for the rest of the day, and I wondered how far it extended.

  Later that afternoon my question was answered as I came back from the filing cabinets to find a packet of cigarettes sitting on my desk. The packet was new and unopened, and I knew instantly where they had come from. I crossed the room and held them out to Odalie, who was in the middle of typing something and looked up at me with a distracted expression.

  “No, thank you,” I said, shaking the packet in her face. “I don’t smoke.”

  “Oh. Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” I said, still holding the packet out.

  “Well then. I guess that’s my mistake,” she said, not sounding mistaken at all, and accepted the cigarettes with a smug, languid hand.

  5

  An incident occurred at some point during that period that had little direct connection to Odalie, but for some reason it always stands out in my memory when I recall her first weeks at the precinct. In fact, perhaps rather than saying the incident had “little direct connection,” it would be more accurate of me to say it had no connection at all. The event in question didn’t even happen at the precinct—it was just a small matter that happened back at the boarding-house once I’d already gone home for the day.

  That afternoon, I was dismissed earlier than usual from my post. There had been a sort of lull after the lunch hour, during which a lazy mood settled over the office. At about half past three, the Lieutenant Detective ambled over with his loose, lanky shuffle and proceeded to half perch, half lean against my desk, sitting on the desktop as though it were a horse he was planning to ride sidesaddle. He pushed the papers lying on my desk around with an air of great interest, although judging from the unfocused gaze of his eyes I don’t think he actually saw any of the words typed on the reports he was looking at. He cleared his throat several times and finally spoke.

  “I believe you’ve already done the work of two typists today, Miss Baker. Perhaps we had better let you go home before you decide to demand twice the pay.” His eyes flicked upward from the reports on my desk to meet my own, but, as though burned by something they found there, flicked away just as quickly.

  “I don’t believe the Sergeant has mentioned anything about my going home early today,” I said.

  “Well, as you know, I’m quite authorized to dismiss you on my own. And anyway, I’m sure the Sergeant would give his blessing,” the Lieutenant Detective continued, his voice straining with affability. He balanced a paper clip flat on one fingertip and pretended to study it. “We wouldn’t want to bring any trouble on ourselves from the union.”

  This last part was a joke. There were no unions for typists—or, for that matter, any profession where the fairer sex made up the majority of workers.

  “Fine,” I said brusquely, refusing to laugh at the joke. “So long as the Sergeant doesn’t mind it, I’ll take the afternoon off.” I promptly set about packing my things up for the day. I reached for some papers under the Lieutenant Detective’s seat and yanked at them unapologetically. With his eyebrows raised, he stumbled out of his sidesaddle perch and stood there blinking at me in a manner reminiscent of the winos who, upon their release from our custody, often staggered out from the darkness of the precinct only to stand on the pavement, dumbstruck and blinking in utter bewilderment at the much-too-bright sun.

  When I had put on my gloves and slipped my handbag into the crook of my elbow, he was still standing there, blinking.

  “But where will you go?” It was plain to see this exchange was not going as he’d planned.

  I gave him a curious glance. “Why, home, of course. You said it yourself.” He did not respond right away. I waited. I sighed and slipped the handbag back off my arm and let it land in the middle of my desk with a plunk. “Unless, of cours
e,” I said, “you’re only having a laugh at me.” I began tugging at the fingers of my gloves with irritation.

  “No, no,” the Lieutenant Detective said with haste. “Definitely not having a laugh at you.” He had an odd, pinched look on his face as he watched me retrieve my handbag from the desktop and walk across the precinct floor to the front exit. He looked flustered, as though there were a sentence half formed in his mouth that was struggling in vain to the point of delivery. Perhaps he had expected a more effusive thank-you. But it was not my job to decode the motivations behind his enigmatic behaviors, and during my commute home, I made an oath to myself not to give it much thought or trouble myself over it.

  Soon enough, I was nearing the boarding-house. The street that led up to it was lined with maples and elms, and as I rounded the block and reached the last leg of my commute, I found myself walking along the sidewalk ankle-deep in late autumn leaves. They had already lost their vivid colors, having transformed from their celebrated blazing reds and ambers to heaps of brittle, gray-brown papery scabs that rustled with the slightest stir of wind. There was an electric chill to the air, the scent of snow not far away; winter was almost upon us. When I finally arrived in front of the boarding-house, I remember peering up at the brownstone building where it squatted seamlessly amid the facades of its neighbors, and regarding its steep stoop and curlicue iron balustrade with a sense of comfort. Home! And it wasn’t even dusk. I didn’t care what the Lieutenant Detective’s motivations were anymore; it was rather nice to arrive home in the middle of the afternoon. I felt a small twinge of lazy indulgence.

  When I pushed the front door open, I was met with the usual blast of warm, stew-scented air. But that afternoon instead of insinuating a fuggy oppression, it was actually a welcome scent, stirring the first inklings of hunger in my stomach. I hung my coat up on a peg by the door and blew on my hands in an attempt to thaw my chilled fingers. Hearing voices in the kitchen, I moved toward them. I recognized the sounds of Dotty and Helen caught in the throes of lively chatter, their conversation rising and falling like two insects buzzing busily around each other. It might be nice, I thought, to join their cozy gossip sessions for once. I moved to enter the kitchen, but was brought up short just outside the double-hinged swinging door by something I heard: my own name. My heart gave a heavy pump, and I froze with my ear instinctively tilted toward the thin stripe of light that rimmed the door crack.