The Other Typist

by Rindell, Suzanne

  “Oh, but don’t look so serious over it!” Odalie exclaimed. “All I mean to say is that I have come to think of you as my truest friend. My dearest and most intimate friend in all the world.” She reached across the table and gave my shoulder a squeeze. “I’m so glad we found each other, Rose. It feels as though we’ve always belonged together.” She reached to her right wrist and unclasped one bracelet. “Here,” she said, taking my hand in hers. I had a moment of shyness, as I was aware of my palms being cold and sweaty while hers were warm and smooth. Before I could protest, she had slipped the bracelet around my wrist and was doing up the clasp. “Here—to prove to you how much I mean it.”

  I looked down at the treasure glittering on my wrist in disbelief. The diamonds caught the dim glow of the electric bulb overhead, releasing a million tiny prisms from even the smallest morsel of light. A hundred tiny stars winked up at me, as if the Milky Way itself had come to rest around my wrist.

  In all my life, no one had ever given me a gift quite so nice. To be honest, I’d never even seen a piece of jewelry of that caliber close-up, let alone wrapped around my own wrist. The brooch that was tucked in my desk drawer at the precinct was also very lovely, but that didn’t really count—Odalie had dropped it and I still meant to give it back to her eventually. Unlike the brooch, which I had merely found, or her clothes, which I only borrowed, here was something she was giving to me. I was dizzy with the thought of it. My lips fluttered silently as I tried to thank her. Seeing my condition, Odalie laughed, the sound of it rippling through the kitchen in a musical wave. We sat there, holding hands and comparing our matching wrists, all the while grinning stupidly at each other with maniacal glee. I looked into Odalie’s smile and felt myself momentarily swallowed up by some sort of euphoric abyss.

  It was moments like this, I would later learn, that would ultimately undo me.

  15

  All at once it got hot, and suddenly the only thing anyone in Manhattan could talk about was the weather. Hot enough for you? O’Neill and Harley said with a long whistle every time they came back into the office after walking a patrol beat. Boy oh boy, could it get any hotter? Upper lips glistened with sweat. Cheeks and noses glowed scarlet with permanent sun-burn. Outside, the sidewalks were empty, and the few remaining pedestrians (presumably either brave or daft) dashed from one tiny patch of shade to the next. Even the precinct, usually a dank, cool cave in the summertime, sweltered with the steamy heat. There was no escaping it. Which was not to say we didn’t try to by any means possible. Feeling magnanimous and perhaps a little desperate himself, the Sergeant used some of his own money to buy a couple of electric fans, and the Lieutenant Detective spent the better part of an afternoon bolting them to the walls so they might cool our necks and faces.

  “Are you able to catch a breeze with it like this?” the Lieutenant Detective asked, angling a fan in my direction and preparing to screw a hinge into place. The black wire cage faced toward me like some sort of dark mechanical flower, and suddenly the little hairs that had come loose from my chignon lifted to tickle my neck and shoulders. Papers fluttered on my desk, coming to life like a tree ferociously shaking its many leaves in the breeze. I rushed to anchor everything down and glanced over at Odalie, Marie, and Iris, all of whom were momentarily lost in their work. The papers on their desks remained at rest; it appeared my desk alone was receiving the benefit of this man-made vortex.

  “I don’t need any favors,” I said.

  “You don’t ever need any anything.” He winked and twisted the screw down on the hinge. Despite the breeze, suddenly the room grew even hotter—I felt a very sudden, heavy flush rise up to my ears. I rose without replying and went to the ladies’ room to splash some water on my face.

  Of course, the water from the taps was not cold or refreshing in the least, the pipes being too warm that day. But I cupped my hands and splashed some tepid water on my face anyway, letting it run down my neck and chin. It was difficult to discern where my skin left off and the droplets began. Everything was seething with a pulsing heat, my perspiration and the water felt so similar in temperature. As I stood dripping over the sink, Odalie came in. She crossed her arms and sighed.

  “Do you know what we need?” she asked rhetorically. I silently prayed the diagnosis was going to be a movie in one of the famously air-cooled theaters in the East 50s. The line of her petite mouth curled at the corners in that signature way she had, and her eyes darted about the empty space just over my head. I could tell she was coming up with more elaborate calculations than a movie theater. “We need a little holiday . . . somewhere with an ocean breeze. I’ll get us invited someplace nice. . . .”

  I blinked. It was as if she had just spoken Chinese. I had never had a proper vacation. I took exactly three days off per year, and usually spent them at home with a stack of novels that would have never met with the approval of the nuns who’d monitored my reading habits throughout my childhood.

  “But . . . what about work? How will we manage it with the Sergeant?”

  “Oh, pfft,” she said, throwing a dismissive hand back at the wrist. “Let me worry about him. I can manage that part. He’s a pussycat, really.” The way she pronounced the word pussycat proved rather unsettling to me. There was something almost obscene in the inflection. The doubt I had tried so hard to banish seeped back in, and my mind drifted to the day after the raid. But I could feel Odalie’s eyes on my face, waiting for an answer now. I pushed my suspicions aside and forced a smile.

  “A holiday would be nice . . . if we could manage it.”

  I had used the word we, but I didn’t really mean it. I knew Odalie would be the one to manage everything, and she did. In record speed, too. By Friday we had been granted a week’s vacation, and found ourselves riding across the Queensboro Bridge in a coupe driven by an accommodating Wall Street man who was so painfully short, he put me in mind of Redmond. It was a wonder his feet could reach the pedals of the automobile. As a matter of fact, perhaps he could only reach the accelerator; I don’t think I can recall him using the brake at all, and we flew along at top velocity toward the broad white beaches of Long Island.

  “So tell me more about what these squires do for you on the trading floor,” Odalie was saying to the broker in an enraptured voice as he sped us along the highway.

  “Squads.”

  “Oh, yes, I mean what these squads do for you on the trading floor . . . It’s so fascinating, so very fascinating . . . I don’t know how you stand all the excitement of it!” With every question she asked the broker she sounded more and more like she was so utterly intrigued, she was on the verge of taking up the profession herself. Of course, by then, I had come to know her better.

  Nonetheless . . . just like that, we had escaped! With each mile we put behind us, I felt the air grow lighter in my lungs. It was as if the city had been one large pressure cooker, simmering in its own juices. With the top down on the coupe and a stalwart, man-made breeze blowing steadily in my face, I tallied the city’s many summertime brutalities: the heat that radiated from the gray asphalt and made the air dance in wavy shimmers; the stagnant ponds in Central Park that turned a milky, putrid, almost phosphorescent green and incubated countless mosquitoes; the blasts of hot dirty air that breathed upward from every subway grate; oh, and how the loud noises pouring from construction sites even somehow seemed to further agitate and heat the air! Why on Earth we modern humans had signed a pact to live like that was beyond my comprehension.

  After pulling off the main roadway and driving through a handful of seaside hamlets, the Wall Street broker finally proved the brake pedal was equally within his reach, applying it rather harshly as we turned into the long drive of a very large house. Oyster shells scattered and crunched as the coupe’s tires rolled over the gravel. Parked automobiles were lined up, nose to tail, all along both sides of the drive. A few parked limousines still contained their hot, sweaty-faced drivers, and here and th
ere from the interior of their front seats the flutter of an open newspaper could be discerned.

  We rolled along toward a fountain at the top of the drive. The broker made one circle of it and, unable to locate anything more accommodating, found a very tight spot alongside some shrubbery that could have only deviated a hair’s breadth from the exact measurement of his coupe. After much finagling that caused him to grunt and pant at the wheel, our impromptu chauffeur was able to wedge the coupe into position and cut the motor. The moment the engine fell silent, strains of music and laughter could be heard from somewhere out behind the house. There was, I surmised, some sort of garden party going on.

  “Perfect timing! A minute more and all that driving would’ve driven me absolutely mad,” Odalie announced. She reached an automatic hand to her hat to make some sort of invisible adjustment to the sporty cloche that had somehow managed to stay perfectly in place throughout the duration of our ride. I looked about to see where here was.

  The house itself was a rather imposing two-story Dutch colonial, with deeply sloping gables. Perched on the highest level of the house was a small imitation of a lighthouse encircled by a widow’s walk that together made up a sort of third story. The whole house was so brilliantly white and incredibly pristine, I had the brief hallucination I could smell the odor of drying paint. Even though no one came out to greet us, the front door was thrown open, and it was clear further guests were expected. Gazing into the dark cavernous space of the house, I could see all the way through it and out a back door, which had likewise been thrown open and acted as a frame for a bright patch of green lawn and a glittering smudge of blue sea. I turned to point it out, but Odalie was already walking a small way ahead of me. As soon as she alighted from the coupe, she had begun to move in the direction of the house’s open door.

  “Thanks so much for the lift, Edwin.”

  “Would you like to get your things out of the trunk?” Edwin inquired. He was still bubbling with self-important glee, having spent the duration of the car ride basking in Odalie’s attention.

  “Oh, not just now,” she answered dismissively. A bit of puff went out of Edwin’s proud pneumatic chest. “We’ll have them send someone out to collect them later, once we’ve been . . . received.”

  A funny feeling came over me as Odalie made this last remark, and I began to wonder if we had been formally invited, or—a small trickle of dread came over me as the thought occurred to me—whether we were in fact that most gauche of all parasites: gate-crashers. Edwin stalked about, fussing with the car, realizing his passengers very clearly intended to go on ahead and leave him behind, and evidently deeply irritated by this development. “How’ll I find you for later?” he asked in a gruff manner.

  “Oh,” Odalie murmured. “We’ll find you. I’m clever at finding people at parties.” This last statement was true enough, although I doubted she would prove her powers by using them to locate Edwin. He seemed equally dubious about his odds and shot her an overt scowl. Odalie tossed her head so that her shiny black bob swung in the sunlight and, with a giggle, made a halfhearted attempt at humor. “And if all else fails I’ll hire a poodle and we’ll have a hunting party and send up flares.” She gave a nervous laugh and linked her arm through mine, whereupon I felt myself urgently propelled in the direction of the open door, and Edwin’s grumbling gave way to the din of the party.

  All morning the sun had been beating down on us as we rode along with the top down on the coupe. It took my eyes several moments to adjust to the dim light inside the house, and I shuffled in close step behind Odalie, instinctually following her as she navigated in and among the many dark shapes in the room. It was, I must say, a very elegant party in contrast to the rabble of the speakeasies to which I’d grown accustomed. We came near a grand piano, where instead of a drunk woman playing “Chopsticks” with her toes a hired pianist sat playing a very polished Debussy tune. Gilded mirrors hung on many of the walls, their opulence set off by the rich blue and gold of the brocade wallpaper. Oriental vases adorned with very clean-looking navy and white floral patterns lined the mantel. Trays of champagne glasses floated over waiters’ heads like golden clouds drifting in and out of formation. Even the accents embedded in the partygoers’ voices seemed to differ from those I’d encountered in the speakeasies; here the consonants of conversation were squared off with a stiff jaw while the vowels were inflected with a continental lilt.

  I did not recognize a single face, certainly none from Odalie’s usual scene in the city, to be sure. The women in the room had an air of polished athletic health about them, their tanned arms suggestive of days spent walking the golf course, their hair either clipped short or else very tidily swept up off their long, lean necks. The men were dapperly dressed in morning suits or more sportily dressed in polo shirts and smartly tailored knickers with their socks pulled up high. The collection of people that had been gathered together was so well-groomed, I suddenly felt a bit shabby and unkempt, even though I had on a very expensive dress Odalie had insisted upon loaning me.

  “Don’t start that,” Odalie said, swatting my hands when she noticed my fidgeting.

  “Who are we here to see again?”

  “The Brinkleys, of course. Max and Vera.” Mr. and Mrs. Maximillian and Vera Brinkley. The names rang a bell, but I was not comforted by this fact, as I quickly realized why. Maximillian and Vera Brinkley were socialites whose engagements and activities were regularly reported in the newspapers, along with their photographs. My earlier apprehension about being gate-crashers returned, and I had a sudden, panicky feeling about our mission there. I froze in my tracks and reached for Odalie’s arm.

  “Odalie . . . are you acquainted with the Brinkleys? Were we invited here?”

  She shrugged, twisted open the clasps of her handbag, and proceeded to extract an envelope from its depths. She waved it absently in front of my face. “I have a letter of introduction. It’s more or less like an invitation.”

  I was taken aback. My eyes goggled in the direction of the letter, but Odalie took little notice. She wasn’t looking at me. Instead, her eyes searched the crowd, her head pivoting on her neck with the automatic, mechanical intensity of a submarine periscope. No doubt she was taking an inventory of partygoers recognizable for their appearances in the society pages. She seemed uncharacteristically jumpy, and I wondered if she had finally gotten us in over our heads. I pointed at the letter still clutched in her hand. I tried to think of who she might know with a great deal of adequately “old” money or else a sizable store of social influence.

  “Is that . . . from the Hungarian?”

  “The who?” she asked with an air of distraction, still scanning the room. She drifted through the main house and toward the backyard. I followed.

  “The Hungarian. Or . . . should I call him your uncle?”

  She suddenly stopped cold. Her eyebrows knit together, and she turned to fix me in her stare with something that resembled a flash of anger. I held my breath. But just as quickly as the flash of anger had sprung to her face, it melted away. Her shoulders relaxed with a shrug, and she tossed her head to let out a peal of haughty laughter.

  “Oh, dear, dear, silly darling! You must have been chatting it up with Gib lately.” She patted my hand and rolled her eyes. I felt supremely foolish as I began to comprehend the extent of my own gullibility. My mental picture of the barrel-chested Hungarian with his aristocratic background and monarchist sympathies began to evaporate as we proceeded to step out the back door and into the blinding, merciless light of the midday sun.

  “I . . . I . . . Well, Gib said—”

  “Oh, I know all about what Gib likely said.” She rolled her eyes again to show her disdain. Then, catching the look of frustrated doubt creeping into my face, she suddenly softened her demeanor and took my hand in hers. She leaned in close, and I could smell her lily-of-the-valley perfume. “You haven’t known him very long, so you can’t know
it, but Gib has quite the imagination.”

  The first part of what Odalie had said was true: I hadn’t known Gib for very long. But the latter part . . . He had never struck me as a particularly creative type, and I very much doubted he was the secret possessor of a vast and potent imagination. It was unlikely he had conjured up the Hungarian all by himself. Odalie, on the other hand, I knew to have a very vital imagination. I was fairly certain that with the story of the Hungarian I had somehow managed to fall for one of Odalie’s creative inventions despite the fact it had come to me secondhand. And then the story she had told the other night about having a dearly departed sister named Violet! While I had been extremely touched by the generous gift Odalie had bestowed upon me when she had fastened the bracelet around my wrist, the gesture had not necessarily served to heighten the plausibility of the story that accompanied it.

  What the ever-changing architecture of her stories was ultimately meant to conceal I still didn’t know at that point. Curiously, despite all her subterfuge, Odalie retained a sympathetic allure in my eyes. When Helen told stories for manipulation or for dramatic effect, nothing bothered me more. I’m ashamed to admit I secretly, and sometimes not so secretly, relished the moments when Helen got caught in one of her lies and was unmasked, much to her own horrified chagrin. I felt a sense of downright glee whenever this happened.

  But it was not this way with Odalie. I’m not certain I fully comprehended why I should feel so differently toward these two women—both of whom I realize are liars—and even to this day I often puzzle over it. Perhaps I liked Helen less because I found her to be a rather desperate and therefore unsuccessful liar, whereas the case could be made that Odalie was something of a virtuoso at it. Odalie lied for sport and never bothered to hide the fact that even she didn’t believe a single word of her own lies. Helen lied out of a pathetic need to see herself through other people’s eyes; I think she convinced herself that many of her own lies were true, and somehow this made her much more despicable than Odalie. My doctor says it is our animal nature to judge the weak more harshly, owing to how survival depends upon weeding these creatures out. He says I have highly developed animalistic tendencies. The way he says it, it does not sound like a compliment. He has formed other, equally unflattering opinions of me as well, although he does not always tell all of them to my face. He constantly writes notes on his little clipboard, and I try to pretend as if I don’t notice, but the other day I leaned over and spied the words acute cruel streak written next to my name in blue fountain pen. I have complained before that he is not particularly keen on me, but when you are in the sort of institution where I currently find myself, they are hardly looking to take a survey—which is to say, the residents’ assessment of the doctors is hardly taken under serious advisement.