Weep for Me

by John D. MacDonald

  I was ten minutes late getting back to my window, and Tom Nairn gave me a cold eye. Paul Raddmann, on my right, said, “About time, Junior.”

  I unlocked, set up for business, and opened the window by taking away the plaque. When I hit a lull, I moved over to the wire grille that separated me from Sam Grinter and said, “Understand there’s a new gal upstairs. Seen her?”

  Sam rolled his eyes ceilingward and said, “Woof! Or maybe grrr. Where have you been? She’s been up there nearly a week.”

  “Fine friends I’ve got!”

  “Man, you’re in the husband category, practically. You don’t want to meet any new talent.”

  I told him to kindly go to hell, then smiled in my best bank-teller way at a lady approaching my window. I hoped her last name began with M and she wanted her balance checked. No luck.

  At three o’clock Dwyer, one of the two floor guards, locked the doors, stood nearby, and let the last few customers out. I checked the slips and entries against cash and came out on the button. I made up the vault bundle, filled out my change requests, and beckoned to Tom Nairn. He initialed the close-out and went with me into the vault as I carried my drawer in. Adams was waiting with his key, and we slid the drawer into the vault recess, each using our keys simultaneously to lock it in.

  I’d worked a lot faster than usual. I was the second teller to finish up. I could tell by the wrinkles on Sam Grinter’s forehead that he had a foul-up. He might find it any minute, or, if it was one of those stubborn double errors, he might be there until late. That makes you unpopular with the guards. They have to stick in full force until at last Adams and Nairn set the time on the big vault.

  I stood for a moment, undecided. It was another decision like the one about the lunch, and seemed to be related to the decision about the lunch. I went back through the mortgage department and up the stairs. As soon as a teller is checked out he can leave. The girls have to stay until five or later. And it was twenty after four when I went up. The checking-account cards are divided alphabetically among the checking-account girls. M is a big enough block to take up the full time of one girl. She does all the posting on the accounts, makes up the statements, that sort of thing.

  Old Hotchkiss had been with the bank so long she had worked her desk over to a favored spot by a window. No new girl would rate that, so I had to look along the office and pick out a new face. The tabulating machines and adding machines were making a heavy roar. I saw a dark head bent over a stack of checks. She was turning them over, one at a time, with her left hand, while the fingers of her right hand danced on the keys of a small adding machine. I couldn’t tell much from that distance. Just a dark-haired girl in a navy blouse with a wide white collar. I received the impression of slimness. I could think of no reasonable excuse to go over, except merely to introduce myself as a fellow employee, as the guy who asked her to check Merton’s balance.

  Mr. Limebright, the fussy narrow-headed little man who keeps the girls in line and checks their work, was giving me annoyed glances. I moved over to the drinking fountain, tramped on the pedal. Emily Rudolph finished the stack of checks. She totaled the addition, ripped the tape off the machine, wound the tape around the checks, and put a big clip on the bundle. Only then did she lift her head. Her face was very unusual. You could not say she was beautiful. Dark hair framed a face of extreme, almost chalky pallor. Her dark eyes were set very wide apart, with the upper lids so heavy as to give them a tilted look. The nose was small, childish, tilted. Her mouth was deep and vivid red. If Myrna Loy had a Chinese daughter …

  She stood up and came down the aisle toward me, carrying the bundle of checks. Her skirt was navy blue also, and she wore dark, low-heeled shoes. No jewelry. No make-up except the lipstick. She walked toeing in slightly, her shoulders well back, head high. She did not swing her arms. All the movement of walking was from the waist down. She turned left by the water fountain, never glancing at me, leaving behind her a faint spicy odor that made me think of the Orient. I watched her as she pulled open the bottom drawer of one of the fireproof lock files. She balanced easily, sitting on her heels, as she searched for the proper folder. The blue skirt was pulled tight across her hips and flanks. Even in that position, there was a concavity about the small of her back, a line that gave her hips a sauciness.

  Limebright was still giving me those darting glances, but I decided to ignore him. As she came back from the file, I said, “Miss Rudolph?”

  She stopped at once. “Yes?” she said in that low tone.

  “I’m Kyle Cameron. Teller. I … talked with you on the phone today.”

  “Yes?” She was giving me no break at all. Her irises were of a brown so deep that they looked black. She was studying me, and the only way I can describe it was that it was a dark look. A look of deep and mocking awareness. Awareness of herself, and a perfect understanding of just what I was. She had the rare ability to stand perfectly and absolutely still. She was slim, as I had seen at first, but sinuously slim, as though the bones were very tiny, buried very deeply under the delicate webs of muscle, the intricate patterning of flesh.

  “I just wanted to see what was on the other end of the line.”

  Limebright came pattering up. “Mr. Cameron. I must insist that you take up with me any question regarding work on this floor.”

  She smiled at Limebright. Her mouth turned up just a bit at the corners. She gave the impression that she never smiled more than that, never laughed aloud. “It was my fault. I stopped to ask Mr. Cameron if he could understand me easily over the phone today. Some think my voice too low.” She moved around Limebright, said softly, “Excuse me,” and went back to her desk.

  “How is she working out?” I asked Limebright. We were both watching her walk away from us.

  “Exceptional girl. Fast, accurate, quiet. Hard to believe that she never worked in a bank before.”

  “Not a local girl, eh?”

  He squinted up into my face. “Did you come up here with anything special in mind, Cameron?”

  “It’s all taken care of,” I said blandly.

  As I reached the door, I looked back. Emily Rudolph was sitting absolutely still at her desk. Our eyes met across the roar and bustle of the room. All I could see was her pale face with its vivid mouth. I seemed to watch her in utter silence. Again I felt that awareness. I didn’t know whether she was twenty or thirty-five. She was a truly ageless woman. But I knew that she was, in some odd way, the physical projection of my restlessness on that June day.

  I went down and put my hat back on. Bankers wear hats. Grinter was still sweating it out. I went out the side door and looked across the street. There was a soda fountain there. Through the window I could see the end stool. It was empty. If I took that stool, I could see Emily Rudolph come out. I could pretend it was an accident when I met her on the street. And suddenly the very intensity of my desire to know more about her frightened me. I turned on my heel and walked the five blocks to my apartment. It was Wednesday. Wednesdays and Sundays I had dinner with Jo Anne and her folks. They liked me to be on time. I showered and changed and caught a Number 7 bus out to the familiar Clark Street corner.

  Chapter Two

  I walked up the four wooden steps onto Jo Anne’s porch. The front door was open and I rapped on the screen at almost exactly five-thirty.

  Mrs. Lane called from the kitchen, “That you, Kyle? Come right in.”

  I went on into the living room. Ed Lane, Jo Anne’s father, was reading the evening paper. He’s a little round bald-headed guy who works for the railroad, doing something or other in the traffic division.

  He beamed at me. “How’s it go, Kyle? Any of that stuff stick to your fingers today?”

  I laughed no more and no less than I had laughed a thousand times before. When he gets a joke, he sticks with it.

  So I gave my usual answer. “Someday they’ll stop searching me when I leave.”

  “How does that porch furniture look to you, Kyle?”

  I turned
and stared through the windows. “Say! Looks fine. I didn’t even notice it. I thought you were going to wait until I could help you paint it.”

  “Got ambitious Monday night.”

  “It sure looks dandy,” I said. I went on into the kitchen, kissed Mrs. Lane on the cheek, and said, “Hi, Mom.” It took me a long time to get used to calling her that, the way Jo Anne does. I call her father Ed.

  “Poor Jo Anne,” she said. “They turned on the airconditioning in her office today. She’s got the sniffles.”

  She was at the stove. I leaned against the sink and lowered my voice so Ed couldn’t hear. “How about your health, Mom? Did you make that appointment today?”

  “Now, don’t start that again, Kyle. I’m a perfectly healthy woman.”

  Both Jo Anne and I were worried about her. Ed didn’t seem to notice it, but she had grown gaunt in the past year. And you could see something in her eyes. Like in the photograph that is published after somebody is dead.

  “Mom, you’ll go get a checkup if I have to take the day off to take you.”

  “Ssh,” she said.

  “I mean it.”

  “All right, all right. I’ll make an appointment tomorrow.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  I heard Jo Anne coming down the stairs. She came into the kitchen. As I went to kiss her she turned her head aside. “This is a cold you don’t want, honey,” she said.

  I took a good look at her. The end of her nose was red and her eyes looked puffy. But she certainly looked pretty. A fluff-headed blonde, with blue eyes, a firm cleft chin, a bouncy, abundant, slim-waisted little body. She was always talking about diets and looking ruefully at her hips in full-length mirrors, but I kept telling her that I liked her just the way she was. I had a hunch that by the time she was forty she’d be just as round as her old man.

  “Feel bad, darling?” I asked her.

  “Biserable,” she said with a loud snuffle. “Dab airconditioning!”

  “Don’t swear, dear,” Mom said comfortably. “It sounds like hell.”

  When dinner was almost ready, three phone calls—less than the usual number—rounded up Daphne, the kid sister, and she came panting home on her bike, full of the usual excuses. It didn’t take any psychologist to see that Daphne, at fifteen, gave much promise of being quite a handful. She was a silver blonde with sharp cheekbones and a breathless manner. And already she knew how to use her eyes. I was a stuffy old bank person, to her, but a legitimate target for the tools she was sharpening in preparation for the heterosexual world.

  Ed and Daphne got into one of their traditional arguments at dinner, and when his face resembled a hothouse tomato, Mom stepped in and shunted the conversation over to whether Jo Anne and I would want any of Aunt Milly’s “good pieces” that were stored in the little room off the attic.

  “But, Mom!” Jo Anne cried. “All that stuff is so big and heavy. Won’t it look kind of silly in a teensy apartment? I mean, you need modern things in an apartment.”

  “You children have to be sensible,” Mom said. “With the way prices are going, you know we can’t afford to help you very much. And Kyle, your dad certainly can’t do much for you. You’ve said how you’re going to get a car for your wedding trip and all that. If you buy new furniture too, you just won’t have anything left, will you?”

  “But that old stuff is ugly!” Jo Anne said. I saw to my surprise that she was quite close to tears.

  “We can take a look at it again, baby,” I said. “You know, with some of that old stuff, if you saw off the legs a little and paint it white and antique it, you get some smart-looking things.”

  She sighed heavily. “All right.”

  “Gosh, you haven’t even got the apartment lined up yet, have you?” Daphne said with hauteur.

  “They’re going to have Hilson Gardens open for inspection a week from Saturday,” Jo Anne said. “The first unit. And the second unit will be available for renting as of August first. And Mr. Anderson has promised to reserve one in Kyle’s name until we get a chance to inspect them, smarty.”

  “Gardens they call it,” Daphne said in a superior tone. “Just a great big muddy field with brick buildings on it. I went by there on my bike last week end.”

  As Ed was telling her to be still, I glanced at Mom. Her eyes were closed and she was holding tightly to the edge of the table and her face had a gray twist to it.

  Jo Anne saw it when I did. She jumped up and went around to her mother, her arm around her shoulders. “Mom, are you all right? What’s the trouble?”

  Mom opened her eyes and gave a weak smile. Her color started to come back and her knuckles lost their ivory whiteness. “Just a little twinge. Probably my own cooking.”

  “Aren’t you losing weight, Myra?” Ed asked.

  “Very observant of you, Daddy,” Jo Anne said acidly.

  Ed’s jaw dropped. “What’s wrong with you, child?”

  “She’s sick and she’s been sick for months and she won’t admit it and she won’t see a doctor.”

  Ed straightened. “We’ll see if she’ll see a doctor.”

  “I’m going tomorrow, definitely,” Mom said.

  Ed and I watched a TV news program while Jo Anne helped Mom with the dishes and Daphne dug into her homework. I don’t know what it is about news programs. When you’re a little kid the American Legion has parades and when they have Fourth of July speeches they tell you how the First World War made the world safe for democracy. Way back there they were saying that war is no way to settle international disputes. Then comes World War II, and it takes a chunk out of your life and you hear a few distant shots fired in anger, and everybody says, “This time we really ended world wars.” The U.N. takes over, and then, too soon, along comes the Korea business and you sense that it bears the same relation to World War III as did the Spanish Revolution. Just a place to try out the weapons, a place to show your teeth.

  And you know, just as sure as you’re alive, that World War III is going to come along and mess up your life and maybe kill you. You think that we can win this third one too—but what about the fourth? There’s no end to them, and they are coming along faster and faster, with fewer of the good years in between them.

  The news programs make you feel like a fool when you do any long-term planning, like taking out insurance, or wondering when you’ll make chief teller, if ever. You think about marriage and about educating your kids and then wonder if the school they go to won’t be a place where they learn how to harden an arrow tip in a camp fire.

  The bloodhound face of the newscaster, his mournful voice and tragic eyes, all seemed to tie in with the restlessness I had felt all day. I watched him, broadcasting to millions, and I was just one little guy watching like a million other little guys, all of us like rabbits in a big lab. All you could do, when they started experimenting on you with radiation, H blasts, and flame throwers, was plan on being one awful quick rabbit.

  I was a lab rabbit who spent every working day behind a bronze grille, handling the stuff that made the world go round.

  After the dishes, Ed and Mom settled themselves to watch a TV program that neither Jo Anne nor I cared for. I raised one eyebrow at Jo Anne and scissored my fingers.

  “We’re going for a walk, Mom,” she said.

  “Take a sweater, dear. You don’t want that cold to get worse.”

  She went up and changed from a cotton dress to a wool skirt and wine-colored sweater. Under daylight time, dusk was still an hour away. Her parents had darkened the living room to make the TV screen bright. We walked slowly down the narrow residential street. Jo Anne was born in that same house. If it were not for the big elms, the careful tending of the small yards, the clipped hedges, the houses themselves would look pretty shoddy.

  People sitting on their porches spoke to us. Kids raced around on bikes and roller skates. An ice-cream bike came down the road, bell tinkling. I bought us both ice cream on a stick and we ate it as we walked.

/>   “You’re acting odd, Kyle,” she said.

  “Odd?”

  “I don’t know. Far away.”

  “I wasn’t aware of feeling far away,” I said stiffly.

  “Well, at dinner you were looking at me sort of … speculatively. Like I could be some girl you didn’t know.”

  That had been exactly what I was doing. I had been trying to look at her with complete objectivity, as though meeting her for the first time. But it annoyed me that my expression should have been so obvious. “Colds must make you imaginative,” I said.

  She took my arm, hugged it close to her body. “Hey, we even sound married, mister.”

  “Practicing, maybe,” I said lightly.

  Still holding my arm, she looked down and scuffed her heels. “Kyle?”

  “What, baby?”

  “Do you ever wonder whether we’ve made a mistake, waiting so long? I mean you’re twenty-nine and I’m twenty-eight. Daddy and Mom treat us like kids, but we aren’t really. When Mom was my age, I was seven years old.”

  “You don’t look a day over fifteen, baby.”

  She looked up into my face, her eyes solemn. “Let’s not joke about it. We’re going to start a baby just as soon as we can, Kyle.”

  It gave me an odd, trapped feeling to hear her say that. “How so?”

  “Well, we could be selfish and have some time to ourselves first, but that would mean I would be over thirty, maybe, for the first one. And they say a first baby when you’re over thirty is pretty difficult. Remember, when I was measured that time, he said I wouldn’t have an easy time.”

  “Let’s get married and then talk about it, baby.”

  “They say men are jealous of babies when you have them too soon after you’re married.”