IT WAS eighteen minutes after nine when Mr. Martin turned into Twelfth Street. A man passed him, and a man and a woman, talking. There was no one within fifty paces when he came to the house, halfway down the block. He was up the steps and in the small vestibule in no time, pressing the bell under the card that said “Mrs. Ulgine Barrows.” When the clicking in the lock started, he jumped forward against the door. He got inside fast, closing the door behind him. A bulb in a lantern hung from the hall ceiling on a chain seemed to give a monstrously bright light. There was nobody on the stair, which went up ahead of him along the left wall. A door opened down the hall in the wall on the right. He went toward it swiftly, on tiptoe.
“Well, for God’s sake, look who’s here!” bawled Mrs. Barrows, and her braying laugh rang out like the report of a shotgun. He rushed past her like a football tackle, bumping her. “Hey, quit shoving!” she said, closing the door behind them. They were in her living room, which seemed to Mr. Martin to be lighted by a hundred lamps. “What’s after you?” she said. “You’re as jumpy as a goat.” He found he was unable to speak. His heart was wheezing in his throat. “I—yes,” he finally brought out. She was jabbering and laughing as she started to help him off with his coat. “No, no,” he said. “I’ll put it here.” He took it off and put it on a chair near the door. “Your hat and gloves, too,” she said. “You’re in a lady’s house.” He put his hat on top of the coat. Mrs. Barrows seemed larger than he had thought. He kept his gloves on. “I was passing by,” he said. “I recognized—is there anyone here?” She laughed louder than ever. “No,” she said, “we’re all alone. You’re as white as a sheet, you funny man. Whatever has come over you? I’ll mix you a toddy.” She started toward a door across the room. “Scotch-and-soda be all right? But say, you don’t drink, do you?” She turned and gave him her amused look. Mr. Martin pulled himself together. “Scotch-and-soda will be all right,” he heard himself say. He could hear her laughing in the kitchen.
Mr. Martin looked quickly around the living room for the weapon. He had counted on finding one there. There were andirons and a poker and something in a corner that looked like an Indian club. None of them would do. It couldn’t be that way. He began to pace around. He came to a desk. On it lay a metal paper knife with an ornate handle. Would it be sharp enough? He reached for it and knocked over a small brass jar. Stamps spilled out of it and it fell to the floor with a clatter. “Hey,” Mrs. Barrows yelled from the kitchen, “are you tearing up the pea patch?” Mr. Martin gave a strange laugh. Picking up the knife, he tried its point against his left wrist. It was blunt. It wouldn’t do.
WHEN Mrs. Barrows reappeared, carrying two highballs, Mr. Martin, standing there with his gloves on, became acutely conscious of the fantasy he had wrought. Cigarettes in his pocket, a drink prepared for him—it was all too grossly improbable. It was more than that; it was impossible. Somewhere in the back of his mind a vague idea stirred, sprouted. “For heaven’s sake, take off those gloves,” said Mrs. Barrows. “I always wear them in the house,” said Mr. Martin. The idea began to bloom, strange and wonderful. She put the glasses on a coffee table in front of a sofa and sat on the sofa. “Come over here, you odd little man,” she said. Mr. Martin went over and sat beside her. It was difficult getting a cigarette out of the pack of Camels, but he managed it. She held a match for him, laughing. “Well,” she said, handing him his drink, “this is perfectly marvelous. You with a drink and a cigarette.”
Mr. Martin puffed, not too awkwardly, and took a gulp of the highball. “I drink and smoke all the time,” he said. He clinked his glass against hers. “Here’s nuts to that old windbag, Fitweiler,” he said, and gulped again. The stuff tasted awful, but he made no grimace. “Really, Mr. Martin,” she said, her voice and posture changing, “you are insulting our employer.” Mrs. Barrows was now all special adviser to the president. “I am preparing a bomb,” said Mr. Martin, “which will blow the old goat higher than hell.” He had only had a little of the drink, which was not strong. It couldn’t be that. “Do you take dope or something?” Mrs. Barrows asked coldly. “Heroin,” said Mr. Martin. “I’ll be coked to the gills when I bump that old buzzard off.” “Mr. Martin!” she shouted, getting to her feet. “That will be all of that. You must go at once.” Mr. Martin took another swallow of his drink. He tapped his cigarette out in the ashtray and put the pack of Camels on the coffee table. Then he got up. She stood glaring at him. He walked over and put on his hat and coat. “Not a word about this,” he said, and laid an index finger against his lips. All Mrs. Barrows could bring out was “Really!” Mr. Martin put his hand on the doorknob. “I’m sitting in the catbird seat,” he said. He stuck his tongue out at her and left. Nobody saw him go.
Mr. Martin got to his apartment, walking, well before eleven. No one saw him go in. He had two glasses of milk after brushing his teeth, and he felt elated. It wasn’t tipsiness, because he hadn’t been tipsy. Anyway, the walk had worn off all effects of the whiskey. He got in bed and read a magazine for a while. He was asleep before midnight.
MR. MARTIN got to the office at eight-thirty the next morning, as usual. At a quarter to nine, Ulgine Barrows, who had never before arrived at work before ten, swept into his office. “I’m reporting to Mr. Fitweiler now!” she shouted. “If he turns you over to the police, it’s no more than you deserve!” Mr. Martin gave her a look of shocked surprise. “I beg your pardon?” he said. Mrs. Barrows snorted and bounced out of the room, leaving Miss Paird and Joey Hart staring after her. “What’s the matter with that old devil now?” asked Miss Paird. “I have no idea,” said Mr. Martin, resuming his work. The other two looked at him and then at each other. Miss Paird got up and went out. She walked slowly past the closed door of Mr. Fitweiler’s office. Mrs. Barrows was yelling inside, but she was not braying. Miss Paird could not hear what the woman was saying. She went back to her desk.
Forty-five minutes later, Mrs. Barrows left the president’s office and went into her own, shutting the door. It wasn’t until half an hour later that Mr. Fitweiler sent for Mr. Martin. The head of the filing department, neat, quiet, attentive, stood in front of the old man’s desk. Mr. Fitweiler was pale and nervous. He took his glasses off and twiddled them. He made a small, bruffing sound in his throat. “Martin,” he said, “you have been with us more than twenty years.” “Twenty-two, sir,” said Mr. Martin. “In that time,” pursued the president, “your work and your—uh—manner have been exemplary.” “I trust so, sir,” said Mr. Martin. “I have understood, Martin,” said Mr. Fitweiler, “that you have never taken a drink or smoked.” “That is correct, sir,” said Mr. Martin. “Ah, yes.” Mr. Fitweiler polished his glasses. “You may describe what you did after leaving the office yesterday, Martin,” he said. Mr. Martin allowed less than a second for his bewildered pause. “Certainly, sir,” he said. “I walked home. Then I went to Schrafft’s for dinner. Afterward I walked home again. I went to bed early, sir, and read a magazine for a while. I was asleep before eleven.” “Ah, yes,” said Mr. Fitweiler again. He was silent for a moment, searching for the proper words to say to the head of the filing department. “Mrs. Barrows,” he said finally, “Mrs. Barrows has worked hard, Martin, very hard. It grieves me to report that she has suffered a severe breakdown. It has taken the form of a persecution complex accompanied by distressing hallucinations.” “I am very sorry, sir,” said Mr. Martin. “Mrs. Barrows is under the delusion,” continued Mr. Fitweiler, “that you visited her last evening and behaved yourself in an—uh—unseemly manner.” He raised his hand to silence Mr. Martin’s little pained outcry. “It is the nature of these psychological diseases,” Mr. Fitweiler said, “to fix upon the least likely and most innocent party as the—uh—source of persecution. These matters are not for the lay mind to grasp, Martin. I’ve just had my psychiatrist, Dr. Fitch, on the phone. He would not, of course, commit himself, but he made enough generalizations to substantiate my suspicions. I suggested to Mrs. Barrows, when she had completed her—uh—story to me this morn
ing, that she visit Dr. Fitch, for I suspected a condition at once. She flew, I regret to say, into a rage, and demanded—uh—requested that I call you on the carpet. You may not know, Martin, but Mrs. Barrows had planned a reorganization of your department—subject to my approval, of course, subject to my approval. This brought you, rather than anyone else, to her mind—but again that is a phenomenon for Dr. Fitch and not for us. So, Martin, I am afraid Mrs. Barrows’ usefulness here is at an end.” “I am dreadfully sorry, sir,” said Mr. Martin.
It was at this point that the door to the office blew open with the suddenness of a gas-main explosion and Mrs. Barrows catapulted through it. “Is the little rat denying it?” she screamed. “He can’t get away with that!” Mr. Martin got up and moved discreetly to a point beside Mr. Fitweiler’s chair. “You drank and smoked at my apartment,” she bawled at Mr. Martin, “and you know it! You called Mr. Fitweiler an old windbag and said you were going to blow him up when you got coked to the gills on your heroin!” She stopped yelling to catch her breath and a new glint came into her popping eyes. “If you weren’t such a drab, ordinary little man,” she said, “I’d think you’d planned it all. Sticking your tongue out, saying you were sitting in the catbird seat, because you thought no one would believe me when I told it! My God, it’s really too perfect!” She brayed loudly and hysterically, and the fury was on her again. She glared at Mr. Fitweiler. “Can’t you see how he has tricked us, you old fool? Can’t you see his little game?” But Mr. Fitweiler had been surreptitiously pressing all the buttons under the top of his desk and employees of F&S began pouring into the room. “Stockton,” said Mr. Fitweiler, “you and Fishbein will take Mrs. Barrows to her home. Mrs. Powell, you will go with them.” Stockton, who had played a little football in high school, blocked Mrs. Barrows as she made for Mr. Martin. It took him and Fishbein together to force her out of the door into the hall, crowded with stenographers and office boys. She was still screaming imprecations at Mr. Martin, tangled and contradictory imprecations. The hubbub finally died out down the corridor.
“I regret that this has happened,” said Mr. Fitweiler. “I shall ask you to dismiss it from your mind, Martin.” “Yes, sir,” said Mr. Martin, anticipating his chief’s “That will be all” by moving to the door. “I will dismiss it.” He went out and shut the door, and his step was light and quick in the hall. When he entered his department he had slowed down to his customary gait, and he walked quietly across the room to the W20 file, wearing a look of studious concentration.
[1942]
JOHN UPDIKE
SNOwING IN GREENWICH VILLAGE
THE MAPLES HAD MOVED just the day before to West Thirteenth Street, and that evening they had Rebecca Cune over, because now they were so close. A tall, always slightly smiling girl with an absent manner, she allowed Richard Maple to slip off her coat and scarf even as she stood softly greeting Joan. Richard, moving with extra precision and grace because of the smoothness with which the business had been managed—though he and Joan had been married nearly two years, he was still so young-looking that people did not instinctively lay upon him hostly duties, and their reluctance worked in him a corresponding hesitancy, so that often it was his wife who poured the drinks while he sprawled on the sofa in the attitude of a favored and wholly delightful guest—entered the dark bedroom, entrusted the bed with Rebecca’s clothes, and returned to the living room. How weightless her coat had seemed!
Rebecca, seated beneath the lamp, on the floor, one leg tucked under her, one arm up on the Hide-a-Bed that the previous tenants had not yet removed, was saying, “I had known her, you know, just for the day she taught me the job, but I said O.K. I was living in an awful place called a Hotel for Ladies. In the halls they had typewriters you put a quarter in.”
Joan, straight-backed on a Hitchcock chair from her parents’ home in Vermont, a damp handkerchief balled in her hand, turned to Richard and explained, “Before her apartment now, Becky lived with this girl and her boy friend.”
“Yes, his name was Jacques,” Rebecca said.
Richard asked, “You lived with them?” The arch composure of his tone was left over from the mood aroused in him by his successful and, in the dim bedroom, somewhat poignant—as if he were with great tact delivering a disappointing message—disposal of their guest’s coat.
“Yes, and he insisted on having his name on the mailbox. He was terribly afraid of missing a letter. When my brother was in the Navy and came to see me and saw on the mailbox”—with three parallel movements of her fingers she set the names beneath in a column—
“Georgene Clyde
Rebecca Cune
Jacques Zimmerman,
he told me I had always been such a nice girl. Jacques wouldn’t even move out so my brother would have a place to sleep. He had to sleep on the floor.” She lowered her lids and looked in her purse for a cigarette.
“Isn’t that wonderful?” Joan said, her smile broadening helplessly as she realized what an inane thing it had been to say. Her cold worried Richard. It had lasted seven days without improving. Her face was pale, mottled pink and yellow; this accentuated the Modiglianesque quality established by her long neck and oval blue eyes and her habit of sitting with her back straight, her head quizzically tilted, and her hands palms downward in her lap.
Rebecca, too, was pale, but in the consistent way of a drawing, perhaps (the weight of her lids and a certain virtuosity about the mouth suggested it) by da Vinci.
“Who would like some sherry?” Richard asked in a deep voice, from a standing position.
“We have some hard stuff if you’d rather,” Joan said to Rebecca; from Richard’s viewpoint the remark, like those advertisements that from varying angles read differently, contained the quite legible declaration that this time he would have to mix the Old-Fashioneds.
“The sherry sounds fine,” Rebecca said. She enunciated all of her words distinctly, but in a faint, thin voice that disclaimed for them any consequence.
“I think too,” Joan said.
“Good.” Richard took from the mantel the five-dollar bottle of Tio Pepe that the second man on the Spanish-sherry account had given him. So that all could share in the drama of it, he uncorked the bottle in the living room. He posingly poured out three glasses, half full, passed them around, and leaned against the mantel (the Maples had never had a mantel before), swirling the liquid as the agency’s wine expert had told him to do, thus liberating the esters and ethers, until his wife said, as she always did, it being the standard toast in her parents’ home, “Cheers, dears!”
Rebecca continued the story of her first apartment. Jacques had never worked. Georgene never held a job more than three weeks. The three of them contributed to a kitty, to which all enjoyed equal access. Rebecca had a separate bedroom. Jacques and Georgene sometimes worked on comic strips; they pinned the bulk of their hopes on an adventure strip titled “Spade Malone Behind the Bamboo Curtain.” One of their friends was a young Socialist who never washed and always had money because his father owned half of the West Side. During the day, when the two girls were off working, Jacques flirted with a Finnish girl upstairs, who kept dropping her mop onto the tiny balcony outside their window. “A real bombardier,” Rebecca said. When Rebecca moved into a single apartment for herself and was all settled and happy, Georgene and Jacques offered to bring a mattress and sleep on her floor. Rebecca felt that the time had come for her to put her foot down. She said no. Later, Jacques married a girl other than Georgene.
“Cashews, anybody?” Richard suggested. He had bought a can at the corner delicatessen expressly for this visit, though if Rebecca had not been coming, he would have bought something else there on some other excuse, just for the pleasure of buying his first thing at the store where in the coming years he would purchase so much and become so well known.
“No, thank you,” Rebecca said.
Richard was so far from expecting refusal that out of momentum he pressed them on her again, exclaiming, “Please! They’r
e so good for you.” She took two and bit one in half.
He offered the dish—a silver porringer given to the Maples as a wedding present and until yesterday, for lack of space, never unpacked—to his wife, who took a greedy handful. She looked so pale that he asked, “How do you feel?,” not so much forgetting the presence of their guest as parading his concern—quite genuine, at that—before her.
“Fine,” Joan said, edgily, and perhaps she did.
Though the Maples told some stories—how they had lived in a log cabin in a Y.M.C.A. camp for the first three months of their married life, how Bitsy Flaner, a friend of them all, was the only girl enrolled in Bentham Divinity School, how Richard’s advertising work brought him into contact with Yogi Berra—they did not regard themselves (that is, each other) as raconteurs, and Rebecca’s slight voice dominated the talk. She had a gift for odd things.
Her rich old cousin lived in a metal house, furnished with auditorium chairs. He was terribly afraid of fire. Right before the depression, he had built an enormous boat to take himself and some friends to Polynesia. All his friends lost their money in the crash. He did not. He made money. He made money out of everything. But he couldn’t go on the trip alone, so the boat was still waiting in Oyster Bay—a huge thing, rising thirty feet out of the water. The cousin was a vegetarian. Rebecca had not eaten turkey for Thanksgiving until she was thirteen years old, because it was the family custom to go to the cousin’s house on that holiday. The custom was dropped during the war, when the children’s synthetic heels made black marks all over his asbestos floor. Rebecca’s family had not spoken to the cousin since. “Yes, what got me,” Rebecca said, “was the way each new wave of vegetables would come in as if it were a different course.”
Richard poured the sherry around again and, because this made him the center of attention anyway, said, “Don’t some vegetarians have turkeys molded out of crushed nuts for Thanksgiving?”
Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker Page 26