Fling and Other Stories

by John Hersey

  Miss Parch paused and examined me, as if she expected some sort of bubble of amazement to float out of my mouth, so I said, “I simply have to take your word for it.”

  “He was far above my head in those days. He was Mr. Byron’s favorite. Mr. Byron used to say, ‘Young Quintillian is a real rug man. He has the right instincts. And the name is good. The i-a-n ending is very useful in a field so long dominated by Armenians, even if he isn’t one himself.’ You understand, Willard wasn’t a boy anymore, even then.” Another sharp look, as if to say, Not a boy like you.

  “What happened? Where’d he get off the track?”

  But Miss Parch turned away from me. She gulped her coffee and seemed sorry that she had opened up as far as she had to an untested person, one in whom Mr. Quintillian, she must have remembered, had no confidence at all.

  I wondered whether I should offer to pay for Miss Parch’s coffee, by way of thanks for her chary words, but as soon as I had finished I moved away and busied myself at a rack of get-well cards, picking them over until she had paid for herself.

  Whereas I had at first considered Mr. Quintillian smug, finely adjusted, and set quite tight, like some old precision instrument, a metronome or a little postage scale, I now began to see many signs of loose connections, unsureness.

  One morning I carried a book on trout fishing, which belonged to Charley Force, to work with me. The season was about to open upstate. I had no hope of going fishing, only of dreaming about it. I felt a deep pull in me of the countryside of my boyhood, for I was really not a city person. Mr. Quintillian’s desk was centered in our cubicle, with room to walk all around it, while mine was pushed into a corner, so my back was to Mr. Quintillian and the world. I left the fishing book on the outer edge of my desk, where I could glance at its jacket and daydream.

  Mr. Quintillian was performing on his adding machine crisply and feelingly, as if playing Bach two-part inventions. There came a tonic, a dominant chord, a long pause. Then, in an ice-breaking voice, he said, “I see you’re an angler.”

  I spun around in my metal chair, startled, as if he had caught me in a mistake of figuring.

  “Where do you go?” he asked.

  “I used to get up north of Gloversville. In around there. Not an angler, sir. Just a bamboo pole and worms, you know.”

  “Best I ever knew,” he said, “was the Margaree, in Nova Scotia.”

  “Are you,” I asked with an incredulity that he could not have taken well, “are you a fisherman?”

  “Used to be.” A flicker, a ghost of a happy memory haunting his face. “Oh, yes,” he said, shifting his papers with both hands, with a definite heartiness, his elbows too high, “I used to tie a pretty decent fly. There was one I had—blue-jay feathers—very small pale blue filoplumes that you can find in among the contour feathers on the shoulder—you know?” He paused; he seemed to be drying out rapidly. “I called it”—an adjournment now—“my Jay Walker.” Rather decisively he punched the add button, and the machine whirred. I turned back to my work. I was acutely aware of the clatter of typewriters and adding machines. It seemed as if numbers and letters were flying around us like gnats.

  I had a picture in my mind then of an old failure. Mr. Quintillian, who had me at his mercy, was what I wanted never to be. I felt no warmth, or even pity, only a kind of horror at this fading nonentity trying to establish a relationship with me through this blurted, fragmentary reminiscence. He was, as one could hear, a New Englander with a thin, pebbly topsoil tongue in a traprock mouth. He had come to nothing, and he was apparently willing to stake out a community of nothingness, to claim me for his void, but I didn’t care to be in it.

  In most people, insecurity brings out an anxiousness to please; with Mr. Quintillian it was quite the opposite. He dealt with the departmental office boys as if they were his personal servants—with an air of superiority that had a definite bite to it, for he had the unchecked power to hire and fire on our floor. More impressive was his cranky and unpredictable irritability when he spoke on the telephone with the upstairs offices, where resided the power, if there should ever be the wish, to fire him. He sometimes talked with higher-ups as if they were naughty children. But underneath Mr. Quintillian’s avuncular snappishness I now began to detect a delicate vibration, an agitation.

  How he chewed out young Scanlon one day!—an office boy who had had polio and was not your ordinary sweet polio person but instead hobbled around like an old wounded veteran of the World War, truculent and resentful, flaunting the moral elegance of his handicap: What did you do for your country? He had been sent off to deliver a packet of Mr. Quintillian’s to the upstairs offices, and he had left it in the wrong room, and the people up there had called down, and Mr. Quintillian went after Scanlon so that you would have thought the old boy was one of those people who hated FDR precisely because he was a cripple. He apparently detested the sight of weakness or suffering of any kind. He was vicious. I had to sit there at close quarters and hear him out.

  Yet I remembered, thinking back to the morning when I had caught Mr. Quintillian murmuring to Miss Tammer in our cubicle, an expression on his face then of serenity, really of something like radiance. It had been a gentle look, and a simple one: a look of simple kindness.

  * * *

  —

  Mr. Quintillian had lost his wallet. Coming from the elevator at eight-twenty-two in the morning, he said someone had stolen it. He said a pickpocket had lifted it from his inner breast pocket in the elevator. The underlined implication of Mr. Quintillian’s account of his loss was that a person in our company, and probably on our floor, was a pickpocket, doubtless a member of a quick-finger team, one to jostle and one to whisk. Mr. Quintillian looked knowing; he went around arresting people with stares.

  Mr. Quintillian told me in our cubicle, with eyes brimming with rheum, as if his sadness at the loss had gone all thick and catarrhal and he could only weep a kind of cheese, that there had been ninety-three dollars in his wallet before its disappearance. At that announcement my heart went out to him. Money of that kind! Gone! I imagined how I would have felt at such a loss—though heaven knows I would never have been able to carry so much money around to lose. His sadness made me sad, and I realized that, after all, I did have some feeling for the old misanthrope. He was so upset. I started up a collection on our floor, to replace the stolen money, and everyone chipped in willingly, because contributing to that fund seemed to blow away the bad odor of thievery and malicious mischief that he had diffused among us as he walked gloweringly around.

  When I came to the new girl, Miss Tammer, on my rounds with my hat literally in my hand, she was typing; she was in a pen with three other girls. I explained the purpose of my begging. The other three dropped in some bills and some change and tittered. Miss Tammer seemed to hesitate. She lowered her eyes and said, “Do you think he can’t replace the money?” I had heard her speak.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s kind of funny passing the tin cup for the boss. Never mind. Give a buck.”

  I had put in a dollar myself. That was a lot for me. I was eating for a dollar a day—ten cents for a breakfast of coffee and a doughnut, then about thirty cents for lunch and about sixty for supper at the Automat; you put the correct change in the little slots and the metal cubby door clicked open, and you pulled out whatever you had chosen, lentil soup or baked beans or beef stew—good solid food, I wasn’t losing weight. I had contributed a day’s food for the boss.

  Miss Tammer looked at me then with a queer prim tightening of her mouth, and she said, “Okay,” and she reached for her purse in the bottom drawer of her small desk, and she pulled out a dollar bill and put it in my hat.

  Her eyes came up to mine again, and she leaned forward slightly, drew me down by my lapel, and spoke in a hoarse whisper against the chatter of the three machines in her cubicle, “He’s a wealthy man. Didn’t you know that?”

  My heart be
gan to jump rope. I don’t know whether it was because Miss Tammer had confided in me, or because she had whispered to me so close that I could smell a sweet whiff of something like cinnamon on her breath, or because of what she had told me about Mr. Quintillian. Anyway, I stood there with a few dollars in my hat and my heart jouncing. It occurred to me—altogether plausibly—that Miss Tammer had been pulling my leg. I took a chance and forced out two syllables of laughter. I gulped afterward, realizing that my raucous haw-haw had been pretty crazy if she had not been kidding. I looked hopefully at her. There was a touch of amusement in her pale gray eyes, but I couldn’t tell what it meant. I felt the blood climbing my cheeks. I wheeled like a drunk and fled.

  Half an hour later, having gone all around the floor, I gave the money to Mr. Quintillian—about two-thirds of what he had lost, it turned out—alone in our little glass box of an office. I had no idea how he was going to react to this gift. If there was to be an explosion, as there might well be, I wanted no witnesses, because the collection had been my idea. I walked in like a brass band while he was working at his desk and just turned my hat upside down and dumped the cash in front of him.

  Mr. Quintillian started counting it at once, as if he had been expecting its arrival for some time. He never looked up at me. There was a fair amount of silver, and some wise guy had tossed in a fistful of pennies. Mr. Quintillian arranged the bills in neat piles of tens, and he stacked the coins, including the pennies, in a row of cylinders of diminishing denominations.

  When he was finished, he wrote on a memo pad: $63.78.

  He left the money in that parade formation on his desk until lunchtime, when he made a roll of the bills and put the change in an envelope and stuffed everything in his trouser pockets, and then got up and went out. Thanks? Not a word. Not even a grunt or a hawk in his throat. I had heard his foot tapping the floor during the counting, while his thin hands fluttered and darted around the money with astonishing speed, like that of the dashing and swooping of chimney swifts on the hunt for insects in a twilight sky; perhaps that tapping had simply been a sign of his impatience with the process of counting. At any rate, it had been the only audible signal of any kind that I got from him after I spilled the money on his desk.

  I had been excited by his dexterity and by his ill-concealed eagerness in handling the cash. He snapped each new bill smartly to make sure it wasn’t two bills stuck together. I understand that a certain type of gambler goes short of breath with suspense when he watches a skillful dealer shuffle a deck of cards with a swift rattle and swish and two cracks of the side of the pack on the table; I’d had the same thrill seeing Mr. Quintillian count currency. Perhaps I should have been a bank teller.

  * * *

  —

  More and more often, as the spring weather came on, I walked to and from the office, and for variety’s sake I would take different routes. One evening, when I had decided to start downtown on Fifth Avenue, I caught a glimpse of Mr. Quintillian pushing Miss Tammer into a Number 15 double-decker bus as the door of the vehicle, like the entrapping tissue of a pitcher plant, closed and devoured the pair of them. One thing I knew: Mr. Quintillian did not live in Queens, to which buses of that number ran. I didn’t know his address, but I had heard him say on the telephone one day that he lived on the Upper East Side. Nor had I found out where the new girl lived; I had, I confess, looked in all the telephone books of the metropolitan area in vain for the name Tammer. As the bus pulled away, with a sharp fart of its air brakes, I suddenly had a thought: Could she be his daughter?

  I grew watchful. One day at lunchtime, having descended in the same elevator with Mr. Quintillian, following him out of the building in the most casual way, walking in the opposite direction from him for part of a block and then doubling back, I picked him out ahead, and yes, saw him meet Miss Tammer at a newsstand. Shamelessly I stalked them to the Stouffer’s on Fifth. Partly to kill a few minutes and partly to have something in which to bury my face, or seem to, I went to Brentano’s basement and bought the Albatross edition of Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing, returned to the restaurant, and managed, without their having seen me, I thought, to get a table behind their backs.

  What insane extravagance—to buy a book, even a thirty-cent European paperbound one—and eat at a place like Stouffer’s, all in one day. I ordered only a cottage-cheese salad, but just the same! I was so absorbed in them that I can’t even remember whether there was a charge for bread and butter.

  I peeked over my book. Those two talked with animation, using enthusiastic gestures. Once in a while I saw the side of her face—glowing, mischievous.

  Did she look like him? I didn’t think so. It struck me then that I didn’t know whether Mr. Quintillian had ever been married. Could I ask Miss Parch over coffee some morning? Or would she report to him that I was getting a shade too curious?

  The time flew and their check came. Miss Tammer reached for her purse. He was fumbling in his breast pocket for the wallet he had bought to replace the stolen one. They leaned over the table; I saw his long forefinger poking above the check, as if at the ghost of an adding machine. Then each forked out paper money; she snapped open a change purse, and he fished not only in the change pouch of his right-hand jacket pocket but also in the little fob pocket at the waistband of his trousers, where, I had noticed one day at the office, he kept pennies separate from silver. They were splitting the bill right down to the last cent, and that seemed to me a strange meticulousness to be observed by a father and his daughter. And stranger yet, it struck me, for man and mistress.

  * * *

  —

  One evening when we three apartment-mates were sitting in Charley’s room having some beers (on Charley, as usual)—Manny and I in the overstuffed chairs and Charley on the edge of his bed—I told the other two how mystified I was about Mr. Quintillian and Miss Tammer. Charley became excited. He wanted me to introduce him to Miss Tammer, said he’d get to the bottom of the thing in two shakes. I said I couldn’t possibly do that; I didn’t know her well enough. Then Charley began to have great fun guessing. She was the old bugger’s niece, had been shipped up to the city by Mr. Q’s elder sister, who had always hated him. No, she was his bastard child by what was that dried-up head typist’s name—Miss Perch? Maybe she was working him for dough. Maybe she was a gold digger who liked the digging more than the gold, so she had staked herself out on a really hardpan case. Nope. It was just an innocent relationship, she was touched by him, sorry for him, wanted to bring him out of himself, so she began inveigling him out on the town—entertainments that would appeal to a tightwad—“You know, Doug, the kinds of things you’d do with a girl on a date, the big room with all the armor in it at the Metropolitan, a twenty-cent ride up Riverside Drive on the open top of a double-decker bus”—and pretty soon they’re in love—it’s possible, you know, some girls want their fathers back.

  “Oh, no!” he then said. “I know what it is. This old guy is bitter because promises made to him years ago haven’t been kept. He handles the money in your department, right? He has this strongbox, right? For ages now, he’s been diddling Byron Carpets, just a little bit at a time, I mean he’s a small-change kind of swindler. But these itty-bitty peculations add up, you know. They add up. And somehow this dame finds out, right? She gets on his soft side, puts on an extra dab of perfume, know what I mean? Then, wham, on the upper deck of a bus to Queens she tells him she knows, and she strings him out with a nasty little run of blackmail.”

  I was suddenly furious. “What balls,” I said to Charley. “You’re really disgusting.” I threw my empty beer bottle in his wastebasket and walked out to the other room.

  Charley called after me, “Aha, Douglas old sport. I get it why you don’t want to introduce her to me.”

  It came to me the next day that the reason I had been so upset by Charley’s game of guessing was that each of his speculations seemed to me, turn by turn, so possible, so believable—an
d perhaps especially the last of them. Perhaps a deeper reason I’d been angry was that the guessing game was so much fun. I could play it, too. I became convinced that Miss Tammer had some sort of hold on poor Quintillian. Could she have found among the secret innermost furnishings of his heart, and threatened to expose, some antique New England love seat where lust and avarice sat guiltily side by side? I began to think Miss Tammer must be a tough number, and I began to feel sorry for Mr. Quintillian.

  In the next few days I had no chance to see them together, and then there came an upheaval at Byron Carpets that turned everything upside down.

  Even I had been noticing for some time that the numbers that crept across the desks of our department had been bad. People out there just couldn’t afford rugs. We all knew that upstairs Mr. Byron was worried. One day a time-study man prowled around our floor, as discreet and menacing as an FBI agent. There were rumors of “some changes.” Mr. Quintillian was called upstairs several times; he returned pale and tightlipped. Then one day the bolt landed—a memorandum, circulated to everyone in the whole company, even the office boys. The memo—signed with flourishes and curlicues by Chester Byron, Jr., President—announced to us that Ernst & Callaghan, management consultants, were coming in “to bring us up to date in all respects.”

  An office boy dropped one copy of the document on Mr. Quintillian’s desk and another on mine at almost the same moment. As I read mine, I thought I heard Mr. Quintillian humming a tune. I did not dare turn my head. It was only much later, when I had gone home that evening, that I realized what I had heard was moaning. Yet afterward, during the rest of the day, Mr. Quintillian was not unusually bad-tempered; if anything, I would have said he was rather more civil to me than usual. But those sounds he had made, those musical utterances, in a chest or belly tone like that of a tenor in the lowest reaches of his range at the end of a tragic aria, haunted me all afternoon.