For Vera, peace proved to be a great confusion. In the months following the end of the war she began to suspect that life in the Army had cruelly unsuited her for what she now had to face. Being a sergeant had taught her that she preferred giving orders to taking them. Already it was becoming clear that women were expected to quickly lose that acquired taste.
Vera could not bring herself to look for work. It was because she found herself always tired now, an affliction so severe that it made life scarcely seem worth living. Hers was a terrifying condition; she did not know what was happening to her. Finally, when her situation grew desperate enough, Vera decided the answer was a holiday, she must have a complete rest. So she checked into a swank hotel in Toronto. To pay for this extravagance she drew on three years of savings and her $349.65 of discharge pay. For the first time in years, Vera bathed and slept in absolute privacy. She had meals sent up by room service and ate them off her lap, sitting in a chair by the window, watching the throngs flocking the sidewalks and the metal torrent of traffic roaring in the street below. It all seemed to have nothing to do with her.
Endeavouring to feel as fresh and optimistic as those people looked, she bought herself perfume, two smart expensive suits, ordered cut flowers for her room, and went to the beauty parlour downstairs for a cut and a perm. Nothing helped. After those initial bold excursions Vera did not leave her room again until her money ran out.
Not that she didn’t try. Her goal was to have dinner downstairs, in the dining room, in the midst of other people. Each afternoon she began to make her preparations. She needed plenty of time to get ready because the slightest effort had become exhausting. Around three o’clock in the afternoon she started with eyebrow plucking, lipstick, and face powder. At four, stockings were rolled up what seemed like miles and miles of leg, and garters were fastened. Next, she picked every blessed speck of lint from her new skirt and jacket, bit by bit, with her fingernails. Finally, it came time to dress. But before she did that it was necessary to pause, to close her aching eyes for just a second. So Vera would stretch herself out on her bed in her bra and panties, and the voices of people passing in the corridor outside her room would come drifting through the open transom, lulling voices that murmured on and on, that pitched her into a thick tangle of dreamless sleep from which she only awoke, shivering, long after midnight, long after the dining room was closed and there was nothing else to do but crawl between the sheets and promise herself. Tomorrow, tomorrow, the dining room.
But the money disappeared, and tomorrow was Mrs. Konwicki’s rooming-house. The day Vera moved in, smuggling a frying pan and second-hand hot plate in her biggest suitcase past the landlady with the flabby, baked-red arms of a domestic bully, was the day she suspended her correspondence with Earl. After all her bragging about the Waldorf-Astoria and the advantages of a uniform she was not about to confess to Earl it had all ended in a cheap rooming-house. Vera was ashamed. And to lie about her present circumstances would have meant that she didn’t regard them as purely temporary. Things would soon look up. When she was back on the rails, a success again, she would resume writing to her brother and send him her address. However, things were so long in looking up that in the end she lost track of him.
With all her money gone, she had no choice but to look for work. The exhaustion that showed in her face and wilted her carriage was a disadvantage applying for jobs. So, too, were her Army discharge papers which listed her trade as cook. When she explained that she had been more of a kitchen manageress than cook, interviewers either looked indulgent or sceptical.
Once, after being turned away yet again, she had said angrily to the man who had interviewed her, “I thought veterans could be expected to be shown preference.”
The man said, “Do you really consider yourself a veteran? A veteran like a man who risked his life on a battlefield? What are you a veteran of?”
Still, she continued on, applying for positions she had no hope of getting. She did this as much to escape the rooming-house as for any other reason. Vera hated it there. It smelled of dusty cocoa-matting and the Polish Princess’s little shitter, Stanny. Stanislaus was Mrs. Konwicki’s daughter’s gift from the angels, a three year old who ran up and down the hallways persecuting his grandmother’s lodgers, banging on the closed doors behind which old men coughed day and night, a dill pickle which he’d sucked white poking out of fat, rosy baby lips, and the odour of stale poop following him wherever he went.
One afternoon as Vera sat on a bench in a park it began to drizzle. Unable to bear the thought of being driven back into her musty room, she got to her feet and started to walk, walking in a rain not feeling nearly as cold, melancholy, and dispiriting as sitting in one. An hour of trudging brought her to the doors of a movie theatre. By then she was soaked, her hair hanging in strings, her shoes and stockings soggy, her teeth chattering. The price of a matinee was cheap to escape what had become an icy shower.
As she paid for her ticket, Vera read a small notice taped to the glass of the booth announcing that the theatre was seeking a presentable young man or woman to assist in seating patrons. Apply in person to Mr. A.J. Buckle, Theatre Manager. An old theatre that had once presented touring operettas, vaudeville, and melodramas before being converted into a cinema shortly before the Great War, it retained certain vestiges of opulent, crusty glory: a tracked and faded lobby carpet that had once been a lush scarlet, brass handrails on all stairs, and curtained smoking-loges whose mahogany trim was scarred with cigarette burns and jack-knife hearts and initials. In her opinion it was romantic, had style. On the spur of the moment Vera decided she would apply.
Mr. Buckle turned out to be a plump, middle-aged man, sleek as a seal, whose tiny feet transported him around the room as smoothly as if he were mounted on castors. While interviewing Vera he rolled from side to side, from one buttock to the other, and flapped his thighs together whenever he supposed he’d made a witty remark. The slapping sound helped reinforce Vera’s feeling that he resembled a seal.
It soon became clear to her that Mr. Buckle was pretty full of himself. And he asked the most peculiar questions. Could she sew? When she said she could, he nodded enthusiastically. There was an inquiry about the condition of her feet. Any corns, ingrown toenails, plantar’s warts? Vera assured him that the condition of her feet was excellent. That was fine, said Mr. Buckle. An usher’s feet were as important as a soldier’s. With that, he appeared satisfied. The motive for his question about her ability to sew became apparent when Mr. Buckle passed a large paper bag across his desk top and said, “This will be your uniform, dear. It will require alteration. Agnes was somewhat more petite than yourself.”
Struggling that night to remake the uniform, Vera wondered what Mr. Buckle’s definition of petite might be. Not only did the uniform look like it belonged on an organ grinder’s monkey, it also looked like it would fit one. Mr. Buckle’s former usherette must have been a midget. Vera couldn’t see how the material could be decently stretched to cover her own long-limbed, gawky frame. Hours passed. Vera stitched madly and ripped apart what she had just stitched, made decisive chalk marks on the cloth and then indecisively rubbed them out with her thumb. She was no seamstress, just somebody who had been thimble-whacked by her mother into a modest proficiency with needle and thread. By midnight she despaired of ever putting back together what she had torn to pieces. Not only would she lose the job, she would probably have to pay Mr. Buckle for the garment she had destroyed.
All her life Vera had been a poor loser. She turned to the amputated sleeves and flopping hems with furious, tight-lipped determination. It was three-thirty in the morning when she bit off the last thread. Her task completed, she sat for a moment, massaging her aching shoulders. The thought did not occur to her that this was the first time in months that she was not the least bit tired.
She slipped into the uniform. To see herself full-length in the mirror above her dresser she clambered up on the bed and stood there unsteadily. The dusty maroon uniform consisted of a wrinkled skirt and a jacket with fringed epaulettes. Worst of all was the pillbox hat, complete with chin strap. While she balanced herself in a half-crouch, swaying on the saggy mattress, Vera examined her handiwork. The sleeves halted half an inch above her wrist-bones. The skirt rode above the hard ovals of her kneecaps. She looked ridiculous. Vera bowed her legs, crooked her arms, and swung them slowly in front of her from side to side, raised a hand, and scratched an armpit. Then she laughed. A real laugh, the first in ages. Laughed so long and so loud that the silence of the sleeping house was shattered. Mrs. Konwicki lodged a complaint with Vera in the morning.
Becoming the darling and champion of the theatre staff helped Vera recover her old self. It didn’t matter that her admirers were a pathetic collection of oddballs and misfits who accepted Buckle’s reign of terror either because they didn’t have the spine to tell him to go and take a long walk on a short pier, or because they knew they weren’t employable anywhere else except in another half-assed establishment run by a lunatic similar to Buckle. Their general incompetence made Vera feel protective, even motherly towards her fellow employees.
Frank the usher was fifty-five; a nancy boy with fluttery hands, wide-awake astonished eyes, and a habit of whispering conspiratorially everything he said. He sucked peppermints constantly because he worried about his breath, carried his comb stuck in his sock, and walked as if he were holding a ball-bearing between the cheeks of his ass and didn’t want it to fall out. Frank was a great fan of musicals and sometimes when he watched them at the back of the theatre his feet would start to shuffle rhythmically. Once Vera saw him suddenly attempt a pirouette in the dark.
Maurice the ticket-seller was in poor health and distressed by worries about losing his job because his angina pectoris was so bad that ticket-selling was just about the only job he could do. He was Mr. Buckle’s errand runner. During the summer Mr. Buckle sent him out to move the manager’s Oldsmobile from parking stall to parking stall, following shade, and in the winter he dispatched him to fire the engine of the car every two hours so that when it came time to go home Mr. Buckle would have no trouble starting it.
Then there were Amelia and Doris, the weird Wilkinson sisters, who stood side by side manning the refreshment counter. They never tired of telling how since childhood they had been inseparable. Their one goal in life seemed to be to keep their destinies linked. Although Amelia was a year older than Doris, in their uniforms they appeared to be twins. Outside the theatre they dressed in identical, matching outfits so as to strengthen that impression. Doris and Amelia liked to pretend they were twins because it made them feel out of the ordinary, special and glamorous the way the Dionne quints were special and glamorous. Their greatest fear was that the other would so anger Mr. Buckle as to get fired, leaving her sister behind, abandoned. The idea was so inconceivable, so unbearable that they had sworn a pact that if one was dismissed the other would immediately resign. However, having sworn such a rash pact, each sister began to doubt the other’s judgement in dealing with Mr. Buckle. They were continually admonishing and checking up on one another. “Doris, don’t you go giving Mr. Buckle one of your looks!” “Amelia, save your sauce for the goose!”
When Mr. Buckle first took over his duties as manager of the movie house, he deeply offended the Wilkinson sisters when he forbade them to take any unsold popcorn home to their mother as they had been doing for years, on the ground that it encouraged overpopping. Despite their outrage over the imputation they could ever be so irresponsible, Amelia and Doris cloaked their real sentiments and always smiled most charmingly, in unison, whenever Mr. Buckle crossed their paths or found himself in the vicinity of the refreshment counter.
The only member of the staff aside from Vera who showed no fear of the manager was Thomas the projectionist. Since projectionists did not come a dime a dozen Thomas was treated more respectfully by Mr. Buckle than the others were. He was distinguished in another important way. Because he did not come under the public eye he did not have to wear the theatre uniform and was exempt from Mr. Buckle’s surprise snap inspections, occasions when all uniformed personnel would be drawn up in the lobby before the doors opened to have their turn-outs scrutinized by the manager. Nothing was more resented than this. Everyone felt Mr. Buckle’s observations about their garments and personal grooming to be belittling and demeaning. Mr. Buckle seldom needed to issue a direct order about a failing in attire, a hint was enough. If, however, his hints were not acted upon, retribution was swift. The upshot could be that you found yourself detailed to pick soggy cigarette butts out of urinals for the next month.
His air when he reviewed the troops was swaggering. “Doris, I’d see to that butter spot on your jacket, if I were you. Those of us who handle food must leave an impression of immaculate cleanliness with the public. Butter spots don’t look very sanitary, do they? I’d go for a thorough dry-cleaning, if I were you, not just a touch-up with cleaning fluid. You’re due for a dry-cleaning. After all, Amelia had hers last week.”
His praise was heartily artificial. Formerly a high school principal until certain difficulties led to his resignation, Mr. Buckle knew the value of commending the deserving. “Well, well, Maurice! Now we’re certainly looking spiffy. The missus certainly got that braid back into fighting trim in short order! Good man!” And a mournful Maurice would get a cordial clap on the shoulder, the sort of warm congratulation you give a man who gets right on top of things, without a moment’s hesitation.
Vera did not get right on top of things, not even after Mr. Buckle had publicly criticized her shoes. Wearing a pair of brown shoes with a maroon uniform just wouldn’t do, would it? They sort of clashed, didn’t they? Black would go much better with maroon, don’t you think? Vera ignored Mr. Buckle and kept right on wearing her brown shoes. The next time the staff were paraded Mr. Buckle made a speech. He said that those who neglected their appearance not only let themselves down, they let down everybody else who worked at the theatre because what one employee did reflected, for good or ill, on all. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind who he was talking about. Especially since he kept his eyes fixed on Vera’s shoes as he spoke.
Go piss up a rope, Vera thought. She wasn’t leaving the one pair of comfortable shoes she owned in the closet because some horse’s patoot wanted to play Napoleon. She’d worn a real uniform in her day, one that actually stood for something, and if he thought she was going to take seriously this monkey’s tuxedo, he had another think coming.
When he raised the issue again, a week later, Vera put it to him straight. “I’m wearing brown shoes because black shoes don’t get picked off trees. Black shoes and my salary don’t see eye to eye right at the moment.”
None of the staff had ever heard anyone speak to Mr. Buckle that way. Maurice studied the toes of his shoes and nervously shunted his top plate back and forth with his tongue. Frank squeezed his lips and buttocks even more tightly together. Doris and Amelia tried to look disapproving of a woman who could be so rude.
Mr. Buckle got oilier and smoother, a sure sign in his case that he was angry. “You knew what your salary would be when you accepted your position here, Miss Monkman. You were informed.”
“Sure I was. But I wasn’t informed half of it would have to be ear-marked for dry-cleaning and new shoes. I didn’t know I was expected to dress like a Rockefeller on what you pay me.”
Mr. Buckle considered such remarks beneath reply. He simply bobbed up and down on his toes, as if he were pumping more pounds per square inch and more purple into his face. When it was sufficiently purple and swollen he turned on his heels and marched off. In retreat to his office he let fly one parting shot over his shoulder. “If shoes are beyond your budget perhaps you might manage to replace your stockings. There’s a ladder in one of yours.”
“Whyn’t you use it to climb up and kiss my ass?” invited Vera under her breath, just loud enough so that the others could catch what she said but Buckle couldn’t.
When Mr. Buckle’s office door closed on that first act of defiance, Frank and Maurice, Doris and Amelia all clustered around Vera, whispering excitedly.
“Atta girl, Vera. Doesn’t he know he got told!”
“What a nerve! The nerve of that man, Vera! Shoes. As if we could afford shoes! Just as easy as glass slippers!”
“The Rockefeller! Did you see his face? The Rockefeller really got to him. Boy oh boy! The Rockefeller!”
“Remember your heart, Maurice,” cautioned Frank.
“Boy oh boy! Rockefeller right up his ass!”
“Let’s not be crude, Maurice,” admonished Frank. “Fair sex present.”
“Well, Vera said it, didn’t she? And so do I. Rockefeller right up his ass!”
Mr. Buckle would have fired Vera right then and there if it hadn’t been for her one invaluable talent. Nobody could deal with a troublemaker the way Vera did and the theatre was situated in an area where troublemakers were not uncommon. If it wasn’t for her, the kids at Saturday matinees might have pulled the building down around their ears the way Samson had the Philistines’ temple. And when it came to the other insalubrious types you met running a theatre in this district – the drunks who argued with Cary Grant, the perverts who pestered unaccompanied ladies, the indecent couples who groped and writhed their way through an entire feature presentation – Mr. Buckle didn’t know how these would have been dealt with if it hadn’t been for that brash young woman.
Maurice certainly was of no use. The mere idea of confronting someone and ordering him to remove himself from the premises was enough to provoke chest pains so bad that the ticket-seller had to be sat down and given an Orange Crush. Frank tried but almost always made matters worse. Six trips to request some noisy chap to quieten down and the fellow grew louder with every visit. There was something about the way Frank walked and talked and breathed peppermint all over the rowdies which only whipped them up into further frenzies of misbehaviour. As for Mr. Buckle – quite early in his career he had got his nose broken when he tried out his high school principal’s voice on a young soldier. He avoided running any risk of a repeat performance.
No, when it came to giving somebody the bum’s rush, nobody held a candle to Vera Monkman. Mr. Buckle attributed her success to the same disagreeable qualities which disrupted his inspections and often caused him to regret the day he ever set eyes on the woman. These were cheekiness, coarseness, natural belligerence, and an outrageously inflated opinion of herself. In many respects, Mr. Buckle thought, Vera Monkman was a thoroughly hateful young woman.
At the first whiff of a disturbance Vera would swing into action, shoulders squared, mouth set, flashlight poised at the ready like a cocked pistol. Vera did not hesitate. She’d give them the high beam full in the face. As they sat blinded, shrinking behind an uplifted hand, she’d say, “Listen, pal, nobody paid good money to listen to you. They came for Clark Gable. They’re having trouble hearing Clark on account of you. So button it and give us all a break. Thank you or else.”
Then, snapping off her flashlight, she would wheel abruptly around and stride vigorously back up the aisle before they got a chance to answer. It was part of her tactics. Don’t let them get a word back at you. Above all, never plead and never argue. Show them who’s boss. If the disturbance resumed, back she went, this time to remove them. There were no second chances. She’d just reach down, grab them, and boost them out of their seats. Most rose without a whimper of protest, it was the element of surprise that did it. If they resisted, Vera quickly sketched what they could expect.
“Look, mister, you don’t want to get in a scuffle with me. I don’t embarrass. I’ve got lungs like a banshee and I hang in screaming bloody blue murder until the cops arrive. So it’s that or get up quietly and leave. You’ve got exactly five seconds to make up your mind which it is before I start in. One, two…” They usually hustled out of their seats by four.
Vera explained her method to Frank. “The most important thing is never to doubt they’ll come. If you do, you’re finished. They’re like dogs, they can smell fear.” But Frank couldn’t seem to get the hang of it.
Although everyone admired Vera, no one admired her quite the way Thomas the projectionist did. Thomas was an unusual young man. Not only did he project film, he also projected wishes. He had a genius for inventing stories and telling them to people who had reason to wish they were true. For instance, he informed Maurice that Mr. Buckle suffered from a secret heart condition much more serious than Maurice’s own angina pectoris. “You think you’ve got it bad? You’ll live to be a hundred because you take care of yourself. Have you taken a good look at Buckle lately? The man looks like he’s got one foot in the grave. Honest to God, he does. They don’t give him much longer, Maurice. Compared to him, you’re the picture of health.” To Mr. Buckle he confided that both Doris and Amelia adored the manager, found him kind and sympathetic and handsome in a mature, distinguished way. “If I were you, I’d be sure not to show one favour at the expense of the other,” counselled Thomas. “It doesn’t do to stir up jealousy at work.”
He encouraged Frank to get a hair-piece. “Why, it would take twenty years off you. Because, Frank, I have to tell you, that fresh, youthful skin of yours just doesn’t jive with those scraps of old hair. Really, it doesn’t.”
Thomas had no stories for Vera because he could not fathom what she might like to be told. Perhaps it was the mystery that prompted and stoked his ardour. Isolated in his projectionist’s booth he meditated on her constantly. Vera, for her part, hardly gave him a passing thought. If she did, it was to feel sorry for him. Sorry for his long, skinny neck perpetually inflamed with ingrown hairs, sorry that he believed wearing a bomber jacket could cover up the fact that he had been rejected for military service. (Frank laid the blame on a hernia.) Sorry that he talked so smugly and embarrassingly of his ambition to operate a small electrical appliance repair shop. “After the war is the Electrical Age. There’ll be a fortune to be made in that field. For the ones with the brains to get in on the ground floor.”
It never dawned on Vera that the bomber jacket and electrical shop were given such prominence for her sake. Nor that Thomas’s offers to walk her home after the theatre closed were anything but a courtesy extended by a shy young man who happened to be strolling in the same direction. So it took her entirely by surprise when Thomas proposed a date. If she had smelled it in the wind she would have prepared a tactful, graceful refusal. But she hadn’t and, caught without an excuse, Vera heard herself agreeing to have supper with him on Sunday, the one night they were free from work.
It was a wretched, excruciating evening, a disaster. Thomas had the taxi drop them off in front of one of the better hotels where he proposed having supper. There his courage failed. He knew he had enough money in his pocket to buy the very best, most expensive meals the dining room served, but did he know how to act in such a place? Was he well enough dressed? He ran his tie between his fingers and said, “I just remembered something. I knew a guy who worked in the kitchen here once. The stories he used to tell. I don’t think we want to eat here.”
So they set off walking in search of another restaurant. Thomas was in a quandary. He had boasted to Vera of the superb meal she had in store for her. “There are only three decent places to eat in town,” he’d said, “and Thomas knows them all.” Now he was in a dilemma: he had to deliver what he had promised but he was afraid that if he went into a really high-class restaurant he wouldn’t know how to behave and would end up making a fool of himself. So he dragged Vera through a hot, humid July night, searching for a restaurant splendid enough to impress Vera but not so splendid as to bewilder him. He would lead her into a hotel, determined this was to be it, and then on the threshold of the dining room he would be assailed by doubt and would hustle her away. His explanation for these sudden retreats was that the place was clearly not up to snuff, didn’t meet his demanding standards. “No,” he would say, gazing with a wistful air at the waitresses ferrying food from kitchen to table, “this isn’t it. I want you to enjoy something really special. I want you to have the best. Money’s no object with Thomas.”
There was always a better place just up the street, just around the corner. Making for it Thomas would swear to himself that this time there would be no backing down, no failure of nerve. This time he would demand a table in a firm voice, nothing would deter him. But at the last second something always did. Shamefaced he would make his excuses to Vera, invent implausible criticisms, and then bolt with her in tow. Each time his resolve collapsed he grew more desperate. He began to walk more quickly, like a man possessed, hurrying down the hot sidewalks from hotel to hotel with long, stiff-legged strides that almost jerked Vera off her high heels as she clung to his arm. “No,” she heard him mumble, “not good enough.”
Vera felt as if she were being asked to run a race in a steam bath. By nine o’clock she had had her fill of galloping around aimlessly in the heat with this maniac. She was starving, she had sweated clean through her girdle and was hobbled by a blister on her heel. Enough was enough. Vera made Thomas promise that they would eat in the next restaurant they happened upon, even if it was a greasy spoon. Although Thomas pretended to resist this eating house ultimatum, it came as a great relief to him. He saw to it that the next they passed was the sort of place he was comfortable and confident in, the kind that advertised working-man’s specials during the week. Vera was grateful just to be able to sit down and slip her shoe off. She was going to have to stand on that stinging blister through a matinee and two screenings the next day and the sooner she got off it now, the more endurable it would be tomorrow.
The restaurant was deserted and its emptiness made Thomas’s voice seem particularly strident and aggressive as he disparaged what it had to offer. After he read each dish aloud from the menu he repeated the refrain, “What a joint. You mean they’ve got nothing better than this?” He insisted that Vera order the T-bone steak because it was the most expensive item listed. To shut him up she did. Thomas had the Sunday supper special: vegetable soup, roast beef, creamed corn, mashed potatoes and gravy, plus a choice of either vanilla ice cream or chocolate pudding for dessert. When Vera’s steak was served to her by a middle-aged waitress with powerful, spectacularly bowed legs, Thomas inquired anxiously, “Is it okay, Vera? Because if it isn’t, I’ll make them take it back and cook it right. You spend that kind of money – it ought to be done to your liking. Exactly so.”
Vera assured him it was lovely, perfect.
“Well, if it isn’t just give me the nod. I know how to handle them in clip joints like this.”
To deflect Thomas before he really got humming on this topic, Vera remarked: “My, wasn’t it hot today though?”
With passion Thomas agreed that it was. Damn hot. Weather like this made you awfully thirsty. Was there enough ice in her water? He could get her more if she wanted it. Boy, was he thirsty. To illustrate how thirsty he was, Thomas noisily downed a large tumblerful of water in one draught.
Never again, Vera promised herself.
Silence reigned for the remainder of the meal. When it came time for dessert Thomas pressed apple pie and ice cream on Vera. He only gave it up after she told him she was watching her figure. “I don’t mind watching it myself,” said Thomas coyly. Other gallantries were interrupted by the arrival of his chocolate pudding. He complained it had a skin on it.
“They all do,” said the waitress implacably. “Cook made them this morning. Can’t be helped.”
Vera watched, fascinated, as Thomas painstakingly skinned his pudding with the blade of his knife before he mined its goodness with a teaspoon.
It was no longer intolerably hot by the time they came out of the restaurant. Thomas was relaxing now that the evening was almost over. He decided that he had handled things rather well. He sauntered along with his suit jacket slung over his shoulder and a toothpick flicking up and down between his front teeth. “That wasn’t such a bad place after all,” he said. “But next time, we’ll go deluxe.”
Vera didn’t hear what he said. The softness of the warm night air had awakened memories of how her father and mother had taken her and Earl for evening drives in the country, to cool them off before they were put to bed. Earl, who was little, rode in the cab, seated between her parents, but she was allowed to ride in the open, in the box of the truck. That had been pure pleasure, her long hair whipping and streaming around her face as she leaned out against the rush of air, pretending not to hear her mother tapping on the rear window, signalling her to sit down, to be careful. And the tears springing into her slitted eyes so that the big-bellied white moon above actually seemed to be afloat and rolling in a vast black ocean.
There was longing in her voice when the thought escaped her. “It would have been a lovely evening for a drive in the country,” she said.
All the next week Vera avoided bumping into Thomas and readied the explanation, the excuse she would offer when he asked her out again. On Friday, he crept down from the projectionist’s booth while the first reel was running and accosted her. “I got one,” he said, evidently highly pleased with himself. Vera thought he looked like the cat who had got the canary.
“Got what?”
“A second-hand Dodge so’s I can take you for those rides in the country you were hoping for. What do you say Sunday we take a spin out to Niagara Falls?”
Vera was speechless. Was this misunderstanding her fault?
“My old man claims I’m crazy,” said Thomas. “One minute I’m saving every penny I earn so’s I can establish myself in business and the next I blow a big chunk of it on a car when the streetcar gets me to and from work, no problem. But what Thomas says is this: If you can give a little pleasure to somebody you care about, what’s money?”
Vera knew she ought to say something right then and there. But how could she? How could she spoil his fun with him looking like that, like a little boy with a new train set? She couldn’t. They went to Niagara Falls. Vera and Thomas stood side by side staring at the hypnotic sheet of falling water, drenched by the fine spray diffused in the air. “Isn’t this just about the most romantic place on the face of the earth?” said Thomas.
“I’m never getting married,” Vera put in quickly.
For the next three Sundays in a row Vera consented to be chauffeured about southern Ontario by Thomas. Barns, cornfields, and red-brick towns slid by her dazed eyes. She was absorbed in a difficult calculation. Exactly how many outings did she owe Thomas because of the car? What it had cost him and was costing him was never long out of his mind or conversation. She wouldn’t believe what oil and gas alone added up to. Then he had had to buy a new battery. “But,” he added graciously, “it don’t seem much when you’re pleasing somebody.”
When could she, in good conscience, make an end of it? And what did it mean to end with Thomas? End what? Was there anything to end? Everything was mixed signals, confusion, ambiguity. On one hand he seemed to assume they were sweethearts, yet he had never so much as kissed her. His behaviour towards her was always scrupulously proper, almost brotherly. The most he permitted himself was to hold her hand while he walked her to and from the Dodge. But on other occasions his talk became suggestive, even smutty. In particular, what Thomas had said about Mr. Buckle had left her feeling uneasy – not about Mr. Buckle but about Thomas. She wasn’t sure she believed his story.
“You watch yourself when you’re alone with Mr. Buckle,” he said one golden Sunday afternoon as the Dodge whirled through a shower of autumn leaves.
Vera hadn’t really been paying attention. “What’s that?” she asked.
“I said,” repeated Thomas with emphasis, “watch yourself when you’re alone with Mr. Buckle.” “I’m never alone with him.”
“You will be,” said Thomas, oracularly. “All the female employees are, sooner or later. It’s when he gets you in his office, alone, that you’ve got to be on your guard.”
The thought of Mr. Buckle pursuing her around his desk like some figure in a bad cartoon amused Vera. “Buckle chasing a woman would be like a dog chasing a car. Neither would know what to do with it if it caught it.”
“He doesn’t chase anybody. He just sits behind his desk. Ask Doris and Amelia if he ever gets out from behind his desk when he scolds them.”
The significance of this was lost on her. “So he sits behind his desk. What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe more goes on than meets the eye.”
“Thomas, if you’ve got something to say, spit it out.” Vera was getting mightily annoyed by these riddles.
“I don’t think I should say.”
“Fine,” said Vera. “Good. If you can’t say, you can’t say. The subject is closed.”
It was obvious Thomas didn’t want it closed. He licked his lips before proceeding. “Well, I came into his office right after he had Doris and Amelia in there about them not watching the kids stealing gum and candy and like that. When I came in he was tucking something away – if you get my drift. It seems he likes to give something an airing when he gives you women hell. Under his desk, I mean.”
Vera stared.
“You get my meaning? He exhibits himself sort of. Under the desk, that’s how.”
“I see,” said Vera. She turned her face away. A horse was standing alone in a field behind a snake fence.
“Would you say that’s sick? That’s pretty sick, isn’t it?”
Vera didn’t answer him.
“So if he ever pulls any of those tricks with you, just let me know. I’ll make him sorry he was ever born. You can count on it.”
It was this story and the queer sensation it left her with that prompted Vera to concoct one of her own stories. This one involved an elderly female relative whom it was necessary to visit every other Sunday. It was the first step in a plan to wean Thomas from her company. On the Sundays she supposedly spent with her female relative the phone in the rooms she had rented after leaving Mrs. Konwicki’s rang all afternoon, at intervals of an hour.
Vera’s feeling of uneasiness about Thomas began to grow. Nothing he had done so far was extraordinarily peculiar, but many things were slightly off, unfocussed, like a blurry film which had you wiping at your eyes as you watched it. The gifts he was constantly presenting her with were a case in point. These were small, inexpensive presents which he rather ceremoniously gave her before they embarked on their Sunday rides. His tributes, however, were strange ones, the sort of gifts given to people in hospital but not to your best girl: a bag of plums, magazines, a package of cigarettes. Never flowers, chocolates, or perfume. Not, of course, that Vera hoped for anything intimately associated with an avowal of love. Far from it. Still, his gifts were so eccentric that Vera sometimes wondered if she wasn’t the butt of a subtle and devious practical joke. Were these offerings an elaborate form of sarcasm? What did he mean to say with a bag of plums?
Then on the last Sunday in October, at a time when Vera’s exasperation with Thomas and his antics had reached the breaking point, she saw an opportunity to clear the air. Mixed in among five or six screen magazines he had presented her with (a case of carrying coals to Newcastle if she had ever seen one) she discovered an issue of Vogue devoted to bridal gowns.
What was the meaning of this? she demanded, flourishing the magazine.
“I wondered when you’d get around to it,” said Thomas. He was sitting on Vera’s davenport and the light coming in the window made him resemble a self-satisfied cat basking in sunshine.
“Get around to what?”
“What’s on every girl’s mind. Marriage. I thought I’d make it easier for you to bring it up.”
“Excuse me,” said Vera. She strode to the bathroom, bolted the door, and sat on the toilet. Think, she urged herself. Think. Think. But she couldn’t. For five minutes, for ten minutes, she crouched on the toilet seat, her heart drumming every solution to her predicament out of her head. All she could be certain of was that she had handled all this very wrong, wrong from the start.
After twenty minutes she heard fingernails politely scratching on the door. The cat wanting to be petted, or given a saucer of cream. “Vera, are you all right?” he said forlornly.
“Yes, but I’d appreciate a little privacy all the same.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Minutes later he was back. “Please come out, Vera,” he said. “I know you feel embarrassed but there’s no need to be. I want exactly what you do. It’s natural for people our age to want to get married. You needn’t hide. We both want the same thing.”
“Like hell we do!” shouted Vera. No, that was not the way to handle the situation. She must control herself. Vera took a deep, calming breath and spoke very carefully. “You’re wrong, Thomas. A terrible mistake has been made. You’ve not understood me from the beginning. I don’t want to marry you, Thomas. I didn’t even want to spend Sundays riding in your car. But I did and that was my mistake. But I’m not going to let this go on any longer. Do you understand? It would be easier on us and better if you left now. I’m sorry for everything. I really am.”
There was a moment of terrible, hushed silence and then Thomas began to shake the bathroom door.
“I blame myself, too,” said Vera, stumbling to offer an apology as the door rattled and jumped in the frame. “I ought not to have encouraged you with these Sunday rides. But I felt bad that you had bought the car. I didn’t mean for you to waste your savings like that. And I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant or what you were after. I kept thinking that maybe you just thought of me as a good friend, a pal. After all… what I mean to say, you never got overly friendly or anything, did you now?”
“I respected you, Vera.”
“And I’m glad you did. I appreciate how you’ve always behaved as the perfect gentleman. And still will now, won’t you, Thomas?”
He ceased rattling the door. All was still. Vera laid her ear to the door and listened intently. There was nothing to hear but she could feel Thomas on the other side. Then he spoke. “Who’s your other Sunday man? The one you see when you won’t see me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Thomas. There is no other Sunday man. Or Monday or Tuesday man for that matter.”
“Who is he?”
“I’m not talking about this. There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Who’s your other Sunday man?” Thomas demanded, his voice rising dangerously.
“If you continue with this nonsense it’s the end of our conversation. Do you understand?”
“Who is he!” The cry was sudden, so piercing that Vera sprang back from the door, startled. Thomas resumed his attack. The door wobbled, creaked, bulged as he flung his weight against it. Vera jerked open a drawer beneath the sink, seized a pair of scissors and retreated from the door as far as possible. This meant climbing into the bathtub. There she stood with the scissors clutched in both hands, extended at arm’s length from her body and pointed at the heaving door.
“Who’s your other Sunday man! Who’s your other Sunday man! Tell me!” implored Thomas wildly.
“Stop it! Stop it this minute, Thomas!”
“Who?” It was his last question. He could not continue the interrogation because he had begun to sob.
“Thomas? Thomas?” Vera realized he had fled his station when she heard him trip over the loose tile in the hallway. Vera clambered out of the tub, rushed to the door, listened. The faint sounds of Thomas moving about in the kitchen penetrated to her. They were muffled and indistinct, unidentifiable except when she heard him blow his nose loudly. The dim noises shifted location, now they seemed to muddle about the living room. After a bit the apartment door slammed. It seemed Thomas had gone off. Vera proceeded cautiously nevertheless, scissors in hand. She did not rule out tricks. Perhaps he lay in waiting for her. She discovered his message in the living room where the word CUNT was written on the davenport in mustard, the letters a foot high.
Vera arrived for work Monday, hopping mad, determined to slap Thomas’s face in front of everybody. If he thought he could get off scot-free after the disgusting thing he had done to her davenport, he had another think coming. And if anybody wanted to know why she had slapped his face, she’d tell them, word and all.
But there was no face to slap. There was no Thomas. A relief projectionist was in the booth and rumours were flying. Someone had heard that Thomas had phoned Mr. Buckle at home, on Sunday, and quit his job. No, said another, he hadn’t quit, only requested sick leave because he was rundown, needed a rest. Despite the differences in the rumours all seemed to be agreed that Vera had had a hand in Thomas’s disappearance. Doris and Amelia hinted to Vera that Mr. Buckle was furious with her and held her responsible for the loss of the best projectionist he had ever had, one who didn’t smoke in the booth in the midst of highly inflammable film and didn’t show up for work drunk. When Frank spoke to Vera he did so gently and mournfully, in a doe-eyed manner appropriate in addressing the wretched in love, the heart-broken.
Vera didn’t give a tinker’s fart for what they thought as long as she was rid of that geek Thomas. It looked as if she was. But shortly after she decided that, the letters began to arrive.
Dear Miss High & Mighty,
I dont expect anyone to feel sorry for me hut isnt it funny. Here I am without a job and no savings because I spend my money on the Dodge all for you to make you happy. And now I cant enjoy it myself without the money to fill the tank or even buy a spark plug. Well remember lifes a funny thing and those who think there on top dont always finish that way.
People have played Thomas for a fool before like at school and whatnot. But tell your Sunday man that this fool has often fooled them and got what Thomas wants. So dont bother to laugh yet the two of you. Another thing Ive got my ways of finding out who he is.
Yours,
Thomas
Several days after this letter was delivered Vera came out of the theatre after it had closed for the night and spotted Thomas. He was across the street, huddled up in the dark doorway of a music store. It gave Vera quite a fright to see him there, spying on her. Her first inclination was just to walk quickly, to pretend he didn’t exist. But maybe that was running away. She took three or four brisk steps, then changed her mind, swung round, and saluted him by waving to him in an exaggerated fashion, like a woman flagging down a bus from the side of a highway.
Thomas betrayed not a flicker of recognition. He remained slouched and unmoving until Vera exhausted the novelty of her performance and walked on with an angry toss of the head.
Dear Miss High Opinion of Yourself,
I suppose you figure it was a big laugh waving like that the other night. Well I wave to my freinds and I have plenty of them good ones more than you think and I dont wave to people who think waving is to make fun of somebody. I could have waved back maybe for a joke if I didnt love you Vera. But love is not a joke. It is the most serious thing there is. More serious than death is love. If you could learn that Vera you might be happier I can see you arent always so angry. Dont make jokes about me or my love. I have been awfully forgiving but it is hard when you are so miserable like me.
Your freind,
Thomas
Vera put a paring knife in her purse and slid a hat-pin into the sleeve of her coat where she could get to it in a hurry if she needed to. It was November. The nights came early and there were fewer people in the streets because of the cold. Vera’s walk home after work seemed lonelier and longer than it had in the summer.
One night she stepped out of the lobby of the theatre and into a change of weather. There was a smell of snow in the air and a harsh wind was scurrying scraps of paper down the street and moaning through the telephone wires overhead.
Change of any sort, even the passing of autumn into winter, always had the effect of temporarily lifting Vera’s spirits. Now the stinging wind which burned her cheeks braced and energized her. She went forward briskly, the rapping of her heels on the sidewalk sounding crisp and metallic in the frosty, clear night. Only the occasional late-night diner showed any signs of life. In them Vera could see cabbies arguing and drinking coffee at the counters. These were the same men who prowled their hacks back and forth in front of the theatre when the movies let out, hoping to snap up a fare. But tonight the hunting had been bad, a sparse crowd for a bad movie. So they were sitting on their duffs, trying to make up their minds whether to call it a night and go home to the little woman or to keep trying to scare up a buck against the odds. Vera might have joined them for a cup of hot chocolate if the wind hadn’t felt so good in her face. It was blowing her head clean of the reek of cheap perfume, men’s hair oil, and the close, hot, overpowering smell of bodies packed shoulder to shoulder so they could be entertained. She turned up her collar, hugged her coat to her bosom, lengthened her stride.
After five minutes at this determined pace, Vera turned into a narrower, quieter street of small shops over which their proprietors and families lived. For almost a year Vera had passed this way each day on her way to and from work but its strangeness had not worn off; it still seemed to her foreign and a touch romantic. Sometimes she imagined it was a street in Europe because she knew this was as close to Europe as she would ever get, and her walk home became a stroll in Vienna, Budapest, Prague. What helped this illusion was the look of the stores and the immigrant storekeepers, most of whom were Jews.
Vera always shopped on this street out of a sense of adventure, to hear the nervous, dark-suited men serve her in English accented by Polish, Russian, German, Hungarian, and Yiddish. She was secretly disappointed when she was waited on by one of the sombre, responsible children who deftly wrapped parcels and climbed onto stools to ring up sales and make change with decision. It was difficult to preserve the illusion of Vienna or Budapest when the children spoke to her in their ordinary, everyday Canadian voices. Neither the Stars of David, the Yiddish signs in the windows, nor the young boys with their beanie hats stuck on the crowns of their heads could help recapture the dream that language had shattered. No, what was more to Vera’s taste was some shrunken old man bent over his counter late at night, poring over a newspaper, a single light burning in the shop for economy’s sake, and the rest in shadow. That could be Russia.
There were no such sights to be seen tonight. The bad weather had long ago blown out hope of customers in even the most stubbornly optimistic. Blinds were drawn and doors were locked. The rings in the window of the shabby jewellery store were covered with a cloth, the sausages were removed from the hooks in the butcher shop; the pawnshop, the shoe store, the corner grocery were all dark.
It was on her favourite street that the absence of traffic allowed Vera to hear footsteps closing quickly on her from behind. A glance over her shoulder told her it was who she thought it was. Only one light showed on the street, a window burned on the second floor above a men’s wear shop across the street. Vera fluttered toward it like a moth. She hurried across the street, coat flapping, eyes lifted to the light. Someone was up there, awake.
Behind her she heard feet break into a run, a patter of leather on asphalt.
Brought up short by the storefront, Vera jerked around, an animal at bay. When she whirled about, Thomas checked his headlong pursuit in the middle of the street. Briefly he hesitated and then came on in a stiff, self-conscious amble meant to suggest a man confident and completely at ease. Over Vera’s shoulder four shadowy mannequins watched his approach, saw him snatch off his tweed cap, ball it in his fist, and stuff it in his pocket when he was just yards from her. He came on like a sleepwalker and only halted when he was so close to Vera that it was all she could do to stop herself from visibly shrinking away, backing herself up against the plate-glass window. The light from the window above revealed perspiration gleaming on Thomas’s upper lip and a ghostly dab of shaving lather on the lobe of his left ear. The run had quickened his breathing. Vera saw him pant white smoke in the cold air.
“What do you want?” demanded Vera, feigning assurance. “Why are you following me, Thomas?”
Thomas did not appear to know how to reply. He started to lift his arms and then let them collapse helplessly against his sides. He shook his head, began to rock back and forth on his toes, swaying like a man overcome by vertigo on the brink of a precipice.
“What do you want?”
Thomas’s answer was to lurch blindly forward, fall on his knees, fling his arms convulsively about her waist, and burrow his face into the front of her coat. The theatricality, the extravagance of this gesture, paralyzed Vera with numbing embarrassment. My God, she thought, what if someone is witnessing this performance? How ridiculous. She cast her eyes apprehensively up and down the street.
“Stop it,” Vera said, her voice lowered now in such circumstances, almost a whisper. “Stop this, Thomas.”
He only clung to her harder, tightening his arms around the small of her back and working his face against the cloth of her coat. The strength of this embrace almost toppled her, and she had to reach out and steady herself by placing a hand on his head, but at the touch of his hair she withdrew her hand as if it had brushed fire. The grinding of his forehead against her pubic bone was becoming painful.
“Stop it!” she cried angrily, shoving at his shoulders. “Get away!”
Which only spurred Thomas to clench her even more suffocatingly close, to crush her spine with the jutting bones of his wrists. It was the squeezing pain, the panic of being robbed of breath, that made Vera strike Thomas smack dab on the dried shaving lather plastered to his ear. Her roundhouse slap rocked him but didn’t break his grip so that when she tried to tear herself free she only succeeded in losing her balance and crashing back against the plate-glass window. The store boomed hollowly, like a drum.
Vera recovered and came up fighting. She pummelled his head and shoulders with both hands, snapped her body backward in an attempt to break free. Thomas was dragged along her line of retreat, scrambling on his knees, his forehead bouncing off her pelvis and his hair shooting up in bursts of shock whenever Vera landed one of her haymakers. Whenever she missed and caught air Vera reeled and slammed against the window, striking the sound of distant thunder out of it.
Then a light burst on behind the mannequins, a lock rattled, and the door to the shop was thrown open. Vera and Thomas froze. Thomas remained on his knees, neck craned around to the door, mouth hanging open stupidly and eyes squinting against the sudden brightness. A man in a vest undershirt, trousers, and stockinged feet stood in the open doorway, a look of gentle, bemused perplexity on his face. He was middle-aged, very tall, stoop-shouldered, and had faded, reddish hair. Something about his manner made Vera think of Jimmy Stewart, her favourite actor. He had the bewildered innocence of Mr. Smith. A slow smile of amusement spread over his face as he took in the scene, Thomas down on his knees before Vera.
“I hope I haven’t interrupted a proposal,” was all the man said.
With that, Thomas got to his feet and began to strike ruthlessly at the dust on the knees of his trousers.
“Not likely,” spat out Vera. She jabbed an accusing finger at Thomas. “He followed me. He chased me. I ran here because I saw a light was on.”
The red-haired man took a step nearer, peered from one to the other, settled on Thomas. “Is that right?” he asked. “Were you following the lady? Did you chase her?”
“I only wanted to talk to her,” said Thomas sullenly. “Anyway, what business is it of yours?”
The storekeeper turned to Vera. “Do you know this man?”
“Does she know me,” interjected Thomas. “I’ll say she does. She’s my girlfriend.”
The red-haired man nodded his head reflectively. “So it’s like that,” he said. “A lover’s spat. But please, not on my window.” He flattened his palm against it. “It’s only glass. A really good spat could break it.”
“I want you to know,” said Vera, “that this man is an out and out maniac. I never was a girlfriend of his. He imagined it all. Mister, this man is crazy and I’m afraid of what he might do to me. Please tell him to go away.”
“You know that isn’t true, Vera. You were my girlfriend.”
“And there’s no lovers’ spat either. He just ran up and grabbed me here on the street. What it is is a pervert attack or something.”
The red-haired man was speaking to Thomas. “Please, maybe it would be better if you left the lady alone for the time being. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow she’ll want to talk. But now she’s upset and it’s clear she doesn’t want to discuss matters.”
Thomas glowered at the advice. “Why don’t you keep that big fucking nose of yours out of our business? Who asked you?”
“Oh, I think this is my business,” the man answered calmly, “because, you see, this window the two of you were trying to crash through is my business. And if it’s true that you’re bothering this young woman like she says you are – well then, in all decency, that has to be my business, too.”
“You’d better believe he’s bothering me,” chimed in Vera.
Thomas raked her with a brooding glare. “You better shut up, Vera,” he warned.
Suddenly she remembered the hat-pin. She drew it out of her sleeve and held it glinting in the light. “How’d you like this rammed up your ass, buster?” she said.
“That’s enough,” the store owner said sharply, pushing her arm down. “Maybe everybody should calm down and stop talking such nonsense, threatening each other like children. Maybe you should go home now, son, and give her time to think about it.”
“Yeah, with any more time to think about it I ought to really make myself sick to my stomach,” said Vera.
The man ignored her. He continued speaking to Thomas in a soft, persuasive tone. “There’s really no point, is there?” he reasoned. “This has all got out of hand. Leave her be. Sleep on it. The morning always makes a difference. Don’t make yourself any more trouble.”
It was the mention of trouble that seemed to agitate and incense Thomas. “There’s no trouble in me standing where I choose!” he said, flying into a rage. “You can’t order me off the street! You and your tribe may have bought everything on it but you don’t own the road yet!” Suddenly seized by suspicion he broke off, threw Vera a cunning, measuring look. “So this is it, is it? Some dirty old Jew waiting for you in his underwear.”
Vera flung her arms into the air in exasperation. “Didn’t I say he was crazier than a shit-house rat?” she appealed to the storekeeper.
“Don’t think I don’t know who the Sunday man is now. Only light on in the street and she goes for it. Pussy bought by a kike!” he shouted. “Pussy bought by a kike!”
“Lower your voice,” said the red-haired man. “There are old people who live on this street who shouldn’t have their sleep disturbed by such foolish and disgusting talk. It frightens them, loud voices and such talk.”
“Make me lower it,” taunted Thomas, mouth twisted, bitter. “What’s the old saying? Takes nine tailors to make a man. How many Jew tailors to make one? Show me. Make me lower it! But your type can’t, can they?”
What astounded Vera was the composure of the red-haired man. She could detect no sign of anger in his face, only some variety of resigned melancholy. “No,” he said quietly, “I suppose my type can’t ever make your type do much.”
“You’re fucking right you can’t!” crowed Thomas. “I’ll make just as fucking much noise as I please. I’ll, I’ll…” and, lost without a threat, Thomas looked wildly about him, reared back, and drove his heel into what confronted him in the glass of the store window, his own desperate, unhappy reflection.
The pane exploded in fissures like the break-up of a frozen river and then the shards began to drop about them in an icy, silvery-sounding rain as the store expelled a long sigh of warm air into their astonished faces. Vera and the shop owner were still gaping when Thomas whirled about and began a panicked get-away, coat billowing out behind him as he clattered up the street. Vera, turning, wondered why the red-haired man didn’t give chase. He hadn’t yet lifted his eyes from the glittering wreckage strewn at his feet. So it fell to Vera to express the anger and contempt she believed Thomas had earned. “Run, you coward, you!” she shouted after him. “Run, you gutless wonder!”
The sound of her voice brought Thomas up short, looking like a man who has forgotten something. He stood facing her, indistinct, blurred by a hundred yards of night. “So, Vera,” he called plaintively, “what’ll it be? Whose side are you on anyway? Mine or his?” A pitiable question that only Thomas could have framed in such circumstances.
Vera squeezed her eyes tightly shut and obliterated Thomas. “His!” she shouted, shaking with fury. In the release of bottled-up tension a kind of exaltation took hold of her. “His! His! His!” she cried, eyes and fists clenched tight. A hand took her by the shoulder. “That’s enough,” said the man. “Quiet. He’s gone now.” Vera opened her eyes to lights springing on above the shops and silhouettes sliding over drawn blinds. Her gaze fell to the road. He was right. Thomas was gone. There was no trace of him. Except for the broken glass.
Vera felt a twinge of responsibility for having led misfortune to the door of a stranger. “Christ,” she said, shoving a piece of glass with the toe of her shoe, “look at the mess he’s made. Look at what that poor excuse for a man did to your window. If you call the police I can give them his address. I know where he lives. I’d be glad to be a witness for you.”
The man shrugged, turned down the corners of his mouth expressively. “I don’t think police are what that unfortunate young man needs,” he said. He regarded the fragments of broken glass and the light which fell glittering upon them. “Kristallnacht,” he said to himself.
Vera had not understood the foreign-sounding word. “Pardon me?”
“Nothing. Don’t pay any attention to me. I was just reflecting upon the beauty of broken glass and electric light. Others have done it before me.”
“There’s nothing beautiful about broken glass. It only means work, sweeping it up, replacing it.”
“A practical woman,” he said.
“Well, maybe we should set about fixing it. If nothing else, we can tape some pieces of cardboard into the window. You must have boxes in the store.”
He dismissed the suggestion with a wave of the hand. “It’s much too big a hole for cardboard. Repairs can wait until morning.”
“I’m not saying it would keep anybody out but what if it snows? And a window without anything in it has got to be an invitation to help yourself.”
“If it snows it snows. There’s nothing really worth stealing except the cash register and I can carry that upstairs with me. Besides, if there are any prowlers I’ll hear them.”
“You sleep that light?”
“As a matter of fact, at night I don’t sleep at all.” He smiled wryly at her surprise. “I’m a man of peculiar habits. I go to bed for five or six hours right after I close the store. At midnight or so I get up to read. Perfect peace and quiet. No interruptions. Except for tonight,” he added. “A bachelor’s freedom to do as he pleases. This is the wild use I make of my freedom.”
“You read all night?”
“I also drink too much coffee. Sometimes with a little whisky in it. More bachelor wildness.” He hesitated. “After such a cold and trying adventure as you’ve had tonight, could I interest you in a cup of coffee?”
“I believe you could.”
He held out his hand. “I believe formal introductions are usually the preamble to whisky. Stanley Miller.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Miller,” said Vera, taking his hand. “I’m Vera Monkman.”
“Please, Miss Monkman,” he said, indicating she should enter, courteously stooping his stooped shoulders even more.
That was how it began. Her trailing him as he puffed up the steep stairs packing an antique nickel-plated cash register in his arms. Or perhaps it didn’t really begin until she stepped into his apartment and looked with amazement upon his living room, books stacked to the height of a man’s head along three walls and a phonograph player spitting static because she and Thomas had interrupted his pleasure. And then he reset the needle on the record spinning there on the turntable and the music began once more at the beginning and it was classical. Pure and refined and as different from what she listened to on her radio in her rented rooms as crystal is different from everyday glass. (Kristallnacht was the word he had said.)
And the conviction took hold of her that all these books and this music were where she was headed when she was sixteen years old, reading Shakespeare and learning French, and then it got stolen from her, this dream she never quite got straight in her head because she was too young, but was nevertheless surely bound for, a true tendency of the heart’s deepest ambition.
It made her feel unworthy, that room, and filled her with regret that she had never become so fine a person as to deserve sitting in such a room. And that, too, was the beginning of it.