Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

It had never stopped ringing all this while. She stood by it, stood looking at it. Finally, to end the nerve-rack of waiting for it to stop by itself, she picked it up.

The voice was that of a woman. It was slightly accented, but more in sentence-arrangement than in actual pronunciation.

“Hello? It is Schultz’ Delicatessen, yes?”

In a lifeless monotone Laurel Hammond repeated the question word for word, just changing it to the negative. “It is not Schultz’ Delicatessen, no.”

The voice, hard to convince, now repeated the repetition in turn. “It is not Schultz’ Delicatessen?”

“I said no, it is not.”

The voice made one last try, as if hoping persistence alone might yet result in righting the error. “This is not Exmount 3-8448?”

“This is Exmount 3-8844,” Laurel said, with a touch of asperity now at being held there so long.

Unarguably refuted at last, the voice became properly contrite. “I must have put the finger in the slot the wrong way around. I’m sorry, I hope you weren’t asleep.”

“I wasn’t, yet,” Laurel said briefly. And even if I had been, she thought, it wouldn’t have been the kind you could have awakened me from.

Still coughing a little, but more from previous reflex now than present impetus, she hung up.

It took a moment for it to sink in. Then she began to laugh. Quietly, simmeringly, at first. Saved by Schultz’ Delicatessen. She wondered why there was something funny about it because of its being a delicatessen. If it had been a wrong-number on a personal call, or on a call to almost any other kind of establishment, there wouldn’t have been anything funny in it. Why was there something ludicrous about a delicatessen? She couldn’t have said. Something to do with the kind of food they sold, probably. Comedy-food: bolognas and salamis and pigs’ knuckles.

She was laughing uncontrollably now, almost in full-blown hysteria. Tottering with it, tears peering in her eyes; now holding her hand flat across her forehead, now over her ribs to support the strain of the laughter. No joke had ever been so funny before, no near-tragedy had ever ended in such hilarity. She only stopped at last because of physical exhaustion, because she was on the verge of prostration.

You couldn’t go back and resume such a thing, not after that kind of a farcical interruption. Your sense of fitness, your sense of proportion, alone — any life, even the most deprecated one, deserved more dignity than that in its finish. She turned on the key under the burner again, but this time she lit a match to it. She put on water, to make a cup of tea. (The old maid’s solace, she thought wryly: trade your hopes of escape for a cup of tea.)

I’ll see it through for one more day, she said to herself. That much I can stand. Just one more. Maybe something will happen, that hasn’t happened on all the empty, barren ones that went before (but she knew it wouldn’t). Maybe it will be different (but she knew better). But if it isn’t, then tomorrow night — she gave a shrug, and the ghost of a retrospective smile flitted across her face — and this time there’ll be no Schultz’ Delicatessen.

She spent the vestigial hours of the night huddled in a large wing-chair, looking too small for it, her little harmonica-sized transistor radio purring away at her elbow. She kept it on the Paterson station, WPAT, which stayed on all night. There were others that did too, but they were crawling with commercials, this one wasn’t. It kept murmuring the melodies of Roberta and Can-Can and My Fair Lady , while the night went by and the world, out there beyond its dial, went by with it. She dozed off finally, her head lolling over like a little girl’s propped-up asleep in a grown-up’s chair.

When the sun made her open her eyes at last, she gave a guilty start at first, thinking this was like other days and she had to be at the office. But it wasn’t. It was the day of grace she’d given herself.

When she was good and ready, and not before, she called the office and told Hattie on the reception-desk: “Tell Mr. Barnes I won’t be in today.” It was after ten by this time.

Hattie was sympathetic at first.. “Not feeling too good, nn?”

Laurel Hammond said, “As a matter of fact, I don’t feel too bad. I feel better than yesterday.” As a matter of fact, she did.

The girl on the reception-desk still tried to be loyal to a fellow-employee. “You want me to tell him you’re not feeling good though, don’t you?” she asked anxiously.

“No,” said Laurel, “I don’t. I don’t care what you tell him.”

The girl on the reception-desk stopped being sympathetic. She was up against something she couldn’t grasp. She became offended. “Oh,” she said, “just like that you take a day off?”

“Just like that I take a day off,” Laurel said, and hung up.

A day off, a lifetime off, forever off, what difference did it make?

Shortly before noon, with a small-sized summer hat on her head and a lightweight summer dress buoyant around her, she closed the door behind her, put the key in her handbag, and stepped out to meet the new day. It was a fine day too, all yellow and blue. The sky was blue, the building-faces were yellow in the sunlight, and the shady sides of the streets were indigo by contrast. Even the cars going by seemed to sparkle, their windshields sending out blinding flashes as they caught the sun.

Where did you go on your last day in New York? That is, on your last day in New York? You didn’t walk Fifth Avenue and window-shop, that was for sure. Window-shopping was a form of appraisal for the future, for a tomorrow when you might really buy. You didn’t go to a show. A show was an appraisal of the past, other people’s lives in the past, dramatized. A walk in the park? That would be pleasant, pastoral. The trees in leaf, the grass, the winding paths, the children playing. But somehow that wasn’t for today either. Its very tranquility, its apartness, its lostness in the center of the buzzing, throbbing city, she had a feeling would make her feel even more apart, more lost, than she felt already, and she didn’t want that. She wanted people around her; she was frightened of tonight.

She got on a bus finally, at random, and let it take her on its hairpin crosstown route, first west along Seventy-second, then east along Fifty-seventh. Then when it reached Fifth and doubled back north to start the whole thing over, she got off and strolled a few blocks down the other way until suddenly the fountain and flower-borders of Rockefeller Center opened out alongside her. She knew then that was where she had wanted to come all along, and wondered why she hadn’t thought of it in the first place.

It was like a little oasis, a breathing-spell, in the rush of the city, and yet it was lively, it wasn’t lonely in the way the park would have been. It was filled with a brightly dressed luncheonbreak crowd, so thick they almost seemed to swarm like bees, and yet in spite of that it was restful, it was almost lulling.

She went back toward the private street that cuts across behind it, which for some highly technical reason is closed to traffic one day in each year in order to maintain its non-public status, and sat on the edge of the sun-warmed coping that runs around the sunken plaza, as dozens of others were doing. She’d come here once or twice in the winter to watch them ice-skate below, but now the ice was gone and they were lunching at tables down there, under vivid garden-umbrellas. Above, a long line of national flags stirred shyly in a breeze mellow as warm golden honey. She tried to make out what countries some of them belonged to, but she was sure of only two, the Union Jack and the Tricolor. The rest were strange to her, there were so many new countries in the world today.