Anne Tyler - Ladder of Years

Authorities do not suspect drowning, the paper had said. It hadn’t occurred to her they might. Since Mrs. Grinstead professed a-how had they put it?-professed an aversion to water. Or something of the sort. Made her sound like a woman who never bathed. She slammed the carriage return more violently than was necessary. And that business about Eliza saying she’d been a cat! People must think the both of them were lunatics.

This typewriter had a stiffer action than the one in Sam’s office. Her first day at work, she’d broken two fingernails. After that she had filed all her nails down blunt, which was more appropriate anyhow to Miss Grinstead’s general style. Besides, it had used up twenty minutes of an evening. She was devoting a lot of thought these days to how to use up her evenings.

“Well, let’s do that! We’ll have to get together and do that!” Mr. Pomfret was saying, suddenly louder and heartier. Delia typed the closing (“Esquire,” he called himself) and rolled the letter out of the carriage. Mr. Pomfret burst through the door. “Miss Grinstead, when Mr. Miller shows up I’ll need you in here taking notes,” he said. “We’re going to send a… What’s that you’ve got?”

“Letter to Gerald Elliott?” Delia reminded him.

“Elliott! I met with Elliott back in…”

She checked the date at the top of the page. “May,” she said. “May fourteenth.”

“Damn.”

It had come to light that Delia’s immediate predecessor had stowed her more irksome chores in the filing cabinet under Ongoing. Anything red-inked by Mr. Pomfret had conveniently vanished. (And a great deal had been red-inked, since Katie O’Connell couldn’t spell and apparently did not believe in paragraphs.) Mr. Pomfret had turned purple when Delia brought him the evidence, but Delia was secretly pleased. This way she looked so capable herself-so efficient, so take-charge. (She felt a bit like a grade-school tattletale.) Also, the retyping job amounted to a low-key training course. She would be sorry when she finished.

“Mr. Miller is due at two-thirty,” Mr. Pomfret told her. He was leaning over her desk to sign the letter. “I want you to write down word for word everything he specifies.”

“Yes, Mr. Pomfret.”

He straightened, capping his pen, and gave her a sudden sharp look over his lizardy lower lids. Sometimes Delia carried her secretary act a bit too far, she suspected. She flashed him an insincere smile and gathered up the letter. His signature was large and sweeping, smeared on the curves. He used one of those expensive German fountain pens that leaked.

“And we’ll want coffee, so you might as well fix it ahead,” he told her.

“Yes, Mr.-. Certainly,” she said.

She went into his office for the carafe, then took it to the sink in the powder room. When she came back he was seated at the credenza, short thighs twisted sideways, tapping once again at his computer. For he did have a computer. He had bought it sometime just recently and fallen under its spell, which might explain his failure to notice Katie O’Connell’s filing methods. Theoretically, he was going to learn the machine’s mysterious ways and then teach Delia, but after her first morning Delia knew she had nothing to fear. The computer would sit forever in its temporary position while Mr. Pomfret wrestled happily with questions of “backups” and “macros.” Right now he was recording every dinner party he and his wife had ever hosted-guest list, menu, wines, and even seating arrangements-so their variables could be rotated into infinity. Delia gave the screen a scornful glance and circled it widely, heading for the coffeemaker at the other end of the credenza.

Water, filter, French roast. This coffeemaker was top-of-the-line: it ground its own beans. She supposed it came from one of those catalogs that weighed down the office mail. Whenever Mr. Pomfret spotted an item he liked, he had Delia place an order. (“Yes, Mr. Pomfret…”) She called 1-800 numbers clear across the country, requesting a bedside clock that talked, a pocket-sized electronic dictionary, a black leather map case for the glove compartment. Her employer’s greed, like his huge belly, made Delia feel trim and virtuous. She didn’t at all mind placing the orders. She enjoyed everything about this job, especially its dryness. No one received word of inoperable cancer in a lawyer’s office. No one told Delia how it felt to be going blind. No one claimed to remember Delia’s babyhood.

She pressed a button on the coffeemaker, and it started grinding. “Help!” Mr. Pomfret shouted over the din. He was goggling at his computer screen, where the lines of text shivered and shimmied. For some reason, it never occurred to him that this always happened when the grinder was running. Delia left the office, closing the door discreetly behind her.

She typed another letter, this one enumerating the corporate bylaws of an accounting firm. (“Buy-laws,” Katie O’Connell had spelled it.) Pursuant to our discussion, she typed, and fiscal liability, and consent of those not in attendance. She sacrificed speed for accuracy, as befitted Miss Grinstead, and corrected her rare mistakes with Wite-Out fluid on original and carbon both.

Mr. Miller arrived-a big, handsome, olive-skinned man with a narrow band of black hair. Delia followed him into Mr. Pomfret’s office to serve their coffee and then perched on a chair, pen and pad ready. She had worried she couldn’t write fast enough, but there wasn’t much to write. The question was how often Mr. Miller’s ex-wife could see their son, and the answer, according to Mr. Miller, was “Never,” which Mr. Pomfret amended to once a week and alternate holidays, hours to be arranged at client’s convenience. Then the conversation drifted to computers, and when it didn’t drift back again, Delia cleared her throat and asked, “Will that be all?”

Mr. Pomfret said, “Hmm? Oh. Yes, thank you, Miss Grinstead.” As she left, she heard him tell Mr. Miller, “We’ll see to that right away. I’ll have my girl mail it out this afternoon.”

Delia settled in her swivel chair, rolled paper into the carriage, and started typing. You could have balanced a glass of water on the back of each of her hands.

The only other appointment was at four-a woman with some stock certificates belonging to her late mother-but Delia’s services were not required for that. She addressed a number of envelopes and folded and inserted the letters Mr. Pomfret had signed. She sealed the flaps, licked stamps. She answered a call from a Mrs. Darnell, who made an appointment for Monday. Mr. Pomfret walked past her, cramming his arms into his suit coat. “Good night, Miss Grinstead,” he said.

“Good night, Mr. Pomfret.”

She sorted her carbons and filed them. She returned what was left of the Ongoing file to its drawer. She answered a call from a man who was disappointed to find Mr. Pomfret gone but would try him at home. She cleaned the coffeemaker. At five o’clock exactly she lowered all the shades, gathered the letters and her handbag, and left the office.

Mr. Pomfret had given her her own key, and she already knew the crotchets of the pebble-paned door-the way you had to push it inward a bit before it would lock.

Outside, the sun was still shining and the air felt warm and heavy after the air-conditioning. Delia walked at a leisurely pace, letting others pass her-men in business suits hurrying home from work, women rushing by with plastic bags from the Food King. She dropped her letters into the mailbox on the corner, but instead of turning left there, she continued north to the library-the next stop in her routine.

By now she had a sense of the town’s layout. It was a perfect grid, with the square mathematically centered between three streets north and south of it, two streets east and west. Look west as you crossed an intersection, and you’d see pasture, sometimes even a cow. (In the mornings, when Delia woke, she heard distant roosters crowing.) The sidewalks were crumpled and given over in spots to grass, breaking off entirely when a tree stood in the way. The streets farther from the square had a tendency to slant into scabby asphalt mixed with weeds at the edges, like country highways.