Alice McDermott - After This

But Pauline had another conversation to pursue. She lifted her hands and put them over the top of her typewriter, she scooted her chair as close as it could get, a familiar routine, so that her breasts were pressed against the keys. She mouthed something, a name-Mr. Someone-or-Other-and rolled her eyes and cocked her head toward the front of the room. “Adele,” she mouthed. Mary looked up, she couldn’t help it, toward the desk where Adele sat, her back to them, her dirty blond hair draped perfectly over her lovely shoulders. “Rita,” another girl from the office, “saw them both,” Pauline whispered. “At lunch.” She paused, her eyes joyous, her lips pursed, her cheeks drawn in, as if the piece of news were butterscotch in her mouth. “Adele was crying,” she added, only mouthing the words, or only speaking them with a breathless wheeze in place of where the words might have been. “Crying.” She pantomimed, dragging her own manicured finger down her cheek.

Pauline had a large face, a strong jaw, and blue eyes forever darting, gesturing, scanning the room, scanning the faces and the backs of passersby-salesmen, bosses, other girls from the secretarial pool-taking everything in with one set of eyes, avid and hungry, and then turning another set, triumphant, well satisfied, to Mary, leaning over her typewriter to report what she’d seen, a bit of gossip, a bit of outrage, a bit of indecorous truth (did you see the shine on his coat, the bad toupee, the yellowed tooth, the pimple, the belly she’s getting?), all of it the same to Pauline, all delightful to savor, all evidence to be used. Evidence of what, Mary sometimes wondered-of the decadence and the decay, the homeliness, the paucity of good intentions that plagued the world? Evidence that no one else’s life, despite whatever false appearances, was any better than her own.

“I knew something was going on there,” Pauline said returning to her stage whisper. And then, louder still, “Something rotten in Denmark,” just as another girl from the pool walked between them, turning attentively to the sound of Pauline’s voice. Pauline raised her eyes to her. “Oh yes, rotten indeed,” she said and gave the girl a “tell you later” smile.

Mary lifted her own steno book. Only about six pages old, it still had its cool, slim heft and straight cardboard covers. By the end of the month, its pages would be bloated with the pencil strokes of her shorthand, its back would be cracked and its edges softened. And then she would begin another. The march of time.

Pauline’s eyes were still on her, even as Mary found her place and set the open book upright on her desk. The goal, Sister Clare had taught them in school, was shorthand so neat and so legible that anyone can pick up your steno book and type your letters for you. So neat and so legible, she had said, smiling at them from within her wimple, that if you elope on your lunch hour, another secretary can finish your letters for you that afternoon.

She looked over her shoulder, glancing at Pauline, even smiling a little, but Pauline only tilted her head again toward Adele’s back. Mary nodded. This was the kind of moral dilemma Pauline often got her into. Mr. Someone-or-Other, Pauline had mouthed. Adele at lunch with him, crying. But Mr. Who? She turned to her typewriter, Pauline’s eyes still on her. She would like to ask “Who?”-but to do so, in that same mouthing whisper Pauline had used, would be to enter too fully into Pauline’s tale, Pauline’s bitter triumph, and, in some way, into Pauline’s unhappy life.

But Mr. Who?

This was the dilemma Pauline put her in: as much as she would like to know the story, the gossip, the whole tale, she hoped not to hear that desperate breathlessness in her own voice. As much as she wanted to know whatever it was that was worth knowing about the secrets and complications and (yes, even) failings and foibles of the people in the office-and she had to admit the few days that Pauline ever missed work were always long and dull-she did not, with equal longing, wish to be a part of the whispering spinster chorus at the edge of other, more interesting lives. She did not want to be one of the gray-haired harridans, one of those brittle and bitter middle-aged virgins who can never be sure that the world is indeed as full of deceit and ill will as they claim, or whether it’s their own tainted version of things that creates the ill will and deceit in the first place. She did not want a life drained of kindness and compassion and humor. It was as much as she had prayed for an hour ago in church, now that the war was over and she no longer prayed for the boys. She had prayed for if not a better life than this daily, lonely one, a better way to be content with it. And then the sudden windstorm, the stream of strangers either bent into it or leaning back to resist it, tears running down all their faces in this valley of tears. George putting his hand on her shoulder. God’s answer.

Never kid a kidder.

“Maybe,” she said to Pauline, not looking at her, just turning her head a bit to speak to her from across the aisle and over her shoulder. Not whispering either. “Maybe it was just the wind.”

It was the lack of a reply, clack of typewriters within the silence, that made her finally raise her eyes to Pauline’s face, which was blank, her jaw thrust forward beneath the neat pink lipstick.

“The wind,” Mary said again. “It was making everyone tear up.”

Pauline examined her face for a few seconds more, her jaw set. And then she smiled a little, not kindly, raising her eyebrows and slowly shaking her big head. “You are naive,” she said, as if confirming something she had already spent a good deal of time discussing, elsewhere. “You really are.”

Mary shrugged. “I suppose. But that wind was making everyone tear up.”

Pauline continued to smile, shaking her head, and Mary, turning back to her work, smiled too. She had escaped the spinster chorus only to join the naïve. And here was the other part of the moral dilemma Pauline embodied. Would it have killed her to play along? To have told Pauline, Oh my! You’re kidding! What a scandal! If gossip gave Pauline pleasure why deny her? Surely there was little enough pleasure for Pauline outside of work. A mother she’d nursed through cancer, a brother she was estranged from because of a terrible wife, a small apartment and a cheap landlord and an unending series of contacts with people-a grocer, a butcher, a waitress, a salesclerk, a bus driver-who did not meet her expectations.

Feed my lambs, Jesus said. What was the cost of a little kindness toward someone who found her pleasure in being unkind? What was the good, as Sister Clare at school used to say, in loving only the lovable?

Oh my, you’re kidding, what a scandal! Would it have killed her to play along?

She whispered a quick mea culpa, resolved to be less naive, and then let herself settle into her work, the pleasure of the speed of her fingers and the neat, dark strokes of her own shorthand, her confident spelling and punctuation, her sense of purpose and community as the busy sound of her own typewriter joined with the busy sounds of the typewriters beneath the hands of all the women in the room. This much she was sure of: if she kept busy, kept her mind to the task at hand, let herself sink into the busy industry of her job, her shoulders straight and her ankles crossed beneath her chair, her desk neat-blotter, stapler, paper clips, dictionary, the surface dusted with a tissue every morning and every afternoon-if she simply worked, worked well, efficiently, competently, then time would pass. Time would march on. Not merely the afternoon hours but the weeks and months. The lunch hour would come and then five o’clock would come and then the evening would come, and then the weekend again, and then another. Christmas would come and mad April again and lovely summer and fall. The war would begin and the war would continue and the war would end and time would pass with all that behind us now, another life (she would have put her palm to the worn gold on his belt), and all that was ahead would pass, and none of it, looking back, would seem to have been very much time at all, even though looking ahead it had seemed endless. If she kept her back straight and her ankles crossed beneath her chair and her hands over the keys, if her fingers struck them quickly and rhythmically and the sound of all their industry filled the room, and if she remembered to take some pleasure in it, the sound, the industry, the feel of Pauline’s eyes on her back, even after Pauline herself had gotten up to take dictation in one of the offices, if she found some pleasure in the changing light as the afternoon moved forward, in the fading perfumes of the other girls as they passed her desk, in the good smell of the paper, the carbon, the old building itself, then time would pass and when she stood to cover her typewriter and to run another tissue over the surface of her desk, to smile apologetically at Pauline already in her hat and coat and waiting like the schoolgirl she surely must once have been for the stroke of five (adding, in her hissed stage whisper, “This isn’t the first time they’ve been seen together like that”), she could tell herself another day gone and not so bad at that and what else to do when you’re a single girl of thirty still at home, the war over and no prospects in sight, your body not meant for mortal sin or a man’s attention or childbearing, either, it would seem, what to do but accept it and go on-a walk to the subway, the air chilled even further without the sun but the wind not nearly so bad as it was, and the ten-stop ride among the crowd of other office workers, and then the walk home, spears of crocus and daffodil rising out of the hard dirt around the caged trees and along the brick foundations, not so bad.