Different Seasons(183)
I could see the two of them in my mind’s eye as she told me the story—Miss Stansfield, her direct hazel eyes fixed on Mrs. Kelly, perfectly composed, refusing to drop her eyes, or weep, or exhibit shame in any other way. I believe she had a much more practical conception of the trouble she was in than her supervisor did, with her two almost-grown children and her respectable husband, who owned his own barber-shop and voted Republican.
“I must say you show remarkably little shame at the way you’ve deceived me!” Mrs. Kelly burst out bitterly.
“I have never deceived you. No mention of my pregnancy has been made until today.” She looked at Mrs. Kelly curiously. “How can you say I have deceived you?”
“I took you home!” Mrs. Kelly cried. “I had you to dinner ... with my sons.” She looked at Miss Stansfield with utter loathing.
This is when Miss Stansfield began to grow angry. Angrier, she told me, than she had ever been in her life. She had not been unaware of the sort of reaction she could expect when the secret came out, but as any one of you gentlemen will attest, the difference between academic theory and practical application can sometimes be shockingly huge.
Clutching her hands firmly together in her lap, Miss Stansfield said: “If you are suggesting I made or ever would make any attempt to seduce your sons, that’s the dirtiest, filthiest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Mrs. Kelly’s head rocked back as if she had been slapped. That bricky color drained from her cheeks, leaving only two small spots of hectic color. The two women looked grimly at each other across a desk littered with perfume samples in a room that smelled vaguely of flowers. It was a moment, Miss Stansfield said, that seemed much longer than it actually could have been.
Then Mrs. Kelly yanked open one of her drawers and brought out a buff-colored check. A bright pink severance slip was attached to it. Showing her teeth, actually seeming to bite off each word, she said: “With hundreds of decent girls looking for work in this city, I hardly think we need a strumpet such as yourself in our employ, dear.”
She told me it was that final, contemptuous “dear” that brought all her anger to a sudden head. A moment later Mrs. Kelly’s jaw dropped and her eyes widened as Miss Stansfield, her hands locked together as tightly as links in a steel chain, so tightly she left bruises on herself (they were fading but still perfectly visible when I saw her on September 1st), began to “locomotive” between her clenched teeth.
It wasn’t a funny story, perhaps, but I burst out laughing at the image and Miss Stansfield joined me. Mrs. Davidson looked in—to make sure we hadn’t gotten into the nitrous oxide, perhaps—and then left again.
“It was all I could think to do,” Miss Stansfield said, still laughing and wiping her streaming eyes with her handkerchief. “Because at that moment, I saw myself reaching out and simply sweeping those sample bottles of perfume—every one of them—off her desk and onto the floor, which was uncarpeted concrete. I didn’t just think it, I saw it! I saw them crashing to the floor and filling the room with such a Godawful mixed stench that fumigators would have to come,
“I was going to do it; nothing was going to stop me doing it. Then I began to ‘locomotive,’ and everything was all right. I was able to take the check, and the pink slip, and get up, and get out. I wasn’t able to thank her, of course—I was still being a locomotive!”
We laughed again, and then she sobered.
“It’s all passed off now, and I am even able to feel a little sorry for her—or does that sound like a terribly stiff-necked thing to say?”
“Not at all. I think it’s an admirable way to be able to feel.”
“May I show you something I bought with my severance pay, Dr. McCarron?”
“Yes, if you like.”
She opened her purse and took out a small flat box. “I bought it at a pawnshop,” she said. “For two dollars. And it’s the only time during this whole nightmare that I’ve felt ashamed and dirty. Isn’t that strange?”
She opened the box and laid it on my desk so I could look inside. I wasn’t surprised at what I saw. It was a plain gold wedding ring.
“I’ll do what’s necessary,” she said. “I am staying in what Mrs. Kelly would undoubtedly call ‘a respectable boarding house.’ My landlady has been kind and friendly ... but Mrs. Kelly was kind and friendly, too. I think she may ask me to leave at any time now, and I suspect that if I say anything about the rent-balance due me, or the damage deposit I paid when I moved in, she’ll laugh in my face.”
“My dear young woman, that would be quite illegal. There are courts and lawyers to help you answer such—”
“The courts are men’s clubs,” she said steadily, “and not apt to go out of their way to befriend a woman in my position. Perhaps I could get my money back, perhaps not. Either way, the expense and the trouble and the ... the unpleasantness ... hardly seem worth the forty-seven dollars or so. I had no business mentioning it to you in the first place. It hasn’t happened yet, and maybe it won’t. But in any case, I intend to be practical from now on.”
She raised her head, and her eyes flashed at mine.
“I’ve got my eye on a place down in the Village—just in case. It’s on the third floor, but it’s clean, and it’s five dollars a month cheaper than where I’m staying now.” She picked the ring out of the box. “I wore this when the landlady showed me the room.”