Ladder of Years

by Anne Tyler

  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.

  On Border Street, the town’s northern boundary, the Bay Borough Public Library crouched between a church and an Exxon station. It was
hardly more than a cottage, but the instant Delia stepped inside she always felt its seriousness, its officialness. A smell of aged paper and glue hung above the four tables with their wooden chairs, the librarian’s high varnished counter, the bookcases chockablock with elderly books. No CDs or videotapes here, no spin racks of paperback novels; just plain, sturdy volumes in buckram bindings with their Dewey decimal numbers handwritten on the spines in white ink. It was a matter of finances, Delia supposed. Nothing seemed to have been added in the last decade. Bestsellers were nowhere to be seen, but there was plenty of Jane Austen, and Edith Wharton, and various solemn works of history and biography. The children’s corner gave off a glassy shine from all the layers of Scotch tape holding the tattered picture books together.

  Closing time was five-thirty, which meant that the librarian was busy with her last-minute shelving. Delia could place yesterday’s book on the counter without any chitchat; she could hunt down a book for today unobserved, since at this hour all the tables were empty. But what to choose? She wished this place carried romances. Dickens or Dostoyevsky she would never finish in one evening (she had an arrangement with herself where she read a book an evening). George Eliot, Faulkner, Fitzgerald …

  She settled on The Great Gatsby, which she dimly remembered from sophomore English. She took it to the counter, and the librarian (a cocoa-colored woman in her fifties) stopped her shelving to come wait on her. “Oh, Gatsby!” she said. Delia merely said, “Mmhmm,” and handed over her card.

  The card had her new address on it: 14 George Street. A dash in the space for her telephone number. She had never been unreachable by phone before.

  Tucking the book in her handbag, she left the library and headed south. The Pinchpenny Thrift Shop had changed its window display, she noticed. Now a navy knit dress hung alongside a shell-pink tuxedo. Would it be tacky to buy her second dress from a thrift shop? In a town this size, no doubt everyone could name the previous owner.

  But after all, what did she care? She made a mental note to come try on the dress tomorrow during lunch hour.

  Taking a right onto George Street, she met up with the mother and toddler who fed the pigeons in the square. The mother smiled at her, and before Delia thought, she smiled back. Immediately afterward, though, she averted her eyes.

  Next stop was Rick-Rack’s Café. She glanced over at the boardinghouse as she passed. No cars were parked in front, she was glad to see. With luck, Belle would be out all evening. She seemed to lead a very busy life.

  Rick-Rack’s smelled of crab cakes, but whoever had ordered them had already eaten and gone. The little redheaded waitress was filling salt shakers. The cook was scraping down his griddle. “Well, hey!” he said, turning as Delia walked in.

  “Hello,” she said, smiling. (She had nothing against simple courtesy, as long as it went no further.) She settled in her usual booth. By the time the waitress came over, she was already deep in her library book, and all she said was, “Milk and the chicken pot pie, please.” Then she went on reading.

  Last night she’d had soup and whole-wheat toast; the night before that, tuna salad. Her plan was to alternate soup nights with protein nights. Just inexpensive proteins, though. She couldn’t afford the crab cakes, at least not till she got her first salary check.

  Paying for her new shoes on Tuesday, she had wished she could use the credit card she was carrying in her wallet. If only a credit-card trail were not so easily traced! And then a peculiar thought had struck her. Most untraceable of all, she had thought, would be dying.

  But of course she hadn’t meant that the way it sounded.

  The print in her library book was so large, she worried she had chosen something that wouldn’t last the evening. She forced her eyes to travel more slowly, and when her meal arrived she stopped reading altogether. She kept the book open, though, next to her plate, in case somebody approached.

  The waitress set out scalloped paper place mats for the supper crowd. The cook stirred something on the burner. Two creases traversed the base of his skull; his smooth black scalp seemed overlaid with a pattern of embroidery knots. He had made the pot pie from scratch, Delia suspected. The crust shattered beneath her fork. And the potatoes accompanying it seemed hand mashed, not all gluey and machine mashed.

  She wondered whether her family had thought to thaw the casseroles she’d packed.

  “If he do come,” the cook was telling the waitress, “you got to keep him occupied. Because I ain’t going to.”

  “You have to be around some, though,” the waitress said.

  “I ain’t saying I won’t be around. I say I won’t keep him occupied.”

  The waitress looked toward Delia before Delia could look away. She had those bachelor’s-button eyes you often see in redheads, and a round-chinned, innocent face. “My dad is planning a visit,” she told Delia.

  “Ah,” Delia said, reaching for her book.

  “He wasn’t all that thrilled when me and Rick here got married.”

  The waitress and the cook were married? Delia was afraid that if she started reading now, they would think she disapproved too; so she marked her place on the page with one finger and said, “I’m sure he’ll accept it eventually.”

  “Oh, he’s accepted it, all right! Or says he has. But now whenever Rick sees him, he always gets to remembering how ugly Daddy acted at the start.”

  “I can’t stand to be around the man,” Rick said sadly.

  “Daddy walks into a room and Rick is like, whap! and his mouth slams shut.”

  “Then Teensy here feels the pressure and goes to talking a mile a minute, nothing but pure silliness.”

  Delia knew what that was like. When her sister Linda was married to the Frenchman, whom their father had detested …

  But she couldn’t tell them that. She was sitting in this booth alone, utterly alone, without the conversational padding of father, sisters, husband, children. She was a person without a past. She took a breath to speak and then had nothing to say. It was Teensy who finally broke the silence. “Well,” Teensy said, “at least we’ve got ourselves a few days to prepare for this.” And she went off to wait on a couple who had just entered.

  When Delia walked out of the café, she felt she was surrounded by a lighter kind of air than usual—thinner, more transparent—and she crossed the street with a floating gait. Just inside Belle’s front door she found an array of letters scattered beneath the mail slot, but she didn’t pick them up, didn’t even check the names on the envelopes, because she knew for a fact that none of them was hers.

  Upstairs, she went about her coming-home routine: putting away her things, showering, doing her laundry. Meanwhile she kept an ear out for Belle’s return, because she would have moved more quietly with someone else in the house. But she could tell she had the place to herself.

  When every last task was completed, she climbed into bed with her library book. If there had been a chair she would have sat up to read, but this was her only choice. She wondered whether Mr. Lamb’s room was any better equipped. She supposed she could request a chair from Belle. That would mean a conversation, though, and Delia was avoiding conversation as much as possible. Heaven forbid they should get to be two cozy, chatty lady friends, exchanging news of their workdays every evening.

  She propped her pillow against the metal rail at the head of the cot and leaned back. For this first little bit, the light from outdoors was enough to read by—a slant of warm gold that made her feel pleasantly lazy. She could hear a baby crying in the house across the street. A woman far away called, “Robbie! Kenny!” in that bell-like, two-note tune that mothers everywhere fetch their children home with. Delia read on, turning pages with a restful sound. She was interested in Gatsby’s story but not what you would call carried away. It would serve to pass the evening, was all.

  The light grew dimmer, and she switched on the goosenecked lamp that craned over her shoulder from the windowsill. Now the children across the street, released from the supper tab
le, were playing something argumentative outdoors. Delia heard them for a while but gradually forgot to listen, and when she thought of them again she realized they must have gone in to bed. Night had fallen, and moths were thumping against the screen. Down in the street, a car door closed; heels clopped across the porch; Belle entered the house and went directly to the front room, where she started talking on the phone. “You know it’s got great resale value,” Delia heard, before forgetting to listen to that as well. Later she stopped reading for a moment and heard only silence, inside and out, except for the distant traffic on 380. It was cooler now, and she felt grateful for the lamp’s small circle of warmth.

  She came to the end of her book, but she kept rereading the final sentence till her eyes blurred over with tears. Then she placed the book on the floor and reached up to switch the lamp off so she could sit weeping in the dark—the very last step in her daily routine.

  She wept without a thought in her head, heaving silent sobs that racked her chest and contorted her mouth. Every few minutes she blew her nose on the strip of toilet paper she kept under her pillow. When she felt completely drained, she gave a deep, shuddering sigh and said aloud, “Ah, well.” Then she blew her nose one last time and lay down to sleep.

  It amazed her that she always slept so soundly.

  The toddler wanted the pigeons to eat from his fingers. He squatted in their midst, his bulky corduroy bottom just inches from the ground, and held a crouton toward them. But the pigeons strutted around him with shrewd, evasive glances, and when it dawned on him that they would never come closer he suddenly toppled backward, not giving the slightest warning, and pedaled the air in a fury. Delia smiled, but only behind the shield of her newspaper.

  Today there was no further mention of her disappearance. She wondered if the authorities had forgotten her that quickly.

  She folded the Metro section and laid it on the bench beside her. She reached for the cup of yogurt at her left and then noticed, out of the corner of her eye, the woman who stood watching her from several yards away.