Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Richard Ford

  That was when the childhood memory began to prey on his mind, for it suddenly struck him—and the force of it sent his thumbnail biting deep into the secret matchbook—that letting things happen and taking them gracefully had been, in a way, the pattern of his life. There was certainly no denying that the role of good loser had always held an inordinate appeal for him. All through adolescence he had specialized in it, gamely losing fights with stronger boys, playing football badly in the secret hope of being injured and carried dramatically off the field (“You got to hand it to old Henderson for one thing, anyway,” the high-school coach had said with a chuckle, “he’s a real little glutton for punishment”). College had offered a wider scope to his talent—there were exams to be flunked and elections to be lost—and later the Air Force had made it possible for him to wash out, honorably, as a flight cadet. And now, inevitably, it seemed, he was running true to form once more. The several jobs he’d held before this had been the beginner’s kind at which it isn’t easy to fail; when the opportunity for this one first arose it had been, in Crowell’s phrase, “a real challenge.”

  “Good,” Walter had said. “That’s what I’m looking for.” When he related that part of the conversation to his wife she had said, “Oh, wonderful!” and they’d moved to an expensive apartment in the East Sixties on the strength of it. And lately, when he started coming home with a beaten look and announcing darkly that he doubted if he could hold on much longer, she would enjoin the children not to bother him (“Daddy’s very tired tonight”), bring him a drink and soothe him with careful, wifely reassurance, doing her best to conceal her fear, never guessing, or at least never showing, that she was dealing with a chronic, compulsive failure, a strange little boy in love with the attitudes of collapse. And the amazing thing, he thought—the really amazing thing—was that he himself had never looked at it that way before.

  “Walt?”

  The cubicle gate had swung open and George Crowell was standing there, looking uncomfortable. “Will you step into my office a minute?”

  “Right, George.” And Walter followed him out of the cubicle, out across the office floor, feeling many eyes on his back. Keep it dignified, he told himself. The important thing is to keep it dignified. Then the door closed behind them and the two of them were alone in the carpeted silence of Crowell’s private office. Automobile horns blared in the distance, twenty-one stories below; the only other sounds were their breathing, the squeak of Crowell’s shoes as he went to his desk and the creak of his swivel chair as he sat down. “Pull up a chair, Walt,” he said. “Smoke?”

  “No thanks.” Walter sat down and laced his fingers tight between his knees.

  Crowell shut the cigarette box without taking one for himself, pushed it aside and leaned forward, both hands spread flat on the plate-glass top of the desk. “Walt, I might as well give you this straight from the shoulder,” he said, and the last shred of hope slipped away. The funny part was that it came as a shock, even so. “Mr. Harvey and I have felt for some time that you haven’t quite caught on to the work here, and we’ve both very reluctantly come to the conclusion that the best thing to do, in your own best interests as well as ours, is to let you go. Now,” he added quickly, “this is no reflection on you personally, Walt. We do a highly specialized kind of work here and we can’t expect everybody to stay on top of the job. In your case particularly, we really feel you’d be happier in some organization better suited to your—abilities.”

  Crowell leaned back, and when he raised his hands their moisture left two gray, perfect prints on the glass, like the hands of a skeleton. Walter stared at them, fascinated, while they shriveled and disappeared.

  “Well,” he said, and looked up. “You put that very nicely, George. Thanks.”

  Crowell’s lips worked into an apologetic, regular guy’s smile. “Awfully sorry,” he said. “These things just happen.” And he began to fumble with the knobs of his desk drawers, visibly relieved that the worst was over. “Now,” he said, “we’ve made out a check here covering your salary through the end of next month. That’ll give you something in the way of—severance pay, so to speak—to tide you over until you find something.” He held out a long envelope.

  “That’s very generous,” Walter said. Then there was a silence, and Walter realized it was up to him to break it. He got to his feet. “All right, George. I won’t keep you.”

  Crowell got up quickly and came around the desk with both hands held out—one to shake Walter’s hand, the other to put on his shoulder as they walked to the door. The gesture, at once friendly and humiliating, brought a quick rush of blood to Walter’s throat, and for a terrible second he thought he might be going to cry. “Well, boy,” Crowell said, “good luck to you.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and he was so relieved to find his voice steady that he said it again, smiling. “Thanks. So long, George.”

  There was a distance of some fifty feet to be crossed on the way back to his cubicle, and Walter Henderson accomplished it with style. He was aware of how trim and straight his departing shoulders looked to Crowell; he was aware too, as he threaded his way among desks whose occupants either glanced up shyly at him or looked as if they’d like to, of every subtle play of well-controlled emotion in his face. It was as if the whole thing were a scene in a movie. The camera had opened the action from Crowell’s viewpoint and dollied back to take in the entire office as a frame for Walter’s figure in lonely, stately passage; now it came in for a long-held close-up of Walter’s face, switched to other brief views of his colleagues’ turning heads (Joe Collins looking worried, Fred Holmes trying to keep from looking pleased), and switched again to Walter’s viewpoint as it discovered the plain, unsuspecting face of Mary, his secretary, who was waiting for him at his desk with a report he had given her to type.

  “I hope this is all right, Mr. Henderson.”

  Walter took it and dropped it on the desk. “Forget it, Mary,” he said. “Look, you might as well take the rest of the day off, and go see the personnel manager in the morning. You’ll be getting a new job. I’ve just been fired.”

  Her first expression was a faint, suspicious smile—she thought he was kidding—but then she began to look pale and shaken. She was very young and not too bright; they had probably never told her in secretarial school that it was possible for your boss to get fired. “Why, that’s terrible, Mr. Henderson. I—well, but why would they do such a thing?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Lot of little reasons, I guess.” He was opening and slamming the drawers of his desk, cleaning out his belongings. There wasn’t much: a handful of old personal letters, a dry fountain pen, a cigarette lighter with no flint, and half of a wrapped chocolate bar. He was aware of how poignant each of these objects looked to her, as she watched him sort them out and fill his pockets, and he was aware of the dignity with which he straightened up, turned, took his hat from the stand and put it on.

  “Doesn’t affect you, of course, Mary,” he said. “They’ll have a new job for you in the morning. Well.” He held out his hand. “Good luck.”

  “Thank you; the same to you. Well, then, g’night”—and here she brought her chewed fingernails up to her lips for an uncertain little giggle—“I mean, g’bye, then, Mr. Henderson.”

  The next part of the scene was at the water cooler, where Joe Collins’s sober eyes became enriched with sympathy as Walter approached him.

  “Joe,” Walter said. “I’m leaving. Got the ax.”

  “No!” But Collins’s look of shock was plainly an act of kindness; it couldn’t have been much of a surprise. “Jesus, Walt, what the hell’s the matter with these people?”

  Then Fred Holmes chimed in, very grave and sorry, clearly pleased with the news: “Gee, boy, that’s a damn shame.”

  Walter led the two of them away to the elevators, where he pressed the “down” button; and suddenly other men were bearing down on him from all corners of the office, their faces stiff with sorrow, their hands held ou
t.

  “Awful sorry, Walt . . .”

  “Good luck, boy . . .”

  “Keep in touch, okay, Walt? . . .”

  Nodding and smiling, shaking hands, Walter said, “Thanks,” and “So long,” and “I certainly will”; then the red light came on over one of the elevators with its little mechanical “ding!” and in another few seconds the doors slid open and the operator’s voice said, “Down!” He backed into the car, still wearing his fixed smile and waving a jaunty salute to their earnest, talking faces, and the scene found its perfect conclusion as the doors slid shut, clamped, and the car dropped in silence through space.

  All the way down he stood with the ruddy, bright-eyed look of a man fulfilled by pleasure; it wasn’t until he was out on the street, walking rapidly, that he realized how completely he had enjoyed himself.

  The heavy shock of this knowledge slowed him down, until he came to a stop and stood against a building front for the better part of a minute. His scalp prickled under his hat, and his fingers began to fumble with the knot of his tie and the button of his coat. He felt as if he had surprised himself in some obscene and shameful act, and he had never felt more helpless, or more frightened.

  Then in a burst of action he set off again, squaring his hat and setting his jaw, bringing his heels down hard on the pavement, trying to look hurried and impatient and impelled by business. A man could drive himself crazy trying to psychoanalyze himself in the middle of Lexington Avenue, in the middle of the afternoon. The thing to do was get busy, now, and start looking for a job.

  The only trouble, he realized, coming to a stop again and looking around, was that he didn’t know where he was going. He was somewhere in the upper Forties, on a corner that was bright with florist shops and taxicabs, alive with well dressed men and women walking in the clear spring air. A telephone was what he needed first. He hurried across the street to a drugstore and made his way through smells of toilet soap and perfume and ketchup and bacon to the rank of phone booths along the rear wall; he got out his address book and found the page showing the several employment agencies where his applications were filed; then he got his dimes ready and shut himself into one of the booths.

  But all the agencies told him the same thing: no openings in his field at the moment; no point in his coming in until they called him. When he was finished he dug for the address book again, to check the number of an acquaintance who had told him, a month before, that there might soon be an opening in his office. The book wasn’t in his inside pocket; he plunged his hands into the other pockets of his coat and then his pants, cracking an elbow painfully against the wall of the booth, but all he could find were the old letters and the piece of chocolate from his desk. Cursing, he dropped the chocolate on the floor and, as if it were a lighted cigarette, stepped on it. These exertions in the heat of the booth made his breathing rapid and shallow. He was feeling faint by the time he saw the address book right in front of him, on top of the coin box, where he’d left it. His finger trembled in the dial, and when he started to speak, clawing the collar away from his sweating neck with his free hand, his voice was as weak and urgent as a beggar’s.

  “Jack,” he said. “I was just wondering—just wondering if you’d heard anything new on the opening you mentioned a while back.”

  “On the which?”

  “The opening. You know. You said there might be a job in your—”

  “Oh, that. No, haven’t heard a thing, Walt. I’ll be in touch with you if anything breaks.”

  “Okay, Jack.” He pulled open the folding door of the booth and leaned back against the stamped-tin wall, breathing deeply to welcome the rush of cool air. “I just thought it might’ve slipped your mind or something,” he said. His voice was almost normal again. “Sorry to bother you.”

  “Hell, that’s okay,” said the hearty voice in the receiver. “What’s the matter, boy? Things getting a little sticky where you are?”

  “Oh no,” Walter found himself saying, and he was immediately glad of the lie. He almost never lied, and it always surprised him to discover how easy it could be. His voice gained confidence. “No, I’m all right here, Jack, it’s just that I didn’t want to—you know, I thought it might have slipped your mind, is all. How’s the family?”

  When the conversation was over, he guessed there was nothing more to do but go home. But he continued to sit in the open booth for a long time, with his feet stretched out on the drugstore floor, until a small, canny smile began to play on his face, slowly dissolving and changing into a look of normal strength. The ease of the lie had given him an idea that grew, the more he thought it over, into a profound and revolutionary decision.

  He would not tell his wife. With luck he was sure to find some kind of work before the month was out, and in the meantime, for once in his life, he would keep his troubles to himself. Tonight, when she asked how the day had gone, he would say, “Oh, all right,” or even “Fine.” In the morning he would leave the house at the usual time and stay away all day, and he would go on doing the same thing every day until he had a job.

  The phrase “Pull yourself together” occurred to him, and there was more than determination in the way he pulled himself together there in the phone booth, the way he gathered up his coins and straightened his tie and walked out to the street: there was a kind of nobility.

  Several hours had to be killed before the normal time of his homecoming, and when he found himself walking west on Forty-second Street he decided to kill them in the Public Library. He mounted the wide stone steps importantly, and soon he was installed in the reading room, examining a bound copy of last year’s Life magazines and going over and over his plan, enlarging and perfecting it.

  He knew, sensibly, that there would be nothing easy about the day-to-day deception. It would call for the constant vigilance and cunning of an outlaw. But wasn’t it the very difficulty of the plan that made it worthwhile? And in the end, when it was all over and he could tell her at last, it would be a reward worth every minute of the ordeal. He knew just how she would look at him when he told her—in blank disbelief at first and then, gradually, with the dawning of a kind of respect he hadn’t seen in her eyes for years.

  “You mean you kept it to yourself all this time? But why, Walt?”

  “Oh well,” he would say casually, even shrugging, “I didn’t see any point in upsetting you.”

  When it was time to leave the library he lingered in the main entrance for a minute, taking deep pulls from a cigarette and looking down over the five o’clock traffic and crowds. The scene held a special nostalgia for him, because it was here, on a spring evening five years before, that he had come to meet her for the first time. “Can you meet me at the top of the library steps?” she had asked over the phone that morning, and it wasn’t until many months later, after they were married, that this struck him as a peculiar meeting place. When he asked her about it then, she laughed at him. “Of course it was inconvenient—that was the whole point. I wanted to pose up there, like a princess in a castle or something, and make you climb up all those lovely steps to claim me.”

  And that was exactly how it had seemed. He’d escaped from the office ten minutes early that day and hurried to Grand Central to wash and shave in a gleaming subterranean dressing room; he had waited in a fit of impatience while a very old, stout, slow attendant took his suit away to be pressed. Then, after tipping the attendant more than he could afford, he had raced outside and up Forty-second Street, tense and breathless as he strode past shoe stores and milk bars, as he winnowed his way through swarms of intolerably slow-moving pedestrians who had no idea of how urgent his mission was. He was afraid of being late, even half afraid that it was all some kind of a joke and she wouldn’t be there at all. But as soon as he hit Fifth Avenue he saw her up there in the distance, alone, standing at the top of the library steps—a slender, radiant brunette in a fashionable black coat.

  He slowed down, then. He crossed the avenue at a stroll, one hand in his pocket,
and took the steps with such an easy, athletic nonchalance that nobody could have guessed at the hours of anxiety, the days of strategic and tactical planning this particular moment had cost him.

  When he was fairly certain she could see him coming he looked up at her again, and she smiled. It wasn’t the first time he had seen her smile that way, but it was the first time he could be sure it was intended wholly for him, and it caused warm tremors of pleasure in his chest. He couldn’t remember the words of their greeting, but he remembered being quite sure that they were all right, that it was starting off well—that her wide shining eyes were seeing him exactly as he most wanted to be seen. The things he said, whatever they were, struck her as witty, and the things she said, or the sound of her voice when she said them, made him feel taller and stronger and broader of shoulder than ever before in his life. When they turned and started down the steps together he took hold of her upper arm, claiming her, and felt the light jounce of her breast on the backs of his fingers with each step. And the evening before them, spread out and waiting at their feet, seemed miraculously long and miraculously rich with promise.

  Starting down alone, now, he found it strengthening to have one clear triumph to look back on—one time in his life, at least, when he had denied the possibility of failure, and won. Other memories came into focus when he crossed the avenue and started back down the gentle slope of Forty-second Street: they had come this way that evening too, and walked to the Biltmore for a drink, and he remembered how she had looked sitting beside him in the semidarkness of the cocktail lounge, squirming forward from the hips while he helped her out of the sleeves of her coat and then settling back, giving her long hair a toss and looking at him in a provocative sidelong way as she raised the glass to her lips. A little later she had said, “Oh, let’s go down to the river—I love the river at this time of day,” and they had left the hotel and walked there. He walked there now, down through the clangor of Third Avenue and up toward Tudor City—it seemed a much longer walk alone—until he was standing at the little balustrade, looking down over the swarm of sleek cars on the East River Drive and at the slow, gray water moving beyond it. It was on this very spot, while a tugboat moaned somewhere under the darkening skyline of Queens, that he had drawn her close and kissed her for the first time. Now he turned away, a new man, and set out to walk all the way home.