by Hank Davis
I was proud of them. There wasn’t a helper there who couldn’t have walked into Saul & Cappell or any other store in town, and walked out a Santa with a crew of his own. But that’s the way we do things at the Emporium, skilled hands and high paychecks, and you only have to look at our sales records to see that it pays off.
Well, I wanted to stay and watch the fun, but Sunday’s a bad day to take the afternoon off; I slipped out and headed back to the store. I put in a hard four hours, but I made it a point to be down at the Special Services division when the crews came straggling in for their checkout. The crew I was interested in was the last to report, naturally—isn’t that always the way? Santa was obviously tired; I let him shuck his uniform and turn his sales slips in to the cashier before I tackled him. “How did it go?” I asked anxiously. “Did Miss Hargreave—I mean the grown-up Miss Hargreave—did she say anything?”
He looked at me accusingly. “You,” he whined. “Mr. Martin, you shouldn’t have run out on us like that. How we supposed to keep up a schedule when you throw us that kind of a curve, Mr. Martin?”
It was no way for a Santa to be talking to a department head, but I overlooked it. The man was obviously upset. “What are you talking about?” I demanded.
“Those Hargreaves! Honestly, Mr. Martin, you’d think they didn’t want us there, the way they acted! The kids were bad enough. But when the old man came home—wow! I tell you, Mr. Martin, I been eleven Christmases in the Department, and I never saw a family with less Christmas spirit than those Hargreaves!”
The cashier was yelling for the cash receipts so he could lock up his ledgers for the night, so I let the Santa go. But I had plenty to think about as I went back to my own department, wondering about what he had said.
I didn’t have to wonder long. Just before closing, one of the office girls waved me in from where I was checking out a new Counselor, and I answered the phone call. It was Lilymary’s father. Mad? He was blazing. I could hardly make sense out of most of what he said. It was words like “perverting the Christian festival” and “selling out the Saviour” and a lot of stuff I just couldn’t follow at all. But the part he finished up with, that I could understand. “I want you to know, Mr. Martin,” he said in clear, crisp, emphatic tones, “that you are no longer a welcome caller at our home. It pains me to have to say this, sir. As for Lilymary, you may consider this her resignation, to be effective at once!”
“But,” I said, “but—”
But I was talking to a dead line; he had hung up. And that was the end of that.
Personnel called up after a couple of days and wanted to know what to do with Lilymary’s severance pay. I told them to mail her the check; then I had a second thought and asked them to send it up to me. I mailed it to her myself, with a little note apologizing for what I’d done wrong—whatever it was. But she didn’t even answer.
October began, and the pace stepped up. Every night I crawled home, bone-weary, turned on my dreamster and slept like a log. I gave the machine a real workout; I even had the buyer in the Sleep Shoppe get me rare, out-of-print tapes on special order—Last Days of Petronius Arbiter, and Casanova’s Diary, and The Polly Adler Story, and so on—until the buyer began to leer when she saw me coming. But it didn’t do any good. While I slept I was surrounded with the loveliest of them all; but when I woke the face of Lilymary Hargreave was in my mind’s eye.
October. The store was buzzing. National cost of living was up .00013, but our rate of sale was up .00021 over the previous year. The store bosses were beaming, and bonuses were in the air for everybody. November. The tide was at its full, and little wavelets began to ebb backward. Housewares was picked clean, and the manufacturers only laughed as we implored them for deliveries; but Home Appliances was as dead as the January lull. Our overall rate of sale slowed down microscopically, but it didn’t slow down the press of work. It made things tougher, in fact, because we were pushing twice as hard on the items we could supply, coaxing the customers off the ones that were running short.
Bad management? No. Looking at my shipment figures, we’d actually emptied the store four times in seven weeks—better than fifty per cent turnover a week. Our July purchase estimates had been off only slightly—two persons fewer out of each hundred bought air-conditioners than we had expected, one and a half persons more out of each hundred bought kitchenware. Saul & Cappell had been out of kitchenware except for spot deliveries, sold the day they arrived, ever since late September!
Heinemann called me into his office. “George,” he said, “I just checked your backlog. The unfilled order list runs a little over eleven thousand. I want to tell you that I’m surprised at the way you and your department have—”
“Now, Mr. Heinemann!” I burst out. “That isn’t fair! We’ve been putting in overtime every night, every blasted one of us! Eleven thousand’s pretty good, if you ask me!”
He looked surprised. “My point exactly, George,” he said. “I was about to compliment you.”
I felt so high. I swallowed. “Uh, thanks,” I said. “I mean, I’m sorry I—”
“Forget it, George.” Heinemann was looking at me thoughtfully. “You’ve got something on your mind, don’t you?”
“Well—”
“Is it that girl?”
“Girl?” I stared at him. “Who said anything about a girl?”
“Come off it,” he said genially. “You think it isn’t all over the store?” He glanced at his watch. “George,” he said, “I never interfere in employees’ private lives. You know that. But if it’s that girl that’s bothering you, why don’t you marry her for a while? It might be just the thing you need. Come on now, George, confess. When were you married last? Three years? Five years ago?”
I looked away. “I never was,” I admitted.
That jolted him. “Never?” He studied me thoughtfully for a second. “You aren’t—?”
“No, no, no!” I said hastily. “Nothing like that. It’s just that, well, it’s always seemed like a pretty big step to take.”
He relaxed again. “Ah, you kids,” he said genially. “Always afraid of getting hurt, eh? Well, I’ll mind my own business, if that’s the way you want it. But if I were you, George, I’d go get her.”
That was that. I went back to work; but I kept right on thinking about what Heinemann had said.
After all . . . why not?
I knew where to find her on Sunday. I waited impatiently, just after services, in an alcove ouside the church door.
I called, “Lilymary!”
She faltered and half-turned. I had counted on that. You could tell she wasn’t brought up in this country; from the age of six on, our girls learn Lesson One: When you’re walking alone at night, don’t stop.
She didn’t stop long. She peered into the doorway and saw me, and her expression changed as though I had hit her with a club. “George,” she said, and hesitated, and walked on. Her hair was a shimmering rainbow in the Christmas lights.
We were only a few doors from her house. I glanced, half apprehensive, at the door, but no Father Hargreave was there to scowl. I followed her and said, “Please, Lilymary. Can’t we just talk for a moment?”
She faced me. “Why?”
“To—” I swallowed. “To let me apologize.”
She said gently, “No apology is necessary, George. We’re different breeds of cats. No need to apologize for that.”
“Please.”
“Well,” she said. And then, “Why not?”
We found a bench in the little park across from the subway entrance. It was late; enormous half-tracks from the Sanitation Department were emptying trash cans, sprinkler trucks came by and we had to raise our feet off the ground. She said once, “I really ought to get back. I was only going to the store.” But she stayed.
Well, I apologized, and she listened like a lady. And like a lady she said, again, “There’s nothing to apologize for.” And that was that, and I still hadn’t said what I had come for. I didn’t know
how.
I brooded over the problem. With the rumble of the trash trucks and the roar of their burners, conversation was difficult enough anyhow. But even under those handicaps, I caught a phrase from Lilymary. “—back to the jungle,” she was saying. “It’s home for us, George. Father can’t wait to get back, and neither can the girls.”
I interruped her. “Get back?”
She glanced at me. “That’s what I said.” She nodded at the Sanitation workers, baling up the enormous drifts of Christmas cards, thrusting them into the site burners. “As soon as the mails open up,” she said, “and Father gets his visa. It was mailed a week ago, they say. They tell me that in the Christmas rush it might take two or three weeks more to get to us, though.”
Something was clogging up my throat. All I could say was, “Why?”
Lilymary sighed. “It’s where we live, George,” she explained. “This isn’t right for us. We’re mission brats and we belong out in the field, spreading the Good News. . . . Though Father says you people need it more than the Dyaks.” She looked quickly into my eyes. “I mean—”
I waved it aside. I took a deep breath. “Lilymary,” I said, all in a rush, “will you marry me?”
Silence, while Lilymary looked at me.
“Oh, George,” she said, after a moment. And that was all; but I was able to translate it; the answer was no.
Still, proposing marriage is something like buying a lottery ticket; you may not win the grand award, but there are consolation prizes. Mine was a date.
Lilymary stood up to her father, and I was allowed in the house. I wouldn’t say I was welcomed, but Dr. Hargreave was polite— distant, but polite. He offered me coffee, he spoke of the dream superstitions of the Dyaks and old days in the Long House, and when Lilymary was ready to go he shook my hand at the door.
We had dinner. . . . I asked her—but as a piece of conversation, not a begging plea from the heart—I asked her why they had to go back. The Dyaks, she said; they were Father’s people; they needed him. After Mother’s death, Father had wanted to come back to America . . . but it was wrong for them. He was going back. The girls, naturally, were going with him.
We danced. . . . I kissed her, in the shadows, when it was growing late. She hesitated, but she kissed me back.
I resolved to destroy my dreamster; its ersatz ecstasies were pale.
“There,” she said, as she drew back, and her voice was gentle, with a note of laughter. “I just wanted to show you. It isn’t all hymnsinging back on Borneo, you know.”
I reached out for her again, but she drew back, and the laughter was gone. She glanced at her watch.
“Time for me to go, George,” she said. “We start packing tomorrow.”
“But—”
“It’s time to go, George,” she said. And she kissed me at her door; but she didn’t invite me in.
I stripped the tapes off my dreamster and threw them away. But hours later, after the fiftieth attempt to get to sleep, and the twentieth solitary cigarette, I got up and turned on the light and looked for them again.
They were pale; but they were all I had.
Party Week! The store was nearly bare. A messenger from the Credit Department came staggering in with a load of files just as the closing gong sounded.
He dropped them on my desk. “Thank God!” he said fervently. “Guess you won’t be bothering with these tonight, eh, Mr. Martin?”
But I searched through them all the same. He looked at me wonderingly, but the clerks were breaking out the bottles and the runners from the lunchroom were bringing up sandwiches, and he drifted away.
I found the credit check I had requested. “Co-Maker Required!” was stamped at the top, and triply underlined in red, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. I hunted through the text until I found what I wanted to know: “Subject is expected to leave this country within forty-eight hours. Subject’s employer is organized and incorporated under laws of State of New York as a religious mission group. No earnings record on file. Caution: Subject would appear a bad credit risk, due to—”
I read no farther. Forty-eight hours!
There was a scrawl at the bottom of the page, in the Credit Manager’s own handwriting: “George, what the devil are you up to? This is the fourth check we made on these people!”
It was true enough; but it would be the last. In forty-eight hours they would be gone.
I was dull at the Christmas Party. But it had been a splendid Christmas for the store, and in an hour everyone was too drunk to notice.
I decided to skip Party Week. I stayed at home the next morning, staring out the window. It had begun to snow, and the cleaners were dragging away old Christmas trees. It’s always a letdown when Christmas is over; but my mood had nothing to do with the season, only with Lilymary and the numbers of miles from here to Borneo.
I circled the date in red on my calendar: December 25th. By the 26th they would be gone.
But I couldn’t, repeat couldn’t, let her go so easily. It wasn’t that I wanted to try again, and be rebuffed again; it was not a matter of choice. I had to see her. Nothing else, suddenly, had any meaning. So I made the long subway trek out there, knowing it was a fool’s errand. But what kind of an errand could have been more appropriate for me?
They weren’t home, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I banged on the door of the next apartment, and got a surly, suspicious, what-do-you-want-with-them? inspection from the woman who lived there. But she thought they might possibly be down at the Community Center on the next block.
And they were.
The Community Center was a big yellow-brick recreation hail; it had swimming pools and pingpong tables and all kinds of odds and ends to keep the kids off the streets. It was that kind of a neighborhood. It also had a meeting hall in the basement, and there were the Hargreaves, all of them, along with a couple of dozen other people. None of them were young, except the Hargreave girls. The hall had a dusty, storeroom quality to it, as though it wasn’t used much—and in fact, I saw, it still had a small Christmas tree standing in it. Whatever else they had, they did not have a very efficient cleanup squad.
I came to the door to the hall and stood there, looking around. Someone was playing a piano, and they were having a singing party. The music sounded familiar, but I couldn’t recognize the words—
Adeste fideles
Laeti triumphantes
Venite, venite in Bethlehem.
The girls were sitting together, in the front row; their father wasn’t with them, but I saw why. He was standing at a little lectern in the front of the hall.
Natum videte, regem angelorum.
Venite adoremus, venite adoremus—
I recognized the tune then; it was a slow, draggy-beat steal from that old-time favorite, Christmas-Tree Mambo. It didn’t sound too bad, though, as they finished with a big major chord from the piano and all fifteen or twenty voices going. Then Hargreave started to talk.
I didn’t listen. I was too busy watching the back of Lilymary’s head. I’ve always had pretty low psi, though, and she didn’t turn around.
Something was bothering me. There was a sort of glow from up front. I took my eyes off Lilymary’s blond head, and there was Dr. Hargreave, radiant; I blinked and looked again, and it was not so radiant. A trick of the light, coming through the basement windows onto his own blond hair, I suppose, but it gave me a curious feeling for a moment. I must have moved, because he caught sight of me. He stumbled over a word, but then he went on. But that was enough. After a moment Lilymary’s head turned, and her eyes met mine.
She knew I was there. I backed away from the door and sat down on the steps coming down from the entrance.
Sooner or later she would be out.
It wasn’t long at all. She came toward me with a question in her eye. She was all by herself; inside the hall, her father was still talking.
I stood up straight and said it all. “Lilymary,” I said, “I can’t help it, I want to marry
you. I’ve done everything wrong, but I didn’t mean to. I—I don’t even want it conditional, Lilymary, I want it for life. Here or Borneo, I don’t care which. I only care about one thing, and that’s you.” It was funny—I was trying to tell her I loved her, and I was standing stiff and awkward, talking in about the same tone of voice I’d use to tell a stock boy he was fired.
But she understood. I probably didn’t have to say a word, she would have understood anyhow. She started to speak, and changed her mind, and started again, and finally got out, “What would you do in Borneo?” And then, so soft that I hardly knew I was hearing it, she added, “Dear.”
Dear! It was like the first time Heinemann came in and called me “Department Head!” I felt nine feet tall.
I didn’t answer her. I reached out and I kissed her, and it wasn’t any wonder that I didn’t know we weren’t alone until I heard her father cough, not more than a yard away.
I jumped, but Lilymary turned and looked at him, perfectly calm. “You ought to be conducting the service, Father!” she scolded him.
He nodded his big fair head. “Doctor Mausner can pronounce the Benediction without me,” he said. “I should be there but—well, He has plenty of things to forgive all of us already; one more isn’t going to bother Him. Now, what’s this?”
