The Baxter Letters

by Dolores Hitchens

  The Baxter Letters

  Dolores Hitchens

  Chapter 1

  At twenty minutes past seven she went down in the elevator, dropping past half-lit floors and gusts of stale odors, the elevator cold and metal-smelling, its linoleum floor scuffed in three different places where you could catch your heel and break your neck, the light in the ceiling the most flickering bilious sick blue, and on the way down she tried to rouse herself, to come alive, to face the day with confidence because this was a brand new day in this new part of her life. Because she had Tom, she loved Tom and they belonged to each other.

  Tom was upstairs asleep. He would get up presently and heat up the coffee and read the note she had left for him, and later he would go back to work on that second half of the second act of his play that wouldn’t, wouldn’t, wouldn’t come out the way he wanted it to.

  The elevator grated to a halt at the lobby floor, gave a last hiccuping lurch like an old drunk trying to steady himself, and then the door opened. She walked out. The lobby was enormous, old, faded, floored with marble slabs, and as she went toward the door she passed Mr. Keeley with his mop and he spoke to her.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Burch.”

  She gave him a sharp look. She was always giving people sharp looks these days. A thoughtless, nasty habit. A silly poisonous thing to do, and it seemed to be something she couldn’t control, like a twitch at the corner of your eye. Like a reflex. Call me Mrs. Burch and I’ll give you a sharp look. To hell with it.

  Less than a year ago she wouldn’t have said to hell with anything, she thought fleetingly. Pure from the Iowa corn. Fresh from the prairies of Nebraska. A simpleton from Indiana. Well, that’s where she had lived while her dad had gone from soybeans and ducks to wheat and pigs to a potato patch and rabbits.

  To hell with all that, too. You’re grown up and you don’t live in the country any more, baby, you live in a city. You live in the biggest, the most exciting city in the….

  There was a letter in their mailbox.

  How could there be, at seven twenty-five in the morning? Postmen sleep too—

  But she could see the edge of the envelope behind the slot, and then she remembered with a ghostly sense of returning exhaustion, she had been in such a rush to get home last night, and so tired, and she had taken for granted that Tom had checked the box—if she had thought of it at all; she couldn’t even remember—and of course Tom had thought that she had. And so last night when he had gone over to talk about the play with Sean Collins, he hadn’t bothered to look either.

  There’s time if I hurry.

  If it’s for Tom I’ll leave it here. I’ll call from the office to tell him it’s in there.

  And she grubbed around in her handbag, through a tumble of bills and cosmetics and the almost-empty wallet, the boxes of tranquilizers and aspirin, the little vial of stuff that pepped you up and took away your appetite and the tablets you chewed when you got nauseated on the subway. She found the mailbox key because it was even colder than her cold fingers. She opened the box to a faint odor of dust and old papers, and there was the letter. The minute she saw the crazy backstroke, her name written bigger than life, the ornate capitals, she wanted to drop it into the trash. Just carry it to the corner and let it go.

  Uncle Bax.

  Mr. Keeley was wandering over, pushing the mop ahead of him like a plow, or making his way like a snail which has to travel on a wet track that it makes as it goes. Mr. Keeley, the snail. The snail who almost but not quite got around to fixing things when they broke or came off the wall or up off the floor.

  “Mrs. Burch—”

  She couldn’t pretend not to hear and just brush past. After all, he did occasionally come up and fix something.

  “I’m sort of in a hurry.” She smiled at him, letting him see her impatience.

  “Mrs. Burch, it’s about the hi-fi. The phonograph. I’m sorry to have to bring it up, but we’ve had complaints and they’re threatening to go to Mr. Walper.”

  She tried to follow what he was talking about, to make sense of it, but her thoughts were a dull porridge of Uncle Bax, getting to the subway, getting to the office, making the payment on her coat—Oh God, don’t let me forget that at noon today—and Tom’s play, most of all Tom’s play which sat like a thundercloud at the peak of their lives, the play which had to come out right because it was the whole reason now for their existence, it compelled and devoured them, drove them, starved them….

  “The hi-fi. But we don’t have one.”

  We couldn’t afford one.

  “Well, it could be a radio, then,” Mr. Keeley decided. “Classical. Loud. Ran most of the night.”

  “My husband was out most of the night. And I sleep.”

  Sure I sleep. No, I don’t. I die.

  If I didn’t get to bed early and lie there oblivious all night, I couldn’t keep up with my job. And God help us if ever—

  She shut off the subconscious advance of disaster.

  “All I’m saying, Mrs. Burch, is that some kind of musical doodad played most of the night in your apartment and it was too loud.” Mr. Keeley wore steelrimmed spectacles, and the lenses were smeared with grease or soot, or both, and this gave him an unfocused threatening look.

  “I’ll check into it,” she promised, dashing past.

  She checked into it for about ten seconds while she ran for the subway. Tom had gone over to Sean’s after she had been in bed for a while. She could dimly remember his coming in and pulling her hair off her face and kissing her and telling her he was going, he wanted to read the new lines to Sean. She had whimpered some kind of acknowledgment, fighting not to wake up, and then after Tom had gone, yes, there had been some kind of noise from the other end of the apartment. And hadn’t he said, “I’ll leave the radio on to keep you company….”

  Or had he?

  In the subway by some miracle she found a seat, and she also found that she still had Uncle Bax’s letter in her hand. She turned it over and looked at it in the jolting light. It had been forwarded twice, she saw, all the way from that ladies’ hotel she’d first lived in when she’d come to the city.

  Fool that I was, to leave a forwarding address.

  Uncle Bax had descended on her there in the ladies’ hotel, when she hadn’t been in town more than a couple of weeks, and he had taken her out to some rather unbelievable places in what she now knew was Greenwich Village, and he had gotten what she knew now was astoundingly drunk, and almost had fallen in front of a subway train, and had propositioned two over-madeup girls who were willing, and who took him away with them.

  Oh, yes, and he had left her his box.

  Bax’s box.

  She tried to make out the postmark on the letter and it was Nueva Something-or-other. Mexican, or Latin American. Or from Spain. Or from wherever outside of the moon Uncle Bax was presently living. Had paused in transit.

  She slit the top of the envelope with her thumbnail, aware of the clattering wheels and the intermittent glare of stations. Inside seemed to be two things: a newspaper clipping, kind of fat, and a sheet of notepaper. She took out the note.

  My darling seductive and prudish li’l niece—

  “You old fool!” she cried under her breath. “I’m not!”

  This is your Uncle Baxter. Baxter Webb. Sometimes I forget who I am and I have to write my name about two dozen times before I’m sure I remember. But I won’t do it now—

  “I’ll tell you what to do with your name—”

  I’m in Mexico for the moment. The Ciudad de Mexico. A real groovy place, as you would say in your innocence.

  “I would’t say that,” she told him. “I’m not an idiot.”

  It’s really pretty nice here, and I’d like to stay o
n, but I think that in about a week I’ll be in El Paso, and you can write me there at that hotel I always stay at.

  “And why would I write to you, you … you old goat,” she whispered, remembering the night she had gone home alone to the ladies’ hotel, scared, afraid to meet the eye of any man who glanced at her. A boob from the sticks, and knowing it. And wondering, too, what those women were going to do to Uncle Bax. Or for Uncle Bax. Two of them.

  “I don’t even know the name of your silly hotel in El Paso,” she added.

  The thing is, baby, I have this itty-bitty errand for you to do for me. You remember the box I left with you? Well, there are some letters in it among other things. A packet of letters. And I want you to take out the third letter in the stack—get it? The third letter?—and do this with it: Take a large plain white envelope and type on it the name and address you’ll find on the front of the letter.

  Then, without messing around in any way with the manner in which the letter is sealed—and baby is this important!—without disturbing the sealing of the letter, you put it into the new plain white envelope and lick the flap and seal the whole thing inside.

  And then you deliver it.

  By hand. In person.

  And you check up enough to make sure that the person you’re giving it to is the one whose name is on the envelope.

  In fact, I guess this is the most important part of all!

  There was more but she refused to read it.

  “You must take me for the worst kind of fool,” she told the absent Uncle Bax, while she swayed to the movement of the rushing train and checked the flickering stations. “To start with, if you are in Mexico City why isn’t your letter postmarked from there instead of from this Nueva-whatever? And what business would I have running God knows where with your idiotic letter in my hand? You do think I’m simple.” She jabbed the note angrily back into the envelope and the envelope into the welter of her purse, and in so doing she disarranged a corner, a very small corner, of the folded bit of newspaper, and just before she snapped her purse shut—in that split second of automatic pressure on the purse-frame, a split second of recognition and not believing what she saw—she caught a glimpse of money.

  Greenbacks.

  And the denomination on the exposed corner she had glimpsed had looked strangely like a hundred!

  Hundred-dollar bills. More than one?

  She sat stiff and taut, her spine a wire, frozen, not looking around, fixed with astonishment.

  Money.

  Even a hundred looked like a million. She despised herself in that moment, because her heart had started to thump in a way it hadn’t since she’d been a kid, and because the raddle of unpaid bills stuffed into her purse seemed to rise in there and lift ghostly heads from the mess, like fish that wanted to speak to her. And because she thought of Tom, and Tom’s anxious face these days, and the perpetual deep line that had etched itself, it seemed overnight, between his black brows, a line of worry and exasperation and the pressure of time.

  Money bought time.

  God knows she knew that by now.

  She opened the purse just enough to slide her hand in. She found the envelope in the midst of the thicket and squeezed the packet wrapped in newspaper gently between her fingers. To her disgust her fingers shook so badly that she couldn’t tell. Thick or thin … it must be more than one bill though. She was going to have to take it out of the purse and count it—

  “Here?” said an incredulous inner voice.

  She looked around guiltily at half-sleeping faces, at the backs of newspapers, overcoats and hats, at gloved hands resting on other purses. Well, she thought, she was no longer so innocent, so silly, that she was afraid to meet any appraising male eye that roved her way. But she was too citywise to count money on a train.

  She clicked the purse shut again; she rose as the train screamed to a stop where she had to get off and was immediately squeezed solidly into the mass that surged toward the door. She found herself in the street. The sun was trying to break through the overhead smoke-haze. There was a smell of the sea blowing up from the bay, a salt smell like that of an old ship, or of waves breaking. The crowd hurried, carrying her along with it. She went into the building, the tall clean slab of glass, and entered the elevator. She nodded to a couple of vaguely familiar faces.

  I had better start saying my name over and over, she thought, because I’m not really sure right now just who I am. I’m like Uncle Bax. I’ve lost whoever belonged to me.

  There really wasn’t time, but she scooted into the ladies’ room anyway, entered a cubicle, locked the door, stood there shaking, trying to draw in a long breath to control the trembling.

  Don’t go to pieces like a cluck.

  It’s counterfeit, anyway. It’s funny-money. Look at his history—what infinitely little bit you know of it. He never did an honest thing in his life. Your mother’s name for him was always That Poor Black-sheep Brother of Mine. And what your father called him while he tried to wring a living out of soybeans and ducks, and wheat and pigs, and potatoes and rabbits, had had a much stronger flavor than that.

  And look how he treated you on that night less than a year ago…. You, a scared-petrified green country kid, and he abandoned you for a couple of chippies.

  She had the envelope out of the purse, and the newspaper-wrapped packet out of the envelope, and now she had the newspaper wrapping off the money.

  She almost dropped the money in the toilet.

  What there was, was the one hundred. There were seven twenties. There was a fifty and a ten.

  She tried to add it in her head, and couldn’t.

  She stuffed it all back inside her purse and ran for the office doors.

  She pounded the typewriter for about an hour without any idea of what she was doing. It was work left from yesterday, it was something to start on until one of the execs got around to dictation. If the squawkbox had blatted her name she wouldn’t have heard it. She was doing mathematics in her head. After a while she had it figured out, in spite of the dizzy clack outside and the heart-thump inside, and it came to three hundred dollars.

  She had three hundred dollars.

  When the mechanics of pounding the typewriter had calmed her, or numbed her, she opened the bottom desk drawer and unsnapped the purse, and on the pretense of needing a tissue to sniffle in she sneaked Uncle Bax’s letter in among other papers, with its tail hanging out, and read the last of it.

  Well, I figure baby that by now you’ve lived long enough in the big city to see how the gals dress, and all like that. You’ve given up those country duds your mother ran up on the old treadle machine at home, and trimmed with tatting. I’ll bet you’ve got your eye on a sharp little number right now. And that’s what the money’s for. For my Ii’l sassy niece to buy something pretty with.

  Write to me at my hotel in El Paso.

  Your loving uncle

  Bax

  “A dress,” she whispered incredulously. “He thinks I’d spend it on a dress.” She tucked the letter back into her purse. “What kind of fool,” she went on to herself, “would spend three hundred dollars on something to wear? When we’re worrying about how we’re going to eat?”

  She had an instant of feeling strangely old and faded, and as if Uncle Bax’s crazy suggestion had given a glimpse of something that might have been and now could never be. But she had no idea of what it was.

  Chapter 2

  After a while Mr. Dunavan came out of his office and walked over to the barrier at the steno pool, the gate that closed them in like sheep, and opened the gate with his hesitant, formal way and threaded a path between desks toward her. He always did it this way; he never did call her on the squawkbox, though all the other execs used it, and it gave forth a peremptory blatt that made you feel like a summoned slave. Mr. Dunavan came to her desk and when she looked up, he smiled and said, “Miss Hamilton, I guess I’ve got some letters for you.”

  “Yes, Mr. Dunavan. Right away.” I really want
to sit here and digest all of this madness about Uncle Bax and his box, but of course the job is a permanent security and comes first.

  Mr. Dunavan was tall. He had a lean face with a mysterious western-prairie look in it somewhere. Nebraska, perhaps, she thought sometimes. Or Wyoming. And she had wondered if his dad had ever tried soybeans or wheat or potatoes. Mr. Dunavan’s walk was also a mystery—he either had a very slight limp or he didn’t quite pick up his feet, a peculiar walk at any rate for a man as young as he was. In the mornings the Wyoming face was usually moody and thoughtful, and by late afternoons it was tired. He wore gray suits in which a flick of color showed here and there like a mistake in the weave, or a reflection off the fluorescent lights. White shirts, neat unobtrusive ties, carefully polished dark loafers. The only things about Mr. Dunavan that didn’t belong in this computerized machine called an office was his hair and his hands. His mercilessly cropped black hair belonged on a submarine and his hands belonged on a plow.

  She grabbed the shorthand notebook from the top drawer, along with a clutch of steno pencils and rose to follow him. He stopped at the gate and held it open for her to pass. He didn’t stare at her legs or her behind as she went ahead of him. His gaze remained at shoulder level. She always went through half sideways to make sure, and the other girls watched, too. The consensus was that Mr. Dunavan’s manners belonged to 1900.

  In his office, he shut the door and walked over behind the big desk, but didn’t sit down. She sat down in the steno chair and crossed her legs and propped the notebook up, ready for business.

  “Have you had a coffee break, Miss Hamilton?”

  “No, Mr. Dunavan, I haven’t.”

  “Well, before we settle down to slave labor, let’s have one now.”

  “That’s fine, sir.”

  This conversation never varied, either.

  A girl page brought them two steaming cups, and Mr. Dunavan drank his standing over by the smoke-colored glass wall, looking out, his morning moodiness quite apparent, and she drank her coffee in her chair.

  “I’ve run across a funny thing,” Mr. Dunavan said after a minute or so, without turning around. “I discovered it in checking some manuals we sent out to have printed. I was going over the galleys with Miss Vonn, and there were some obvious mistakes, I mean, a third grade kid wouldn’t have made them. Words that were misprinted in ways that just didn’t make sense, and I asked Miss Vonn how come, how come the printer hadn’t seen these, and she told me that printers don’t read the stuff they’re setting up. They can put words into print—print up whole books, I guess—without paying any attention whatever to the sense of it all. The continuity. The meaning.”