The Baxter Letters

by Dolores Hitchens

  “Well, I hadn’t heard that.”

  “Miss Vonn’s an old head in printing and proofreading, and I suppose she knows all about it.”

  “Yes, I guess she does.” And where is this leading us?

  I wish I could tell Mr. Dunavan about Uncle Bax and this crazy letter, and his wanting to bribe me to deliver his letter to somebody I don’t even know, and what I ought to do about it. And how do you find out if somebody is really the person you think he is.

  “Then, you know,” Mr. Dunavan went on, still looking moody and remote, “I got to thinking about you. You type all this stuff for me, incredible stacks of it—and is it like printing? To you?”

  She hadn’t followed him; she had been wrapped up in the puzzle of Uncle Bax and the errand he had for her; she had been wishing that it was five o’clock in the afternoon and she could be tearing out of here to take the subway home and to get at that box. Or should she call Tom and have him open the box and see what was inside? See whose name and address was on that third letter, and call her back when he had found out?

  “I … I guess I don’t understand what you—”

  “Do you read as you type?”

  At once the memory of the morning rushed through her; she had sat there oblivious with shorthand running from her notebook into her eyes and coming out on the typed sheet in the form of words, and she couldn’t remember a sentence, a phrase, a name. And hadn’t paid any attention to it while she worked on it. And for a moment she almost said, “Yes, I don’t read as I type,” which was mixed up but was what she meant. But she didn’t say it. Instead she said, “I’ll have to think about it. I’ll have to notice whether I read as I go, or not. I think that most of the time I do.”

  “You read.”

  “Yes, I think I do.”

  She had the funniest compulsion in that moment to tell Mr. Dunavan about Uncle Bax and the letter, and even the money. She had the feeling that Mr. Dunavan wouldn’t be disinterested or amused, that he would take it all seriously, that he would hold Uncle Bax’s letter carefully in his big square hands and go through it word by word, as if it were some document involving millions, and he would look at the money. And the idea of someone needing three hundred dollars so desperately that having it was literally like an intervention of magic, or heaven, wouldn’t seem funny to him, maybe because of a potato failure in his childhood….

  He was over at the desk again, his coffee finished, the paper cup in the wastebasket. “You look different today,” he said, surprising her.

  “I do?” She almost lost the notebook off her knees.

  “If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you’d been drinking on the job.” He smiled at her as he sat down.

  But you don’t know me at all—

  “How could I do anything like that,” she managed to say, “even if I wanted to. I’m surrounded out there—”

  “It’s been done. Right out there. Surrounded.” He was still smiling, picking up a few papers, glancing through them. “This is in confidence of course. I knew about it because the one who got involved finally reached a ragged edge, and came to me, and I did what I could. She went elsewhere. This wasn’t the right spot for her. I gave her a good recommendation. She was just having a tough time of it for the time being.”

  “That was awfully … awfully broadminded of you.”

  Oh, did I make it sound like that?” The smile went away and he frowned. “It wasn’t anything. But about you today—you seem pink and excited, and I’ve never seen you look like this before.”

  “It’s … well, it’s something I got in the mail.”

  He gave her a look she didn’t understand and said, “One of those, mm? There’s nothing like the written word, after all. Tie it up with the rest with pink ribbon and save it for a rainy day.” He had selected something he wanted to answer; all smiles and frowns exited from his face and he took on that moody, rebuffed look she knew so well, and it occurred to her to wonder, just then, if he really liked this job he had, or whether he brought to it a side of himself that bored him.

  She was back at her desk in the steno pool, her hands on the typewriter, before that last remark of his registered and she realized that he’d thought the thing that had come in the mail was a love letter.

  At noon she battled the crowds in the big department store to make the payment on her coat. She broke the ten-dollar bill from Uncle Bax to buy a couple of bargain bras and a slip. She looked long at a dress, a thirty-dollar dark red knit marked down to seventeen-ninety-nine. But the thought of using most of one of the twenties was too much; she couldn’t do it without talking to Tom about it first.

  The rest of the day seemed like forever but it ended anyway at five o’clock and she went home.

  Tom was on the couch in the living room, asleep. They had spent what they had, between them, on this room, trying to get a decent effect, and they had shopped second-hand stores until the clerks ran when they saw them coming, or tried to pretend they weren’t in the store. The couch was the result of vigilant ad-watching, a quilted plum-colored velvet, big and elegant and soft, and Tom ought not to be lying on it, really, all sprawled out like that. It was hard on the cushions. He should be on the bed in the bedroom, the wreck of a bed with the shabby cotton cover that nothing could hurt any more.

  She dropped her purse and knelt beside the couch and kissed his temple. “Tom. Tom, darling, wake up.”

  “Mmmmm?” He rolled, almost fell off, caught himself, and his eyes came open, the strange greenish eyes with the golden flecks in them, what she thought of as green-topaz eyes, and he yawned. “Good God, what time’s it, anyway? Where the hell did the day go?” He pushed himself up, worked his shoulders to rid them of stiffness, then pulled her toward him off her knees, so that she fell against him, and he rubbed a hand over her hair. “Jeff. Little Jeff. My working girl. I can smell the subway on you, and before that an office full of paper and ink and machines, and I hate it, I hate it because you ought to smell of green grass and woods where shadows lie, and the sun shines down through the trees, trees like apricot and peach and apple—”

  “Cows.”

  “The sweet breath of cows eating nothing but fresh hay all day.”

  “Milk”

  “A path where you carry the milk, and there are branches that whip against your cotton dress, and the branches are full of flowers and dew and bees—”

  The game had gone on long enough. “Tom, listen.”

  “And if you look closely enough, under the greenery is a rabbit—”

  “Tom, listen.”

  “Or a toad, all sleepy and frosted with wet—” He broke off to hold her away from him, to study her. He seemed tired, she thought in that moment of examination, their eyes meeting—he looked like too many hours fixed in a chair and too much thinking and too many cups of coffee and too many cigarettes and too many unfinished pages dropped into the box that served for a wastebasket. “Something’s happened. You’re full of excitement—” He hesitated. “They promoted you, they gave you a different job. A better job.”

  “No.” She got up off her knees and sat beside him on the couch. “It’s Uncle Bax. A letter from my uncle. Here. Read it.” She opened her purse and took out the letter, and fished out Uncle Bax’s handwritten note.

  He took the note as if he didn’t really want to look at it, as if he was so tired of looking at words that even the thought of Uncle Bax’s letter was too much. But when she waited, not saying anything, he opened the page.

  When he finished reading, he sat with the page hanging from his fingers as if now, having read it, he really didn’t want to think about it.

  “Did you read it all?” she asked softly.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think about it?”

  “Where is the money?”

  “Here.” She pulled the envelope wide and uncurled the piece of newspaper enough for him to see the bills. “Three hundred dollars.”

  He nodded. “And where is the box?�
��

  “In the bedroom closet, in that carton of junk I never unpacked.”

  “Go get it,” he told her, “and let’s have a look.”

  When she brought the box and put it into his hands, he turned it over and examined it curiously. “An old shoebox, tied with string—he must be a pretty casual old guy, I mean as far as the safety of his belongings go. You’ve had this for a year? And no word about it until now?”

  “Not a word. I’d forgotten all about it. Wait a minute, I’ll get the scissors.”

  She cut the twine with difficulty—it was a hard, tough, waxed kind of string, and the knots were monsters. Tom brushed the cut string aside and lifted the lid.

  “What was it he said? The third letter from the top?”

  “Yes.” It looked such a mess, she thought; it looked as if the stuff had been tossed into the box from a distance, the lid clamped on—

  “There is no third letter,” Tom said. “The letters are just a jumble, along with this other stuff—” He took out a battered small notebook, leather bound, in which loose papers and clippings had been interpolated. There was some ragged foreign money, big worn bills. French, she thought. There were half-used checkbooks and some unmounted photographs with old-fashioned formal settings.

  “Any of these pictures of Uncle Bax?”

  “Yes. Here, with the man who looks like a general.”

  “This must be Bax, too, with this woman. She’s a looker. My God, the hair!”

  “It’s a terribly old picture. Let’s see what we can make of the letters.”

  They sorted the letters into a separate heap between them on the couch. There were fourteen in all. She looked at them in despair. “We can’t pick out the third letter. We can’t do what he wants us to do,” she said, “so we can’t use the money. We’ll have to send it back to him, when we have an address—”

  “He had them fastened together with this rubber band, I’ll bet, and it rotted and broke,” Tom told her, fishing a dried and cracked slip of rubber out of the mess in the box. “That’s why the letters shifted into the rest of the junk. But we’ve got to make an effort, baby. We need the three hundred. Look, a lot of the letters are addressed to Bax himself and they’ve been opened. None of these can be the letter you’re supposed to deliver.”

  He was taking it for granted that she was going to do what Uncle Bax wanted; and to her surprise she discovered that she had every intention of doing it too. Quickly she picked up a sealed envelope. “Here’s one that’s not addressed to Bax. It’s addressed to a Mr. Coulter in Brooklyn. This must be the one that—”

  “Hold on. This one’s for a Mrs. Kate Appleton in Far Rockaway. It could be the one, it’s well inside personal delivery distance.”

  “Oh, no,” she cried, despairing again, “here’s a third. For a Mr. Shima at the United Nations—”

  Tom cried out in disgust, and started to drop all of the letters back into the box, and then changed his mind and went through them again. There were only the three which had not been opened, hadn’t been originally addressed to Bax himself.

  “But three of them!” she worried. “I wouldn’t know what to do.”

  “We’ll have to play it by ear. A process of reasoning. Beginning with your Mr. Shima. For some reason Mr. Shima sounds to me like your uncle’s type of man. His name is offbeat and his job apparently has something to do with international politics on an upper level, whereas from what you’ve told me of Bax, and his flitting about the world, it could be that his business is along the same line, on a lower level. I guess I’m not putting it very well—”

  “No, you’re right. I know what you mean. Uncle Bax could very easily be dabbling in politics, wherever he goes. There’s this photo of him with the general, as a kind of proof. And the woman in the other picture—she looks important somehow. She looks as if for all of her life she’s been used to servants and luxury.”

  He re-examined the picture of the woman and Bax. “Made in New Orleans. Something’s been scratched away. The photographer’s name, or the date, perhaps. What you’d better do … you’ll deliver Mr. Shima’s letter first. And then again, playing it by ear, you watch for the reaction. I can’t tell you what to expect. This must be pretty important to your uncle, to have sent the amount of money he did, so it might be, you’d try to see if Mr. Shima considers it important, if he acts impressed or surprised or pleased. If he obviously doesn’t seem like any of these, and doesn’t know or care anything about the letter, we’ll go on to the Coulter guy in Brooklyn.”

  “And in case it’s necessary, to Mrs. Appleton in Far Rockaway.” She paused to worry. “I hope Bax doesn’t mind, I hope it’s not spoiling anything for him if all three letters are delivered.”

  “Depends on what’s inside.” Tom had picked up the letter for Mr. Shima. “I’d really like to know what’s in it. Feels like several sheets of paper, plus something stiff, like cardboard. Or like a piece off one of those pictures—” With the envelope he tapped the picture of Uncle Bax and the much-decorated Latin-looking officer.

  The man was staring straight at the camera, in contrast to Bax, who had a shifty, unfocused look. He was taller than Bax, with a military straightness, square-shouldered, black hair closely clipped. Bax was wearing a white suit and held a Panama hat in his hand, against his leg, and she thought the vague smile was uneasy, as if he wanted the photo made and done with. There was a rattan settee in the background, a painted backdrop of palms and hills and birds flying, a scuffy rug on the floor. You could almost see past the frame of the picture, she thought all at once; you could visualize the rest of the place, the slatternly building, the heat, the blinding sunlight outdoors, the photographer bent behind his ancient, patched camera, the smell of fish and copra … or bananas. A tropical country at any rate.

  “It’s all sealed,” she pointed out, “and Bax says it’s important that it not be opened.”

  Tom turned the envelope over. Broad bands of tape had been glued across the back of the letter, completely hiding the flap. “Oh, I’m not going to fool around with it. I wonder why he wants it all put into another envelope, the address typed?”

  They puzzled over it, and then she said, “Well, Bax’s handwriting isn’t one you’d forget. Perhaps he doesn’t want anyone to know about the letter except the one I’m to give it to.”

  “Could be. And why don’t you get on the phone right now, just to settle the question, and find out if Mr. Shima can really be reached at the U.N.? Someone might be working late. There might be an emergency session, or something.”

  “Yes, that’s a good idea.”

  She called the U.N., but by now, it turned out, most of the offices were closed; the woman on the phone implied that U.N. people went home at night like everybody else. And why didn’t she call again in the morning?

  “Well, you’ll have to call tomorrow,” Tom said, when she had relayed the message.

  “Or you could,” she told him. “Tom, you could even deliver the letter. Who’s to know the difference? You just make sure you’re talking to Mr. Shima, and then put the envelope into his hand. That’s all there is to it.”

  He began to pile all of the junk back into the shoebox. It was an oversized shoebox but he hadn’t the knack of getting everything back inside, and the lid woudn’t fit. “Somehow I don’t think your uncle wants me—he wants you. He doesn’t know a damn thing about me, for one thing. The letter’s addressed to Jennifer Hamilton. It could be, that in some way we don’t know anything about, my delivering the letter would screw things all up.”

  “But I have to work—”

  “Why don’t you take tomorrow afternoon off? Plead a headache. And meanwhile I’ll check at the U.N. and be able to give you the green light, I’ll find out in which department or by which embassy Mr. Shima is employed, exactly where you can find him … what do you think?”

  Without telling Tom anything about it, she decided in that moment to go to Mr. Dunavan and not to lie to him. She would tell Mr. Dunavan t
hat she had an important errand to run for a member of her family.

  And Mr. Dunavan would tell her, fine, take the afternoon or as long as you need.

  And she just might, even yet, tell him about Uncle Bax.

  Chapter 3

  She heated last night’s coffee in the dark kitchen, drank it standing on the cold scratchy floor beside the sink, rinsed the cup under the faucet. She dressed in the bathroom so as not to wake Tom. She put on one of the new bras and the new slip, and felt somehow deliciously and luxuriously spoiled, and then for no reason she thought of the woman in the photo with Uncle Bax. That woman had worn soft and silky things next to her skin all of her life. She had never rinsed a cup in the sink nor looked with longing at a thirty-dollar knit dress, marked down or not, and though Jennifer couldn’t really imagine what the woman’s life had been like in all its details, she knew that the assurance built by years of protection and homage shown from that imperious face.

  She brushed her teeth in the gloom, ran a comb through the sheaf of brown hair, powdered her nose and dashed on lipstick.

  I’m such an ordinary-looking thing, she told the one in the mirror. My kind by the millions run through those streets down there, one indistinguishable from another. A herd. A troop of mice, and only a trifle more sentient than the real mice in the walls of the buildings

  Cut it out!

  You have Tom, goose.

  No one can be ordinary, no one can be unremarkable, who has a man like him. He has set you apart. No subway crush, no mob in an office, no streetful of faceless mice can change that. You are Tom’s woman. He has made you a part of himself, he has brought you into a new land where you had never lived before, a land you didn’t know existed—where you would never have lived at all, but for him. Your story is the twin to the one where the princess kisses the frog and turns him into a prince. Tom kissed you and you became a queen.