by Joanna Scott
“Um...”
“Yes?”
“Me?”
“You dropped this.”
“I did?”
She wanted to thank him, but first she had to check to make sure her money was still in the wallet. When she looked up again the man was walking away with a decisiveness that from behind conveyed a fierce disgust, though the tilt of his head suggested that he might have been laughing. So Nora laughed, too, along with the rich old matron who’d been laboriously entering the store with tottering, high-heeled steps and had paused to witness the conversation.
“It’s your lucky day, miss!” cried the old woman in delight. Nora made a motion as though tipping a hat, and she continued on her way, heading uptown on Fifth Avenue. She rested the fingertips of one hand on the wallet in her pocket. She intended to be more careful with her belongings, though not careful enough to guard against the sudden blinding of the winter sun as she crossed the street, the glare dissolving the oncoming taxi into a watery nothing. The taxi honked, Nora jumped, and that was that—the taxi had already entered the jam on Fifth Avenue and Nora was safely up on the curb.
She stopped to examine a store’s display of robes and slippers. She stopped again to admire the diamonds in Tiffany’s window. She crossed Fifth Avenue beside a man walking a poodle, both of whom, man and dog, were haloed by white puffed curls.
Up the carpeted steps of the hotel past a doorman who was helping a woman into a limousine. Through the revolving door and into the hushed lobby. Red-capped wooden soldiers dangled on gold threads from the branches of a ten-foot Christmas tree. Piles of gift boxes sparkled in the light cast by the immense chandelier. Everyone seemed to be floating a few inches in the air, except for Nora. What was she doing there? Blink. Um. The pale, freckled face of a girl inept at deception. She felt like she would collapse in a faint if someone asked her what she wanted. But staff and guests alike seemed absorbed in some important communal task, and Nora could move among them along the main corridor without any objections. She could muse over a breakfast menu posted on a pedestal. Even better, she could retreat into the shadows of stairway number 5 and sit on the bottom stair, settle herself, relax. She could listen to the pleasant music coming from the Palm Court. She could savor the mingling scents of perfume and cinnamon and cigarettes.
Eyes narrowed into a squint, shoulders hunched, back stooped, knees indecorously apart. She held steady, but the longer she sat and watched, the more her attitude expressed uncertainty. She stared at the ladies in their furs, watched one and then another as they made their way along the corridor. Not many people noticed her. A bellman wheeling his cart nodded with a hint of complicity, and one elderly man circled back after passing her once, tapped his cane near her feet, and hissed something, though whether it was an admonition, an insult, or advice, she wasn’t sure.
She sat there for a long time, long enough to think hard about her strategy. The plan she’d devised at home did not include a detailed vision of action. And so she sat and thought and thought some more. And then all at once she sprang up, seized by an idea, fumbled for her wallet, slipped a bill from it, and discreetly crumpled it in her hand.
“Ma’am, excuse me, ma’am, I think, um, you dropped this.” Nora held up the dollar bill. The woman, a wispy, fragile thing enshrouded in a lavender silk pantsuit, looked at her with disbelief that within seconds had transformed into disdain.
“Pardon?”
“You dropped this?” She could only cast the possibility as a question. This, um, here—a whole dollar. Actually, it was Nora’s dollar, but Nora was pretending otherwise, earning no more than the woman’s cough of scorn and retaining the dollar for herself.
Although shaken, she wasn’t yet defeated, and after a few minutes she tried again, catching a woman on her way to the powder room down the hall. But the woman, who had dark eyes furrowed with thick, extravagantly arched brows, spoke little English. She shrugged and took the dollar from Nora, then searched in her own purse for change. Confused, she thrust the handful of coins toward Nora, and Nora was obliged to accept it—a total of one dollar and thirty cents, unintended profit that had a heartening effect.
She decided that one dollar wasn’t enough. Next time, she tried a five-dollar bill.
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
The woman glared at her. Her dyed blond elegance looked coarse at close range. Nora smiled weakly. Without a word, the woman accepted the five dollars and clacked away on sequined shoes before Nora could explain.
She would have no other opportunity to try again, for a concierge came striding toward her, obviously preparing to ask if she was indeed staying at the hotel or if she was what she appeared: an abominable vagrant off the streets.
No need to bother asking. Nora brushed past him, ducking to hide her face and keep him from enjoying the pleasure of her humiliation. He stood with folded arms, watching to make sure she reached the doors without an escort.
ON THE MORNING of the day that I first met Nora Owen, I was at the main branch of the public library, though not in my usual place, which had already been claimed by a woman who was bent over the desk, studying her documents with a magnifying glass. I was impressed by her absorption in her work. Taking a seat at a table across the aisle, I set out to mimic her concentration.
I’d intended to spend the whole day working on an extensive footnote, but as the hours passed, I became convinced that I’d been wasting my time. I’d wasted the morning on a footnote, and I’d wasted many months on a project that would come to nothing. The more I considered it, the more defeated I felt: the subject of my research was arcane, and my information came from questionable sources. I might as well have been transcribing the documents word for word. I’d been working intently, with the effort that as a child I devoted to color-by-number kits. I’d been too pleased with the precision of my study to wonder about my purpose, and I’d forgotten to ask myself whether the fantastic claims I’d been recounting were true.
Shortly after eleven o’clock I left the library. Instead of going directly back to my apartment, I set out walking. I stopped in a shop on Madison and bought a pair of leather gloves—a Christmas present for my fianç—and a scarf for my sister. At noon I decided to have some lunch. Back then, in the winter of 1972, there was still an Automat on the southeast corner of Third Avenue and Forty-second Street, and this is where, after I finished my sandwich, I spent a lazy hour sipping coffee cranked from the mouth of a brass dolphin and reading the newspaper. This is where I first laid eyes on Nora Owen.
A COUPLE OF LONG BLOCKS WEST OF THE HOTEL, Nora decided to try again, acting this time with a jittery boldness that made itself visible in the ten-dollar bill she pretended to scoop from the sidewalk.
“Excuse me”
“Mmm?”
The woman’s age was hard to gauge beneath the mask of rouge and eye shadow. She could have been forty-five or twenty-five. A tall white woman with a wide-brimmed black hat, a white lamb’s wool coat, and black boots, she inhaled smoke through her long cigarette holder and studied the money Nora offered.
“I think you dropped this?” Nora leaned her weight forward on the ball of her left foot. For a few awkward seconds the woman didn’t say anything. Then she did something remarkable enough to draw stares from passersby: she withdrew her cigarette holder from the corner of her mouth, pursed her glossy lips, turned her face aside, and spit onto the curb.
“You are a dear,” the woman growled, her English tinged with a slight accent that Nora couldn’t identify. “You are truly the sweetest thing I have seen in months, and for your kindness you must come home with me and enjoy a cup of hot cocoa, yes?”
“Um...”
“Yes!”
Later, Nora would tell this story more than once to me. In one version, the woman took her by the hand and forcefully led her into a nearby building. In another version, the woman delivered a lengthy monologue right there on the street—a speech about the rarity of a girl as innocent and sweet as Nora in a
world rife with criminals.
Whatever the exact sequence of events, Nora eventually found herself crossing a Beaux Arts threshold whose door was held open by a man in tails and white gloves. She rode with the woman up the spacious elevator to the sixth floor, filed down a plush hallway, and entered a dank, unpleasant box of a studio overlooking an airshaft, a single room furnished only with a mattress on the floor, a card table, a small refrigerator, and an electric burner. The coil, left on, had heated into a pulsing red.
“Trust no one, ch豩e,” the woman said, bolting the door and turning with the flare of an experienced dancer to place her hat on a brass wall hook shaped like a beckoning hand. “Except yourself. Trust your instinct.” This last word she pronounced with emphasis on the second syllable. “Instinct will serve you well. Instinct will give you access to the true self behind the mask.” Behind what mask? What did she mean? And why did she tuck a new cigarette into her holder and light it, only to leave it burning in the ashtray?
Nora indicated her puzzlement with a shrug, at which the woman seemed to take offense. Rapidly unbuttoning her coat, she said, “You have already concluded I am raving mad!”
“No, really! I was, you know, just wondering where you’re from?”
“From?”
“From wh-where are you?” Nora stuttered through the jumbled syntax.
“I am third-generation American, if you please! But I have invited you here not to answer your questions but so you may confirm a hunch for me.”
“A hunch?”
“You want cocoa, yes? And what stupid ass left the burner on! Mother of God. It couldn’t have been you, pussy-puss-puss. Somewhere in this room there is my little pusswillow.”
Whether this woman was as raving mad as she dared Nora to consider her or whether she was amusing herself with the performance, Nora would never know for sure. She was calling for her cat; obviously, there was no cat. It wasn’t hiding under the one table or in a cabinet. “Here, sweetbit.” It wasn’t anywhere to be found. “Ah, mea culpa, little dandelion puff.” The cat clearly didn’t exist, even if the woman thought otherwise.
“Love-pie!”
This was the moment when Nora should have excused herself and headed toward the door—except that the cat suddenly was there, a blue-veined hairless feline lump, uncovered when the woman peeled back the bedspread. Pussy-puss-puss, with squinting eyes and tuftless ears flattened in annoyance at the woman who had roused it from sleep. And suddenly what seemed mad was not the woman herself but the Chinese box of a world which she inhabited, a cell inside a cell, which happened to be the same world where Nora was trapped, a world designed to make no sense.
With the hairless cat on her lap, the woman positioned herself amid the pillows on the mattress while Nora took it upon herself to heat milk and measure out the cocoa. They conversed about the weather—yesterday a storm, today clear, tomorrow predicted to be overcast, perhaps with morning flurries. They talked about the carriage horses and the dangers of Central Park at night. Then, out of the blue, the woman said, her gaze resting heavily on Nora’s back, “By the way, the money you purported to have found belonged to you, I know. I never carry a bill so grand. Nothing more than three dollars, in case of purse-snatching. I think, therefore, you have a secret.”
Nora flinched, startled by the woman’s insight, and her right heel slipped out of the suede nest of her desert boot. She struggled to reset it while she stirred the cocoa and sugar into the milk.
“I don’t have any secret,” she murmured.
“Everyone has a secret. And your own has to do with money, I believe. A girl your age who returns her own money to a stranger is looking for a gift she cannot bring herself to request directly. You have a need for charity, yes? You are looking for a mother, yes? Perhaps it is that you are an orphan, yes? This is my hunch. Wrong or right?”
Nora had to bend over and untie her boot in order to fit her foot back into it. The action gave her a chance to formulate a reply.
“Wrong.”
“Oh!” The woman voiced her surprise with this delicate exclamation and picked up her cigarette to indicate that she would forget the subject altogether. Between puffs she sipped her hot cocoa. She told Nora about her dream of someday moving from the back of the building to the front, into a luxury apartment with a view of the park. She said she had many boyfriends who were contributing to her cause. They were none of them hippies, she said. This was her choice. She did not like hippies. Peace signs pasted on their jeans. Hair down to their knees. Stay away from hippies, she warned Nora in a fading voice. Hippies and dogs. There was no reason for dogs to exist, as far as the woman could see. And she could see very far. Hippies, dogs, and purse-snatchers. Begin with instinct, she said, drifting off into a dream. And from there...
The sleeping, hairless cat floated like a strange seabird on the waves of the sleeping woman’s chest. Nora watched them for a few minutes, then she turned off the burner, unlocked the door, and let herself out.
I’M NOT SURE EXACTLY HOW Nora occupied herself during the next couple of hours. She didn’t go into any stores or hotels, and I don’t know if she approached any more women. But the day wore relentlessly on, and finally Nora Owen was standing beside me in the Automat, looking famished and exhausted, her nose red from the wintry air.
“I think you dropped this.”
She held a crumpled bill, which I started to accept with gratitude. But when I saw it was a twenty, I withdrew my hand, convinced that the money wasn’t mine and suspecting the kindness to be followed by some quick, clever swindle, likely with an accomplice appearing on the scene any moment.
“Please” She thrust it back at me.
“You’re mistaken.”
“I found it...”
“It’s not mine.”
“It is”
“Not.”
“It must be.”
“No!”
My raised voice hushed the voices of diners around me, but only for a moment. After the pause, the murmur in the Automat resumed, and I tried to continue reading. But the girl kept herself planted stubbornly beside my table, so I began gathering the sections of the newspaper, preparing to leave. Then I looked up and saw that her face was damp and puckered from crying.
I figured that I was more than twice her age. I wasn’t ready to trust her completely, but I wanted to help. My work, I decided, could wait while I bought this poor girl some lunch and listened to the story she had to tell.
With the money, Nora’s money, I bought her what she requested: a tuna sandwich and a cup of coffee. I pocketed the change, intending to give it back to her as soon as she was ready to accept it. I was surprised to hear she wanted coffee but was less surprised as I watched her dilute it with cream and three packets of sugar. She appeared relieved to have food in front of her, behavior I initially misinterpreted as evidence that she didn’t usually know where her next meal was coming from. But after we’d introduced ourselves I soon learned that she had a home in the suburbs and, I could guess, a mother who kept the refrigerator well-stocked. She was in Manhattan because, well, um, to tell the truth, she was playing hooky, she confessed with a grin.
I was starting to feel some impatience with her and suggested that she go ahead and eat her lunch. She took a sip of her coffee to oblige me, then she clapped a hand over her mouth. Before I could ask her what was wrong, she’d gotten up from her seat and rushed out the nearest exit. Through the window I watched her lean against the side of the building. She stood there with her eyes closed, her hand tight over her lips, while people made a wide arc around her.
I stood up, meaning to offer assistance, but sat down again after deciding that my presence would only add to her discomfort and embarrassment. Watching her, my suspicions began to clarify into a new formulation. The girl was no swindler. She was not using money to make an illegal profit. She had no accomplices.
After a few minutes she recovered from the nausea, dabbed at her face with a paper napkin, and stretched h
er arms before she returned to join me at the table in the Automat. I tried to lock her gaze with mine, but she shook her head, shaking away unpleasant thoughts.
“You feel better now?”
“Sort of.”
“Good.”
“Mmm.”
“It’s really not my business...” I began.
“What?”
“I hope you don’t mind my asking...”
“What?”
“Are you in trouble, dear?”
She watched a customer poke change into the slot for the sandwich case. “I hate tuna,” she said idly, as though to herself.
“Then why’d you order it?”
“I didn’t order it. You just bought it for me.”
I bristled, hearing the ring of contempt in her voice. There would be no shaking her belief that the mistake was mine.
“Does coffee often make you ill?”
“No.”
“Do you think you’re coming down with the flu?”
“No.”
“Then there’s the other possibility to consider. The possibility of trouble. Now do you know what I mean?”
At the time, I judged her to be seventeen or eighteen. If I had known that she was only fourteen I don’t think I would have confronted her so bluntly. Her sudden intake of breath suggested more the shock of guilt than of surprise. She started to rise, then sat back down and rested her hands on the edge of the table. I expected her to begin to sob. Instead she leaned forward, looked me straight in the eye, and, with a prepossession that made it my turn to cringe, said simply, “Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
This, I thought, was just how the girl, so sensible when faced with the world’s insanity, would have said it to her mother, if her mother had known to ask. Yeah. That’s right. Big deal.
SITTING ACROSS FROM NORA OWEN in the Automat, it occurred to me that she was made much of, to borrow a description from one of the historical documents I’d been reading recently, but the details were eluding me. The turning point came when I decided I would not badger the defiant girl with more questions. After waiting for the explanation that didn’t come, I stood up, preparing once more to leave her on her own. Truthfully, I wanted Nora to experience the force of my impatience. She’d singled me out for a reason, but if she wasn’t going to say what, exactly, she needed from me, I wasn’t going to linger.
