Situated in the heart of a lake district, summer residents the principal reason for its existence, the town had yet to wake when the truck stopped in front of a restaurant whose plate-glass windows were just beginning to reflect early-morning sunlight.
“This here is a classy dump. We’ll go round by the back,” the trucker said, without a trace of embarrassment.
The position of cashier at Oliver’s was not one that a transient, without references or previous experience, would normally have stood a chance of obtaining, but when Psyche was presented to him, Ollie, with a week of the summer season still ahead of him. was desperately trying to replace a girl who had let him down without notice. Any local girls who might have measured up to the standards he required were already preparing to shake the dust of a small town from their shoes for the winter. Psyche, swimming against the tide, appeared at what was, for her, a most propitious moment.
Ollie was in the kitchen in his shirt-sleeves. Normally he wore coat and tie, but at a quarter to seven he had not yet taken up his public duties. A swarthy, thick-set little man in his early fifties, he reminded Psyche in many ways of Bel’s Joe.
“This here’s a friend of mine who wants to work for you, Ollie,” the trucker said. “She hasn’t done the kind of job you want, but she’s good with figures, and like you can see for yourself, she’s got class.”
During the ensuing colloquy Psyche was aware that she was being sized up by shrewd dark eyes well used to judging people, and she was weak with gratitude and relief when she was told she would be given three days’ trial.
With a grin and a wink, the trucker said, “Well, I guess you’re all set, sister. Be seeing you.”
When he had gone, Ollie said briskly, “No time to show you the ropes before we open, honey. I’ll do your job for you to-day, and you stay with me and keep your eyes open. That’s a nice dress you’re wearing, not too fancy. You wear that kind of thing and you’ll be exactly right. Now, we better get you fixed up with your name.”
Crossing the big kitchen in which a cook and two fresh-faced waitresses were already working, he led her into a small office. Going to a filing cabinet, he opened a drawer, and took out a large box which he placed on one end of a polished oak desk. Looking at it. Psyche’s surprise was clearly written on her expressive face.
With a self-satisfied smile, Ollie said, “Look like solid silver, don’t they, honey? Nearly a hundred of them, too. All the girls’ names you’re ever likely to bump into. Now, which one’s yours?”
She knew what was coming, but she said it anyway. “Psyche.”
Shocked disbelief wiped the smile from his face. “Say that again?”
Psyche said it again.
“You’re kidding!”
“I’m sorry. I’m not.”
Looking down at the desk where he had already laid out an assortment—Mary, Elizabeth, Ann, Antoinette, Catherine—he rubbed the bald spot on the back of his head, and said unhappily, “This has never happened before. I guess you’ll have to use your other name, honey. What’s your other name?”
On the verge of breaking the news to him that she had no other name. Psyche changed her mind. The last thing she wanted to do was to appear odd or difficult in any way. Maggie—Margaret. It would do.
“Margaret.”
“Oh, my gosh, honey, that won’t do. We got a Margaret. One of the girls you saw just now in the kitchen is a Margaret. Look, we got to open in twelve minutes. Isn’t there something you always wish you’d been called instead of that outlandish handle you got? Here, take your choice!” Scooping up several fistfuls of nickel-plated brooches, he spread them at random before her.
“Do I have to be called anything?”
“It gives a friendly note. The customers like it.”
“I don——’t” Psyche began, but Ollie would not let her go on.
“Make up your mind, honey. It’s time we were out front. Here, this is a nice one. Simple. Dignified.”
He held out a short, square palm, and Psyche saw traced across it in glittering Old English script—Nora.
Drawing in her breath sharply, she exclaimed, “No!” And reaching blindly into the box, said, “I’ll take this one.”
In time she became used to being called Rosalie, or, depending on who spoke to her, Miss Rosalie; but she never liked it.
Ollie, on the other hand, was entirely satisfied. “That’s fine,” he said, when he saw what she had chosen. “The customers will like that. Now, I’ll make you acquainted with the rest of the staff, and one of the girls will show you where to wash up. Be as quick as you can, honey, and when you’re ready you’ll find me out front.”
Five minutes later Psyche walked through the restaurant proper toward the front entrance and a glass show-case of cigarettes and candies on which rested the cash register over which she was to preside. And even as she approved green leatherette, and fresh flowers, she experienced an odd pang as she realized that the space on the street outside, occupied earlier by the big oil truck, was now empty.
It was Sharon, herself, who had suggested that they read a little longer before going up to bed, but Dwight, watching her, saw that her book had slipped from her hands.
Guessing what she was thinking about, he was aware of familiar pain against which he could erect no effective bulwark. If necessary, he would have laid down his life for her, his good, his beautiful, his passionate wife. That the one thing she most desired should be beyond his power to give her was a stark truth he at times found almost unbearable.
“Sharon——”
She looked up at once, and warmth came back into blue eyes which had been blank, fixed on a fathomless distance. “Yes, my darling?”
“You can share it, you know.”
“I was,” she said simply. “Nothing, not this endless impotent waiting, not anything, really matters—as long as I have you.”
He got up from the chair in which he had been sitting, and crossed to the couch. He sat down beside her, and took both her hands in his. “We might get much further, much faster, if we gave it to the newspapers,” he said gently.
“No, darling, no! We discussed that before.”
“That was some weeks ago. There is a limit to what you can take, Sharon.”
“As long as I have you,” Sharon said quietly, “I can take anything. I can wait for the rest of my life—or hers, if I have to. But there must be no publicity.”
It was a point that the man had not stressed when they had talked of it previously. He had not wanted her to recognize as clearly as he did himself the infinite number of unpleasant possibilities that seventeen years might contain.
When Sharon spoke again, he realized that he had again discounted her basic realism as he need not have done.
“Because I keep the wishful thinking on top,” she told him quietly, “you must not think that I don’t see what we may be up against. I know as well as you do that there may be things a reporter could turn up that would smear and twist her whole future. That must not happen. Even if it means that we never find her—still, that must not happen.”
10 THE NEWSPAPERMAN
I
DURING the few brief weeks that she worked at Oliver’s, psyche was more wholly contented than she could ever remember being. deeply satisfied with her own complete independence, thankful to be temporarily rid of all personal claims, she hibernated emotionally while adjusting herself as a free member of a free society.
Grown used to adapting herself to rapidly changing circumstances, she settled into her new routine in a matter of days.
She liked Ollie who, despite his brooches, was an employer with very few quirks. She liked the stir and movement of a day which began at seven o’clock in the morning and did not end until midnight. With Sundays and the middle of every afternoon to herself, she either walked or read as the weather and her mood dictated. If she had chosen, she could have had friends, and from the beginning she could have had dates in as varied and great a number as she wished. For
the time being she wanted neither.
The people whom she saw most often were those who lived, as she did herself, in rooms above the restaurant, and who, making a special arrangement with Ollie, ate all their meals in the restaurant. They were a heterogeneous collection, but each in his or her own way contributed something to her growing understanding of, and sympathy with, humanity as a whole. Although she was never intimate with any of these people, as the weeks passed she came to know them very well simply through observation and the closeness of contact obligatory in the circumstances under which they lived. Becoming aware of their problems, seeing the different ways in which they accommodated themselves to conditions as they found them, she began to achieve a perspective with regard to her own life infinitely more mature than it had been previously.
Up until this time she had always found herself within a framework of living unified in itself, making her the exception, setting her apart as unique not only in the minds of others but in her own. Now she began to see herself as unique only in so far as she was individual. Having long considered it a tragedy that she should have no known origin, she recategorized this state of affairs under the heading of misfortune. As for the present, irrespective of the past, she achieved a degree of objectivity that would not permit her to see herself as other than relatively very fortunate.
That the work she was doing would not continue to satisfy her indefinitely, she knew, but for the time being it more than sufficed. And to think, even vaguely, of leaving this peaceful little town, was to relinquish a tranquillity too rare in her experience to be other than precious in itself.
By chance, in this place, she had found not only a job but pleasant acquaintances in whom there had been no necessity to confide. She had not at any time had to say that she was ignorant of her origin, that she did not know who she really was. The relief this brought her was so great that she became daily more determined not to embark on any future course that would implicate her in the telling of a story she would now prefer to forget almost in its entirety.
She would continue to be grateful to Butch and Mag, to Bel and to Kathie—even to Nick, who, through his faults as much as his virtues, had given her a very precise idea of the kind of man who could be of permanent interest to her.
Each of these had contributed toward her present ability to make a place for herself in an everyday world. But to explain her various relationships with them was, she was convinced, close to impossible.
She wondered how long it would take, in her new life, to build up a personal history—a history she could present to other people as sufficiently complete to need no previous detail, other than that she had come from the north and had no living relations. Even more important than this, how long would it take to prove to herself that she was the kind of person she had always hoped to be, on the basis of an imagined heredity? Two years. Perhaps three. Perhaps longer.
This metaphorical journey would, to be successful, have to be undertaken to all intents and purposes alone. No really close relationship would be safe.
As autumn clothed the town in red and gold and bronze glory, and the summer tourists vanished like migrating birds, what had at first been a tentative decision became, for Psyche, a firm resolve.
She was realistic enough to know that she would probably have to pay some price for this decision. Sensitive, imaginative, she was nevertheless a fighter, and on the late September morning when Steve Ryerson came into the restaurant, she was already prepared to pay that price.
She had found peace of mind. She would retain it, at any cost.
2
WHEN Steve Ryerson, at the end of his third college year, had taken a summer job on a newspaper, he had had no prior intention of making this his profession. by the middle of that summer, however, it was as apparent to him as to his managing editor that he was a born newspaperman.
The editor had called him into his office, a week before the university reopened, for a purpose as obvious to both of them as it would not at first have been to an outsider.
A short man, the editor conducted all interviews from the chair behind his large, untidy desk. “You’re too goddamn well dressed,” he said.
Steve grinned. “Is that all you wanted to say to me?”
“You look like a goddamn gentleman.”
“You don’t,” Steve said pleasantly, “pay me enough to be able to call me names.”
“What’s your price?”
“Double what I’m getting now.”
Commencing with some beautifully balanced blasphemy, the editor told him what he thought of this suggestion.
Steve sat down in a chair near the desk, stretched long legs out in front of him, lit a cigarette, and waited for the recommencement of negotiations whose outcome had at no time been in any doubt. He would not get the salary he had asked for, but he did not care about this. He would get the kind of assignments he wanted. He did care about this.
During the next three years, work alone would never have brought Steve Ryerson the brand of success he very quickly achieved—any more than his terse, compelling prose would have done, if it had had to stand unsupported. The core of his success lay, from the beginning, in his unerring instinct for a story.
Under his own by-line, Steve produced news where, previously, no news had been known to exist. The obvious leads he left to others to explore, and human interest as such did not move him. An apparently cynical crusader, his armour bare of any lady’s favour, the articles he wrote shook the established order of things where, in his opinion, it most needed shaking. His news stories, when they broke, had both bite and drama while still adhering to unembroidered truth.
That a devotion to truth, as a thing in itself, was not always easy to adhere to in his particular field, he discovered early. With dispassionate realism, he accepted this as entirely human if not entirely admirable, and built the kind of reputation he himself wanted within the terms of reference as he found them. That this should at times prove difficult did not discourage him, for the simple reason that his own self-respect would always mean more to him than the opinions of others.
On the late-September morning when he came into Oliver’s, he was, ostensibly, on holiday. A small assignment, actually out of his line, that he had undertaken only because he was to be in the vicinity, did not give the lie to this as much as did his typewriter, already set up in the cabin he maintained on a lake two miles from the town. His fishing tackle was still in the trunk of his car where, with a mixture of regret and amusement, he knew it would probably remain.
Psyche, when she heard the door open, was standing by the cash register while she checked over the accounts from the previous day. It was a time of day when, breakfast over, there were scarcely any customers, and she was responsible for looking after what few there were. So, although she was half-way through a long column of figures, she looked up to face the man who had paused briefly in the open doorway.
Sunlight, shining directly into her eyes, blinded her for the moment to anything more definite than an impression of broad shoulders, and dark hair thick and close against a well-shaped head.
Shaken by coincidence, by the memory of another man in another doorway limned not by sunlight but by sheet lightning, she silently called herself a fool for imagining that some, at least, of the same ingredients might be implicit in this encounter.
This, you idiot, she told herself fiercely, is a complete stranger, and one whom you will probably never see again. He can not possibly present any kind of threat to you. Neither will he be of any interest to you.
Yet, when he came forward to the counter behind which she stood, she needed all the poise she had ever acquired in order to behave naturally.
“Is it too late to get some breakfast?”
Psyche met the gaze of smiling grey eyes, and, tall though she was, she had to look up to do so. “Of course not,” she said. “Would you like to sit down and look at a menu, or would you like to give me your order now?”
Steve, who ha
d paused in the doorway because his interest had been stirred by his first sight of her, was still further intrigued by a voice and manner as greatly at variance with her surroundings as was her appearance. But it was not until she had led the way to a booth, and taken his order, that he became convinced he had seen her before. He could, he knew, be mistaken in this, but it was a kind of mistake he rarely made.
As he waited for her to bring his breakfast, he reminded himself that he had left the city at seven that morning in order to enjoy a week of comparative relaxation. To start immediately seeing a mystery where almost certainly none existed, was no way to go about doing this. Yet it annoyed him that he could not pin down the elusive memory that now insisted, not only that he had seen her before, but that the setting had been very far removed from the cashier’s desk at Oliver’s.
“Hello, Steve. No news still bad news with you?”
Absorbed in thought, Steve had not been aware of Ollie’s approach. He laughed at a pleasantry the little man was never able to resist whenever they met, and said, “That’s right, Ollie. And it looks as if it’s bad news for me this week.”
Although he saw him rarely, this was one of Ollie’s favourite customers. “That’s good,” he said. “You don’t take enough time off, Steve. You don’t relax enough.”
“Well,” Steve said, “I’m relaxing now. Sit down and tell me what’s new.”
For a minute or two they talked about inconsequential changes in the district before Steve, watching the door through which she would reappear, asked about Psyche.
“I see you have a new cashier, Ollie.”
Ollie, who had forgotten that Psyche had ever had any name other than the one he had quite literally pinned on her, beamed. “You mean Rosalie? She’s a lovely girl, isn’t she? And smart, too. Not that the others weren’t good girls, mind you, but there’s never been anyone in the place to compare with Rosalie.”
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