Neither Five Nor Three (Helen Macinnes) (3 page)

“Hello, darling,” he began, and listening to her voice he began thinking of her as she had been last night. “Hello, beautiful... did you enjoy it?... Did I? It was the best evening we’ve had in a long time. Let’s have some more. To hell with the cost, Rona. Are we living, or are we living?” He listened to her laugh, and wished he could manage one like that at this hour. “Honey,” he said, “by the way—I can’t meet you for lunch today. Sorry, got to go out of town... No, I’ll be back in time for the party. Don’t worry. Sorry about lunch, though... I meant to tell you last night, but I was enjoying myself too much, I guess. Forgive me, darling?”

He replaced the receiver. He was smiling now. Rona was pretty wonderful. In spite of Orpen’s sneers about mantraps, Rona was wonderful. But the smile left Scott Ettley’s face as he thought of Nicholas Orpen, of Rona, of his father, of all the complications in his life. All that was enough to drive him back into gloom, away from the moment of pleasure when he had listened to Rona’s laugh over the telephone. Orpen was wrong about Rona. Rona was understanding, Rona was pliable. It was the only way to be happily married—to take the girl you wanted when she was still impressionable and mould her into someone who would be yours forever. Orpen was right about most things, but he was wrong about Rona.

Ettley shaved and dressed with care, choosing a dark grey flannel suit, a fresh white shirt, a navy silk tie. Conservative, he told himself with a grin. He left the apartment before nine, complimenting himself on his speed and efficiency. (He would have time, after all, for a cup of coffee. He might even walk to the office.) He closed the door and double-locked it, leaving behind him the disordered room with yesterday’s shirt and stray socks and the bed-covers still lying abjectly on the floor. Marija, who came in to pick up and clean each day, would have everything in order for his return. She was a quiet Esthonian who had never learned enough English to be able to take out her citizenship papers. She was a reliable woman. Orpen had recommended her: he knew her husband.

I must see Orpen tonight, Scott Ettley was thinking as he reached the street. It was a cool, fresh morning. The small trees spaced along the sidewalk were in bud, their black thin branches dusted with green. He skirted an empty ash can, a couple of milk bottles, a dog straining at the end of a leash. I must see Orpen. This waiting and wondering is getting me down. Tonight, I’ll see him.

Then he remembered Rona’s party. After it, no doubt, his father would insist on taking Rona and him to dinner. Her sister and brother-in-law would be drawn in, too. One of those family evenings with Duty raising her ugly head. And every time his father made a tactful allusion to weddings, Rona would try not to look embarrassed, yet her cheeks would colour and her eyes would find something interesting to watch on the other side of the room. But getting married wasn’t so easy, not at the moment. Perhaps by Thanksgiving, perhaps by then. Rona would wait another six months: she was his, she trusted him. Some day he could explain to her, and that would make everything clear to her. She would understand. They could be happy together, in spite of what Orpen said.

He stopped for a moment at the corner newsstand and read the morning’s headlines. He didn’t even bother to buy a paper. Just the same old stuff, ground out day after day. And then he went into Schrafft’s, sat at the counter, and drank a cup of strong black coffee. He caught sight of himself in the mirror behind the bubbling coffee-pots—a fair-haired man, well-fed, well-dressed, with a look of prosperity about him. He turned sharply away from the mirror, paid the clerk, and left.

2

Rona Metford left the office just after half-past four.

“Where’s
she
going?” the new typist asked, catching a glimpse of Rona as she passed the open door of the large room where fifteen tables and fifteen typewriters stood in neat rows.

Mrs. Hershey, In Charge, looked up with a frown. She did most of the important typing for the Architecture Department, and so she felt she had to defend Rona. Besides, she liked Rona Metford and she didn’t like new girls who thought they were running the magazine after three weeks on its staff. “When you’ve been working here nine years and become assistant editor of the Architecture Department and learned to finish your job by half-past four, no doubt Mr. Burnett will let you leave early whenever you are giving a cocktail party.”

“Nine years. Good grief!” the new typist said in disgust. “And she isn’t even married yet.”

Miss Guttman looked up from the filing cabinet. “We don’t all rush to grab the first man that asks us.” She exchanged a small smile with Mrs. Hershey—just a couple of old-timers putting Miss Pert in her place—and came back to her desk. Talking of Rona Metford though... “Guess who I saw in the street today?” she asked in a lowered voice.

Mrs. Hershey couldn’t.

“Paul Haydn! He didn’t see me...too busy looking at a windowful of ties.”

Mrs. Hershey was impressed enough to stop her work, even if it kept her late. “Paul Haydn in New York? Well!”

“I heard rumours that the magazine wants him back here.”

“There have been plenty of rumours. But will he come?”

Miss Guttman shrugged her thin shoulders. “He was in uniform, a general or something, perhaps he’s staying in the army.”

“It might be difficult for him here,” Mrs. Hershey said. “I mean, with Rona Metford and all that.”

“He’s forgotten long ago. He wasn’t the kind of man to let a broken engagement worry him. Wasn’t that why she broke it, anyway—all those women in Europe?”

“Oh, you can’t believe all you hear,” Mrs. Hershey said good-naturedly. “He couldn’t help it if the girls liked him.” She shook her head, pushed a grey curl back into place, and her plump white face looked regretful. She had been sorry when Rona Metford and Paul Haydn had broken off, for she had seen the beginning of their love affair right here in this office; there was nothing like a touch of romance to brighten up life and they had looked so well together, just right, as if they’d never be the ones to disappoint Mrs. Hershey.

“He’s like all men,” Miss Guttman said gloomily. She looked down at her neat figure in its excellent black suit, and then admired her carefully kept hands. They looked nicer ringless, anyway, she decided. “I think I’ll get a waistcoat, white piqué,” she announced suddenly. “Wonder where she bought that one she wore today? Touches of white, that’s what’s new this spring.”

“Too much laundering,” Mrs. Hershey said. Then she suddenly remembered that she was to take care of her grandson tonight, so she couldn’t waste any more time at all. Her expert fingers raced over the electric typewriter. “My son and daughter-in-law are going to see
South Pacific
,” she explained, her eyes on the clock.

“And I’ve got seats for
The Cocktail Party
tonight,” Miss Guttman said, also suddenly remembering the time. “They say it’s good.” She began typing too.

Couple of old cows, the new typist thought politely. But she was feeling depressed because three weeks of typing and shorthand had turned out to be more work and less glamour than she had imagined when she had told her friends she was going to become a secretary. She stared defiantly at Mrs. Hershey for inflicting all these letters on her—the dullest, silliest letters of no importance at all—and was startled to see that Mrs. Hershey was watching her table.

But Mrs. Hershey was remembering the morning, nine years ago, when she had pointed out that desk to a dark-haired girl with large brown eyes. “Rona Metford,” the girl had said nervously, “I’m Rona Metford.” She had been seventeen then, straight from high school. And more willing to learn than some of those college graduates who wanted to work on a magazine nowadays. Mrs. Hershey looked severely at the new girl. (She’ll have to go. Lazy, inefficient, blaming all her troubles on other people. As if we didn’t earn most of our own troubles: pity they hadn’t taught her
that
in college.) Then she pulled back her attention to the last letter she had to type. She slipped a sheet of paper, carbon and second sheet neatly in place and typed the date expertly to balance the elegantly embossed heading—trend: a magazine for living. In all her fifteen years with
Trend
, Mrs. Hershey had never quite decided what that really meant. Perhaps that was why so many people bought it, just trying to find out.

“I don’t care,” Miss Guttman said suddenly, her blonde palomino-rinsed head turned towards Mrs. Hershey. “I’m going to get a white piqué waistcoat.”

Mrs. Hershey nodded placatingly, frowned at a word, and typed on.

* * *

The white piqué waistcoat which had aroused Miss Guttman’s envy was now getting out of the elevator and arousing passions of a slightly different nature in the men hurrying through the lobby.

Joe, the elevator operator, was finishing the story which he had begun on the twenty-third floor about Monday at Jamaica. “Fifty-to-one shot. Breezed in.”

“It paid the rent, then?” Rona asked with a smile.

“Sure did. Paid the rent all right.” He grinned and added, “This week.”

“Good night, Joe.” Rona hurried past the row of elevators toward the entrance of the building, before he could add the inevitable phrase that his life was just a series of ups and downs.

“Good night, Miss Metford.” Joe’s voice sounded cheated of a laugh, but in another half hour or so he would have plenty of customers coming down from the upper floors. He knew them all, had seen them come and go. Not many of them could say they had been working here in this building for twenty-one years. Miss Metford was leaving soon—so they said. Engaged to that nice-looking young fellow with the fair hair and blue eyes. But he wasn’t waiting for her, down here in the lobby, tonight. She wasn’t expecting him, either, for she was walking past the Coffee Shop where they usually met, out into Fifth Avenue through the big swing doors.

Rona turned east towards Madison, walking quickly, keeping to the right of the sidewalk to prove she was now an old New Yorker. Tonight, she didn’t even glance at the hats and dresses and ties and shirts and books and glassware which were so invitingly displayed in the small shops all along the street. At Madison Avenue, busy, less formal than Fifth but with its own elegance and high-priced look, she had to wait for a traffic light. And looking up and down the avenue, looking at the buildings with their varied lights and shadows, looking at the spring evening sky so high and blue, looking at the white clouds so admirably placed to balance the skyscrapers, she fell in love with her town all over again. Each evening, waiting at Madison and East Fifty-fourth Street, she’d look at the sky, and then at the buildings, and then at the buses and taxis and people, and—no matter how tired or annoyed or worried she had been that afternoon—her spirits would lift. Today, she had been happy and excited so that now she felt like singing. The vision of herself gaily skipping across the avenue, hitting a high note, made her smile. The woman beside her, draped in a silver-blue mink stole, her enamelled face expressionless under a riot of roses, looked at Rona curiously for a moment. A man watching both of them, kept his thoughts to himself. And then the traffic lights changed to green, the buses and taxis lined up, and the three of them crossed Madison quickly, adeptly, now only intent on their own private business.

Rona cut up Madison for a couple of blocks to see how the new building was coming along. Like everyone who had lived in the city for some years, she took a proprietary interest in all the tearing down of old buildings, the piling up of new ones. Only a few months ago, the bulldozers had been biting into the debris of this block. Then the piles had been driven deep for the foundations, the steel girders had started mounting, the concrete had been moulded. Now the building was reaching up into the sky, a fretwork of steel and concrete, and the large open space where the bulldozers had worked was a vast ground floor, black and cavernous behind its protective boarding. There, under bare electric bulbs, mounds of supplies lay in a confusion that the workmen seemed to find orderly. In another month or two, all this would be gone, to the last speck of dust. And the ground floor would have its displays of delicate dresses, or porcelain and crystal, of fragile hats and precious jewels, against a background of soft pale colours and polished mirrors and thick carpets. Modern magic, Rona thought; and standing at the rough gateway cut into the wooden boarding she watched an electrician at work on the long reels of lead piping exposed in an unfinished pillar, with the awe that Cinderella must have felt for the old lady with her wand.

But to see better—although, of course, she mustn’t spend more than a minute tonight—and to be out of the way of workmen clearing debris on to a truck, she moved farther along the temporary wooden gangway and put her eye to one of the square holes cut for “sidewalk-superintendents” in the fence. Beside her, a small boy was watching through another square hole cut obligingly at a three-foot height, while he resisted all attempts by his mother to drag him away. She was saying, “But Billy, we’ve
seen
it! And the men are leaving now. They’ve nearly all gone.” It was true, although the very junior sidewalk-superintendent didn’t want to believe it. Or perhaps the huge ground floor, still unbroken into rooms, fascinated him by its size. It seemed all the bigger because only a few men, busy on overtime, were left to emphasise its loneliness. “I’ll build a house just like that,” the little boy announced, and decided to leave and get home and start right away. His mother ran after him.

Time for me to leave too, Rona thought, and she turned away. A tall man in uniform stepped aside to let her pass over the narrowed sidewalk. Then, even as she had passed, his arm suddenly went out and he gripped her by the elbow and pulled her back. Startled, she looked up at him and saw a dark-haired man with strong eyebrows, a face that was now more handsome than good-looking, a pleasant mouth beginning to smile, serious grey eyes now losing their surprise. “Rona!” he said. “Rona...”

She stood staring at him. She half-opened her mouth. When she did speak, her voice was incredulous. “Paul Haydn!”