The Other Typist (4 page)

I trailed off in this lecture, remembering my place and, more importantly, my desire to remain employed. Young and disrespectful though he might be, the Lieutenant Detective technically outranked both the Sergeant and myself. It wouldn’t do to dress him down too severely, so I halted and waited to be reprimanded in return. But he only gazed at me for several seconds, a solemn, pitying expression creeping into his eyes. “I stand corrected,” he said. This was unexpected, and I stood blinking and dumbstruck for the space of a full minute. Then, having no desire to stay and attempt to determine the sincerity of this comment, I simply turned on my heel and left the room.

It was all a lot to absorb. My job is often full of unruly men doing unruly things, but there was an air of absurdity—of dark absurdity—about the events of that Friday. And that exchange with the Lieutenant Detective! I felt humiliated, somehow, to have been brought down to such a level.

I got off the streetcar on the Brooklyn side of the bridge and began making my way home, absorbed in thought, still possessed by images of the crazy man who may or may not have drowned a man in the East River, of the Lieutenant Detective and his solemn expressions, of the new typist who had come in for an interview (the name of that latter individual playing musically in my head, tripping along to the pace of my own steps like a child’s song:
Oh-dah-lee, Oh-dah-lee, Oh-dah-lee . . .
).
I thought of the brooch and what the Sergeant would say if he knew it was tucked away in the back of my desk drawer. I mused on the fact that, secretly, I rather agreed with the Lieutenant Detective about the Sergeant’s resemblance to Mayor Hylan. All of these thoughts and more skirted the edges of my reverie as I walked home automatically and with unseeing eyes.

Preoccupied thus, I wasn’t at all prepared for the ambush that awaited me back at the boarding-house. When I walked in, the first thing I encountered was a blast of thick stew-scented air. This first part, at least, was typical. The house generally smelled of bones boiling in water on the stove—mostly all chicken, but sometimes also beef. It was such a pervasive odor throughout the boarding-house, I often wondered if this meant I carried the smell of beef stock and chicken stock around with me in my clothes and my hair, unwittingly trailing it about the precinct and among my coworkers, who were too polite to remark upon it. But today when I walked in the house I instantly noticed there were a few additional fragrances wafting in the atmosphere: the scent of coffee brewing and of cologne. And cigarettes—it smelled very strongly of cigarettes.

I peered into the parlor and was greeted by a dense fug of cigarette smoke. The chalky cloud appeared even more opaque where it drifted under the weak light of the overhead electric bulb—and this, too, I spotted as being unusual, as Dotty did not often allow us to turn on the electric lights during the day. I blinked, and as my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting and stinging smoke, I made out the figures of two men perched side by side on the sofa, each casually arranged so that his legs were crossed with one ankle resting on the opposite knee. I thought, at first, that the smoke had affected my vision, but presently I realized this was not the case. I was not seeing double, but rather a pair of identical twins, even dressed and groomed in a similar manner.

“You must be Rose,” the one on the right said. Neither man got up from the sofa—a gesture that would have only been polite—and so I simply stood in silence, blinking at them. I noticed they were wearing similarly patterned but different-colored plaid jackets, complemented by identical boat shoes and straw boater hats. Somehow, though, I very much doubted the existence of an actual boat, as otherwise implied by their attire. There were ink stains on the thumb and forefinger of each man’s right hand. Clerks or accountants, I guessed.

The silence was broken as Dotty and Helen burst into the sitting room, each carrying a tray full of coffee things, the cups chattering against the saucers like teeth in the cold.

“There you are,” Helen exclaimed, as if my presence in the room was something they had long anticipated. Helen set her tray down next to Dotty’s, and Dotty began pouring out slightly burnt-smelling coffee from a very tarnished silver carafe. “You’re just in time to meet Bernard Crenshaw, my
beau
,” she said, pronouncing his name
Burr
-
nerd
. “And Leonard Crenshaw, his brother,” she finished, with a slight flourish of her hand.
Bernard and Leonard.
They had clearly fallen victim to the somewhat silly tradition of naming twins in a vaguely rhyming way, as if twins were not individual humans but rather two variations on the same theme. I knew there were lots of mothers who failed to resist this cozy habit.

“Actually, we mostly go by Benny and Lenny,” the one on the right said. In an attempt to be amicable, I repressed the snort that rose reactively to the back of my throat. Even more ridiculous than the almost-rhyme of their given names was the rhyme of their preferred sobriquets, but it would be rude to laugh outright. I did not approve of rude behavior in others, and I couldn’t very well permit myself a different standard. I regarded the twins again, trying to determine which one was Benny, Helen’s “beau.” Leave it to Helen to use a word like that. In addition to the faces she made in the mirror, there were times when her speech sounded inexplicably affected.
My people are from the South,
I once heard her drawl to an inquiring stranger. I knew that this was only true insofar as Sheepshead Bay could be considered the South, as her “people” were all Brooklynites, going back several generations.

Meanwhile, Dotty was flitting around with the distracted, burdened air of someone deeply inconvenienced by a surprise guest—and in this case, a guest who had inconsiderately duplicated himself. But I knew her too well; she was secretly delighting in the opportunity to entertain two young men, not to mention the pleasure she took in playing the martyred host. “Please forgive this old coffee service,” she said, meaning the silver carafe. “I didn’t know youse two would be staying for coffee or I woulda polished this ratty thing up.” I think she meant to extract a compliment, but failed in this mission. She addressed mainly the twin on the right, whose plaid jacket was predominantly red.

I decided Benny must be the one on the right, the one who had spoken up to introduce their nicknames.

“We were just saying how, since Benny brought Lenny along, I should find a girl-friend to bring along, too,” Helen remarked. There was a brittle, stretched quality to the cheerful tone of her voice, and suddenly her desperation was transparent—these were the strings that came along with Benny; wherever he went, his brother also needed to be entertained, a fact for which she had not been prepared. Suddenly Helen whirled in my direction. “Don’t you look smart today,” she said, the rhetorical comment echoing with emptiness. In an attempt to come up with a more specific compliment, she looked me over, her eyes traveling from my head to my toes. It did not appear they could wholly endorse what they found there. “You look . . . ,” she began, still casting about wildly for something she might find pleasing about my person. “You look so . . .
healthy
!”

“Helen!” Dotty chastised.

“What? I’m paying her a compliment. Normally she looks so drawn and pale. But look, dear”—she turned back to me—“look how your complexion is just perfectly
rosy
! You’d be a fool not to come out with us.

“And of course you can borrow some of my things,” she added quickly, making it clear that no matter how “healthy” I looked, she didn’t want me stepping into public with her dressed in the suit I’d worn to work and still had on now.

“I would go if I could,” Dotty interjected. “But of course, who would take care of the children?”

I suppose this was my cue to volunteer. Neither prospect seemed very appealing. At least with Helen and the twins I might get a nice meal. Dotty waited, and as the seconds ticked by, the look she gave me became increasingly laced with arsenic. In addition to Helen and myself, there were five other boarders, but they were all somewhat elderly, and none of them was reasonably equipped to babysit four small children. One of the oldest men who boarded at the house, a pensioner named Willoughby who had milky-blue eyes and who wore a copious amount of some sort of exotic, sickly-sweet cologne, would be all too happy to be left alone with the children, and I knew Dotty was guarding them from such an occurrence.

I looked from Dotty’s genuinely miserable face to Helen’s agitated, nervous expression and realized I had won this coveted invitation merely by default.

After a cup of coffee, my acquiescence was assumed, and I found myself whisked upstairs and forced to try on several rather frilly and ill-fitting dresses until one finally met with Helen’s approval. Eventually we came back downstairs with Helen’s dress fitted precariously to my admittedly scrawny frame by means of several black satin ribbons tied in strategic places. The quieter of the twins, the one in the blue plaid jacket—Lenny, I’d guessed by that time—made a halfhearted attempt to compliment me on the dress, a tactic I found somewhat offensive, as it had been made plain not more than fifteen minutes earlier that the dress was not something I could take credit for. A stickler for good manners, though, I mumbled a thank-you. Then we all said farewell to Dotty, who was tidying up the coffee dishes and doing absolutely nothing to conceal her disgruntled misery, and before I knew it we were out the door.

The agenda for the evening was dinner and dancing. At first I was inwardly curious about the dinner part—I envisioned the kind of restaurant I had never been to, one with creamy white tablecloths and napkins and exciting things on the menu I had never tasted, like oysters Rockefeller. But the meal turned out to be diner food at a greasy spoon owned by a friend’s second cousin. The twins proudly informed us they received 20 percent off the total bill every time they dined.

The conversation, I’m afraid to report, was rather inane throughout most of the evening. The twins were both the quiet sort—so quiet, in fact, there was something a bit unnerving and unnatural about their silence. Always happy to assume center stage, Helen tried to fill most of the dead space with chatter, but despite the fact she had a number of memorized lines and embellishing accents at her disposal, I could tell she was running thin on material after only thirty minutes of the twins’ stoniness. She was wearing an old-fashioned and rather fussy frock, and when she reached across the table her sleeve accidentally got caught in the puddle of murky gravy on her plate. The result was an extremely unbecoming brown stain running the length of her blousy forearm. She bemoaned this tragedy with great dramatic flare, and hinted—not too subtly, I might add—that as a gentleman Benny might think to assist her in the dress’s replacement. Benny either did not catch on to her insinuations or else did an excellent job of appearing not to. After dinner, we piled into a taxi-cab and gave the driver the address of some sort of dance hall to which the twins claimed to have been specifically invited.

As had been the case with the restaurant, the dance hall was not as I’d (very optimistically, I now realize) pictured. The dance, they’d explained during the taxi-cab ride, was being put on by their club. Upon hearing this disclosure, Helen had turned to me, the delighted gleam of bragging in her eyes, and had hissed,
That
’
s right, Rose; they belong to a social club!
The words
social club
loomed large in the air. Involuntarily, I pictured the lush oak-paneled rooms I had so often glimpsed through a high open window here and there while walking the city blocks near Grand Central. Behind those oak-paneled rooms I imagined marbled hallways and thickly carpeted sitting rooms and—with any luck—a swell ballroom with decadent refreshments and young couples dancing. And perhaps all these imaginings
are
what lies behind the oak-paneled rooms, but I cannot claim to be able to verify that, for the place we were destined to go was a cheaply lit café near Broadway as it crossed over Sixth Avenue and plunged deeper into the West Side. The “social club” in question turned out to be a volunteer sporting league, whose central organization was based in Hell’s Kitchen.

Inside the café, there was a small elevated platform meant to serve as a grandstand for the orchestra. Four musicians were all that made up the entire “orchestra,” but they played with tremendous enthusiasm, perhaps in part to make up for their lack of greater numbers. We found a table in a corner and sat down to take in the scene. A quick survey revealed a pathetic but sincere effort on behalf of the dance’s organizers. Someone had draped black oilcloths over the café tables and set out mason jars that had been first scrubbed clean and then outfitted with little white candles that were now alight and burning brightly. The same someone had probably also hung the long strands of colored crepe paper that were draped in awkward abortive swags high up along the walls. There were only two couples dancing to the music in the middle of the room, and they were dancing a conservative and dowdy foxtrot. Even in my premature state of spinsterhood, I was aware this dance was beginning to go out of fashion. I peered over at Helen in an attempt to gauge her dismay, but her face showed a sort of haughty, imperial delight. I felt a strange inkling of pity for her. But like an evening chill, this sympathy passed through me and announced itself with the brevity of a shiver. After only a minute or two of sitting at the table, she insisted we take to the dance floor straightaway, and so we did.

It will come as no surprise when I say Leonard and I were a bit of an awkward abomination on the dance floor together. After three songs’ worth of strained shuffling and tripping over each other’s toes, I was dripping with perspiration from the effort and could no longer take Helen’s mirthful shrieks and jibes whenever she and Bernard clipped close to us on the dance floor. I suggested to Leonard we sit it out for a bit. Ever silent, he nodded sternly and did not attempt to feign any great disappointment. We sat back down at the same table in the corner. There was a wilted carnation in the lapel of his plaid jacket I hadn’t noticed previously. I commented on the “pretty” flower (it wasn’t—I was merely trying to make conversation), and he very mechanically extracted it and handed it to me.