Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax

The nurse walked out of the room, closing the door behind her, and Mrs. Pollifax looked at the doctor and he in turn looked at her. He was a very
nice
young man, with black hair, very white teeth and horn-rimmed glasses that he removed now, placing the stem of the earpiece between his teeth. “Well, Mrs. Pollifax,” he said pleasantly, “I don’t know how you manage it, but for a woman of your age you’re in fantastically good health. I congratulate you.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Pollifax flatly, and the doctor glanced at her with such a peculiar expression that she added brightly, for his benefit, “Oh!”

He smiled and returned his glasses to his nose. “Which brings me to the fact that, although I find you in excellent health physically, I do note certain signs of depression. You’re not quite the same Mrs. Pollifax I saw last year. Anything in particular troubling you?”

She hesitated, wondering if he could possibly understand. He looked so absurdly young—he
was
young.

He added pointedly, “I had the distinct feeling that you were disappointed at being in such excellent health.”

She said guardedly, “I don’t believe I’ve ever cared about outliving my contemporaries, you know. I’ve never regarded
life as a competition to see who can hold out the longest. I think one can sometimes have too
much
time.” She paused and then added recklessly, “I daresay it sounds terribly frivolous when people are starving in India, but I can’t help feeling I’ve outlived my usefulness.” There, she thought firmly, she had said it, the words were out and curdling the air.

“I see. Your children, Mrs. Pollifax, are…?”

“Grown and far away. And visits aren’t the same, you know. One can never
enter
their lives.”

He was listening attentively—yes, he was a very nice young doctor. “I think you said you do a great deal of volunteer work?”

In a precise voice she ticked off the list of charities to which she gave her time; it was a long and sensible list.

The doctor nodded. “Yes, but do you enjoy volunteer work?”

Mrs. Pollifax blinked at the unexpectedness of his question. “That’s odd,” she said, and suddenly smiled at him. “Actually I suppose I loathe it.”

He could not help smiling back at her; there was something contagious about her smile, something conspiratorial and twinkling. “Then perhaps it’s time you looked for more congenial outlets,” he suggested.

Mrs. Pollifax said slowly, with a little frown, “I enjoy meeting the people, you know, it’s just that so often nothing more is needed for volunteer work than a good set of teeth.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Teeth—for smiling. There are rules, too. You can’t imagine how regimented some of the volunteer work can be. It’s very impersonal—not yours, somehow, because of all the restrictions.”

“Do you feel you’re a particularly creative person?”

Mrs. Pollifax smiled. “Goodness, I don’t know. I’m just—me.”

He ignored that, saying very seriously, “It’s terribly important for everyone, at any age, to live to his full potential. Otherwise a kind of dry rot sets in, a rust, a disintegration of personality.”

“Yes,” she said simply. “Yes, I agree with you wholeheartedly on that, but what is one to do? After my husband died I set out to make a very sensible life for myself—I always intended to, you see—so that I would never be a nuisance to my children. It’s just that—”

“It’s too sensible, perhaps?” Caught by something in her eyes that did not match the light mockery of her voice, he said, “But isn’t there something you’ve always longed to do, something you’ve never had either the time or the freedom for until now?”

Mrs. Pollifax looked at him. “When I was growing up—oh for years—I planned to become a spy,” she admitted.

The doctor threw back his head and laughed, and Mrs. Pollifax wondered why, when she was being her most serious, people found her so amusing. She supposed that her tastes always had been somewhat peculiar. Her husband’s favorite form of endearment for her had been “lovable little goose,” which was his way of forgiving the odd bent in her that he didn’t quite understand, and as they grew older the children, too, had acquired the habit of thinking her just a little absurd. She could hear Jane now: “But mother, why on earth—why on
earth
—a dozen antimacassars? Nobody’s used antimacassars since Queen Victoria died!” How futile it had seemed even to explain the woman selling crochetwork at the door that morning, a dear, mangy little woman with a most fascinating story of being abandoned six years earlier on McGovern Street. With no husband and four babies to support she had turned in desperation to the handwork learned as a child at a convent, and Mrs. Pollifax had listened with rapt attention, enjoying every minute of it. After buying the antimacassars, however, she had felt it only kind to make a suggestion. “When you go to the next house,” she had said tactfully, “it would be much wiser to call it McGivern Street, not McGovern. Strangers invariably make this mistake, but there has never been a McGovern Street here, and if you’d lived on it for six years you’d have known this. Although otherwise,” she added warmly, “it’s a terribly good story. The tears came to my eyes, they really did.”

The woman had looked astonished, then confused, then badly frightened until she saw the twinkle in Mrs. Pollifax’s eye. “Well, if you aren’t the surprise,” she said, beginning to laugh. “I certainly had you down as an easy mark.”

They’d had a lovely talk over a cup of tea in the kitchen, and the woman’s real story had proven even more fascinating than her false one, and just to prove her basic honesty the woman had offered to sell Mrs. Pollifax the antimacassars at list price—they’d been made in Japan. But Mrs. Pollifax had firmly refused, feeling the morning was well worth the price. Jane would never have understood, however; Jane had sensible
Pollifax blood flowing in her veins and Jane would have been deeply shocked. “What, you didn’t call the police?” she would have demanded. “Mother, honestly! That would have been the sensible thing to do.”

Mrs. Pollifax thought with astonishment, “I don’t suppose that I
am
a very sensible person actually. Perhaps the doctor’s right, I can’t be happy trying to be what I’m not.”

The doctor was still chuckling, his glasses off again as he polished them with his handkerchief, but the mood of confessional had ended with his roar of laughter and was not to be recaptured. He wrote out a prescription for antidepressant pills, they chatted a few minutes longer but without further rapport, and Mrs. Pollifax left his office.

“But I wasn’t joking,” she thought indignantly as she walked down the street. “I really was going to be a spy.” She had worked hard at it, too, going to the town dump every Saturday morning with her cousin John to watch him shoot rats, and proving such a persistent tag-along that he had condescended to show her how guns worked. On several glorious occasions he had allowed her to shoot with him. There were the maps, too, that she had pored over in her room year after year, and with such scholarly devotion that when the second world war began she was able instantly to announce the longitude and latitude of obscure little islands nobody else had ever heard of. What a funny child she had been, she thought with affection, a lonely but very happy child. She was lonely now but so—so
unused
, so
purposeless
, she realized; and at the back of her mind lay the memory of last Monday when she had carried her geraniums to the roof of the apartment building and had stood at the edge of the parapet looking down, her mind searching for one good reason why she should not take a step forward into oblivion. And she had found none. Even now she was not sure what would have happened if young Mr. Garbor hadn’t seen her and called out, “Mrs. Pollifax! For heaven’s sake step back!” When she obeyed him she saw that he was trembling.

She hadn’t told the doctor this. Obviously she must find a way to instill novelty into her life or she would be afraid to carry her geraniums to the roof, and she was very fond of geraniums.

She walked up the steps to her apartment house and pushed aside the heavy glass door. Her mailbox produced an assortment of circulars, no letters today. She stuffed then into her
purse and unlocked the inner door to discover that Miss Hartshorne had preceded her to the elevator and was standing guard beside it. Immediately Mrs. Pollifax felt herself and her intentions shrivel. It was not Miss Hartshorne’s fault that she reminded Mrs. Pollifax of the algebra teacher who had nearly blighted her life at thirteen, but Mrs. Pollifax illogically blamed her for it nevertheless.