Lucinderella, p.12
Lucinderella, page 12
I told her she would feel better when she got a little coffee—inadequate but the best I could do; I didn’t know how to condole with a lady on that level.
She didn’t care, more concerned as to the pitch of my voice than what it said, putting a chewed finger against her lips to quiet me, glancing back at the windows and doors; she didn’t want anybody to see her, one of the reasons we had crept out so much ahead of time. But the sun was up and I knew it wouldn’t be long before Uncle Brownell would be too, pacing the upper porch in his striped pajamas, breathing deep (an old habit of pre-industry days, foolhardy now but he couldn’t break himself of it), and I steered her away up Bay Street under the trees. I told her the hotel dining room would be open by the time we got there and Vincille would give us breakfast—emphasis on the “give”—but she hardly let me say it for shaking her head and saying she didn’t want to be seen. I said there was no use in being so furtive. “You’re not robbing the bank, just taking a job there.”
She said she was robbing them of a hundred dollars a week, going on over my protests, “I’ve never done this sort of work before, Cliff. I’m much better adapted to garage work. Or making bombs,” and after a few more trees, “Couldn’t you talk to your garage about me? I know you don’t work there now, but the one before you went to Uncle Otis.”
I said Mr. Maloof didn’t hire women mechanics and I didn’t like asking him as a favor and she said he would be violating her Constitutional Rights if he wouldn’t hire her and she didn’t believe those old men would sit up there on the Court and let him screw her like that and I said, “Now listen, why don’t we not get another job until they’ve kicked our ass out of this one?” and she seemed ready to consider it. I mumbled various things meant to comfort her about the bank job and tried to change the subject: “We’ll go to the Busy Bee then, it’s open all night.”
She seemed to feel better by the time we reached Broad Street; crossing it against the light (there wasn’t yet much traffic) she stopped in the middle and gazed off down the empty vista at the sky-glow of the sun trying to find out where it was and said in that finger-stretched way of hers that made you think she was talking to somebody else, or to nobody, “Here comes the sun … over the trees at the end of Broad Street, the main street, pushing through a shaggy pad of smoke … and higher than you would have guessed.”
I nodded; it was true enough but hardly worth spelling out. Still I was glad her thoughts were getting off herself. I said, “Some scrambled eggs and hominy might be good.”
“A nice breeze is moving in from the river now … stringing cobwebs across the water tank on the hotel, the Jonathan Copp Hotel … twitching the light-brown coat of a not-so-young young woman crossing the Center Street intersection, Miss Lucinda Fannin, on her way into the wiles of trade … fluttering a last-night’s parking ticket under the wiper of a locked-up car. Heavy-eyed shadows still lie abed in Center Street, catching a last wink [Dissenters Street, it was]; a Honeycrust Bread truck, yellow, flashes like a match as it turns out into the bleary sun——”
I said, “Okay, Lucy, we’ll go on up here to the Busy Bee.”
“Not much traffic,” she said. “A Stuckie’s Linen Service truck with a nest of gray new-laid bags on top … a Dixie-Mixie truck, a Hav-A-Tampa, a milk truck standing at the Busy Bee Café, fresh milk for the bees … a Fox Potato Chips truck with three fishing poles bent over the top, the propeller of an outboard peeping foxily between the doors … a few passenger cars letting people out and driving on, sometimes with a wave and a smile—sometimes, alas, with neither.”
I said we had better push along. It made me self-conscious to stand there gaping at all this every-morning stuff like a hillbilly from the piny woods.
“Not much noise,” she said listening. “No horns … rubber on tar … a revving motor, a bus brake in distress. A one-armed colored boy banging through on a green scooter smoking a cigar——”
That’s Welborn,” I said. “He works for——”
“Paperboy on the corner [he’s forty-seven] with a new sack of new papers … and a new cigar … and a new shave. It’s a new day, a new combination. ‘Good-morning,’ says an ivory-black painter in white overalls lifting a white cap to a tobacco-brown woman sweeping the sidewalk in front of the tobacco store——”
“Come on, we’ll get a paper,” I said, not that I wanted one but I thought it would start us moving again and we crossed the rest of the way.
She watched from the curb while Ewell pinched out a paper by the middle fold, slapped it against his pants to fold it again and flicked it up under my arm before I could find a nickel, a trick he has; I thought she was going to clap hands, which would have embarrassed Ewell and me and Patrolman Gepfert and everybody else. I said, “Listen to this,” opening out the paper and pronouncing as if reading from the front page, “‘World-famous Author Joins Bank Staff.’ Come on, I’ll read it to you at breakfast,” as the wind snapped and pulled it.
She went on as if I hadn’t spoken, “Seems windier now, a cool blowy morning,” stopping at the Café door and looking back. “A bosom in a white sweater crossing, cherry-colored skirt teasing the enamored wind … an old man crossing, puffing out his lips, the wind only for breathing … a Grapette truck beeps to the bosom a cry of love … motorcycle cop with a new shave bangs across on dandling springs. New shaves everywhere—Oh, it’s wonderful, Clint!”
I nodded, holding the door; there was no use arguing, besides I was glad she had caught hold.
“The newborn breathing reality of it. You can see the parts and where they fit together and how, and what turns what. I am sick of not knowing where I fit, sick to death of anonymity. You know, I never left my apartment without checking two things; did I have my key? Did I have my slip of paper?”
I took us to a table by the window, helped her with her coat as if I thought I was Lord Chesterfield, sat down and ordered scrambled eggs and bacon for each of us (they would include the hominy), she making no objection, maybe not even hearing. When the waitress had gone I said, “Slip of paper?” encouraging her to go on, keeping her off her present trials. She said, “With my name and address and phone,” and I said, “In case of accident, yes.”
“Not just for an accident. For myself. Sometimes up there you half forget who you are and have to check it. Nobody is going to pass you and say, ‘Good morning, Miss Lucinda Fannin’—lifting a white cap.”
I said she was too modest, anybody she met could have told her who she was, but she said, “No, the world is deaf, Clint. You write your books, you say your piece but it doesn’t hear you; you go in one world-ear and out the other. And lucky for you you do. If it were going to hear you and be changed the responsibility of changing it the right way would strike you dumb. Oh, it can lip-read a little, catch a word here and there that it can feed into its own computer.”
I pushed her the jar of sugar for her coffee and when she let it stand poured some myself. She said to the window with èfaC eeB ysuB on it that I was afraid was going to remind her any second of dear Dr. Zyggy, “Back to solid ground again. And yet it’s not all materialism. Broad Street is material: the Café, the dime store, stationery, jewelry, the loan sharks. But Center Street is spirit: books, phonograph records, art supplies, to say nothing of a dry cleaner and a Minute Car-Wash——”
“Look, Lucy——”
“Commerce on Broad, love on Center, and where they cross the friction strikes a spark and life ignites. Each must have the other. And bad leads to good and good to bad and figs do grow on thistles if you give them time,” going on like that, the eggs coming in unnoticed, the Monument out there lit up on the early side like a whitewash job. “And your hotel, Clamp, facing both ways, and the bank over there facing both ways, because money which seems so materialistic is only interesting for the dreams it can buy.”
I said, “Lucy, you blow these things up too big; eat your breakfast.”
“But I don’t blow them up at all. You diminish them. I’ve told you before.”
“Well, go on and diminish your eggs.”
“You can’t see the spirit for the gut. A person is more than gut and genitalia.”
I said, “I can see well enough to see Bennie going round to open up,” which brought her out of it because my eyes were aimed straight across at the bank. She asked who Bennie was as if still hoping and I said Bennie Low was the porter. I didn’t mean to throw cold water in her face but she said, “At the——” voice ending like lifting the needle off a record. She laid down her fork, put her napkin on the table, pushed back her chair with a screak on the tile. I told her there was no hurry. It wasn’t quite seven-thirty.
She said she had to get there before anybody else did. “This is very difficult for me, Clamp.” I stretched out my hand past her quarter-drunk coffee and she gripped it convulsively as if it had just got there in time and hung on. She mumbled at the good scrambled eggs, “If I don’t go now I’m not going at all,” and when I started to protest said, “You see, if I get there first it’s only the place that’s strange. I can’t face a strange place and strange people at once.”
“But, Lucy, you do that every day.”
“Oh, I wish I had stayed in Brooklyn. It’s such a pretty place.”
“Brooklyn?”
“Oh, it’s a lovely place.”
I said, “Now, honey, you’re going to like it here. You’re going to like the job and the people at the bank. And they’re going to like you.” I felt like a mother on the first day of school. I said, “Savannah loved the bank. And the bankers,” trying to get her mind on something else if only sex. But she wasn’t hearing any of it. She said, “I’m not really fit for anything but writing lousy books,” and I said, “Come on. We’re going right now. You’ll be there in time to see the windows washed,” pointing at Bennie on the corner with the two men who had stopped him, buckets, squeegees, sponges and all that—just trying to divert her. I don’t think she saw them, or cared; Bennie was leading them toward the back door before she seemed to catch on to what I meant. She said, “It makes a difference whether you pour cold into hot or hot into cold,” still thinking I suppose about getting to the bank first. I told her to come on, gulped the rest of my coffee and paid the check.
I was pretty sure the etiquette called for our entrance at the back door, employees (I felt like one if I wasn’t), and pretty sure too that Bennie didn’t unlock the front door until banking hours; still it was shorter to go in by the front if we could and less of a strangeness for Lucy and no harm in trying and I walked with her, hand in sticky hand, across the wide filling-up street, round the car at the curb with a patient customer waiting (dead battery—that is, he seemed afraid to cut off the engine), up the three steps and between the center pair of Dorics.
The door was locked as I expected but I made light of it. “Bennie will let us in the back. Just as good. Maybe better.” I don’t know why “better” but I didn’t want her to panic at the idea of not getting in until later, hot into cold I suppose.
Then I heard the bolts sliding in their heavy responsible solid-brass way and the left panel swung in with a sort of welcome that made you glad to belong in a section of the country that didn’t mind doing the little accommodating things for a newcomer. I said, “Catch the Chase Manhattan doing that for you,” nobody visible in the dimness for a moment, then just about the last person in the wide world I expected to see. I said, “Oh, hello, Dr. Crit,” a filmy pride in myself at having absorbed Uncle Otis’ training so well that even in my astonishment the name was ready; I had never heard the name of the man who was with him or I might have called it too. I said, “Lucy, I’d like to have you meet——”
Dr. Crit said, “Shut your mouth real tight now, son, and you won’t get hurt. Take ’em back there, tie ’em up with the other one.”
I was speechless though I couldn’t shut my mouth. But Lucy wasn’t; she had words, quick, free-flowing, and indignant. “Now just one minute, please!” she said. “If this is some feeble-minded joke you think you can play on me because I’m a new girl you can think again. I’m surprised a grown-up bank would stoop to such a crappy trick and I’ve got a good mind——”
Dr. Crit said, “Tape her,” and the man slapped a strip of surgical plaster over Lucy’s mouth and pulled the ends round under her ears. There was nothing I could do, or I couldn’t think of what it was. I did try to say something, it seemed the manly thing, and I could feel my lips moving, but nothing came out, which was just as well because I believe I was trying to say I didn’t work there, about as senseless a remark as you could have found.
And Dr. Crit wasn’t listening anyway, shooing us all toward the back with a blue-nosed pistol. He closed the door with an oily click and took up a post at one side looking out, while Number Two handed us down the wide peaceful rubber-floored lane between the tellers’ windows like an usher at the movies, polite enough, silent, waving a .38 round our feet like a flashlight. We exchanged looks, Lucy and I, but I don’t know what she was thinking, perhaps the same as I, which was just a childish “I’m a son of a bitch!”
There seemed to be nobody else in the bank at all, not a sound from anywhere, not a smell, except the faint comfortable dirty-clothes smell of last week’s money; the great round door of the vault was closed as tight as a hospital room with a “No Visitors” sign, as if the currency in there needed the rest. I don’t think I had ever seen it closed before; it looked like the head of an old-time locomotive that wouldn’t be pulling out for an hour, the engineer hadn’t even come. A few night lights were burning though you hardly saw them now with the new sunlight beginning to streak through one of the venetian blinds.
I am no part of a hero but I couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t some little thing I could do, at least some gesture I could make to show my heart was in the right place, or pretend it was; because I had a feeling I wasn’t measuring up very well. Lucy had put up a resistance and I who, reincarnated, would have been resourceful and hard, had just blanked. Not something physical, which was out of the question, for me at any rate, but something—something that, when all this was over and we were rehashing it, I could add to prove I wasn’t just paralyzed, as I was. It seemed to me the sunlight, weak though it was, was trying to send me some sort of signal, but I couldn’t interpret it, except as maybe a reminder it was too nice a day outside to spoil it by a bullet in the arm or leg or, if they were nervous, in the stomach, or worse. I was still puzzling on it when we came to the Trust Department and Number Two pointed us into the enclosure.
The situation seemed to expand then. Bennie Low was sitting on the marble floor not far from the window-washer buckets and chammies, and a cleaning woman I didn’t know was propped more comfortably against the end of Mr. Roop’s desk, Tatnall A. Roop, Vice-President and Trust Officer and Uncle Brownell’s co-Trustee (as who cared?). The wrists of both were taped but only the cleaning woman’s mouth was, as if Crit’s people had been at this kind of thing long enough to know who was likely to try to do the talking. Number Three was with them, a large man in a Marine battle jacket and celebrity glasses, and he was kneeling on the thick rug across from them waving a gun at Lucy and me in a sort of dangerous hospitality to get down on the floor. I don’t know how my wrists got to be taped but when I tried to sit down I saw they were, taped in front, as Lucy’s were too.
It was very quiet, a waiting, patient quiet; a rise in the surf noises of the traffic that was like a tide-change at the beach but peaceful still and, as Number Two was leaving us for the back door, the airy sound of it must have been eight on the chimes of St. Paul’s, a winging ethereal sound as much as to say don’t worry about it, we aren’t going to. I saw Number Three glance at his wrist watch and it seemed human and somehow friendly and I said, “Look, this young lady and I, we don’t belong here, we just——”
“You want your big mouth taped too, don’t you!”
I shook my head.
It made me mad to be talked to like that, in front of Lucy and everybody, and in a Chicago voice or some such place up there moving down on us with the heavy stuff. But what could you do? I managed a dirty look, which didn’t bother him, and the look not very dirty either, with the gun in his hand and all that. Lucy was so still I thought she might have passed out, all this strain coming on top of the strain she was under anyhow, but her black eyes were hopping like lively mice on a search for crumbs, darting here, squinting there, seeing everything—and probably then some. It seemed rather intimate of me to be concerned about her bowels (no doubt she wouldn’t have thought so) but she didn’t appear to have them on her mind, seemed physically in first-rate condition, drinking in the whole situation like water on a parched tongue. It was odd to be sitting there in such straits with the benign sun slanting through the high window, the air so motionless you could see the dust motes in the slant, blue-gray and hardly moving. Everything seemed to have come to a standstill though of course they were obviously only waiting—patiently, I thought at first, until I saw a drop of sweat fall off Number Three’s unshaved chin.
Then I realized what the sunlight was trying to tell me, or the venetian blinds were; it all came back in one sparkling flash: I was with Savannah. We were driving past the bank from the late show in Uncle Otis’ car that I had borrowed. It was soon after she started to work there. I asked her why they didn’t close the Venetian blinds at night and she said, “We leave them open to discourage burglars,” the “we” showing a nice intimacy with all that money. I said if her bank wasn’t so stupid it would know a robber would just snatch them shut and she laughed at my ignorance and said, “If they’re shut we know something’s wrong,” not a very important message from the sunlight maybe, because I certainly wasn’t planning to walk over there and close them, but it seemed worth thinking about (there wasn’t much else), worth working on; and even if I didn’t do it I might be able to make something of the thought at the rehashing. If we ever got that far.
