“Would a client be able to get her groceries carried in? Her garbage taken out to the alley? Little humdrum things like that?”
“Oh, the humdrum is our specialty,” I told her. Then it dawned on me that she might have her mother in mind; so I added, “We operate just in Baltimore, though.”
“I was thinking about my Aunt Grace. She’s in Baltimore; and independent? You wouldn’t believe how independent. But she’s getting hard of hearing, and she’s frail as a stick, besides; has trouble with her bones. She can break a bone in midair, if she’s not careful.”
“Osteoporosis,” I said knowledgeably.
“ ‘Aunt Grace,’ I tell her, ‘you need a companion! Someone live-in, to fetch and haul!’ But oh, no, no. Not Aunt Grace. ‘I prefer to have my house to myself,’ she says, and of course you can’t really blame her.”
“Yes, we see that every day,” I said. Then, trying to get back to the subject, I said, “But anyhow. You believe in intuition.”
“I most assuredly do.” She nodded several times, cradling her coffee cup in both hands.
“You believe a person will just be led to the proper action.”
“Absolutely,” she told me.
I made myself keep quiet a moment. I allowed her a block of silence to fill; I put on an expression that I hoped would seem receptive. She didn’t seize her chance, though. She just took a sip of her coffee. Beyond her head, bare trees skimmed past.
“So,” she said, finally.
I sat up so straight, you’d think I’d been electrocuted.
But all she said was, “Tell me more about your company.”
“My company,” I repeated.
“How many workers does it employ? Would you call it a success?”
“Oh, yes, it’s done very well,” I said.
And then I gave up and just went with the flow — told her about our two newspaper write-ups and our letters from grateful clients and their relatives, their sons and daughters living elsewhere who could finally sleep at night, they said, now that we had taken over their parents’ heavy lifting. Sophia kept her eyes on my face, tilting her head to one side. I could see how she would make an excellent loan officer. She had this way of appearing willing to listen all day.
I described my favorite customers — the unstoppable little black grandma whose children phoned us on an emergency basis whenever she threatened to overdo (“Come quick! Mama swears she’s going to wash her upstairs windows today!”); and our “Tallulah” client, Maud May, who smoked cigarettes in a long ivory holder and drank martinis by the quart and called me “dahling.” Then the weird ones. Ditty Nolan, who was only thirty-four and able-bodied as I was but couldn’t face the outside world; so everything had to be brought to her. Or Mr. Shank, a lonesome and pathetic type, who took advantage of our no-task-too-small, no-hour-too-late policy to phone us in the middle of the night and ask for someone to come right away for some trifling, trumped-up job like securing a bedroom shutter that was flapping in the wind.
By the time we reached Wilmington, I’d progressed to Mrs. Gordoni, who couldn’t afford our fees but needed us so badly (rheumatoid arthritis) that we would doctor her time sheet — write down a mere half hour when we’d been at her house a whole morning. “For a while, none of us knew the others were doing it,” I said. “Then it all came out. Our two girl employees, Martine and Celeste: they weren’t filing any hours at all for her, which is a whole lot easier to catch than just underreporting.”
“Isn’t that nice,” Sophia said. “You don’t often see that kind of heart in the business world.”
“Well, I wasn’t trying to brag,” I said. “I mean, we generally do charge money for our labors.”
“Even so,” she said, and she gave me a long, serious stare and then nodded, as if we had shared a secret. But I didn’t know what secret. And before I could say any more, the conductor walked through, announcing Philadelphia.
Still, even then, I hadn’t quite lost hope for some kind of revelation. I went on weighing and considering her most casual remark, giving her every chance to redirect my course. As we stepped off the train, for instance, she said, “Notice how much faster people move, here,” and I blinked and looked around me. Faster? People? Move? What was the deeper significance of that? But all I saw was the usual crowd, churning toward the stairs in the usual hobbling manner. “It always takes me by surprise, what a different atmosphere Philadelphia has from Baltimore,” she said, and I said, “Atmosphere. Ah,” and stumbled as I started up the steps, I was so intent on analyzing the atmosphere.
In the terminal, I stopped and faced her, wondering if her goodbye, at least, might be instructive. “Well,” I said, “I enjoyed our conversation.”
“Yes! Me too!” she told me. But she continued walking, and so I was forced to follow. She said, “I thought that was so fascinating about your company. Where are you headed?”
“Where am I headed,” I repeated, sounding like a moron.
“Does your daughter live nearby?”
“Oh. Yes, she’s off Rittenhouse Square.”
“So’s my mother. Shall we share a cab?”
“Well …”
It hadn’t occurred to me that my actions would be observed at the other end of my trip. I said, “No, thanks; I—”
“Though it is a nice day to walk,” she said.
A nice day?
We followed a group of teenagers through the Twenty-ninth Street exit, but I was dragging my heels, pondering how to get out of this. Suppose, by some horrible coincidence, Sophia’s mother lived in Natalie’s building! What then?
The weather did seem to have improved, I found when we reached the sidewalk. The temperature had risen some, and the sun was trying to shine. I said, “It’s still kind of damp underfoot, though.” I was looking toward the line of taxicabs, hoping she would change her mind and take one. But she walked right past them, and it was true she had those boots on.
On Market Street, she asked, “Are you bringing your daughter a present?”
“No,” I said. I flipped my jacket collar up. (Tweed was not half as warm as leather.) “This was such a sudden decision,” I said. “She’s probably not even home! I should just cut my losses and grab the next train back.”
“Darn,” Sophia said, not appearing to hear me. “If I’d thought, we could have picked up something in the station. They have all those boutiques there.”
“Well, no great loss,” I told her. “I wouldn’t have had the slightest idea what to get her, anyhow.”
“You could have bought a stuffed animal. Something of that sort. All little girls like stuffed animals.”
We veered around a man pushing a grocery cart full of rags. Sophia’s pace had grown leisurely and wafting. I had a sense of being dragged backward. “When I was nine,” she said, “my favorite toy was a stuffed raccoon named Ariadne.”
“Ariadne!”
“Well, I was extremely fanciful. I liked the Greek myths and all that. It’s because I was an only child. I was quite the little reader, as you might imagine.”
She had the only child’s elderly way of speaking too, I noticed. But I didn’t point that out to her.
“My father kept forgetting Ariadne’s name,” she was saying. “Most often he called her Rodney. ‘Sophia! Come and get Rodney! She’s out here on the porch, and there’s supposed to be a storm!’”
She laughed.
I looked at her then and knew, for a fact, that she was not my angel. She was an ordinary, middle-class, middle-aged bank employee with no particular life of her own, and it showed what a sorry state my life had come to that I could have imagined otherwise even for an instant.