She left the envelope unsealed, so there would be the least possible obstacle to Mrs. Fairfield’s almost immediate discovery of her munificence, preferably while she was still present. Then she patted her hair a little and went down the hall to 710. She tipped the knocker, and in a moment a strangely composite type of person was standing before her. She was both youthfully old and oldly youthful, a peculiar blend of overage flapper and vivacious dowager. She hadn’t jelled right; one hadn’t been able to submerge the other. Artfully waved silver-blue hair. Triple ropes of pearls the size of Chiclets, which couldn’t have been anything but genuine, they were too large. Some sort of trailing garb with lots of satin and lots of lace. She was even carrying a cigarette in a short jade holder, a thing Madeline hadn’t seen anyone do since her own childhood in the fourth Roosevelt Administration. She was completely unlifelike, she seemed to have stepped out of a cartoon in The New Yorker. Madeline almost wanted to look down around the floor under her in search of a signature.
“Mrs. Fairfield?” Madeline said smilingly. “I took the liberty of bringing this to you myself, because I—”
“Miss Chalmers,” Mrs. Fairfield said, reading the name on the envelope. “How d’do. Very kind of you.”
Madeline’s strategy had proved well advised. It now paid off handsomely. Mrs. Fairfield had managed to deftly project and compute the bills in the folder without seeming to do so at all, just by a trick of the fingernails, much in the way a practiced card player scans his cards by the merest tips of their corners while he holds them close in to him.
Madeline suddenly found herself high in favor, high beyond mere cordiality, high almost to the point of unbridled enthusiasm. Mrs. Fairfield gave her a dazzling electric smile with teeth that must have cost a fortune. “Won’t you come in for a few moments and chat?” she invited.
“If I’m not taking up your time,” Madeline said apologetically, but moving forward even as she was saying it.
“I’m expecting my husband to take me to a violin recital,” Mrs. Fairfield informed her as they seated themselves, “but he’s late. He always seems to be late at times like this.” Then she added archly, “Sometimes I wonder about that.”
Madeline wasn’t interested in the surroundings, she wasn’t there for that, so she took no notice of them. But she inescapably received a blurred off-center impression of ornateness all around her, and at least one detail came through clearly: a large oil painting on the wall of Mrs. Fairfield herself, some twenty-five or thirty years ago. Irreproachably beautiful, but irreparably dated by the peculiar flat hairstyling of the early thirties, always worn with a part far over to the side of the head, the way men wore them. Madeline recognized it from movies she’d seen.
Mrs. Fairfield had seen her gaze up at the wall. “My husband insisted I sit for that,” she remarked complacently. Then she went on to explain, rather piquantly, “Not this one. One of the earlier ones. I forget just which.”
She wants me to know she’s been married more than once, Madeline thought, so that it won’t fail to point up how attractive to men she once was. But anyone can be married more than once, she reflected. All it takes is a disagreeable disposition.
“I’ve seen you from a distance once or twice, coming and going,” Mrs. Fairfield confided. “I asked everyone, ‘Who is that lovely young girl?’ No one seemed to know. No one could tell me anything about you—”
“There isn’t anything to tell,” Madeline murmured.
“—Always alone. Never a young man with you. Why, when I was your age, I could hardly put my foot down without fear of stepping on one of them.”
She wants to give me the mental picture that they were always on their knees all around her, groveling.
“They don’t interest me too much,” Madeline said dryly. “They seem to be always there, a part of the background. I take them for granted.”
A look of genuine horror passed fleetingly across Mrs. Fairfield’s marshmallow-white face. She promptly dropped the topic, which was what Madeline had wanted in the first place, anyway.
“I don’t suppose most people deliver their contributions in person,” she said.
“I assume you wanted to be very certain I received it.”
“That’s only part of the reason,” Madeline said. “It struck me that I might be able to do something for the cause besides what cash I can afford to contribute.”
“How do you mean?”
“I thought I could solicit donations. I’m sure not every building in the city is fortunate enough to have a volunteer passing out envelopes and collecting contributions. I could go around to other buildings, tell people a little about multiple sclerosis, and see if they’d care to make a donation.”
“That’s grueling,” the woman said. “If you just leave envelopes you never hear from the people again. And if you press for a donation on the spot, you get turned down time after time. All in all, it can be a terrible waste of time.”
“It’s my time,” Madeline said evenly. “I don’t mind wasting it, not if it’s in a good cause.”
“I don’t know. I’m not authorized to deputize you as a building representative or anything of the sort—”
“Just give me some literature and contribution envelopes,” she suggested. “I don’t have to have any official standing. Any contributions I receive I’ll hand over directly to you and you can turn them in with whatever else you collect.”
The woman thought for a moment. Then, abruptly, she shook her head. “I’ll list you as a volunteer,” she said. “It may be slightly irregular, but it will be all right.”
An hour later, a sheaf of donation envelopes in her purse, she stood on the sidewalk in front of the address listed for V. Herrick, on Lane Street.
It was a frugal, little apartment building, no frills or luxuries, somewhat run-down in appearance but still clinging to an overall aspect of respectability. It was of newer vintage than the old walk-ups of the early 1900s — she could see a self-service elevator no wider than a filing cabinet standing open at the end of the hall — but it was anything but modern. It probably dated, she surmised, from the immediate pre-Pearl Harbor period, when all such construction was jerry-built, due to the shortage of funds and the low level of rents. It had probably just gotten in under the wire before controls went on, all private building was frozen, and the hordes of war workers came pouring in from all over the country, to beg, bribe, and fight for every square inch of floor space that was to be had. And today — who wanted it?
The Herrick door was indicated as the first one on her left as she entered the ground-floor hall. There was a peculiar vibration such as a riveting machine might make somewhere about, but she couldn’t identify what the source of it was. She took out the donation forms, took in a deep but not very heroic breath, and knocked. Nothing happened. She knocked again. Nothing happened again. There was a roaring sound, then it died down again.
She noticed a small push button at the side of the door. It had escaped her until now because some unsung but remarkably conscientious (or remarkably sloppy) painter had painted it over the same sage-green color he’d used on all the rest of the woodwork around it.
She didn’t hear any sound when she thumbed it in, but evidently it still worked, because in a matter of not more than a minute or so the door opened, and the torrential tumult of hundreds of shouting voices came banging out at Madeline’s eardrums, almost bowling her over by the sheer impact and unexpectedness of it alone. Somewhere in the middle of it all a man was screaming away, as if he were being torn apart by wild horses: “—into the bleachers back of left field! Bob Allen, twenty-three! A left-hander from Texas!”