“We’re a grass-roots movement, we’re lobbying Congress with the acupuncturers and hypnotists.”
Dorothy removed the petition from where it was stapled at the back of the other forms and handed them to the receptionist.
“You’re not standing with us, dear?”
“Ich hob dich in drerd,” Mrs. Bliss cursed her sweetly.
“Is this your first visit then, dear?”
“Two or three times a few years ago once.”
“It shouldn’t be long now.”
Dorothy sat back down on the leatherette sofa where she’d filled out the forms the woman had handed her. “There’s no magazines,” she said.
“I keep them back here, dear. Otherwise, people walk off with them.”
“They do?”
“You’d be surprised. Or cut out recipes, or rip whole articles from them even. Would you care to look at a magazine?” she asked suspiciously.
Mrs. Bliss wondered if this was the same one she’d spoken to on the phone. It didn’t sound like her, but she was getting so deaf it was all she could do to distinguish a man’s voice from a woman’s these days. For the most part she depended on the little whistle a woman’s higher pitch set off in her head. It was the queer combination of intimacy and attitude that reminded Dorothy of that other one. She asked her outright.
“That must have been Iris. Iris is with another client now. You’ll probably see Milt.”
“Milt.”
“Milt’s one of the best. He bought in as a partner.”
No one came in, no one came out. Magazineless, Mrs. Bliss sat in the empty waiting room. The one who wasn’t Iris had turned back to do whatever it was she’d been doing before Mrs. Bliss had first given her her name. “I have to do my billing now,” she said. The old woman, who could see her at her desk, was surprised to notice that she worked on an old manual typewriter, a portable, not even a heavy upright. She used carbon paper, and typed hunt-and-peck with only her pinky, forefinger, and thumb. Every time she made a mistake she pulled the sheets of typing paper out of the roller, crumpled them, and tossed them into a wastebasket. Then she made a big deal about setting the carbons and fresh paper into perfect alignment and inserting them in the platen.
In the twenty-five or so minutes that Mrs. Bliss waited the phone didn’t ring once, and the girl made out only one bill. Then she kicked back and picked up one of the magazines she kept with her in her tiny cubby of an office and idly turned its pages. Either the Greater Miami Recreational Therapeusis Research and Consultants was experiencing a slow period just now, or the fact of Toibb’s unsolved murder was scaring clients away. (As it had scared Mrs. Bliss into coming back again.) She wondered if recreational therapeusis still made the all-night call-in shows, or if it, too, had gone the way of all flesh as had the great days of the chiropractor/M.D. wars, the fluoridation/pure drinking-water ones. Though she still slept with her radio turned on all night, she was too deaf to take in very much of what was actually being said.
“I’ve been here almost forty minutes,” Mrs. Bliss said suddenly, going up to the little counter that separated the waiting room from the girl’s office. “Where’s Milt?”
“He went out for a sandwich,” the one who wasn’t Iris said.
“I had an appointment.”
“It’s not down here that you asked to see anyone in particular. We penciled you in for who was available. Iris is busy, Milt’s out to Wolfie’s for a sandwich. It shouldn’t be — See, what did I tell you? That was Milt’s buzzer. He signaled he’s back in his office.”
Dorothy put down to her deafness that she had heard no buzzer. Often, in the Towers, people would literally lean against the buzzer at the entrance to her condo for minutes at a time before she passed by the hall door close enough to hear it. Frank, who’d shown a late-blooming, surprising mechanical aptitude, had recently installed into his mother’s telephones lights that flashed whenever the phone rang. He had an illustrated catalog from the Center for Independent Living with maybe three or four hundred separate listings of aids for people who had a use for their special gadgets because of a handicap. He would clip them out of the catalog and send them from Pittsburgh to his mother in Miami Beach with a short note: “For your consideration, Ma: These are for the bath. The bar screws into the tile, you can let yourself down in the tub and hold it to pull yourself up. The friction strips bond to the bottom of the tub with a watertight sealant so you don’t slip. I can put them in the next time I come down. Let me know what you think. Love, Frank.” “I don’t remember if you still have that whistling teakettle. This works for coffee or tea. It whistles when the water comes to a boil if you’re making tea or by fixing it at the coffee setting when you make coffee. Give me the word and I’ll have it sent out. Love, Frank.” He called her at least twice a week, but except for these clippings and his brief explanations rarely wrote. He didn’t bother with birthday, New Year’s, or even Mother’s Day cards, so Dorothy was touched by these proofs that he thought of her and filed them away in her bedroom closet on the same shelf she kept her photograph albums. The reason she usually turned down these gadgets was that she had no wish to parade her infirmities before every Tom, Dick, or Harry who might stop by for a cup of coffee or ask to use her toilet. The lights on the phone were something else again. People knew she was deaf, and anyway how often did the phone ring on the rare occasions when someone was in her apartment?
Still, when the not-Iris one indicated that Milt was back in his office, she wondered how many times she had missed visitors by not having some special sort of light that flashed throughout the condo when people were at the door? Nah, she thought, it wasn’t worth the convenience if you had to live out your life in a rigged environment.
“I didn’t see anyone come in, even.”
“Oh, he didn’t come in here,” the girl said. “Milt’s office is next door. This is Iris’s suite. The consultants use it as a waiting room for all the clients. As you go out, it’s the first door on your left.”
Milt’s name wasn’t on the door, or a legend to indicate that it was part of the Greater Miami Recreational Therapeusis Research and Consultants organization. Indeed, it didn’t even have a number, and for what was supposed to be an office in an office building was about as anonymous as a spare bedroom in an apartment building.
Dorothy’s first thought was that Toibb could have been murdered here, or behind any one of the blank-looking doors up and down the long corridor.
There wasn’t a buzzer. She wondered if she should knock first or just open the door and go in. She wondered if she should go in at all. And was about to turn, was in fact already partway around and starting to move off when the door opened and she was confronted by a large, broad man standing in the doorway, his head with its dark, thick hair inclined downward as he rifled through some papers on a clipboard that appeared — she recognized her blunt handwriting — to be the forms Mrs. Bliss had filled out in GMRTRC’s waiting room.
How did they work that one, Dorothy wondered.
“Come in,” the man said and, assuming her compliance, was already headed toward a chair behind a desk Mrs. Bliss instantly recognized as the same one Holmer Toibb had sat behind years before.
How can I know this? she asked herself, and she answered, How did my fingers know his number when I was dialing Maxine that time?
“Dorothy, what’d you do with the petition?” Milt said, still gazing downward and looking very closely, like someone terribly nearsighted, for that last sheet she had pulled from the back of the forms.
“I decided not to sign it.”
“Why? It’s important.”