It didn’t shock her a bit. She was quite a lot younger than he was, I would say around twenty-five, with blue eyes, brown hair, and a shape you couldn’t take your eyes off of. She was about medium size, but put together so pretty she looked small. Whether she was really good-looking in the face I don’t know, but if she wasn’t good-looking, there was something about the way she looked at you that had that thing. Her teeth were big and white, and her lips were just the least little bit thick. They gave her a kind of a heavy, sullen look, but one eyebrow had a kind of twitch to it, so she’d say something and no part of her face would move but that, and yet it meant more than most women could put across with everything they had.
All that kind of hit me in the face at once, because it was the last thing I was expecting. I took her coat, and followed her into the living room. She sat down in front of the fire, picked up a cigarette and tapped it on her nail, and began looking around. When her eye lit on the highball tray she was already lighting her cigarette, but she nodded with the smoke curling up in one eye, “Yes, I think I will.”
I laughed, and poured her a drink. It was all that had been said, and yet it got us better acquainted than an hour of talk could have done. She asked me a few questions about myself, mainly if I wasn’t the same Dave Bennett that used to play halfback for U.S.C., and when I told her I was, she figured out my age. She said she was twelve years old at the time she saw me go down for a touchdown on an intercepted pass, which put her around twenty-five, what I took her for. She sipped her drink. I put a log of wood on the fire. I wasn’t quite so hot about the Legion fights.
When she’d finished her drink she put the glass down, motioned me away when I started to fix her another, and said: “Well.”
“Yeah, that awful word.”
“I’m afraid I have bad news.”
“Which is?”
“Charles is sick.”
“He certainly doesn’t look well.”
“He needs an operation.”
“What’s the matter with him — if it’s mentionable?”
“It’s mentionable, even if it’s pretty annoying. He has a duodenal ulcer, and he’s abused himself so much, or at least his stomach, with this intense way he goes about his work, and refusing to go out to lunch, and everything else that he shouldn’t do, that it’s got to that point. I mean, it’s serious. If he had taken better care of himself, it’s something that needn’t have amounted to much at all. But he’s let it go, and now I’m afraid if something isn’t done — well, it’s going to be very serious. I might as well say it. I got the report today, on the examination he had. It says if he’s not operated on at once, he’s going to be dead within a month. He’s — verging on a perforation.”
“And?”
“This part isn’t so easy.”
“...How much?”
“Oh, it isn’t a question of money. That’s all taken care of. He has a policy, one of these clinical hook-ups that entitles him to everything. It’s Charles.”
“I don’t quite follow you.”
“I can’t seem to get it through his head that this has to be done. I suppose I could, if I showed him what I’ve just got from the doctors, but I don’t want to frighten him any more than I can help. But he’s so wrapped up in his work, he’s such a fanatic about it, that he positively refuses to leave it. He has some idea that these people, these workers, are all going to ruin if he isn’t there to boss them around, and make them save their money, and pay up their installments on their houses, and I don’t know what all. I guess it sounds silly to you. It does to me. But — he won’t quit.”
“You want me to talk to him?”
“Yes, but that’s not quite all. I think, if Charles knew that his work was being done the way he wants it done, and that his job would be there waiting for him when he came out of the hospital, that he’d submit without a great deal of fuss. This is what I’ve been trying to get around to. Will you let me come in and do Charles’s work while he’s gone?”
“...Well — it’s pretty complicated work.”
“Oh no, it’s not. At least not to me. You see, I know every detail of it, as well as he does. I not only know the people, from going around with him while he badgered them into being thrifty, but I used to work in the bank. That’s where I met him. And — I’ll do it beautifully, really. That is, if you don’t object to making it a kind of family affair.”
I thought it over a few minutes, or tried to. I went over in my mind the reasons against it, and didn’t see any that amounted to anything. In fact, it suited me just as well to have her come in, if Brent really had to go to the hospital, because it would peg the job while he was gone, and I wouldn’t have to have a general shake-up, with the other three in the branch moving up a notch, and getting all excited about promotions that probably wouldn’t last very long anyway. But I may as well tell the truth. All that went through my mind, but another thing that went through my mind was her. It wasn’t going to be a bit unpleasant to have her around for the next few weeks. I liked this dame from the start, and for me anyway, she was plenty easy to look at.
“Why — I think that’s all right.”
“You mean I get the job?”
“Yeah — sure.”
“What a relief. I hate to ask for jobs.”
“How about another drink?”
“No, thanks. Well — just a little one.”
I fixed her another drink, and we talked about her husband a little more, and I told her how his work had attracted the attention of the home office, and it seemed to please her. But then all of a sudden I popped out: “Who are you, anyway?”
“Why — I thought I told you.”
“Yeah, but I want to know more.”
“Oh, I’m nobody at all, I’m sorry to say. Let’s see, who am I? Born, Princeton, New Jersey, and not named for a while on account of an argument among relatives. Then when they thought my hair was going to be red they named me Sheila, because it had an Irish sound to it. Then — at the age of ten, taken to California. My father got appointed to the history department of U.C.L.A.”
“And who is your father?”
“Henry W. Rollinson—”
“Oh, yes, I’ve heard of him.”
“Ph.D. to you, just Hank to me. And — let’s see. High school, valedictorian of the class, tagged for college, wouldn’t go. Went out and got myself a job instead. In our little bank. Answered an ad in the paper. Said I was eighteen when I was only sixteen, worked there three years, got a one-dollar raise every year. Then — Charles got interested, and I married him.”
“And, would you kindly explain that?”
“It happens, doesn’t it?”
“Well, it’s none of my business. Skip it.”
“You mean we’re oddly assorted?”
“Slightly.”
“It seems so long ago. Did I mention I was nineteen? At that age you’re very susceptible to — what would you call it? Idealism?”
“...Are you still?”
I didn’t know I was going to say that, and my voice sounded shady. She drained her glass and got up.
“Then, let’s see. What else is there in my little biography? I have two children, one five, the other three, both girls, and both beautiful. And — I sing alto in the Eurydice Women’s Chorus... That’s all, and now I have to be going.”