“Never missed a day, sir.”
The president studied Henry a moment longer, then cleared his throat. “Yes, well... Nice chatting with you, Overby.”
“The pleasure was mine, Mr. Tipton.”
Henry was able to contain himself until he was alone in his neat, almost barren bachelor apartment. On his record player he put some very cool Brubeck and very torrid Rusty Warren and then, from the tenth which he’d purchased on the way home, poured himself a precise ounce of Scotch to celebrate the occasion. Unlike the slightly built, commonplace Overby of banking endeavors, Henry brazenly cracked back at Rusty, guffawing as he realized he’d topped the gag emitted by the tinny record player.
He danced his way to the kitchenette to stash the Scotch for future special occasions, a birthday ounce, a Christmas ounce, perhaps even two ounces at New Year’s.
The usual covey of strutting and cooing pigeons were gathering on the window sill. Henry fed them generously with graham crackers, bran flakes, and bread crumbs.
“Eat hearty, pals,” he told the fluttering flock, “toward the nearing day when it will be cake!”
Ah, yes, he thought as he began frying a thin hamburger for his dinner, Mr. Tipton’s conversation today has but one meaning.
Mr. Darcy Featherstone, who was now cashier, was going to be made a vice-president of the bank. Everyone knew that. But until today there had been no indication of who might be elevated to the cashier’s post.
As cashier, Henry thought, I’ll enjoy complete trust, unquestioned access to that beautiful vault.
The culmination of five years of planning, working, and waiting was almost at hand. It made all Henry’s past years seem remote and unreal. He could hardly remember the scrawny myopic little boy who, pushed from one unwilling relative to another after his parents had died, had long ago learned to keep his hungers, fears, and hopes to himself.
The day after he got his high school diploma, Henry had risen before dawn and crept from the house of the final relative, an uncle named Hiram. Henry had never turned back.
For the next couple of years, Henry had sampled the world, drifting and working odd jobs. A neat, polite, unobtrusive young man, he had been employed as a hardware clerk when he’d heard of the opening at the bank.
Applying for the job, he’d known he had impressed Mr. Joshua Tipton, then a vice president, as a fellow whose wants and needs were simple and few.
Little did he know, Henry chuckled as he flipped his dinner patty of ground beef.
After his loveless and vitamin-deficient childhood, Henry had a secret yearning for prestige so powerful that it occasionally boiled out of his subconscious in the form of dreams. Slumber might transform him briefly into a renowned statesman, or a famous philanthropist planning an Alice-in-wonderland community for orphaned children, or an eminent explorer pushing far up the Amazon.
But the fiber of Henry’s agile mind was far too strong to be satisfied by mere dreams. Prestige, he analyzed, was possible to him only through material things, since he had little prospect of becoming a statesman, philanthropist, or explorer.
He lined his secret sights on four specific prestige symbols: an imposing home; membership in an exclusive country club; a big expensive automobile, and an expensive and somewhat snobbish wife with a family tree, even if she should turn out to be a bit plain.
It was not through choice that he placed the wife at the bottom of the list. He was simply realistic, accepting the natural order of things.
The prerequisite to Henry’s needs was, of course, commonplace. Money, money, money: enough to take him far away, to a new name, to a beginning of life.
He’d had no hope of ever coming into so much money, even when he had gone to work at the bank. The position, at the outset, had attracted him for two reasons. A bank teller enjoyed more prestige than a hardware clerk. And he liked the feel of money, the thought of being surrounded daily by so much of it.
Then one day, he’d watched Mr. Darcy Featherstone go into the bank vault where fortunes, plural, were stacked. And the thought had come quite naturally to Henry’s mind: If I were in Mr. Featherstone’s position, I’d disappear one day, and when they started checking up they’d find I’d become a very rich man. In Mr. Featherstone’s position, I could easily alter the record of the serial numbers of the large bills. With free run of the vault I could secrete the bills in my clothing, if I prepared the garments beforehand with hidden pockets and pouches, slip into my topcoat, bid everyone the usual goodbye for the day, and walk out of the bank as a veritable animated gold mine. I could break down the bills later in one part of the country, take the hoard to some nice little town in, say, Vermont. Who would think ever of looking for the boldest of bank robbers around a snooty Vermont country club?
Henry had been jarred out of his trance, a few beads of sweat on his forehead, by the impatient clearing of a customer’s throat. The idea hadn’t frightened Henry for very long. It became a part of him, another facet in that unknown portion of his personality. The bank vault, only a few yards from where he worked each day, became something more to Henry than mere case-hardened steel and flame-resistant alloys. With the passage of time, the vault assumed the aspects of a hiding place for Henry’s own secret treasure trove; a personal depository just waiting the day when he could claim his fortune.
He was young. He had plenty of time. Eventually, efficient worker that he was, he had to be taken into the inner circle, from which he would have intimate and unsuspected association with the treasure. It was his one hope. It was surely worth waiting for.
Meanwhile, he had more than his salary to sustain him. Each day, he would be near his treasure. In a way, he would be watching over it. With a start, Henry came out of his money-spangled fog. Greasy black smoke was rising from the hard lump of scorched hamburger. Not only that, someone was knocking on the door of his apartment He grabbed the frying pan, blistered his fingers, yelped, reached for a pot holder, and removed the pan to the sink. Then, sucking his burned fingers, he dashed for the door.
With a vacuous smile on her large, damp mouth, Miss Mavis Birdsong was standing in the corridor. She had moved into the building a few weeks previously. Ripened to the point of generosity in face and figure, she was a blonde with large, round blue eyes. There was just a little too much of her for Henry’s taste, although he had accepted her friendship from the day she had moved in and crossed the hall to borrow a cup of sugar.
“Hi, Henry.”
“Hello, Miss Birdsong.”
She gave him a little pinch on the cheek. “Come on over. I made spaghetti like even the Italians wish they could make, more than I can handle by myself.”
Henry thought of the charred mess in his frying pan. “Well, I... Fine.”
She linked her arm with his, precluding any further hesitation on his part. “I even have wine to go with it.”
“If you’re sure it won’t inconvenience you, if none of your other gentlemen callers...”
“Just a couple guys I know, Henry. But you’re the only real gentleman in my life!”
In her apartment Mavis hummed in a throaty voice as she prepared his plate. “How goes it at the bank, Henry?”
“Okay. Well, excellent really.”
“That’s great. You get a promotion or something?”
“I think I’m going to. I... I’m sure they’re going to make me cashier. It’s been a long time coming, five years, but I’m certain I’ll be more than amply rewarded.” He gave a beatific sigh.
“Wonderful!”
Henry gave her a glance. For some reason or other, Miss Birdsong seemed slightly strained this evening.