In the Absence of Angels (6 page)

Once outside, she felt lighthearted, the decision for that day, at least, being over. Down here the neighborhood eased itself into living with the unconstraint of a slattern who has no plans. Across the street, in front of the Olive Tree Inn for Homeless Men, one of the flophouses run by the city, a few rumpled bums lounged like fallen dolls, staring vacantly with their frayed, inoffensive look. They were the safest people in the world to live among, she thought, for one could no more focus on their identities than they on the world around them; in their eyes there was never the shrewd look of the striving, but only the bleared gentleness of humiliation, and their dreams were not of women.

As she walked the long blocks westward to the BMT, the streets filled with people who had the crisp silhouette of destination, but as she neared them, going down the subway stairs, she could see the mouths still swollen with the un-reserve of sleep, under the eyes the endearing childish puffs of the rudely awakened. Since she was travelling uptown against the morning rush, she got a seat almost at once and, settling into it, looked at the people opposite, who bobbed up and down with the blank withdrawal of the subwayite. Some mornings, translating them into their animal counterparts, she returned to the lidded stare immured in the bravely rouged, batrachian folds of some old harridan, traced the patient, naglike decline of a nose, watched the gibbon antics of the wizened messengers of the garment district as they pushed their eternally harrying, dwarfing packages. Once inside the store where she worked, exposed to them “on the floor,” they all became the customer, the enemy, sauntering along freely in their enviably uncaged day, striking at her with the inimical, demanding shafts of their eyes, but here, until then, she could feel a wave of tenderness, of identification with them, which possessed her with a pity that included herself.

Thinking of the varied jobs toward which the people in the car were travelling, she remembered the prying regard of Miss Shotwell, the head of the store’s “interviewing,” and heard again the chill beads of words which had dropped from the deceptive, ductile bloom of her face.

“We can get any number of college graduates these days. We’re only interested in those with a real vocation for merchandising.” The protuberant eyes scrutinized with a glance which seemed to come from the whole eyeball.

“I worked in a store for a year before I went to college. And all my summer jobs were in department stores.” She had sat there quietly, trying to shine with vocation, but thinking of those sweating miserable summers which had helped make possible the long winter hibernations in the libraries, she had wished herself back among the books, feeling the nausea of the displaced.

“H’mmm.” The sedulously fluffed hair bent over the folder on the desk between them. “Your extracurricular leadership record was really very good.” The head cocked to one side as if deliberating an article of purchase, then bent to the folder again in a gesture either habitual or posed, for the folder was closed. “Philosophy major, fine arts minor. That’s not so good. We’d rather have it business administration, let’s say, or mathematics.”

“Something — more concrete?”

“Exactly,” said Miss Shotwell, bringing her head back to center, her face obviously readied for the fulsome courtesies of rejection.

Behind the chic camouflage of her own smart appearance, that slick armor which she had learned to assume with the wiliness of the job-hunter, she had felt shaken with hatred for these people who had the power to let you in, who could annihilate, with a dainty, deprecatory finger, spheres of value which were not their own.

“It does not seem to have impaired my ‘leadership,’ as you call it,” she had said at last, anger forcing the gassy word on to her tongue.

The flickering interest had revived in the fish stare opposite. Miss Shotwell had smiled almost in approval. “Perhaps we can use you after all,” she had said. “We like them to be aggressive.”

Them. In the past year she had indeed become one of “them,” learning the caitiff acquiescence, the shiny readiness which would cover the segregation of self, acquiring that whole vocabulary of pretense forced upon those who must make themselves commercially valuable, or die.

She looked around now at the others herded together with her in the car. Perhaps her mistake had been to think that she was alone in this; perhaps each of her neighbors was sitting stiffened in the same intent misery before the deadening span of the day to come, each crouched protectively over the misfit hunch or sore of some disparity which had not fitted in. She looked again, but the set faces looked back at hers stonily, as if not all the prying tentacles of her pity could slip behind the mask which each had assumed for his journey through the ambuscade of the practical. Bending her head over the interlocked hands in her lap, she loosened them, cupped them softly over the unwanted extrusion of her compassion.
Everybody,
she said to herself in tentative kinship, each one of them, of
us,
locked up alone with the felony of his private difference.

The car rocked to her station and she pressed out with the others, up the stairs into a brief interlude of sunshine and into the swinging door of the employee’s entrance, kept constantly ajar by the procession of batting hands. Inside the olive green locker room she found the number of her own compartment and set her hat and coat away, smelling with a dull sense of recognition the basement’s odor of wax and disinfectant, interfused with the vague patchouli of congregated women. One after the other, as they took off the bright spring hats and coats which had differentiated them up to now, they sank into conformity, leveled by the common denominator of their dark dresses as if by the command of some sullen alchemist.

Nodding diffidently to the few she knew by sight, she joined them on the escalator to the main floor, her spirits sinking as she rose. Upstairs in the glove department where she had been assistant section manager for the past two months, the salesgirls lounged negligently behind the counters, waiting for the opening bell to ring and the first trickle of customers.

“Good morning,” she said.

“ ’Morning, Miss Abel.” They were polite but reserved, with the resentment of old stagers who see a neophyte brought in to supervise.

“Miss Baxter in yet?” She asked only to make conversation, but was warned by their suddenly innocent gazes. Baxter must have come in drunk again.

“She’s behind — in the cubbyhole,” said one of the girls, and bent over, stifling a snicker.

Behind the counter there was a door which led into the cavity under the escalator, a space big enough for two people if one sat in the single chair and the other stood with head bent under the declivity of the ceiling. The girls seldom used it, ducking in for an aspirin, or when a garter had broken and there was not time to go off the floor. Once or twice, when the hysteria of milling people around her had overwhelmed her with a feeling of nakedness, of exposure to too much and too many, she had crept in there herself for a moment of poise. She opened the door and went in, closing it behind her.

Miss Baxter sat erect in the single chair, her angular shoulders squared tensely in one of the severely cut suits she wore daily. Miss Abel had never known her to wear a dress. Her cropped black hair was sleek from the brush, and her starched white shirt lay flat and crisp under one of the ties she affected, the cuffs projecting slightly from the jacket sleeves to show the only touch of vanity she allowed herself, onyx intaglio cuff links which clipped together like a man’s. With her firm, pallid profile and small, almost lipless mouth, she had the anomalous attractiveness of a well-groomed boy who is knowing and bitter beyond his years. Reputed to be the best section manager on the floor, she had been recruited temporarily from the enormous book department to cover the glove section during the spring rush. Once or twice Miss Abel, longing for congeniality, had tried to get her to talk about books, of which she was supposed to have considerable knowledge, but had been not so much rebuffed as forestalled by the controlled distance of manner, the look of careful mistrust in the deep-set eyes.

Miss Baxter grasped her own chin in one hand and gravely swung her head to one side, then back. “I daren’t move it by itself,” she said in her husky whisky voice. Staring straight ahead, she uncurled the other hand in her lap to show a package of Life Savers. “Have one?” she said without moving further, and laughed.

“Can I get you anything?” Miss Abel put out a hand, but somehow she did not dare touch her.

In answer Miss Baxter, still sitting erect, closed her eyes. “What a night!” she said. “Lois’ job is folding, so we went on the town.” The words came oddly from the closed face, with a kind of bravado perhaps made possible by it. “Know Lois Gow, up in the doctor’s office?”

“Oh. Yes, of course.” She remembered the girl mainly because of the pliant, hesitant manner which did not go with the nurse’s uniform, and the suffused pink of her face, which always looked as if she were about to sneeze or break into tears.

“Think I can go on the floor, Abel?” Miss Baxter had opened her eyes, and was looking straight at her with her thin, slight smile. Except for the closed eyes, she had seemed up to now almost as she had on those other mornings when, rigidly controlled, exuding a powerful perfume of cinnamon, she had managed quite competently, handling both staff and customers with a dispatch which was, if anything, chillier than normal. But now, looking into the opened eyes, Miss Abel saw that the liquor had not glazed them but rather had melted from them some last cornea of reserve, so that, nude, and pained, they focused beyond her, askance at some unalterable incubus.

“Look,” said Miss Abel, “you’ve signed in, haven’t you? Why don’t you go to the rest room? I can cover up for you here.”

Miss Baxter shook herself slightly. With that shake, policy shuttered her face and she was again the equilibrist, the authority.

“Quite a gal, aren’t you?” she said. “Able Abel.” She laughed. Then she put her head in her hands.

Miss Abel went out and closed the door behind her. Hurrying to the high desk behind which she would stand all day, she began needlessly to set its sparse equipment in order. She couldn’t have gone on the floor, she said to herself. Not with those eyes.

The rest of the morning she worked steadily to reduce the constantly forming queue of women in front of her. Just before noon, a cool voice said, “I’ll take over now. Thanks.” Miss Baxter stood beside her, resurrected and remote.

Miss Abel got her purse from the desk, signed out and left the floor. Outside the locker-room windows the day had turned greenish and it had begun to drizzle. She had no heart for battling one of the crowded restaurants outside and turned into the employees’ cafeteria, where she ate her way through the flaccid “special plate,” flavored for the general and made more tepid by the humid smell from the steam tables. Gratefully she remembered that it was Saturday and, half-reluctantly, she visualized her usual date with Max.

As on many other Saturday nights, she would prepare dinner for him, and they would sit over it in a coy, uncomfortable imitation of the domesticity they could not afford to make actual. If, during the past week, he had been called for part-time work in one of the biological-testing laboratories which allowed him, as a former fellow in chemistry, to make tests of blood and sputum, they would go to one of the movies on Fourteenth Street. Otherwise, while he talked ardently of his ambitions, his hopes, warming his self-confidence with her attention, she would watch the light on the humbled nape of his neck, the abnormal cleanliness of his hands, seeing in them something already intimidated, subdued. Either way, she thought, it would end in the half-fearful, fending love-making of the uninitiate, in that tentative groping, not toward affirmation but only toward escape, in which each caressed and comforted the affrighted, sad replica of himself.

She rose with a counterfeit briskness and went back upstairs. Signing in again, “Abel — 12:45,” she slipped into her station beside Miss Baxter.

At five o’clock when the two of them, working steadily together, had disposed of the last of the queue, the crowd in the store had thinned. It was raining hard outside now, and most of the customers, wandering along desultory and vacant-faced, were of the brand the clerks called “just looking.” Miss Abel and Miss Baxter stood together behind the high pulpit of the desk, careful not to mar with more than fragmentary conversation their air of alert, executive readiness.

Along the aisle a small, nondescript woman teetered aimlessly toward them. She was no different from the scores of women who had today — and would tomorrow — filtered colorlessly through the store from the cardboard suburbs or the moderately respectable crannies of the city. A coat of some nameless but adequate fur flapped back from a dress which was indistinctly neither fussy nor smart. On her precise, mat hair a small flyaway hat with a veil halfway between coquetry and conservatism perched sharply to one side — denotation that its wearer might have lost touch with her sense of the ridiculous but not with her instinct for what was correct for her station in life. Beloved of some man, she would amble through the stores, coming home with a darling blouse or another pair of stubby, frilled shoes, or perhaps only with a sense of virtue at having viewed and resisted all the temptations of the
bon marché
except the paper bag of caramels from which she was now munching.

She stopped in front of them, just to one side, and stared frankly, curiously at Miss Baxter. Then, with her face screwed up in kittenish perplexity, she backed up, sidestepped, craned over to get a glimpse of Miss Baxter’s legs.

“Is there something I can do for you?” There was an edge of insolence in Miss Baxter’s tone which made Miss Abel catch her breath with apprehension. Sidling a glance from under the dropped lids of embarrassment, she saw what she had never before seen in Miss Baxter’s face — the creeping red of color.

“Well, uh, no.” The woman tittered ingratiatingly. “I mean — I just couldn’t tell whether — I mean I just wanted to see …whether you had
trousers
on,” she finished, the words coming out on a cozy gust of confidence. She smiled, and tittered again.