The Other Typist (3 page)

During the rest of the day I carried an odd feeling around with me. I was plagued by a sensation of perpetual distraction; it was as if there were an object in my vision I could perceive but couldn’t quite look at directly. Even then, I harbored the suspicion that Odalie had dropped the brooch on purpose, as a test to me. And in retrospect I realize such a tactic certainly bore her signature. With one simple act, Odalie had snared me in a trap that consisted of equal parts temptation and shame. I was bound to her from that moment on, always wondering yet eternally unable to ask if she was privy to my act of covetous theft. All this before we’d ever even shaken hands or been introduced.

I
t’s misleading to insinuate I was aware at that early time of the
full
impact Odalie would have on my life, or on the precinct in general. I stated previously that I recognized
something
was happening the moment Odalie walked in the door, and indeed that much was true, but I would have been hard-pressed to tell you exactly
what
that something was, or the extent to which I would be affected in particular. Mostly, after that first encounter, the thought of Odalie inspired a mild disquieting feeling within the pit of my stomach, but nothing more complicated or concrete than this. A few times during the remainder of the week I opened my desk drawer and snuck a peek at the brooch and thought of Odalie—but my work obligations often cut my musings short. She probably owned a lot of brooches, I told myself once or twice. She may not have even taken note of the fact that this one was missing from her collection. She may not even care, I reasoned. I pictured myself casually returning it to her. I also pictured myself just as casually forgetting to return it. In both scenarios I refused to be impressed. The pretense was I didn’t give a fig for the brooch; it meant nothing to me. It felt very liberating to imagine myself capable of such a blasé disposition, so indifferent to this new exotic creature and her rare treasures. And then the weekend came, and I didn’t picture the brooch or Odalie at all.

At that time I lived in a boarding-house, as was the common custom for most unmarried ladies of my age and income. The woman who ran the house was a young widow named Dorothy—or Dotty, as she preferred to be called—with lank, dishwater-colored hair and four small children. The toils of childbirth and constant housework had aged her countenance somewhat, lending her complexion a reddish, splotchy, wind-stung appearance, loosening the skin below her eyes, and adding a pair of jowls to her jawline. But I would doubt she was more than thirty. In truth, I suspect she was closer to twenty-eight or twenty-nine. Of course, these days, it’s not at all unusual to come upon a widow so young. Hers was a very familiar story: Dotty’s husband disappeared into the now infamous war that swallowed so many young men of our generation whole without so much as spitting out the bones. If it weren’t for the children needing her at home, she often said, she would make the journey to those pockmarked fields along the border of France and Germany to see his final resting place—the place, she says, where Danny no doubt succumbed to mustard gas.

Danny and Dotty; the sound of their names together suggested a cozy, complementary alliteration, a fact I’m sure only deepened Dotty’s sense of loss and mourning. After too many nips of what she kept in the kitchen pantry and called cooking sherry (a supply of which mysteriously replenished itself without fail, despite the challenges presented by Prohibition), Dotty sometimes told the story of Danny’s death as if she witnessed it firsthand. She felt very certain his body fell into a trench and now lies haphazardly buried there, lost in one of the hundreds of long, puckered mounds of earth that I’ve been told are still visible upon the French farm fields, like so many wormy scars. Dotty’s youngest child was three and a half years old; I wasn’t entirely certain the math worked out in her husband’s favor on this score, but I never said as much to Dotty, as I was grateful for the reasonable boarding fee she offered and I had no desire to stir up unnecessary trouble. I had always been given to understand that loneliness during a time of war is a different and more potent kind of loneliness than any other in the world.

I know a little bit about loneliness myself, but not about being alone. In the boarding-house, I was never alone. The house was a rather tattered brownstone located in Brooklyn. I suppose it was in such a state because, as a widow, Dotty had no husband to do the routine maintenance required and limited disposable income to hire out for even the most necessary of repairs. It was quite a large brownstone when you imagined it housing one family, but not so much when you experienced it housing eight adults and four children, as it did during my tenure there. Needless to say, there was always quite a bit of noise and commotion.

Even my room within the boarding-house did not offer the regular amount of privacy one might expect. It was quite large, but it had been divided in two by means of several graying and badly stained sheets pinned to a clothesline strung up across the middle of the room.
Semi-private,
I believe the advertisement Dotty posted in the newspaper read. I do not think Dotty meant to be deceitful in this description, for after all it was somewhat accurate, and the price she charged was lower than I’d have likely gotten at any other boarding-house. But then, that amount doubled by two people was probably more than Dotty could’ve gotten renting the room to a single person. I suppose the relative quality of a deal is always a matter of perspective, really.

The other occupant of the room was an auburn-haired girl with chubby cheeks and dimpled knees who was close to me in age. She was called Helen—a name, I fear, that may have gone to her head, for she frequently acted as though she had confused herself with Helen of Troy. Perhaps that is cruel of me to say. It’s just that I have encountered a number of cockatoos, but have met very few humans who preen quite as much as Helen did. She was constantly before the mirror, angling her face this way and that, feigning looks of surprise and rapture. With her fleshy face it was a bit like watching a soft lump of dough being molded into a series of baker’s forms, and she was only moderately convincing in these expressions. She never admitted as much, but I suspected she was secretly harboring aspirations to one day take to the stage. At the time of our cohabitation she was a shopgirl, a profession she felt was infinitely superior to my own. She made no secret about what she thought of my job as a typist at the precinct.
Don
’
t fret, Rose,
she often remarked to me, unsolicited.
You won
’
t have to work in that ghastly place forever. I
’
m sure something better is bound to come along. And when it does, I
’
ll help you replace those mannish clothes of yours and we
’
ll find you some lovely, tasteful things
. Helen was fond of using the word
tasteful,
but I came to understand, during our time together, that it didn’t mean quite the same thing to her as it did to me.

When I took up residence at the boarding-house, Helen had already occupied the room for some time, and had consequently selected its more advantageous half—which is to say, the side farthest from the hallway door. Having no reason to pass through Helen’s side of the room, I generally left her to her privacy. But on her way in and out of the bedroom, teleology dictated she was obliged to pass through my side, and she had no qualms about making a ruckus or leaving her shoes and stockings on the floor in my half of the room. I also suspect she rearranged things before I moved in so that all the most prized pieces of furniture resided solely on her side of the room. But I suppose that’s just human nature. Who’s to say I wouldn’t have done the same, had I been the first to move in myself?

In any case, during that particular week, Helen had been making a fuss about a gentleman caller she was to receive on Friday evening, so my apprehensions about work and Odalie were quickly consumed by Helen’s theatrics the moment I got home that day. Of course, on the sojourn home I had no idea how thoroughly I would be made to play a role in Helen’s social engagement. This latter discovery lay like a bear trap waiting to spring on me at the conclusion of my commute.

On my way home from the precinct, I ride the streetcar over the Brooklyn Bridge and finish the remainder of my journey on foot. Despite the passing automobiles and their intermittent low wail of Klaxon horns and nattering of engines, I have come to regard this process as a relaxing ritual, one that allows me to think over the events of the day. On that particular Friday, several abnormalities occurred at the precinct that had me especially preoccupied. In the morning we had taken the confessional statement of a man who seemed, at the first, quite sober, but who turned out to be extremely inebriated and perhaps not altogether sane.

I went into the interview room with the Lieutenant Detective and began taking dictation of the suspect’s statement in the usual way. At first, things seemed quite normal—just your run-of-the-mill husband and wife kitchen knife stabbing.
An accidental crime of passion
is always how the lawyers describe crimes like that later on in the courts. Not that I always attend the trials, but I
do
like to sit in from time to time, and I have always found the pairing of the words
accidental
and
passion
to be an odd turn of phrase—as if the accident were loving someone, not killing them. In any case, the man’s story was a very familiar one, and I took down everything he said with an automatic reflexivity.

But much to our surprise, ten minutes into the confession the suspect quite abruptly began describing a different crime altogether—something about drowning a man in the East River. Confused, I caught the Lieutenant Detective’s eye, and we exchanged a hesitant look. The Lieutenant Detective shrugged, and his eyes seemed to say,
Well, if the chap wants to confess to two murders and not just one, let him hang himself.
Keeping all traces of urgency out of his voice, the Lieutenant Detective dropped his line of questioning about the man’s wife and began to ask instead about this mystery drowning. He changed gears ever so gently, I noticed, and took a casual tack. The mood in the room significantly shifted, and it was suddenly as if the Lieutenant Detective was talking to a friend and discussing something as inconsequential as the weather. On instinct I felt my touch on the stenotype grow lighter and my presence recede into the wall, and it was as if they were alone. Finally, the man leaned over and dropped his voice to a whisper. The mayor had told him to do it, the man said; he was only following orders. I looked again at the Lieutenant Detective. I could tell by his external demeanor that he was struggling to maintain an unimpressed skepticism, but he had flinched at the mention of Mayor Hylan’s name, and the corners of his mouth had gone taut with an involuntary tension.

“And why,” the Lieutenant Detective asked in a condescending voice that clearly implied he was humoring our suspect, “would the mayor want you to attack this man?”

“Because,” our suspect said, “he was part of the invisible government! The corrupt one!” It was then, as the man shouted, that I began to detect a premiere whiff of bathtub gin on the man’s breath. He began to hiccup loudly. His mention of “the invisible government” was, I believe, a reference to a controversial speech Mayor Hylan had given, accusing men like Rockefeller of having too much control over politics. I realized we were hearing the mayor’s speech repeated through a filter of booze and possible insanity. The Lieutenant Detective struggled to reclaim order over the situation and reorient his line of questioning, but before he could successfully accomplish this aim, the suspect began to hiccup more loudly and worked himself into a state of extreme agitation. He began shouting again. “The mayor told me to do it! I’m a soldier of righteousness, I tell you, a soldier!”

Just then, the Sergeant poked his head in the door to see what all the commotion was about. Our suspect took one look at the Sergeant and leapt out of his chair. He snapped his hand to his forehead in a salute.

“Reporting for duty, Mr. Mayor, sir!”

The Sergeant blinked at the man saluting him, utterly stupefied. The scar on the Lieutenant Detective’s forehead rolled into a series of S’s, configured by the deep furrows of his concerned brow. It took us all a few minutes to realize we were witnessing an absurd case of mistaken identity. Suddenly the suspect spun around in a frenzy, vomited with a startling ferocity, and finally ended his spasms by passing out cold on the floor, his cheek pressed against the tile and his tongue lolling thickly out of his mouth. The whole room filled with the wretched smell of rancid, partially digested alcohol. The Sergeant looked at us, unamused.

“Get him out of here” was all the Sergeant said, and disappeared. We sat there, stunned for a few seconds, until the Lieutenant Detective shook himself, sighed, and got up from his seat. He leaned out the doorway of the interrogation room and called to a couple of deputies to help remove the drunken man now snoring loudly on the floor. I set about tidying up the stenographer’s desk and removing the used paper from the shorthand machine. What I’d been typing was likely useless. You couldn’t take a drunk man’s words down as testimony—at least not a man so drunk as to be incomprehensible. The suspect had become as inanimate as a sack of potatoes and barely opened his eyes as he was lifted and hauled away.

“I thought for certain that man was sober,” the Lieutenant Detective murmured, more to himself, it seemed, than to me.

“I did as well,” I said. “Couldn’t smell a drop on him, and he was so lucid at the start. Guess he had us both fooled.” The Lieutenant Detective looked up, surprised. This perhaps was the lengthiest exchange we’d shared in months. He regarded me for a few seconds. A strangely appreciative smile spread over his face, but it made me uncomfortable, and I was forced to look away. We went back to putting the room in order, both of us carefully tiptoeing around the puddle of vomit in the middle as we did so.

“He sort of does, you know,” the Lieutenant Detective said.

“Who? Does what?”

“The Sarge. Look like Mayor Hylan.”

I bristled. “How rude! Although I can’t say I’m surprised by your disrespect, really.” My voice came out sounding shrill, uncontrolled. I was vaguely horrified. I adopted a brisker pace in gathering together a stack of files and headed for the door.

“It’s not an insult,” the Lieutenant Detective said, his eyes widening in surprise. This proved to be too much for me. Almost to the door, I whirled about on him.

“Mayor Hylan has been called a communist, and as you very well know, the Sergeant is
not
some sort of dirty Bolshevik. He is a
good
man.” I hesitated before adding, “You would no doubt be vastly improved if you were only
half
the man . . .”