Nothing That Meets the Eye (26 page)

DOORBELL FOR LOUISA

T
he mere sight of her name spelled “Trott” on the square white envelope whose flap was parsimoniously tucked in was almost enough to make Louisa Trotte throw it away without opening it. It was only an advertisement from the department store where she kept a charge account anyway. But because she seldom got mail of any kind, Louisa, standing by the long table in Mrs. Holpert's dimly lighted hall, slipped the booklet out, slanted it toward the yellowish bulb in a candlelike wall fixture, and gave the fur coats a rather nearsighted, thoughtful, but quite detached attention. Slowly, a strand of copper-tinged brown hair pulled from the bun at the back of her neck, stood out horizontal, then drooped slightly.

“H'lo, Miss Trott.”

Louisa Trotte adjusted her glasses a little on the bridge of her long thin nose and peered into the Cimmerian darkness at the hall's rear. “Good morning, Jeannie!” she called as a small pale blur moved closer.

“Did you get a letter?” Jeannie asked, shyly twisting up the tail of her shift till it was above her navel.

Louisa glanced at the big brown stairway, lest one of the male roomers be descending its carpeted steps, then went to Jeannie and pulled her dress down. She gave the child an impulsive hug that brought her soft stomach abruptly against her bony knees, then released her with a pat across the buttocks. “Yes, I've got a letter, Jeannie. Would you like to share it with me?”

“I wan-nit,” Mrs. Holpert's little granddaughter replied, and began twisting up her dress again.

“Ju-ust a minute,” Louisa said, turning through the last pages as carefully as she had the first. One coat she rather liked, a black Persian lamb with generous, turned-back cuffs. But four hundred and forty-nine dollars!

Closing her mind to the fur coats as abruptly as she closed the booklet, Louisa bent down and presented the latter to the little girl. “Here you are! Pick yourself out a nice warm fur coat and show it to me when I come home. All right?”

“Awright.”

From the back of the hall came the sound of a child's coughing, distant and thin.

“How's your little sister?” Louisa asked, jerking straight the jacket of her black suit.

“She's worser,” Jeannie replied. “Gramma says.”

“Is she?” Louisa did not like Eleanor so well as she did Jeannie, though perhaps that was ridiculous to say of a baby hardly three years old. “Well, you be careful you don't catch it. Sweetie!” She caught Jeannie again, patted her head with a flat, bony hand, and turned toward the door.

“Got any sugar lumps?”

Louisa stopped and felt in the side pocket of her jacket. “I certainly have. Here!” She laid a wrapped lump in Jeannie's chubby palm and watched the fingers with the incredibly tiny nails close over it. It was one of the lumps she saved from her lunch to give Al, the flower man's horse, who was generally somewhere near on West End Avenue when she came home from work. But tonight there would be more sugar lumps.

“Good-bye, Jeannie!”

She strode across the polished, creaky floor toward the tall double doors with colored glass that opened to a square tile foyer, then through the next pair of doors onto the sunny brownstone steps. She walked briskly toward Riverside Drive and the bus stop one block north.

“Trott indeed!” she murmured as she dropped the empty envelope into a wastepaper receptacle. Bad enough that American pronunciation had won the battle with the final e during the fifteen years she had been in the country, people could at least spell the name correctly.

It was not that she was seriously disturbed by her name's misspelling, for she was not vain or small-minded, but that she hated inefficiency and she had nothing else particularly to think of that morning. Her work was going smoothly at the office, and she had no eye for the changing colors of early autumn that showed in the strip of green park along the drive. Her long upward-sloping nose took no pleasure in the cool new air of eight-thirty in the morning.

And somehow, too, the incompetence of the unknown addresser of her letter prompted her to think, dully and idly as she rode on the top deck of the bus, of other minor irritations in her life, of her liquor-loving brother who was wandering somewhere in Europe, of the increasing difficulties of living in New York on her modest salary, or the fact she had been forced to wait nearly ten minutes for Mr. Noenzi to come out of the bathroom that morning, and of the obliquely slanting handle that projected from the dark ventilator shaft in the ceiling over the tub—a clumsy thick stick of wood that looked violent and made the word murder enter her mind every time she saw it. It looked as though someone held the other end of it. But none of these annoyances troubled her gravely. They merely played around in her brain and caused a look of mild distraughtness to be fixed on her face as she scanned the front page of the Times. To fret about things gave Louisa, unconsciously, a raison d'être.

When the bus turned from Fifty-seventh Street onto Fifth Avenue, she dismounted and began to walk southward. She might have ridden the bus down to Forty-eighth Street, of course, but each morning, if it wasn't raining, she walked the nine blocks for exercise.

Her somewhat tall, somewhat angular figure, the figure of an unmarried, professionally efficient, tolerably content woman of forty-five, had gathered full speed by Fifty-fifth Street. The hem of her black suit's skirt, widened at the bottom by a series of pleats six inches long all the way around, flounced spiritedly about her hustling bony legs, and the wisp of coppery brown hair that had slipped from the big tortoise hairpin undulated behind her with each aggressive step. Atop her head sat a round-brimmed little black hat with straight sides, unobtrusive and meaningless, a dutiful observance of convention. Her shoulders were tense and rather thrust forward beneath the black jacket whose tailoring was relieved by four closely set buttons down the front. Fifteen years of secretarial work had not much broadened her hips, though all her skirts slatted a little across her flat derriere.

Besides classifying her, probably immediately, as a secretary, one thought of Europe when one saw Miss Louisa Trotte hurrying down Fifth Avenue of a morning. There was a more complex emanation from her oxford shoes, her old custom-made suit, and her copper-glinting bun than that of simple practicality. There was the look of an individual about her, and a stamp of romance and adventure that one sees sometimes in a good, well-used suitcase carelessly splotched with faded stickers. She would live, one thought, in a furnished room, for the mobility of a traveler sat lightly upon her, a room whose walls bore photographs of the Black Forest, a canal in Holland, a seaport in Denmark, or a fjord in Norway. Her bathroom would be down the hall in the quiet, irreproachably clean and respectable old house to which her instinct and training would have led her as surely as it leads a homing pigeon back to its base. One might have imagined her cultivating a small window box in spring, on fine Saturday afternoons sitting in a camp chair on the gritty triangle of roof outside her second-story rear window, a roof which overlooks the postage stamp garden of her landlady, drying her hair carefully with a white bath towel. For she would be selfish about her two free days a week, through long habit preferring her own company to that of the best of her few friends. Seeing her en route to work in the morning, one might have imagined her a few minutes earlier standing by an electric plate, dipping a sweet bun into a cup of black coffee and staring into space. And, if one had imagined all this about Louisa Trotte, one would have been almost exactly correct. Except that the pictures on her walls were small oil paintings by her aunt of Copenhagen Harbor and its surroundings, or Gloucester watercolors she had acquired on one of her summer vacations. The fading photographs of the Black Forest and the Spreewald, the strange, haphazard snapshots her brother had made in Holland, treasured just because they were by him, Louisa kept in a leather-bound album that had stayed only half full for the last ten or twelve years.

And anyone with the perspicacity to imagine these things about Louisa would have seen, too, that something in her transcended the frustrated spinster, the eccentric old maid. An air of independence and contentment sheathed her from ridicule. Her patina of an older continent could stop an American's smile and command respect. She looked as though she had a few thoughts and possessions of her own and was not envious of those of other people.

Who knows, maybe he's dead! Louisa thought of her brother as she turned onto Forty-eighth Street. I'll just put him right out of my mind. The last a phrase she used very often for matters she was afraid, being alone, and there being so little she could do if she wanted to, to think out.

Then an old image of Europe and her brother rose up before her eyes: a drunken Gert sitting on some tavern bench, and all the chaos of the years of Hitler and the world conflict breaking over him like a great wave that wobbled his head a little, rushed on and left him sitting, sodden, in the same place. No, what could kill Gert? Who would bother killing him?

She had not heard from him in two years, when he had been, of all sober places on earth, at The Hague. It was even a drunken letter he had written last, partly in Dutch, mainly in Danish, not at all about himself or what had happened or what he intended to do, but about sunlight on stone steps somewhere. It had been enough to disgust a decent being who felt some interest and responsibility for what was going on in Europe. Louisa thought herself quite justified in outting him off from her life. Only sometimes, like this morning, when she took inventory of her discomforts, Louisa felt she might be doing something for him, simply because he was one more care her energetic temperament might take on.

“Morning, Miss Trott,” said the elevator man.

“Good morning, George,” Louisa replied. Her gentle, dark hazel eyes blinked thoughtfully behind her glasses. Her small, tapering and slightly plump face, soft as the limp cotton collar of her blouse that was fastened at the neck with a little bar pin of seed pearls, slowly shed its distraughtness and had taken on a pleasant, alert expression by the time she stepped out of the elevator at the eleventh floor.

Louisa was well into the morning's work before Mr. Bramford entered their office in the Pioneer Engineering and Designing Company. The sight of his slow, substantial figure in the pepper-and-salt suit laid the last ghost of disquietude in Louisa's mind. She could not have imagined a finer, more kindly, yet comfortably impersonal man to work for than Mr. Clarence Bramford, managing editor of publications. In the past ten years, she might have gone elsewhere many times for a higher salary, but Louisa knew something about character and the character of a business organization, and she knew when she was well off.

“It's a fine day, isn't it, Miss Trotte?” Mr. Bramford said as he stuck his hat on top of the clothes tree where Louisa's hat and pocketbook hung.

“It is indeed, Mr. Bramford.”

“I imagine the drive looks quite pretty.”

“Yes, it does.” She thought he seemed a little depressed by something. It was not like him to talk so much.

Louisa was surprised that Jeannie did not come upstairs while she was making her cup of tea. She always drank a cup of tea and relaxed a moment before she went out to supper, and it was Jeannie's habit to stroll in and to eat one of the cookies Louisa kept on hand just for her. With her stockinged feet extended luxuriously before her, Louisa sat a long while in her one easy chair, listening for Jeannie's small knock, low down on the door, but it did not come. She was more disappointed than she admitted to herself, for she remembered the department store booklet, and she had thought that she and Jeannie could choose fur coats for themselves. Then she forced a smile, just to cheer herself up. The child probably had something more amusing to do than to visit her. And the Persian lamb coat, if indeed she had really liked it, would have had to go the way of all her whims, like the ski train she wanted to take north sometime—with skis and full regalia, of course—and the week she wanted to spend at the Plaza Hotel. Funny whims for a woman who got older every year. And poorer! Which was to say, the amount she could save regularly out of her salary grew less every year.