With Option to Die Page 21

  Lyle had opened, first, the wrong door, which was that to the business office. She had been asked, by a friendly middle-aged woman behind a counter, if she could be helped.

  “I’m looking for a job,” Lyle said, keeping it simple. The woman behind the counter said, “A job?” in a tone which implied she had never before heard of such a thing. “What kind of a job, dear?”

  “As a reporter,” Lyle said. “At college I was on the college paper. Actually, I was assistant editor.”

  “Well,” the friendly woman said, “I don’t know, dear. You’d have to ask Mr. Wallis about that. And he’s likely to be busy.”

  “I could come back when he isn’t,” Lyle said. “If you could tell me when.”

  “Well,” the woman said, “he’s always busy. But—all right, I’ll ask him.”

  There was a telephone on the counter, but she did not use the telephone. She went from behind the counter and through a door and was gone for a minute or two and came back and said, “He says you can ask him. Through that way.” She pointed at the door. Lyle went that way and walked into an open room with several typewriter desks scattered through it. A large blond boy was in front of one of the typewriters, anxiously hunting and pecking on it. He looked up. He said, “Hi, Lyle,” and she said, “Hi, Reggie,” to Reginald Peterson. She had gone to the Van Brunt High School with Reggie. “Where is Mr. Wallis?”

  Reggie pointed toward a door. She went to the door and knocked on it, a man with a grating voice said from behind the door, “All right. It isn’t locked.” She went into a small room occupied by a large desk and a man with black hair. The man stood up behind the desk, but kept both hands hard down on it, as if he were preparing to vault over it. He said, “What do you want a job for?”

  “To work at,” Lyle said.

  “Or,” he said, “to get into what half-wits call the newspaper game? Or are you one of those who want to be writers? Think working on a newspaper is, for God’s sake, a stepping stone?”

  “I just finished college,” Lyle said. “I just want a job, Mr. Wallis.”

  “What’s your name?”

  She told him.

  “You’re Lytton Mercer’s daughter.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you don’t need a job,” Wallis said and sat back in his chair, as if that ended matters. But then he pointed at a wooden chair and said, “Sit down, for God’s sake.”

  She sat down. He said, “Do you?”

  “If you mean need a job,” she said, “not in the way you mean it. No, Mr. Wallis.”

  “Something to play at,” Wallis said, and leaned forward, his head jutting toward her.

  At first sight he doesn’t like me, Lyle thought. She started to get up from the chair.

  “Can you type, by any chance?” Wallis said, his inflection implying the high improbability that she had ever seen a typewriter.

  “Yes,” Lyle said. “I learned in high school. Almost everybody takes typing at Van Brunt High School, Mr. Wallis.”

  “Harry Peterson’s kid sure as hell didn’t,” Wallis said. “He’s an all-right kid, for one named Reginald. But he can’t type.”

  His voice grated. Abruptly, he ran his right hand over the stiffness of his black hair.

  “Typing wasn’t required,” Lyle said. “It was elective.”

  She felt, obscurely, that she was defending Reggie Peterson—even more obscurely all the Mercers and Jacksons and Petersons in the town of Van Brunt, and further, Van Brunt High School. She decided that she did not want to work for Robert Wallis, who obviously disliked her; who acted as if he disliked almost everybody.

  “Your people have lived around here for a long time,” he told her, leaning forward toward her. It had, somehow, the sound of an accusation. “You grew up here.” He looked at her from hard eyes and then, quite suddenly, there were crinkles at the corners of the eyes and he smiled at her. He had a wide, thin-lipped mouth, but there was nothing thin about the smile. “Have started to, anyway. You’re sure you can type, child?”

  “Quite sure,” she said.

  “All right,” Wallis said. “You can have a try at it. We’ll pay you, whether you need it or not. Sixty a week. Go out there”—he pointed toward the door which she had closed behind her—“and call up the undertakers here—two of them, if you didn’t know—and the ones in Cold Harbor and Yorktown. Get the names of their new customers. Call up their families and find out about them. There’s a Who’s Who out there somewhere. Check it. You never know. And check the names in the telephone book to see how they’re spelled. Even if it sounds like ‘Jones,’ check it out.”

  “Now?” Lyle said.

  “Of course now,” Wallis said. “You came here for a job, didn’t you? All right. You’ve got a job. Get on with it.”

  She got up and started toward the door.

  “By the way,” Wallis said, his voice still a grating voice, “do you know anything about taking photographs? Paper like this, reporters double.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m not very good but I’ve taken pictures.”

  “You’ve got a camera?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bring it along tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock till God knows when. This isn’t a Guild shop.”

  She did not ask him what he meant by that. She went out into the wide room, where Reggie Peterson still hunted and pecked and where now a balding man in his fifties was attacking a typewriter with what appeared to be anger. She called up undertakers and wrote down names—not very many names; the area seemed momentarily healthy—and checked them. She found a rack of copies of the Citizen and looked until she found “Obituaries” and read them, to see how they should be written. She telephoned the survivors of the newly dead and, in a voice which shook a little that first day, asked questions.

  After a week of that, during which her voice quit shaking, the balding man, who had turned out to be named Oliver Fermer and to be the man who covered town meetings and other matters of importance, came out of Wallis’s office and to her desk.

  “Man named Brownley’s rented the Atcheson place,” he said. “Pretty well known as a painter, Brownley is. Bob wants you to go out and interview him. Know where the Atcheson place is?”

  She did know.

  “Take your camera.”

  She interviewed Max Brownley and took pictures of him, one in front of a landscape he was working on, and wrote about him, and at the top of her story that Thursday—a story considerably shorter than the one she had written—there was a line which read: “By Lyle Mercer.”

  There had not been many of those in her nearly four months. There had been, still, the telephoning to undertakers and to the families of their “customers.” There had been a House Tour in July—no by-line on that—and a Book and Author Luncheon for the benefit of the Visiting Nurse Association. No “By Lyle Mercer” on that, either, although she had rather hoped there might be.

  She expected no by-line on the few sticks the breakfast of the Van Brunt Hunt would get in the Van Brunt Citizen of October 17. Her fingers went up to the keys. “More than forty members and their guests attended the annual breakfast of the Van Brunt Hunt, held Saturday at the Old Stone Inn. The breakfast this year was—”

  Robert Wallis, his head jutting forward, came out of his office and walked rapidly, his heels snapping on the wooden floor, across the big room and through the door to the business office. He did not seem to see Lyle Mercer, nor to hear the clicking of her typewriter. She clicked on at it. Her account of the hunt breakfast ran nearer to four sticks than to three; it included a complimentary reference to the cuisine of the Old Stone Inn; it did not include a reference to Roger Spence’s to-be-expected misadventure. She was checking names, most of them names she had known all her life, in the Westchester-Putnam County telephone directory when Wallis jutted his way out of the business office.

  He saw her, this time. He came over to her desk. He said, “Anybody ride a horse to the breakfast?”

  “No,” she
said. “A good many of them talked about a fox they call ‘Grandpa’ who failed to show up. They’re afraid he’s dead of the mange.”

  “A wake for a fox,” Wallis said. “You play it that way?”

  “No,” she said. “Should I have?”

  “Probably not,” Wallis said. “They might think we were kidding them. Take themselves seriously, most of them. Themselves and their horses and their foxes. No other highlights?”

  “Roger Spence fell off his horse again,” Lyle said.

  “No highlight,” Robert Wallis said and shook his head. There was abruptness in the movement. “When you get the spellings checked come into the office. Something I want to show you.”

  She finished checking the spelling of some twenty names. In spite of cautioning herself, she had used an “e” instead of an “a” in Shephard. She corrected that. She went into Wallis’s office and, as he had months before, he stood up behind his desk with his hands on it. He said, “Sit down, child,” and she sat on the unreceptive chair. “See this?” he asked her, and pushed toward her a fragment of newsprint, torn roughly from a page of last week’s Citizen. “Where I’ve marked,” he said. “Read them.”

  What he had torn out of the paper was a part of the want-ad section. He had checked two ads, in the “For Sale, Misc.” column. The first read:

  “For Sale: Bay stallion. Trained hunter. Reasonable. Also .25-caliber Winchester rifle. Telescopic sight. Box No. 375.”

  She looked up and shook her head. “Read the other one,” Wallis told her and she went down the column to another check mark.

  “For Sale: Wedding dress. Size 10. Never used. Box No. 376.”

  She read that twice. When she looked up again at Robert Wallis she did not shake her head. She said, “Oh.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Does stop you, doesn’t it?”

  “You tell yourself a story about it,” Lyle said. “And it makes you want to cry.”

  “Yes,” he said. “End of love’s young dream and that sort of thing.”

  “It’s the size ten part mostly,” Lyle said. “A little girl. Not tiny, but a little girl. You—you think of someone very young. Someone who—who isn’t hoping any more.”

  “All right,” Wallis said in his grating voice. “You’re making me cry, baby.” He showed no signs of crying.

  “You’d think,” Lyle said, “that she wouldn’t try to sell it, wouldn’t you? That she’d put it away some place. Or, maybe, give it to the thrift shop.”

  “Yes,” Wallis said. “One would think that. You know people named Wainright, child? Mr. and Mrs. Paul Wainright.”

  “I met Mr. Wainright at the breakfast. As a matter of fact, he paid for the breakfast. They’ve bought the old Kynes place on Long Hill Road. Why, Mr. Wallis?”

  “I know that,” Wallis said. “We had a piece about it—‘Distinguished Architect and City Planner Is New Resident.’ Wouldn’t think they’d want to sell a wedding dress, would you? Size ten wedding dress, never used.”

  She shook her head.

  “I didn’t see it,” Wallis said. “Not until about half an hour ago. Probably I’d have checked it out if I had. On the chance—oh, on the chance we’d been had. No reason, I guess, for Mrs. Allsmith to send up a rocket about it. It was this way, as she remembers it.”

  Two plain white envelopes, addressed to “Advertising Department, Van Brunt Citizen,” had been in the mail early in the week—the day before want ads were closed for the Thursday edition. There was no return address on either envelope. There was no letterhead on the plain 8½-by-11 sheets they contained. There were dollar bills in each envelope, payments adequate—a little more than adequate—to cover the cost of the advertisements. The texts of two advertisements were typed. One offered the wedding dress for sale; the other the horse and the rifle. Instructions also were typed. As Mrs. Allsmith remembered, the instruction for both ads read: “For the issue of October 10 only. Please assign box number.”

  And under that was typed, “Paul Wainright, Rte. 1, Van Brunt, New York.”

  “The Kynes place is a big place,” Lyle said, as much to herself as to Wallis. “Fifty acres. Maybe more than that. And a big house. It must—”

  “Yes,” Wallis said. “It must have cost Wainright quite a lot. And throwing this party today. Mrs. Oliphant doesn’t give things away.”

  “A thousand dollars,” Lyle said. “At least a thousand dollars. Perhaps more.”

  “And they want to sell an unused wedding dress,” Wallis said. “For—what do wedding dresses cost, child?”

  “I’ve never had one,” Lyle Mercer said. “I suppose some of them cost a lot. But a girl I knew at school got hers at Klein’s.”

  “A lot or a little, it doesn’t jibe, does it?” Wallis said.

  She shook her head.

  “Know where the Kynes place is?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then,” Wallis said, “suppose you drive there this afternoon and ask the Wainrights why they want to sell an unused wedding dress. Tell them—oh, that we feel we should have verified the ad before we printed it.”

  “Probably,” Lyle said, and stood up, “they’ll say it isn’t any of our business.”

  “What’s printed in the Citizen is my business,” Wallis said. “If we’ve been had—if the Wainrights had been had—it’s our business. Because, Lyle, there’s a funny smell about it.”

  3

  Autumn had painted all the hills above the Hudson—painted them yellow and red and accented the blaze with green. It was as if the still, warm day held its breath lest it smear the green. When Lyle turned into it from the valley through which NY-11F ran, Long Hill Road climbed steeply into a world of almost overwhelming color. Just before it was time to turn into the drive which led up to a white house at the top of the tallest hill, Lyle pulled the Volks off the road and sat for almost five minutes and merely looked—looked down at color falling away from her as the land fell; looked down at the Hudson River. There was an island in the wide river there and the island was gold in the sunlight. The river sparkled in the sunlight.

  It was worth looking at; worth spending time on. People had driven many miles that Columbus Day weekend to look at painted hills not by half so beautiful. But it was more than the beauty around her which had made Lyle Mercer stop her little car beside the road. I’m stalling, Lyle thought. I’m only pretending to look at autumn leaves. What will I say to them? Ask them if they have a daughter, size ten, who thought she was going to be married and was—what? Jilted when everything was ready and the date set and the wedding dress fitted? Or was it she who had changed her mind?

  Well, she thought, you wanted to work on a newspaper. You knew, must have known, that part of that kind of work would be to ask people private questions. But then, she thought, they put the advertisements in the newspaper. It was they who opened the door, and it was a strange thing to do.

  She started the car and drove on Long Hill Road for another hundred yards or so and turned at a mailbox marked “Paul Wainright” and drove up a curving drive with maples bright on either side of it. She stopped the Volks in a graveled turnaround and got out of it and walked to the door of the big white house. She pushed a button and heard chimes inside the house.

  After a time, the door opened and a pretty Negro girl in a blue uniform said, “Yes’m?” She looked at Lyle Mercer and particularly at her hands. Lyle understood her caution. People showed up for donations to worthy charities. They also showed up bearing tracts and wishing to speak of God.

  “I’d like to see Mrs. Wainright,” Lyle said. “Or Mr. Wainright, if he’s home. I’m from the Citizen.”

  “The newspaper?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Wainright isn’t home,” the girl in the blue uniform said. “I don’t know whether Mrs. Wainright wants to see people.”

  “I won’t—”

  Lyle was interrupted. A blonde woman—a somewhat plumpish blonde woman—came through a doorway and into the entrance hall behind t
he maid. She wore a summer robe which was yellow and black and floating. She walked carefully on the waxed oak floor of the entrance hall. She said, “Lucy. You mustn’t send people away. It isn’t hospitable.”

  Then, to Lyle, she said, “Do come in, dear.”

  There was South in the blonde woman’s voice. There was also, Lyle realized, a considerable blur in it. The blonde woman swayed, very slightly, and put a hand on top of the high back of a hall chair.

  Lyle said, “Mrs. Wainright?” and Mrs. Wainright said, “Of course, dear. Did you say you were from this newspaper? But I’m sure we already subscribe, dear. Don’t we take the newspaper, Lucy?”

  Lucy said, “Yes’m. We take the newspaper.”

  “I’m so sorry, dear,” Mrs. Wainright said and took her hand from the back of the chair and swayed slightly and put the hand back on it. “We already take the newspaper.”

  “Mrs. Wainright,” Lucy said, “you oughtn’t to be up with that headache of yours. You ought to be sitting down, anyway.”

  “Headache?” Mrs. Wainright said. “I haven’t got a headache, Lucy. And this pretty young lady’s come all the way up here to get a subscription to the newspaper and it’s a warm day and I’m sure she’d like something cool to drink.” The “something” was almost “someshing.” Mrs. Paul Wainright then said, “Juleps,” on a note of triumphant recognition and went back through the doorway she had come out of. But then she reappeared, partially, in the doorway and said, “Do come in, dear. I haven’t seen anybody all day. Plenty of ice, Lucy.” She then receded into the room.

  Lyle looked at the pretty girl in the blue uniform and Lucy shrugged her shoulders slightly. Then she said, “She wants you to, miss. She gets sort of upset when Mr. Wainright’s away.”

  Lyle Mercer was somewhat upset herself, but did not say so. She went into the room Mrs. Wainright had vanished into.