But when she turned the lock and ducked through Walter’s door, she saw no sign of him.
Well, it was hardly surprising, after such a victory. No doubt he had been delayed in cordial argument with some officious rival and would be up shortly. Tomorrow morning she and Walter were leaving for a week’s holiday, in some discreet Alpine resort of which Violet had never heard. He would want to say good-bye to his scientific friends, to perhaps share a last drink. She took off her clothes and hung them in the wardrobe and readied herself for the night.
But the minutes had ticked by, and still Violet waited in Walter’s bed, counting the repeats in the floral wallpaper by the streak of brown light from the crack in the curtains, dozing off only to jolt back awake, until the door had at last squeaked open at three o’clock in the morning. She pretended to be sleeping. Walter went to the bathroom and opened the tap in the tub, and after he had bathed and brushed his teeth, he slipped into the sheets beside her.
“Are you awake, child?” he asked gently.
She didn’t reply, but when morning arrived, and after Walter’s reassuring body had found hers in the early spring sunshine, she bent her forehead into his damp shoulder and told him that despite the diligent applications of vinegar each time they were together, she thought she might be pregnant.
Vivian
Monday morning! Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always relished the idea of a new week, and never more than when it contained the prospect of a Doctor Paul ringing my doorbell right smack at the beginning.
But first. Work. And even work had its charms today! I whistled my way up the Lexington Avenue subway and sang my way through the brass-framed revolving doors into the musty lobby of the Metropolitan building on Forty-ninth Street. My great-aunt Violet lurked somewhere in the holy sanctity of the archives here. I was sure of it! And I would find her!
“Good morning, Agatha!” I trilled to the receptionist, the instant the elevator doors staggered open on the eleventh floor.
“Miss Schuyler,” she said, in that charming voice of hers, somewhere between a rasp and a mutter. She didn’t so much as raise her shellacked gray head from her magazine, which, by the way, was not the Metropolitan, not even close, unless you took a big black permanent marker and scrawled Metro over the Cosmo. She took a long draw of her cigarette and—again, without looking, the modern miracle of her!—tipped it into the ashtray just before a long crumb tumbled from the end.
And this was the storied magazine’s face to visitors.
The switchboard rang as I swished past the desk. “Metropolitan!” Agatha snapped, like an accusation of manslaughter.
But don’t you worry. Things got better as I went along, past the industrious typing pool (to which, thank God and Gogo, I had leapfrogged membership), past secretaries with scarlet nails and towering nests of hair, past secretaries with bitten nails and limp heads of hair, past office doors and distracted editors and clench-jawed columnists pecking wit at typewriters, until I reached my own humble corner and humbler desk, of which the only redeeming features were its convenient proximity to the office of Edmund Tibbs, managing editor, and its exclusion from the incessant clacking of the typing pool.
I dropped my pocketbook into the bottom desk drawer and headed to the kitchenette.
Tibby hadn’t been kidding around about sugar, no cream. He liked a single teaspoon of the white stuff, not a grain more, and it had better be hot and it had better be brimming, and if so much as a precious drop spilled over the edge and into the saucer below, I would make it up in my own crimson blood: with sugar, no cream.
Still, regardless of that anomaly before heading into Doctor Paul’s bedroom Saturday night, I was not of the trembly-handy tribe, and this Monday morning, as every morning, I delivered Tibby his medicine intact and stood before his desk, smiling my best smile, curving my best hip, even though I knew for a fact that Tibby liked his coffee black and sweet and his chromosomes strictly XY.
He winced at the first sip, but he always did.
“Good morning, Mr. Tibbs,” I said.
“Miss Schuyler.”
“Is there anything I can do for you this morning? Any facts to check?”
If looks could growl. “Check your desk.”
“Right away, Mr. Tibbs.”