ONE WEEK EARLIER, Alvin Musgrove—Mr. Mousegrove to the girls in the typing pool—had left his job and his wife and run off with his secretary to Reno to get himself a quickie divorce. At least that was the story circulating around the office. The detail about Reno was based largely on whispers and misapprehensions about Nevada’s divorce laws. What was known was that Mr. Musgrove, director of the Foundation’s arts and culture section, had abruptly announced his resignation on the previous Friday, citing reasons of a personal nature. On the following Monday, just as word of Mr. Musgrove’s sudden departure was creating ripples through the hallways and offices of the Foundation, somebody wondered out loud why his secretary, Carole Turner, was also a no-show that morning. One of the girls called Carole’s home, only to reach her distraught mother, who had spent the weekend grappling with the news that her daughter had run off with a married man. This latest wrinkle sent the Foundation into a tizzy. Carole had never breathed a word of the affair to any of the other girls, and now the story on Carole was quickly being revised from “quiet and sweet” to “stuck-up and scheming.” Who did she think she was, running off with Mr. Musgrove? And how long had this been going on, right beneath everyone’s nose? And of all the girls in the office to run off with, why Carole Turner? And of all the men, why Mr. Musgrove?
While most of the office debated the wheres and whens of the Musgrove-Turner tryst, Ruby Kadetsky was tasked with cleaning up the mess. Ruby was a trouper; everyone knew that. She was a roll-up—your-sleeves kind of gal, a quit-your-bellyaching-and-get-to-work kind of gal. But still, this was some pickle: losing a senior program officer and his secretary on the same day! And to make matters worse, Ruby couldn’t make heads or tails of the files. They were like a crossword puzzle without any clues. One of Mr. Musgrove’s pet projects was a scheme that brought European artists to the United States on the Foundation’s dime, but there was no way of knowing who the latest batch of fellows were or whether or not they were still in the country. After three days of digging, Ruby could tell only one thing for certain: Carole Turner had not been prized for her secretarial skills.
It was typical, really. Girls like Carole got the man with the name on the door, and Ruby got to clean up after them. It was bad enough to get stuck with a thankless task, but what really got to Ruby were the bigger questions. Such as: What if happiness depended on making other people miserable—on robbing them of their happiness? That was what Carole had done. Her mother was a wreck, but mothers were like that: they turned on the waterworks whenever life (yours) didn’t go according to plan (theirs). Ruby knew that story, cover to cover. But what about Mr. Musgrove’s wife, who had to be honest-to-God miserable? Ruined, even, and all so Carole could be happy. But maybe Carole didn’t care. Maybe she was just selfish. Or maybe she told herself—because Mr. Musgrove had told her first—that the Musgroves had a bad marriage and his wife was sick of him and there would be no hard feelings if he left. Ruby couldn’t imagine anyone falling for a line like that, one that made it all so easy. The desperate business of wanting what you did not have was never easy.
WHEN LILLY ARRIVED for her appointment, she did not find Mr. Musgrove’s quiet, moonfaced secretary, but instead a dark-haired girl in jeweled cat’s-eye glasses surrounded on all sides by stacks of jacketed files.
“Pardon me,” Lilly said. “I am looking for Mr. Musgrove.”
“Join the club,” Ruby said. She had spent the past hour trying to square receipts with Mr. Musgrove’s comings and goings. “Mr. Musgrove isn’t here anymore.”
“But I have an appointment,” Lilly said. A leather-bound calendar was on the edge of the desk, atop one of the piles. “The other girl should have written it down.”
There was a lot that Carole Turner should have written down, but for the benefit of her visitor, Ruby flopped open the cover to the current week. Every box was blank, which should have been a tip-off, if anyone had been paying attention. The previous week wasn’t much better: Carole’s loopy scrawl indicated the odd meeting or lunch, and at the end of the column for Friday she had written !!!! in red ink. This had made her private-secretary material?
Ruby snapped the cover shut. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but there’s no appointment, and no Mr. Musgrove.”
“But where is he?”
“We’ve got a pool going on that. The smart money says Reno, but it could be Mexico, for all I know.”
“Mexico?” Lilly tried to absorb what this meant. The girl might as well have said that Mr. Musgrove had gone to the moon.
“Yes, Mex-ee-ko. It’s a country, just below America.”
Lilly was losing patience with this girl and her join-the-club, her smart-money, her Mex-ee-ko. Two weeks ago, Mr. Musgrove had promised they would get things fixed. “You just have to know the right people,” he had told her. But now everything was unraveling because she couldn’t make this girl understand.
“I know where Mexico is,” Lilly said, “but why is Mr. Musgrove there?” She took a deep breath, an effort to steady herself, but it came back out in a series of short, ragged bursts. “Mr. Musgrove,” she said, trying to take it slow, “brought me to New York, for the Foundation. I am from Prague—you know Prague? You know Czechoslovakia?”
Ruby wrinkled her nose. Did she know Czechoslovakia? Wasn’t her brother talking about it all the time, him and his City College friends? When they weren’t ransacking the icebox at the Kadetskys’ apartment in Astoria, they yammered on and on about the Czechs and Hitler and the Bund and Lindbergh. In the college’s Great Hall, her brother and his friends had already started draping black sheets over the flags of nations that had fallen to fascism: first Germany, then Austria, Czechoslovakia…
A panic was blooming in Lilly’s chest. When the girl didn’t reply, her words came in gasps. “Check-oh-slo-wa-key-ah,” she said. “Yes? And soon my visa expires, and I must go back. But this is impossible. And he—Mr. Musgrove—he told me he was going to help me. If Mr. Musgrove is not here, then how is he going to help me?”