Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories of Shirley Jackson (44 page)

As he started to move away, Arthur Adams, breaking from his dumbfounded stare, said, “But see here, mister, you
can’t
do this. Why—how do you know—I mean,
we
don’t even know—I mean, how do you know we won’t just take the money and not do what you said?”

“You’ve taken the money,” Mr. Johnson said. “You don’t have to follow any of my suggestions. You may know something you prefer to do—perhaps a museum, or something.”

“But suppose I just run away with it and leave her here?”

“I know you won’t,” said Mr. Johnson gently, “because you remembered to ask
me
that. Goodbye,” he added, and went on.

As he stepped up the street, conscious of the sun on his head and his good shoes, he heard from somewhere behind him the young man saying, “Look, you know you don’t
have
to if you don’t want to,” and the girl saying, “But unless
you
don’t want to…” Mr. Johnson smiled to himself and then thought that he had better hurry along; when he wanted to he could move very quickly, and before the young woman had gotten around to saying, “Well, I will if
you
will,” Mr. Johnson was several blocks away and had already stopped twice, once to help a lady lift several large packages into a taxi, and once to hand a peanut to a sea gull. By this time he was in an area of large stores and many more people, and he was buffeted constantly from either side by people hurrying and cross and late and sullen. Once he offered a peanut to a man who asked him for a dime, and once he offered a peanut to a bus driver who had stopped his bus at an intersection and had opened the window next to his seat and put out his head as though longing for fresh air and the comparative quiet of the traffic. The man wanting a dime took the peanut because Mr. Johnson had wrapped a dollar bill around it, but the bus driver took the peanut and asked ironically, “You want a transfer, Jack?”

On a busy corner Mr. Johnson encountered two young people—for one minute he thought they might be Mildred Kent and Arthur Adams—who were eagerly scanning a newspaper, their backs pressed against a storefront to avoid the people passing, their heads bent together. Mr. Johnson, whose curiosity was insatiable, leaned onto the storefront next to them and peeked over the man’s shoulder; they were scanning the Apartments Vacant columns.

Mr. Johnson remembered the street where the woman and her little boy were going to Vermont and he tapped the man on the shoulder and said amiably, “Try down on West Seventeen. About the middle of the block, people moved out this morning.”

“Say, what do you—” said the man, and then, seeing Mr. Johnson clearly, “Well, thanks. Where did you say?”

“West Seventeen,” said Mr. Johnson. “About the middle of the block.” He smiled again and said, “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” said the man.

“Thanks,” said the girl as they moved off.

“Goodbye,” said Mr. Johnson.

He lunched alone in a pleasant restaurant, where the food was rich, and only Mr. Johnson’s excellent digestion could encompass two of their whipped-cream-and-chocolate-and-rum-cake pastries for dessert. He had three cups of coffee, tipped the waiter largely, and went out into the street again into the wonderful sunlight, his shoes still comfortable and fresh on his feet. Outside he found a beggar staring into the windows of the restaurant he had left and, carefully looking through the money in his pocket, Mr. Johnson approached the beggar and pressed some coins and a couple of bills into his hand. “It’s the price of the veal cutlet lunch plus tip,” said Mr. Johnson. “Goodbye.”

After his lunch he rested; he walked into the nearest park and fed peanuts to the pigeons. It was late afternoon by the time he was ready to start back downtown, and he had refereed two checker games, and watched a small boy and girl whose mother had fallen asleep and awakened with surprise and fear that turned to amusement when she saw Mr. Johnson. He had given away almost all of his candy, and had fed all the rest of his peanuts to the pigeons, and it was time to go home. Although the late afternoon sun was pleasant, and his shoes were still entirely comfortable, he decided to take a taxi downtown.

He had a difficult time catching a taxi, because he gave up the first three or four empty ones to people who seemed to need them more; finally, however, he stood alone on the corner and—almost like netting a frisky fish—he hailed desperately until he succeeded in catching a cab that had been proceeding with haste uptown, and seemed to draw in toward Mr. Johnson against its own will.

“Mister,” the cabdriver said as Mr. Johnson climbed in, “I figured you was an omen, like. I wasn’t going to pick you up at all.”

“Kind of you,” said Mr. Johnson ambiguously.

“If I’d of let you go it would of cost me ten bucks,” said the driver.

“Really?” said Mr. Johnson.

“Yeah,” said the driver. “Guy just got out of the cab, he turned around and give me ten bucks, said take this and bet it in a hurry on a horse named Vulcan, right away.”

“Vulcan?” said Mr. Johnson, horrified. “A fire sign on a Wednesday?”

“What?” said the driver. “Anyway, I said to myself, if I got no fare between here and there I’d bet the ten, but if anyone looked like they needed a cab I’d take it as an omen and I’d take the ten home to the wife.”

“You were very right,” said Mr. Johnson heartily. “This is Wednesday, you would have lost your money. Monday, yes, or even Saturday. But never never never a fire sign on a Wednesday. Sunday would have been good, now.”

“Vulcan don’t run on Sunday,” said the driver.

“You wait till another day,” said Mr. Johnson. “Down this street, please, driver. I’ll get off on the next corner.”

“He
told
me Vulcan, though,” said the driver.

“I’ll tell you,” said Mr. Johnson, hesitating with the door of the cab half open. “You take that ten dollars and I’ll give you another ten dollars to go with it, and you go right ahead and bet that money on any Thursday on any horse that has a name indicating… let me see, Thursday… well, grain. Or any growing food.”

“Grain?” said the driver. “You mean a horse named, like, Wheat or something?”

“Certainly,” said Mr. Johnson. “Or, as a matter of fact, to make it even easier, any horse whose name includes the letters C, R, L. Perfectly simple.”

“Tall Corn?” said the driver, a light in his eye. “You mean a horse named, like, Tall Corn?”

“Absolutely,” said Mr. Johnson. “Here’s your money.”

“Tall Corn,” said the driver. “Thank
you
, mister.”

“Goodbye,” said Mr. Johnson.

He was on his own corner, and went straight up to his apartment. He let himself in and called, “Hello?” and Mrs. Johnson answered from the kitchen, “Hello, dear, aren’t you early?”

“Took a taxi home,” Mr. Johnson said. “I remembered the cheesecake, too. What’s for dinner?”

Mrs. Johnson came out of the kitchen and kissed him; she was a comfortable woman, and smiling as Mr. Johnson smiled. “Hard day?” she asked.

“Not very,” said Mr. Johnson, hanging his coat in the closet. “How about you?”

“So-so,” she said. She stood in the kitchen doorway while he settled into his easy chair and took off his good shoes and took out the paper he had bought that morning. “Here and there,” she said.

“I didn’t do so badly,” Mr. Johnson said. “Couple young people.”

“Fine,” she said. “I had a little nap this afternoon, took it easy most of the day. Went into a department store this morning and accused the woman next to me of shoplifting, and had the store detective pick her up. Sent three dogs to the pound—
you
know, the usual thing. Oh, and listen,” she added, remembering.

“What?” asked Mr. Johnson.

“Well,” she said, “I got onto a bus and asked the driver for a transfer, and when he helped someone else first I said that he was impertinent, and quarreled with him. And then I said why wasn’t he in the army, and I said it loud enough for everyone to hear, and I took his number and I turned in a complaint. Probably got him fired.”

“Fine,” said Mr. Johnson. “But you do look tired. Want to change over tomorrow?”

“I
would
like to,” she said. “I could do with a change.”

“Right,” said Mr. Johnson. “What’s for dinner?”

“Veal cutlet.”

“Had it for lunch,” said Mr. Johnson.

T
HE
M
ISSING
G
IRL

Fantasy and Science Fiction,
December 1957

S
HE WAS HUMMING, TUNELESSLY
, moving around somewhere in the room stirring things gently, and always humming. Betsy tightened her shoulders over the desk and bent her head emphatically over her book, hoping that her appearance of concentration would somehow communicate a desire for silence, but the humming went on. Debating a dramatic gesture, a wild throwing of the book to the floor, a shout of annoyance, Betsy thought as she had so often before, but you
can’t
be cross with her, you just
can’t
, and she bent farther over her book.

“Betsy?”

“Um?” Betsy, still trying to look as though she were studying, realized that she could have described every movement in the room until now.

“Listen, I’m going out.”

“Where? At this time of night?”

“I’m going out anyway. I’ve got something to do.”

“Go ahead,” Betsy said; just because one could not be cross, one need not necessarily be interested.

“See you later.”

The door slammed and Betsy, with relief and a feeling of freshness, went back to her book.

It was not, as a matter of fact, until the next night that anyone asked Betsy where her roommate had gone. Even then it was casual, and hardly provoked Betsy to thought: “You all alone tonight?” someone asked. “She out?”

“Haven’t seen her all day,” Betsy said.

The day after that, Betsy began to wonder a little, mostly because the other bed in the room had still not been slept in. The monstrous thought of going to the Camp Mother occurred to her (“Did you
hear
about Betsy? Went tearing off to old Auntie Jane to say her roommate was missing, and here all the time the poor girl was…”) and she spoke to several other people, wondering and curious, phrasing it each time as a sort of casual question; no one, it turned out, had seen her roommate since the Monday night when she had told Betsy, “See you later,” and left.

“You think I ought to go tell Old Jane?” Betsy asked someone on the third day.

“Well…” consideringly. “You know, it might mean trouble for
you
if she’s really missing.”

The Camp Mother, comfortable and tolerant and humorous, old enough to be the mother of any of the counselors, wise enough to give the strong impression of experience, listened carefully and asked, “And you say she’s been gone since Monday night? And here it is Thursday?”

“I didn’t know what to do,” Betsy explained candidly; “she could have gone home, or…”

“Or…?” said the Camp Mother.

“She said she had something to do,” Betsy said.

Old Jane pulled her phone over and asked, “What was her name again? Albert?”

“Alexander. Martha Alexander.”

“Get me the home of Martha Alexander,” Old Jane said into her phone, and from the room beyond, in the handsomely paneled building that served as the camp office and, at the other end, as kitchen, dining room, and general recreation room, Old Jane and Betsy could hear the voice of Miss Mills, Old Jane’s assistant, saying irritably, “Alexander, Alexander,” as she turned pages and opened filing drawers. “Jane?” she called out suddenly, “Martha Alexander from…?”

“New York,” Betsy said. “I
think
”

“New York,” Old Jane said into her phone.

“Righto,” Miss Mills said from the other room.

“Missing since Monday,” Old Jane reminded herself, consulting the notes she had made on her desk pad. “Said she had something to do. Picture?”

“I don’t think so,” Betsy said uncertainly. “I may have a snapshot somewhere.”

“Year?”

“Woodsprite, I
think
,” Betsy said. “I’m a woodsprite, I mean, and they usually put woodsprites in with woodsprites and goblins in with goblins and senior huntsmen in with—” She stopped as the phone on Old Jane’s desk rang and Old Jane picked it up and said briskly, “Hello? Is this Mrs. Alexander? This is Miss Nicholas calling from the Phillips Education Camp for Girls Twelve to Sixteen. Yes, that’s right…. Fine, Mrs. Alexander, and how are
you?
… Glad to hear it. Mrs. Alexander, I’m calling to check on your daughter…. Your
daughter
, Martha…. Yes, that’s right, Martha.” She raised her eyebrows at Betsy and continued. “We’re checking to make sure that she’s come home or that you know where she is… yes, where she is. She left the camp very suddenly last Monday night and neglected to sign out at the main desk and of course our responsibility for our girls requires that even if she has only gone home we must—” She stopped, and her eyes focused, suddenly, on the far wall. “She is not?” Old Jane asked. “Do you know where she is, then?… How about friends?… Is there anyone who might know?”

The camp nurse, whose name was Hilda Scarlett and who was known as Will, had no record of Martha Alexander in the camp infirmary. She sat on the other side of Old Jane’s desk, twisting her hands nervously and insisting that the only girls in the infirmary at that moment were a goblin with poison oak and a woodsprite with hysterics. “I suppose you
know
,” she told Betsy, her voice rising, “that if you had come to one of us the
minute
she
left
…”

“But I didn’t
know
” Betsy said helplessly. “I didn’t know she was gone.”

“I am afraid,” said Old Jane ponderously, turning to regard Betsy with the air of one on whom an unnecessary and unkind burden has been thrust, “I am very much afraid that we must notify the police.”

It was the first time the chief of police, a kindly family man whose name was Hook, had ever been required to visit a girls’ camp; his daughters had not gone in much for that sort of thing, and Mrs. Hook distrusted night air; it was also the first time that Chief Hook had ever been required to determine facts. He had been allowed to continue in office this long because his family was popular in town and the young men at the local bar liked him, and because his record for twenty years, of drunks locked up and petty thieves apprehended upon confession, had been immaculate. In a small town such as the one lying close to the Phillips Education Camp for Girls Twelve to Sixteen, crime is apt to take its form from the characters of the inhabitants, and a stolen dog or broken nose is about the maximum to be achieved ordinarily in the sensational line. No one doubted Chief Hook’s complete inability to cope with the disappearance of a girl from the camp.

“You say she was going somewhere?” he asked Betsy, having put out his cigar in deference to the camp nurse, and visibly afraid that his questions would sound foolish to Old Jane; since Chief Hook was accustomed to speaking around his cigar, his voice without it was malformed, almost quavering.

“She said she had something to do,” Betsy told him.

“How did she say it? As though she meant it? Or do you think she was lying?”

“She just
said
it,” said Betsy, who had reached that point of stubbornness most thirteen-year-old girls have, when it seems that adult obscurity has passed beyond necessity. “I
told
you eight times.”

Chief Hook blinked and cleared his throat. “She sound happy?” he asked.

“Very happy,” said Betsy. “She was singing all evening while I was trying to write in my Nature Book, is how I remember.”

“Singing?” said Chief Hook; it was not possible to him that a girl upon the very edge of disappearance had anything to sing about.

“Singing?” said Old Jane.

“Singing?” said Will Scarlett. “You never told
us.”

“Just sort of humming,” Betsy said.

“What tune?” said Chief Hook.

“Just
humming,”
Betsy said. “I
told
you already, just
humming
. I nearly went crazy with my Nature Book.”

“Any idea where she was going?”

“No.”

An idea came to Chief Hook. “What was she interested in?” he asked suddenly. “You know, like sports, or boys, or anything.”

“There are no boys at the Phillips Educational Camp for Girls,” Old Jane said stiffly.

“She could have been
interested
in boys, though,” Chief Hook said. “Or—like, well, books? Reading, you know? Or baseball, maybe?”

“We have not been able to find her Activity Chart,” the camp nurse said. “Betsy, what recreational activity group was she in?”

“Golly.” Betsy thought deeply, and said, “Dramatics? I think she went to Dramatics.”

“Which nature study group? Little John? Eeyore?”

“Little John,” said Betsy uncertainly. “I
think
. I’m pretty sure she was in Dramatics because I think I remember her talking about
Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil.”

“That would be Dramatics,” Old Jane said. “Surely.”

Chief Hook, who had begun to feel that this was all unnecessarily confusing, said, “What about this singing?”

“There’s singing in
Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil,”
Will Scarlett said.

“How about boys?” said Chief Hook.

Betsy thought again, remembering as well as she could the sleeping figure in the other bed, the soiled laundry on the floor, the open suitcase, the tin boxes of cookies, the towels, the face cloths, the soap, the pencils… “She had her own clock,” Betsy volunteered.

“How long have you roomed together?” Old Jane asked, and her voice was faintly sardonic, as though in deference to Chief Hook she were forced to restrain the saltier half of her remark.

“Last year and this year,” Betsy said. “I mean, we both put in for rooms at the same time and so they put us together again. I mean, most of my friends are senior huntsmen and of course I can’t room with them because they only put senior huntsmen with—”

“We know.” Old Jane was beginning to sound shrill. “Any mail?”

“I don’t know about that,” Betsy said. “I was always reading my own mail.”

“What was she wearing?” Chief Hook asked.

“I don’t know,” Betsy said. “I didn’t turn around when she left.” She looked from Chief Hook to Will Scarlett to Old Jane with a trace of impatience. “I was doing my
Nature
Book.”

A search of the room, from which Betsy abstained and which was carried on with enthusiasm by Old Jane and Will Scarlett and with some embarrassment by Chief Hook, showed that after Betsy’s possessions had been subtracted from the medley, what was left was astonishingly little. There was a typed script of
Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil
, and a poorly done painting of Echo Lake, which was part of the camp. There was a notebook, labeled, like Betsy’s, “Nature Book,” but it was unused, lacking the pressed wildflowers and blue jay feathers; there was a copy of
Gulliver’s Travels
from the camp library, which Old Jane felt might be significant. No one was able to tell certainly what she had been wearing, because the clothes in the closet were mostly Betsy’s, and jackets or overshoes left in the room by Betsy’s friends. In the drawers of the second dresser were a few scraps of underwear, a pair of heavy socks, and a red sweater which Betsy was fairly sure belonged to a woodsprite on the other side of camp.

A careful checkup of Recreational Activity lists showed that while she was listed for dramatics and nature study and swimming, her attendance at any of them was dubious; most of the counselors kept slipshod attendance records, and none of them could remember whether any such girl could have come on any given day.

“I’m almost sure I remember
her
, though,” Little John, an ardent girl of twenty-seven who wore horn-rimmed glasses and tossed her hair back from her face with a pretty gesture that somehow indicated that winters she wore it decently pinned up, told Chief Hook. “I have an awfully good memory for faces, and I think I remember her as one of Rabbit’s friends and relations. Yes, I’m sure I remember her, I have a good memory for faces.”

“Ah,” said the librarian, who was called Miss Mills when she was secretary to Old Jane, and the Snark when she was in the library, “one girl is much like another, at
this
age. Their unformed minds, their unformed bodies, their little mistakes; we, too, were young once, Captain Hook.”

“Hell,” said the muscular young woman who was known as Tarzan because she taught swimming, “did you ever look at fifty girls all in white bathing caps?”

“Elm?” said the nature study counselor, whose name was Bluebird. “I mean, wasn’t she an elm girl? Did a nice paper on blight? Or was it the other girl, Michaels? Anyway, whichever one it might have
been
, it was a nice job. Out of the ordinary for
us
, you know; remember it particularly. Hadn’t noticed either of the girls to speak of—but if she’s really gone, she might be up on Smoky Trail looking for fern; want the girls to make a special topic of fern and mushroom.” She stopped and blinked, presumably taking in a new supply of chlorophyll. “Fern,” she said. “Pays to know plenty about fern.”