Weep for Me (2 page)

A man named Merton wanted his balance checked. I phoned upstairs. The M’s. That would be the tart-voiced old lady named Hotchkiss.

“Yes?” a low, soft voice said.

“Current balance on Merton, Lawrence T.”

“One moment, please.” Definitely not Old Lady Hotchkiss. This was a nice girl-voice. It seemed to go with the day. It made me feelgood.

She gave me the figure.

“Thanks,” I said. “Who is this, please?”

“Miss Rudolph,” the soft voice said. “Emily Rudolph.”

“Well?” Mr. Merton said impatiently.

“Sorry, sir.” I scribbled his balance on a slip of paper, shoved it under the grille to him. That’s the rule. It’s more private and there are fewer chances for misunderstanding. He grunted with that satisfaction which indicated
the balance was higher than he had figured it, and walked away.

For nearly a half hour I was rushed. They come in droves sometimes. Sam Grinter, on my left, and Paul Raddmann, on my right, were working at the same top speed. When you first go “out front” you’re scared to death to work fast, because you are afraid of mistakes. I’d had three years behind the teller window. Kyle Cameron, teller number six at the First Citizens’ National Bank of Thrace, New York. When at last Tom Nairn, chief teller, gave me the nod for the lunch break, I was glad to put the little “Closed” plaque across the slot. I dropped the cash bin into the drawer, locked up, took my drawer key back, and hung it on the board behind O’Day, the vault guard.

I went back to my locker and took out the lunch I picked up every morning at the little corner restaurant near my so-called efficiency apartment. I bounced it in my hand a couple of times. I knew exactly what was in it. Jo Anne and I were saving money as fast as we could. Bringing a lunch to the bank from my breakfast spot was one way to do it. Ever since I first saw Jo Anne in History III at Thrace High, it had been one of those things with us. Jo and Kyle. Understood. Patent pending.

After business school I was drafted. That was in ’43, when I was twenty. After two and a half years as a company clerk, I was discharged at Dix, came back to Thrace, and joined the 52-20 Club while I looked around. My father had married again, after my mother died, while I was in Thrace High, and the house was full of little kids. Only three, but they seemed like a dozen. As soon as I landed a job in the bank, I moved to the little apartment. After nearly three years in the bank they made me a teller.

Now Jo Anne and I had enough in the bank so it looked as though we could be married in late July or August, depending on when we could arrange simultaneous summer vacations. Jo Anne was living with her folks and running an IBM key punch for the Thrace Insurance and Casualty Company.

Everything is all set in your life. A pretty little girl who loves you. A job where they like you. Money in the bank.
You’re twenty-nine and you’ve got your health. You wear glasses behind the window and when you read, and your brown hair isn’t receding much at the temples, and you’ve got one of those standard issue faces. Jo Anne tells you you’re handsome, but the mirror says you are just a guy with normal features in all the normal places.

So you stand, bouncing the tired lunch in your hand, and it is sort of a turning point. You can sit down on the bench and open the lunch and eat it. And go back to work. Then you marry Jo Anne, and have three kids, and carry too much insurance, and fight your way through the joy and misery of a normal, contented marriage. You can stand on your flat feet behind the teller’s window until they promote you or retire you. If you get all the right breaks, maybe you and Jo Anne can one day retire to a little house in St. Pete, and remember the grandchildren’s birthdays and play a hot game of shuffleboard.

Or you can do like I did. You can go out into the festive colors of a day in June and drop the lunch into one of those orange trash cans with a lid that swings when you push against it. You can hear the lunch thud among the papers, and wonder why a little gesture like that gives you a big sense of freedom and relief.

I stood on a corner and looked into my wallet. Two bucks. My friends who don’t work in banks get the idea that because a guy handles money all day, he’ll get a sort of contemptuous feeling toward his own cash. It isn’t that way at all. It’s as if there are two kinds of money—bank money and your money. Almost as though the bank money were printed in a different color ink.

It wasn’t that I wanted a fancy meal, anyway. I just wanted to be out in the sun, out where life was going on. So I had a quick sandwich in a drugstore, and did some walking. I watched the girls in their light dresses. I thought about the voice of Emily Rudolph. The office girls were on their lunch hour. Office girls and store clerks, swinging their trim little hips, belts snug around slender waists, breasts high and sharp against their summer dresses.

I knew that it was a good thing that Jo Anne and I were going to be married soon. Way back in high school we had
decided that we wouldn’t do it until we were married. We figured that if we did, it would spoil the marriage. Probably most, kids who are serious about each other say that. Then each time they’re together they go a little further and a little further until one night in the back of a car, or out on a blanket someplace, they slip and slip good.

On the last date Jo Anne and I had before I left for the Army, we almost slipped. I can remember her tortured face, the moon shining on it, the way she rolled her head from side to side, saying, “No, no, no, no,” in a tiny monotone. And we didn’t. We left the car and walked down the country road for what must have been three miles. We didn’t talk much. We agreed that when I came back we wouldn’t put ourselves in that kind of spot again. And in the six years that I had been back, we hadn’t. When they had shipped our outfit to England, I had been, except for an experimental episode of childhood in a piano box with a neighbor girl, virginal. I had a girl in England, and later one in Brussels. I didn’t tell Jo Anne about them. There didn’t seem to be much point in hurting her that way.

And ever since my discharge, I’d been faithful to Jo Anne. If you go at it right, it isn’t too tough. There are plenty of nights when you can’t get to sleep. But I had a membership at the Thrace A.C., and a good rough workout can lower the blood pressure. Incidentally, it also keeps you in pretty good shape. But the average guy is not meant to live like a monk. And it was June and I walked among the shop girls on their lunch hour, feeling seven feet tall, and holding my arms so rigid that my shoulders ached.

I was ten minutes late getting back to my window, and Tom Nairn gave me a cold eye. Paul Raddmann, on my right, said, “About time, Junior.”

I unlocked, set up for business, and opened the window by taking away the plaque. When I hit a lull, I moved over to the wire grille that separated me from Sam Grinter and said, “Understand there’s a new gal upstairs. Seen her?”

Sam rolled his eyes ceilingward and said, “Woof! Or maybe grrr. Where have you been? She’s been up there nearly a week.”

“Fine friends I’ve got!”

“Man, you’re in the husband category, practically. You don’t want to meet any new talent.”

I told him to kindly go to hell, then smiled in my best bank-teller way at a lady approaching my window. I hoped her last name began with M and she wanted her balance checked. No luck.

At three o’clock Dwyer, one of the two floor guards, locked the doors, stood nearby, and let the last few customers out. I checked the slips and entries against cash and came out on the button. I made up the vault bundle, filled out my change requests, and beckoned to Tom Nairn. He initialed the close-out and went with me into the vault as I carried my drawer in. Adams was waiting with his key, and we slid the drawer into the vault recess, each using our keys simultaneously to lock it in.

I’d worked a lot faster than usual. I was the second teller to finish up. I could tell by the wrinkles on Sam Grinter’s forehead that he had a foul-up. He might find it any minute, or, if it was one of those stubborn double errors, he might be there until late. That makes you unpopular with the guards. They have to stick in full force until at last Adams and Nairn set the time on the big vault.

I stood for a moment, undecided. It was another decision like the one about the lunch, and seemed to be related to the decision about the lunch. I went back through the mortgage department and up the stairs. As soon as a teller is checked out he can leave. The girls have to stay until five or later. And it was twenty after four when I went up. The checking-account cards are divided alphabetically among the checking-account girls. M is a big enough block to take up the full time of one girl. She does all the posting on the accounts, makes up the statements, that sort of thing.

Old Hotchkiss had been with the bank so long she had worked her desk over to a favored spot by a window. No new girl would rate that, so I had to look along the office and pick out a new face. The tabulating machines and adding machines were making a heavy roar. I saw a dark head bent over a stack of checks. She was turning them
over, one at a time, with her left hand, while the fingers of her right hand danced on the keys of a small adding machine. I couldn’t tell much from that distance. Just a dark-haired girl in a navy blouse with a wide white collar. I received the impression of slimness. I could think of no reasonable excuse to go over, except merely to introduce myself as a fellow employee, as the guy who asked her to check Merton’s balance.

Mr. Limebright, the fussy narrow-headed little man who keeps the girls in line and checks their work, was giving me annoyed glances. I moved over to the drinking fountain, tramped on the pedal. Emily Rudolph finished the stack of checks. She totaled the addition, ripped the tape off the machine, wound the tape around the checks, and put a big clip on the bundle. Only then did she lift her head. Her face was very unusual. You could not say she was beautiful. Dark hair framed a face of extreme, almost chalky pallor. Her dark eyes were set very wide apart, with the upper lids so heavy as to give them a tilted look. The nose was small, childish, tilted. Her mouth was deep and vivid red. If Myrna Loy had a Chinese daughter …

She stood up and came down the aisle toward me, carrying the bundle of checks. Her skirt was navy blue also, and she wore dark, low-heeled shoes. No jewelry. No make-up except the lipstick. She walked toeing in slightly, her shoulders well back, head high. She did not swing her arms. All the movement of walking was from the waist down. She turned left by the water fountain, never glancing at me, leaving behind her a faint spicy odor that made me think of the Orient. I watched her as she pulled open the bottom drawer of one of the fireproof lock files. She balanced easily, sitting on her heels, as she searched for the proper folder. The blue skirt was pulled tight across her hips and flanks. Even in that position, there was a concavity about the small of her back, a line that gave her hips a sauciness.

Limebright was still giving me those darting glances, but I decided to ignore him. As she came back from the file, I said, “Miss Rudolph?”

She stopped at once. “Yes?” she said in that low tone.

“I’m Kyle Cameron. Teller. I … talked with you on the phone today.”

“Yes?” She was giving me no break at all. Her irises were of a brown so deep that they looked black. She was studying me, and the only way I can describe it was that it was a
dark
look. A look of deep and mocking awareness. Awareness of herself, and a perfect understanding of just what I was. She had the rare ability to stand perfectly and absolutely still. She was slim, as I had seen at first, but sinuously slim, as though the bones were very tiny, buried very deeply under the delicate webs of muscle, the intricate patterning of flesh.

“I just wanted to see what was on the other end of the line.”

Limebright came pattering up. “
Mr.
Cameron. I must insist that you take up with me any question regarding work on this floor.”

She smiled at Limebright. Her mouth turned up just a bit at the corners. She gave the impression that she never smiled more than that, never laughed aloud. “It was my fault. I stopped to ask Mr. Cameron if he could understand me easily over the phone today. Some think my voice too low.” She moved around Limebright, said softly, “Excuse me,” and went back to her desk.

“How is she working out?” I asked Limebright. We were both watching her walk away from us.

“Exceptional girl. Fast, accurate, quiet. Hard to believe that she never worked in a bank before.”

“Not a local girl, eh?”

He squinted up into my face. “Did you come up here with anything special in mind, Cameron?”

“It’s all taken care of,” I said blandly.

As I reached the door, I looked back. Emily Rudolph was sitting absolutely still at her desk. Our eyes met across the roar and bustle of the room. All I could see was her pale face with its vivid mouth. I seemed to watch her in utter silence. Again I felt that awareness. I didn’t know whether she was twenty or thirty-five. She was a truly ageless woman. But I knew that she was, in some odd way, the physical projection of my restlessness on that June day.

I went down and put my hat back on. Bankers wear hats. Grinter was still sweating it out. I went out the side door and looked across the street. There was a soda fountain there. Through the window I could see the end stool. It was empty. If I took that stool, I could see Emily Rudolph come out. I could pretend it was an accident when I met her on the street. And suddenly the very intensity of my desire to know more about her frightened me. I turned on my heel and walked the five blocks to my apartment. It was Wednesday. Wednesdays and Sundays I had dinner with Jo Anne and her folks. They liked me to be on time. I showered and changed and caught a Number 7 bus out to the familiar Clark Street corner.

I
walked up the four wooden steps onto Jo Anne’s porch. The front door was open and I rapped on the screen at almost exactly five-thirty.

Mrs. Lane called from the kitchen, “That you, Kyle? Come right in.”

I went on into the living room. Ed Lane, Jo Anne’s father, was reading the evening paper. He’s a little round bald-headed guy who works for the railroad, doing something or other in the traffic division.