Dr. Berry led him then into the drawing-room where his mother’s bed was placed near the window. She lay in it, frail and beautiful, her soft hair about her face.
“Well, here’s your new nurse, Mrs. Foster.”
Branny moved to his mother’s bedside and took the slender hand that she held out to him. They looked long into each other’s eyes like lovers.
“Branny,” she breathed. “Oh, Branny, darling...”
After the doctor had left, they stayed there, fingers intertwined. There was a faint fall of snow outside the windows and through an open door Branny could see his own bed in the little room that had been prepared for him. There was even a fire.
Soon Aunt Hilda came in, carrying a tea tray with two cups only. There was a boiled egg for Branny and muffins to be toasted.
“Now, Nurse Branson,” she said, “I’m going to leave you to take care of your patient.”
Branny felt his heart would burst with joy.
Thomas Walsh
The Good Prospect
In which Thomas Walsh tells two stories at the same time: what happened to Joe Nolan, and what happened when Detective McCann investigated what happened to Joe Nolan. The intertwining, dovetailing, and meshing are beautifully executed in a tour de force of technique...
McCann should have passed the buck with this girl whose name was Elizabeth Nolan, who was thin and tired-looking and too worried to be pretty, who faced him across the table and spoke in a low voice, her dark eyes fixed on him, her breathing unsteady despite the way she fought to control it. McCann should have used his head; he should have told her that the precinct house was no place to come with her story. Missing Persons, downtown, handled those jobs. This one, this husband of hers who hadn’t come home last night — well, there wasn’t anything mysterious about him, or his reasons, or his absence. He’d married her, yes. And then he’d lost his job, and there was a baby on the way, and things got so tough this one just ducked out. That happened — oh, a hundred times a year — and there wasn’t a thing in the world McCann could do about it. Not a thing.
But McCann didn’t tell her those things, of course; he couldn’t, maybe, because she reminded him of his own Edie, and maybe because twenty years on the Force hadn’t hardened his heart.
She had a picture — a small snapshot — and as McCann looked at it she tried to supplement the photo haltingly. Joe Nolan was twenty-four, five feet ten, a hundred and forty-five pounds. He had dark hair and eyes, no distinguishing marks. He was, or three months before he had been, an accountant. Then he’d lost his job, and he hadn’t been able to find another, not in that line. He’d tried, of course, but in the end he had answered an ad in the paper. Jarrett & Sons wanted salesmen; it was May, and soon people would be buying electric refrigerators.
Joe Nolan didn’t believe everything in the ad, of course. He thought he might, with luck, sell two refrigerators a week. That didn’t seem very difficult at first, because everybody at Jarrett’s was very nice, and they even had a school to train men who had no experience. There was no salary; but every refrigerator he sold would give him a straight ten per cent commission. Two would mean something close to forty a week.
“And there’ll be more some weeks,” Elizabeth told him, very surely. “People like you, Joe. You get on well with them. I know you’re going to make out fine...”
Joe thought so too, before doors began to close against him, before people said, “No, no,” and slammed them without even listening to what he had to say: before little white cards, stuck up neatly over the bell, said salesmen or canvassers needn’t ring, before Joe knew what he was up against. There were eight men in Joe’s crew, and that first month there were only two refrigerators sold. Neither of them was credited to him.
But the beginning was, their crew manager insisted, the most difficult time. He was a short, jolly little man, named Russell, and he never lost heart.
That was fine until Joe came home, alone, at night. Elizabeth always came out to the landing after he rang, and leaned over the railing, so that he could see her face dimly against the high shadows that hovered in the stairwell above her. He knew what she came out for, although she never asked; after he’d climbed up the stairs and kissed her he’d be very cheerful about some new prospects, about people who were going to buy, next week, next month. Most of the time he had no prospects; and when he contacted the Cramers, when they got interested, he didn’t say a word about them, because it seemed almost too good to be true, and because he didn’t want Elizabeth to know a thing about it until he had the papers signed and the deposit in his pocket. It was, till then, to be a secret.
McCann turned in the information he had to the Missing Persons Bureau that morning; and then, since he didn’t have much to do, since the pinched face of Elizabeth Nolan, so like his oldest, his Edie, if she were worried and alone, plagued him, he stopped in at Jarrett’s, though he was sure it wasn’t going to do him any good. The crew had just returned from canvassing; they were in the basement, in the employees’ quarters, listening to a brisk and hearty little man named Russell, who was giving them what sounded to McCann like a pep talk. He wasn’t greatly concerned over Joe Nolan, for he knew fellows like that were drifters. They came and went. They never got anywhere. Eying the crew, Mr. Russell said he had a good idea why Joe Nolan hadn’t come to work that morning. Probably he just lay down and quit, like a yellow dog.
McCann didn’t like this Russell much; he didn’t tell him that Joe Nolan hadn’t been home either. “Keep your lip buttoned, mister,” he said, “or someday someone might button it for you.”
The hospitals and the morgue were out too, he discovered later that afternoon. Nobody resembling Joe Nolan had been in an accident, or taken to either place, and that, McCann thought, was all he could be expected to do for her. It was up to the Missing Persons Bureau now, and when he stopped in to see Elizabeth Nolan later that afternoon he meant it to be only for a moment.
The chances were, he said, that everything was going to be all right. But a little thing sometimes gave them a lead; and if she could think of anything unusual he’d done, any remark he’d made, it might help them. If they had money in the bank, and he’d taken that—
He hadn’t. She got the bankbook from the bureau drawer, and showed it to McCann, without seeming to understand what he meant by the remark. Their one room and kitchenette faced east; it was shadowed now and hot, its windows looking out over backyards and clothes-lines.
Across from him, on a couch that at night must be their bed, Elizabeth Nolan folded a letter over and over in her slim fingers. It had come that afternoon, addressed to Joe, from his old firm; and she had opened it because she was afraid, because she hoped it — Her lips quivered wordlessly.
Muttering something, McCann took it from her hand. Four or five typewritten lines were all it contained, and as he read them he cleared his throat, for he could see easily how this would make her feel — now, when Joe had not been home. Due, it said, to the improvement in business conditions, they were able to take on their old employees again. Mr. Nolan’s former job was waiting for him, at the same salary; he could report in Monday morning, at nine sharp.
McCann tried to change the look on her face by questioning her gently again. But she could recall nothing, save that once or twice he’d been — queer, teasing her about a secret that he couldn’t tell to anyone, not yet. In the quiet room, desperately, she forced herself to remember.