I thought I was sunk for a minute, and felt myself beginning to wobble, like a concertina left standing on end. But I went back to motioning again, with the added device of shouting through the glass and getting it all misty with my hot breath.
He finally indicated a side entrance, met me there, unlocked it, and thrust his head out.
“Mr. Plattner go home yet?” I demanded breathlessly. If he had, curtains!
“Who are you?” he said.
I gave him the name and said, “Ask him if I can come in and speak to him for a minute.”
He locked up, went away, stayed away, came back, and unlocked once more.
“We gotta be careful, these days, y’know,” he said, by way of invitation to enter.
I found Fred in his office, the whole place very solemn-looking under green-shaded lights. I’d come in like this after-hours once or twice before, but that was because we were going to have dinner together or something. And that had been the first year he had the job, not lately. But at least my barging in now wasn’t an utter innovation. “Hello, Wade,” he said, shaking hands with me across a glass desktop. “Where you been keeping yourself all these years?”
I didn’t tell him that, but instead I told him I wanted to close out my account.
“Kind of late in the day, isn’t it?” he mentioned. “Tomorrow suit you just as well?”
“I’m taking the nine-thirty train to Chicago with my bundle of happiness,” I told him, “and I haven’t a nickel in my pocket.”
“Oh, you’re taking Maxine with you?” he said interestedly.
“Maxine doesn’t spell happiness for me any more,” I told him point-blank. “Do this thing for me, will you, Fred?” And I said to myself: “If he gets moral all of a sudden and tries to talk to me like a father, I’m gonna throw the inkwell right in his eye — even if I get held up for damages!”
But he didn’t say a word, just looked at me attentively for a minute, then asked me if I had my passbook with me, and told me to write out a check for the full amount. I had the check written almost before he was through speaking, but I told him I didn’t have my passbook with me. They had a duplicate there, though, so that didn’t make much difference; he told me to mail the other one in the first chance I got. He okayed the check, and then I thought I might as well kill two birds with one stone, so I showed him the other one I’d gotten from my late firm earlier in the week, which luckily I hadn’t deposited yet over in Brooklyn as I had planned to, and he okayed that too. Then he shook hands with me, wished me a lot of luck, and said, “Let me hear from you some day, Wade.”
I went outside to the cashier’s window and cashed the two checks — the cashier still being there, fortunately, and being occupied in separating dollar bills that had gotten wrinkled from dollar bills that hadn’t gotten wrinkled, or something like that. The watchman let me out the side entrance, and I found my taxi driver pacing back and forth, aged with worry and impatience. I looked at the bank clock through the window — it was just five, to the minute. As long as I wasn’t going to meet Bernice until eight-thirty, there seemed to be no reason why I should ride all the way home in a taxi when the subway “gets you there just as quickly too.” So I paid him off and bade him Godspeed — or the modern equivalent of it, which is a fifty-cent tip.
I went over to the station next and got the tickets — which made the wad of money I’d gotten at the bank much less conspicuous to carry around with me. I glanced across to the other side of the big, vaulted place, echoing with hundreds of footsteps all at one time, and picking out a certain spot under a light, said:
“There’s where she’ll be standing three hours from now. I can see her now, so neat, so sweet, so all-around complete, with her big valise beside her on the ground and one little foot pointed out ahead of the other. Waiting for me, lucky stiff!” And I tipped my hat to the empty place against the wall and half closed my eyes for a minute, with reverence and ecstasy.
I realized there was no chance of getting at the compound-interest account I had over in Brooklyn any more; even if the bank had been open, you have to take a blood test and let yourself be fingerprinted to get money out of one of those accounts. So there was nothing left to do now but go home. I wasn’t going home because I wanted to say good-bye to Maxine — I could’ve done that over the telephone from here just as well. I was going because I wasn’t in awe of her enough to go all the way to California without my shirts and socks and handkerchiefs. And since there was still nearly three hours’ time left and nothing else to do, why not go home, take a bird’s-eye inventory of my things, and pack a grip? I got on the subway and went.
In the act of putting the key in the door, I stopped and looked down at it, held in the flat of my hand. “Last time I’ll be using it,” I said thoughtfully. “I’ll take it off the ring on my way out and leave it in the door.” I opened the door and went in.
Maxine wasn’t in yet. “The breaks!” I chuckled to myself. “I can get all my packing done calmly and systematically, without having her yell blue murder over my left shoulder all the while.”
So I dropped my hat over the telephone, stripped off my coat and vest and draped them over a chair, and rubbed my hands briskly together in token of anticipation. Then I took a minute off to turn the radio on, and as I left it, I was unconsciously mimicking the brazen noises it gave out. “Shouldn’t,” I reproved myself, and stopped. “I’m leaving her tonight.”
I went into the bedroom, and the evening sun made the walls of it look like the inside of a wicker box that has been full of crushed strawberries. I threw open all the drawers of the bureau one after the other — bang! slap! bang! — and then I pulled my valise out of the closet and opened it on the floor. I hadn’t used it since the last trip to Atlantic City, the summer before. There was still an old bathing shirt rolled up in the corner of it. I got it out of the way and flung it unceremoniously into a far comer.
Then I began to pile shirts in like one of those three-decker sandwiches, colored ones on bottom and on top and white ones in the middle, where they wouldn’t get dirty so quickly. When the shirt angle was through, my other suit came to mind — at the dry cleaner’s, two blocks away. The other suit. “Too bad,” I sighed. “Have to get a new one out there; I’m not going out after it now any more, save my strength for the trip.”
The socks I packed last, after everything else had gone in, because I knew by experience they could be rolled up in balls and wedged far down into the corners of the thing. The neckties I left out altogether, because there was no way of folding them or anything, and they kept sticking out all over like thirsty tongues each time I shut the lid down on them. So I tossed them all back where they came from. “Get new ones,” I said recklessly. “Starting a new life, so I’ll get everything new to match it!” I locked the valise at last and stood it up against the wall, where I wouldn’t trip over it. Then I pushed all the drawers back in again, and tried not to look at Maxine’s silky, fluffy things, left all to themselves now that mine were gone.
It was quarter to six by the time I was through, and she hadn’t come yet. “Wouldn’t it be just like a movie show,” I thought grimly, “if she didn’t get back on time and I had to leave her a note!”
And ridiculous, fantastic, or insane as it may sound, I found myself growing actually impatient and fretful over her lateness, as though my going away depended upon her being there to say good-bye to. “Just tonight she has to be late!” I caught myself saying with a scowl, “Every other night she’s always around here hours before I get home! I suppose she’s standing chewing the rag over the counter with the A and P manager’s wife—”