A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

She got on a bus finally, at random, and let it take her on its hairpin crosstown route, first west along Seventy-second, then east along Fifty-seventh. Then when it reached Fifth and doubled back north to start the whole thing over, she got off and strolled a few blocks down the other way until suddenly the fountain and flower-borders of Rockefeller Center opened out alongside her. She knew then that was where she had wanted to come all along, and wondered why she hadn’t thought of it in the first place.

It was like a little oasis, a breathing-spell, in the rush of the city, and yet it was lively, it wasn’t lonely in the way the park would have been. It was filled with a brightly dressed luncheonbreak crowd, so thick they almost seemed to swarm like bees, and yet in spite of that it was restful, it was almost lulling.

She went back toward the private street that cuts across behind it, which for some highly technical reason is closed to traffic one day in each year in order to maintain its non-public status, and sat on the edge of the sun-warmed coping that runs around the sunken plaza, as dozens of others were doing. She’d come here once or twice in the winter to watch them ice-skate below, but now the ice was gone and they were lunching at tables down there, under vivid garden-umbrellas. Above, a long line of national flags stirred shyly in a breeze mellow as warm golden honey. She tried to make out what countries some of them belonged to, but she was sure of only two, the Union Jack and the Tricolor. The rest were strange to her, there were so many new countries in the world today.

And in every one of them perhaps, at this very moment, there was some girl like herself, contemplating doing what she was contemplating doing. In Paris, and in London, yes and even in Tokyo. Loneliness is all the same, the world over.

Her handbag was plastic, and not a very good plastic at that, apparently. The direct sunlight began to heat it up to a point where it became uncomfortable to keep her hand on it and she could even feel it against her thigh through the thin summer dress she had on. She put it down on the coping alongside of her. Or rather a little to the rear, since she was sitting slightly on the bias in order to be able to take in the scene below her. Then later, in unconsciously shifting still further around, she turned her back on it altogether, without noticing.

Some time after that she heard a curt shout of remonstrance somewhere behind her. She turned to look, as did everyone else. A man who up to that point seemed to have been striding along rather more rapidly than those around him now broke into a fleet run. A second man sprang up from where he’d been sitting on the coping, about three or four persons to the rear of her, and shot after him. In a moment, as people stopped and turned to look, the view became obstructed and they both disappeared from sight.

It was only then she discovered her handbag to be missing.

While she was standing there trying to decide what to do about it, they both came back toward her again. One of them, the one who had given chase, was holding her handbag under one arm and was holding the second man by the scruff of the coat-collar with the other. What made this more feasible than it might otherwise have been was that the captive was offering only a token resistance, handicapped perhaps by his own guilty conscience.

“Whattaya trying to do? Take your hands off. Who do you think you are?” he was jabbering with offended virtue as they came to a halt in front of Laurel.

“Is this yours?” the rescuer asked, showing her the handbag.

“Yes, it is,” she said, taking it from him.

“You should be more careful,” he said in protective reproof. “Putting it down like that is an open invitation for someone to come along and make off with it.”

The nimble-fingered one was quick to take the cue. “I thought somebody had lost it,” he said artlessly. “I was only trying to find out who it belonged to, so I could give it back to them.”

“Oh, sure,” his apprehender said drily.

A policeman materialized, belying the traditional New York adage “They’re never around when you want them.” He was a young cop, and still had all his police training-school ideals intact, it appeared. Right was right and white was white, and there was nothing in-between. “Your name and address, please?” he said to Laurel, when he’d been told what had happened.

“Why?” she asked.

“You’re going to press charges against him, aren’t you?”

“No,” she demurred. “I’m not.”

His poised pencil flattened out in his hand. He looked at her, first with surprise then with stern disapproval. “He snatched your handbag, and yet you’re not going to file a complaint?”

“No,” she said quietly. “I’m not.”

“You realize,” he said severely, “you’re only encouraging people like this. If he thinks he can get away with it, he’ll only go back and do it some more. Before you know it, this city wouldn’t be worth living in.”