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

“You shouldn’t be so good-natured, lady,” another woman rebuked her from the crowd. “Believe me, if it was me, I’d teach him a lesson.”

Yes, I guess you would, thought Laurel. But then, you have a whole lifetime ahead of you to show your rancor in. I haven’t enough time left for that.

The prisoner had begun to fidget tentatively now that this unexpected reprieve had been granted him. “If the lady don’t want to make a complaint, whaddye holding me for?” he complained querulously. “You got no grounds.”

The quixotic young cop turned on him ferociously. “No? Then I’ll find some, even if I have to make it loitering!”

“How could I be loitering when I was running full steam ah—” the culprit started to say, not illogically. Then he shut up abruptly, as if realizing this admission might not altogether help his case.

“Oh, won’t somebody get me out of this, please!” she suddenly heard herself say, half in wearied sufferance, half in rebellious discontent. She didn’t want to spend the little time there was left to spend standing in the center of a root-fast, cow-eyed crowd. Above all, she didn’t want to spend it making arrangements to have some fellow-wayfarer held in a detention-cell overnight until he could be brought before a magistrate in the morning. She hadn’t meant it for anyone to hear; she’d only meant it for herself. A plea to her own particular private fortunes of the day and of the moment.

But the man who had salvaged her handbag must have caught it and thought it was meant for him. He put a hand lightly under her elbow in guidance and opened a way for her through the ever-thickening crowd.

“Sure you won’t change your mind, lady?” the cop called after her.

“I’m sure,” she said without turning her head.

Once detached from the focus of attention, they continued to walk parallel to one another along the flower-studded, humanity-studded promenade or mall that led out to the Avenue. Past and past.

“You let him off lightly,” he remarked. “Not even a lecture.”

She nodded meditatively, without answering. It’s so easy to be severe, she thought, when you’re safe and intact and sure of yourself, as you probably are. But me, I feel sorry for the whole world and everyone in it, today, even that poor cuss back there.

“I remember, in Chicago once,” he was saying, “I had my wallet lifted out of my back pocket right while I was standing in line outside the ticket-window in Union Station—”

They’d reached the Avenue. With one accord, without even a fractional hesitancy or break in stroll, they turned and continued on northward, back along the way she’d originally come. It was done as unself-consciously as though they’d known each other long and walked along here often. As naturally as though they had a common destination agreed upon beforehand.

She noticed it after a moment, but didn’t do anything to disrupt it. On any other day, she realized, she would have been alerted, taut to separate herself from him. Not today. Until he said something, or did something, that was out of order — not today. It was better to walk with somebody, than to walk with nobody at all.

“—Things like that happen in all large cities, far more than they do in smaller places. I guess the huge crowds give them better cover.”

“Aren’t you from a large city yourself?”

“We like to think of ourselves as a medium-large city, but we’re willing to admit we’re no Chicago or New York. Indianapolis.”

“Oh, where the speedway races are.”

“Our only claim to fame,” he said mournfully.

“I suppose you used to go to them regularly.”

“I never missed a year until this year, and then I couldn’t go because I was here. I saw it on t.v., but it wasn’t the same. Like a midget-race around a twenty-one-inch oblong.”

Suddenly and quite belatedly — for if she’d had any actual objections they would have manifested themselves long before now — he turned to ask: “I’m not bothering you by tagging along like this, am I? I never realized I was until this very—”

“That’s quite all right,” she said levelly. “It’s not a pick-up. And if it were, I’d be the one who did the picking.”

“Nothing of the sort,” he asserted stoutly.

That was the conventional, the expected, answer, she recognized. But in this case it also happened to be true. A pick-up was a planned selection. This had been anything but that; un planned, unsought-after, by both of them.

“Been here long?” she asked him, to get off the prickly topic.

“About six months now. I was transferred here to the Company’s New York office.”

She asked him a question out of her own melancholy experience. “Did you find it hard to adjust?”

“Very. I was king, back home. The only fellow in a houseful of women. I got the royal treatment. They spoiled me rotten.”

That, she decided, was not apparent on the surface, at least.

“My mother spoiled me because I was the only son in a family of girls. (My eldest sister’s married and lives in Japan.) My elder sister spoiled me because she looked on me as her kid brother, and the younger one looked up to me as her big brother. I couldn’t lose.”