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

“Thanks just the same, Rube,” she called out as she passed Ruby’s partly open door, so that there wouldn’t be any protracted hard feelings between them. Everybody got a little edgy at times, in a place like this. Especially in the afternoons, with so much time on their hands.

“That’s all right, anytime,” Ruby generously called back in answer.

Going down the stairs, she was a little worried about what it could be, and more particularly, who it could be from. She didn’t like telegrams or registered or special-delivery letters, they made her uneasy. Not that she ever got any. The only letters she ever got here came from her mother, and they came under a plain, ordinary five-cent stamp.

They’d taken the precaution of reclosing the door on the deliveryman while he was waiting for her. When she reopened it and looked out, he said: “Marie Cameron? Are you Miss Cameron?”

She liked that. She seldom heard herself called “Miss” any longer. He must be new on this route, didn’t identify the house. She flashed him a brief but friendly smile of appreciation, and forgot to be worried for a minute.

“Would you sign here, please?” he said.

First she was going to lift her knee and write across that. Then remembering how she was dressed, she turned her back and wrote holding the receipt against the doorframe.

He handed her the letter, and she immediately became uneasy again at sight of it. It wasn’t from her mother, because it was typed, but it was from Allentown, where her mother lived, she could tell that by the postmark. Up in the right-hand corner were three or four combined names, like a business-firm or a law office.

She took it inside with her and closed the door, forgetting completely in her preoccupation to give the man the two dimes she’d intended to.

She turned it this way and that, and then, seeking moral support, carried it up the stairs with her, still unopened. She called Ruby out of her room, held it up for her to see.

“I’m afraid to open this, Rube.”

“Go ahead,” Ruby encouraged her. “How you going to find out what’s in it, otherwise? You’ll never find out if you don’t open it.”

Marie went ahead and tore it open, at the same time enjoining Ruby: “Don’t go ’way. Stay here a minute. I may need you.”

When Ruby noticed the changed look on her face, she asked her: “Is it bad?”

Marie looked up at her and nodded mutely, and tears started to well up in her eyes.

“I lost Mom,” she said. “She’s dead.”

She put her head down on Ruby’s shoulder and began to cry wholeheartedly and unrestrainedly. Ruby stroked her hair awkwardly but sympathetically.

“I cried when I lost mine too,” Ruby remembered.

She took the letter from Marie’s hand and read it across her bowed shoulder.

“She left you some money,” she said.

“I didn’t get down that far,” Marie said.

“You gotta go there and get it.”

“Does it say how much?” Marie asked her. She had stopped crying temporarily, not because she was mercenary but because the new train of thought had momentarily distracted her from her grief.

“It says eight hundred, but it says you gotta pay a tax out of it.”

“I didn’t know Mom had that much,” Marie said mournfully. She cried again a little after that, and then she stopped, and didn’t cry any more from then on.

They went into Ruby’s room and sat down side by side on the edge of the bed and talked it over.

“What do you think you’ll do with it?” Ruby asked, awed.

“I know the first thing I’m going to do,” Marie said determinedly, “and that’s get out of this business.”

“They say it’s awfully hard to do that,” Ruby remarked doubtfully.

“Not if you really want to. I’ve wanted to for a long time. Two-and-a-half years is too long. Now with this money to fall back on. I can go out and hunt for a regular job. It’ll tide me over until I find something. If I don’t quit now, I never will. There isn’t any future in it,” she declared vehemently. “If you got a good job, you can keep on with it after you’re fifty, sixty even. With us, we’re through at forty, sometimes even before. Then what’s left? The gutter.”

Ruby nodded. She knew it was the truth.

As word of Marie’s imminent departure spread throughout the house, one by one its other occupants gathered in Ruby’s room, until finally the entire quota was assembled there. Even some who ordinarily weren’t chummy with the others. Rozelle, the Syrian girl with the harem-type beauty; round moon face and dark liquid eyes. And Louise, the Korean-American girl, who had come over as a soldier’s bride and then been discarded. As somebody had once remarked, “We got a regular United Nations among us.” Even Mrs. Burnside herself finally joined them. Questioned as to whether she would put any difficulties in the way of Marie’s departure, she replied: “This isn’t a jail. She’s free to go, just so long’s her bills are all paid up, and just so long’s she don’t try to compete against the house from the outside. I can always get them to send me a replacement.”