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

“All of a sudden I didn’t see her anymore,” I tried to explain. “She dropped out of sight, and I couldn’t find out why. Nobody told me.”

“I could’a’ told you,” he said. “Why di’ntya come to me?”

“Well, what is it?” I urged. “What?”

“She was picked up,” he said flatly.

I didn’t understand at first; I thought he meant a flirtatious pickup, by some stranger on the street.

“Picked up by some fellow? She wasn’t that kind. I know her too well.”

“I don’t mean picked up by some fellow. Picked up by the cops. She was taken in.”

I felt as though one of his best punches had hit me squarely between the eyes. All I could see for a minute were swirls in front of them. Like a pair of those disks with alternate black and white circular lines that keep spinning into a common center, but they never come to an end, they always keep right on coming.

“For what?” I managed to get out when they’d finally thinned somewhat and started to fade away. “What for?”

I guess he could see by my face the kind of effect he had had on me; it seemed to make him feel regretful that he’d told me. “Don’t take it like that,” he said contritely. “I wounna told you, if I knew it was going to get you like that.”

“But why?” was all I kept saying, tearful without any tears, querulous, resentful, all those things at once. “What’d she do? They can’t just come along like that and haul anybody in they want to.”

He didn’t stop to argue that with me; evidently he felt the facts did it for him. “You know the old lady she worked for part-time, the rich old lady on West End Avenue—? She ever tell you about her?”

“Yeah, I knew she worked for her,” I said marginally.

“The old lady put in a complaint about her to the cops. She called them up and told them there was an expensive fur coat missing out of her closet, and she accused Vera of swiping it. So they went over there to Vera’s place, looking for it, at eight o’clock in the morning. She was still in bed, but they found it folded up underneath her mattress.”

“She had one she was paying for on time—” I tried to say in her defense.

“Na,” he said juridically. “The old lady identified it, it had the same labels on it.”

“Then what’d they do?” I faltered, sickish in the throat with backed-up salty fluid.

“They made her get dressed, and they took her with them. She claimed she just borrowed it to wear for one night, and was going to bring it right back the next day. The trouble was she couldn’t prove that, because they caught up with her too quick and she still had it in the room with her when they got there.”

An excruciating little mental image crossed my mind, of her coming out the street-doorway of her house, that same doorway where she hadn’t wanted the neighbors to see her “all dressed up,” but now with two men alongside her, people looking on from windows and from the steps, holding her head down, and with tears probably, tears almost certainly, gliding down her shame-flushed face.

“But if the old lady got her coat back, why didn’t she just let her go?” I wailed querulously.

“She wanted to teach her a lesson, I guess. She said she’d been very good to Vera, and Vera had repaid her by stealing from her behind her back.” And he interpolated sagely: “You know, them old ladies can be very mean sometimes, especially when it comes to losing something like a fur coat.”

“I know,” I assented mournfully. To both of us, I suppose, a woman of forty would have been what we considered an old lady.

“She was sore, and she wouldn’t drop the charges. They brung Vera up before a magistrate — I doanno if it was in juvenile court or where, but I guess it was there, because she’s still a minor — and he committed her to a reformatory for six months. She’s up there now, at some farm they got upstate.”

And he added, quite unnecessarily, “That’s why you haven’t seen her around anymore.”

After a wordless pause of several moments, I started to move away from him.

“Hey, come back here,” he said. “Come back here.” He was trying to be sympathetic, consolatory, in a gruff sort of way, which was the only way he knew how.

I kept on going, drifting away from him.

Then he tried to come after me and rejoin me. I didn’t see him because I didn’t turn to look, but I knew he was, because I could tell by the sound of his feet, coming along behind me. I motioned to him with a backward pass of my hand to leave me alone, to go on off.

I didn’t want him to see my face.

I felt like a dog that’s just had its paw stepped on real hard, and it goes limping off on three feet and is leery of everyone, doesn’t want anyone to come near it for a while. The only thing I didn’t do was whimper like one.

All the winter long I’d pass there now and then, and every time I passed I’d seem to see her standing there in the doorway. Just the way I’d seen her standing sometimes when we’d met by her door instead of at the park bench.