Wednesday

talked about myself for years.”

“There’s a nice bar at the corner,” he pointed out, tremendously relieved. She’d looked for a while as if she’d intended to keep on crying all day! “Let’s pop in, and I’ll have a drink. You can use the ladies’ room to fix yourself up.”

He took her arm and steered her into the place. Then he climbed onto a bar stool and had himself a double brandy.

What an experience! And what a strange, strange girl!

Of course, he shouldn’t have pushed her quite so hard on a subject about which she was evidently so sensitive. Was that his fault, though, that she was so sensitive?

Fabian considered the matter carefully, judicially, and found in his favor. No, it definitely wasn’t his fault.

But what a story! The foundling business, the appendix business, the teeth, the hair on the fingernails and tongue… And that last killer about the navel!

He’d have to think it out. And maybe he’d get some other opinions. But one thing he was sure of, as sure as of his own managerial capacities: Wednesday Gresham hadn’t been lying in any particular. Wednesday Gresham was just not the sort of a girl who made up tall stories about herself.

When she rejoined him, he urged her to have a drink. “Help you get a grip on yourself.”

She demurred, she didn’t drink very much, she said. But he insisted, and she gave in. “Just a liqueur. Anything. You order it, Mr. Balik.”

Fabian was secretly very pleased at her docility. No reprimanding, no back-biting, like most other girls— Although what in the world could she reprimand him for?

“You still look a little frayed,” he told her. “When we get back, don’t bother going to your desk. Go right in to Mr. Osborne and finish taking dictation. No point in giving the other girls something to talk about. I’ll sign in for you.”

She inclined her head submissively and continued to sip from the tiny glass.

“What was that last comment you made in the restaurant—I’m certain you don’t mind discussing it, now— about not being born, but being made? That was an odd thing to say.”

Wednesday sighed. “It isn’t my own idea. It’s Dr. Lorington’s. Years ago, when he was examining me, he said that I looked as if I’d been made—by an amateur. By someone who didn’t have all the blueprints, or didn’t understand them, or wasn’t concentrating hard enough.”

“Hm.” He stared at her, absolutely intrigued. She looked normal enough. Better than normal, in fact. And yet—

Later that afternoon, he telephoned Jim Rudd and made an appointment for right after work. Jim Rudd had been his roommate in college and was now a doctor: he would be able to tell him a little more about this.

But Jim Rudd wasn’t able to help him very much. He listened patiently to Fabian’s story about “a girl I’ve just met” and, at the end of it, leaned back in the new upholstered swivel chair and pursed his lips at his diploma, neatly framed and hung on the opposite wall.

“You sure do go in for weirdies, Fabe. For a superficially well-adjusted, well-organized guy with a real talent for the mundane things of life, you pick the damndest women I ever heard of. But that’s your business. Maybe it’s your way of adding a necessary pinch of the exotic to the grim daily round. Or maybe you’re making up for the drabness of your father’s grocery store.”

“This girl is not a weirdie,” Fabian insisted angrily. “She’s a very simple little secretary, prettier than most, but that’s about all.”

“Have it your own way. To me, she’s a weirdie. To me, there’s not a hell of a lot of difference—from your description—between her and that crazy White Russian dame you were running around with back in our junior year. You know the one I mean—what was her name?”

“Sandra? Oh, Jim, what’s the matter with you? Sandra was a bollixed-up box of dynamite who was always blowing up in my face. This kid turns pale and dies if I so much as raise my voice. Besides, I had a real puppy-love crush on Sandra; this other girl is somebody I just met, like I told you, and I don’t feel anything for her, one way or the other.”

The young doctor grinned. “So you come up to my office and have a consultation about her! Well, it’s your funeral. What do you want to know?”

“What causes all these—these physical peculiarities?”

Dr. Rudd got up and sat on the edge of his desk. “First,” he said, “whether you want to recognize it or not, she’s a highly disturbed person. The hysterics in the restaurant point to it, and the fantastic nonsense she told you about her body points to it. So right there, you have something. If only one percent of what she told you is true— and even that I would say is pretty high—it makes sense in terms of psychosomatic imbalance. Medicine doesn’t yet know quite how it works, but one thing seems certain: anyone badly mixed up mentally is going to be at least a little mixed up physically, too.”

Fabian thought about that for a while. “Jim, you don’t know what it means to those little secretaries in the pool to tell lies to the office manager! A fib or two about why they were absent the day before, yes, but not stories like this, not to me”

A shrug. “I don’t know what you look like to them: I don’t work for you, Fabe. But none of what you say would hold true for a psycho. And a psycho is what I have to consider her. Look, some of that stuff she told you is impossible, some of it has occurred in medical literature. There have been well-authenticated cases of people, for example, who have grown several sets of teeth in their lifetime. These are biological sports, one-in-a-million individuals. But the rest of it? And all the rest of it happening to one person? Please.”

“I saw some of it. I saw the hairs on her fingernails.”

“You saw something on her fingernails. It could be any one of a dozen different possibilities. I’m sure of one thing; it wasn’t hair. Right there she gave herself away as phony. Goddammit, man, hair and nails are the same organs essentially. One doesn’t grow on the other!”

“And the navel? The missing navel?”

Jim Rudd dropped to his feet and strode rapidly about the office. “I wish I knew why I’m wasting so much time with you,” he complained. “A human being without a navel, or any mammal without a navel, is as possible as an insect with a body temperature of ninety-eight degrees. It just can’t be. It does not exist.”

He seemed to get more and more upset as he considered it. He kept shaking his head negatively as he walked.

Fabian suggested: “Suppose I brought her to your office. And suppose you examined her and found no navel. Now just consider that for a moment. What would you say then?”

“I’d say plastic surgery,” the doctor said instantly. “Mind you, I’m positive she’d never submit to such an examination, but if she did, and there was no navel, plastic surgery would be the only answer.”

“Why would anyone want to do plastic surgery on a navel?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t the vaguest idea. Maybe an accident. Maybe a disfiguring birthmark in that place. But there will be scars, let me tell you. She had to be born with a navel”

Rudd went back to his desk. He picked up a prescription pad. “Let me give you the name of a good psychiatrist, Fabe. I’ve thought ever since that Sandra business that you’ve had some personal problems that might get out of hand one day. This man is one of the finest—”

Fabian left.

She was obviously in a flutter when he called to pick her up that night, so much more of a flutter than a date-with-the-boss would account for, that Fabian was puzzled. But he waited and gave her an ostentatious and expensive good time. Afterward, after dinner and after the theater, when they were sitting in the corner of a small night club over their drinks, he asked her about it.

“You don’t date much, do you, Wednesday?”

“No, I don’t, Mr. Balik—I mean, Fabian,” she said, smiling shyly as she remembered the first-name privilege she had been accorded for the evening. “I usually just go out with girl friends, not with men. I usually turn down dates.”

“Why? You’re not going to find a husband that way. You want to get married, don’t you?”