It was not until the following week, when Celia remarked sympathetically that the vacuum was an unwieldly one, that the cleaning woman’s restraint began to slip. “It’s as old as the hills and gives me a nasty shock every now and again,” she said with a snort. “I told Mrs. Cannon we needed a new one, but you wouldn’t believe the way that woman can pinch a penny.”
“You can’t go to Mr. Tomlinson about things like that?”
Mrs. Meggs shook her unlikely brown head with emphasis. “He’s not to be bothered, she says. Bothered how? What it is, is the poor old soul can’t live forever and she’s the only relative. She and that husband of hers will get everything and sell this house. They should worry about the work of keeping it up in the meantime.” She paused reflectively, and a small, amazingly sardonic laugh escaped her. “Not that they haven’t had their worries lately, and not over new vacuum cleaners either.”
Celia was too clever to diminish her own position by prying information from a lesser employee. She commenced a shopping list with every appearance of having lost interest, and Mrs. Meggs could not stand it. Her enjoyable secret popped from her like an overripe fruit from its skin.
Mr. Tomlinson had tended to want to marry his last two housekeepers, women in their healthy and companionable fifties. (“And why not, if he wants to?” demanded Mrs. Meggs argumentatively. “He’s a lonely old thing and it’s his own business. But she won’t have it. She shuffles them off like stray cats.”)
And Mrs. Cannon had rightly reasoned that, from the vantage point of eighty-two, anyone of Celia’s age was hardly more than a child. That was why Mr. Tomlinson had remarked fretfully that she looked very young. Celia was entertained rather than resentful, and would not quarrel with whatever the motive for bringing her to Stedman Circle. It was refreshing not to have a female employer in residence, and she was somehow convinced that when she was firmly entrenched it would be pleasanter still.
She had not seen Mrs. Cannon since the day of the interview, but performed her tasks as though the black-haired young woman were watching every move. She would have done so in any case: in this—as in other matters—Celia was ruthless, and had nothing but contempt for timekilling servants. It would never have occurred to her, although far more shocking things presently would, to settle down in the kitchen with a magazine when she was theoretically dusting the downstairs rooms.
She had wondered how such a fragile old man would fill his days, and was amazed at how busy he made himself. After he came down to breakfast at nine, an apparently unvarying meal of cooked cereal, three-minute egg, toast and tea, he observed birds in the back garden and took notes; often, in consequence, he wrote letters to bird watchers, all over the country. He read and dealt with his mail before lunch, which was often creamed fish or milk toast, and after a nap he went out on his iron-railed balcony, a Panama tilted over his eyes, and picked up a gold-embossed leather volume.
Sometimes in the afternoon there were the visitors Mrs. Cannon seemed to consider such a health hazard, usually men in their sixties or older but occasionally a young couple. Promptly at six o’clock Celia brought Mr. Tomlinson a ceremonial bourbon and water and the evening paper; promptly at seven she served him thin-sliced chicken or lamb, a pureed vegetable, a bland dessert.
The dining room was small but pretty, with its faded pink-and-white paper and rose velvet curtains, and it seemed to Celia a waste when one old man occupied it. She was actively pleased on the mornings when he told her with an apologetic air that there would be guests for dinner; it was possible then to introduce the herbs and mushrooms and sauces she was impatient to practice with, and to demonstrate her competence to more than one pair of eyes.
At first her evenings off presented something of a problem. She was neither a reader nor a letter writer, and the early retirement hour at Stedman Circle allowed her ample time for hair washing and personal laundry. She could go to a movie, or linger over a little shopping, or even, as on one occasion, enter the cocktail lounge of the Gaylord Hotel and stretch a single drink over an hour. This was not a success: although she had long ago gotten over any nervousness with waiters, she knew herself to be—a young woman out alone in the evening—an object of mild speculation.
On an evening in late November, the free and assured-looking walk which was an accident of muscles and bone structure carried Celia past her usual perimeter. The main doors of a lighted office building opened and people came streaming and chattering out into the cold—mainly young people, Celia realized with an unconscious surprise that came from spending her days largely in the company of Mr. Tomlinson and Mrs. Meggs. She crossed a tiny, windy park and entered the lobby of the building, although overheard scraps of conversation along the way had already told her what she wanted to know. On the second floor, the Fennimore Business School was conducting night classes in shorthand and typing.
Celia went thoughtfully back to Stedman Circle.
There were all those letters to fellow bird-watchers, written in Mr. Tomlinson’s jagged, meticulous script. On the afternoons when he did not have visitors, he dictated mild opinions about foreign policy, interspersed with reminiscences of World War I, into a tape recorder, and played them back with obvious glee. If he cocked his head and cupped his good ear with such pride, mightn’t he be even happier to see his own words in print? On the other hand, there was the vigilant Mrs. Cannon, who would certainly be up in arms at
