“There’s a many comes and looks at this place.” The woman stood beside but a little behind me again, her soft voice urging me over my shoulder. She never seemed to stand where I could look at her. “But there’s a many I don’t want. Chillern, now, I can’t stand chillern around. I’m a middle-aged woman, and my nerves ain’t as good as they were.”
She was sixty-five if she was out of the cradle.
“You any chillern?”
“No. There’s only myself. I’m divorced.”
“Oh. You give parties?”
“Not very many.”
“One or two quiet men friends, now, I don’t object to. I know how girls are; they got to have men friends. But I don’t like my furniture broke.”
“I’ve never had any furniture broken.”
“You a working girl?”
“Yes,” I said, “but I shan’t be working all the time. I’m taking most of the summer off.”
“Oh.” I’d expected suspicion there, and got it. “I like my rent paid in advance. A week advance. And them as don’t pay up, I only give a day notice to vacate. I’m an old woman alone in the world and I got to pertect myself.”
“I have money in the bank . . .” I tried, again, to face her, but she again edged around so she kept her view of my half face.
“That’s fine, that’s fine,” she said. “But you oughtn’t to trust banks. I’d never keep a penny—” She stopped there, seemed to come to a decision; she came closer, took her light grasp of my sleeve. “You’re a nice girl, I can see; it would be lovely to have a nice girl in the house, almost like a companion to me. I don’t get so much chance to rent over summer, so many goes to the lake. For a nice girl like you, dearie, having a little trouble with her job and all, I could maybe let you have it for four dollars a week for the summer. Till September, maybe.”
Four dollars a week! That would leave me almost eighteen dollars a month to eat on. Heavens! I could almost go to movies! I took a breath.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
We went back to her parlor for the receipt for the first week’s rent. As we passed the stairs I chanced to look up. On the wall of the landing was a shadow cast by some hall light upstairs, a shadow with a head on it, perfectly still.
Someone was standing there, listening.
Curious, I thought, and thought no more about it.
2
IT WAS MARCH TWENTY-NINTH when I lost my job, when I paid my first visit to Mrs. Garr’s house; it was April fifteenth that I moved. I’d picked up a couple of days’ work as a salesgirl at Chapman’s, so it was eight o’clock in the evening before I loaded my suitcases, my steamer trunk, my cedar chest with the china packed in it, my sewing cabinet, my aluminum kettles and copper frying pans into a taxi. My precious furniture was safely in storage. As it was, the taxi was so full I sat on top of a suitcase with my feet on the box of kitchenware, and the driver had my trunk upended on the seat beside him.
“Why don’t you put the steamer trunk in back and let me sit with you?” I asked him, with an eye to his own comfort.
“Lady, that’s against the rules,” he reproved me. “You stay in back.”
We started off. I looked in my handbag mirror to see if I looked like a seducer of taxi drivers, but I didn’t, so I just took my foot out of the teakettle every time it jounced in, resigned.
The driver evidently felt sorry for me when he saw what I’d come to. In front of 593 Trent Street, he helped me out of the kitchenware with a flourish. He even carried things into the house.
“You leave these boxes to me, miss; I’ll take ’em in.”
Mrs. Garr—Harriet Luella Garr was the name she’d signed to that first rent receipt—opened the door quickly; she must have been watching again. She hovered near the double doors, taking a good look at everything that went in. I tipped the driver three dollars, which made cheap moving, and he said, “Thank you, miss,” as if he meant it.
Mrs. Garr said approvingly to me before he was halfway down the hall, “I like to see a body be generous to servants,” and I saw him hesitate at the door as if he wanted to come back and kick her in the shins. But he winked at me instead and went back to his sacred front seat.
Mrs. Garr trailed me, back and forth, as I began pushing the kitchen boxes toward the room where they were to go.
“I’ve got some rules for this house all the people in it have to go by,” she said. “A young girl like you don’t realize, now, the expense you can run up in gas bills, running a lot of hot water. The gas heater, that’s terrible dear to run. If you want to take a bath, you let me know, and I’ll be respons’ble for turning it off. I don’t want any more turning on the hot-water heater and then forgetting it, like I’ve had happen. And if you want any water for washing dishes or such, I’d thank you to heat it on the gas stove in your kitchen. The big gas heater is more expensive. That’s your sheets and cases I got laid out on the table there. They go in a place in the studio couch if you want, but I can see you’re going to have plenty of drawer room to keep ’em in the buffet. You going to unpack that trunk?”
“Not now. That’s mostly filled with summer clothes I won’t need for some weeks yet.”
“I could help you move that. That’s heavy for a young girl like you.”
I’m short and stocky, as a
