friendliness was gone now. And when she stepped into Mrs Kelly’s office on her break,
Miss Stansfield told me, she knew what to expect.
‘You’re in trouble,’ this previously kind woman said curtly.
‘Yes,’ Miss Stansfield said. ‘It’s called that by some people.’
Mrs Kelly’s cheeks had gone the colour of old brick. ‘Don’t you be smart with me,
young woman,’ she said. ‘From the looks of your belly, you’ve been too smart by half
already.’
I could see the two of them in my mind’s eye as she told me the story – Miss Stansfield,
her direct hazel eyes fixed on Mrs Kelly, perfectly composed, refusing to drop her eyes,
or weep, or exhibit shame in any other way. I believe she had a much more practical
conception of the trouble she was in than her supervisor did, with her two almost grown
children and her respectable husband, who owned his own barber-shop and voted
Republican.
‘I must say you show remarkably little shame at the way you’ve deceived me!’ Mrs
Kelly burst out bitterly.
‘I have never deceived you. No mention of my pregnancy has been made until today.’
She looked at Mrs Kelly almost curiously. ‘How can you say I have deceived you?’
‘I took you home!’ Mrs Kelly cried. ‘I had you to dinner … with my sons.’ She looked at Miss Stansfield with utter loathing.
This is when Miss Stansfield began to grow angry. Angrier, she told me, than she had
ever been in her life. She had not been unaware of the sort of reaction she could expect
when the secret came out, but as any one of you gentlemen will attest, the difference
between academic theory and practical application can sometimes be shockingly huge.
Clutching her hands firmly together in her lap, Miss Stansfield said: ‘If you are
suggesting I made or ever would make any attempt to seduce your sons, that’s the dirtiest,
filthiest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.’
Mrs Kelly’s head rocked back as if she had been slapped. That bricky colour drained
from her cheeks, leaving only two small spots of hectic colour. The two women looked
grimly at each other across a desk littered with perfume samples in a room that smelled
vaguely of flowers. It was a moment, Miss Stansfield said, that seemed much longer than
it actually could have been.
Then Mrs Kelly yanked open one of her drawers and brought out a buff-coloured
cheque. A bright pink severance slip was attached to it. Showing her teeth, actually
seeming to bite off each word, she said, ‘With hundreds of decent girls looking for work
in this city, I hardly think we need a strumpet such as yourself in our employ, dear.’
She told me it was that final, contemptuous ‘dear’ that brought all her anger to a sudden
head. A moment later Mrs Kelly’s jaw dropped and her eyes widened as Miss Stansfield,
her hands locked together as tightly as links in a steel chain, so tightly she left bruises on
herself (they were fading but still perfectly visible when I saw her on 1 September), began
to ‘locomotive’ between her clenched teeth.
It wasn’t a funny story, perhaps, but I burst out laughing at the image and Miss
Stansfield joined me. Mrs Davidson looked in – to make sure we hadn’t gotten into the
nitrous oxide, perhaps – and then left again.
‘It was all I could think to do,’ Miss Stansfield said, still laughing and wiping her
streaming eyes with her handkerchief. ‘Because at that moment, I saw myself reaching out
and simply sweeping those sample bottles of perfume – every one of them – off her desk
and onto the floor, which was uncarpeted concrete. I didn’t just think it, I saw it! I saw them crashing to the floor and filling the room with such a God-awful mixed stench that
the fumigators would have to come.
‘I was going to do it; nothing was going to stop me doing it. Then I began to Breathe,
and everything was all right. I was able to take the cheque, and the pink slip, and get up,
and get out. I wasn’t able to thank her, of course – I was still being a locomotive”
We laughed again, and then she sobered.
‘It’s all passed off now, and I am even able to feel a little sorry for her – or does that
sound like a terribly stiff-necked thing to say?’
‘Not at all. I think it’s an admirable way to be able to feel.’
‘May I show you something I bought with my severance pay, Dr McCarron?’
‘Yes, if you like.’
She opened her purse and took out a small flat box. ‘I bought it at a pawnshop,’ she
said. ‘For two dollars. And it’s the only time during this whole nightmare that I’ve felt
ashamed and dirty. Isn’t that strange?’
She opened the box and laid it on my desk so I could look inside. I wasn’t surprised at
what I saw. It was a plain gold wedding ring.
‘I’ll do what’s necessary,’ she said. ‘I am staying in what Mrs Kelly would undoubtedly
call “a respectable boarding house”. My landlady has been kind and friendly … but Mrs Kelly was kind and friendly, too. I think she may ask me to leave at any time now, and I
suspect that if I say anything about the rent-balance due me, or the damage deposit I paid
when I moved in, shell laugh in my face.’
‘My dear young woman, that would be quite illegal. There are courts and lawyers to
help you answer such -‘
The courts are men’s clubs,’ she said steadily, ‘and not apt to go out of their way to
befriend a woman in my position. Perhaps I could get my money back, perhaps not. Either
way, the expense and the trouble and the … the unpleasantness … hardly seem worth the
forty-seven dollars or so. I had no business mentioning it to you in the first place. It hasn’t
happened yet, and maybe it won’t But in any case, I intend to be practical from now on.’
She raised her head, and her eyes flashed at mine.
‘I’ve got my eye on a place down in the Village – just in case. It’s on the third floor, but
it’s clean, and it’s five dollars a month cheaper than where I’m staying now.’ She picked
the ring out of the box. ‘I wore this when the landlady showed me the room.’
She put it on the third finger of her left hand with a small moue of disgust of which I
believe she was unaware. There. Now I’m Mrs Stansfield. My husband was a truck-driver
who was killed on the Pittsburgh-New York run. Very sad. But I am no longer a little
roundheels strumpet, and my child is no longer a bastard.’
She looked up at me, and the tears were in her eyes again. As I watched, one of them
overspilled and rolled down her cheek.
‘Please,’ I said, distressed, and reached across the desk to take her hand. It was very,
very cold. ‘Don’t, my dear.’
She turned her hand – it was the left – over in my hand and looked at the ring. She
smiled, and that smile was as bitter as gall and vinegar, gentlemen. Another tear fell – just
that one.
‘When I hear cynics say that the days of magic and miracles are all behind us, Dr
McCarron, I’ll know they’re deluded, won’t I? When you can buy a ring in a pawnshop for
a dollar and a half and that ring will instantly erase both bastardy and licentiousness, what
else would you call that but magic? Cheap magic.’
‘Miss Stansfield … Sandra, if I may … if you need help, if there’s anything I can do -‘
She drew her hand away from me – if I had taken her right hand instead of her left,
perhaps she would not have done. I did not love her, I’ve told you, but in that moment I
could have loved her; I was on the verge of falling in love with her. Perhaps, if I’d taken
her right hand instead of the one with that lying ring on it, and if she had allowed me to
hold her hand only a little longer, until my own warmed it, perhaps then I should have.
‘You’re a good, kind man, and you’ve done a great deal for me and my baby … and your
Breathing Method is a much better kind of magic than this awful ring. After all, it kept me from being jailed on charges of wilful destruction, didn’t it?’
She left soon after that, and I went to the window to watch her move off down the
street towards Madison Avenue. God, I admired her just then: She looked so slight, so
young, and so obviously pregnant — but there was still nothing timid or tentative about