Quantum Girl Theory, page 20
Lois returned to her desk just as an elevator full of secretaries spilled out, a dozen girls purring in brightly colored wool. Two glanced her way—Sherman’s girl and Sandra, the clerical head—and Lois looked away with affected nonchalance. It hadn’t even been two years since she was in the papers last. She kept her hair dark like Elizabeth Taylor’s to avoid recognition, which had worked for the most part. People still looked at her a bit too long at times, lingered as though she were some starlet whose name was just out of reach. When Lois took this position last summer, Sandra had given her the washroom key and stood for a moment with her hand on Lois’s shoulder. “I am so certain we know each other,” Sandra had said. “Are you a Bryn Mawr girl?”
January 1947
The first time Lois met Raymond Schindler, he was sitting at the lunch counter of the Everett Spa, where Lois was a waitress. She handed him a paper menu and sloshed thin sepia liquid into a mug in front of him. It was winter, just a month after she’d left school. Raymond was white-haired with a broad carriage and looked every inch the private dick he was. Only Lois hadn’t known that yet.
He came back three days in a row and asked her benign questions about her neighborhood. She lied most of the time, but he found her.
One evening, in the back barroom of the Annex, where half the girls were playing penny poker and the other half were pressed chest to chest on the dance floor, Raymond Schindler stepped in. Somehow he hadn’t been made for a cop, which, fair enough, he wasn’t. But he might have been made for a husband, of which Lois had already seen a few steaming into the Annex, curling their lips at the boys out front. This night, when Raymond Schindler walked through that backroom door and stood with assumed authority over the proceedings, the Black girls looked at Lois and at the other white girls on the dance floor with impatience.
“Miss Paula Welden, your family’s mighty worried, young lady,” he said. “Is this what you’ve thrown them over for?” He reached into his breast pocket and lit a cigarette from one of those little silver cases, reveling in the attention he’d garnered.
“No last names,” someone hissed into her beer bottle.
Lois, in a bare-shouldered gown she’d rented from a woman on Perry Street, stepped away from her dance partner. She’d been on pins and needles over being found, the very idea of it tasting like electricity and rubbing alcohol. Watching over her shoulder for her father’s shadow for the past month and a half. But look here at this pain in the ass—was she supposed to be cowed by a self-important thug surrounded by dykes?
“I think you must be mistaken, old man,” she said, and lit a cigarette of her own from one of the poker players’ packs. She hadn’t smoked since high school. “This right here is my family.”
One of the poker players, an older Jewish woman in a full skirt and tight white blouse, cackled and drummed her short red nails on the table.
“We sure are, mister,” the woman said. “I’m Granny.” She gestured and said, “That’s my boy Junior”—pointing at a round, busty blonde in lace gloves—“and that’s Uncle Sam,” nodding at the next poker player, a handsome Black person who leaned back in her chair, wearing pleated trousers, a heavy silver watch, and a crisp pink shirt unbuttoned to flash a white undershirt. The poker player chuckled and nodded at the man.
“Surprised you didn’t recognize me,” he said.
Of all the ways Lois had seen power wielded—restraints, belts, cruel expressions—she’d never before seen it as lashes of laughter.
The savage look in the man’s eye told her there’d be consequences.
The bartender leaned into the back room just then. “This your problem?” he asked, his gaze landing on Lois.
She exhaled smoke through her nostrils and nodded. “Taking care of it.”
“Take care of it down the block, then,” he said.
Lois grabbed her pocketbook and walked past Raymond Schindler, through the bar’s maze of high-top tables, up the half flight of stairs to the street, and down to the wide corner at Seventh Avenue. Under the streetlight, she turned to face him. She’d already started with the dark hair dye by then and used scarlet lipsticks and dark brows like a divorcée on the make. She looked at herself each morning in the mirror and Paul Welden seemed miles and years away.
“All right, then,” Lois said, stubbing the cigarette beneath her shoe. “Is my father here?”
Raymond Schindler, though she still didn’t know that was his name, shook his silver head, and the light from the streetlamp streaked. “No, missy. I’m the only one here, though your intuition is correct. Your father did send me. Your father and The Stamford Advocate, to put a finer point on it.”
She nearly choked. “The newspaper? Are they out of their goddamn minds?”
“I suppose you’ve not been keeping up with the locals, then,” Raymond Schindler said. “Your disappearance is still the primary matter on the imagination of most everyone in your hometown. And there’s a reward, in fact.”
“Naturally,” Lois said. “My father wouldn’t have it appear any other way.”
“It’s a mighty high reward, too. Seven thousand dollars, at last count. Well, high for some.” Raymond Schindler ran a hand along his lapel.
“Buddy, I think—”
“ ’Course, the money would really be secondary to the victory, having found the famous little coed who made people climb three mountains in search of her.” He snorted lightly. “Would have to change the tale about where you were found. Considerably so.”
“I’ll not go to bed with you,” Lois said. “If that’s where this is headed.” She sounded far more confident than she felt on the matter, for she knew what awaited her back in Connecticut. Confinement, needles, more electroshock therapy. In the face of that threat, her morals and dignity were moving targets.
Always had been.
“Now, keep that voice down,” Raymond Schindler said. “I’ve known your father for years and I met you as a little girl. No.” He shook his head with some disgust. “I’m thinking through an alternative arrangement. If we were to put together a simple payment plan, you slip me say fifty dollars a month—”
She barely made that much.
“—it would be a decade before you’d be able to compensate me for losing that reward, and that’s not accounting for interest accrued on that seven thousand dollars.”
It was after one in the morning, and the only people around were couples ducking into alleys, drunks in doorways. Lois stood with Raymond Schindler, stark under the streetlight as though performing a play. Lois couldn’t believe this conversation was happening out in the open.
Her fear tasted like pennies. Had done, ever since the electroshock.
“You’re well raised. Pretty in an unobtrusive way.” Raymond Schindler’s manner reassumed the sovereignty he’d lost when those women in the bar laughed at him, now that he was no longer outnumbered. “You can gather information for me. Easy job, no training required. And to remind you of the bargain, one of my men will stop by each month to pick up that fifty dollars you owe me for keeping your location and indiscretions to myself.”
Oh, she’d love to slug him.
He lit another cigarette, taking his time, opening the case, tapping the cigarette, snapping the case closed. Lois leaned against the streetlamp and wondered with a start whether her father had offered a reward for finding her dead, too.
All she’d wanted was to get away, from the constant surveillance and the taste of smoke and metal, the threat of lobotomy that had wavered across the telephone line the last time she spoke to her parents—They take an ice pick to your eye sockets, girl, her father had said, and these compulsions of yours will disappear. Is that what you want? What she’d wanted was peace from the constant brutality, not the new intrigue of dark street corners and extortion.
It was a wet cold, and Lois had left her secondhand overcoat in the bar. She wrapped her arms around herself, palms spread wide to cover her bare upper arms. Raymond Schindler made no move to offer her his coat.
Good. She had no interest in pretending they were friendly.
“Can we agree on such a bargain, or shall I place a long-distance call to Stamford?”
“I’ll run,” Lois said.
“I’ll catch you,” Raymond Schindler said. “I caught you here once already. And you’ll hardly run in this getup—” He gestured with his cigarette. “One of my boys is watching your boardinghouse already.”
Lois tried to find something cruel enough to match him. Her scalp prickled.
“On the other hand,” Raymond Schindler said, “I suppose I could wander back into that bar and start collecting names and addresses of the patrons. Make sure my trip wasn’t a lost effort.”
Lois shuddered and shook her head.
Raymond Schindler flicked a business card at her, then snagged a taxi just dropping off a tumble of barflies.
“Hey, sister,” Lois heard. Her whole body lamppost-stiff, she turned to face the stairwell down to the Annex. The blonde with the bosoms—what had that woman called her, Junior—crouched, stage-whispering, “Sister, I’ve got your coat here.” The woman’s voice had a crisp, bilingual articulation, something European. She straightened, patted at her tight hairdo, and walked over, shifting her hips in a leonine manner.
“I know who you are,” she said, as she handed the tatty coat over. The woman, Ruth, had been stopped just last month on suspicion of being one Paula Welden, she said, along with six other blond girls sitting on benches at Grand Central. Ruth had a dark complexion, was thick and bow-lipped, and short of the bleach job had no passing resemblance to Paula Welden at all.
“Don’t I just look like a Vermont girl to you?” Ruth said wryly, wiggling her torso like a dashboard figurine.
The gal was too much, for sure, and Lois was defenses down when she ought to be battening her hatches. Lois hadn’t told a soul her real name, her old name, not since getting to New York, and here she was, suddenly vulnerable to a slick private dick and a hot-to-trot blonde. She may as well be handing out calling cards.
“Say, you know who that Raymond Schindler fella is, don’t you?” Ruth asked, her voice sounding concerned now.
“Knows my father, he says.” Lois thumbed at his business card.
The gal clucked her tongue against the back of her bright front teeth. “He’s big league. Loaded. His own table at the 21 Club, just worked on that big royal-murder case in the Bahamas. You don’t read the papers?”
Lois didn’t. And she couldn’t quickly piece together why he pretended to care about fifty bucks a month if he really was rolling in it.
“You must be in deep, then,” Ruth said, and reached out a hand to pat Lois’s arm.
She hadn’t been, a day ago. But now, “I guess I am,” she said, and turned toward the Christopher Street subway entrance. “Thanks for my coat,” she called over her shoulder.
Under the streetlamp, Ruth looked dazzling, doe eyes and sorrowful concern. Lois poked through her pocketbook for a subway token. Now was hardly the time for that nonsense.
But Ruth called out, “I’m famished, you know.”
Lois turned back.
“I know a guy,” Ruth said, and pointed at a diner so dimly lit that Lois would have guessed it closed for the night. “My treat.”
And Lois, God bless her, walked with Ruth through the beginning of a winter drizzle to the spot across the street, where Ruth needled at the owner to fry up a few free eggs, there’s a good sport.
It wasn’t until she got back to her room at the boardinghouse that night that Lois raged—threw a chair across the room, pulled her old red parka from the closet and tore through the gabardine, pulling off the hood, ripping the seams.
The next morning, the house mistress stopped her on her way out the door. Out at the end of the week, the mistress said. Whatever that ruckus was last night, it had no place here.
When Lois arrived at the Everett Spa for her shift, one of Raymond Schindler’s goons was already seated at the counter, with a green envelope that he slid to her under his mug. Inside, a typed note directing her to apply for a clerical position at a travel agency in Midtown and a falsified letter of reference to match. She only had to stay at the Y for three nights before she found another room; turned out it was much easier, as an office girl, to find respectable accommodations.
Monday After Thanksgiving, 1950
In the mild evening, Lois walked with her coat over her arm. She twisted her wristwatch band.
Electric shock had meant stars in her head and light-headedness for days. A side effect of the treatments, besides the short-term retrograde amnesia: a sort of corruption of memory. The memories revealed themselves unpredictably, Technicolor pieces of her life that startled her with their unfamiliarity, something like seeing a photograph of herself in a place she knew she’d never been.
The memories had mostly proven false—enchanting and convincing episodes from some life she hadn’t led. Her roommate Beth had been transferred to a different dormitory by the time Paul returned to school, had suffered no consequences of their affair but no longer had an appetite for Paul’s company after all the dramatics. Still, Beth would pick up the hall phone when Paul called, trying to puzzle out what was real (Did I have a love affair with my art teacher? Did I have a baby? Who drives a Studebaker?). Lois’s first year alone in New York had been painfully uncertain. No one to remind her of who she wasn’t. She just walked along foreign streets, trying to carry herself as someone whose sins were myriad and undiscovered.
But eventually she had Ruth, and Ruth was willing to laugh out loud when Lois asked odd questions. Have I ever killed a man? Lois had asked after a cold memory dropped on her last week, a hot motel room and a man with yellow eyes crying out her old name. Not today, Ruth said, and wrapped an arm around Lois’s waist. But the next time Krenshaw paws at you, you could dose his coffee with poison.
A prickle on Lois’s scalp would be her only warning that something amiss was coming to mind, that some odd idea was trying to shoehorn into her memory. The images were impossible, some of them—Lois, middle-aged, standing side by side with a younger version of herself. Or holding the hair of a lover who must have been Ruth as she dry-heaved into a sink, Lois’s own shockingly aged face looking back at her in the mirror.
Was it possible that Lois was actually on the other side of things, looking back even on this time in memory? If that were the truth, then at least she had Ruth for a lifetime. She’d rather have that future with Ruth than any future without her.
There were other memories, of course, that Lois knew were hers, that she wished she could disclaim. The ripped-open pain of finding out Wise had died in some convent only three hours away and that it was Lois’s fault. She’d’ve gladly traded that away for a bottle of gin or a subway token.
It was just past five and the Annex was packed shoulder to shoulder. Lois stood on the low bar rail and spotted Ruth waving her into the back room. Lois shimmied between heated bodies, inconspicuous in her office drag. She closed the backroom door behind her.
At the high poker table, drawn together as though threaded with a cord, were Ruth and her people—Hannah, Melinda, Freddie, and three other girls Lois didn’t know. The newcomers must be from what Lois called Ruth’s “Red Lady Brigade,” her Morningside Communist friends, not Annex regulars like the rest. Their faces were close and the table scattered with bottles, newspaper, and stationery. Ruth reached out for Lois, wrapped an arm around her shoulders.
Under Ruth’s other hand was a distinct green envelope with crosshatching—one of Raymond Schindler’s.
Lois knew these envelopes well. She’d been slipping them into employers’ drawers for nearly four years; she’d just fingertipped one into Krenshaw’s mail stack this afternoon, for chrissakes. Raymond Schindler had one business model—extortion—and the appearance of his green stationery meant life was about to become dire for someone.
Now for Ruth.
Ruth’s fingers curled around Lois’s wrist. Lois had made no secret of how jumpy she was about Ruth’s Communist Party membership, particularly since the Subversive Activities Control Act had passed over Truman’s veto just this fall. Ruth was in danger of losing her citizenship. Being shipped back to Poland, where every single member of her family was dead, villages burned. Or being detained indefinitely in some dank underground cell.
Ruth rubbed her thumb against Lois’s watchband. Ruth knew the watch had belonged to Lois’s first lover, also knew not to ask too many questions about it, or her. Lois could be a real monster, of course she knew that, and Ruth bore it with more grace than Lois ever could have.
“We shouldn’t have paid him after those first letters,” Hannah said, and pounded a fist on the table. “We’re just the suckers he thought we were.” Hannah, a tall Jewish woman, had white hair that flew around like a wind sock. Lois had made that observation once, and Ruth held Lois’s hand for a moment before saying, “That’s fine, Lo, but Hannah was field-dressing soldiers in Spain while you were learning penmanship.”
And, credit where it was due, Hannah was the one to laugh at Raymond Schindler when he’d followed Lois in here nearly four years ago.
“What were we supposed to do?” Melinda said, placing a hand on Hannah’s forearm. “Take the risk that he’d tell our landlords? Your boss?” She sneezed loudly into her elbow. Freddie, dapper as ever in her suit and suspenders, held out a handkerchief.
No question that the girls could lose their apartments, their jobs, if their Party membership got out. Raymond Schindler’s scheme was built on that guarantee.
“Who all got letters?” Lois asked. She’d never particularly wondered how a cannonball in the stomach might feel, but she was finding out just the same.
