Chapter 7: On the Van Alst Account

“Nell Corrigan,” she said.

The waiter did not pick up a pen.

“Put it in the book,” she said. “Nell Corrigan. I’ll be in Monday with the money.”

“Monday.” He set the saucer down on the tray, flat, and left his hand on it. “If it is not on this tray when I take it down, I send for a policeman. That is not my rule. That is the house.”

At the far end of the room a boy was going along the wall with his pole, turning the jets down one by one. In the long mirrors over the sideboard the lights had gone the color of weak tea.

Miss Rusk had gone down to look at the carriages and Mrs. Ott had gone to look for a glove, and neither of them was coming back up twelve floors tonight to help.

She turned the paper around until the figures sat square to her.

A dollar a day. Six days in the week, and the frames running the year round, and no sickness in her and no lateness in her and never once a hand off the frame to cough. That came to a little over three hundred dollars in a year.

Two thousand three hundred was what she owed.

Seven times three hundred was two thousand one hundred, and the rest besides. Seven years and a half. Eight, near enough. Eight years standing in the noise with her ears full of shuttles, and nothing eaten in them, and nowhere to sleep in them, and at the end of it a dinner at the Wexford to show for it.

The carpet by itself was ninety-five dollars. Not quite four months of her life. She had not touched the carpet.

Six more lines ran under her finger, in words that would not stand still for her. She went back and read the three she could, and did not put a number on the others, because a number she could not get at was worse than no number at all.

She had the rest of it arranged in the time it took to breathe twice. A police justice in the morning, looking at her over his glasses and making an example of her, because an example is cheaper than the paper it takes to do anything else. Then down through the kitchens with her sleeves rolled, plates to the elbow, the girl at the sink with her hands in the lye saying there’s company in the house tonight, and the plates coming faster than she could take them. Then her hands going, a finger at a time, so that she could not hold a plate at all. Then the street, and her sitting on the curb with her shoes off, and people stepping around her.

And then—

Enough.

She sat back.

The waiter’s hand was still on the saucer.

“It’s not a thing you can think your way out of, miss,” he said, and he said it kindly, which was worse.

She kept her lips shut and asked the one who had been riding in her all night, the one nobody could see: could he make silver?

No.

Could he make a little silver?

No.

Then he was no use to her at all, and she had been carrying him around all night for nothing.

I did not say that.

She looked at the tray, at the folded napkins on it, at the eight years, and found she was almost calm.

Ask him for paper. And a pen.

Her first thought was the paper you signed to belong to a place. A girl at the mill had told her about that—the dishes, the cellars, and nothing after.

“Have you got a pen?” she said.

“If you’re writing to somebody, miss, the post went at six.”

“I’m not writing to anybody.”

“Then what are you writing?”

“Have you got paper, or haven’t you?”

He took his hand off the saucer and went to the sideboard at the end of the room, and came back with a small bottle of ink and a pen, and set them down, and stood back with his hands folded.

She looked at the pen. “I’ll be signing myself over, then,” she said. “To the hotel. For the dishes.”

“It’s paper, miss.”

Pick it up.

She picked it up. Her face had gone hot and then cold twice since the storeroom floor, and she had put it down at the time to the fright and the food and the heat of the building, and meant to think about it when there was less on her mind.

You cannot even read.

She told him, without speaking, that she could read figures.

Figures, he said.

Now take the pen, and do not hold it like a shovel.

Her fingers closed on it.

She had not told them to. It was the way a door gives under your hand when somebody on the far side has turned the knob. The grip was wrong—high up the shaft, the second finger braced, the whole hand rolled over further than hers ever went. It was the grip of somebody who had been taught, and nobody had ever taught her anything.

The nib went into the ink and came out and stood at the top of the slip, and did not shake.

She watched it from behind her own eyes, from a long way back. Her hand made a shape, and then another shape, and dipped, and went on. The letters were not her letters, which were big and went uphill and had to be started over. These stood on the line.

There was ink on her second finger now. There was a name, and under the name a shorter word, in the same even hand.

She could not read either of them.

Put it down.

She put the pen down and turned the slip with one finger and pushed it to the edge of the table, and sat back, and put her hands in her lap.

The waiter came and took it up.

He read it. Then he read it again, and the second time his lips moved. He set it down on the tray and straightened it with two fingers though it was already straight, and when he looked up his face had changed and stayed changed.

He bowed, a small bow from the neck.

“On the Van Alst account, madam.”