The Whitaker Girl

Chapter 5: The Checkbook

The gate arm was up, and she walked in under it. A truck stood on the scale with its wheels square on the plates, and the man in the booth leaned out and wrote the weight on his clipboard and said something to the driver that the driver did not like. Past the scale house the yard ran back a quarter mile: containers stacked three high, a crane on rails, the lake showing in strips between the fuel tanks. It smelled of diesel and hot tar. The office was brick, two stories, with an iron stair bolted to the outside and going up to the second floor, and a ground-floor window that looked straight at the scale.

She had telephoned from the drugstore on Weller Street and given her name, and the girl on the telephone had said two o'clock and had not asked what for. She had walked from the trolley stop to keep the fare.

The anteroom was hot. A girl sat behind a desk with a typewriter and a fan that turned and turned and moved the hot air from one side of the room to the other without improving it. There was a bench against the wall, and a calendar with a photograph of a lake on it, and a smell of carbon paper. Clara sat on the bench with her hands folded in her lap and did not look at the girl, and the girl did not look at her, and at ten past two the girl said, "He'll see you now," and pushed the inner door open with the flat of her hand.

The office had the same window and the same view of the scale, and a desk with a map over it, and a coat on a hook, and a carpet worn pale down the middle. He was standing at the window with his back to the door. He turned around when the door closed.

"Miss Whitaker."

"Mr. Kessler." She sat down in the chair in front of the desk without being asked, because she had decided on the trolley that she would sit down without being asked.

"I'll take the blame," she said. "If the engagement ends, it ends on my side. You can tell your father I asked for it and you gave in, and I'll tell anyone who asks me the same thing, and I'll tell it the same way every time."

He came around the desk and sat down. There was a glass on the desk with two fingers of water in it and the ice going soft at the top. He turned it once and left it.

"Your family gets nothing from mine," she said. "Not a name worth having, not a connection, not one thing that would help you in this town. As in-laws we would be a debt you carried. Ending it is the sensible thing and you know that it is."

The ice knocked against the side of the glass and settled.

"And I need money," she said. "I'm not going to put a number on the table and hold my hand out, so don't sit there and price me. I know what this looks like from where you're sitting. But a large sum would change what people say about it. It wouldn't be that you threw me over. It would be that the Kesslers did right by us and the Whitakers took everything they could get." She put her hands flat on her knees. "So that's all of it. Ending it, and a sum, and my name on the blame for both. You can have it in writing if you want it in writing."

He did not answer. He sat with one hand around the glass and looked at her the way a man looks at an invoice he has already decided to pay, and she made herself sit still under it and not fill the room with talk.

Then he stood up and pulled the second drawer of the desk open and took out a checkbook and opened it flat on the wood. He wrote standing, one hand flat on the desk, and blotted what he had written, and signed it, and turned it around, and pushed it across toward her, and she had a moment to see that it was a great deal of money.

She reached for it. He drew it back half an inch.

"Is there something else?" she said. "Tell me, and I'll do it."

"That isn't a settlement," he said. "It's a gift to my fiancée. The date will be set. I'm going to marry you."

She looked at him. The fan in the outer room ticked around and around on the other side of the door.

"Why?"

"I told you at the house. I'm satisfied with the match. With the family, and with you. And not because of what people would say about me."

"Say the rest of it plainly."

"The wedding goes ahead as planned."

"One question," she said.

"Ask it."

"Do you like me?"

He did not move. The fan ticked.

"Miss Whitaker, that question isn't any use to you or to me," he said, and he put the check down on the desk between them, squared to the edge. "Take it. Deal with your family first. Your mother looks worn down."

She did not take it. "If it isn't for the engagement, then I don't want it."

"Why not?"

"Because I can't pay it back. I could get work. A hospital, a newspaper office, some business that wants a girl who can keep accounts and won't ask for much. Whatever any of them pays me, this is several hundred years of it, even if I never eat or sleep or buy another coat."

"After we're married you'll have an allowance," he said. "Count this as paid in advance."

"That's twenty years of an allowance. There's no sense in it."

"Not quite twenty."

"That's worse, not better. I'd be spending money I hadn't earned, in a house I hadn't earned, and every month of it would be handed to me by a man I couldn't pay back."

"The money isn't my father's. I earned it. When we're married you'll see the books. What's mine is yours."

"Then it's wages for work I haven't done." She said it slowly, because he had a way of making the second sentence come out of her mouth before she had agreed to the first. "You lose nothing by ending this. There's nothing I bring you that you need, and in all the years we've been engaged you have never once behaved as though you wanted me. So what is it for?"

He picked up the pen again and set it down again, and that was all he did.

Her back had begun to ache, the way it did when she sat still too long, and the ache brought the rest of it with it.

The engagement had been his idea, and the year abroad had been his idea too. Mrs. Kessler had sent for her in June and had her sit down in a room with the shades down and said that the two of them could do as they liked, only she was not to come home pregnant, because that would be difficult to explain to people.

Three days out, the ship took a swell and rolled, and Clara put a hand out and came down against him, her shoulder into his chest and her hat knocked sideways. He had shoved her off him so hard that her back hit the rail and her breath went out of her and stayed out for a moment. There had been nothing in his face at all. He had gone back inside, and she had stood holding the rail with both hands until the ache in her back turned into an ache she could carry, and she had not seen him again until they were off the ship.

In London she saw him at most once a year. He was up the coast at a school that turned out merchant officers. She read economics because the family had decided she would, and sat in on a friend's medical lectures because she could not make herself care about economics, and stayed on two years past the degree, first in a laboratory and then on a ward. He came home a year before she did. She came home with the degree, the two years of hospital work behind it, and a back that still told her when the weather was changing.

"Mr. Kessler." She said it quietly and she kept her eyes on him. "You like men."

He looked at her.

"It would explain the whole of it," she said. "A wife with nothing behind her. Nobody who could make a fuss, nobody whose father could go to your father. A woman who stands in front of you and takes the questions for you."

"Don't guess," he said.

"Then give me something better to guess with."

He did not.

She reached across the desk and put her hand flat over his. For a moment nothing happened. She had never touched him except the once, on the ship, and she felt the warmth of the back of his hand and the small hard bone at the wrist, and then he changed. His pupils narrowed. The muscle at the hinge of his jaw moved once and stood out. He did not pull away, and he did not turn his hand over, and under her palm she felt the tendons go tight in his wrist.

"Or perhaps it's no one at all," Clara said, and kept her hand where it was. "You can't stand to have a woman touch you. And I'm to be furniture in your house."

His jaw moved again. He took his hand out from under hers. Then he stood, and the side of his hand took the check off the desk, and it went off the edge and landed on the carpet.

He walked out and pulled the door to behind him. The latch caught with a click and not a slam.

She sat where she was for a while. Then she stood.

The check lay on the carpet, face up, his signature showing. She looked at it the way she would look at something in the road. Then she stepped past it and opened the door and went out through the anteroom, and the girl at the desk looked up and said something Clara did not catch, and Clara said, "Thank you," and went out into the yard.

The gate arm was rising. A flatbed came out from between the containers, empty, the bed rattling, and the driver took it through the gate without slowing and turned south with the sun on the cab, and the arm came down behind him and stopped level, and the man in the booth went back inside.