Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) (36 page)

     "You know I will."

     "Do you love me, Alan; do you?"

     "Of course I love you, darling."

     She held tightly to him as she closed her eyes and thought, I mustn't lose Alan's love, I mustn't lose
him.
If I did, I wouldn't want to live. Not after all we've been through together, after all these years.

San Fernando Valley, California, 1959

H
ANNAH
R
YAN THOUGHT THAT THE WAY THE SEAT OF
A
LAN
Scadudo's pants fit snugly over his rear end was positively obscene.

     And she loved it.

     She had just come in out of a torrential rain, soaked and dripping, with the day's lunch order from Baumgartner's Deli. She hadn't had far to go—on sunny days the trek from Halliwell and Katz to Baumgartner's on Ventura Boulevard usually took three minutes, but during one of southern California's rare storms it seemed to take forever. She had hurried down the aisle between the twelve brokers' desks, which were arranged facing the Dow Jones board up front, her shoes squishing inside her boots as she distributed the sandwiches. She had collected money as she went, running into a problem when she reached Mr. Driscoll. He had ordered a hot pastrami on rye, and he looked at it askance, commenting that it was cold. When he
told her he was short of change and that he would "catch her later," she had remained standing there with her hand out, water from the sleeve of her raincoat dripping onto his
Wall Street Journal.
Finally he had dug into his pocket, counted out the exact change, and slapped it into her icy palm.

     And now she was at Mr. Scadudo's desk, where he was standing with what twenty-one-year-old Hannah thought was a wonderful
man's
frown on his face, reading a printout just off the Teletype. She was secretly in love with Mr. Scadudo, who was studying to become a CPA. "Here you are," she said, handing him the tomato and onion and jack cheese on a Kaiser roll, extra mayo, wrapped in wax paper. "Forty-two cents, please."

     "Thanks," he said without looking at her and not taking the sandwich. She placed it neatly on his messy desk, which was covered with margin calls and confirm notices. "Jesus," he said. "International Petrochemical has announced a two-for-one split. I knew it!"

     He absently reached into his pocket, counted out change, and dropped it into her outstretched hand. When the money, still warm from where it had just been, fell into Hannah's palm, lust rose up to her ears and pounded there for a few seconds, then settled back down into her abdomen, where it throbbed like a steady little engine whenever she was around Mr. Scadudo. She could have stood there forever, inhaling his Old Spice, but she had other sandwiches to deliver.

     As she finally headed back to the lounge, where she looked forward to getting warm and dry, she passed the cashier's cage and saw Mrs. Faulkner, the office supervisor, talking to a young woman who was saying, "It's all so exciting to me! I know exactly
zip
about the stock market!" Hannah thought, New account, since opening new accounts was one of Mrs. Faulkner's many duties.

     Inside the lounge, Hannah shed her raincoat, boots, and shoes and brought a towel out of the ladies' room. As she dried her short brown hair, she could hardly contain her excitement. After work today, she had an appointment with a counselor at the Greer Art Academy in Glendale, a small but prestigious school that had a highly acclaimed fashion design department. The school was expensive, and neither Hannah nor her parents, with whom she still lived, could afford the tuition, but Hannah had applied for a
scholarship that, if she received it, would cover half her expenses. The counselor had called the night before with the good news: the scholarship was hers. The appointment that afternoon was to fill out the admission forms and to work out a class schedule that would allow Hannah to work at Halliwell and Katz, because she still had to come up with the rest of the tuition, which was why she had insisted Mr. Driscoll pay her for his sandwich. Every penny she earned went into a carefully monitored savings account. Hannah hadn't slept all night, she was so excited. Ever since she was a little girl, she had dreamed of being a dress designer, but not just for any women. She wanted to design clothes for the overweight woman.

     Hannah herself was overweight; she had been for as long as she could remember. While on her mother's side Hannah was French and possibly Indian, her father was pure Irish, and many of her relatives were immigrants who had come out right after the war with rationing in the old country a recent hungry memory. Here in the United States, where food was plentiful, if you didn't stuff yourself at big family gatherings you were considered ungrateful, and children were admonished to eat until they thought they might burst. Hannah couldn't ever remember being thin; her mother was fat, and so were her aunts and female cousins, and the one thing they all had in common was difficulty finding clothes. There was only Monica's Overweight Shop on Sherman Way, where the clothes were dowdy and there was a feeble selection.

     But Hannah had a dream. There was a big need out there and she was going to fill it. Having learned to sew when she was still in grammar school and having taught herself about fabrics, discovering which draped well, which flattered, she made clothes for herself and her female relations, all of whom declared that Hannah had a gift. But she needed to go further— she needed more extensive training. And Greer offered it.

     The only obstacle was money. While her family was not poor, they could only afford to pay for her brothers' college educations, and even with the Greer scholarship and her savings, it still wasn't enough. But Hannah's money problems were about to be over. And that was what she was going to inform the counselor that very afternoon, to make sure nothing stopped them from accepting her.

     When her hair was dry, Hannah inspected herself in the mirror. As she regarded her vaguely Indian features and high cheekbones that people said would make her look pretty if she weren't so fat, Madeline came in to freshen her makeup.

     Madeline was Mr. Katz's private secretary, holding the position that Hannah had applied for two years ago and that she hadn't gotten because they said she was too young and inexperienced, being just nineteen years old and only a year out of high school. However, when they had offered her a lesser job, to work in what they called the "cage" as a general office worker for two hundred dollars a month, with a chance to be promoted to secretary eventually, she had taken it. Since then the coveted honor of working for Mr. Katz had been held by four different women, Madeline being the latest, and each time Hannah had been passed over she had been told it was because Mr. Katz needed a more experienced secretary.

     And now Madeline was leaving. Hannah didn't pretend to be sorry to see the pretty blonde go, because now the job would be hers; it would be her ticket to Greer.

     The lounge door opened and, for an instant, the room was flooded with the noise of the clattering Teletype and an out burst from Mr. Driscoll: "Whoa, there goes Kodak again!" Mrs. Faulkner came in, and when she closed the door, the lounge was quiet once more.

     "It's another heavy-volume day, ladies," she said as she slumped down onto one of the sofas and set her purse and lunch sack next to her. "I'm betting it'll be twenty million by the end of the day."

     "Uh oh," Hannah said. "That'll mean overtime on the confirm notices."

     Ardeth Faulkner opened her lunch sack, bringing out an enormous meat loaf sandwich, Fritos, and a Mars Bar, and said, "I saw the way you made Driscoll pay you for his sandwich. Good for you. He's always trying to stiff people. Lousy cheapskate."

     "It was my money," Hannah said as she opened the fridge and took out the cottage cheese and a diet Fresca she had brought for lunch. "I can't afford to buy lunch for a man who earns ten times what I do."

     "You sure do want to go to fashion school awful badly, don't you?"

     "Oh," Hannah said excitedly, stirring fruit cocktail into the cottage cheese, "I can't think of anything I'd rather do! And I see my counselor this afternoon!"

     The lounge door opened again, and Alan Scadudo, the margin clerk for whom Hannah burned with lust, came in. "Whew!" he said as he went to the coffeepot and filled a Styrofoam cup. "Heavy volume today. It'll be overtime for all of us."

     "I don't mind," Hannah said, looking at him. "I can use the money."

     As he stirred Coffee-mate into his cup, he turned around, a soft-spoken young man with thick hair and glasses, nice brown eyes, and the kind of personality that made you imagine he took in stray animals. He was short, but that didn't bother Hannah. "Yeah," he said, "well,
I
don't want to work late."

     When he said that, Hannah's heart filled up and ached. He has a date, she thought. He's going out with someone.

     Just before he left, he paused and looked Madeline up and down, and Hannah didn't miss it. It made her feel even worse. Take a dress off a hanger and put it on Madeline and it looked as if it were still on the hanger. Mr. Scadudo clearly liked skinny women.

     After he left, Ardeth said to Hannah, "You really go for him, don't you?"

     "Is it that obvious?"

     "Only to me." When she saw Madeline staring at herself in the mirror, not saying anything, Ardeth looked over at Hannah. They exchanged a glance and then looked away, suddenly embarrassed with themselves, and for Madeline.

     Mr. Katz's secretary was leaving Halliwell and Katz in disgrace. In fact, she had been fired. "She had you-know-what happen to her," Mrs. Faulkner had said, pulling Hannah to one side a few days ago. And when Hannah had said, no, she didn't know what, Ardeth had whispered, "Pregnant!" And Madeline wasn't married. "We're a respectable firm," sixty-year-old Ardeth Faulkner had added with a self-righteous sniff.

     Madeline finally turned away from the mirror, looked first at Hannah and then at Mrs. Faulkner, paused as if she wanted to say something, then left quietly.

     Hannah slowly ate her cottage cheese, taking sips of diet Fresca in between, then said, "By the way, when is Madeline's last day?" The college counselor would want to know when Hannah's improved financial status would go into effect.

     Ardeth peeled her hard-boiled egg with care, keeping her eyes on the egg instead of on Hannah as she said, "Mr. Katz gave her a month's notice."

     "Well," Hannah said, "I'm certainly ready!" calculating that in just three weeks her salary was going to double.

     Hannah didn't notice at first that the other woman avoided looking at her. It was only when she seemed to pay unusually close attention to her meat loaf sandwich that Hannah sensed something was wrong. She waited, and finally Ardeth looked at her and said, "I'm sorry, Hannah, but you aren't going to get the job."

     Hannah stared at her. "What do you mean?"

     "I mean," Mrs. Faulkner said, salting her egg, "that I've already hired her replacement. You saw her. The young woman who was at my desk a while ago."

     "You mean the one who said she knew nothing about the stock market? I thought she was a new account! How can you hire her over me? You certainly can't say she's more experienced than I am! Ardeth, that job is mine!"

     "I know," the other woman said, looking unhappy. "It's just that Mr. Katz—"

     "Ardeth, remember when I filled in for Madeline when she was out sick for two weeks and how Mr. Katz praised my efficiency? Remember when I discovered how sloppy Madeline kept her files, and that her letters were always full of mistakes? Ardeth, she can barely take shorthand! Mr. Katz was so impressed with me that he even told you about it. He surely must want me to take her place."

     Ardeth stared at her sandwich as if it had suddenly gone bad, then abruptly wrapped it in the wax paper, shoved it back into the brown sack, and faced Hannah squarely. "Look, I want you to know that I have nothing to do with this. I know you're a good worker, I know you're being wasted in the back office. But the fact is, Mr. Katz told me that he doesn't want you for his secretary."

     "Doesn't want me! But why?"

     Ardeth tried to find the best way of saying it, but finally just said, "He said...he says you're too fat."

     Hannah stared at her.

     "I'm sorry," Ardeth said. "I really am. If it were up to me—"

     "But didn't you tell him that my qualifications should mean more than how much I weigh? Didn't you tell him the job was
mine?
You mean I've done all the jobs around here that no one else would do, and studied the stock market, to be rewarded like
this?
"

     "Hannah, this is just as painful for me to say as it is for you to hear—"

     "No, it isn't! Ardeth, I need that money!"

     "Listen to me. You didn't get the job two years ago because of your weight. That first girl, the one you competed against, didn't do anywhere near as well on the tests as you did, but Mr. Katz liked her looks. He said he didn't want a fat secretary."