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into Pauline’s tale, Pauline’s bitter triumph, and, in
some way, into Pauline’s unhappy life.
     
But Mr. Who?
     
This was the dilemma Pauline put her in: as much as she would
like to know the story, the gossip, the whole tale, she hoped not to
hear that desperate breathlessness in her own voice. As much as she
wanted to know whatever it was that was worth knowing about the
secrets and complications and (yes, even) failings and foibles of the
people in the office—and she had to admit the few days that Pauline
ever missed work were always long and dull—she did not, with equal
longing, wish to be a part of the whispering spinster chorus at the
edge of other, more interesting lives. She did not want to be one of the
gray-haired harridans, one of those brittle and bitter middle-aged
virgins who can never be sure that the world is indeed as full of deceit
and ill will as they claim, or whether it’s their own tainted version of
things that creates the ill will and deceit in the first place. She did not
want a life drained of kindness and compassion and humor. It was as
much as she had prayed for an hour ago in church, now that the war
was over and she no longer prayed for the boys. She had prayed for if
not a better life than this daily, lonely one, a better way to be content
with it. And then the sudden windstorm, the stream of strangers
either bent into it or leaning back to resist it, tears running down all
their faces in this valley of tears. George putting his hand on her
shoulder. God’s answer.
     
Never kid a kidder.
     
“Maybe,” she said to Pauline, not looking at her, just turning her
head a bit to speak to her from across the aisle and over her shoulder.
Not whispering either. “Maybe it was just the wind.”
     
It was the lack of a reply, clack of typewriters within the silence,
that made her finally raise her eyes to Pauline’s face, which was blank,
her jaw thrust forward beneath the neat pink lipstick.
     
“The wind,” Mary said again. “It was making everyone tear up.”
     
Pauline examined her face for a few seconds more, her jaw set.
And then she smiled a little, not kindly, raising her eyebrows and
slowly shaking her big head. “You are naive,” she said, as if con-
firming something she had already spent a good deal of time
discussing, elsewhere. “You really are.”
     
Mary shrugged. “I suppose. But that wind was making everyone
tear up.”
     
Pauline continued to smile, shaking her head, and Mary, turning
back to her work, smiled too. She had escaped the spinster chorus
only to join the naïve. And here was the other part of the moral
dilemma Pauline embodied. Would it have killed her to play along? To
have told Pauline, Oh my! You’re kidding! What a scandal! If gossip
gave Pauline pleasure why deny her? Surely there was little enough
pleasure for Pauline outside of work. A mother she’d nursed through
cancer, a brother she was estranged from because of a terrible wife, a
small apartment and a cheap landlord and an unending series of
contacts with people—a grocer, a butcher, a waitress, a salesclerk, a
bus driver—who did not meet her expectations.
     
Feed my lambs, Jesus said. What was the cost of a little kindness
toward someone who found her pleasure in being unkind? What was
the good, as Sister Clare at school used to say, in loving only the
lovable?
     
Oh my, you’re kidding, what a scandal! Would it have killed her to
play along?
     
She whispered a quick mea culpa, resolved to be less naive, and
then let herself settle into her work, the pleasure of the speed of her
fingers and the neat, dark strokes of her own shorthand, her confident
spelling and punctuation, her sense of purpose and community as the
busy sound of her own typewriter joined with the busy sounds of the
typewriters beneath the hands of all the women in the room. This
much she was sure of: if she kept busy, kept her mind to the task at
hand, let herself sink into