Open Secrets Read Free Page B

She understood now how people believed they had seen ghosts. Whenever the door opened she expected to look up into his face. Sometimes she made a pact with herself not to look up till she had counted to ten. Few people came in, because of the flu. She set herself jobs of rearranging things, else she would have gone mad. She never locked up until five or ten minutes after closing time. And then she fancied that he might be across the street on the Post Office steps, watching her, being too shy to make a move. She worried of course that he might be ill, she always sought in conversation for news of the latest cases. No one spoke his name.
    It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.
    She had to be forgiven, didn’t she, she had to be forgiven for thinking, after such letters, that the one thing that could never happen was that he wouldn’t approach her, wouldn’t get in touch with her at all? Never cross her threshold, after such avowals? Funerals passed by her window and she gave no thought to them, as long as they were not his. Even when she was sick in the hospital her only thought was that she must get back, she must get out of bed, the door must not stay locked against him. She staggered to her feet and back to work. On a hot afternoon she was arranging fresh newspapers on the racks and his name jumped out at her like something in her feverish dreams.
    She read a short notice of his marriage to a Miss Grace Home. Not a girl she knew. Not a Library user.
    The bride wore fawn silk crêpe with brown-and-cream piping, and a beige straw hat with brown velvet streamers.
    There was no picture. Brown-and-cream piping. Such was the end, and had to be, to her romance.
    But on her desk at the Library, a matter of a few weeks ago, on a Saturday night after everybody had gone and she had locked the door and was turning out the lights, she discovered a scrap of paper. A few words written on it.
I was engaged before I went overseas
. No name, not his or hers. And there was her photograph, partly shoved under the blotter.
    He had been in the Library that very evening. It had been a busy time, she had often left the desk to find a book for somebody or to straighten up the papers or to put some books on the shelves. He had been in the same room with her, watched her, and taken his chance. But never made himself known.
    I was engaged before I went overseas
.
    “Do you think it was all a joke on me?” Louisa said. “Do you think a man could be so diabolical?”
    “In my experience, tricks like that are far more often indulged in by the women. No, no. Don’t you think such a thing. Far more likely he was sincere. He got a little carried away. It’s all just the way it looks on the surface. He was engaged before he went overseas, he never expected to get back in one piece but he did. And when he did, there is the fiancée waiting—what else could he do?”
    “What indeed?” said Louisa.
    “He bit off more than he could chew.”
    “Ah, that’s so, that’s so!” Louisa said. “And what was it in my case but vanity, which deserves to get slapped down!” Her eyes were glassy and her expression roguish. “You don’t think he’d had a good look at me any one time and thought the original was even worse than that poor picture, so he backed off?”
    “I do not!” said Jim Frarey. “And don’t you so belittle yourself.”
    “I don’t want you to think I am stupid,” she said. “I am not so stupid and inexperienced as that story makes me sound.”
    “Indeed I don’t think you are stupid at all.”
    “But perhaps you think I am inexperienced?”
    This was it, he thought—the usual. Women after they have told one story on themselves cannot stop from telling another. Drink upsets them in a radical way, prudence is out the window.
    She had confided in him once before that she had been a