Voice Out of Darkness Read Free Page A

walked up the hall, initialed the space next to her name on the copywriters’ time sheet, wrote 9:14 after it, and collided violently with Stan Smith, who wrote drug and cosmetics copy and with whom she usually lunched.
    Stan backed away and looked at her. “Late night,” she said judiciously. “Intemperance and worse. You know what’s good for that?”
    “Paige’s Pacifies,” Katy said, edging away. “No thanks. I had trouble sleeping, that’s all.”
    “It’s difficult at those noisy little bars,” Stan agreed. “There’s a copy meeting at ten, so no coffee. See you later.”
    Copy meeting at ten—she couldn’t talk to Michael, then, until well after eleven. Katy went on into the copy department, took off her coat and hat and boots, reclaimed her ashtray from a neighboring desk, and settled down to work. The talk with Michael and her four o’clock decision had smoothed the roughening edges of her nerves; she should, of course, have done both before this. But that was on the schedule, too. You didn’t just say, as a conversational gambit, “By the way, I’ve just had another letter accusing me of murdering my foster-sister.” Not to Stan, whom she had known well for two years. Not even, until two months of waiting and dread had had their way, to Michael.
    Her phone rang. A buyer with a voice like a hornet demanded to know why her merchandise had been mis-keyed in the News; customers were insisting on fifteen-ninety-five hats for nine-ninety-five and the department was in an uproar. Katy investigated, said soothingly that the News would send a letter of apology and explanation, and hung up. The day at Paige’s had begun.
    The store’s advertising department, one of the largest and most frenzied in New York, wasn’t a place for leisured meditation. Noise and confusion and the pressure of deadlines battered and drove from every side. Voices lifted out of the steady humming pattern: a copywriter asking of the department at large the name of a particularly fresh-sounding flower; a shriek of laughter from the basement writer, whose Mirror proof announced that Paige’s scouring pads were impregnated with vegetable “soup” instead of “soap”; a bellowed warning from the production department that all Times and Tribune proofs must be okayed and released by two o’clock.
    Normally, a routine day plunged Katy into complete oblivion of everything but Paige merchandise by ten o’clock as she divided her time between typewriter and phone. There were pleased buyers, and buyers who gibbered with rage. There were acid penciled comments from the copy chief, and blue-moon moments of excited approval. There were the crises, like the time her wild-mink ad had run in the first three thousand editions of an evening paper as mild mink. There was, every day, the challenge and fascination of convincing matrons in the Bronx and sleek Manhattan secretaries, doubting mothers in Pelham and pretty, expensive girls all over New York that there was nothing like Paige’s Fabulous Fashions Floor.
    Stan Smith, who knew vaguely of Katy’s inheritance, had been frankly incredulous. “Work in this slave-ship when you don’t absolutely have to? Ah, well. Weak in the head. Young and fetching and mad as a hatter—”
    “I like it,” Katy had interrupted calmly. “And anyway, what else would I be doing with myself? And why don’t you go back to your dreadful drugs and potions and leave me alone?”
    But, today, her typewriter stumbled over headlines she’d have to rewrite later, and her phone was a maddening and persistent enemy. She told herself crisply that Michael had work to do too and couldn’t drop everything just to call and be comforting; in spite of herself her hand went out eagerly at every ring. And it was the debutante-dress department with a correction in a color listing, or Mr. Carrara of Better Furs to say bitterly that his Persian lamb ad looked like matted cat, or timid Mr. Wilsham, assistant in Raincoats,