The Delicate, Passionate World of Gregory Morgan and Vivien Prevette / Book 3: The Small Family

By Mia Marko

A love story can touch your heart. Can it also touch your soul? The Delicate, Passionate World is a fairy tale for thoughtful, sensitive adults. It is a loose
retelling in a 20th Century setting of one of the oldest supernatural love stories ever told - that of Eros and Psyche, his mortal love. While easy and fun to read,
exploring desire and love's milestones from this gentle and elevated point of view is intended to take the reader toward the Big Questions of life. So be
entertained, be swept away, and maybe even find enlightenment ... Six years in the making, this one-of-a-kind self-help love story is ultimately a meditation on
the Great Love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mia Marko
• Release date: Dec 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732554634

Book preview

The Pepperton Press

536 Park Avenue, #56

Scotch Plains, NJ  07076-9998

First printing, November 2018

Copyright © Mia Marko, 2018

All rights reserved.  Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book, and for complying with copyright laws.  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts or quotations.  All inquiries should be addressed to the address given above.

The Pepperton Press and the caged bird logo are trademarks of The Pepperton Press.

Visit the website of The Delicate, Passionate World at www.delicatepassionateworld.com.

ISBN:  978-1-7325546-3-4

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2018909302

Art elements and frontispiece drawing by Milagro Bethel Rivera.

Book Layout by Michal Marko. 

Printed by Thomson-Shore in the United States of America

Gore, M. (2001) I am You [Recorded by Depeche Mode]. On Exciter [CD]. London, England: Mute Records.

Wise Brown, M. (1942) The Runaway Bunny. New York, New York:  Harper & Row.

To my Angel, in all his mortal and immortal forms,

to the greater glory of His unspoken name.

There’s no turning back, we’re in this trap, no denying the fact.  No excuses to give, I’m the one you’re with, we’ve no alternative, no …

-Depeche Mode, I am You and You are Me

The Delicate, Passionate World

of Gregory Morgan and Vivien Prevette

Book 3 – The Small Family

CHAPTER 25

Survival, determination, hardship, becoming tough, loneliness, responsibility, hope

T

he windswept chill of the winter morning urged the office supplies delivery man on to greater speed as he pushed his cart towards the front door of a large office building near Columbus Circle.  The freight elevator, you, the building porter reminded him, pointing with a fat thumb.  The delivery man pushed his cart around the corner, went inside, and pushed the button to call the freight elevator.  Then he got himself and his cart into the elevator and pressed the button for the eighth floor, where the headquarters of the Carlisle Addressing Machine Company were located.  This delivery was one of the highlights of his delivery route because Mr. Carlisle, Company President, had a particularly lovely young secretary who sat just outside of the President’s office door.  This girl was one of the scenic glories of New York, thought the delivery man.  He came out on the eighth floor, knocked where Carlisle Addressing Machine Company was painted in bold letters across the double-wide glass doors, and the receptionist came out to see him. 

Mr. Carlisle‘s private secretary had been the receptionist at first, but it was obvious to see that a girl of that caliber would not be left to guard a mostly-empty office lobby for long, and Mr. Carlisle would have been a fool not to want her closer.  She lasted as receptionist for under half a year before Mr. Carlisle proved he was no fool and placed her right in front of his imposing wooden office door.  This new receptionist looked sleepy and possibly hung over, her hair a strange color that looked like it must have come from a cheap bottle.  There had been a few receptionists in rapid succession here and none of them had been given the supplies closet key, so the Glory of New York always had to be called for him when he arrived.  Ah, how fortunate!  The latest receptionist pointed listlessly in the direction of the lobby sofa, and he sat down next to his cart to wait.  The reception area had no windows which made waiting there quite dull, but a few more minutes and … ah!  There she was!  Today she was radiant, her above-shoulder-length bob pulled gracefully back on her head in a small all-business low ponytail, in the long pencil skirt that she almost always wore, this time with a warm-looking scarf tucked around her neck beneath her lady’s suit jacket, which was decorated with the brooch that she always wore.  He knew every detail of her look.  He also knew, from when he watched her hands as she took his clipboard to sign his order delivery form, that she wore no wedding band.  Now her dark high heels beat out a light, smooth beat across the floor as she came closer.

Good morning, Mr. Neville, said Mr. Carlisle’s private secretary somberly.  She was always very serious.

Mr. Neville smiled.  Good morning, Ma’am.  I have your supplies right here, if you can please just sign on the line, as usual?

With pleasure, Mr. Neville, she said, signing.  Please follow me.

She handed him back his clipboard and pushed open the door at the end of the reception lobby and held it for him while he got his supplies cart through it, and then they walked through the main floor office area, between the desks, to her dark wooden desk with her name plate on it, with the window overlooking Manhattan just behind it.  The paperwork stood in perfectly straight, neat piles on top of her desk.  I have picked up the wrong key, she said by way of explanation, and then she sat down behind her desk, unlocked the drawers, and pulled out another key ring.  It is this one.

They walked past Mr. Carlisle’s office door to the supplies closet.  She always held the door open while he unloaded the supplies and placed them on the shelves.  At first she had had to indicate to him where she wanted everything to go, but now it had become routine.  He busied himself with putting everything in perfect order, hoping to please her, but all she ever said was a plain Thank you.  This she said to him now, and then she accompanied him back to the receptionist’s desk.  He thanked the beautiful secretary, smiled hopefully although she had never yet smiled back, and then watched her as she walked back onto the main office floor.  It was always over so quickly.  He sighed.  Then he turned his head and looked at the latest receptionist, who was busying herself with peeling flaking polish off of her nails with her pen cap.  No, she would never become a President’s private secretary.  The odds were low that she would even be at this desk again when he returned in two weeks’ time.  Some girls just had It and others did not.  He sometimes thought about marrying and settling down, but what if he ended up with someone like this creature?  He shuddered, managed a weak good-bye, and pushed his now much-emptied cart back out toward the service elevator.

******

Back inside the Carlisle Addressing Machine Company, the workers on the main office floor quietly resumed their standard, uneventful workday morning.  Mr. Carlisle’s secretary returned to her desk, allowed herself a moment to gaze out of the window onto the cold, grey winter day, and then she took up a packet of correspondence work, fed a sheet of office paper into her typewriter, correctly aligned the margin for her first line, and began to type.  Within a few minutes, the buzzer on her Talk-A-Phone Intercom on her desk went off. 

Yes, Mr. Carlisle? she asked politely.

Please come into my office.  Two black coffees, please, Mr. Ward is here, and come prepared to take dictation, said Mr. Carlisle’s voice, coming slightly distortedly out of the small, black machine.

Yes, sir.  It will only be a moment, replied the girl.  She got up, went to the small office kitchen, pulled the small silver tray out of the locked cabinet to which only she had the key, and told the two colleagues standing by the coffee machine to please excuse her, but Mr. Carlisle had requested two coffees, and of course everyone knew that Mr. Carlisle’s order came first.  The girl did not add that Mr. Ward was visiting because that would have been indiscreet, and also because it was a worrisome sign.  Mr. Ward was the primary Legal Counsel for the Carlisle Addressing Machine Company, and there had been an ongoing legal tussle with a competitor company recently over a patent.  Should the court rule in favor of the competitor, the company’s future looked bleak.

The girl returned to her desk with the tray and two black coffees, where she grabbed her dictation notebook and pencil, tucked her dictation notebook and her to-do items notebook under her arm, got the tray with the coffees, and then smoothly opened the door to Mr. Carlisle’s office with all of her items on her person and ready to go.  The two older gentlemen looked up and smiled appreciatively when she walked in and set the silver coffee tray down on the small conference table by the window.

Ah, Ms. Westcott!  Prompt as ever! said Mr. Carlisle with a smile.

How do you do, Ms. Westcott?  It is good to see you again, said Mr. Ward, rising politely before reseating himself.

How do you do, murmured the girl politely.  Once, she had not known the proper response to this greeting.  She had also not known whether it should perhaps be accompanied by a small curtsey or some such thing, but now she knew exactly what to do.  She sat down, professional and straight-spined, in the smaller chair that was reserved for her use and placed at the side of Mr. Carlisle’s desk.  She opened the larger of her two notebooks and prepared herself with her pencil to take dictation.

The gentlemen helped themselves to their coffees, and Mr. Carlisle waved his cup and saucer toward the window.  This weather is abysmal and I am heartily sick of it.  Smoke? he asked.

Mr. Ward shook his head.  Mrs. Ward and my doctor have joined forces and they keep telling me how it wreaks havoc with my blood pressure … which wreaks havoc with my blood pressure!

Mr. Carlisle smiled pleasantly.  One likes to see such practical sense and self-control in one’s chief attorney.  I, however, will have a smoke.  He set his coffee down, took a cigarette from the box, and lit it.  As the legal uncertainties continued, Mr. Carlisle sent his private secretary out for cigarettes with increasing frequency.  The smoke from the cigarette’s burning end wafted aesthetically if malodorously through the closed room of the office.  The girl (who never smoked) had long ago trained herself to suppress the urge to rub at her nose or to sneeze.  So Ms. Westcott, here is what we need from you today.  A letter must go out to the Board of Directors with the invitation to the next Board Meeting for next month, together with a summary of the points that Mr. Ward will now list.  Mr. Ward, my secretary is ready.  Please proceed.

Mr. Ward’s style, the girl already knew, was to speak at length, then to break off from key points with irrelevant side remarks about Mrs. Ward or politics or traffic congestion, to return from these distractions without remembering exactly where he left off, then to speak quickly to make up for lost time, and finally to need to be reminded of which points he had already made so that he could reorganize and rally his thoughts for one final concluding onslaught.  If a secretary could take dictation from Mr. Ward, she could take dictation from anyone.  The girl was able to do it without blinking.

Wait just a moment …. Did I already mention Section Six of the Elliott court materials? asked Mr. Ward when he at last reached the confused point that he always reached after a few minutes of speaking.

Yes, sir, said the girl. We have covered Sections Four, Five, and Six.  Will there need be mention of any other sections?

Oh dear, said Mr. Ward.  Now I am not certain.  Could I trouble you to please read back what we have so far?

It is no trouble, said the girl primly.  She read back what she had taken down and both men nodded.

It took another few minutes but Mr. Ward finally got all of his information across, adding that she needed to put Confidential on top of all the pages.  Then Mr. Carlisle gave her a list of follow-up items to take care of in regards to the Board of Directors meeting.  The girl switched notebooks, opened her slightly smaller notebook where she usually listed out her to-do’s, folded the next sheet in it lengthwise so that the crease down the center separated it into two neat halves, and she began to take down the items.  Board of Directors meetings took from afternoon into the evening, so those were always days that she disliked, but as the girl always kept her face completely blank, no one knew what her likes or dislikes were.  In fact, no one knew anything, and that was the way that she wanted to keep it.  She took her leave of the gentlemen, returned to her desk with her notebooks, looked at the clock, and saw that it was practically lunchtime.  Since becoming Mr. Carlisle’s private secretary, once a week she splurged and treated herself to lunch at the nearby Automat on Broadway, and this was that day.  Lois, please cover for me, she said to the woman whose desk was nearest to hers.  I am going out for my lunch break. 

Certainly, Vivien.  My pleasure, said Lois.  They had become close colleagues over the past year, and they alone called each other by their first names.

The girl went to the coat closet to pick up her coat and hat.  On the ride down with the lift operator, she checked the time on the elevator clock.  Mr. Carlisle prized promptness above many other virtues, and she had a reputation to maintain with him.  The elevator doors opened out onto the lobby and she stepped out, becoming one young woman among many people milling through the lobby of the large office building.  There was the interior entrance to the Carlisle Addressing Machine Company showroom, whose main door faced out directly onto the street, and inside were the sales clerks who were busy at work providing a continued livelihood for everyone up on the eighth floor.  The girl adjusted her hat, pulled her scarf and coat closer, made sure her gloves were on tight, took a deep breath, and passed through the revolving doors and out into the bitter cold.

Although she had lived in New York for many years now – it would soon be nine years, she reflected – if there was one thing about life in New York that she would probably never get used to, it was the cold.  Vivien the girl had grown up in a warm and often tropically humid place.  Ms. Westcott, the professional young secretary that the girl had become, was forced to live in a place that was tropically humid for a few weeks out of the year but that was near arctic for many, many weeks out of the year.  She had never owned a heavy winter coat before she came to live up North; there was no need for such a garment back where she had come from.  Cold weather had not been the only thing that she had had to get accustomed to, of course.  It had been like moving to another country.  The English that people spoke was different, sounded different, and used different words.  They also spoke it at a speed about seven times faster than the speed that anyone spoke back home.  For the first three years, whenever she had opened her mouth to utter a single sentence, New Yorkers had laughed.  She started working on that problem even before she started stenography and typing night classes.  She might have been laughed right out of the job interview for the position of a telephone switchboard operator in her early days, but that had just put her on another path that was ultimately a far better paid one.  Her accent would never entirely disappear but now at least she could compensate for it by moving confidently and knowledgeably through the office like a secretary in a Hollywood film, spine ever straight and her suit jacket tapered attractively near her always slender waist.  Her work was likewise diligent and of the highest quality.  The truth was that she could not bear to not fit in, she could not bear to be ridiculed, and she did not want to be caught by anyone in a moment of uncertainty or lack of poise.  The other girls in offices were often mean.  Once you got on their bad side, they might gossip about you and it might be impossible to get your good reputation back.

Clothing and hairstyle were important elements as well.  Office girls wore close-fitting, dark-colored suits, and although it might take several miles to walk all over town each day, stylish heels were simply mandatory even if the snow piled about in three-foot high drifts.  If a young office girl fell into a snowdrift, after all, it might even end up working in her favor if she could convince a passing unmarried executive to lend her a hand and help her back up, but no office girl would be caught dead in comfortable shoes.  Before she had turned herself into one of them, Vivien the newly arrived girl had spent a lot of time making sandwiches at a lunch counter in another office building, all the while observing the way that office girls dressed and comported themselves.  It was not important to have many clothes, but the ones that one did have had to be of a quality cut and of the right material or else it would be impossible to fit in, and fitting in was what it was all about.  Everything that Vivien had learned about the life of an office girl in New York had been self-taught, closely observed, and practiced in night school and in a string of temporary jobs until she had turned herself into what she was now.  She looked younger than she was, she knew, and she used this to her benefit.  It had landed her the position in Mr. Carlisle’s office, and occasionally at lunch it landed her a free half sandwich from a passing young man.  Lift operators were extra polite to her and she took care to smile back in case she ever needed a favor later, such as learning which companies in that building might be hiring secretarial help.  She encouraged in others the view that she was only recently come to the city and was beginning her upward career path, whereas in fact there had already been a hard half decade that she did not want anyone to know about, a time of clawing her way toward even the lowest rung of the New York office world.

She sat down in the Automat on this particular day at a small table by the window, and she looked out into the street.  The people walking on the opposite side of Broadway looked a bit out of focus, and Vivien wondered vaguely whether she should begin wearing the glasses that the optometrist had prescribed for her a few months ago when her office building had had a free optometrist check-up day in the building lobby.  All that typing was probably making her vision weaken, but she had worked too hard to look this good only to now ruin it by wearing unattractive eyewear!  The glasses remained stubbornly in a drawer at home.  Lunch was a quick and small affair.  A slice of apple pie was something she rarely allowed herself, because of the expense of it if for no other reason.  Coffee she would have back in the office.  A small cup of soup helped to get the half sandwich down.  Her to-do list from Mr. Carlisle involved making travel plans for the two out-of-town Board Members, arranging for catered food to be brought in for the meeting, restocking the office bar cart that Mr. Carlisle kept behind his desk because the Board members drank like fish whenever they got together, and preparing documents in multiple copies for the meeting attendees.  She would have to work with Lois on that.  Everything had to be done perfectly, because that was the standard that Vivien set for herself in her professional work, but also at least in part because she wanted Mr. Carlisle to be satisfied with everything.  He was a good man and had given her a wonderful chance when he had promoted her to his private secretary, for which Vivien was very grateful.  She did not want to let him down.  He had taken a risk with her and she wanted to ensure that it would pay off for him.

On the one hand, her work was in a comfortable, heated office, but on the other hand the days could be grueling, especially once the commute was tacked on, and in late winter it was invariably dark before she returned home.  By the time she climbed out of the train in Queens and dragged herself toward her apartment building, she was more than ready to throw her heels across the room and soak her aching feet in Epsom salt.  Today was no exception.  She turned the key in the lock as quietly as she could, hoping as always to get a few moments of respite first on the sofa, but the door was not even open yet when the small and excited footsteps started running full speed towards her. 

Mama!  Mama! cried the small girl.

Oh, Sophie, at least give me a chance to come inside, said Vivien, entering the apartment and closing the door behind her.  She set her hat, gloves, and pocketbook down on the small table and picked Sophie up.  What is Grandmama feeding you?  You are getting to be so heavy! she said.  Sophie laughed happily.

Vivien’s mother came out of the small kitchen.  She is just like you were, Vivien, and refuses to eat much at all.  I am sure I have no idea where she gets the energy from to grow like this.

Vivien carried Sophie over on her hip and gave her own mother a kiss on the cheek.  Thank you for trying to feed her, at least.  It certainly doesn’t feel like she is wasting away.  How did the dress fitting today go?  They all went back into the tiny kitchen where Sophie’s largely untouched dinner sat on the table.  Vivien sat Sophie back down in front of it, on top of a pile of cushions so that Sophie could sit up comfortably high enough at the table.

Well, I left Sophie at Edith’s again and then left for the fitting.  That was probably at ten this morning.  The fitting went well and I dare say I hope this will turn into some additional recommendations among Mrs. Baker’s friends, because Mr. Baker keeps his wife on a very stingy budget on which many new dresses cannot be afforded.  I came back to get Sophie by around noon, and her and little Robert were already at each other’s throats.

Vivien looked at Sophie.  Why are you such a tyrant to that little boy?  Ms. Edith will not let you come and stay if you are so mean to Robert.  Do you not like Robert?

Sophie smiled happily.  I like Robert, she said in her child’s voice.  Apparently pounding the stuffing out of him on a regular basis did not equate in her little mind to not liking him.

Well, he will not long like you if you are so unkind to him, said Vivien, and then she sighed.  Things look uncertain at the office, mother.  You know we are being sued by a much larger competitor, Ellison Addressing Machine, over a patent?  Well, it does not look good.

What will you do? asked her mother.

I will wait until the next month’s Board Meeting and then hear what the news is.  If it looks uncertain, I will stop by the stenography school and leave my name as available for new job opportunities, said Vivien.

It seems disloyal, somehow, after everything that Mr. Carlisle has done for you, though, do you not think so, Vivien? asked her mother.

Perhaps, replied Vivien, putting out plates for her and her mother to join Sophie for dinner.

Vivien genuinely did hope that Mr. Carlisle’s fortunes would improve, but at the next Board Meeting, the news was anything but good.  She sat in her small chair, now brought over into the Board Room, and was taking down the meeting minutes.  Mr. Ward was explaining to the Board Members how the paper feeding mechanism that the latest Carlisle Addressing Machine models featured would very likely be ruled a violation of a patent held by Harmon P. Elliott.  Elliott Addressing Machines already held a significant market share whereas Carlisle machines had never managed to gain much above a ten percent market share.  The Board Meeting then proceeded to a lengthy review of the financial statements of the company, and everyone was on edge.  Vivien stopped by the stenography school the very next day and left her name.  If there was such a thing as loyalty that could be expected in this business, then it was not a luxury that she could afford, with a small child to raise and a mother to help support and a husband nary in sight.  There was only one key criterion for her next job, and that was that it would pay better than her current position.  She had passed in and out of enough office doors by now to feel confident that she was up to the task, wherever the next job took her.

Looking back on it, her life since leaving New Orleans had hardened her and had further validated her already practical life outlook.  Vivien had never been a girl to believe in fairy tales, and the way her life had turned out had proven her right.  She never once imagined that her mindset had helped to create its own validation; life was just this way.  The key was to never look back and to never let the anguish inside come out.  In the beginning, she had wanted to run away and to take the next train back South, but she had always been too stubborn to admit failure.  Then it looked like there might be a child but it turned out not to be.  It was a nightmare to lose a baby in the early months of her first pregnancy, and with her mother so far away.  Vivien had thought she would not live through the grief of it.  Afterward, it took her months to mourn.  She would sit alone, curled up in the old armchair that she had dragged up North with her after her wedding, and she would throw a blanket over herself and just cry and cry.  But life cannot break you in the same way twice once a wound partly heals, and the loss of her second child, an unborn son, was far less devastating although physically it took a lot more out of her since it happened further along in her pregnancy.  She began to wonder if she would ever have a healthy born living child, and she tried not to think about the line that life was drawing for her between physical passion and death.  What good did it do to dwell on these things, after all?  Her diet was poor, her health was fragile, she was eroding her body in the constant effort to bear a child, as well as in the hard work of multiple odd jobs, from cleaning toilets in a hotel to standing all day behind a sandwich counter to eventually working as a waitress in several small restaurants.  She never left a job; she merely added another one to it.  The cost of living near New York was exorbitantly high.  A family of six could feast for dinner back in New Orleans on the cost of what one reasonable dinner for two could cost in New York.

The war had created opportunities that would never otherwise have come about, and in Vivien’s case it gave her her first big chance, making good use of her seamstressing skills by working in the textile industry in a company that made the more ridged backing used for the collars of military uniforms.  From there she took up light clerical work in addition to her work on the sewing floor, and eventually she was able to attend stenography and typing classes at night on a special wartime stipend.  From there, she had the skillset to apply for other office work and she had not lacked for a job since then.  Sophie’s birth came at an interesting time, in the midst of the war.  Vivien’s marriage had been on the rocks for a couple of years and in hindsight it amazed her that Chip had even hung around long enough to father Sophie.  How had they ever made it through six whole years together?  It must have been because time flew as Vivien spent her days alone and working her fingers to the bone while Chip was away.  By the end, Vivien found that she could suddenly face the demise of her marriage with dry eyes and an entirely cool mind.  It was clear that they were never going to work as a couple, and it was purely out of apathy and oversight that Sophie had been conceived.  Once she had Sophie, Vivien really had no further need for Chip, and a fortuitous gust of the winds of fate blew him out of her life at just that moment.  Vivien wrote to her mother, asked if she would come up to New York or if Vivien should move back home, and her mother came up North.  Times were hard and everyone knew that there were far more war-related new jobs springing up in New York than in New Orleans.  Vivien knew she never would never have made it through Sophie’s baby years without her mother’s help, and she was deeply grateful.  Having made friends with Edith, a woman married to a traveling salesman who lived down the hall from them and who had a small son, made things complete.  Edith watched Sophie during the times that Vivien’s mother went about her seamstressing work, and Vivien paid a small monthly amount to Edith for her help.  As long as Vivien had a job, their world could continue to go round, and Sophie always came first, above everything, above Mr. Carlisle and everyone at the office, above even what Vivien might have ever wanted for herself.  Every slice of pie that Vivien did not buy at the Automat could turn into a small treat for Sophie on a Sunday.  The math was very simple.  Even her odd jobs had not entirely ended.  Up until her most recent promotion to the role of Mr. Carlisle’s Private Secretary, she had continued to help out at one restaurant, and although it was in Queens and her office positions were in Manhattan, she still dreaded that someone she knew from her professional life in the city might ever show up there and see her waiting tables.  Now, there were nights when she would help her mother with her sewing, just as they had done back in New Orleans, as if nothing had ever changed except the walls of the apartment around them.  When her mother could finish a blouse or a tablecloth or a set of curtains quicker, that meant that her mother could take up new jobs more quickly, and that also meant more money and more clothing and food for Sophie.

Now, with the Carlisle Addressing Company prospects so shaky and with Sophie’s wellbeing foremost in her mind, Vivien asked Mr. Carlisle for a private word and gave him her two weeks’ notice.  Mr. Carlisle was stunned.  Would she reconsider?  He would put in a small raise for her if only she would agree to stay.  She was doing such wonderful work.  But Vivien shook her head.  As Mr. Carlisle’s disappointment began to get the better of him, he began to make the argument to Vivien that she owed him some loyalty after the way that he had elevated her so quickly to the post of his private secretary.  Vivien stood up, repeated her thanks for the job, but reaffirmed that she had already accepted another position and that was the end of it.  Back at her desk, she called Lois over to set up time for them to transition the keys and all of the notes.  Lois was incredibly surprised as Vivien handed over the notebook that she used for dictation.  The smaller private notebook for her to-do items Vivien kept with her.  The days flew quickly by and then two weeks later, Vivien was walking through the rotating glass door of another large office building, just down the street from Columbus Circle, as it happened, and she found herself riding the elevator up to the tenth floor, to the insurance records department of the Manhattan National Life Insurance Company, where she folded in half the next sheet in her small notebook and prepared to take down the new work asked of her.  What did it matter where her exact place of employment was?  Hold your head high, keep your spine straight, never look back, and never, ever cry. 

Mr. Neville, office supply delivery man to the Carlisle Addressing Machine Company, was disappointed to learn that the Glory of New York had left her job as Mr. Carlisle’s Private Secretary, but he was not entirely surprised when the company went bankrupt a mere eight months later.  Supplies orders had been getting smaller and smaller for a number of months.  Her going must have taken the lifeblood out of the place.

******

Vivien’s change of employer hardly fazed her.  When she worked somewhere, nobody ever really got to know anything about her.  No one ever knew that she had a daughter, no one knew how old Vivien really was or where she lived or what her life was like.  The job was a kind of theater where she became, for the duration of the workday at least, someone without her problems, without any past, without any personality almost, someone who was a universally interchangeable cog in a faceless system.  Her career outlook continued favorably at the Manhattan National Life Insurance Company and quite soon she went from purely clerical tasks in the records library to working directly with in-process claims records.  When she sat at her desk and her work almost literally flew off of it, it was easy to block out the fact that the rest of her life could be described as a failure.  She was well aware of the stigma of raising a child without a husband in the picture, but fortunately it was a stigma that the ending of the war had made less burdensome because there were so many war widows about, especially in a large city like New York, with its hope of employment opportunities for these women.  Vivien told people who had to be told something – people like Edith, whose traveling salesman husband was hardly ever home – that her own husband had died in the war.  With Edith, this turned out to be an unfortunate choice of lie because Edith put Vivien in touch with another woman in their apartment building named Angela who had, in fact, really lost her husband in the war.  Angela had no children.  She had joined a group of other war widows in the city who had as their primary club goal the organizing of social mixers and dances with former servicemen at VFW halls and other similar venues.  Vivien had absolutely no desire to go to afternoon tea dances and have former servicemen lay their hands on her, and she even briefly considered admitting to Angela that she was not really a war widow, but then the discomfort of confessing to such a vile lie to a woman who had in fact lost a much-loved husband was just too great, and so Vivien said nothing.  After a few more invitations, Vivien explained that she was very busy raising Sophie and that she was just not ready to meet a new man. 

Ah, I understand.  The grief is still too raw, Angela said, nodding.

I will be sick, thought Vivien. This is the price for my lying!  She lowered her head and made a small, strangled sound.  The only risk of physical harm that Chip had ever faced was the risk that Vivien would poison him in a fit of rage.  Their last years together had been tempestuous.

In that case, you might want to come with me to a widows’ discussion group that meets once a month, where we sit in a circle and remember what we most loved about our husbands, suggested Angela helpfully.  It is very comforting to be able to discuss these things with other widows.

I – I think – I’m just not ready for that either, Vivien finally managed to say, her face burning with shame.

Angela placed a consoling hand on Vivien’s shoulder.  Take your time.  You will heal.  You will find someone new and you will love again.

Late that night, Vivien lay in the darkness listening to Sophie breathing in her sleep beside her, and Angela’s words came back to her.  The war widows club and its events notwithstanding, did Vivien want to find someone new to love, and to have someone to love her?  It had taken a while to clean up the mess that Chip had left her in, but now she was free to remarry if she wanted to.  Did she want to?  If a man like Mr. Carlisle, who had been upstanding as well as married but who had clearly looked at Vivien and liked what he saw, if a man like that were to be single and were to ask her to be his wife, would she agree, for Sophie’s sake?  If there were no Sophie, would Vivien do it for her own sake?  She had already married once for the wrong reasons.  No, I am not going to take a nibble from that poisonous mushroom again, she thought.  She would rather spend the rest of her days alone.  But there was Sophie to consider …  All of these thoughts were entirely theoretical since Vivien met no men and gave a swift brush-off to any who dared to approach her.  Her new job put her in the middle of a very large company sprawled across several floors of a huge building, and in her first months Vivien had had a lot of brushing off to do to indicate that she was not interested but at last the word seemed to have gotten around.  The challenge was that, in addition to the headquarters men, there were many young insurance salesmen coming and going for trainings or for other meetings and they required constant, ongoing brushing off.  So, is there a Mr. Westcott? the ones who thought themselves particularly clever would ask her.  There is somewhere, thought Vivien bitterly.  It did not matter to her what these men looked like; the unhandsome ones she glared down and the handsome ones she fled and evaded so that they would not fluster her.  With the frothy days of adolescence behind her, she reverted back to her original mindset from before she had married Chip, where she did not want to be touched by anyone, although unlike then, now she really was starved for adult affection.  In truth, she had no understanding of the extent of damage that had happened to her heart in her unfortunate marriage.  She only knew that it hurt to contemplate digging for hope within herself to try such an experiment over again.  Self-pity was not one of her failings and she never thought that she was being asked to face something unreasonable in her life, whether it was being little better than a child bride when she was torn away from family and home, to losing one pregnancy after another, to struggling for money, or finally to living a life nearly all alone and trying to raise a small child.  It was just the way that things had turned out, that was all.

And Gregory …  Since those first lonely and overwhelming years up North she did not think of him often, and she told herself that she was too practical for pointless pining.  Occasionally she remembered him with bitterness, wondering if this entire path that her life had taken was the outcome of having fallen in love at the age of sixteen with an incompatible man.  To know that Gregory had loved her, too, but in a way that was so utterly useless that it could not hope to serve as a foundation for a real life together, was the icing on the cake.  There was no way around the fact that he had been a giant piece of bad luck.  Still, on the days when she had been at her lowest ebb, when Chip had been shouting at her and she had had to face the exposure of his most underhanded deceptions, she had gone to bed sobbing and calling in her heart on the man with wings who had used to come regularly in her imagination and sit beside her bed in her mother’s apartment in Milneburg, the angel who could make her believe that everything could still turn out right in the end.  This was as close as Vivien got to religion in those years, since she stopped going to church when Chip had declared that he did not want to go to a Roman Catholic Church since he was an Anglican, and then when she had suggested that they go to an Anglican Church he just came up with other excuses to not go.  Going to bed, pulling up the covers, and occasionally praying for salvation in a weak moment, when her angel with Gregory’s face sat beside her bed in her mother’s old invisible dining chair as he always had, his grey wings rising majestically over the shoulders of his dark suit jacket, this was her only religion, so simple and childlike that it somehow managed to fly beneath the radar of her otherwise skeptical, practical mind.  To either separate or to unify this angel with the man whom she had loved but who had so disappointed her would have involved the kind of theologian’s mental calisthenics that were not part of Vivien’s nature and she pushed all such thoughts back to the deep recesses of her mind.  Nadine had written to Vivien about how she had also lost her first child in but in childbirth, a fate far worse than Vivien had faced in either of her two failed pregnancies, and how Gregory had come and helped them all and how he had arranged for the funeral and burial.  Vivien had wondered then how it would have been, to have Gregory nearby to help her when she had had her own miscarriages, to be able to talk to him and to know that he would have helped her in any way that he could.  It was obviously true that one could be a good man without necessarily making a good husband, but as this once again touched on the complex grey realm between the angel and the man, Vivien finally folded up Nadine’s letter and tried to think of something else.

Nadine was an enthusiastic writer and wrote to Vivien frequently in the beginning.  Vivien very much appreciated these letters.  They were as Nadine had always been, almost always upbeat and lively in tone, and Vivien came to look forward to them even more than to the letters from her own mother.  But Vivien herself was not a good correspondent, never had been, and she struggled with what to write back.  Vivien’s life was not going all that well and she did not want Nadine to know – and she most certainly did not want her mother to know.  There were only so many bland the weather is getting warmer here kinds of things she could write before she would hit upon uncomfortable facts like I still have the job cleaning toilets at the hotel but am now also going to be washing dishes in a nearby restaurant or The money to pay the landlord this month is not where I left it or Chip didn’t come home again last night.  After a while, Nadine’s letters also slowed.  Both friends agreed that they should do a visit, but lack of funds was always an issue and then Nadine got pregnant again and gave birth to Frank Jr., and Vivien had Sophie, so travel that far away was out of the question for either of them.  As soon as Vivien got the news of Frank Jr.’s birth, she sewed a small receiving blanket and a bonnet and infant gown and sent them down in a small package which Nadine was very happy to get.  Vivien never asked Nadine about Gregory or if Nadine had seen him about town, but then Nadine wrote saying that she had walked by and seen that Wolfgang Gerstner’s store was closing and she had gone in and briefly spoken with Mr. Gerstner.  Business was bad since the war had started, he had said, and when she had asked what he planned to do next he had begun to give an answer but then awkwardly stopped himself and just said that he was not entirely decided yet, which struck her as odd.  He told Nadine that Gregory had nobly enlisted even before the draft began and that he was now serving somewhere in the Pacific.  Vivien had folded up that letter and sat in her armchair for a long time in the gathering dusk, remembering the conversation that they had had so long ago about enlisting in the war and she wondered if that conversation was what had driven Gregory to enlist.  At twenty-nine or thirty, he was not at immediate risk of being pulled into the war in an initial draft, so why had he volunteered?  Could it really have been his pride because Vivien had told him that Chip said he would go to enlist should war break out?  Her thoughts were interrupted by her husband opening the door and waving an unusually jovial hello to her, but when he came closer to kiss her she coldly pushed him away.  That this rodent was still smoothly striding the streets of Manhattan while a paragon of virtue like Gregory was fighting his war for him in the Pacific was suddenly too grotesque to tolerate.

After Chip was gone and Sophie was born, Vivien had written to her mother to move closer so that she could help with the baby.  The same day that she went to Penn Station to meet her mother, Vivien took baby Sophie to the photo booth at Penn Station and got a few pictures taken with her, one of which she sent to Nadine accompanied by a short letter.  She looked at one of the copies of that photo now and saw her sunken-in cheeks and her sleep-deprived eyes and she wondered how she had survived giving birth and coming home from the hospital to no one but Edith and the other neighbors.  Where she could, she had taken Sophie with her to her jobs at first, but that made her so exhausted that she thought she would keel over dead.  She had held out more on hope than on anything else until her mother at last arrived.  They settled into their new life together easily, as if they had never been apart, and for the first time Vivien was able to tell her mother everything about how those early years up North had been and what her marriage with Chip had been like.  Then, with the entire story told and as if by silent mutual agreement, they never spoke of Chip again.  Their conversations were mostly filled with all things to do with Sophie, and they also reminisced about New Orleans and daydreamed about a return visit and all of the places that they would take Sophie to see.  They never spoke of Gregory at all. 

Their tiny Queens apartment had become hopelessly small for Sophie once she began walking and then running, so they spent as much time outdoors as they could, visiting city parks, and of course no park was as wonderful as Central Park in Manhattan, where on special occasions Vivien would take Sophie to ride the carousel.  Looking at Sophie now and seeing how happy a child she was, oblivious to the hardships of life around her, made Vivien determined to do all she could to give Sophie a better life than Vivien had ended up with.  Without thinking of Gregory directly or even really making the connection that he had helped to shape Vivien’s dreams of what a wonderful future for a girl could be like, Vivien imagined that Sophie could get a better education and read smart books and visit the free museums to see all of the best art that New York had to offer, and go to see plays and concerts and in general live the kind of life where she would never have to wash a dish or wait on a table to earn her living.  At work, Vivien had heard two of her women colleagues talking about a new parenting book just recently published by a certain Dr. Spock and she dutifully went out to buy it, bringing the total of the books she owned to two:  Dr. Spock, and Gregory’s old copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology which she had never returned to him.  She had heard on the radio that reading out loud to even small children expanded their vocabulary and their brains, so on the rare nights when she was not completely exhausted, she read out loud to Sophie from these two books.  Sophie seemed not to mind that she did not understand anything and always quickly fell asleep.  Then Vivien would tuck the blanket around her small form, kiss her forehead, and go to sit with her mother and help with some sewing if she still had the stamina. 

As hard as life often was these days, winter made it even harder.  The cold, the early darkness, and the inability to keep Sophie content indoors combined to create a real cabin fever misery for them all.  Vivien’s mother bought Sophie a small box of crayons which Sophie used to color all over the pages of Dr. Spock’s childrearing guide.  She had opened the cover of the antique copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology and had gotten started with scribbling on the inside of that when Vivien noticed, swooped in, and administered a stern admonition and some immediate punishment which caused Sophie to howl.  This child will make me lose my mind! Vivien cried.

You were hardly different, said her mother from the kitchen.  The day I caught you sitting on the floor and swallowing loose buttons is not a day I will ever forget!  I had no idea how many you had swallowed before I got to you, and then I desperately checked your diapers for days to see if they all came out!

More disgusting than making a mess with crayons, agreed Vivien.

And that boring childrearing manual at least has some color in it now.  No mother of my generation ever had to get a book to figure out what to do with her baby!  I should think it is all silliness of the first order, and that this man is just playing off of the worries of new mothers to sell them his book.  And a book on the raising of babies that is written by a man, well really now!  Let Sophie color in it until all of the pages are covered with her scribbles, and if you have any questions on childrearing, just come to me.  It just so happens that I have a wonderful daughter who turned out quite fine of a person, so I have excellent credentials! her mother replied with a smile.

Sophie’s fourth birthday was coming up and when Vivien asked her what she wanted, Sophie said she wanted a pony to ride.  Where did she get these ideas, Vivien wondered?  The man who could have gotten you that went out of my life years ago.  And with that one unbidden thought, the images of Thibodaux and of brief happiness came into her mind suddenly and without her being able to stop them.  There was Gregory riding D’Artagnan across the meadow, and then they were riding together and his arm was about her.  A chill swept her upper back.  She had blocked these memories in her mind for years and suddenly here they were, seeping out.  She saw the small creek where they had sat, she saw the Mullins’ dining room and the face of Mrs. Mullins …

Vivien, are you alright?  Vivien! her mother said in alarm.  You looked like you might faint suddenly.  Maybe you should stop working on this birthday cake and let me finish?  You go and sit down.

Vivien nodded mutely.  She saw Gregory’s small cottage and remembered standing in front of it and wondering what it would be like to live there with him.  He would have taken Sophie riding, without a doubt, pulling the lead of her pony like Rhett Butler had pulled Bonnie along in Gone with the Wind (which Vivien had gone to see after Nadine’s repeated urging).  One could only believe that Clark Gable was the handsomest man ever seen on the Earth if one had not yet seen Gregory, and to now imagine how it would have been if he had ever known Sophie … Well, it was just beyond all heartbreak, wasn’t it?  It took