I realized only after Deke hung up that he hadn’t mentioned Sadie… and two nights after Lee’s lecture to the newsboy, I decided I had to talk to her. I had to hear her voice, even if all she had to say was
As I reached for the phone, it rang. I picked it up and said — with complete certainty: “Hello, Sadie. Hello, honey.”
There was a moment of silence long enough for me to think I had been wrong after all, that someone was going to say
I almost said
“Because I’ve been thinking about you all day,” I said.
“How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Yes,” she said. “Done deal. Isn’t that one of the things you say, George? Done deal?”
“I guess so. How’s school? How’s the library?”
“George? Are we going to talk like this, or are we going to talk?”
“All right.” I sat down on my lumpy secondhand couch. “Let’s talk. Are you okay?”
“Yes, but I’m unhappy. And I’m very confused.” She hesitated, then said: “I was working at Harrah’s, you probably know that. As a cocktail waitress. And I met somebody.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. A very nice man. Charming. A gentleman. Just shy of forty. His name is Roger Beaton. He’s an aide to the Republican senator from California, Tom Kuchel. He’s the minority whip in the Senate, you know. Kuchel, I mean, not Roger.” She laughed, but not the way you do when something’s funny.
“Should I be glad you met someone nice?”
“I don’t know, George…
“No.”
“Roger is handsome,” she said in a flat just-the-facts voice. “He’s pleasant. He went to Yale. He knows how to show a girl a good time. And he’s tall.”
The second me would no longer keep silent. “I want to kill him.”
That made her laugh, and the sound of it was a relief. “I’m not telling you this to hurt you, or make you feel bad.”
“Really? Then why
“We went out three or four times. He kissed me… we made out a little… just necking, like kids… ”
“But it wasn’t the same. Maybe it could be, in time; maybe not. He gave me his number in Washington, and told me to call him if I… how did he put it? ‘If you get tired of shelving books and carrying a torch for the one that got away.’ I think that was the gist of it. He says he’s going places, and that he needs a good woman to go with him. He thought I might be that woman. Of course, men say stuff like that. I’m not as naïve as I once was. But sometimes they mean it.”
“Sadie…”
“Still, it wasn’t quite the same.” She sounded thoughtful, absent, and for the first time I wondered if something other than doubt about her personal life might be wrong with her. If she might be sick. “On the plus side, there was no broom in evidence. Of course, sometimes men hide the broom, don’t they? Johnny did. You did, too, George.”
“Sadie?”
“Yes?”
“Are
There was a long moment of silence. Much longer than the one when I had answered the phone with her name, and much longer than I expected. At last she said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You don’t sound like yourself, that’s all.”
“I told you, I’m very confused. And I’m sad. Because you’re still not ready to tell me the truth, are you?”
“If I could, I would.”
“You know something interesting? You have good friends in Jodie — not just me — and none of them know where you live.”
“Sadie—”
“You say it’s Dallas, but you’re on the Elmhurst exchange, and Elmhurst is Fort Worth.”
I’d never thought of that. What else hadn’t I thought of?
“Sadie, all I can tell you is that what I’m doing is very impor—”
“Oh, I’m sure it is. And what Senator Kuchel’s doing is very important, too. Roger was at pains to tell me that, and to tell me that if I… I joined him in Washington, I would be more or less sitting at the feet of greatnesss… or in the doorway to history… or something like that. Power excites him. It was one of the few things it was hard to like about him. What I thought — what I still think — is, who am I to sit at the feet of greatness? I’m just a divorced librarian.”
