Might as Well Be Dead

“There weren’t many duties, really-I mean there wasn’t much work. I opened the office in the morning-usually he didn’t come in until around eleven o’clock. I wrote his letters, but that didn’t amount to much, and answered the phone, and did the filing, what there was of it. He opened the mail himself.”

“Did you keep his books?”

“I don’t think he had any books. I never saw any.”

“Did you draw his checks?”

“I didn’t at first, but later he asked me to sometimes.”

“Where did he keep his checkbook?”

“In a drawer of his desk that he kept locked. There wasn’t any safe in the office.”

“Did you do any personal chores for him? Like getting prizefight tickets or buying neckties?”

“No. Or very seldom. He did things like that himself.”

“Had he ever been married before?”

“No. He said he hadn’t.”

“Did you go to prizefights with him?”

“Sometimes I did, not often. I didn’t like them. And later, the last two years, we didn’t go places together much.”

“Let’s stick to the first year, while you were working for him. Were there many callers at the office?”

“Not many, no. Many days there weren’t any.”

“How many in an average week, would you say?”

“Perhaps-” She thought. “I don’t know, perhaps eight or nine. Maybe a dozen.”

“Take the first week you were there. You were new then and noticing things. How many callers were there the first week, and who were they?”

She opened her eyes at me. Wide open, they were quite different from when they were squinting. I merely noted that fact professionally. “But Mr. Goodwin,” she said, “that’s impossible. It was four years ago!”

I nodded. “That’s just a warm-up. Before we’re through you’ll be remembering lots of things you would have thought impossible, and most of them will be irrelevant and immaterial. I hope not all of them. Try it. Callers the first week.”

We kept at it for nearly two hours, and she did her best. She enjoyed none of it, and some of it was really painful, when we were on the latter part of the year, the period when she was cottoning to Molloy, or thought she was, and was making up her mind to marry him. She would have preferred to let the incidents of that period stay where they were, down in the cellar. I won’t say it hurt me as much as it did her, since with me it was strictly business, but it was no picnic. Finally she said she didn’t think she could go on, and I said we had barely started.