Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

15

IN THE MIDST OF MADNESS we are in apparent normalcy. Nine days after my stakeout duty with Eddie Troyn I had a Saturday night date. With a telephone repairman named Mary Edna Sweeney.

It was actually a double date, set up by Max Nolan, involving him and another local girl, named Dotty Fleisch. Max had broached the subject of finding me a date earlier in the week, and I had expressed immediate interest. “I’m not talking about great stuff,” he had cautioned me. “All the good gash goes out of town to college. In the summer around here you can write your own ticket, but this time of year you take what you can get.”

“I’ll take it,” I had said.

There was nothing wrong with Mary Edna Sweeney. On the other hand, there was nothing right with her either. She was twenty-five, deeply involved in her telephone company job, and she’d apparently had three boy friends in a row who’d joined the Army, been shipped to unlikely places, and promptly married girls they’d found in the foreign clime. Including one who had been sent to some remote radar station up around the Arctic circle and immediately married an Eskimo.

All of these departures had made Mary Edna just a bit nervous; she tended to look startled at sounds like doors closing or car engines starting. Otherwise, however, she was a placid girl, a bit heftier than my usual tastes, with large, sweet, dark eyes and masses of black hair. “I have to keep my hair tied up when I’m working,” she told me, “but boy, as soon as I get home I let it fly.”

“I never met a lady telephone repairman before,” I said.

“The telephone company is an equal opportunity employer,” she said, with that primness which unimaginative people reserve for nobler thoughts they’ve memorized. “They’re experimenting with male operators,” she said. “And I’m an experiment the other way.”

“A repairlady.”

“A repair person” she said.

I said, “You do all that repairperson stuff? Climb the poles and everything?”

“Sure,” she said. “Of course, I can’t wear a skirt.” And she blushed. Girls in small towns still blush.

This conversation took place in the Riviera Restaurant & Cocktail Lounge after the movie. We had had an absolutely traditional first date; Max and I had crawled through the tunnel at just after seven o’clock, had met the girls in front of the Strand Theater, there had been introductions, and we had gone at once into the darkness to sit next to one another without touching while we watched a double feature. A double feature. Unfortunately the first picture was a caper movie about a bank robbery, full of hardened criminals and violent action-including the pursuit, beating and painful death of a squealer-and it left me a little limp. It took the entire second feature, a comedy about a giraffe that swallowed an experimental formula and became a super-genius, to bring me out of my doldrums and make it possible for me to exchange dialogue with Mary Edna Sweeney at the Riviera, to which we had repaired for cheeseburgers and a pitcher of beer.

Mary Edna was a friendly enough girl, but she wasn’t someone I would have crossed a crowded room for. Nor an empty room either. But she did have one absolutely first-rate quality which put her above every other girl I d ever gone out with: she thought my name was Harry Kent.

Dotty Fleisch was more of the same, without being quite an exact carbon copy. Paler, plumper, more given to bursts of speech or outbreaks of giggle, she was definable from Mary Edna without being any more or less desirable. Max had apparently been dating her off and on for several months, having told her he was a civilian employee out at Camp Quattatunk who lived in quarters on the base; I was now given the same background, and in the course of the conversation I learned for the first time that Camp Quattatunk wasn’t an Army base in the usual sense of the word but was an arsenal, a storage depot for military equipment. Thus, no doubt, the laser.

Which led to thoughts of robbery. Certain scenes from the caper movie came vividly back into my imagination, in perfect color. I flung myself into conversation, trying not to look over my shoulder.

At one point, in the men’s room, I discovered that the paper towel dispenser could be rigged so as to bring the entire load of paper towels out when the first one was tugged, but other than that it was just impossible to think about anything except the robbery. The caper movie had made it all much more real and much more desperate.

Finally we all left the Riviera and separated, Max and his Dotty going off in one direction arm in arm, Mary Edna and I trailing away in the other, walking side by side but not touching. The streets we walked along were tree-lined, but at this time of year the trees were leafless, bony grasping things reaching out from the streetlights, branches clutching together over my head like medieval punishments.

The specter of the bank robbery followed me along the sidewalk, making the already cold air even colder. Scenarios of disaster ran in repertory through my head: the robbery would occur and degenerate into gunplay and I would be shot to death; we would be caught and I’d stand trial for robbery and jailbreak and possibly even murder and be sent up forever; we would get away with it and I’d spend the rest of my life waiting for the axe to fall as inevitably it would; we would get away with it and the gang would insist on more robberies and one of the preceding scenarios would inexorably follow; in the course of the bank robbery I’d be called upon to shoot somebody and would refuse and be shot by my own people; or I’d do it and become a murderer as well as a bank robber; I would attempt some desperate ploy to prevent the robbery from taking place and would be found out by my co-conspirators and would be unloaded; or I’d be found out by the authorities and would be charged with jailbreak and attempted robbery; or . . . The variants were endless, it seemed, and not a happy one in the lot.

Meanwhile, Mary Edna spoke at length on the subject of telephone company training films. No topic was likely to capture much of my interest right now, so telephone company training films were about as useful as anything else to fill in the spaces. I managed an occasional appropriate comment, Mary Edna pointed out occasional poles she had climbed for one purpose or another, and eventually we reached the smallish two-family house in which she lived on the second floor with her widowed mother and two younger sisters.

It was so hard for me to remain aware of Mary Edna’s presence. It wasn’t her fault, it was that damned robbery. I was dimly aware of a slight sense of awkwardness when I said good night to her on her porch and politely waited till she had unlocked the door and gone inside, but it wasn’t until Max asked me the next day how I’d made out that I realized Mary Edna had been anticipating some sort of overture from me. A kiss, at the very least, possibly some groping. Who knew what she might not have had in mind? The next night, lying in my solitary bunk in my cell, the sounds and sighs of sleeping men in their other cells all around me, I thought of how almost any of them-enforced celibates all-would have behaved the preceding night on Mary Edna’s front porch, and my own behavior, or lack of behavior, struck me as very strange.

But on that first date night, spurred on by the caper movie, I just couldn’t think about anything except the robbery. It was scheduled for ten days from now, Tuesday the fourteenth of December. I had first heard about it over two weeks ago, the time was rushing by, and I wasn't getting anywhere. My only forlorn hope was that the gang, who seemed to have everything else thoroughly planned, would never find a way to make that initial entry into Federal Fiduciary Trust, no matter how much surveillance was done. If we couldn’t get into the bank in the first place we couldn’t rob it, could we?

I walked with my fingers crossed.