"William Tenn - Wednesday's Child" - читать интересную книгу автора (William Tenn)

As he chewed the roast beef with the requisite thoroughness he beamed at the thoughtful concern on her face and was mentally grateful that he hadn't had to present that line of argument to anyone as sharp as Arlette Stein, for example. He knew what the well-hipped thirtyish widow would have immediately replied: "But every girl in the office doesn't ask for it, Mr. Balik." A heavy sneer at such sophistry would mean little to Stein.
Wednesday, he appreciated, was not the person to go in for such counterattacks. She was rolling her lips distressedly against each other and trying to think of a polite, good-employee way out. There was only one, and she would have to come to it in a moment.
She did.
"Would it help any," she began, and stopped. She took a deep breath. "Would it help any, if I told you the reasons—for the leaves-of-absence?"
"It would," he said heartily. "It would indeed, Miss Gresham. That way I, as office manager, can operate from facts instead of mysteries. I can hear your reasons, weigh them for validity and measure their importance—and your usefulness as a secre­tary—against the disorganization your absences create in the day-to-day operation of Slaughter, Stark and Slingsby."
"M-m-m." She looked troubled, uncertain. "I'd like to think a bit, if you don't mind."
Fabian waved a cauliflower-filled fork magnanimously. "Take all the time in the world! Think it out carefully. Don't tell me anything you aren't perfectly willing to tell me. Of course anything you do tell me will be, I am sure I need hardly reassure you, completely confidential. I will treat it as official knowledge, Miss Gresham—not personal. And while you're thinking, you might start eating your raw cabbage. Before it gets cold," he added with a rich, executive-type chuckle.
She nodded him a half-smile that ended in a sigh and began working at her plate in an absent-minded, not-particularly-hungry fashion.
"You see," she began abruptly as if she'd found a good point of departure, "some things happen to me that don't happen to other people."
"That, I would say, is fairly obvious."
"They're not bad things. I mean what, oh, the newspapers would call bad. And they're not dangerous things, exactly. They're—they're more physical-like. They're things that could happen to my body."
Fabian finished his plate, sat back and crossed his arms. "Could you be just a little more specific? Unless—" and he was struck by a horrifying thought—"unless they're what is known as, er, as female difficulties. In that case, of course—"
This time she didn't even blush. "Oh, no. Not at all. At least there's very little of that. It's—other things. Like my appendix. Every year I have to have my appendix out."
"Your appendix?" He turned that over in his mind. "Every year? But a human being only has one appendix. And once it's removed, it doesn't grow back."
"Mine does. On the tenth of April, every single year, I get appendicitis and have to have an operation. That's why I take my vacation then. And my teeth. Every five years, I lose all my teeth. I start losing them about this time, and I have some dental plates that were made when I was younger—I use them until my teeth grow back. Then, about the middle of October, the last of them goes and new ones start coming up. I can't use my dental plates while they're growing, so I look kind of funny for a while. That's why I ask for a leave of absence. In the middle of November, the new teeth are almost full-grown, and I come back to work."
She took a deep breath and timidly lifted her eyes to his face. That was all she evi­dently had to say. Or wished to.
All through dessert, he thought about it. He was positive she was telling the truth. A girl like Wednesday Gresham didn't lie. Not to such a fantastic extent. Not to her boss.
"Well," he said at last. "It's certainly very unusual."
"Yes," she agreed. "Very unusual."
"Do you have anything else the matter with—I mean, are there any other pecu­liarities—Oh, darn! Is there anything else?"
Wednesday considered. "There are. But, if you don't mind, Mr. Balik, I'd rather not—"
Fabian decided not to take that. "Now see here, Miss Gresham," he said firmly. "Let us not play games. You didn't have to tell me anything, but you decided, for yourself, for your own good reasons, to do so. Now I must insist on the whole story, and noth­ing but the whole story. What other physical difficulties do you have?"
It worked. She cringed a bit in her chair, straightened up again, but a little weakly, and began: "I'm sorry, Mr. Balik, I wouldn't dream of—of playing games with you. There are lots of other things, but none of them interfere with my work, really. Like I have some tiny hairs growing on my fingernails. See?"
Fabian glanced at the hand held across the table. A few almost microscopic ten­drils on each glittering hard surface of fingernail.
"What else?"
"Well, my tongue. I have a few hairs on the underside of my tongue. They don't bother me, though, they don't bother me in anyway. And there's my—my—"
"Yes?" he prompted. Who could believe that colorless little Wednesday Gresham...
"My navel. I don't have any navel."
"You don't have any—But that's impossible!" he exploded. He felt his glasses sliding down his nose. "Everyone has a navel! Everyone alive—everyone who's ever been born."
Wednesday nodded, her eyes unnaturally bright and large. "Maybe—" she began, and suddenly, unexpectedly, broke into tears. She brought her hands up to her face and sobbed through them, great, pounding, wracking sobs that pulled her shoulders up and down, up and down.
Fabian's consternation made him completely helpless. He'd never, never in his life, been in a crowded restaurant with a crying girl before.
"Now, Miss Gresham—Wednesday," he managed to get out, and he was annoyed to hear a high, skittery note in his own voice. "There's no call for this. Surely, there's no call for this? Uh—Wednesday?"
"Maybe," she gasped again, between sobs, "m-maybe that's the answer."
"What's the answer?" Fabian asked loudly, desperately hoping to distract her into some kind of conversation.
"About—about being born. Maybe—maybe I wasn't born. M-maybe I was m-m-made!"
And then, as if she'd merely been warming up before this, she really went into hysterics. Fabian Balik at last realized what he had to do. He paid the check, put his arm around the girl's waist and half-carried her out of the restaurant.
It worked. She got quieter the moment they hit the open air. She leaned against a building, not crying now, and shook her shoulders in a steadily diminishing cre­scendo. Finally, she ulped once, twice, and turned groggily to him, her face looking as if it had been rubbed determinedly in an artist's turpentine rag.
"I'm s-sorry," she said. "I'm t-terribly s-sorry. I haven't done that for years. But—you see, Mr. Balik—I haven't talked about myself for years."
"There's a nice bar at the corner," he pointed out, tremendously relieved. She'd looked for a while as if she'd intended to keep on crying all day! "Let's pop in, and I'll have a drink. You can use the ladies' room to fix yourself up."
He took her arm and steered her into the place. Then he climbed onto a bar stool and had himself a double brandy.
What an experience! And what a strange, strange girl!
Of course, he shouldn't have pushed her quite so hard on a subject about which she was evidently so sensitive. Was that his fault, though, that she was so sensitive?
Fabian considered the matter carefully, judicially, and found in his favor. No, it definitely wasn't his fault.
But what a story! The foundling business, the appendix business, the teeth, the hair on the fingernails and tongue...And that last killer about the navel!
He'd have to think it out. And maybe he'd get some other opinions. But one thing he was sure of, as sure as of his own managerial capacities: Wednesday Gresham hadn't been lying in any particular. Wednesday Gresham was just not the sort of a girl who made up tall stories about herself.
When she rejoined him, he urged her to have a drink. "Help you get a grip on yourself."
She demurred, she didn't drink very much, she said. But he insisted, and she gave in. "Just a liqueur. Anything. You order it, Mr. Balik."
Fabian was secretly very pleased at her docility. No reprimanding, no back-biting, like most other girls—Although what in the world could she reprimand him for?
"You still look a little frayed," he told her. "When we get back, don't bother going to your desk. Go right in to Mr. Osborne and finish taking dictation. No point in giving the other girls something to talk about. I'll sign in for you."
She inclined her head submissively and continued to sip from the tiny glass.