Anything Goes

him good night. As she was dropping off to sleep, she could hear him bashing around, punching his pillows into the hollows in the sofa in the other room and muttering things like, “Boomer Feldman! How could I have forgotten him! He’s rolling in dough and he loves to fish!”
     
    On Sunday Lily and Robert treated themselves to a heavy breakfast at the greasy spoon on the ground floor of their apartment building and made lists of things to be done. Early Monday morning, Lily went to the bank for the last time to give her notice and withdraw their money. Her supervisor, who had given her the job because he had once known her father, couldn’t disguise his relief.
    “I had orders this morning to either fire one of the women in your group or put you all on four-day weeks with only four days of pay. I hate it that you’re the one leaving, Lily, but you’ve saved the others a pay cut.”
    Lily didn’t say goodbye to the women she had worked with. She hoped never to see or even think of them again. They were all older than she—or at least looked older. Several had husbands out of work and starving children to feed. They either worked through their lunch break in order to get home a half an hour earlier, or they brought food from home that was even more disgusting and meager than the sandwiches Lily took to work. They never joked or smiled. It wasn’t their fault, but Lily was enormously relieved to be free of them.
    While Lily was quitting her bank job, Robert sent a telegram to Mr. Elgin Prinney, Esquire, letting him know they would arrive to take up residence on Tuesday. He also rounded up a couple furniture movers to carefully crate up the pier glass. By the time it was padded with old quilts and had a wooden frame built around it, it took up nearly the entire room. None of the rest of the terribly shabby furniture belonged to them, so it wasn’t a concern.
    When Lily got back to the apartment, bedraggled and hot, but with a light step, she took the moving men to the basement of the building to show them the four large trunks stored there that contained everything else they owned and struck a hard bargain on the price of having the trunks and mirror shipped up to Voorburg-on-Hudson.
    Meanwhile, Robert informed the landlord of their plans to leave and didn’t manage such a good bargain. There was a long waiting list of tenants who, like Lily and Robert, had come way down in the world and couldn’t afford their previous comfortable accommodations. The tiny apartment would be reoccupied practically before they could close the door, but the landlord refused to give them back the half month’s rent they’d paid ahead.
    Brother and sister went across the street to sit on the bench at the trolley stop. It was the only place to get out of the way while the pier glass was wrestled out of the apartment and onto a truck. Robert whistled quietly for a while and Lily hurriedly read the last of a library book, a mystery story, that had to be returned before they left the city.
    Robert stopped in the middle of a fairly awful whistled rendition of “Ain’t Misbehavin’.“ He didn’t quite have the range for it. “This is good,“ he said. “What is?“ Lily closed her book.
    “Doing something different.”
    Lily put her arm through his and her head on his shoulder. “I’m so glad you feel that way. I do, too. It can’t be worse than living here and it might be better.”
    Robert patted her hand, but didn’t look at her. “Sometimes—not often, but sometimes lately—I’ve had this dream that I’m suddenly fifty years old. Still wearing the same tux. Working where we had breakfast instead of Sardi’s. Being too old to interest the old ladies who want a dashing pseudo-nephew. Fading away. Becoming passé and dreary.“
    “Not you, darling,“ Lily said. “Never dreary. When you’re fifty, you’re going to be a dashing old roué with beautiful young girls hanging on your every word. But I know what you mean. One day last week, when I got to the block the bank is on, I had to stop and have a little cry. Not because I had to go there that day, but because I suddenly had a shivering horror of having to go there every day for years and years and years. That I’d start looking like the women I worked with. That, God forbid, I’d start thinking like them!“
    “This is one good thing that’s come out of this last couple years,“ Robert said.
    Lily looked up at him, confused. He was remarkably