Chase: Roman

Cauvel), but either way it would be an intolerable development.
        ‘Now,’ Glenda said, ‘what would you like to have first?’
        Before he could respond, one of the reporters at the microfilm machines looked up from his work and said, ‘Glenda, could I have all the dailies between May 15, 1952, and September 15 of that same year?’
        ‘In a moment,’ she said, grinding out her unsmoked cigarette. ‘This gentleman was first.’
        ‘That's okay,’ Chase said, grasping the opportunity. ‘I've got plenty of time.’
        ‘You sure?’ she asked.
        ‘Yeah. Get him what he needs.’
        ‘I'll be back in five minutes,’ she said.
        As she walked the length of the small room and through the wide arch into the filing room, both Chase and the reporter watched her. She was tall but not clumsy, moving with a sensuous, feline grace that actually made her seem fragile.
        When she had gone, the reporter said, ‘Thanks for waiting.’
        That's okay.’
        ‘I've got an eleven o'clock deadline on this piece, and I haven't even begun to get my sources together.’ He turned back to his viewer and scanned the last article, so engrossed in his work that he had not, apparently, recognized Chase.
        Chase used the opportunity to leave the room. He had been afraid, before the fortunate interruption, that he was going to have to request materials and waste an hour or more going through them in order to play out the role he had established for himself.
        Back in his Mustang, he opened his notebook and looked at the list, but he had absolutely nothing to add to it, and he could not see any pertinent connections between the familiar eight items. He closed the book, started the car and drove out into the traffic on John F. Kennedy Throughway.
        Fifteen minutes later he was on the four-lane interstate beyond city limits, the speedometer steady at seventy miles an hour, wind whistling at the open windows and rustling through his hair. As he drove, he thought about Glenda Kleaver, and he hardly noticed the miles going by.
        
        After high school Chase had gone to State because it was just over forty miles from home and, therefore, offered several advantages not to be had at more distant universities. For one thing, his mother was pleased that he could come home more often than at Christmas and spring holidays, though that was only a minor sales point to Chase. He was sold on State because it meant he could still use his father's completely equipped garage for an engine tune-up for his Dodge every month. He had inherited his love of automobiles from his father and would have experienced a deal of anxiety at being long away from proper mechanic facilities. (In the war, when all machines came to mean something totally different to Chase, he lose his enthusiasm for such tinkering.) Also, being so close to home, he could continue to maintain contact with the girls he had dated who were a year or two years behind him in high school. If he should find the girls at State too sophisticated to pay him much mind, he knew there were several still-willing young ladies at home, easily accessible, every weekend if he needed them that often. (In the war, Chase had been bleached of his male chauvinism, though that had been replaced with something far worse - with a complete lack of interest, a boredom so profound that even he was disturbed by it.)
        Now, as he parked before the administration building, he felt like a stranger to the place, as if he had not spent nearly four years of his life in and about these buildings, on these flagstone paths and under the rich canopies of willows and elms. That part of his life had been divorced from this moment by the war, and to recapture the essence of those memories and moods would entail crossing again through the stream of the war to the shores of the past, an act he could not indulge in simply for the sake of sentimentality. He was a stranger to this place, then, and would remain so.
        He found the Student Records Office where it had been for fifty-odd years, and he recognized most of the people who worked there, though he had never known any of their names. This time, when he was approached by the office manager, he decided that the simple truth was the best key to a proper response. He gave his name and sketchily explained his purpose.
        ‘I should have recognized you, but I didn't,’ the manager