Chase: Roman

car. She looked as if she was crying, one hand gripping his arm, far more full of grief than she had actually been.
        ‘I'm so proud of you,’ Mrs Fiedling said. She sounded like his mother. Indeed, she was old enough for the post, in her mid-fifties. Her hair was curled tightly in an old-fashioned style and shot through with grey. Her doughy face had been rouged and lipsticked and had, peculiarly, been made to look ten years older by those cosmetic tricks. She was twenty or thirty pounds too heavy and carried nearly all of it in her hips.
        ‘It wasn't anything like they said, not as exciting as that,’ Chase told her.
        ‘How do you know? You haven't read it.’
        ‘They always overwrite. I know, because they did it the last time.’
        ‘Oh, you're just too modest,’ Mrs Fiedling said. She was wearing a blue and yellow housedress with the two top buttons opened. He could see not only the pallid bulge of her breasts, but the edge of a yellowed brassiere as well.
        Though he was much larger and much younger than Mrs Fiedling, with three times her strength, she frightened him. It was, he had once decided, because he did not know what she wanted from him.
        She said, ‘I bet this brings twice the job offers that the last article brought!’
        Mrs Fiedling was much more interested in Chase's eventual employment than was Chase himself. At first he had thought that she was afraid he would fall in arrears on the rent, but he eventually decided that she believed him about his inheritance and that her concern went deeper than that.
        She said, ‘As I've often told you, you're young and strong, and you have a lifetime ahead of you. The thing for a fellow like you is work, hard work, a chance to make something of yourself. Not that you haven't done all right so far. But this lounging around, not working - it hasn't been good for you. You must have lost fifteen pounds since you first moved in.’
        Chase did not respond.
        Mrs Fiedling moved closer to him and took the morning paper out of his hands. She looked at the picture in the centre of the front page and sighed.
        ‘I have to be going,’ Chase said.
        She looked up from the paper. ‘I saw your car.’
        ‘Yes,’ he said.
        ‘It tells about it in the paper. Wasn't that nice of them, though?’
        ‘Yes.’
        ‘They hardly ever do anything for the boys who serve and don't make a big protest of it. You read all about the bad ones, but no one lifts a hand for good boys like you. It's about time, and I hope you enjoy the car.’
        ‘I will,’ he said, opening the front door and stepping outside before she could carry on any further.
        The nightmare, Mrs Fiedling, then breakfast, one bit of bad business after the other…
        Ordinarily, the counter at Woolworth's was a guarantee of privacy, even if every stool was taken. Businessmen reading the financial pages, secretaries drinking coffee and chattering each other fully awake, labourers slumped forward over greasy eggs and potatoes that their wives had not risen to fix for them -none of the customers wanted to talk or be noticed. The proximity of the seats, the elbow-to-elbow circumstances left no room for graceful dining unless one could pretend that there was really no one else about. That Tuesday morning, however, Chase discovered, halfway through his meal, that most of the other people there were watching him with only poorly disguised interest.
        When he had sat down, the pert little blonde waitress had said, ‘Good morning, Mr Chase. What will you have?’ He should have known then that everything was not as it should be, for he had never been on friendly terms with her and had never told her his name. The ubiquitous newspaper, spread across with his likeness, betrayed him wherever he went.
        He stopped eating halfway through, left a tip, paid his bill and got out of there. His hands were shaking, and the backs of his knees quivered as if his legs would let him down.
        He went to the newsstand to purchase a paperback and was confronted with so many copies of his own face in the paper racks that he turned away at the door without going in.
        At the liquor store, the clerk commented on the size of his purchase for the first time in months. Clearly, he seemed to feel it was improper for a man like Chase to drink so much. Unless, of course, the whiskey was for a party. He