The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax Read online

  One

  The nurse walked out of the room, closing the door behind her, and Mrs. Pollifax looked at the doctor and he in turn looked at her. He was a very nice young man, with black hair, very white teeth and horn-rimmed glasses that he removed now, placing the stem of the earpiece between his teeth. "Well, Mrs. Pollifax," he said pleasantly, "I don't know how you manage it, but for a woman of your age you're in fantastically good health. I congratulate you."

  "Oh," said Mrs. Pollifax flatly, and the doctor glanced at her with such a peculiar expression that she added brightly, for his benefit, "Oh!"

  He smiled and returned his glasses to his nose. "Which brings me to the fact that, although I find you in excellent health physically, I do note certain signs of depression. You're not quite the same Mrs. Pollifax I saw last year. Anything in particular troubling you?"

  She hesitated, wondering if he could possibly understand. He looked so absurdly young—he was young.

  He added pointedly, "I had the distinct feeling that you were disappointed at being in such excellent health."

  She said guardedly, "I don't believe I've ever cared about outliving my contemporaries, you know. I've never regarded life as a competition to see who can hold out the longest. I think one can sometimes have too much time." She paused and then added recklessly, "I daresay it sounds terribly frivolous when people are starving in India, but I can't help feeling I've outlived my usefulness." There, she thought firmly, she had said it, the words were out and curdling the air.

  "I see. Your children, Mrs. Pollifax, are ... ?"

  "Grown and far away. And visits aren't the same, you know. One can never enter their lives."

  He was listening attentively—yes, he was a very nice young doctor. "I think you said you do a great deal of volunteer work?"

  In a precise voice she ticked off the list of charities to which she gave her time; it was a long and sensible list.

  The doctor nodded. "Yes, but do you enjoy volunteer work?"

  Mrs. Pollifax blinked at the unexpectedness of his question. "That's odd," she said, and suddenly smiled at him. "Actually I suppose I loathe it."

  He could not help smiling back at her; there was something contagious about her smile, something conspiratorial and twinkling. "Then perhaps it's time you looked for more congenial outlets," he suggested.

  Mrs. Pollifax said slowly, with a little frown, "I enjoy meeting the people, you know, it's just that so often nothing more is needed for volunteer work than a good set of teeth."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  'Teeth—for smiling. There are rules, too. You can't imagine how regimented some of the volunteer work can be. It's very impersonal—not yours, somehow, because of all the restrictions."

  "Do you feel you're a particularly creative person?"

  Mrs. Pollifax smiled. "Goodness, I don't know. I'm just— me."

  He ignored that, saying very seriously, "It's terribly important for everyone, at any age, to live to his full potential. Otherwise a kind of dry rot sets in, a rust, a disintegration of personality."

  "Yes," she said simply. "Yes, I agree with you wholeheartedly on that, but what is one to do? After my husband died I set out to make a very sensible life for myself—I always intended to, you see—so that I would never be a nuisance to my children. It's just that—"

  "It's too sensible, perhaps?" Caught by something in her eyes that did not match the light mockery of her voice, he said, "But isn't there something you've always longed to do, something you've never had either the time or the freedom for until now?"

  Mrs. Pollifax looked at him. "When I was growing up— oh for years—I planned to become a spy," she admitted.

  The doctor threw back his head and laughed, and Mrs. Pollifax wondered why, when she was being her most serious, people found her so amusing. She supposed that her tastes always had been somewhat peculiar. Her husband's favorite form of endearment for her had been "lovable little goose," which was his way of forgiving the odd bent in her that he didn't quite understand, and as they grew older the children, too, had acquired the habit of thinking her just a little absurd.

  She could hear Jane now: "But mother, why on earth— why on earth—a dozen antimacassars? Nobody's used antimacassars since Queen Victoria died!" How futile it had seemed even to explain the woman selling crochetwork at the door that morning, a dear, mangy little woman with a most fascinating story of being abandoned six years earlier on Mc-Govern Street. With no husband and four babies to support she had turned in desperation to the handwork learned as a child at a convent, and Mrs. Pollifax had listened with rapt attention, enjoying every minute of it. After buying the antimacassars, however, she had felt it only kind to make a suggestion. "When you go to the next house," she had said tactfully, "it would be much wiser to call it McGivern Street

  , not McGovern. Strangers invariably make this mistake, but mere has never been a McGovern Street

  here, and if you'd lived on it for six years you'd have known this. Although otherwise," she added warmly, "it's a terribly good story. The tears came to my eyes, they really did."

  The woman had looked astonished, then confused, then badly frightened until she saw the twinkle in Mrs. Pollifax's eye. "Well, if you aren't the surprise," she said, beginning to laugh. "I certainly had you down as an easy mark."

  They'd had a lovely talk over a cup of tea in the kitchen, and the woman's real story had proven even more fascinating than her false one, and just to prove her basic honesty the woman had offered to sell Mrs. Pollifax the antimacassars at list price—they'd been made in Japan. But Mrs. Pollifax had firmly refused, feeling the morning was well worth the price. Jane would never have understood, however; Jane had sensible Pollifax blood flowing in her veins and Jane would have been deeply shocked. "What, you didn't call the police?" she would have demanded. "Mother, honestly! That would have been the sensible thing to do."

  Mrs. Pollifax thought with astonishment, "I don't suppose that I am a very sensible person actually. Perhaps the doctor's right, I can't be happy trying to be what I'm not."

  The doctor was still chuckling, his glasses off again as he polished them with his handkerchief, but the mood of confessional had ended with his roar of laughter and was not to be recaptured. He wrote out a prescription for antidepressant pills, they chatted a few minutes longer but without further rapport, and Mrs. Pollifax left his office.

  "But I wasn't joking," she thought indignantly as she walked down the street. "I really was going to be a spy." She had worked hard at it, too, going to the town dump every Saturday morning with her cousin John to watch him shoot rats, and proving such a persistent tag-along that he had condescended to show her how guns worked. On several glorious occasions he had allowed her to shoot with him. There were the maps, too, that she had pored over in her room year after year, and with such scholarly devotion that when the Second World War began she was able instantly to announce the longitude and latitude of obscure little islands nobody else had ever heard of. What a funny child she had been, she thought with affection, a lonely but very happy child. She was lonely now but so—so unused, so purposeless, she realized; and at the back of her mind lay the memory of last Monday when she had carried her geraniums to the roof of the apartment building and had stood at the edge of the parapet looking down, her mind searching for one good reason why she should not take a step forward into oblivion. And she had found none. Even now she was not sure what would have happened if young Mr. Garbor hadn't seen her and called out, "Mrs. Pollifax! For heaven's sake step back!" When she obeyed him she saw that he was trembling.

  She hadn't told the doctor this. Obviously she must find a way to instill novelty into her life or she would be afraid to carry her
geraniums to the roof, and she was very fond of geraniums.

  She walked up the steps to her apartment house and pushed aside the heavy glass door. Her mailbox produced an assortment of circulars, but no letters today. She stuffed them into her purse and unlocked the inner door to discover that Miss Hartshorne had preceded her to the elevator and was standing guard beside it. Immediately Mrs. Pollifax felt herself and her intentions shrivel. It was not Miss Hartshorne's fault that she reminded Mrs. Pollifax of the algebra teacher who had nearly blighted her life at thirteen, but Mrs. Pollifax illogically blamed her for it nevertheless.

  "Mrs. Pollifax," boomed Miss Hartshorne in her quartermaster's voice.

  "Lovely day, isn't it?" said Mrs. Pollifax, trembling a little. The elevator arrived and they stepped inside. Thoroughly cowed, Mrs. Pollifax let Miss Hartshorne press the floor button and received a pitying glance in return. ("You have forgotten pi again, Emily").

  "It's warm," Miss Hartshorne announced as the elevator began to rise.

  "Yes, warm. Quite humid, too," contributed Mrs. Pollifax, and pulling herself together added, "Planning a trip this summer, Miss Hartshorne?" It was not so much a question as an exploratory statement, because Miss Hartshorne was always planning a trip and when she was not planning one she was showing colored slides of previous trips. Sometimes Mrs. Pollifax felt that her neighbor did not really see the countries through which she traveled until she came home to view them on a screen in her living room.

  "In September," said Miss Hartshorne crisply. "It's the only month for the knowledgeable traveler."

  "Oh, I see," replied Mrs. Pollifax humbly.

  The door opened and Miss Hartshorne moved toward apartment 4-

  C and Mrs. Pollifax to 4-A. "Good day," Miss Hartshorne said dismissingly.

  "Yes—that is, to you, too," mumbled Mrs. Pollifax, and opened the door of her apartment with a feeling of escape.

  Nothing had changed in her three rooms except the slant of the sun, and Mrs. Pollifax adjusted the Venetian blinds before removing her hat. As she passed the desk the engagement calendar caught her eye and she stopped to glance at it with a sense of ennui. This was Monday; on Tuesday she wheeled the bookcart at the hospital, on Wednesday she rolled bandages, on Thursday morning there was a meeting of the Art Association and in the afternoon she worked in the gift shop of the hospital. On Friday the Garden Club met, on Saturday morning she would have her hair trimmed, and in the afternoon Elise Wiggin would come for tea—but Elise talked of nothing but her grandchildren and how joyously they embraced toilet training.

  The doctor had said, "Isn't there something you've always wanted to do but never had the time or freedom for?"

  Mrs. Pollifax tossed the day's newspaper on the couch, and then on second thought picked it up and leafed through its pages because it was important to be well informed and in touch with the world. On page three the photograph of a woman caught her eye. finds career at 63, said the words over the photograph, and Mrs. Pollifax, captured, immediately sat down to read. It was about a woman named Magda Carroll who had turned to "Little Theater" groups after her children married, and following only two plays she had been discovered by a Broadway casting director. Now she was performing in a play that had opened to rave reviews in New York. "I owe it all to my age," she told the interviewer.

  "The theater world is teeming with bright and talented young things, but there is a dearth of sixty-three-year-old character actresses. They needed me—I was unexpected."

  Mrs. Pollifax let the paper slide to the floor. " They needed me—I was unexpected.' How perfectly wonderful," she whispered, but the words made her wistful. She stood up and walked to the mirror in the hall and stared at the woman reflected there: small, feminine, somewhat cushiony in figure, hair nearly white, eyes blue, a nice little woman unsuited for almost everything practical. But wasn't there any area at all, she wondered, in which she, too, might be unexpected?

  Nonsense, she told herself; what she was thinking was absolutely out of the question.

  "You could always try," she reminded herself timidly. "After all, nothing ventured, nothing gained—and you're a taxpayer, aren't you?"

  Preposterous. Unthinkable.

  But at the back of her mind there remained the rooftop and how very nearly her right foot had moved into space.

  "Isn't there something you've always longed to do?" the doctor had asked.

  "Of course it wouldn't hurt to ask," she began again, feeling her way cautiously toward the idea once more. "Just looking into the idea would be a nice little vacation from volunteer work."

  Now she was rationalizing because it was insane, utterly.

  "But I haven't visited Washington, D.C., since I was eleven years old," she thought. "Think of the new buildings I've not seen except in pictures. Everyone should remain in touch with their own Capitol."

  She would go. "Ill got" she announced out loud, and feeling positively giddy at her recklessness she walked to the closet and pulled down her suitcase.

  On the following morning Mrs. Pollifax left by train for Washington. The first thing she did after registering at a hotel was to go by taxi to the Capitol building and visit her congressman. The next day was spent in sight-seeing and in restoring her courage, which had a tendency to rise in her like a tide and then ebb, leaving behind tattered weeds of doubt. But on Thursday, after lunch, she resolutely boarded the bus for the twenty-minute ride to Langley, Virginia, where the new headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency had been built. Its address and location had been discovered by Mrs. Pollifax in the public library, where she had exercised a great deal of discretion, even glancing over her shoulder several times as she copied it into her memo pad. Now she was astonished—even shocked—to see sign after sign along the road directing everyone, presumably Russians, too, to the Central Intelligence Agency. Nor was there anything discreet about the building itself." It was enormous—"covers nine acres," growled the bus driver—and with its towers, penthouses and floors of glass it fairly screamed for attention. Mrs. Pollifax realized that she ought to feel intimidated, but her courage was on the rise today—she was here now, and in such a glorious mood that only Miss Hartshorne could have squashed her, and Miss Hartshorne was several hundred miles away. Mrs. Pollifax walked through the gates and approached the guards inside with her head high. "I would like," she said, consulting her memo pad, "to see Mr. Jaspar Mason."

  She was given a form to fill out on which she listed her name, her address and the name of Mr. Mason, and then a guard in uniform escorted her down the corridor. Mrs. Pollifax walked slowly, reading all the signs posted on how classified wastepaper should be prepared for disposal, and at what hours it would be collected, and she decided that at the very least this was something that would impress Miss Hartshorne.

  The room into which Mrs. Pollifax was ushered proved to be small, bright and impersonal. It was empty of Mr. Mason, however, and from its contents—several chairs, a striped couch and a mosaic coffee table—Mrs. Pollifax deduced that it was a repository for those visitors who penetrated the walls of the citadel without invitation. Mr. Mason contributed further to this impression when he joined her. He carried himself like a man capable of classifying and disposing of people as well as wastepaper but with tact, skill and efficiency. He briskly shook her hand, glanced at his watch and motioned her to a chair. "I'm afraid I can give you only ten minutes," he said. "This room is needed at two o'clock. But tell me how I can help you."

  With equal efficiency Mrs. Pollifax handed him the introduction that she had extracted from her congressman; she had not told the congressman her real reason for wishing to interview someone in this building, but she had been compelling. The young man read the note, frowned, glanced at Mrs. Pollifax and frowned again. He seemed particularly disapproving when he looked at her hat, and Mrs. Pollifax guessed that the single fuchsia-pink rose that adorned it must be leaning again like a broken reed.

  "Ah—yes, Mrs. Politflack," he murmured, obviously baffled
by the contents of the introduction—which sounded in awe of Mrs. Pollifax—and by Mrs. Pollifax herself, who did not strike him as awesome at all.

  "Pollifax," she pointed out gently.

  "Oh—sorry. Now just what is it I can do for you, Mrs. Pollifax? It says here that you are a member of a garden club of your city, and are gathering facts and information—"

  Mrs. Pollifax brushed this aside impatiently. "No, no, not really," she confided, and glancing around to be sure that the door was closed, she leaned toward him. In a low voice she said, "Actually I've come to inquire about your spies."

  The young man's jaw dropped. "I beg your pardon?"

  Mrs. Pollifax nodded. "I was wondering if you needed any."

  He continued staring at her and she wished that he would close his mouth. Apparently he was very obtuse—perhaps he was hard of hearing. Taking care to enunciate clearly, she said in a louder voice, "I would like to apply for work as a spy. That's why I'm here, you see."

  The young man closed his mouth. "You cant possibly— you're not serious," he said blankly.

  "Yes, of course," she told him warmly. "I've come to volunteer. I'm quite alone, you see, with no encumbrances or responsibilities. It's true that my only qualifications are those of character, but when you reach my age character is what you have the most of. I've raised two children and run a home, I drive a car and know first aid, I never shrink from the sight of blood and I'm very good in emergencies."

  Mr. Mason looked oddly stricken. He said in a dazed voice, "But really, you know, spying these days is not bloody at all, Mrs.—Mrs.—"

  "Pollifax," she reminded him. "I'm terribly relieved to hear that, Mr. Mason. But still I hoped that you might find use for someone—someone expendable, you know—if only to preserve the lives of your younger, better-trained people. I don't mean to sound melodramatic, but I am quite prepared to offer you my life or I would not have come."

  Mr. Mason looked shocked. "But Mrs. Politick," he protested, "this is simply not the way in which spies are recruited. Not at all. I appreciate the spirit in which you—"