Short Stories by PJ

After Sarah was older, married and with children, she no longer attended church so regularly as she had when she was a child, going almost every Sunday with her mother. As time went by, she went to church occasionally and prayed and sang and repeated and listened with everybody else, finally not trying to mark differences between one Protestant denomination and another. If a congregation sang an unfamiliar hymn, she usually managed to follow the refrain. Occasionally, she memorized a doxology here or a benediction there. Mechanically she could still recite the Apostles' Creed:

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth: And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord: Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary: Suffered under Pontius Pilate, Was crucified, dead and buried: He descended into hell . . . .

She didn't believe a word of it. And the Sunday voices faded on Monday when she returned to her desk at the welfare office and by Tuesday could scarcely be heard above the tumult.

"Mrs. Mueller?"

"Speaking."

"This is Lola. Lola Gonzales. I didn't get my check this morning. The mailman's already gone by. Everybody got a check but me."

She looked at her desk calendar: Tuesday, April 2, 1963.

"Mrs. Gonzales, I'm sorry. We had to put a hold on your check. We can't give you any more aid until the father of your expected child signs an acknowledgment of paternity."

"But, Mrs. Mueller."

"I don't make the rules. You know welfare policy comes out of Sacramento."

"But Mrs. Mueller . . . . The landlord here is awfully strict about my paying the rent when it's due, and the kids need stuff for school. I've got to have food. I owe on the milk bill, and I don't know how much longer the milkman will trust me. What am I going to do?"

"You've named Mr. Romero as the father of the child you're expecting. I have to have some contact with him. We have to get a statement of responsibility from him. I can't help you until you get him in here."

"But Mrs. Mueller, I've told him and told him. He can't speak much English, and he has to have a friend come in with him."

"We have Spanish-speaking workers."

"No. No, Lorenzo says it has to be a friend of his. I've told him I don't have no money."

"Explain that we can't give you further aid. We don't expect him to do anymore than he's able to do financially, but . . . ."

"All right, Mrs. Mueller. I'll see him again. I know he's not working today. He won't go to work till late tonight. Maybe . . . ."

"I hope so, Mrs. Gonzales. If things are really bad, you can get an emergency food order the minute he signs the forms."

"Okay, Mrs. Mueller. I can't just let my kids . . . ."

"What about Julio?"

"Oh, he's lots better. He's doing just fine. The doctor says send him back to school next week."

"Well, that's good news. If it will help any, I could meet with Mr. Romero at your place."

"No. No, I'm going to get him in, Mrs. Mueller."

"Be sure he checks with me before he comes to the office. Did you give him my office hours?"

"Sure. Sure, he knows everything. He knows he's got the papers to sign. He's...oh, you know, a little embarrassed."

"Well, the papers have to be signed."

"Okay. I'll see you, Mrs. Mueller. G'bye."

"Good-bye."

The county provided forms on which Sarah H. Mueller, Social Case Worker II, recorded the essentials of telephone conversations with clients: the date, upper-righthand corner, client's name, the message, worker's initials. The phone rang again before she managed to scrawl her initials in the bottom righthand corner.

"This is Mrs. Mueller."

"Oh, is it now? Well, Mrs. Mueller, this here's Benny Landis and I want you to know I'm the brother of Essie Bayliss. Now my sister's been in there and she's applied for aid and aid was approved and today she didn't get her check." As he spoke Benny Landis's voice rose in pitch and volume. "What are you going to do about it? Just what do you plan to do to set things right for my sister, Mrs. Essie Bayliss? No fault of hers her husband's back in jail. She is an innocent party in this little matter, I can tell you. It is no fault of hers. Now just what?"

"Mr. Landis, I just received your sister's case from the intake worker. I've signed an emergency grocery order for her. That's all I can do. It takes the accounting office a little while to get a check to her."

"Those county checks came out today. I know a thing or two."

"But . . . ."

"I want my sister to have what's owed her. You hear me, Mrs. Sarah Mueller? You hear that?" He was screaming. She heard every word. Becky who sat at the desk next to her heard every word and shook her head in sympathy. Her sympathy was for Sarah Mueller.

"Now just what can you do?"

"I've explained it, Mr. Landis. I've given your sister as much emergent aid as I can. I can't do anything more for her. She'll have to wait for her check."

"We'll see about that, Mrs. Sarah Mueller. We'll just see about that. If you will be so kind, please transfer me to your supervisor."

"All right. I'll do that, Mr. Landis." She signaled the phone clerks. "Will you please transfer this call to Mr. Lowe?" And she heard Mr. Lowe's phone ring behind her. When she heard his voice, she hung up.

"Well, the mailman's gone by."

"I've put in my phone time already," Becky responded. "Mrs. Rodriguez didn't get her check. Mrs. Johnson. And Ellie Banning was surprised to learn that aid had been discontinued. What's a little thing like a man with an income of eight thousand living with the family?"

"Oh, that one." She groaned. "Becky, what time is the unit meeting?"

Becky spoke softly, "One-thirty, I think. You'll have time."

"I guess so, but I wish Mr. Lowe wouldn't choose Tuesdays for unit meetings. He used to have them on Mondays. That's why I switched my appointment to Tuesday."

The phone rang again. "Mrs. Mueller speaking."

"Mrs. Mueller, this is Mrs. Larson. I'm the school nurse at Third Street School. You know I've talked to you before. Mrs. Little, who is the mother of Bonnie and Lena Dubow, has been in and requested PTA lunches for the children. I understand she'd been aided by your office and files gave me your name."

"Yes, she is aided. We don't send her too much now, though. Mrs. Larson, I know she has trouble making ends meet. The baby's father is on the case as a step father, and we just can't give those older children whom he refuses to help much money because of his income."

"The Dubow children's father is in New Mexico?"

"Yes. He's never provided to my knowledge."

"Well, that's what she tells me. I don't know whether we'll be able to help her. But thank you for your information, Mrs. Mueller."

"Surely. I hope you can help her. She tries. She hopes to give up aid altogether and go back to work as soon as she's able. But, you'll never believe it, the baby's father is objecting. Says he feels a mother's place is in the home."

"Oh? If he's concerned about that sort of thing, he could do her a bit of a favor and marry her, you know?"

"He could. He informed the worker before me that he thought that man in New Mexico had had more use of her than he had. I thought that was perceptive."

"It takes all kinds. We'll see what we can do to help."

"Say, while we're talking, have you had any more trouble with the Rollins children?"

"Not a bit. She manages to get them here every morning."

"Pretty soon she'll be an officer in the PTA."

"Well, I'm proud of what we've done with that family. I thought that was going to be a neglect case six months ago."

"Mrs. Larson, you and I deserve a few successes."

"How right you are!" She laughed. "Say, stop by and see me if you get a chance."

"I'll try to do that. I really will."

"Good-bye."

"'Bye." She turned back to Becky who was staring at some kind of bill that had arrived with her mail. "Mrs. Larson over at Third Street."

"Gosh, I wanted to talk to her."

"I'm sorry."

"Could I have a minute of your time?" Mr. Lowe, her supervisor, a slender impeccable man, was at her desk. A former teacher with an M.A. to his credit, he had lived in California for fifteen years and had been with the agency all but three of those years. In one of his dark hands he carried the Bayliss case and with the other he made a slashing movement across it. "How did you manage to get this client in our unit?"

She smiled at him. "You've talked to Bennie Landis?"

"Yes, I have. Talking to Benny Landis, I have explained agency policy about fifteen times. I have also asked him just why he happens to be so concerned about when his sister receives her check. That really set him off."

"What's he going to do now?"

"Well, he's never met me, you know."

"No. He's seen me only once."

"You want to know what he's going to do? Report me to the NAACP. Immediately." He held up his NAACP membership card. Then he tucked the case under his arm. "Report me to the NAACP. I'll just put this case back in your file drawer for you."

"Sure. Thanks a lot."

Becky murmured, "Now somebody who enjoys himself that much can't be all bad."

"He could have planned the unit meeting for tomorrow. You think he knows about my appointments?"

"If he does, he'd rather not know. Isn't that the system around here? He's been here an awfully long time."

"I know."

Becky whispered, "I can't accept the ones who work here and don't see a psychiatrist."

"Oh, it's an interesting job, Becky. There are days--we've both had them--when we feel that we've accomplished something. You know how I've worked with the Chavez family? I think there's going to be a reconciliation. He'll pay the bills and everything."

"Wonderful. Say isn't your phone time over? Are you going for coffee?"

"No. Not this morning. I have to. . . .work on my dreams. You know I try to write some of them down and I haven't had a chance today. I'll just drink the coffee in my thermos."

"All right. Don't work too hard."

Sarah took a half sheet of yellow paper from her desk and a number-two pencil. There had been something that was golden in her dream the night before, something of gold. She frowned, trying to remember.

At lunchtime she and Becky walked down to the hamburger stand on the corner of the boulevard two blocks from the office. There was always a line in front of the handout window because the sauce on the hamburgers was, in its way, famous. They carried their purchase back to the office in brown sacks and ate at the plastic-covered tables in the big room at the back of the welfare office. The sauce was so hot that tears came to their eyes when they swallowed. It was the kind of stuff that was retasted about every fifteen minutes while the digestive processes worked at it. Terrible. Becky and she had these hamburgers every once in a while, not often, not until they could stop tasting the last ones, which was a period of time of at least two weeks according to some estimates.

"If one of us just had the moral courage to say no when the other had this dumb idea . . . ."

"Who would it be? You're older than I am, Sarah. You ought to have better sense, married, the mother of children, and all that."

"If I had good sense--excuse me, if I were a mature sexual woman, I wouldn't be here in the first place. Who am I, Becky? When am I going to accept the fact that I don't have to get out and enter some contest? What am I trying to prove?"

"You're asking me?"

"No. You're not well, let's face it."

"I'm just waiting till some nice Jewish boy waltzes me off to the rabbi's study."

"Then you'll live happily ever after?"

"And have a child."

"Oh, God." And tears came to her eyes when she hadn't even swallowed the special sauce. "I want you to be happy, Becky. You and me and Mrs. Ramirez and poor Lola Gonzales . . .even some days I want Mrs. Essie Bayliss to enjoy the good life."

"But not her brother, Benny Landis?"

"Not Benny. Not really. I am unable to experience warm feelings for Benny Landis." Sarah bit into the hamburger that had oozed its orange sauce, congealing, onto the waxed yellow paper in which it had been wrapped at the little stand on the corner. Then she took a gulp of grape Nehi. "That was delicious."

"That damned hamburger? We're going to poison ourselves one day."

"No, not the hamburger," Sarah chided her. "The pop. We're both impulsive, that's why we walk down there and buy these things." She pronounced impulsive impoolsive the way her doctor did, and that too made tears in her eyes when she hadn't swallowed. "When I'm well, I'll stay home and wear some sort of capri pants like other housewives. I'm very . . .you know, feeling today. Emotional. I'm reacting to everything. Is that good?"

"You want me to tell you?"

"You over-react," Sarah told Becky who had listened to such a judgment before, many times. "You cry out, and you did that little dance by your desk when Mrs. Duffy closed her case."

"I'm doing better. You'll have to admit I'm doing better."

"Oh, yes. Except that you fell down the stairs."

"Sarah Mueller, that was an accident. I did not deliberately fall down the stairs."

"I didn't say deliberately."

"But I know what you're thinking. All right so your doctor doesn't believe in accidents. My doctor doesn't believe in dreams. My doctor says dream analysis is a bunch of hooey."

"We are such stuff . . . ."

"Didn't I see an analyst once? I've told you about him. The one from Vienna. Couldn't he learn English if he was so smart? I spent my whole fifty minutes saying, `Would you say that again, Doctor?' And he always pestered me about my dreams."

"But you saw him for several months. Didn't you take him any dreams?"

"Two or three. He said it wasn't enough."

Mr. Lowe entered the room and stood beside them, looking at them with school-teacher disapproval. "I want to go to lunch and there's just nobody covering the unit."

Sarah wadded the yellow paper into its brown sack. "We're through in here. I'll get back there right now."

She left Mr. Lowe and Becky regarding each other, Becky defiant like a fourth-grader who had misbehaved and wasn't a bit sorry. Prefiguring the unit meeting, Sarah realized that misuse of lunch time would certainly be on the agenda. But that was always a dependable topic, the way, when the director addressed the entire staff, everybody in the office expected that once again for some unnumbered time he would breathe heavily into the microphone and remind each worker that he must not spill coffee on the brown asphalt-tiled floor or that, if he did spill coffee, that he must wipe it up immediately. "I can't always be around with a mop." The director always concluded with his little joke. And then, as dependably, he would proceed to point out that each worker must observe the lines painted in white, repainted frequently, in the parking area and, heeding the lines, park between them.

Every bit as reliably, Mr. Lowe would mention observing the half-hour allotment of lunch time and the propriety of not abusing field time. "Be sure," he warned the members of his unit once a week, "that I always have a copy of the field calls you intend to make before you leave the office." What was so wonderful about sitting next to Becky for Sarah was that Sarah had in her life learned and followed thousands upon thousands of rules--no rules had ever been lost upon her--and Becky was simply impervious to any of the major disciplines of life.

Becky would readily admit, "It hasn't been easy for me to like you, Sarah. You've got all that German blood. You can't deny that. You keep your files up to date. You're a logical, well-disciplined, orderly German, that's what you are. I've never gotten along with a blonde. It's not easy to trust you."

Until she was in her thirties, it had not seemed strange to Sarah that she was never allowed to comb her own hair until she was fourteen years old. Becky, ten years younger than she, had experienced twice the independence. Only recently had Sarah struck out for herself, wanting desperately to grow up before her own children were adolescents. Yes, Becky had lived longer near the California coast. Sarah, born in Kansas City, had been isolated not only from that world outside the Midwest, but also from that care inside herself. Her own feelings had been but sparsely sounded.

It was Sarah, not Becky, who needed those contours of dreams. Her midwestern upbringing had exacted the literal at the expense of the imagination.

The unit meeting was at one-thirty. It couldn't last over an hour, and Sarah would leave for the field immediately. With good luck she might have time for at least two or three calls before her appointment at four o'clock. In her loose-leaf notebook she wrote down everything Mr. Lowe said:

She discovered that she could write down what he said without listening. Outside the conference room, at right angles, sat the rows and rows of social workers. Some talked on the phone; some read; some wrote; some stared into space. It was a warm day, and a big office fan rotated rhythmically catching the sitting, talking, reading, writing, staring workers' hair in its sweep. Only one bald man was unaffected by the occasional mock-turbulence.

Mr. Lowe was asking, "How many of you are asking your clients if they want referrals to Planned Parenthood?"

Automatically, she raised her hand to be counted. She did not press the yellow two-by-three slips upon women who wanted babies. She did not remonstrate, "But Mrs. . . . ." Or, "Oh, Miss . . . ." No. But for those who did not want to visit the health center periodically to be weighed and to have their urine analyzed, for those who did not want to deliver any more babies in the crowded maternity ward at General Hospital and to carry them home at the end of the ritual three days . . . .

"Sarah," Mr. Lowe admonished, "I've counted your hand."

She put down her hand, her signal that she very much hoped every baby born into the world would be wanted. Why, if her parents had not planned to have her, had they taken such scrupulous care of her? Guilt? Shame? Fear of community disapproval? Had her own birth been accident or accidence?

Becky's voice could surely be heard half-way across the office. "I don't see any reason why I can't give a referral to an unmarried woman who's already got herself two babies. I don't see any reason . . . ."

Mr. Lowe took clear stands on two issues: the wisdom of Planned Parenthood and the goodness of anything that Mrs. McCurdy, his worker to whom he gave the best ratings, did, believed, and said.

And Mrs. McCurdy, a Catholic widow, appealed to Mr. Lowe.

He scratched his shorn head, the graying transparency across his mahogany scalp. In his dilemma he raised his hands as if he were at the front of his old classroom. "Well, now . . . ."

How, Sarah idly wondered, do we all manage to live in God's world together?

When she returned to her desk after the unit meeting, Sarah found a message wobbling fitfully in the fan's wake. Concerning her Gonzales case, Lorenzo Romero was in the office. Could she see him as soon as possible? The little hand on the round wall clock pointed to the 2, and the big hand rapidly approached the 4.

Wildly, she opened the upper righthand drawer of her desk where she kept forms. In twenty minutes, if she were lucky, she might be able to sign papers and to phone a release on Mrs. Gonzales' check.

Becky sat down. "I guess you're leaving, aren't you?"

"Leaving? Lola Gonzales' Mr. Romero is out at the reception desk. I have to interview him and . . .Becky, do you have an acknowledgment of paternity in your desk? I can't find one."

"Yes, I do." Becky quickly proffered two of the forms. "Do you have carbon?"

"Oh, yes." Sarah grabbed the papers she would need and a memo for interview notes. "Honestly!" she gasped before she rushed down the aisle to the waiting room.

She entered the rear of the room where only a few people sat in the staleness of tobacco smoke and perspiration and in the relentlessness of the gathered afternoon heat. That room had no fan. "Mr. Romero?"

Rising and walking toward her was a man of medium height, heavy in a muscular way, a man who wore a white short-sleeved shirt, open at the throat, exposing his clean t-shirt. Following him, there was a second man who had a look of meticulous propriety and who had put on a well-pressed seersucker suit, white shirt and black tie. Compared to the first, the other man was lighter complected, leaner, altogether suggesting a sensitivity and fragility untenable to any characterization of his companion. The latter man's hair receded at his temples, and a thin moustache appeared to be penciled primly to respect the outline of his upper lip. "I am Robert García," he introduced himself. "My friend asked me to help him. He don't speak English good."

"Of course," Sarah replied. It's nice of you to come in, Mr. García. Let's find a booth where we can talk." She led them to one of the interviewing booths and they sat down across the table from her, leaning back, crossing their arms, looking to her as if she must remind them of the reason for their visit.

Not wanting to waste time, she assisted them. "You've come about Lola Gonzales?"

Her question prompted a volley of Spanish from Mr. Romero, much too rapid for Sarah to follow, the patterns of his speech resembling those of Spanish and the vocabulary neither Spanish nor English, but patois. Apparently, Mr. Romero had a lot of bills and something was wrong with his automobile. The name Lola figured prominently in his lengthy explication.

All this was translated succinctly by Mr. García. "He says Lola's been telling it all over that he's stopped her aid."

Certainly she doubted that the exegesis was creditable. But she ignored the limits of verisimilitude and respected Mr. García's presentation of the hapless friend's anxieties. "We unfortunately can give Lola no more aid until either Mr. Romero signs papers saying that he is the baby's father or refuses to sign papers. If he refuses to sign, Lola must file papers against him with the District Attorney before we can continue to help her. Do you understand?"

But she could tell before Mr. García demanded "¿Comprende?" that Mr. Romero understood. Because she also inferred that he would sign the papers, she began fitting the carbon between the blank Acknowledgment of Paternity forms. The format of that particular document was actually a frame for mimeographed lines on which workers and prospective fathers might work out some unique statement of why the signer of the document felt himself obligated to be a signer. She began explaining the form to Mr. García. "You may write in Spanish, if you wish. I think its better that Mr. Romero sign a statement in Spanish, don't you?"

Gravely, Mr. García nodded. Mr. Romero blotted his forehead with his handkerchief.

"Write something to the effect that `I, Lorenzo Romero, am the father of the child Lola Gonzales expects in September.' Put the date down here." She pointed to the bottom of the form. "Put the date below that place where Mr. Romero will sign his name."

Another barrage of Spanish greeted the form after Mr. García had carefully written out the statement and after Sarah had read it approvingly. In Spanish, Mr. Romero deplored his condition, somehow blaming his difficulties not only upon Lola but also upon, if she heard correctly, a place called the Python Bar. Or did these words have some meaning in Spanish unknown to her?

She remembered her appointment and glanced at her watch: 2:35. "Mr. García, I'm terribly sorry, but I do have to hurry. I'd wanted Mr. Romero to make an appointment before he came to the office. This afternoon I have some calls to make. Will Mr. Romero sign the form?"

Mr. García firmly placed his hands over the hands of Mr. Romero who appeared oblivious of her problems and continued in Spanish, a troubled denunciation of himself, Lola, the patrons of the Python Bar, Lola's aid, the postal department. When Mr. García shook his friend slightly, it was as if he awoke a sleepwalker. In Spanish he explained that the social worker must hurry, that he must sign the form, that they could not remain forever in the welfare office. Moreover, Mr. García's wife was unaware of his whereabouts and would be expecting him at home. As if he were an engine and must stop himself by degrees, Lorenzo Romero slackened his tirade until it eased in a few phrases, words finally, "Lola," the "Python Bar," and at last halted.

Mr. García pushed the form toward his friend and pointed out the line on which he was to sign. While Mr. Romero whispered the words aloud, Mr. García explained. "He will sign. Lola has been telling his friends at the Python Bar that he's stopped her aid." Mr. Romero, indignant, extended the palms of his hands. "He must sign," Mr. García continued. "How can he go to the Python Bar if he does not? How can he go with these things Lola has been telling?"

To acknowledge a child, fatherhood, a matter of so great moment because . . . . She clasped her hands together. "I'm sure everything will be all right now. I'll call Lola tomorrow morning. I'll tell her to say the right things at the Python Bar."

The men beamed upon her. Mr. Romero signed the form with a flourish. She presented him with a copy of what he had signed. "This is for you."

The men were smiling when they left her. They bowed slightly, in delight. She had pleased them. "Gracias, gracias," Mr. Romero murmured.

Infected by their unchecked good spirits, optimism, ebullience, she smiled in spite of herself. "Oh, thank you. Thank you for coming in today. Good-by. Good-by."

Triumphantly, they departed, assisting each other out the door, congratulating each other. By his gallantry she assumed that Mr. Romero felt every confidence in the respect of all who might thereafter attend the Python Bar.

After overseeing the complexities of releasing Lola's stipend, she sat down at her desk and opened her field notebook. With what time she had left it would be impossible to make the home call for the purpose of signing affirmation papers, the call that she had planned. Instead, she must limit her calls that afternoon to those involving recipients living between her office and her doctor's office in Beverly Hills. There was, in truth, one family whom she must see as soon as possible--they were the Greenleaf family--even though she preferred to avoid Mr. Greenleaf indefinitely. She jotted down the name and address of the Greenleafs. Two other cases now . . . She couldn't leave the office with the ostensible purpose of making only one call. Briefly she wanted to stop in on Mrs. Pierce who had managed four husbands but only one child. It was necessary to find out when her new training program would begin. Who else was in that Hollywood area of her file? The woman with the terribly scarred face who was due an initial home call . . . what was her name? The unfortunate woman had supported herself for years by begging outside the movie studios--old clothes, handouts of various kind--and was, at the middle of her ugly life, expecting a first child. A well-known movie actor had confirmed her need, a handsome, but older, actor responding to the county's routine residency form. Sarah had always had that scattering of Hollywood cases, usually pitiful women who drank. She'd see Greenleaf, Pierce . . . Bertram was the last name she remembered and wrote down.

It was three o'clock. Where were her dreams? She opened her upper righthand drawer, searching out those effusions. "Sarah," Becky hissed at her, "you've got to get out of here. What in the devil are you doing? This isn't the time to start staring into your desk drawers the way you do."

"Becky," she turned to her friend, "I've lost my dreams!"

Rebecca Bernstein rose up in her chair the way she did when she over-reacted, clutching the wooden back of the chair, her beautiful eyes wide as if she depicted the heroine in a climactic scene from some old horror movie. "Not at a time like this? What do your dreams look like? I'll help you find them."

"They're on a half sheet of yellow paper. Remember, I worked on them this morning." Becky and she ransacked her desk.

"Here are your dreams, Sarah. Here, under these Acknowledgment of Paternity forms you just put down."

"Oh, thank you."

Becky put the yellow half-sheet into her hands. "Now be careful and don't leave them with Mr. Lowe. Don't give him your dreams instead of that list of your field calls."

"I'll be careful. Oh, thank you, Becky." Fortunately Mr. Lowe was not at his desk to witness the confusion of her departure. He was a fanatic about neatness, and she put the list exactly where he had instructed his workers to leave communications.

In front of the Greenleafs, she took a long breath. But Mr. Greenleaf, who was aided as an incapacitated father on the grounds of mental illness, could not be avoided. She saw him at once; he was sitting on the stoop behind a copy of the newspaper that the Black Muslims distribute. Not only was he to be at home, but also she detected from the intensity with which his woolly head leaned over the paper, that he was in a poor mood. And Mr. Greenleaf on one of his better days frightened her. He did not move from the front steps when she approached, nor did he look up.

"She ain't home."

"Are any of the children here?"

"None of your business."

"But it is my business, Mr. Greenleaf."

"They've all gone to the schoolhouse, Miss Busybody."

"I'm sorry if you feel that way, Mr. Greenleaf."

"Bet you are. Bet you're sorry about that check the county sends you to pay you for all your prying, too." He still didn't look up at her or move.

She took out one of her cards and wrote, "Please call me. Mrs. Mueller." on the back of it. "Please give this to Mrs. Greenleaf when she returns, Mr. Greenleaf."

"I might."

Back in the car she recorded the mileage and thought to herself that she had been lucky. The Greenleafs lived only a few blocks from the district office. She'd have time to stop by Mrs. Pierce's and look in on Gloria Bertram who had been named for Gloria Swanson and at the age of four disfigured by the boiling waters of her mother's laundry tub. At that time of day Sarah could still depend on making good time on Santa Monica Boulevard. Only once had she been late to a therapy appointment.

At 3:35 she called on Mrs. Pierce. "She's not there," a neighbor called out. "Just went down to the store. Go on in and set down. You her social worker?"

"I'll just leave my card," Sarah responded; "thank you!"

Gloria Bertram, on the other hand, was at home. "Come in, Mrs. Mueller." She touched her arm. "I'm happy to meet you." The scarred woman lived in a court apartment below Hollywood Boulevard. In the small living room was an imitation fireplace with a cracked mirror above it. The walls were painted a light green. They were covered by silver-framed pictures of yesterday and today's screen stars. Big smiles. Perfect teeth. Best wishes for my friend, Gloria.

"How are you feeling?"

"Much better, thank you."

"You're keeping your appointments at the clinic?"

"Just like the doctors tell me, Mrs. Mueller. I'm not as young as I was once." Her eyes were a liquid gray-green, as if she appeared underwater in the streaked green room. Though her sight too had been damaged in the trauma of her childhood the woman, tall and always in long-sleeved dress, would never wear glasses. "Vanity," she had explained to the intake worker who had put it and the long sleeves in the case history with no hint of irony. "You want to see something?"

"What is it?" Sarah, despite her sense of rush and immediacy, matched Gloria's quiet manner.

Gloria opened a large white box that took up a great portion of the seating space on the old plush couch that was a part of the furnishings, dim in the space that never saw the sun through the cracked slats of the wooden venetian blinds. "It's what my friends at the studio sent me." Gloria's eyes filled with tears when she spoke of her friends. "Look. All these things for the baby. It's a complete layette." Tiny yellow and green kimonas, dozens of diapers, hand-knit booties with thin satin ribbons.

"That's lovely, Gloria. I'm so happy for you."

"The baby's my husband's you know," Gloria told her. "You read that in the case, didn't you? My husband and me've been separated for a long time, but I seen him last Christmas in the South."

"Of course," Sarah confirmed her, though silently she doubted. "Of course, the child is your husband's."

"My friends at the studio . . . they feel bad he don't support me. He won't do nothing for the baby and me so I had to ask the county for help. I just had to ask the county for help."

"I know."

"And I'll be back on my feet before you know it. Wait and see. I can take care of this baby all right, don't need any help from anybody."

"I'm glad you feel that way."

Finally she had excused herself, rejoicing in the sunlight and the warmth of the car before she started it and drove away. Somehow, for her, Sarah's Hollywood cases, the pale lonely women, all seemed more terrible than did those of the vivid dark-skinned people whom she visited in East Los Angeles.

While she drove away from them now, all the people whose lives she looked in upon, she remembered a time her mother combed her hair. Her mother was saying, "Sarah, I don't think you'd better play with that girl you brought over yesterday." Who had that girl been? Marilyn, was that the name of the companion her mother bade her exclude? "Don't see any more of Marilyn than you have to, darling. Did mother pull your hair? I'm sorry. It's so tangled. Sit still now. You find playmates among the people we've known here in Kansas City. Marilyn's been around a bit too much. She's seen a little more than I care to have my little girl see. That's the way it is, Sarah. There's no reason for you to look around too much. No reason for you to know about things that will never, never trouble you." How long ago . . . . "Do you want to wear a ribbon?"

The third day he rose again from the dead: He ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

Driving west on Santa Monica Boulevard Sarah discerned that figure that rises commandingly above the traffic. A pilgrim. Sarah wondered whether it might not be toward Bedford Drive that Moroni atop the great Mormon Temple overlooking the boulevard blew his horn. From his pedestal the angel directed his unheard blast toward Bedford Drive, where so many of the psychiatrists had their offices, awaiting the prophesied hour.

At its juncture she followed little Santa Monica. That way she could make a right turn to the metered off-street parking that lay parallel to the boulevard. It was five to four when she walked down Bedford Drive, and the light on the corner was green.

I believe in the Holy Ghost: The holy Catholic Church; The Communion of Saints: The Forgiveness of sins: The Resurrection of the body: And the Life everlasting. Amen.

No she didn't believe in any of it. After the heavy door of the office building closed behind her, she found herself alone in the lobby. The place was, with its marbles and tiles and rubber mats, as still as some deserted church. Sarah walked over to the self-operated elevator and summoned it from another floor. In the sixties Sarah had believed in Sigmund Freud.

Short Stories by PJ