Wednesday Read online

  Wednesday

  William Tenn

  Wednesday’s Child

  by William Tenn

  When he first came to scrutinize Wednesday Gresham with his rimless spectacles and watery blue eyes, Fabian Balik knew nothing of the biological contradictions that were so incredibly a part of her essential body structure. He had not even noticed—as yet—that she was a remarkably pretty girl with eyes like rain-sparkling violets. His original preoccupation with her was solely and specifically as a problem in personnel administration.

  All of which was not too surprising, because Fabian Balik was a thoroughly intent, thoroughly sincere young office manager, who had convinced his glands conclusively, in several bitter skirmishes, that their interests didn’t have a chance against the interests of Slaughter, Stark & Slingsby: Advertising & Public Relations.

  Wednesday was one of the best stenographers in the secretarial pool that was under his immediate supervision. There were, however, small but highly unusual derelictions in her employment history. They consisted of peculiarities which a less dedicated and ambitious personnel man might have put aside as mere trifles, but which Fabian, after a careful study of her six-year record with the firm, felt he could not, in good conscience, ignore. On the other hand, they would obviously require an extended discussion and he had strong views about cutting into an employee’s working time.

  Thus, much to the astonishment of the office and the confusion of Wednesday herself, he came up to her one day at noon, and informed her quite calmly that they were going to have lunch together.

  “This is a nice place,” he announced, when they had been shown to a table. “It’s not too expensive, but I’ve discovered it serves the best food in the city for the price. And it’s a bit off the beaten track so that it never gets too crowded. Only people who know what they want manage to come here.”

  Wednesday glanced around, and nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I like it too. I eat here a lot with the girls.”

  After a moment, Fabian picked up a menu. “I suppose you don’t mind if I order for both of us?” he inquired. “The chef is used to my tastes. He’ll treat us right.”

  The girl frowned. “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Balik, but—”

  “Yes?” he said encouragingly, though he was more than surprised. He hadn’t expected anything but compliance. After all, she was probably palpitating at being out with him.

  “I’d like to order for myself,” she said. “I’m on a—a special diet.”

  He raised his eyebrows and was pleased at the way she blushed. He nodded slowly, with dignity, letting his displeasure come through in the way he pronounced his words. “Very well, as you please.”

  A few moments later, though, curiosity got too strong and broke through the ice. “What kind of diet is that? Fresh-fruit salad, a glass of tomato juice, raw cabbage, and a baked potato? You can’t be trying to lose weight if you eat potatoes.”

  Wednesday smiled timidly. “I’m not trying to reduce, Mr. Balik. Those are all foods rich in Vitamin C. I need a lot of Vitamin C.”

  Fabian remembered her smile. There had been a few spots of more-than-natural whiteness in it. “Bad teeth?” he inquired.

  “Bad teeth and—” Her tongue came out and paused for a thoughtful second between her lips. “Mostly bad teeth,” she said. “This is a nice place. There’s a restaurant almost like it near where I live. Of course it’s a lot cheaper—”

  “Do you live with your parents, Miss Gresham?”

  “No, I live alone. I’m an orphan.”

  He waited until the waiter had deposited the first course, then speared a bit of the shrimp and returned to the attack. “Since when?”

  She stared at him over her fresh-fruit salad. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Balik?”

  “Since when? How long have you been an orphan?”

  “Since I was a little baby. Someone left me on the doorstep of a foundling home.”

  He noticed that while she was replying to his questions in an even tone of voice, she was staring at her food with a good deal of concentration and her blush had become more pronounced. Was she embarrassed at having to admit her probable lack of legitimacy? he wondered. Surely she had grown accustomed to it in—how old was she?—twenty-four years. Nonsense, of course she had.

  “But on your original application form, Miss Gresham, you gave Thomas and Mary Gresham as the names of your parents.”

  Wednesday had stopped eating and was playing with her water glass. “They were an old couple who adopted me,” she said in a very low voice. “They died when I was fifteen. I have no living relatives.”

  “That you know of,” he pointed out, raising a cautionary finger.

  Much to Fabian’s surprise she chuckled. It was a very odd chuckle and made him feel extremely uncomfortable. “That’s right, Mr. Balik. I have no living relatives—that I know of.” She looked over his shoulder and chuckled again. “That I know of,” she repeated softly to herself.

  Fabian felt irritably that the interview was somehow getting away from him. He raised his voice slightly. “Then who is Dr. Morris Lorington?”

  She was attentive again. In fact, wary was more like it. “Dr. Morris Lorington?”

  “Yes, the man you said should be notified in case of emergency. In case anything happened to you while you were working for us.”

  She looked very wary now. Her eves were narrowed, she was watching him very closely; her breathing was a bit faster, too. “Dr. Lorington is an old friend. He—he was the doctor at the orphanage. After the Greshams adopted me, I kept going to him whenever—” Her voice trailed off.

  “Whenever you needed medical attention?” Fabian suggested.

  “Ye-es,” she said, brightening, as if he had come up with an entirely novel reason for consulting a physician. “I saw him whenever I needed medical attention.”

  Fabian grunted. There was something very wrong but tantalizingly elusive about this whole business. But she was answering his questions. He couldn’t deny that: she was certainly answering.

  “Do you expect to see him next October?” he inquired.

  And now Wednesday was no longer wary. She was frightened. “Next October?” she quavered.

  Fabian finished the last of his shrimp and wiped his lips. But he didn’t take his eyes off her. “Yes, next October, Miss Gresham. You’ve applied for a month’s leave of absence, beginning October fifteenth. Five years ago, after you had been working for Slaughter, Stark and Slingsby for thirteen months, you also applied for a leave of absence in October.”

  He was amazed at how scared she looked. He felt triumphantly that he had been right in looking into this. The feeling he had about her had not been merely curiosity; it had been an instinct of good personnel management

  “But I’m not getting paid for the time off. I’m not asking to be paid for it, Mr. Balik. And I didn’t get paid the—the other time.”

  She was clutching her napkin up near her face, and she gave the impression of being ready to bolt through the back door of the restaurant. Her blushes had departed with such thoroughness as to leave her skin absolutely white.

  “The fact that you’re not going to be paid for the time off, Miss Gresham—” Fabian began, only to be interrupted by the waiter with the entree. By the time the man had gone, he was annoyed to observe that Wednesday had used the respite to recover some of her poise. While she was still pale, she had a spot of red in each cheek and she was leaning back in her chair now instead of using the edge of it.

  “The fact that you’re not going to be paid is of no consequence,” he continued nonetheless. “It’s merely logical. After all, you have two weeks of vacation with pay every year. Which brings me to the second point. You have every year made two unusual requests. First, you’ve asked for an
additional week’s leave of absence without pay, making three weeks in all. And then you’ve asked—”

  “To take it in the early Spring,” she finished, her voice entirely under control. “Is there anything wrong with that, Mr. Balik? That way I don’t have any conflict with the other girls and the firm is sure of a secretary being in the office all through the summer.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that per se. By that I mean,” he explained carefully, “that there is nothing wrong with the arrangement as such. But it makes for loose ends, for organizational confusion. And loose ends, Miss Gresham, loose ends and organizational confusion have no place in a well-regulated office.”

  He was pleased to note that she was looking uncomfortable again.

  “Does that mean—are you trying to tell me that—I might be laid off?”

  “It could happen,” Fabian agreed, neglecting to add that it was, however, very unlikely to happen in the case of a secretary who was as generally efficient on the one hand, and as innocuous on the other, as Wednesday Gresham. He carefully cut a fork-sized portion of roast beef free of its accompanying strip of orange fat before going on. “Look at it this way. How would it be if every girl in the office asked for an additional week’s leave of absence every year—even if it was without pay, as it would have to be? And then, every few years, wanted an additional month’s leave of absence on top of that? What kind of an office would we have, Miss Gresham? Not a well-regulated one, certainly.”

  As he chewed the roast beef with the requisite thoroughness he beamed at the thoughtful concern on her face and was mentally grateful that he hadn’t had to present that line of argument to anyone as sharp as Arlette Stein, for example. He knew what the well-hipped thirtyish widow would have immediately replied: “But every girl in the office doesn’t ask for it, Mr. Balik.” A heavy sneer at such sophistry would mean little to Stein.

  Wednesday, he appreciated, was not the person to go in for such counterattacks. She was rolling her lips distressedly against each other and trying to think of a polite, good-employee way out. There was only one, and she would have to come to it in a moment.

  She did.

  “Would it help any,” she began, and stopped. She took a deep breath. “Would it help any, if I told you the reasons—for the leaves-of-absence?”

  “It would,” he said heartily. “It would indeed, Miss Gresham. That way I, as office manager, can operate from facts instead of mysteries. I can hear your reasons, weigh them for validity and measure their importance—and your usefulness as a secretary—against the disorganization your absences create in the day-to-day operation of Slaughter, Stark and Slingsby.”

  “M-m-m.” She looked troubled, uncertain. “I’d like to think a bit, if you don’t mind.”

  Fabian waved a cauliflower-filled fork magnanimously. “Take all the time in the world! Think it out carefully. Don’t tell me anything you aren’t perfectly willing to tell me. Of course anything you do tell me will be, I am sure I need hardly reassure you, completely confidential. I will treat it as official knowledge, Miss Gresham—not personal. And while you’re thinking, you might start eating your raw cabbage. Before it gets cold,” he added with a rich, executive-type chuckle.

  She nodded him a half-smile that ended in a sigh and began working at her plate in an absent-minded, not-particularly-hungry fashion.

  “You see,” she began abruptly as if she’d found a good point of departure, “some things happen to me that don’t happen to other people.”

  “That, I would say, is fairly obvious.”

  “They’re not bad things. I mean what, oh, the newspapers would call bad. And they’re not dangerous things, exactly. They’re—they’re more physical-like. They’re things that could happen to my body.”

  Fabian finished his plate, sat back and crossed his arms. “Could you be just a little more specific? Unless—” and he was struck by a horrifying thought—“unless they’re what is known as, er, as female difficulties. In that case, of course—”

  This time she didn’t even blush. “Oh, no. Not at all. At least there’s very little of that. It’s—other things. Like my appendix. Every year I have to have my appendix out.”

  “Your appendix?” He turned that over in his mind. “Every year? But a human being only has one appendix. And once it’s removed, it doesn’t grow back.”

  “Mine does. On the tenth of April, every single year, I get appendicitis and have to have an operation. That’s why I take my vacation then. And my teeth. Every five years, I lose all my teeth. I start losing them about this time, and I have some dental plates that were made when I was younger—I use them until my teeth grow back. Then, about the middle of October, the last of them goes and new ones start coming up. I can’t use my dental plates while they’re growing, so I look kind of funny for a while. That’s why I ask for a leave of absence. In the middle of November, the new teeth are almost full-grown, and I come back to work.”

  She took a deep breath and timidly lifted her eyes to his face. That was all she evidently had to say. Or wished to.

  All through dessert, he thought about it. He was positive she was telling the truth. A girl like Wednesday Gresham didn’t lie. Not to such a fantastic extent. Not to her boss.

  “Well,” he said at last. “It’s certainly very unusual.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Very unusual.”

  “Do you have anything else the matter with—I mean, are there any other peculiarities—Oh, darn! Is there anything else?”

  Wednesday considered. “There are. But, if you don’t mind, Mr. Balik, I’d rather not—”

  Fabian decided not to take that. “Now see here, Miss Gresham,” he said firmly. “Let us not play games. You didn’t have to tell me anything, but you decided, for yourself, for your own good reasons, to do so. Now I must insist on the whole story, and nothing but the whole story. What other physical difficulties do you have?”

  It worked. She cringed a bit in her chair, straightened up again, but a little weakly, and began: “I’m sorry, Mr. Balik, I wouldn’t dream of—of playing games with you. There are lots of other things, but none of them interfere with my work, really. Like I have some tiny hairs growing on my fingernails. See?”

  Fabian glanced at the hand held across the table. A few almost microscopic tendrils on each glittering hard surface of fingernail.

  “What else?”

  “Well, my tongue. I have a few hairs on the underside of my tongue. They don’t bother me, though, they don’t bother me in anyway. And there’s my—my—”

  “Yes?” he prompted. Who could believe that colorless little Wednesday Gresham…

  “My navel. I don’t have any navel.”

  “You don’t have any—But that’s impossible!” he exploded. He felt his glasses sliding down his nose. “Everyone has a navel! Everyone alive—everyone who’s ever been born.”

  Wednesday nodded, her eyes unnaturally bright and large. “Maybe—” she began, and suddenly, unexpectedly, broke into tears. She brought her hands up to her face and sobbed through them, great, pounding, wracking sobs that pulled her shoulders up and down, up and down.

  Fabian’s consternation made him completely helpless. He’d never, never in his life, been in a crowded restaurant with a crying girl before.

  “Now, Miss Gresham—Wednesday,” he managed to get out, and he was annoyed to hear a high, skittery note in his own voice. “There’s no call for this. Surely, there’s no call for this? Uh—Wednesday?”

  “Maybe,” she gasped again, between sobs, “m-maybe that’s the answer.”

  “What’s the answer?” Fabian asked loudly, desperately hoping to distract her into some kind of conversation.

  “About—about being born. Maybe—maybe I wasn’t born. M-maybe I was m-m-made!”

  And then, as if she’d merely been warming up before this, she really went into hysterics. Fabian Balik at last realized what he had to do. He paid the check, put his arm around the girl’s waist and half-car
ried her out of the restaurant.

  It worked. She got quieter the moment they hit the open air. She leaned against a building, not crying now, and shook her shoulders in a steadily diminishing crescendo. Finally, she ulped once, twice, and turned groggily to him, her face looking as if it had been rubbed determinedly in an artist’s turpentine rag.

  “I’m s-sorry,” she said. “I’m t-terribly s-sorry. I haven’t done that for years. But—you see, Mr. Balik—I haven’t talked about myself for years.”

  “There’s a nice bar at the corner,” he pointed out, tremendously relieved. She’d looked for a while as if she’d intended to keep on crying all day! “Let’s pop in, and I’ll have a drink. You can use the ladies’ room to fix yourself up.”

  He took her arm and steered her into the place. Then he climbed onto a bar stool and had himself a double brandy.

  What an experience! And what a strange, strange girl!

  Of course, he shouldn’t have pushed her quite so hard on a subject about which she was evidently so sensitive. Was that his fault, though, that she was so sensitive?

  Fabian considered the matter carefully, judicially, and found in his favor. No, it definitely wasn’t his fault.

  But what a story! The foundling business, the appendix business, the teeth, the hair on the fingernails and tongue… And that last killer about the navel!

  He’d have to think it out. And maybe he’d get some other opinions. But one thing he was sure of, as sure as of his own managerial capacities: Wednesday Gresham hadn’t been lying in any particular. Wednesday Gresham was just not the sort of a girl who made up tall stories about herself.

  When she rejoined him, he urged her to have a drink. “Help you get a grip on yourself.”

  She demurred, she didn’t drink very much, she said. But he insisted, and she gave in. “Just a liqueur. Anything. You order it, Mr. Balik.”

  Fabian was secretly very pleased at her docility. No reprimanding, no back-biting, like most other girls—Although what in the world could she reprimand him for?