Read Online The City Below by James Carroll - Free Book Online Page B

He saw it coming, the insult she would feel. If he could have touched a button and disappeared—Captain Video! "I mean, like twenty minutes ago. They sent me over, like desperate, to see if you would help?"
    "Help Kennedy?"
    "Yes. At the campaign headquarters near the Parker House."
    "Is he there?"
    "Kennedy?" Doyle burst out laughing. "No, Didi, no. The candidate is anywhere but in his headquarters. I've been working there a month, and I've never seen him."
    "Well, but what—?"
    "A typist, Didi." Terry stopped, then she did. They faced each other. Behind her the brilliant sky glowed, making her hair seem spun of the purest light. "We need a typist, right now. We need one bad."
    Terry had himself braced for her reaction, but he knew so little.
    "Really?"
    "Yes."
    Her face filled with delighted surprise. "You need me?"
    "You can type, can't you?"
    "A hundred words a minute. I won a prize last month."
    Doyle's eyes took a light from hers. "If you come with me, you can win one next month—but for Kennedy. Will you?"
    She seemed very young to him, despite her more formal clothes. She was so unlike the charging people he spent time with now, and sure enough, without a hint of the mortification he'd have felt saying such a thing, she answered, "Yes, I'd love to. But I have to call my mother."
    She was great. She sat at a typing table in the corner, her fingers flying. Other girls took the letters as she finished them, fed her fresh sheets of bond, carbons arranged, and crossed out the names as she moved down the lists. She rarely hit the wrong key, but when she did, she erased as if by magic, leaving no perceptible mark.
    Bright McKay had arrived after she set to work, and he, crossing back and forth for phone calls and for coffee, sent signals of approval toward Terry—winks, three-ring signs—as if Didi's accomplishment were his. Or was that his meaning?
    Her work sparked that of others, and soon the Young Dems were bustling among the tables, pushing voter lists at one another, barking into telephones.
    All the bustle made Didi pull into herself, the way she could in the middle of the vast typing-pool floor at Hancock She'd been shy when Terry had first made the introductions, but she'd tried to compensate by being funny. When they'd shown her to the typing table, she'd cracked, as girls did at work, "Now to knock off some hen tracks on my roll-top piano." But no one had laughed. A couple of girls eyeballed each other without even trying to keep her from seeing.
    Terry encouraged her to take a break at one point, but she refused. She let the coffee he brought grow cold. He sensed her need to avoid having to make small talk with the other girls, to whom her presence had to be a rebuke. She resembled them hardly at all. With her garish costume jewelry, bangles on her jumping arms, and oversize earrings she looked more like the middle-aged housewives licking envelopes across the room than the girls in bobby sox and loafers. Terry wanted to see her getup as offbeat, but the truth was Didi seemed like an adolescent in her mother's clothes. In that company, he wanted to protect her.
    It was almost ten when she finished. Except for the Young Dems' corner, the vast room was nearly deserted, and all but the hanging cone lights had been turned off. Their corner glowed, however, and the eight kids who remained gave a rousing cheer when Didi snapped the last letter out of the machine.
    Ed Lake put the stack of pages in an accordion folder and hurried across the room, through the door that would take him upstairs.
    Doyle saw Didi rubbing her neck. He stood behind her and put his hands on her shoulders and began to massage gently while the others congratulated her. Didi twisted in her chair to look up at Terry. The ripeness in her face made it clear that a sense of his pleasure was all Didi Mullen really wanted. The other kids saw it, and they fell silent to hear what Doyle would say—which of course made his saying anything