Darts of Cupid and Other Stories

Sometimes I wondered whether he had not chosen the Merry Widow because she had crinkly red hair, freckles, a bony face, and small dark eyes, the same as hejust as people choose dogs whose masks resemble their own features. But I knew this was an idle conceit of mine. He had obviously wanted a mature, well-bred, and decorous woman for the job, and he could not have taken anyone else from our crowd, because the Merry Widow was the only one of us who, owing to a perverse whim during one phase of her life, had learned to be competent in shorthand and typing. The Merry Widow was also known as the Secretary, because she was the Brigadier General's secretary, and the Brigadier was the only one in the Office of the Chief Surgeon, U.S. Forces, who had a personal secretary to himself. According to the law of irony, which states one thing while implying its opposite, the Merry Widow was neither merry nor a widow; she was married and grieved for her absent husband, who was doing service overseas, and in this she was the exception in our crowd, who were none of us single and had all a history of ill-starred marriage behind us. It was fortunate for all of us women who worked in the U.S. War Office in Bathdale in those days of the war that Claudia Carter and the Merry Widow were both "old girls" of the Bathdale Ladies' College, and had been in the same house at school. Thus, through Claudia, we were guaranteed our supply of the very best quality gossip, fresh and untainted by later distortions. The Merry Widow, sitting in the anteroom of the Brigadier General's office, was not easily accessible; she did not take her tea break, nor was she given to dawdling in the ladies' rest room. Yet there were certain occasions when she could be drawn into talk, because it was she who dished out the remedies for hangovers, coughs, and headaches. With the cough mixturea sinister-hued, muddy green liquid of early Victorian vintageshe had the greatest success, because she never failed to comment, "Only a teaspoonful, mind you. It's got real dope in itit's dangerous, you know. It beats me how they allow it to be sold across the counter."? In the beginning, I had made attempts to draw out the Merry Widowlike, "I say, Gwendolyn threw a frightful tantrum and weeping fit in the ladies rest room again. Is it true that the General took the Osborne woman to a party?" And she would reply, "Never you fear, Prescott-Clark; he's merely widening his field of operations." This was quite witty, because he was, like most of the officers in the department, a doctor, and he was a Regular Army man, too, but it was an unsatisfactory reply, and I resigned myself, like the others in our crowd, to leaving it to Claudia, whose claims to intimate gossip were further strengthened by the fact that both she and the Merry Widow were natives of Bathdale and had remained in that town. We, the others who were employed as civilian labor in the U.S. War Office, had merely happened to be living there at the outset of the war, owing to various circumstances in our lives. While the Merry Widow dealt with such unspectacular complaints as coughs and headaches, it was Sergeant Parsons who was called in on those dramatic occasions when it was imperative to remove grit from under the eyelid or a splinter embedded in the hand. He was the only man who was allowed to enter the ladies ' rest room, where, on an electric hot plate, he boiled his surgical implements in a tin that had once contained condensed milk. He had "golden hands " and a way of saying, "Don't worry, ma'am. I won't do anything yet. I'm only going to have a look-see," while adding, a few seconds later, "Here, that's what's been bothering you, isn't it?" To shrieks of "It's not possible. I never felt a thing," he would reply, "Do you want me to put it back again, to convince you?Templeton, Edith is the author of 'Darts of Cupid and Other Stories', published 2002 under ISBN 9780375421594 and ISBN 0375421599.