MISS SYBIL TURNER OPENED THE ENVELOPE AND TOOK OUT THE ENCLOSURE, glanced at it, started to set it down on a stack of similar mail, and then took it back and glanced at it again; then she giggled. “Listen to this, Mabe,” she said, and her friend Mabel Johnson, working at an identical desk, but typing at the moment, said, “Wait a minute,” and finished her line before looking up. “What?” she said.
Sybil was still holding the letter. “Listen,” she said. “Here’s a guy wants us to run an ad for money.”
Mabel laughed shortly. “That’s no way to get it,” she said, looking down again at her typewriter. “Better he should go to work.”
“No, listen. He says, ‘Money to give away’ and he’s got a post office box to write to and two dollars enclosed for the ad to run all week, and everything. Can you imagine?”
“He must be crazy,” said Mabel Johnson.
“Crazy it is,” Sybil Turner agreed devoutly.
“Here’s something funny,” Mr. George Carter commented to his wife the next evening. He had been quietly reading his evening paper and his wife was doing needlepoint; they sat peacefully in front of their living room fire, with the children soundly asleep upstairs. “Here’s a real good one,” George Carter said again, and his wife looked up patiently. “‘Money to give away,’” George Carter read, once he was sure he had her attention. “Right here in the paper. People think of the screwiest things.”
“But so many people are taken in by a thing like that,” Ellen Carter said in her soft voice. “People writing to him, hoping.”
“Paper has no right to print a thing like that,” George said.
Ellen started to speak and then paused, her eyes lifted to the ceiling and her mouth open, listening. Then, reassured, she looked again at her husband and said, “Probably they run a thing like that to test how many people read the classified ads. Couldn’t that be it?”
George was obviously sorry that he had not thought of this himself. “Maybe so,” he said grudgingly. “Wish they’d send some of that money along to us, though. We could use it.”
“Oh, dear,” Ellen agreed with a sigh. “With prices the way they are, and meat …” She dropped her scissors onto the arm of the chair, and folded her hands in her lap, and sighed again. “George,” she demanded, as one who begins a long and intricate story, “just try to guess how much they had the nerve to charge for lamb today? Lamb!”
“Things are pretty bad.” Mr. Carter hastily elevated the paper before his face. “Screwiest idea I ever heard,” he muttered.
“The fact is perfectly plain,” Mrs. Harmon said severely to her daughter. “Your own mother’s sewing, weeks and weeks of work, isn’t good enough for you to wear out in public. So you can go without.”
“Without clothes?” said Mildred sullenly.
“You know perfectly well what I mean. You picked out the style of this dress yourself and I spent three weeks making it and it looks just beautiful on you and—”
“I didn’t pick out the style,” Mildred said.
Her mother sighed. “I sometimes think you are the most unreasonable—”
“I wanted the dress in the store,” Mildred wailed. “Not for you to copy it.”
Her mother took a deep breath, as if determined to be reasonable in spite of everything. “Dresses in the store cost a lot of money,” she said. “This dress cost less than—”
“If I only had some money,” Mildred said hopelessly. “I’ll write to this guy in the paper says he’s giving money away. I’ll get married or something.” She tossed her head defiantly. “Then I can have dresses.”
Mrs. Harmon shifted her ground abruptly and began to weep. “Three weeks I took to make that dress,” she said mournfully, “and now it’s not good enough for you, and you want to run away and get married, and all these years I’ve tried to keep you looking nice and worked to buy pretty things and spent three weeks—”
“Oh, Mother,” said Mildred. She blinked to keep tears out of her own eyes. “I’m not going to get married, honestly. And the dress is beautiful. I’ll wear it, honestly I will, I’ll wear it all the time.”
“It’s no good,” her mother said. “I know all the other girls—”
“It’s beautiful,” Mildred said. “It’s just like the one in the store. It’s the prettiest dress I ever saw, and I’m going to put it on right now.”
Mrs. Harmon lifted her face briefly from her handkerchief. “Watch out for that pin I left in the shoulder,” she said.
“For the last time, I’m afraid I find it necessary to say,” Amy Nelson said emphatically, “that I do not wish to go to any movie.”
“But—”
“Indeed I do not,” Amy said. She set her shoulders and looked extraordinarily stern. “Movies last night,” she said. “Movies the night before. I’m so tired of going to movies I don’t know what to do. And anyway there’s nothing left to see.”
“But, Amy—”
“Some girls,” said Amy pointedly, “like to go to the theater. Some girls like to go to a nightclub and dance. Some girls even like to ride in taxis and wear gardenias. Of course I’m always happy at the movies, though. Good old Amy.”
“I can’t afford—”
“That point,” said Amy delicately, “is the one I was too polite to refer to. Let me just remark, however, that I know of only one grown man who has not got enough initiative to get out and do something for himself. He works heart and soul for this organization and comes around every week and says thank you to them so gratefully for—What is it they pay you? Seventeen cents a week?”
“Now listen—”
“Some men are making good money at twenty-four. Some men have good jobs and they’re not afraid to assert themselves and keep up with other people and not let everyone else get ahead of them, and their girls don’t have to go to movies every night of the week and see the same old—”
“But when I’ve worked there a little—”
“And some men,” Amy continued icily, “do not expect girls to wait around until they are sixty-five and drawing old-age pensions before they can get married.”
“Well, to hear you talk—”
“Here,” said Amy in her sweetest voice, “perhaps this will help you. Here, in the classified section of tonight’s paper. Perhaps this is the lucky break you’ve been waiting for. Let me just give you this copy of tonight’s paper, since I am sure it would take your entire weekly earnings to buy one for yourself.”
“You don’t have to talk like—”
“And now, good night,” said Amy, less than graciously.
“He shouldn’t of done it, that’s all,” said Ronald Hart, who was fifteen years old and felt utterly responsible for his mother and ten-year-old brother. “He’s going to get us all in trouble, that’s what.”
“Dickie,” said his mother, “tell me again what happened.”
“I wrote the man like I said,” Dickie told her. He looked nervously from his mother to his brother. “I didn’t think he’d answer,” he said, his voice trembling. “I never thought he’d answer.”
“I’m afraid we ought to send it back to him,” his mother said. She had tight hold of the shining bill, and she twisted it between her fingers as though afraid to let it go.
“Well, we haven’t really done anything,” Ronald said. “Maybe we ought to tell the cops.”
“No, no,” said his mother hastily. “That’s the most important thing of all. We’re not going to tell anybody, you hear? Ronald?”
“Okay,” said Ronald, “but maybe he’s a gangster or—”
“Dickie, you hear me?”
“Yes, but suppose they catch us?” Dickie said.
“We haven’t done anything,” his mother said again. “I don’t even know if it’s any good. I don’t dare take a hundred-dollar bill into the bank and ask them if it’s any good.”
“Counterfeit,” said Ronald wisely.
“But what if it isn’t?” said his mother. “Suppose it’s real?” She sighed, and looked down at the hundred-dollar bill. “They have our address, of course.”
“I had to put the address in for him to know where to send the money,” Dickie said miserably.
His mother reached a sudden decision. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” she said. “We’ll put it right in Dickie’s piggy bank. Then if they come and ask us about it, we can say we just put it away for safekeeping. And if no one comes after a while, why, I guess it’s ours. But don’t tell anyone.”
“Don’t you tell, Dickie,” his brother said warningly.
“Don’t you tell,” Dickie said.
“You’re the one always blabs out everything.”
“I was the one thought of writing him in the first place, wasn’t I?”
“And look what you got us into.”
“Boys,” said their mother warningly, “we’ve got enough trouble without you quarrelling. Now, Dickie, there’s one more thing I want you to do.”
“What?”
“Just in case it is all right,” his mother said, “I want you to sit right down and write that man a nice letter saying thank you.”
“Oh, Mother!”
“No one is ever going to say my boys weren’t brought up right,” she said firmly.
Mr. John Anderson let himself into his apartment, carrying his mail, and sighed deeply as he closed the door behind him. He was hungry and tired, and his day had gone poorly. He had succeeded in persuading a newsboy to accept ten dollars, and he had slipped a hundred-dollar bill into the cup of a blind beggar, but otherwise he had had no success at all. He winced when he remembered the way the truck driver had spoken to him, and the thought of the giggling shopgirls made him almost ill.
He took off his coat and sat down wearily in the easy chair. In a few minutes he would take care of the mail, then have a shower and dress and go out to some nice restaurant for dinner; he would take a vacation for this evening and carry only enough to take care of his own expenses. He could not decide whether to take a taxi uptown to a fancy steakhouse, or to go to the seafood restaurant nearby and have a lobster. Lobster, he rather thought.
After he had rested briefly he got up, went to the desk, and picked up the mail he had brought home with him. Absently he stared at the stacks of ten-dollar bills in the pigeonholes of his desk: the fives, the fifties, the hundreds. The mail under his hand was typical—one offensively humorous request for a million dollars, badly written in capital letters, and unfortunately including no return address; one circular from a loan company featuring on the envelope a man pointing toward the reader and the statement “YOU need no longer worry about money.” There was a terse note from the newspaper saying that his week was up today, and asking if he desired to continue running his ad. One letter was signed by three hundred children in the Roosevelt Elementary School, saying thank you for the television set he had given the school library. One postcard read, “Dear Sir, If you really mean it please send ten dollars return mail.” This last he answered, addressing the envelope quickly and enclosing, without counting, a handful of ten-dollar bills.
Then he sat down at the desk, looking with desperation and frustration at the stacks of money. Finally, in a fury, he took one of the piles of ten-dollar bills and threw it wildly against the opposite wall, where it scattered so that ten-dollar bills floated all about the room and settled gently down onto the furniture. “In the name of heaven,” he wailed, “what am I going to do with it all?”