A Decent Director

The state had given its employees ten days that winter, a full holiday, one of those long gracious pauses that the legislature granted every few years in a spirit of general goodwill, and when the staff of the Marlow County branch came back on the second Monday, tanned and heavy and dragging their suitcases into the lobby, the first thing they saw was the cake.

It stood on the front counter, on a doily, under a glass dome. It was a plain lemon cake, three layers, with white icing and a border of candied peel, and beside it a stack of paper plates and a knife and a card, in a hand that everyone in the building knew, small and upright and clear. Welcome back, with gratitude. —E.V.

"He's done it again," said Dolores Pratt, and put her handbag on the counter, and pressed one hand to her chest.

Ruth Albright, at her desk by the window with the lights on and the radiator warming and her own coat still on its hook, smiled to herself and did not get up. She had been there since twenty past seven. She had heard the brass lock turn at seven-forty, as always, and had looked through the glass, and seen the gray overcoat come in with the briefcase held in front of it in both hands, and the lean pleasant face above the scarf. He had nodded to her. He had said "Good morning, Ruth," and she had said, "Good morning, Mr. Vaughn," and for a moment she had the curious impression, which she put down to the long break, that the whole thing had been exactly as it was a fortnight ago, as exactly as a photograph.

He looked rested. That was all. He looked as a man looks who has slept well for ten nights in a row.

…

It was a busy morning. By nine the lobby was full of the soft clamor of reunions, and the cake had been cut into forty slices, and the clerks were passing paper plates along the counter and telling each other what they had done with their time. A young assessor named Patrick had been to Vermont. A woman from records had gone to see her daughter in Phoenix. And Eric Vaughn, who had come out of his office with his sleeves rolled once at the wrist, went along the counter with a cup of coffee in his hand, and spoke to them one by one.

He asked after Patrick's mother's knee. He asked the woman from records about the daughter's new baby, and remembered its name. He spoke to the young man from the front counter who had lately lost his father, with a quiet hand on his shoulder, for the space of thirty seconds, and the boy's eyes filled, and Eric said something short, and the boy nodded, and wiped his face on the back of his wrist. He asked Dolores about her roses. He asked the cleaner who came in the mornings about her grandson's trumpet lessons. He did not hurry, and he did not skip anyone, and when he reached the end of the counter he had spoken, Ruth reckoned, to every person in the room.

"Did you have a good holiday, Mr. Vaughn?" asked Patrick, shyly, with his mouth full of cake.

"A restful one, thank you." Eric smiled. "I stayed close to home. I find that I need very little."

"The inventory go all right?"

"The inventory?" There was the slightest pause. It was so slight that Ruth, who was watching only because she had nothing to do, would not have noticed it had she not been thinking, quite idly, of the supply room. "Oh. Yes. Everything was in order. I left it in good shape."

He raised his cup to the room.

"To all of you," he said. "I'm very glad to be back."

They applauded him, again. It was a little unnecessary this time, thought Ruth, a little excessive for coffee, and she clapped anyway, and felt, as she did so, a small odd flicker of unease, like a hair on the back of the neck. She looked down at her hands. She did not know where it had come from. It went away.

…

In the afternoon, when the lobby had emptied, she opened his page.

She did it out of habit, as she did most days, because the staff of the branch were all friends with one another on the website that everyone used, and the director's page was a kind of bulletin board. It was a dignified one. It had a photograph of the front of the building, in the snow, and a small header that said Public Servant. Marlow County. It held no pictures of food, no holiday snapshots, no jokes. There were only his notices, now and again, in the plain bare style of his speeches, and under each notice a column of hearts.

A new one had appeared that morning at ten past eight.

Kindness is not a feeling, it said. It is a procedure. It is what we do in the hour when no one is looking, and it is the only measure of a decent life. I am grateful to work among people who understand this. Welcome back, everyone.

Forty-one people had liked it already. There was a long thread of comments below, mostly from the staff. Beautifully said, sir. You set the tone for all of us. Thank you for the cake!!! A woman from the state capital whom Ruth did not know had written, This is what public service should be. Dolores had put three hearts. Patrick had put a thumbs-up and a small salute.

Ruth clicked on the little heart at the bottom of the post, and watched the number tick up to forty-two.

She scrolled through the comments. She scrolled back through the previous weeks. In all the years she had been a friend of his, in all the long list of notices that he had posted, the kind words and the quotations and the little reflections on service, she realized, with a faint surprise, that he had never answered a single comment. He read them. She knew he read them, because he had once told her that he liked to see what people were thinking. But he never wrote back. He never typed a word under anyone's name, not thank you, not even a small heart of his own. There were three hundred comments under the last month alone, and each one stood there in its place, warm and hopeful, with nothing underneath it, like a row of open hands.

It was only a habit, she thought. A man of his dignity did not chat on the internet. She shut the page.

When she looked up, he was standing in the door of her office.

"Ruth," he said.

"Mr. Vaughn."

"Would you be so kind as to type this out for the file?" He held out a single sheet. His eyes, behind the glasses, were gentle and tired. "Whenever you have a moment. There's no hurry."

"Of course."

"You are always so good to me."

She took the sheet, and smiled, and he smiled back, and went away down the corridor. And she sat holding the paper, warm from his hand, and found that she was listening to his footsteps until they had gone, though she could not have said why.

…

At seven o'clock Luna came in with her cart.

She took the service elevator, as she always did, from the loading dock, and came out on the second floor into the empty corridor with the fluorescent tubes humming overhead. She had put on the company's gray smock and tied back her hair. The cart was her own, the gray one with the mop bucket on the left and the trash bag on the right, and its left front wheel had a slight wobble, which she could feel in her wrist and no one else could hear, and which she had been meaning for a year to oil.

She worked her way along the corridor, office by office. It was a Monday, the first night back, and the baskets were full of paper cups and cake plates. She emptied them. She wiped each desk with her damp cloth, and straightened the chairs, and she did not hurry, because there was no one to hurry for.

At the end of the hall, on the cart's lower shelf, she found a note.

It was a small white sheet, folded once, tucked under the roll of paper towels, in the upright hand she knew better than she knew her own. She unfolded it with her wet fingers.

Luna—Would you please see to the supply room this evening? It has been closed for some time. I have left the door unlocked. Thank you. —E.

She read it twice.

She had never been asked to clean it. In all the years of her contract it had been marked on her schedule in blue pen, DIRECTOR ONLY — DO NOT ENTER, and she had passed it every Tuesday and Thursday and Monday and Friday, and had never once opened the door. She stood in the corridor with the note in her hand. Then she folded it and put it in her pocket, and pushed the cart the last twenty feet, and stopped in front of the gray steel door.

It stood a little open. She put her palm on it, and it swung inward without a sound.

She smelled it before she saw anything.

It was bleach. It was an enormous pale harsh stench of it, so strong that her eyes began to water at once, and under the bleach there was something sharper, a citrus tang, the cheap scented stuff that is sold in jugs, and under that, very faint, something else that she could not place. She put the back of her wrist against her nose. She reached in with her other hand along the wall and found the switch, and the tubes flickered and came on.

It was a narrow windowless room, as clean as a hospital.

There was nothing in it. The shelves along the left wall held a few boxes of toner, squared at the edges. A stack of folding chairs stood in the corner. And the floor, the old gray-blue checkerboard, worn pale at the center, was spotless and still faintly damp, so wet that the fluorescent light lay on it in long wavering strips, as on the surface of a pond. Somebody had scrubbed it. Somebody had scrubbed it more than once. It was cleaner than she had ever seen a floor.

She did not go in.

She stood on the threshold with her hand on the doorframe, and counted. It was a thing she did when she was frightened, an old habit of her girlhood, in the school for the deaf, when the matron came at night. She counted slowly, on the fingers of her left hand. One. The light hummed. Two. A drop of water fell, somewhere. Three. Four. She was aware, with every nerve, of the room's perfect and ordinary stillness. Five. Six. The smell went down her throat like something swallowed. Seven.

Eight.

Then she took her hand from the frame, and wrung out her cloth, and went in.

She knelt on the tile and began, as she always did, from the door. She wiped the nearest square, and the next, and the next, working across the floor on her knees, along the pattern, with the damp cloth in a slow steady rhythm. She did it without thought. It was only a floor. There was a stain here, and she lifted it; a smear there, and she rubbed it away. She was good at this. It was the one thing in her whole life that she had always known how to do.

At the third square from the door, her cloth stopped.

It was whiter than the others.

It was only a little whiter. A stranger would never have seen it. But she had washed floors for thirty years, and she knew the exact degree to which a surface grows pale when it has been scoured many times, and this tile was a shade paler than its neighbors, as though the color itself had been taken out of it, and it shone, faintly, in the light, like a coin that has been rubbed.

She looked at it for a long moment.

Then she bent, and wiped the fourth square, and the fifth, and the sixth, and went on across the room, scrubbing each one, patiently, harder than she had meant to, until all of them were exactly as pale.