The Model Director

Ruth Albright had worked as a secretary at the Marlow County branch of the State Licensing Office for twenty-two years, and in that time she had served under four directors, and she could say with a clear conscience that Eric Vaughn was the best of them.

He arrived at seven-forty every morning. She knew it the way she knew the sound of her own kettle, because the lock on the main door was a heavy old brass thing that had to be turned twice, and she was always at her desk by seven-thirty-five with the lights on and the radiator warmed, so that when she heard the key turn she could look up and see him come in through the glass, tall and quiet in his gray overcoat, with his briefcase held in front of him in both hands.

"Good morning, Ruth."

"Good morning, Mr. Vaughn."

He never said anything else at that hour, and never needed to. He went down the corridor to his office and she heard the door close, soft as a drawer, and for the next ten minutes the whole floor held its breath without knowing it was doing so, and then the first clerks came in stamping the frost off their shoes, and the day began.

He knew everyone's name. That was the first thing people said about him, in the break room and at the bank and at the Fourth of July picnic, when someone from another branch had asked what the new director was like. He knew the name of the janitor's nephew and the name of the woman who ran the coffee cart in the lobby, and the name of the child who had once, many years ago, been born to a clerk in the records room, and whom Eric had asked after, in the corridor, in the winter of her third year. He greeted each of them as he passed. He asked about their mothers. He wiped his glasses on a folded paper tissue, always the same, folded in four, when he stood waiting for the elevator, and Ruth had once seen a young man from the front counter, a nervous boy with a new tie, copy the gesture without knowing why.

There was one subject on which he said nothing, and that was his family.

Ruth knew that he had a wife and a son, because a photograph stood on the corner of his desk in a plain silver frame, and in it a pale, small, dark-haired woman stood stiffly beside a boy of about ten, with her hand resting on his shoulder as though to keep him from floating off. She had never heard the wife's voice. She had seen her only a handful of times, at the very end of the day, pushing a gray cart along the corridor with a mop bucket on one side and a bag of trash on the other, because the cleaning company that held the contract for the building employed her four nights a week, and the whole office knew it, and no one remarked on it.

That was how Eric wished it. When the other directors' wives came to the Christmas party in sequined dresses, Eric came alone, and said that his wife was unwell, and nobody asked again. Ruth had decided long ago that it was modesty. A man of his position might have asked the company to find her a different building, or quietly placed her in an easier post, and instead he let her work under his own roof with her head down and her cart rattling, as if to say that no one in the Marlow County branch was above honest labor. She found it rather beautiful, in its way.

Once, in the elevator, the wife had looked at her. It had been a quick, shy, searching glance, the kind a stray animal gives, and Ruth had smiled and nodded and the woman had looked away at once.

It was a model office. There were framed commendations in the lobby, and a plaque from the governor, and a certificate of excellence that the state had mailed in a cardboard tube every year for nine years. Nobody in the building could remember a single complaint filed against the branch that had not been resolved within the statutory ten days.

On Monday of that week, as proof, a man in a stained work jacket had come to the front counter with a revoked license, and had raised his voice, and then raised it again, until the line behind him went silent and the security guard shifted his weight by the door. Eric had come out of his office at once. He had not hurried. He had walked up to the man and stood beside him, about an arm's length away, and said, "Sir, I can see this has been a very hard week. Let's sit down and fix it properly," and led him to the little room behind the counter, and brought him a paper cup of water with his own hands. Twenty minutes later the man had come out holding a form and shaking his head, with the stunned look of someone who had come to fight and been defeated by kindness, and on his way to the door he had stopped in front of Ruth's desk and said, "That guy's a saint."

She had agreed. She agreed with everyone who said it.

…

On the second Thursday of the month there was a ceremony, and Ruth had set out the folding chairs herself.

It was held in the big training room on the first floor, under the fluorescent tubes, with a table at the front draped in a blue cloth and a sheet cake from the grocery store with the words EMPLOYEE OF THE QUARTER written in white icing, and about forty people stood among the chairs with paper plates and cups of lukewarm punch. The winner that quarter was a counter clerk named Dolores Pratt, a heavy cheerful woman of fifty-five who had processed eleven thousand renewals without a single error and who was now standing at the front with her handbag held against her stomach, in the grip of a happiness so complete that she did not know what to do with her hands.

Eric rose to speak.

He did it as he did everything, without haste. He stood behind the table in his gray suit with a single index card in his palm that he did not look at, and waited until the room was perfectly still, and when he began, his voice was low and even and carried to the last row without his ever seeming to raise it.

"I have worked in public service for twenty-six years," he said, "and I have been asked many times what makes a good public servant. People expect me to say competence. They expect me to say loyalty, or ambition. They do not expect me to say what I actually believe, which is that a good public servant is someone who does not need anyone to be looking."

He paused.

"The work we do here is not seen. A license is stamped and filed, and a person walks out, and no one thanks the stamp. And so the whole of our profession rests on a single fact, which is whether, in the hour when no one is watching, a person does the work correctly anyway. Dolores has done it correctly for eleven thousand renewals. Nobody was watching any of them." He turned and inclined his head toward her. "That is what I mean by a decent person."

There was a silence, and then the applause began, and swelled, and went on far longer than the occasion required.

Ruth clapped until her palms stung. Beside her, a young assessor named Patrick, who had been at the branch for only three months, wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist, and whispered, "God, I'd follow that man anywhere," and Ruth thought, without knowing why she thought it, that it was an odd thing to feel so moved by a man who had said so little about himself.

Dolores wept into her handbag. Eric shook her hand with both of his, and the photographer from the county newsletter came forward with the flash.

…

By six o'clock the building had emptied.

Ruth stayed behind as she always did on Thursdays, to close out the day's correspondence, and she was putting the last folder into the outgoing tray when she looked up through the open door of her office and saw, at the far end of the corridor, a thin line of light on the floor.

It came from the supply room.

It was a narrow windowless room at the back of the second floor, beyond the records annex, that had once been the old fingerprint lab and was now used for storing toner and spare chairs and boxes of obsolete forms. Nobody went there. The key to it hung in the director's office, on a hook behind his door, and as far as she knew it was the only one, because the second had been lost during the move in her second year and nobody had ever had it cut again.

She got up and walked down the corridor, her shoes quiet on the carpet.

The door stood ajar. Inside, Eric Vaughn was standing alone in the middle of the floor with his hands folded in front of him, looking down at the tiles.

They were old tiles, a blue-gray checkerboard, worn pale at the center where generations of feet had passed, and he was gazing at them with great attention, as a man looks at a map.

He had taken off his overcoat and laid it across a stack of boxes, and his sleeves were rolled once at the wrist, so that she could see the pale underside of his forearm and, just above the wrist, a small dark mark that she had never noticed before, a blue smudge no bigger than a postage stamp, which she took for a bruise.

He did not seem to hear her.

For a moment Ruth stood in the doorway and said nothing, because she was not in the habit of intruding. But the light in that room was a poor dim yellow and the air had the stale dusty smell of a place long closed, and he stood so still, so entirely without purpose, that she felt for the first time in twenty-two years as though she were looking at a man in a private moment and ought to look away.

"Mr. Vaughn?"

He turned his head.

He was not startled. His face did not change at all. He looked at her pleasantly, over his shoulder, with his glasses catching the light, and said, in the same low unhurried voice that he had used in the training room, "Ruth. Still here."

"I was closing out the mail. I saw the light."

"Of course." He reached for his coat. "I'm doing an inventory before the holiday. The long weekend, you know. One likes to leave things in order." He smiled at her, a good smile, wide and warm. "I'll lock up myself. Go home. Give my best to your husband."

"Thank you, Mr. Vaughn. Good night."

"Good night, Ruth."

She went back down the corridor and took her coat from the hook and her purse from the drawer, and as she waited for the elevator she realized with a small, vague, passing curiosity that she had worked in that building for twenty-two years and had never once seen the director set foot in the supply room.

But an inventory was an inventory, and it was only sensible to do one before a holiday, and the elevator came, and she stepped in. By the time the doors opened on the lobby, she had forgotten it entirely.