OCR Text |
Show 380 Dave Archibald, who ran operations, who in turn introduced him to Mary, Maxine, Mai da, Janet, Gerald, Joe, Larry, Kathleen, Marcia, Sylvia, and back in the vault Fred and Jose. There were others, and he promptly forgot them all. Judy. Toby. He would not be there long enough to have them become part of his life, but he would be polite. Kit, Josie. Another Larry. They were all different ages, but the men were mostly young. John was middle-aged and British, and worked in Safe Deposits downstairs. Lorin wondered what his deficiency was that he should still have a tacky job like this one at his age. Peter was pale and had red hair and sad basset-eyes and was in love with Rosemarie who was vacuous and divorced. He learned that during coffee break from Margaret, who worked in Escrow and had everyone's number. He spent the day on a tall stool at the elbow of Mary Cooper, who was in her fifties and had grey hair coiled in a bun held in place by a wicked Spanish comb. She wore a red sheath dress and glasses shaped like half-moons that she peered at you over the tops of. She told Lorin she was an old maid. She also called him sweetheart, which she also called most of her customers. She smote the checks and deposit slips that came across her window with her teller stamp and kept asking Lorin if he understood what he was seeing. It was all a haze of arbitrary motions to him, but he knew a rationale would emerge eventually and that before he was trusted with his own window and teller stamp he would understand more than he did now. It wasn't that different from running racks of dishes through a washer. He let himself be taken to lunch by a Duane somebody, whom Dave Archibald put onto him. Duane was about Lorin's age but short and wore slicked-down hair and a Cornell tie tack. He was in the officer-training program, moving from branch to branch, learning operations here, loans there, escrow somewhere else. Duane lost interest in him by the time |