Hanno’s Doll by Evelyn Piper Page A

Mildred’s chair, grabbing the handles of the desk drawer as he heard the chair creak under his great weight. He had buried the boy, but had dug up, unburied, muscles in his arms and shoulders and back and thighs which had come out of the ground like trolls and tortured him. When he leaned back, still holding to the drawer handles, the drawer naturally pulled open. It was when he had leaned forward to close it that he saw the snapshot.
    His hands had carried out the closing movement they had begun because his ears had caught the sound of footsteps. When Miss Mildred came in, he stared at her, wondering if his imagination could possibly have put that face on that snapshot; wondering whether this had been an act of that most famous of clichés, the guilty conscience; desperately hoping that if he looked at it again, with his eyes and not with his conscience, it would turn into another face, any other face.
    Miss Mildred said, “Mr. Dietrich, please, if you look at me like that, I’ll cry again.”
    She had, of course, begun crying again.
    He had wearily pulled himself out of her too narrow chair and lowered her in his place, had lifted the hand with his big handkerchief still in it to her convulsed face. He had leaned against her desk and made soothing noises. (There was no American sound so soothing as “ Na, na .”) “ Na, na , Miss Mildred, surely nothing is as bad as that?”
    At first she had wept but had not talked. Miss Mildred was a true small-town girl. It had taken all his practice— ach God, how great it was! How many of these stories he had listened to, before and after Puppchen’s, the same story. All of them, he thought, like birth; no one agony quite like the next, but alike all the same, the same beginning, the same end, the same confession having to force its way through the narrow opening between shame and need, with the need always pushing to birth in convulsions.
    First he had to hear the part he had known when he connected the photograph and her tears.
    It would kill her parents. It would kill her. Oh, oh, Grace Metal! What would Grace think? Grace, from home, from Clifton, Idaho, who had got her this wonderful job with him because she knew how much she wanted to be an actress.
    â€œ Na, na, Kind! ”
    The talk! The disgrace! No, he couldn’t imagine what it would be like in Clifton, Idaho. He was a man of the world; he couldn’t know.
    He had to force himself to “ Na, na ” through this. It had to take its own time and he must not seem too interested in the particulars of her case.
    â€œI told him when I wrote him, I couldn’t go home like this. I couldn’t! I can’t, I can’t!”
    â€œ Na — na . Not one of the students, Miss Mildred?”
    â€œOh, no. Oh, no. Not a college boy.”
    (“Do I look wet behind the ears?”)
    â€œOlder and … and … married. Not from here, Mr. Dietrich.”
    She had met him that summer. That summer Miss Mildred had gone as an apprentice to a summer-stock company in Idaho. The Hilltop Theatre. She had met him then. No, not part of the company, a real professional … laughed at their director … He had made her want to make an impression on him at first just because of being a professional.… You know.…
    Then she had fallen in love with him. He had stayed awhile.… Until … until …
    â€œ Na , na, Kind! ”
    Then he had gone away. He had given her a post-office address in case. In case of trouble. And there had been trouble, and she had written him at the P.O. address in New York. How could she blame him? It was as much her doing as his. She had been so crazy in love. No, at first he hadn’t told her he was married, that was true, but neither had he said anything about marrying her. And that was the same thing, the same thing.
    â€œThen you wrote him and …” (And he came to Bradley? Yesterday he came?)
    Yesterday he had