Chapter 7 Emily
EMILY
The Monday after the meeting in Doris’s office with the staff writers, Emily glanced at the clock above the door of the Closet, as she had every half-hour since she arrived.
Doris had meetings in the early morning, but had left a memo for Emily to come to her office at eleven and they would discuss “the Mercer matter.” Emily had spent most of the weekend and that morning making discreet phone calls and reviewing her notes on the Female Refuges Act to figure out exactly what steps they would need to take—if Doris approved it—to get her before a judge.
With a little flutter of excitement, she collected her notes and stood to go fetch herself a fresh cup of tea before the meeting. She’d gone just two steps when Betty swept through the door.
“Betty!” Emily said, a little exasperated. “Where have you been? I wondered if you were ill.”
“No-oooo!” Betty sang playfully. A grin split across her face and she held her left hand up, wiggling a finger with a sparkling diamond ring. Her nails matched her pale-pink trench coat. “Stuart proposed on Saturday night, at the Silver Rail! I’m engaged, Emily! Finally!”
“Oh!” Emily forced an expression of cheer onto her face, chose her next words carefully. “Well, this is just what you wanted, isn’t it? Congratulations, Betty.”
“We were up late last night celebrating with our families. Lots of champagne,” Betty said, “So I’m a teensy bit tardy, I know.” Emily raised an eyebrow. She was over two hours late. “But I figured, special circumstances and all…”
Betty shed her coat and sat down, grin wilting to a pouty frown at the sight of her overflowing in-tray.
“So when’s the big day?” Emily asked, struggling to feign enthusiasm.
“Well,” Betty said, her tone shifting to businesslike, “Mother wants us to wait an entire year because she thinks a spring wedding is chic. But Stuart doesn’t want to wait that long. And you can understand why—he’s waited long enough.” She winked. “So I think we might aim for September.”
“Oh wow, three months,” Emily said, backing toward the door. If she didn’t extract herself from this unwelcome conversation soon, she’d miss the opportunity to get her tea before the meeting with Doris. Also, the encroaching panic might win.
“Yes,” Betty said happily. “So I have to let Doris know today that I’ll be leaving.”
Emily tried to resist the retort, but it came out anyway. “Why do you have to leave just because you’re getting married?”
Betty looked at Emily as though she’d lost her senses. “I can’t work once I’m married,” she said, scowling. “I’ll be raising a family soon. And besides, Stuart wouldn’t stand the shame of having a working wife. Jem wouldn’t either, would he?”
Emily’s fists clenched at her sides. She needed to get out of there. “Well, it certainly won’t be the same without you,” she offered.
Betty leaned back in her chair. “It won’t be long for you, then, will it? You’re what, mid-twenties? Not getting any younger, really. You could be next. And then maybe they could turn this place back into a proper closet,” she added, nose crinkling at the windowless walls. “It wouldn’t take much.”
Emily was rooted to the spot, blinking.
You could be next. Not getting any younger. The spinster’s refrain, an insult wrapped in the clever silkiness of well-intentioned optimism.
“And if you’re on your way out, too, you needn’t take your work so seriously, Emily,” Betty continued, relentless.
“Do you really want to be like these women here?” She dropped her voice, cocked her head toward the open door.
“Spending all your time at the office, missing out on family life? I wonder what their husbands must think of it all.”
Emily exhaled her outrage in a cough of disgust. She was genuinely surprised by Betty’s words.
As much as Emily had found her silly and stupid over the past year they’d been coworkers, they’d never had a real argument.
Betty hadn’t cared enough about any of her work to dig her three-inch heels in on anything, but clearly the engagement had caused her to jettison all pretense to collegiality.
She had one foot out the door now, and was thrilled about it.
“They do have families and family lives,” Emily said. “They just have other ambitions and dreams, too. Other things they think are important. And so do I,” she added with a snap of defiance. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Betty’s face clouded over. “If you say so,” she said icily, taking in Emily’s plain navy linen skirt. Bare face and low heels. “But you’re burning precious time here in this working-girl prison. You do know that, don’t you?”
Emily looked away from her, glancing at the clock again. She’d missed out on her damn tea now. “I have to go,” she said. “I have a meeting with Doris in three minutes to discuss my continued path to spinsterhood. Excuse me.”
She left the Closet and stomped down the hall to the kitchenette.
There was no time to boil the kettle, but she snatched a glass and gulped down some cold tap water to help settle her nerves.
She needed to forget about Betty, Eleanor, her mother, and Jem and focus on this monumental thing she was about to discuss with Doris: the scoop that could make her career as a journalist, which, despite what others might suggest, was the thing she wanted most in the world right now.
Emily approached Doris’s office and rapped smartly on the door frame to announce herself. The editor looked up from her work, dark eyes piercing Emily from behind black horn-rimmed reading glasses.
“Emily, come in,” she said, standing. Emily sat down in the same spot on the couch where she had last Friday with the staff writers, notes resting on her thighs. She tapped them rapidly with her index finger as Doris took a seat opposite in the green armchair.
“You seem flustered, Emily,” she said. “Are you having second thoughts about this? I wouldn’t blame you in the least.”
“No, no it’s not that. It’s uh…” She didn’t want to speak ill of her coworker to their boss, but was having trouble holding it in. “It’s Betty, actually. She got engaged over the weekend and we got into an odd argument about it.”
“Ah. So she’ll be leaving, then. That one was only a matter of time. I’m not surprised.”
Emily shrugged the tension from her neck. She hesitated, but then remembered her father’s suggestion that she speak to Doris about her situation with Jem.
“Can I ask how you do it all?” she burst out in desperation. “Marriage? Children? Work?”
“Oh, well, that’s a question and a half,” Doris said, scratching a spot on her forehead.
“I think part of it is just raw determination. Stubbornness, or whatever title you want to slap on it. I always wanted children, but I wanted a career, too. A real one. And by the time I met my husband and we got down to having a family, I was so entrenched here that I simply couldn’t stomach giving it all up.
I had my first child at thirty-seven, and…
well…” She shrugged, paused. “I’m pregnant again now, in fact. ”
“Really?” Emily gaped, then caught herself. “I’m sorry, that’s just—”
“I know, I am positively ancient, as everyone from my family to the delivery nurses delighted in telling me last time. I can’t wait to hear what they have to say about a forty-year-old giving birth.
The way they act, I might as well be a grandmother.
But this career took time to establish, and I didn’t even marry David until I was thirty-six, so… ” She smiled thinly.
Emily took a breath, encouraged but daunted, too. “My father told me the man I’m going with is about to propose,” she confided.
Doris watched her. “And?”
“And I’m terrified,” Emily said, her voice cracking on a humourless laugh.
“Why is that?”
Emily angrily fought back the tears that pricked her eyes. She wasn’t a crier. “Because I’m not ready. Because there’s still a lot I want to do, specifically here, with my career. And I can’t see how marriage and babies fit into that.”
Doris nodded knowingly. “Well, it doesn’t necessarily have to be one or the other, but it sure isn’t easy.
I never quite feel like I’m exactly where I should be.
At work, I worry I should have stayed with my son longer before finding a nanny.
At home, I have work on my mind—and on my bedside table—because it never really ends.
To some extent, you have to just accept that everything is going to be chaos, and do the best you can.
But you’ve got to have the right man beside you, willing to let you do it.
” She paused. “So, if I may: Do you think your beau is that kind of man? Or no?”
Emily’s throat was tight. Jem was not that kind of man. He was amusing and friendly but firm in his traditional beliefs. He would not be willing to let her keep working.
“I shall let you mull that one over,” Doris said, spotting Emily’s dismay and sparing her from having to answer. “But we aren’t here to only discuss Betty and babies. The Mercer: What are your thoughts after the weekend?”
Emily shoved rumination of Jem aside. “I gave it a lot of thought, Doris. Honestly I did. And I spent this morning sorting out the process for being deemed ‘incorrigible.’ It seems my father could bring me down to the courthouse and tell them he wants me brought before the judge for whatever fabricated reason. Unruliness, maybe. Staying out after curfew, refusing authority or some such. If the judge will see us, I’ll just act surly and ‘unmanageable,’ like it says in the Act.
And then I suppose we’ll find out whether June Jones is right, and if it is actually that easy to get locked up at the Mercer. ”
Doris sighed deeply. “And you are prepared for that, if it comes to it? The allegations in that inmate’s note make it quite clear what sort of horrid conditions you could be facing.”