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“You sent me here, dear,” said Miss Hostetter. Her face looked for a moment as though it would soften. But her muscles tightened, and the austere lines of her face held firm. “You’ve said a lot of things about my life, Amy, and I heard them all. They all hurt, and here I am.” She looked down at her hands, and worked her fast and accurate fingers slowly. “Am I still a ghost? Does this crazy trip out here to see a dead man make me not a ghost anymore?”

Tears filled the eyes of my wife-to-be. “Oh, Miss Hostetter,” she said, “I’m so sorry if I hurt you. You’re not a ghost, really you’re not. You never were.” She was overwhelmed with pity for the stark, lonesome woman. “You’re full of love and mercy, Miss Hostetter, or you wouldn’t be here.”

Miss Hostetter gave no sign that the words moved her. “And what brought you here, Amy?”

“I loved him,” said Amy. The pride of a woman in love straightened her back and colored her cheeks and made her feel beautiful and important again. “I loved him.”

Miss Hostetter shook her homely head sadly. “If you loved him,” she said, “take a look at him. He has a lovable knife in his lovable lap, and a lovable grin that will turn your hair white.”

Amy’s hand went up to her throat. “Oh.”

“At least we’re friends now, aren’t we, Amy?” said Miss Hostetter. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes, yes,” said Amy limply. She managed a wan smile. “That’s a great deal.”

“We’d better leave,” said Miss Hostetter. “Here come the men and the dogs.”

The two left building 227 as the men and the dogs zigzagged across the wasteland a quarter of a mile away.

The two caught a company bus in front of the Shipping Department, and said nothing to each other during the long, dead trip back to the main gate.

At the main gate, it was time for them to part, each to her own bus stop. With effort, they managed to speak.

“Goodbye,” said Amy.

“See you in the morning,” said Miss Hostetter.

“It’s so hard for a girl to know what to do,” said my wife-to-be, swept by longing and a feeling of weakness.

“I don’t think it’s supposed to be easy,” said Miss Hostetter. “I don’t think it ever was easy.”

Amy nodded soberly.

“And Amy,” said Miss Hostetter, laying her hand on Amy’s arm, “don’t be mad at the company. They can’t help it if they want their letters nicely typed.”

“I’ll try not,” said Amy.

“Somewhere,” said Miss Hostetter, “a nice young man is looking for a nice young woman like you, and tomorrow’s another day.

“What we both need now,” said Miss Hostetter, fading, ghost-like, into the smoke and cold of Pittsburgh, “is a good, hot bath.”

When Amy scuffed through the fog to her bus stop, ghost-like, she found me standing there, ghost-like.

With dignity, we each pretended that the other was not there.

When suddenly, my wife-to-be was overwhelmed with the terror that she’d held off so long, she burst into tears and leaned against me, and I patted her back.

“My gosh,” I said, “another human being.”

“You’ll never know how human,” she said.

“Maybe I will,” I said. “I could try.”

I did try, and I do try, and I give you the toast of a happy man: May the warm springs of the girl pool never run dry.

(illustration credit 7)

RUTH

The two women nodded formally across the apartment’s threshold. They were lonely women, widows; one middle-aged and the other young. Their meeting now—ostensibly to defeat their loneliness—only emphasized how solitary each was.

Ruth, the young woman, had travelled a thousand miles for this meeting with a stranger; had endured the clatter and soot and itch of a railroad coach from springtime in an Army town in Georgia to a factory town in a still-frozen New York valley. Now she wondered why it had seemed so right, so imperative that she come. This heavy, elderly woman, who blocked the door and smiled only with difficulty, had seemed in her letters to want this, too.

“So you’re the woman who married my Ted,” said the older woman coolly.

Ruth tried to imagine herself with a married son, and supposed she might have phrased the question in the same way. She set