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very well but no one got loaded. I can remember it yet a little bit, particularly the cottage sitting high up above the shore of Lake Delta and the slope descending to the water and having just enough beer to make you forget your problems and enjoy the present. But the next day I felt a bit guilty about having had a good time while Willie was home alone with the responsibility of the children and the work and the worry. Some traveling was involved in the study and I managed to work that out so I could spend the last two weekends at home, and I felt a little better about that.

But to get back to Schenectady. Unless there was a trip, at best I had to spend from Monday morning to Friday night, there by myself outside of working hours. It was a strain. I was working with Armand Chandonnet, who lived in Schenectady, but he never so much as had me out to his house for a bottle of beer--and no one else did either. I'd usually have breakfast at the Toddle House near the hotel, where they had great waffles, and it was a bit more cheerful than the hotel dining room or coffee shop as I recall it as well as less expensive--I could pick up enough in a day or so to pay movie admission by having breakfast at the Toddle House. Dinner was the lonely meal, eaten at the hotel, or Louis Nicklaus's restaurant at the corner of State and Erie Boulevard, or even my old hangout of test days, Pelop's, the good Greek place on State. Then I'd go to the movies or wander around the depot and go up on the platforms and watch the flyers sail through westbound, few of them stopping at Schenectady. They'd come drifting down off the hill and around the curve east of the station, and then boom across the State Street bridge and zing along the depot platform at around sixty, the big, dark-green Pullmans zipping by in a blur--and then everything would disappear around the curve to the west and you'd hear the train roar over the Mohawk River bridge, the throttle wide open again as the line straightened out into the valley. The red tail lights would fade away and I'd wish I were aboard en route home. If I returned to the hotel, I'd sometimes buy a paper and sit in the lobby and read for awhile.

It was one of these occasions that led to the situation I used as the basis of my short story. They would sometimes have big banquets in a dining room opening off the end of the lobby. At such times, they would have hat and coat checking facilities arranged with portable racks down near the dining room door. This service would be taken care of by a hatcheck girl who performed similar functions around the hotel. She was a tall. slender girl with an unusual-looking face as though she might be a gypsy from middle-Europe--black hair and olive skin. I rather enjoyed her looks and when I happened to be reading my evening paper and she was working the hat stand in the lobby, I'd throw a covert glance her way occasionally. I didn't think she was aware of me at all, but one evening, to my astonishment,

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