3. Romantic Roundabout

Sidney and Kate planned to go off and get married, bat they failed to meet each other in Washington, D.C. Instead of looking for her all over the city, Sidney stayed in one spot for three long years. By sticking to this plan does he finally meet up again with his girlfriend? Read on and find out.

The Air and Space Museum, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., is the most visited museum in the United States. Year after year, more people visit this massive exhibit honoring the men and women who have pioneered flight and the exploration of space than visit any other monument or museum in the entire country.

I work in a little room off the main entrance to the museum, checking coats and other articles which people do not want to carry around as they tour the building. I see virtually everyone who enters the museum.

Maryanne Wilson, who used to sell souvenirs at the stand located next to my checkroom, has studied the laws of probability because she likes to bet. She claims that she can calculate, according to her system, the odds against anything happening. She calculated once that if I held my job for 112 more years, I would know everyone in the United States by sight.

I myself came to the conclusion that at the very least, if I waited long enough, I would see everyone who traveled. I've told people this theory for years, but no one ever did anything about it. No one except Sidney, that is. Sidney came into the museum a little over three years ago.

There are several short films which are shown at the museum every half hour. The one called To Fly is the most popular, and people line up hours in advance to see a particular showing. Sidney was waiting at the head of the line for the 1:05 showing one afternoon. He was standing there looking very nervous.

I remember noticing him that first day. He wasn't much more than a thin, anxious kid, but there was something about him. It was eerie. I knew. I just knew that he was meeting his girlfriend and that they were going to go off and be married that same day. There's no use in my trying to explain how I knew this, but after one has watched people for eighteen years, as I have, it's easy.

Well, more tourists poured through the front door, so I got busy. I didn't look up again until it was nearly time for the 1:35 showing of To Fly. I was surprised to see that the young fellow was still there, at the head of the line.

Sidney's girlfriend wasn't there for the 2:05 either, nor the 2:35, and when the viewers of the 3:05 showing were leaving the theater, Sidney was looking pretty desperate. Soon he wandered over near my window, so I called out and asked him if I could help.

He described her in a loving way. "She's small and dark, nineteen years old, and has a spirited face. I mean she can get mad, but she never stays mad for long. She has a short coat made of soft brown leather, but maybe she's not wearing it."

I couldn't remember anyone like her.

He showed me a letter, actually a postcard, from her: "I'll be there Thursday. Meet me at the museum. Let's fly. Love, love, love, love, Kate." It was from Omaha, Nebraska.

"Why don't you phone home? She's probably called there, since she missed you here."

He looked ill. I've only been in town two days. "We were going to meet and then drive to Florida, where I've got a job promised me. I have no address." He touched the postcard. "I got this general delivery." And with that, he walked back to the head of the line to look over the people going to the 4:35 show.

When I came on duty the next day, he was still there.

"Did she work anywhere?" I asked.

He nodded: "She was a gardener. I called her former boss, but all he knows is that she left to get married."

Well, that's how it began. Sidney hung around that line and the museum for the next three or four days. The D.C. police looked into the case, but they couldn't do much; after all, no crime had been committed. Maybe she had just changed her mind, they reasoned. Somehow I didn't believe that.

One day, after about two weeks, I told Sidney of my theory. "If she's a traveler, and if you wait long enough, you'll see her coming through that door someday." He turned and looked at the front entrance as though he had never seen it before, while I went on explaining about Maryanne's figures on the laws of probability.

Sidney went to work for Maryanne as a clerk. "I had to get a job somewhere, didn't I?" he said sheepishly. Neither of us ever spoke of Kate anymore, and we dropped the subject of the laws of probability, but I noticed that Sidney observed every person who entered that most visited of all museums.

Maryanne tired of life in the nation's capital about a year later, and she moved to New Mexico. Sidney took over the stand, expanded it, and soon had a very nice little business.

Then came yesterday. It was spring and the tourists had descended on Washington, as they do every year. There was an endless stream of them, as usual. What made yesterday different began with a great noise.

Sidney cried out and the next thing I knew, there were souvenirs and cards, dolls, and who-knows-what flying all over the place. Sidney had leaped over the counter and upset everything in sight. He ran across the floor and grabbed a young woman who was standing not ten feet from my window. She was small and dark and had an interesting face.

For a while they just hung on to each other, laughing and crying and saying things which had no meaning. She'd say a few words like, "It was the other one, the one down the street, the one called the castle on the mall," and he'd kiss her speechless and tell her the many things he'd done to try to find her. What apparently had happened, three years ago, was that Kate had gone to a different building. When she was young, her family had taken her to a part of the Smithsonian where the plane in which Charles Lindbergh had flown across the Atlantic Ocean was. She remembered where it was, but she didn't think that they would move it. She had waited at another museum for days and had spent all her money trying to find Sidney. Finally, she got a job as a gardener with the Department of the Interior, working on the grounds of various government buildings around town.

"You mean you've been here all the time?" Sidney gasped incredulously.

She nodded.

"But everybody visits the Air and Space Museum! You mean you've been here for three years and never come through those doors before? I've been here all the time, waiting and waiting for the day to come, watching everyone who came here ... "

She began to look pale. She looked over at the doors and said in a weak voice, "No, I've never been in here before. But Sidney, for almost three years I've been working on the grounds around this very building! I've thought about coming in here often, but I never did before today. I just never got around to it." Then she threw her arms around him and they both began to cry again.

What a wonderful drama had unfolded before my eyes! It's too bad Maryanne couldn't have seen it, too. The wonderful thing is how the laws of probability worked so hard and so long until they finally got Kate to walk through those front doors of ours.

From Modern Short Stories in English

edited by Dixson, Robert J.

Regents Publishing Company, Inc., 1984.