Dorothy Schleicher

Spouse of Clifford Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Dorothy Schleicher was born in 1916 at New Braunfels, Texas, and lived eighty years as a bookkeeper in San Antonio, a woman of the Proctor bloodline by marriage who was never a hunter and never pretended to be one. In 1942 she married the machinist Clifford Proctor, and they raised two children, Edwin Proctor, who became a vampire slayer of the White Ledger, and Ethel Schleicher Proctor, who did not. Dorothy belonged to no great house and carried no alias, archetype or craft. Her work was the ordinary kind that holds a family up, and for more than fifty years she kept the household accounts of the Proctors of San Antonio, and in a separate ledger, in a separate hand, the small sums that the White Ledger spent on lamps, train fares, hospital bills and silver. She died in 1996 of a sudden collapse, aged eighty, at her own kitchen table, with a pencil in her hand. She is remembered as the woman who made the books balance in a family whose business was not supposed to appear in any books at all. New Braunfels in 1916 was a German town on the edge of the Hill Country, where the Comal and the Guadalupe ran clear over limestone and the shop signs were still, in places, in the old language. It had been founded by a prince's agent in 1845 and settled by people who believed in neat fences, choral societies and written receipts, and the Schleichers, who sold feed and seed from a long shed near the mill, believed in all three. The Ledger's papers do not name Dorothy's parents, which in a family of laundresses and clerks usually means that nobody thought the matter was anyone else's business. They say only that she was a quiet, square-faced, fair-haired child who could add a column of figures upside down, and that she did so at the counter of the feed shed from the age of seven, to the quiet alarm of the customers. She learned her trade the German way, that is thoroughly. She was sent at fifteen, in the hardest of the Depression years, to a commercial school in San Antonio, where she boarded with a widow on the Southside and learned double entry, typewriting and a clear, upright hand. The school taught her that every sum has two sides and that a mistake does not go away because it has been ignored. She said, later, that it was the best religion she was ever offered. She took a post in a lumber yard on the Pleasanton Road, then a better one in the counting room of a brewery, and by twenty-three she was the head of its small bookkeeping office, a position she held through the years when the country was recovering and every ledger in the city was being closed, reopened and argued over. She was liked by the drivers, feared by the salesmen and trusted by the owner, who once said that she could find a missing nickel by the sound it made on the page. She met Clifford Proctor in the spring of 1941, on a bus. He was a lean, shy machinist of twenty-two, born at Victoria on the Gulf coast, the younger son of a dockworker and a boarding-house keeper, who worked on the engines of the army's aircraft at Kelly Field and who rode the Number Nine out from the depot with a lunch pail and a book on lathe tolerances. She found him reading it, upside down, as she sat beside him. She told him so. He said that it was the only way in which he could keep the pages from interfering with the diagrams, and she laughed, which was, he later said, the end of his bachelorhood. They were married in 1942, in the first summer of the war, when every church in the city had a wedding on Saturdays and the bridal parties queued on the steps. She wore her mother's dress, taken in. He wore his only suit and a pair of shoes that had been polished by his landlady's son. His brother Norman, who had come down from north Texas, stood up with him and was observed to be keeping an eye on the door. It was after the wedding that she learned what the family was. Clifford told her, on a bench in Brackenridge Park, in a flat and apologetic voice, the way a man might tell his bride that there was a debt. She asked him two questions. She asked whether it was true, and he said that it was. She asked whether anyone kept the accounts, and he said that nobody did, in the proper sense, and that his mother's people had done it on the backs of envelopes. Dorothy said that she would see to it. It was the whole of her response, and it was the greatest compliment that the White Ledger ever received. She opened a cash book that autumn, with a column for receipts and a column for payments and a third, which she headed Sundries, in which went everything that the Proctors preferred not to explain. She never once asked what the sundries were for. She asked only that each of them should have a receipt. The Proctors of San Antonio lived on a narrow lot off the Nogalitos Road, in a frame house with a pecan tree and a garage that smelled of machine oil, and Dorothy ran it as she ran a counting room. The rent was paid on the first. The groceries were entered. When Clifford was moved to night shifts at the base during the war years, she sat up with the ledgers, a thermos of coffee and the radio turned very low, and in the morning had the sums done, which she believed to be a better use of a sleepless night than worry. In those years the city filled with soldiers and airmen, and the lodging houses on Alamo Street took in anyone who had a dollar, and the White Ledger needed more money than it had. She found it. She found it in the margins of a hundred small accounts, in bills that had been paid twice and in a fund for church repairs that nobody had audited since the Armistice. Her children came in the middle of this. Edwin Proctor was born in 1945, in the last months of the war, a quiet, watchful boy who counted the steps on the porch before he walked up them, and who became, in time, a vampire slayer of the Ledger. Ethel Schleicher Proctor followed in 1948, a loud and cheerful child who took her mother's name as a middle name and her father's cheerfulness as a way of life. Dorothy brought them both up on a strict calendar. Mondays were for the wash, Fridays for the accounts, and Sundays for the Ledger, when the family went to the early service, took a walk along the river and read, in the evening, the names of the dead in the old book, a few at a time, so as not to tire the children. She did not hide from either child what the work was. She taught them to read a balance sheet at about the age that other families taught the catechism, and she was of the opinion that the one was more useful than the other. In the Korean War the base was busier than ever, and Clifford worked double shifts, and she moved to a position with an insurance office on Houston Street, where she stayed for twenty-two years. She was a senior bookkeeper by 1960 and a trusted officer by the end of the Vietnam years, when the city's young men were being taken away in buses and the families on the barrio streets hung blue stars in their windows. She was not a sentimental woman, but she kept a file on the neighbours' sons, in her own head, and she had a way of discovering that a boy overseas had a mother whose rent was behind. The rent was then, by a mistake that was never traced, paid. In 1968, when the city threw open a fair on the old Hemisfair grounds and bulldozed half of a neighbourhood to make room for towers and a lake, she wrote the check for her sister-in-law's cousin's relocation herself, and entered it under Sundries. She retired in 1981, to the great disquiet of the insurance office, which hired two people to replace her and was believed to have missed her still. She spent the last fifteen years of her life at home on the Nogalitos Road, reading the paper, quarrelling with the telephone company over a charge of forty cents and doing the Ledger's accounts in a school notebook on the kitchen table. She was not a fanciful woman, but she thought of the work as a long and unfinished sum, and she was fond of saying, to her son, that a slayer can win a night and a bookkeeper can win a century. Edwin, who went to the door at midnight with a pistol and a case of silver rounds, said that he had never doubted it. She died in 1996, on a Saturday in early autumn, of a sudden collapse, at her kitchen table, at eighty. The notebook was open before her. Her pencil, when Clifford came in from the garden, lay across the last entry, which was a receipt for lamp oil, correctly totalled. He said that she had left it balanced. He lived on to 2003, and he is said to have kept the notebook on the shelf above his lathe, unopened, as one keeps a clock that has stopped at a good hour. Dorothy Schleicher is remembered in the Proctor family as the bookkeeper who made the White Ledger solvent, the German-Texan wife who asked only that every sundry should have a receipt. In the Slayerverse she stands for the clerks, counters and quiet accountants of the Proctor line, the ones who never carried a pistol and who kept the hunters fed, housed and paid for five centuries, because someone had to, and because the books, as she said, do not forgive.