So I scrambled to my feet and slowly and very painfully started up the hill to the lodge. The first few steps felt as though my ankle was being crushed in a giant vice. “I simply can’t stand this”, I said sitting down and starting to unlace my ski boot. Immediately several people rushed over and said, ‘Oh, don’t do that. Never take off your ski boot, it supports the sprain and anyway you’ll never get it on again. Just get up and walk on it.’
“I can’t”, I said. “It feels like my ankle is crushed.” “Nonsense”, said a tall man with a moustache, grabbing my foot with his big strong hands and pinching my ski boot to test for broken bones.
I screamed, “You’re hurting! Don’t touch my ankle.”
He dropped my foot, it clunked down, I moaned in agony and he went away mumbling things about poor sports and only trying to help.
Fortunately, just before it was time to leave, someone who didn’t belong to our hardy group, and who knew something about skiing, told me I should not walk on my foot and produced a toboggan to take me to the car.
When I got home Mother cut off my ski boot and sock, put my foot in a bucket of boiling water and called Mary’s husband. He came right over, examined my foot, gave me some codeine and said my ankle was broken. “And I was relaxed and my knees were bent”, I told Mary bitterly.
She said, “Nobody but a fool would ski in the rain. Terribly dangerous.”
Mary’s husband said, “Nobody but a fool would ski. Mary has the right idea. She doesn’t risk her limbs in the snow. She stays in the lodge drinking whisky and playing the slot machines.”
That was my last office party.
16
Hand Me That Straightjacket, Joe—The Government
ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS I LEARNED AND loved about the Government was that I wasn’t the only bonehead working for it. There were thousands of us who didn’t know what we were doing but were all doing it in ten copies.
I got my first Government job by falling down a flight of stairs. Mary and I had gone to a dinner party at the apartment of friends of ours. I can remember that I didn’t want to go. “I should be going to night school”, I told Mary. She said, “Betty, you only live once. There will be some very charming people at this dinner party and we’re going to a concert afterwards. Now for God’s sake let’s forget night school.”
So we went to the party and the people were so charming that I didn’t look where I was going, and fell down my host’s small winding stair and ripped the knee out of my stocking.
“Oh”, I moaned as they all hurried to help me. “No job and my only pair of stockings.”
“Don’t you have a job?” said a very shy man with a French wife.
“No”, I said. “Not since yesterday.”
“I’d like you to work for me”, he said. “The Government. National Recovery Administration. It’ll only be temporary for a while but then there should be some good permanent jobs.”
“You see”, said Mary later. “People like Mr Sheffield don’t hang around night schools. He’s terribly brilliant, an Oxford graduate and speaks French.”
“Not in the office, I hope”, I said, remembering my struggles with the Serbo-Croat.
“For heaven’s sake, Betty”, said Mary. ‘You haven’t even started to work and you don’t even know what the job is, but you’re already worrying about not being able to do it. This is your chance! You’re in on the ground floor and you can get to be an executive.”
I’ll always remember my first day with the Government. At eight-forty-five, Monday morning, Cleve and his Cord convertible deposited me in front of the Federal Office Building. It was a cool bright July morning but the irritable croaking of foghorns from the Sound two blocks away indicated low, heavy morning mists and gave promise of a hot afternoon.
The Federal Office Building, occupying a whole block on the west side of the street, bathed placidly in the summer morning’s warmth and brightness, and radiated respectability and solid worth from every one of its neat red bricks.
I looked across at the occupants of the other side of the street, a burlesque theatre, pawnshop, cigar store, pool hall and old hotel, huddled in the shadows in a pitiful attempt to protect their ageing faces from the searching rays of the sun, and thought, ‘How unfair—it is like putting some poor, old, unshaven, shabby Alaskan prospectors in competition with a fat, pink, smooth-shaven, pompous young business man.’
Then I flicked a speck of dust from my skirt, straightened my seams, adjusted my clean white gloves and went skipping up the marble steps. I was on the right side of the tracks, at last. The Government. Working for the Government! What a firm ring it had. How pleasantly it would slide off my tongue when I applied for credit. I waved to Cleve, who, in spite of a petrol tank that had registered empty all the way to town, was easing sleekly away from the kerb accompanied by many envious glances, and pushed open the swinging door.
The inside of the building was as cool as a springhouse. The tiled foyer, crowded with people going to work and waiting for elevators, had a nice, happy, relaxed atmosphere and afforded a complete contrast to mornings in other office buildings where I had worked. Mornings marred by worried grumpy business men, shuffling their feet, glancing irritably at their watches, hunching their shoulders, twitching, blinking, rattling things in their pockets, and jerking at their collars as they awaited their chance to push into the elevator and be whisked up to where they could hurry and get started doing something obviously distasteful to them.
Government people had a delightful ‘It’ll keep until I get there’ attitude. ‘What a day!’ they said to each other. ‘Look at those mountains rising out of the fog! This is beautiful country.’ ‘When are you taking your leave, Joe? Looks like vacation weather.’ They exchanged morning pleasantries with the elevator starter and the operators and laughed and kidded a small coloured man called Bill who loaded his car as though it were a train—“All aboahd for Evrett!” he shouted. “This cab’s goin’ to Evrett! Shake a leg, Colonel, youh julep’s getting’ wahm waitin’ foh you.”
Several people looked at me, recognized me as a stranger and smiled. I smiled back and felt welcome.
I asked Bill where Mr Sheffield’s office was and he grinned and said, “Eighth flooh. You startin’ to work theah?” I said I thought so and he said, “Well, now, I’m real glad. We don’t have any red haih in this building at all. It look mighty nice on cold mornings.”
I said, “Maybe I won’t last until winter.”
He said, “You’ll last all right. Don’t worry about that. Evybody last with the Govment.” As I got in, he winked and whispered for me to look behind me. A woman in a coonskin cap and sheepskin coat was leaning on the windowsill eating doughnuts out of a greasy bag. “She lasted”, Bill said. “She left over from Daniel Boone’s time, he, he, he!”
Mr Sheffield’s office, on the top floor, was labelled Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce but taped below the black lettering was a square of white cardboard bearing a large blue eagle and the letters NRA. I opened the door and walked into what might have been a receiving room at a terminal post office. Everywhere were bulging grey canvas mailbags and new confused employees.
I waited uncertainly by the door. The room was large and light with huge windows that framed a magnificent view of mountains and islands, all up to their knees in mist which made them appear detached and like mirages. Some of the windows were open and let in the croaking foghorns, the shouts of warehousemen and truckers on produce row just below us, and a pungent odour of burning coffee and vanilla beans.
At the far end of the room, against the windows, seated facing each other at mahogany desks, were two young women. They were opening mail, exchanging occasional remarks and exuding an air of stability and leisure that seemed to cut them off from the hurrying and confusion of the rest of the room as completely as though they were glass-enclosed. I knew instinctively that they were Civil Service—and had nothing to do with the new regime.
I was watching them env
iously when a tall, dark girl, who introduced herself as Miss Mellor, told me to hang my hat up and follow her. She led me into what had been Mr Sheffield’s private office, and to a chair by his desk which had been pushed against the wall.
Mr Sheffield, a slender, nervous man, was talking on the phone, running his hands through his hair and staring wildly at a stack of telegrams, airmail, and airmail special delivery letters that the office boy added to continually, in spite of its already overflowing the desk and spilling on to the floor.
This room was also very attractive. The large windows along its west wall had the same wonderful view of mountains, islands and mist; against the other walls were bookcases and files; the mahogany furniture was large, simple and comfortable, and there was a thick rug on the floor. It had obviously been a quiet, delightful place in which to write leisurely letters and reports and to contemplate the price of grain in Algeria. Now it was like a subway station. At long mahogany tables in the centre of the room were seated about fifteen assorted people, old, young, male and female, all armed with letter openers and canvas bags of mail. As they grabbed out letters, slit them open and unfolded the contents, they laughed and talked.
I asked Miss Mellor what was in the mail sacks. She said, “PRA’s—President’s Re-employment Agreements. Everybody in business is supposed to sign one and promise that he’ll pay his Office employees at least fourteen dollars a week and cut their hours to forty a week and pay his factory workers at least forty cents an hour and cut their hours to thirty-five a week. When he signs he gets a sticker like this to put in his window.” She pulled from under the confusion on Mr Sheffield’s desk a sticker about five by eight inches with the letters NRA in bright red across the top, then small letters in blue stating MEMBER, then a fierce-looking blue eagle with one foot on some sort of gear. The words WE DO OUR PART were spread across the bottom.
Miss Mellor said, “According to the National Industrial Recovery Act that was passed June thirteenth, you can’t have Government contracts unless you have a blue eagle in your window. This is the district office for four states.”
Just then Mr Sheffield hung up the phone, jumped to his feet, and looked at me dazedly for a minute without the slightest sign of recognition.
I said, “Remember me, I fell down the stairs Friday night and you offered me a job.”
He said, “Oh, yes. Betty Bard.” The telephone rang again. He picked up the receiver and began talking.
Miss Mellor, who drawled and appeared to be as unrufflable as slate, laughed and said, “That’s enough. He recognized you. Come on, I’ll put you to work.”
She led me to the table, introduced me, gave me a paper knife and a stack of mail and I set to work at the first job I had ever had that really fitted my capabilities.
Lift, slit, take out, unfold, lift, slit, take out, unfold, lift, slit . . .
By eleven o’clock my shoulders ached and my slitting hand was cramped, so I got up and went down the hall to the rest room for a cigarette.
The rest room, clean and light, with large windows facing the Sound, was deserted except for a slender girl with tinselly blonde hair and grey eyes, who was smoking and staring pensively at the jagged pale blue mountains in the fog. We looked shyly at each other and then she said, “Are you working for Mr Sheffield?” I said I was and she said so was she, she typed.
I said, “I thought I would like a monotonous job but I’m already bored and tired.” She said, “This is my third day and by five o’clock I’m so tired I could die but I keep saying, ‘Four dollars a day. Four dollars a day’, and going out for a cigarette whenever I can.”
I said, “Is four dollars a day all we get?”
She said, “All? I think that’s dandy. My last job paid eight dollars a week and I ran the whole company. Anyway, as soon as we’re put on a permanent basis, we’ll get either a hundred and five or a hundred and twenty dollars a month. Can you type?”
“Sure,” I said, adding bravely, “shorthand too.”
“Better tell the office boy”, she said. “He assigns the work and he needs typists. Are you going to eat lunch with anybody?”
“No”, I said.
She said, “I brought my sandwiches but we can eat at a grocery store in the next block. They have little tables upstairs and if you buy coffee and dessert they let you take your sandwiches up there. My name’s Anne Marie Offenbach and my mother’s a friend of the Sheffields.”
I said, “My name’s Betty Bard and my sister Mary is a friend of the Sheffields.”
We walked back to the office together and on the office boy’s next trip I told him that I could type and take shorthand, so he moved me to another room, sat me at a wiggly little table back of Anne Marie and started me typing alphabetical lists of the PRA signers.
At twelve o’clock, Anne Marie and I went over to the grocery store which catered to charge customers and carried things like cherimoyas, canned tangerines and rattlesnake meat and had a wonderful over-all smell of cinnamon, roasting coffee and ripe cheese.
The restaurant, a small balcony around the store, had the regulation faded parsley-coloured tea-room tables and chairs, very inexpensive, very delicious food and terrible service, owing no doubt to the crowds and a dumbwaiter that never seemed to work except when a harassed waitress leaned down the shaft and yelled to someone below.
For twenty cents I had shrimp salad, fresh brown bread and butter and coffee. Anne Marie had a Mocha éclair with her coffee and as we ate she told me that she hated being poor, hated bringing her lunch, and already hated most of the people working with us. She said, “A woman came over to me yesterday, gripped my arm and hissed, ‘Don’t work so fast. Make it last.’”
I said, “That’s the trouble with big offices, if you’re slow you get fired, and if you’re fast everybody hates you.”
She said, “Already there’s a strained feeling in the office—everybody listening and watching to see who you know. Don’t tell anybody you know Mr Sheffield.”
I said, “How can I? Nobody speaks to me.”
She said, “That’s because you came to work in that big cream-coloured car. Somebody saw you and the word has already gone around the office that you’re rich and don’t need to work.”
I laughed, told her that we were on our sixty-third straight Sunday of meatloaf, and I didn’t see how we could be any poorer, and that anyway Cleve had acquired the car by a series of trades dating back to his tenth birthday and a saddle Mother had had made in Mexico.
Anne Marie said, “Well, if I were you, I’d have your brother let you off a block from the office, a lot of those people seem kind of desperate.”
When we got back to work at one o’clock, I asked the office boy if he’d heard I was rich and he said, “Sure, that’s why I like you,” and winked. A woman sitting across the room nudged her neighbour, whispered something to her and they both glared at me. I typed my lists and tried to ignore them but I could feel their hostility smouldering across the room, its acrid smoke growing thicker and more noticeable as the hours passed.
The afternoon was very hot, the minutes crept by and there sprang into being that oldest and most bitterly fought of all office feuds. No air versus fresh air. Anne Marie and I both sat by windows which we had opened wide. When we came back from lunch we found them shut and locked, the office thick with heat and acrid with the smell of perspiration. We opened our windows wide again and immediately remarks, like little darts, went flitting through the air. ‘Brrr, it’s so cold I can hardly type’, or ‘Pardon me a minute while I get my sweater. Some people seem to have been raised in the North Pole.’ ‘Would you mind if I put your coat around my knees. It’s so draughty.’
At three o’clock, Anne Marie signalled to me and we went over to the grocery store for coffee. When we got back the windows were shut and locked again and there was a note on my typewriter. ‘Listen, you, type slower—you’re working us out of a job.’
I crumpled the note up and threw it in the waste-basket and ope
ned the window again. There wasn’t any air either inside or outside now, and my fingers splashed on the typewriter keys. As soon as I would get to the last of a large stack of the PRA’s another appeared in its place. I had to stop and think whether C came after or before E and there were sharp shooting pains between my shoulder blades.
Noticing that several of the typists were hunt-and-peckers, I tried to tell myself, ‘Look, that’s their problem. They should have gone to night school.’ But I knew that these people were desperate for work and there wasn’t going to be enough to go around. One of the hunt-and-peck typists was as old as my mother and had a gentle, most unbusinesslike face. I smiled at her and she smiled back and just before we went home she gave me a recipe for a one-egg cake. On the streetcar I prayed that there would be some sort of a permanent filing job for her.
That night we had supper with our neighbours in their backyard. Everyone was eager to hear about my new job and I was eager to tell everything. When I reached the part about the woman gripping Anne Marie’s arm and the note on my desk, Mary said, “Communists undoubtedly. They are everywhere. We’re tottering right on the edge of a revolution.”
Rhodsie, our dear little neighbour, said, “I thought that revolution was averted when Roosevelt closed the banks.”
Mary said, “Just held up temporarily. Frankly, I think we should put beds in the basement and lay in groceries.”
“Why should we lay in groceries when we’ve got beds?” Dede asked and Mary gave her a cold look.
Mother said, “I think everything is going to be all right from now on.”
I said, “Well, there’s certainly room for improvement. Why, Anne Marie Offenbach, a girl who sits in front of me, ran a whole office for a year for only eight dollars a week.”
Mary said, “And I hate her because she did. It’s the Anne Maries of this world who cause depressions. People are just so constituted that if they can get some little Kick-Me-Charlie to run their whole offices for them for eight dollars a week they are not going to hire you or me and pay us twenty-five dollars a week.”