In actual fact, I read all the boring financial magazines, but I shook everything I had read up in a bin bag and issued in my own words and well-seasoned with my own personal prejudices, a bulletin as to the state of the world’s finances. I remember one bulletin that I headed, ‘War with Japan Inevitable!’ I don’t know where this dope got that dope.
Mr Chalmers, who never took the trouble to read any of the magazines or to check my facts, used to make huge blue-pencil marks around single words and then quote Matthew Arnold and Emerson at me to prove that other words would more accurately convey the exact shade of meaning I had in mind. I was reasonably sure that none of the lumbermen read my dull bulletin and I was also reasonably sure that no one of them would come storming into the office and demand a showdown because I had said money instead of pelf, or Mammon or lucre, but I didn’t dare argue with Mr Chalmers, who was at his worst on Saturday morning.
In the meantime, or interim or interregnum, Mary took Mr Chalmers’ dictation, arranged bouquets of lovely out-of-season flowers for his desk and hers, ordered his whisky from Joe the Bootlegger and left me alone with him in the office more and more.
He would buzz for her and I would answer and he would roar, “Where’s Mary?” and I would tell him that she was out paving the way for him to meet the right people and he would say, “Humph, well as long as you’re here, lower that Venetian blind three and five-eighths inches, empty this ash tray and fill my pen.” When I had finished, he would say, “Betty, did I ever tell you about the time I organized the lumber industry in Louisiana?” and I would say “No” and he would say, “Sit down” and I would and hours later when Mary returned, he would be pouring little drinks of bourbon and tap water and I would be listening to Volume XVII, Chapter 32 of Mr Chalmers Is Smarter than Anyone in the World, Living or Dead. Lumber was a lot of fun.
Occasionally Mr Chalmers became mildly irritated at Mary and me and threatened to tear us apart, tendon by tendon. One such outburst was precipitated by his being unusually unreasonable and hateful all week long, then leaving for Chicago by plane without his teeth, which he had carelessly left at his club. ‘Go to Athletic Club and airmail me bridge’, he wired Mary. “You can starve to death, you disagreeable old bastard”, said Mary, throwing the telegram in the waste-basket. ‘Mary, send bridge or you are fired!’ was the next wire. Mary crumpled it up and threw it out the window. ‘Am calling tonight’, was the next wire so Mary airmailed his teeth that afternoon and when he called that evening she was like honey and told him that she had mailed his teeth the minute she had got his first wire and she did hope he was chewing and having a good time.
The very closest we came to being fired was on the occasion of Mr Chalmers’ visit to New Orleans and arrival back at the office a week ahead of schedule. It was a very hot summer afternoon and Mary and I, who had received a rather unexpected invitation to dine on board a battleship, were in Mr Chalmers’ private office freshening up. We had removed and washed out our underwear and stockings and pinned them to the Venetian blinds to dry. We had steamed out the wrinkles in our silk print office dresses by holding them over Mr Chalmers’ basin while we ran the hot water full force, and had hung them on hangers on the Venetian blinds.
We had washed and pinned up our hair and finally, in bare feet and petticoats, were taking refreshing sponge baths in Mr Chalmers’ basin, when there were knocks on the outer door, which we had locked. Mary called through the transom, “Mr Chalmers is in conference—who is it?” It was a telegram so she told the boy to put it through the mail slot. A little later, Mr Chalmers’ lawyer knocked and she told him that she had torn her dress and was in her petticoat mending it and he laughed and said that he had some papers for Chalmers but she could get them in the morning.
“Everything is just working out perfectly”, we exulted as we felt our underwear and stockings, which were almost dry, and I ran the water for my bath. Suddenly there was a loud pounding at the outer door. “Shall I call through the transom?” I asked, taking my right foot out of the basin full of warm suds. “No,” Mary said, “it’s almost five. We’ll pretend we’ve gone home.”
But the knocking continued, getting louder and louder and even sounding, to my sensitive ears, as if it might be accompanied by hoarse shouts. “Maybe I’d better put on my coat and see who it is”, I said nervously. “I wouldn’t if I were you,” Mary said, “it might be some out-of-town lumberman who has read your financial bulletin.” We both laughed gaily but I was very relieved when the knocking finally stopped.
Mary was patting Eau de Cologne on her neck and shoulders and I was drying my left thigh on the last of Mr Chalmers’ hand towels, when I thought I heard the outer-office door open and voices. “Did you hear the door open?” I asked Mary. “No”, she said.
I heard voices again and this time they sounded as if they were coming from the conference room. “Mary,” I said, “do you hear anything?” Spreading her make-up out on Mr Chalmers’ desk, she said, “Stop being so nervous! You know we’re going to a lot of trouble considering the fact that all the Navy men I’ve ever met were liars, short and married.” We both laughed.
Just then the door of Mr Chalmers’ office opened and in charged Mr Chalmers like a bull from a chute at the rodeo. His face was pomegranate-coloured, his cigar hung from his lips like brown fringe, and his voice was a hoarse croak as he roared, “Who locked the door? What in Hell’s going on here?”
Behind him stood the building office manager, swinging some keys and looking embarrassed. Mary, sitting at Mr Chalmers’ desk in petticoat and pin curls with all her make-up spread out on his blotter and her pocket mirror propped against his inkstand, said quite calmly, “You’re not supposed to be here.”
Mr Chalmers dropped his briefcase and his suitcase and yelled hoarsely, “I’m not supposed to be here? What in hell’s going on?”
Mary said, “You said you weren’t coming back until next week.”
Chalmers said, “I wired you this morning.”
Mary said, “I didn’t get it.”
He said, “Of course you didn’t. I found it unopened under the door. Here”, and he threw the telegram at her. “Now clean up this Goddamn Chinese laundry and get out! You’re fired!” He tripped over his briefcase, kicked it and slammed through the door.
Mary and I finished dressing, wiped up the spilled bathwater and Eau de Cologne, lowered the Venetian blinds, put Mr Chalmers’ mail on his desk and prepared to leave. Perhaps because Mr Chalmers was hot and tired and we looked so clean and fresh, he rescinded the order about firing and in gratitude we took him to dinner with us on board the battleship, where he had some excellent Scotch and sat next to the Executive Officer, who turned out to be a bigger ‘and then I said to Andrew Mellon’ and ‘Otto Kahn said to me’ than Mr Chalmers.
By the end of six months, Mr Chalmers’ office force had been increased to include, besides Mary and me, a certified public accountant and a liaison man between Mr Chalmers and the lumbermen. I was still killing Mr Chalmers’ flies and filling his fountain pen, but I had to take dictation for the liaison man and so Mr Chalmers was sending me to night school for fifteen dollars a month.
For reasons of pride I did not go back to the night school Mr Webster had sent me to, but chose one further up town, nearer to my streetcar. My teacher, a nice motherly woman, grew exasperated with my inability to read my notes and made me read them back aloud in front of the whole class, night after dreary night.
I grew to dread night school and probably would have quit if it hadn’t been for the woman who sat across from me. She worked for an insurance company, dressed in black crêpe, musky perfumes and big hats and told me that every single good job in the city of Seattle required that the girl also sleep with her boss. “And they won’t get me to do that for eighty dollars a month”, she told me as she furiously practised her shorthand. ‘But they might get me for a lot less!’ I told myself, as I tried desperately to figure out whether I had written pupil, purple, purposeless, bilious
, blurb or babble.
The CPA and the liaison man were very nice but they kept Mary and me so busy we never did get to finish ‘Sandra Surrenders’ and they insisted on taking sides in our fights so that they were seldom on speaking terms with each other, and one or the other was always not on speaking terms with one or the other of us.
Mary and I had many violent fights, sometimes even slapping each other, but we made up instantly and it was most disconcerting to come back from lunch and find the fight of the morning still hovering around the office like stale smoke, and the accountant and the liaison man wanting to take sides and talk about us, one to the other.
They thought I really meant it when I screamed at Mary, “It’s no wonder you’re an old maid, for twenty-five years you’ve always got your own way and you think you can boss everybody!” and Mary screamed back, “It’s better to be twenty-five years old and unmarried than to shuffle through your old marriage licences like a deck of cards”, or “You haven’t done a stroke of work in this office since I came—all you do is smoke and order me around like a slave”, and “I will continue to order you around like a slave as long as you act like a slave, think like a slave and smell like a slave.”
By the fall of 1932, the depression was very bad and we were sure that the lumbermen weren’t going to put up with Mr Chalmers much longer.
Now I grew more and more conscious of the aimlessness and sadness of the people on the streets, of the ‘Space for Rent’ signs, marking the sudden death of businesses, that had sprung up over the city like white crosses on a battlefield, and I lifted up myself each day timidly and with dread expecting to find the dark despairing mask of unemployment staring at me.
Mary was so unworried about it all that she took two hours for lunch, another hour or two for coffee, and when Mr Chalmers finally took her to task, she told him that the interesting part of his job was over and she guessed she’d leave and sell advertising.
Then for a few terrible weeks, until one of the lumbermen sent over his girl, I had to stop dusting and filling pens and take Mr Chalmers’ volumes of dictation. He mumbled so and used so many enormous and obscure words that I could never read my notes and had to bring them home at night for Mary to transcribe. She was always able to read my shorthand but finally doing both our jobs must have palled for she told me that I should quit Chalmers and sell advertising. With great tact she said that red-haired people were not meant for dull office work and instead of bawling because I couldn’t learn shorthand, why didn’t I use some of my many other talents.
I said that considering that Mr Chalmers had put up with me this long and had paid my way to night school, I thought I should stay until the end. And I did, in spite of Mr Chalmers telling me many times that the depression was all my fault, the direct result of inferior people like me wearing silk stockings and thinking they were as good as people like him.
One day my brother Cleve came in to take me to lunch and caught the tail end of one of these little talks. “The only way to get rid of the poor is to line them up against a wall and shoot them”, said kind old Mr Chalmers, chewing his cigar. “I feel the same way about sons of bitches like you”, said my tall, handsome, red-haired brother smiling in the doorway. Chalmers went into his office and slammed the door shut. Cleve and I went to lunch.
Two days later the office closed and its closing, like the death of an invalid who has hovered for long wearisome months at the brink of death, brought relief rather than sorrow. I cleaned out my desk, throwing away the accumulation of half-filled bottles of hand lotion, packages of personal letters, dried-up bottles of nail polish, used cakes of soap, broken-toothed combs and tobacco-y lipsticks, which littered my bottom drawer, and wondered how I would say good-bye to Mr Chalmers. For, in spite of his holding me personally responsible for the depression, I was fond of him, knew that his job had been in the nature of his last stand and worried about what was to become of him.
The closing of Mr Webster’s office meant merely that Webster would be on his own instead of working for a big corporation, and we had celebrated the occasion with club sandwiches and champagne. I didn’t expect anything like that from Chalmers, who had chosen to ignore the repeated warnings from the lumbermen or notice the fact that all the office force but me had left for other jobs, but I did expect him, that last day, to admit that it was all over.
He didn’t though. At ten-thirty he came slamming and banging into the office, rang the buzzer furiously and demanded that I call Joe the Bootlegger and order him a case of Canadian Club. Old Custer was all alone but he was still commanding, still shooting.
I dialled Joe’s number and wondered if being out of business would affect our credit. Joe’s wife answered. I asked for Joe. She said, “He can’t come to the phone. He’s dead.” I said that I was very sorry and she said, “That’s okay, honey, we all gotta go sometime. What did you wish?” I said, “I want to order a case of Canadian Club.” She said, “All we got now, honey, is the alcohol and the labels.” I wondered if she also had the sand and seaweed with which Joe used to adorn his bottles and offer as final proof that it was the real stuff brought from Canada by water. I told her that I’d talk to Chalmers and call her back and she said, “OK, honey, I’ll be here all day.”
I told Chalmers about Joe and he said, “Humph!” put on his hat and left and, though I waited and waited, he never came back.
At a little after one I took my package of personal belongings and went home. I never saw Mr Chalmers again. I called his club and left word for him to call me but he didn’t and when I called again I learned he had checked out and left no forwarding address.
Lumber was over.
5
‘Nobody’s Too Dull or Too Short for My Sister’
MOST FEMALES BETWEEN THE AGES of thirteen and forty-five feel that being caught at home dateless, especially on a Friday or Saturday night, is a shameful thing like having athlete’s foot. I used to harbour the same silly notion and many’s the lie I’ve told to anyone tactless enough to call up at nine-thirty and ask me what I was doing. “What am I doing?” I’d say, brushing the fudge crumbs off the front of my pyjamas and marking the place in my book. “Oh, just sitting here sipping champagne and smoking opium. My date had trouble with his car.”
Which is why, now that I’ve had time to heal, I’m really grateful to Mary for deciding that along with making me self-supporting, she would use me as a proving ground for dates.
The first time, however, that I heard Mary, who has a great love for people, any people, and is not at all critical, which qualities though laudable in a friend are perfectly awful in a matchmaker, say, “I can’t go but Betty will”, I protested.
Mother said, “Remember, Betsy, a rolling stone . . .” Mary, always quick to seize an opportunity, repeated, “Yes, remember a rolling stone.” Only I could tell, after just a few dates, that her real interpretation of the old saying was, ‘Come out from under that stone and no matter how mossy, you’re a date for Betty.’
As ‘I can’t go but Betty will’ became Mary’s stock answer to any phone call, so ‘Oh, please God, not him!’ was my usual reaction. Mary launched my business and social career the same day. The business career with mining, the social career with Worthington Reed, who when he called and asked Mary to lunch was told. ‘I’ve already got a date but you can take my sister, Betty.’ I was surprised and terribly thrilled when, just before twelve, Worthington appeared in a big wrinkled tweed suit, pipe and raised eyebrow, and said, “Come on, you.” He was very handsome and because of his dress, which was so casual it included a few spots and a hole in the heel of one sock, I decided immediately that he was also very intellectual. ‘Ah, this is the life’, I thought ecstatically as I locked the office door. ‘A job, the city and a brilliant man to take me to lunch.’ Worthington took my arm as we left the elevator in the basement of the building and I swallowed uncontrollably.
The restaurant too was romantic. Dark woodwork, brick floors, real leather on the seats and b
acks of the booths, rich warm smells of toasted rolls, roast beef, wienerschnitzel and coffee, prosperous customers who looked as if they took long lunch hours; and dim lights that hid the darns in the tablecloths and the shaking of my hands as I lit cigarette after cigarette, and tried desperately to assemble enough courage to cast the first stone into the deep pool of silence between Worthington and me.
Frantically I searched around in my mind for something to say. Something sophisticated enough to go with wrinkled tweeds and a pipe. Worthington, who was slouched comfortably back in the booth, seemed very relaxed. He pulled on his pipe and looked over my head at the people entering and leaving the restaurant. Finally, desperately, I said, “My, this looks like real leather.” “Uppa, uppa, uppa”, said Worthington’s pipe. “It feels like real leather too”, I said, running my hand over the seat. Worthington said nothing. “It smells like real leather, too”, I said, leaning over and sniffing. Worthington raised his eyebrow but said nothing.
Some people took the booth next to us. Their shoulders were wet and their faces were rosy and shiny with rain. “Why, it’s raining outside”, I said, as though it hadn’t been for the past five months. Worthington looked at me quizzically. His eyes were a clear French blue with a black ring around the iris. There was a small brown mole in the corner of the right eye. His eyelashes were black and silky. When it seemed suddenly as if he had only one eye, one big eye with two irises, I realized that I had been staring into his eyes and blushed and looked away.
What could I talk about? What besides real leather? I tried to recall some of the brilliant witty things Mary’s intellectual friends had said over the week-end but all I could remember was one remark made by an odd boy, who lay around on the floor under the furniture with his eyes closed, hating everything. He had said, ‘Oh, God, not Bizet! He’s so nauseatingly rococo.’