The 42nd Parallel

  Working at Dreyfus and Carroll’s was quite different from working at Mrs. Robinson’s. There were mostly men in the office. Mr. Dreyfus was a small thinfaced man with a small black moustache and small black twinkly eyes and a touch of accent that gave him a distinguished foreign diplomat manner. He carried yellow wash gloves and a yellow cane and had a great variety of very much tailored overcoats. He was the brains of the firm, Jerry Burnham said. Mr. Carroll was a stout redfaced man who smoked many cigars and cleared his throat a great deal and had a very oldtimey Southern Godblessmysoul way of talking. Jerry Burnham said he was the firm’s bay window. Jerry Burnham was a wrinklefaced young man with dissipated eyes who was the firm’s adviser in technical and engineering matters. He laughed a great deal, always got into the office late, and for some reason took a fancy to Janey and used to joke about things to her while he was dictating. She liked him, though the dissipated look under his eyes scared her off a little. She’d have liked to have talked to him like a sister, and gotten him to stop burning the candle at both ends. Then there was an elderly accountant, Mr. Sills, a shriveled man who lived in Anacostia and never said a word to anybody. At noon he didn’t go out for lunch, but sat at his desk eating a sandwich and an apple wrapped in waxed paper which he carefully folded afterwards and put back in his pocket. Then there were two fresh errandboys and a little plainfaced typist named Miss Simonds who only got twelve a week. All sorts of people in every sort of seedyrespectable or Peacock Alley clothes came in during the day and stood round in the outer office listening to Mr. Carroll’s rich boom from behind the groundglass door. Mr. Dreyfus slipped in and out without a word, smiling faintly at his acquaintances, always in a great mysterious hurry. At lunch in the little cafeteria or at a soda-fountain Janey ’ud tell Alice all about it and Alice would look up at her admiringly. Alice always waited for her in the vestibule at one. They’d arranged to go out then because there was less of a crowd. Neither of them ever spent more than twenty cents, so lunch didn’t take them very long and they’d have time to take a turn round Lafayette Square or sometimes round the White House grounds before going back to the office.

  There was one Saturday night when she had to work late to finish up typing the description of an outboard motor that had to be in at the Patent Office first thing Monday morning. Everybody else had left the office. She was making out the complicated technical wording as best she could, but her mind was on a postcard showing the Christ of the Andes she’d gotten from Joe that day. All it said was:

  “To hell with Uncle Sam’s tin ships. Coming home soon.”

  It wasn’t signed but she knew the writing. It worried her. Jerry Burnham sat at the telephone switchboard going over the pages as she finished them. Now and then he went out to the washroom; when he came back each time a hot breath of whisky wafted across the office. Janey was nervous. She typed till the little black letters squirmed before her eyes. She was worried about Joe. How could he be coming home before his enlistment was up? Something must be the matter. And Jerry Burnham moving restlessly round on the telephone girl’s seat made her uncomfortable. She and Alice had talked about the danger of staying in an office alone with a man like this. Late like this and drinking, a man had just one idea.

  When she handed him the next to the last sheet his eye, bright and moist, caught hers. “I bet you’re tired, Miss Williams,” he said. “It’s a darned shame to keep you in like this and Saturday night too.” “It’s quite all right, Mr. Burnham,” she said icily and her fingers chirruped. “It’s the damned old baywindow’s fault. He chewed the rag so much about politics all day, nobody could get any work done.” “Well, it doesn’t matter now,” said Janey. “Nothing matters any more. . . . It’s almost eight o’clock. I had to pass up a date with my best girl . . . or thereabouts. I bet you passed up a date too, Miss Williams.” “I was going to meet another girl, that’s all.” “Now I’ll tell one . . .” He laughed so easily that she found herself laughing too.

  When the last page was done and in the envelope, Janey got up to get her hat. “Look, Miss Williams, we’ll drop this in the mail and then you’d better come and have a bite with me.”

  Going down in the elevator Janey intended to excuse herself and go home but somehow she didn’t and found herself, everything aflutter inside of her, sitting coolly down with him in a French restaurant on H Street.

  “Well, what do you think of the New Freedom, Miss Williams?” asked Jerry Burnham with a laugh after he’d sat down. He handed her the menu. “Here’s the scorecard . . . Let your conscience be your guide.”

  “Why, I hardly know, Mr. Burnham.”

  “Well, I’m for it, frankly. I think Wilson’s a big man . . . Nothing like change anyway, the best thing in the world, don’t you think so? Bryan’s a big bellowing blatherskite but even he represents something and even Josephus Daniels filling the navy with grapejuice. I think there’s a chance we may get back to being a democracy . . . Maybe there won’t have to be a revolution; what do you think?”

  He never waited for her to answer a question, he just talked and laughed all by himself.

  When Janey tried to tell Alice about it afterwards the things Jerry Burnham said didn’t seem so funny, nor the food so good nor everything so jolly. Alice was pretty bitter about it. “Oh, Janey, how could you go out late at night with a drunken man and to a place like that and here I was crazy anxious . . . You know a man like that has only one idea . . . I declare I think it was heartless and light . . . I wouldn’t have thought you capable of such a thing.” “But, Alice, it wasn’t like that at all,” Janey kept saying, but Alice cried and went round looking hurt for a whole week; so that after that Janey kept off the subject of Jerry Burnham. It was the first disagreement she’d ever had with Alice and it made her feel bad.

  Still she got to be friends with Jerry Burnham. He seemed to like taking her out and having her listen to him talk. Even after he’d thrown up his job at Dreyfus and Carroll, he sometimes called for her Saturday afternoons to take her to Keith’s. Janey arranged a meeting with Alice out in Rock Creek Park but it wasn’t much of a success. Jerry set the girls up to tea at the old stone mill. He was working for an engineering paper and writing a weekly letter for The New York Sun. He upset Alice by calling Washington a cesspool and a sink of boredom and saying he was rotting there and that most of the inhabitants were dead from the neck up anyway. When he put them on the car to go back to Georgetown Alice said emphatically that young Burnham was not the sort of boy a respectable girl ought to know. Janey sat back happily in the seat of the open car, looking out at trees, girls in summer dresses, men in straw hats, mailboxes, storefronts sliding by and said, “But, Alice, he’s smart as a whip. . . . Gosh, I like brainy people, don’t you?” Alice looked at her and shook her head sadly and said nothing.

  That same afternoon they went to the Georgetown hospital to see Popper. It was pretty horrible. Mommer and Janey and the doctor and the wardnurse knew that he had cancer of the bladder and couldn’t live very long but they didn’t admit it even to themselves. They had just moved him into a private room where he would be more comfortable. It was costing lots of money and they’d had to put a second mortgage on the house. They’d already spent all Janey’s savings that she had in a bankaccount of her own against a rainy day. That afternoon they had to wait quite a while. When the nurse came out with a glass urinal under a towel Janey went in alone. “Hello, Popper,” she said with a forced smile. The smell of disinfectant in the room sickened her. Through the open window came warm air of sunwilted trees, drowsy Sundayafternoon noises, the caw of a crow, a distant sound of traffic. Popper’s face was drawn in and twisted to one side. His big moustaches looked pathetically silky and white. Janey knew that she loved him better than anybody else in the world . . . His voice was feeble but fairly firm. “Janey, I’m in drydock, girl, and I guess I’ll never . . . you know better’n I do, the sonsobitches won’t tell me . . . Say, tell me about Joe. You hear from him, don’t you? I wish he hadn’t joined t
he navy; no future for a boy there without pull higher up; but I’m glad he went to sea, takes after me . . . I’d been three times round the Horn in the old days before I was twenty. That was before I settled down in the towboat business, you understand . . . But I been thinkin’ here lyin’ in bed that Joe done just what I’d ’a’ done, a chip of the old block, and I’m glad of it. I don’t worry about him, but I wish you girls was married an’ off my hands. I’d feel easier. I don’t trust girls nowadays with these here anklelength skirts an’ all that.” Popper’s eyes traveled all over her with a chilly feeble gleam that made her throat stiffen when she tried to speak. “I guess I can take care of myself,” she said. “You got to take care of me now. I done my best by you kids. You don’t know what life is, none of you, been sheltered and now you ship me off to die in the hospital.” “But, Popper, you said yourself you thought it would be best to go where you’d get better care.” “I don’t like that night nurse, Janey, she handles me too rough . . . You tell ’em down at the office.”

  It was a relief when it was time to go. She and Alice walked along the street without saying anything. Finally Janey said, “For goodness’ sake, Alice, don’t get sulky. If you only knew how I hated it all too . . . oh, goodness, I wish . . .” “What do you wish, Janey?” “Oh, I dunno.”

  July was hot that summer, in the office they worked in a continual whir of electric fans, the men’s collars wilted and the girls kept themselves overplastered with powder; only Mr. Dreyfus still looked cool and crisply tailored as if he’d just stepped out of a bandbox. The last day of the month Janey was sitting a minute at her desk getting up energy to go home along the simmering streets when Jerry Burnham came in. He had his shirtsleeves rolled above the elbow and white duck pants on and carried his coat. He asked her how her father was and said he was all excited about the European news and would have to take her out to supper to talk to somebody soothing. “I’ve got a car belongs to Bugs Dolan and I haven’t any driver’s license, but I guess we can sneak round the Speedway and get cooled off all the same.” She tried to refuse because she ought to go home to supper and Alice was always so sulky when she went out with Jerry, but he could see that she really wanted to come and insisted.

  They both sat in the front seat of the Ford and dropped their coats in the back. They went once round the Speedway but the asphalt was like a griddle. The trees and the brown stagnant river stewed in late afternoon murk like meat and vegetables in a pot. The heat from the engine suffocated them. Jerry, his face red, talked incessantly about war brewing in Europe and how it would be the end of civilization and the signal for a general workingclass revolution and how he didn’t care and anything that got him out of Washington, where he was drinking himself silly with his brains addled by the heat and the Congressional Record, would be gravy to him, and how tired he was of women who didn’t want anything but to get money out of him or parties or marriage or some goddam thing or other and how cool and soothing it was to talk to Janey who wasn’t like that.

  It was too hot so they put off driving till later and went to the Willard to get something to eat. He insisted on going to the Willard because he said he had his pockets full of money and would just spend it anyhow and Janey was very much awed because she’d never been in a big hotel before and felt she wasn’t dressed for it and said she was afraid she’d disgrace him and he laughed and said it couldn’t be done. They sat in the big long gilt dining room and Jerry said it looked like a millionaire morgue and the waiter was very polite and Janey couldn’t find what she wanted to eat on the big bill-of-fare and took a salad. Jerry made her take a gin fizz because he said it was cooling; it made her feel lightheaded and tall and gawky. She followed his talk breathless the way she used to tag along after Joe and Alec down to the carbarns when she was little.

  After supper they drove round some more and Jerry got quiet and she felt constrained and couldn’t think of what to say. They went way out Rhode Island Avenue and circled round back by the Old Soldiers’ Home. There was no air anywhere and the staring identical streetlights went by on either side, lighting segments of monotonous unrustling trees. Even out on the hills there was not a breath stirring.

  Out in the dark roads beyond the streetlamps it was better. Janey lost all sense of direction and lay back breathing in an occasional patch of freshness from a cornfield or a copse of woods. In a spot where a faint marshy dampness almost cool drifted across the road Jerry suddenly stopped the car and leaned over and kissed her. Her heart began to beat very fast. She wanted to tell him not to, but she couldn’t.

  “I didn’t mean to, but I can’t help it,” he whispered. “It’s living in Washington undermines the will . . . Or maybe I’m in love with you, Janey. I don’t know . . . Let’s sit in the back seat where it’s cooler.” Weakness started in the pit of her stomach and welled up through her. As she stepped out he caught her in his arms. She let her head droop on his shoulder, her lips against his neck. His arms were burning hot round her shoulders, she could feel his ribs through his shirt pressing against her. Her head started going round in a reek of tobacco and liquor and male sweat. His legs began pressing up to hers. She yanked herself away and got into the back seat. She was trembling. He was right after her. “No, no,” she said. He sat down beside her with his arm round her waist. “Lez have a cigarette,” he said in a shaky voice.

  Smoking gave her something to do, made her feel even with him. The two granulated red ends of the cigarettes glowed side by side.

  “Do you mean you like me, Jerry?” “I’m crazy about you, kid.” “Do you mean you . . . ?” “Want to marry you . . . Why the hell not? I dunno . . . Suppose we were engaged?” “You mean you want me to marry you?” “If you like . . . But don’t you understand the way a feller feels . . . a night like this . . . the smell of the swamp . . . God, I’d give anything to have you.”

  They’d smoked out their cigarettes. They sat a long time without saying a word. She could feel the hairs on his bare arm against her bare arm.

  “I’m worried about my brother Joe . . . He’s in the navy, Jerry, and I’m afraid he’s going to desert or something . . . I think you’d like him. He’s a wonderful baseball player.”

  “What made you think of him? Do you feel that way towards me? Love’s a swell thing; goddam it, don’t you realize it’s not the way you feel towards your brother?”

  He put his hand on her knee. She could feel him looking at her in the dark. He leaned over and kissed her very gently. She liked his lips gentle against hers that way. She was kissing them. She was falling through centuries of swampy night. His hot chest was against her breasts bearing her down. She would cling to him bearing her down through centuries of swampy night. Then all at once in a cold spasm she felt sick, choking for breath like drowning. She began to fight him. She got her leg up and pushed him hard in the groin with her knee.

  He let go of her and got out of the car. She could hear him walking up and down the road in the dark behind her. She was trembling and scared and sick. After a while he got in, switched on the light and drove on without looking at her. He was smoking a cigarette and little sparks came from it as he drove.

  When he got to the corner of M Street below the Williams house in Georgetown he stopped and got out and opened the door for her. She got out not knowing what to say, afraid to look at him.

  “I suppose you think I ought to apologize to you for being a swine,” he said.

  “Jerry, I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I’ll be damned if I will . . . I thought we were friends. I might have known there wouldn’t be a woman in this muck hole with a human spark in her . . . I suppose you think you ought to hold out for the wedding bells. Go ahead; that’s your business. I can get what I want with any nigger prostitute down the street here . . . Good night.” Janey didn’t say anything. He drove off. She went home and went to bed.

  All that August her father was dying, full of morphine, in the Georgetown hospital. The papers came out every day with big headlin
es about war in Europe, Liége, Louvain, Mons. Dreyfus and Carroll’s was in a fever. Big lawsuits over munitions patents were on. It began to be whispered about that the immaculate Mr. Dreyfus was an agent of the German government. Jerry came to see Janey one noon to apologize for having been so rude that night and to tell her that he had a job as a war correspondent and was leaving in a week for the front. They had a good lunch together. He talked about spies and British intrigue and pan-Slavism and the assassination of Jaurès and the socialist revolution and laughed all the time and said everything was well on its way to ballyhack. She thought he was wonderful and wanted to say something about their being engaged and felt very tender towards him and scared he’d be killed, but suddenly it was time for her to go back to the office and neither of them had brought the matter up. He walked back to the Riggs Building with her and said good-bye and gave her a big kiss right there in front of everybody and ran off promising he’d write from New York. At that moment Alice came up on her way to Mrs. Robinson’s and Janey found herself telling her that she was engaged to be married to Jerry Burnham and that he was going to Europe to the war as a war correspondent.

  When her father died in early September it was a great relief to all concerned. Only, coming back from Oak Hill Cemetery all the things she’d wanted as a girl came back to her, and the thought of Alec, and everything seemed so unhappy that she couldn’t stand it. Her mother was very quiet and her eyes were very red and she kept saying that she was so glad that there’d be room on the lot for her to be buried in Oak Hill too. She’d have hated for him to be buried in any other cemetery than Oak Hill. It was so beautiful and all the nicest people in Georgetown were buried there.

  With the insurance money Mrs. Williams did over the house and fixed up the two top floors to rent out as apartments. That was the chance Janey had been waiting for for so long to get a place of her own and she and Alice got a room in a house on Massachusetts Avenue near the Carnegie Library, with cooking privileges. So one Saturday afternoon she phoned from the drugstore for a taxicab and set out with her suitcase and trunk and a pile of framed pictures from her room on the seat beside her. The pictures were two color prints of Indians by Remington, a Gibson girl, a photograph of the battleship Connecticut in the harbor of Villefranche that Joe had sent her and an enlarged photograph of her father in uniform standing at the wheel of an imaginary ship against a stormy sky furnished by a photographer in Norfolk, Va. Then there were two unframed colorprints by Maxfield Parrish that she’d bought recently and a framed snapshot of Joe in baseball clothes. The little picture of Alec she’d wrapped among her things in her suitcase. The cab smelt musty and rumbled along the streets. It was a crisp autumn day, the gutters were full of dry leaves. Janey felt scared and excited as if she were starting out all alone on a journey.