Skyscraper

by Faith Baldwin

  “I don’t know.” Sarah signaled the waiter and requested a menu. “Will you have a sweet, Lynn?—Two French pastries then, although I shouldn’t, I’m getting fat. I don’t know,” she repeated, recalling herself to the topic of conversation, “I believe there wasn’t enough to put him through, or Mr. Norton thought he had better start in working. There is no surer way for a young man to learn the banking business, generally, than by becoming secretary to a banker. Only so few do. I think that he—young Shepard—took a secretarial course before finally coming in with us.”

  “But he doesn’t take dictation, does he?” asked Lynn, wide-eyed and unable to picture Tom Shepard making pothooks.

  “No, Miss Mason does that. His job is to meet people and be tactful, I believe,” Sarah told her, “and to keep track of Mr. Norton’s appointments and carry confidential messages for him and all that sort of thing.”

  “General errand boy,” murmured Lynn.

  The French pastry disposed of, Miss Dennet drank her tea and observed her companion.

  “The Wilkins boy pestered you to return home, I imagine,” she ventured.

  “Oh, about as usual.” Lynn flushed a little. “He always thinks when he arrives in town full of the possibilities of the dental-equipment business that I will fall on his neck from sheer admiration—and homesickness. He’s a good lad,” said Lynn carelessly. “He brought me a box of cake and fudge and cookies and never turned a hair, carrying it under his arm as if it were going to explode all the way up, I suppose. But he never arrives without bringing something from mother.”

  “Well, I don’t know him; but I do know his mother,” said Sarah firmly, “and I must say I’d hate to see you go back and be one Mrs. Dental-Equipment Wilkins—”

  “Don’t worry,” Lynn said, and laughed. “Marriage is the last thing that would interest me now, and you know it!”

  Presently they went back to work, stopping first on the main banking floor for Sarah to cash a personal check. The main banking floor was stately and beautiful; murals looked down from the walls. Here the conversation, the footsteps, and the ceaseless activities of the bank seemed subdued to a monotone. Lynn spoke to one of the tellers, waiting for her friend to finish her transaction. Then they went into the lobby together and waited for the elevator. The express lifts flashed by, and Lynn watched them, taking on and discharging their human freight. If you waited by the elevators long enough you saw rather exciting people: the artists of the air being transported to the broadcasting studies, seven stories of them, in the tower. You saw Broadway actors and actresses, Metropolitan Opera singers, you saw motion-picture stars and orchestra leaders, crooners and daily dieters, lecturers and saxophonists, people whose following was purely local or people whose names were traditional for their work all over the country.

  “There goes Gloria Faye,” whispered Lynn, clutching Sarah’s arm. “She’s on the air tonight. Perhaps she is going up to rehearse.”

  Gloria—Radio’s Sweetheart—in a summer ermine coat and a little helmet of felt and fur swept with her accompanist into the metal cage. Sighing a very little, Lynn turned back to the local elevator and stepped in.

  But when she stepped out again that evening she perceived, lounging by the door, feet planted sturdily upon the floor and entirely unmoved by the surge and press of people about him, one Mr. Thomas Shepard, confidential secretary to the vice-president, waiting, as was evident from his practically shouted greeting, for her.

  “Here you are,” remarked Tom amiably, and took her by the arm. “Where would you like to eat?”

  He had the audacious eyes of self-confidence. He won assurance lightly, without offense, as if it were a fresh unfading flower in the buttonhole of his well-cut unobtrusive blue serge. Lynn was distressed to find herself coloring, stammering even.

  “Why—why—”

  “Where do we eat?” he inquired again sternly.

  “But—”

  “But me no buts, why me no whys,” he told her, and took her arm with the gesture of a man who knows his own mind. A girl not much older than Lynn, hurrying past on her way home to cook supper for her husband—who was out of a job—glanced at them with cynical understanding and a little envy. She thought, Poor idiots! And went on her way, small, alert, redheaded. She forgot the couple by the elevator doors, rushing through those of bronze. She thought, as addled as the White Rabbit, Oh, dear, oh, dear, I shall be late again!

  Lynn, unaware of that fleeting scrutiny, said, involuntarily keeping pace with Shepard as they moved away from the clicking doors, “You were awfully sure of me weren’t you?”

  He denied it, laughing, “No, your error. Awfully sure of myself; of what I want. I couldn’t wait till breakfast. Look here”—he stopped dead, heedless of the people who were thronging against him and who bounced back startled, from the impact with his exceedingly solid flesh and bone, like rubber balls—“look here—you don’t dislike me or anything, do you? I mean, we were introduced properly and all that—”

  “Even if you didn’t remember—!”

  “Check,” he admitted, imperturbably. “Am I—don’t spare my feelings—am I the sort of fellow no nice girl ever goes out to dinner with?” he inquired with a total lack of syntax but complete sincerity.

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” she said, surrendering.

  Now they were hurtling through the doors, now they were out on the street. Tom advanced to the curb and signaled a taxi. Lynn asked thriftily, “Can’t we walk—or take a bus?”

  “Oh, God, a practical woman!” He helped her into the cab and settled himself beside her. He said, “This is an occasion. After you get to know me better I’ll permit you to save me money.”

  His voice was grave; his eyes danced. She felt suddenly self-conscious. What an idiot he must think her. No, he did not think her an idiot. He thought her, and she knew it, a very pretty girl. He said so, immediately. He said aloud something he had been thinking ever since he had seen her at the cafeteria counter, “It’s a shrieking shame that pretty girls have to work.”

  “What about homely ones?” asked Lynn, delighted.

  He liked her. He liked her a lot. His kind of girl, cute as a trick, a regular honey, intelligent as the devil, a sense of humor. He liked her the better for not exclaiming, Oh, Mr. Shepard, do you really think I’m pretty? or something equally inane. Not that girls ever said that, exactly, nowadays, but they managed to convey the impression. He grinned cheerfully. He answered, lighting a cigarette and offering her his case.

  “Have a cigarette? Homely girls, well, I’m sorry for them, as a matter of course. But, personally, I don’t give a hoot whether they work or not!”

  Not many men so plainly speak the mind of all men.

  “No, thanks. I don’t smoke much. After coffee, perhaps.”

  “That’s good,” he put the case away.

  She asked curiously, “You don’t mean to say that you object?” She eyed him as if he might prove to be a museum piece.

  “Well, no, why should I? Personally, I don’t like stained fingers,” he admitted. “I meant that girls who have to have their cigarettes in taxis, in theater lobbies, and on top of buses are so expensive! You see, even if they smoke your brand,” he confided engagingly, “they always feel it their duty to order another kind!”

  “You haven’t much use for girls?”

  “Not anymore. In the plural,” said Tom cheerfully.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” asked the driver suddenly.

  They regarded him blankly. His face was appallingly ugly; it was pockmarked. He was so hideous that his photograph, before them, did him complete justice. He looked like a racketeer, a gunman, a thug; or he looked like the general conception of these useful gentlemen. As a matter of fact he was a family man with a strong religious sense and a great reader. Tom remembered vaguely that when, on netting his fares, the driver had mechanically inquired, “Where to?” he had merely waved a vague hand in the downtown direction.

  Laughte
r in the taxi. The driver grinned, sympathetic to youth. He knew how it was. He said over his shoulder, steering deftly in and out of cabs, cars, trucks, and delivery wagons in the usual rush-hour huddle, “I had the missus out in the cab, last week and didn’t turn down me flag. I got a ticket.”

  They commiserated with him. Tom said, “I know a little place in the Village.” Leaning forward, he gave the address.

  “Okay,” agreed the driver amiably.

  Off Fifth Avenue, the little place. Up a flight of brownstone steps. Small tables, dim light, a radio, a fat proprietor in a morning coat. “Haven’t seen you for a long time, Mr. Shepard.”

  “Cocktail? They’re very good,” promised Tom. “Right off the boat. Fishing smack, Staten Island ferryboat, passage to Welfare Island. Who knows?”

  When the small frosted glasses came, Tom raised his and looked at her over the rim. “Here’s mud in your eye,” he said sentimentally, “and now I’ll let Mike there order, it’s less trouble. You like veal, don’t you? Well, if you don’t, you’ll learn. Broccoli? I thought so. And some of that fluffy stuff in glasses, with a kick in it. And coffee. Large, I hope.” He regarded her anxiously. “Don’t say you’re a demitasse girl,” he implored her. “Be bourgeois like me!”

  She confessed to a liking for large coffee with, no less, hot milk and cream. “Swell,” said her host in great contentment. “Now that’s done. Tell me all about yourself, so I can reciprocate. I promise to curb my impatience while you spin your yarn. Then I’ll tell one.”

  “There isn’t much,” she told him, laughing, and spoke briefly of home and her people, of her boredom at the university, of her sense that she was wasting time. And of her arrival in New York, Sarah Dennet’s protégée.

  “Do you live with her?” Tom asked, attacking the antipasto.

  “No.” Lynn pushed a spineless red rim of something about on her plate and eventually ate it, abstractedly. “No, I live in a business club for girls.”

  “Sounds God-awful,” commented Tom. “Hen house or chicken coop?”

  “Chicken coop, I fancy. They throw you out when you’re thirty.”

  Tom was silent, visualizing thousands of women of thirty hurtling down the steps of the club, fleeing homeless into the night. “Hard luck,” he said, “but you have about fifteen years to go, haven’t you?”

  She replied primly, “I’m twenty-two.”

  “I’m twenty-three,” said Tom in a superior manner.

  They viewed each other across the table. Forty-five years between them. The waiter removed the antipasto and brought on the minestrone. “It looks like such a lot!” said Lynn, regarding it with some trepidation.

  “Elegant soup,” praised Tom. “Times when I’m broke I order me minestrone, and it stays by me all day. Spaghetti is a snare and a delusion. You eat it until it comes out of your ears, but three hours later you could devour the side of a barn. Minestrone sticks. Probably glue in it,” he suggested helpfully.

  He wanted to know all about the club. She told him—sketchily. Yes, they had meals there, breakfast, cafeteria style, and dinner. Dinner was chicken Sundays and hashed chicken Mondays, and lamb on Tuesdays and lamb hash on Wednesdays.

  “Don’t tell me any more,” begged Tom, “you poor kid!”

  But she went on, laughing a little, “We’ve a radio. And a phonograph. We have to be in at eleven-thirty or do a lot of expert explaining. We’ve a parlor where we can receive gentlemen visitors.” She looked at him, her head a little on one side, gray eyes shining through the black lashes. “The visitors have to meet the directress, and there’s an awful rush to see who gets the couch in the corner if more than one girl is entertaining. It’s great fun,” she added, remembering young Mr. Wilkins and one or two others.

  Tom called upon his maker. He said, sighing, “Well, we’ll spend our time at the movies then. Do you skate? That’s nice of you. We’ll skate. Bus ride. Now and then we’ll see a good show. Oh,” mourned Tom gustily, “oh, for the good old days when every girl had a back parlor for her personal use, and the family could sit in the kitchen!”

  This was skimming over surfaces, and they contemplated each other briefly, confronted so soon by the changing standards and living conditions for young people, who at twenty-two and twenty-three like each other very much and do not possess back parlors and complaisant parents.

  “Your turn,” Lynn reminded him.

  “No, not yet. What about this bank business? You don’t really like it, do you?” he asked her.

  “I’m crazy about it!”

  He said, a little self-consciously, “I didn’t listen, I’m afraid, when your department was first explained to me so I asked old Gunboat about it—”

  “Gunboat?”

  “Norton. Did you ever look at his shoes?—I asked him today. He was tickled silly. He thought I was beginning to take an interest in the organization. In a way he was right. Do you mean to tell me that you expect to sit at a desk for the next forty years, looking up annual dues of clubs and things and trying to remember that the Racquet Club is not in Chicago nor yet in Red Hook and that the Junior League isn’t a church society?” he demanded.

  “Of course, I don’t expect to,” she told him. “There are other jobs. Better ones. I’m mad about the work. I’m going to start courses at Columbia, nights, in February; going to learn all I can. I like the whole atmosphere of the place.”

  “That’s more than I do. Oh, well,” he shrugged, “what’s the use of bleating? I couldn’t go on with what I wanted to do, and that’s that. Only”—he grinned—“I’ve been taking night courses too.”

  “Oh, Tom!” she regarded him, delighted. “Banking?”

  “No, radio, at the Y. M. C. A.”

  “Radio!”

  “It all comes natural to me,” he confessed, “Gee, I’m nuts about it. I could eat it up! I started to get my M. E. degree at Sheff, you know. Radio! Girl, I’ve a set I built myself in my rooms that will get anything from here to heaven, and sometimes when the static is bad, a bit of the other place, too. You’ll have to come and listen to it,” he told her.

  She said instantly, “I’d love to.” She asked, “I suppose you’re always tearing it to pieces? Father has one. It’s his only hobby. It never works because he is always doing something to it.”

  “I know a guy up in the UBC control room,” Tom told her. “I sneak up there a lot, and, gosh, it’s great stuff.” His eyes were suddenly no longer gay; they were wistful. He said, “Well, such is life. It’s always the way. Rising young banker longs to be a radio-service man.”

  She argued with animation, “But—banking? That’s constructive, marvelous—necessary. A grand job, I think. Your finger on the very pulse of the world.”

  “Like a ticker tape?” he demanded. “Not for me! Radio, isn’t that constructive too?”

  His eyes were blazing with enthusiasm. He ruffled his hair so that, more unruly than ever, it stood up in crests and waves, untidy, attractive. He looked, she thought, about ten years old. She said, dissatisfied, “Somehow I don’t see you as an announcer.”

  “Oh—announcing—” He dismissed it with a wave of his big hand. “I don’t want to do that.” He grinned. “Me! Imagine trying to pronounce jawbreakers and getting dirty letters: ‘Dear sir, last night you said bin instead of bean!’ Hell’s bells, that’s the bunk, not but what some of ‘em aren’t swell guys at that. No, but the control room—the lab—that’s where I’d like to be, digging out new ways, short cuts, learning, discovering.”

  He was off. By the time they had reached the fluffy stuff in a glass she knew more—and less—about radio than she had ever known. Her head whirled. Coils, condensers, high frequency, ground circuits, filaments, oscillation—was there no end to this jargon which contained such mysteries as Nemos and cranking gains? She felt as if she had been transported to a new world and there, had heard an entirely alien language.

  He said, “You’re bored to death!” A mild, but sorrowful accusation.

&nb
sp; “No, I’m not. I don’t understand half of what you’re saying,” she admitted, “but go on, I like it!”

  It was perfectly true. She did like it. She liked watching him; liked the grave twisting of his mouth, the changing color of his enthusiastic eyes, the gestures of the big hands which looked so awkward and which must be so deft, so adept with wires and little finicking important things.

  Presently over coffee, large, over their companionable cigarettes, he was telling her that he lived in a “dump” not far from where they were sitting, with another man, an engineer with the telephone company. He was telling her of the Long Island town where he had been born, where he had gone to high school. “Used to be all farms, that town; my great-granddad owned most of ‘em. Didn’t hold on though, more’s the pity.” Telling her of fishing in Peconic Bay, of swimming, of his first stolen airplane flight with a commercial pilot. “Pancaked right into mother’s hen house. No, we weren’t hurt, but maybe I didn’t get a trimming!”

  It was past ten o’clock when he deposited her on the narrow brownstone steps of the club. “Tomorrow night?” he asked. “And I’ll see you at breakfast?”

  She stood a step above him and looked down; hatless, he returned her regard under the dim light shining from the glass of the hall door. “No,” she answered, “I mean, yes, for breakfast, but not tomorrow night; I promised one of the girls I’d go to the movies with her.”

  “Wednesday then?”

  “I’m going to dinner at Miss Dennet’s.”

  “Thursday?” He was grave and stubborn.

  She gave in, laughing. “Thursday, then,” she agreed, “but no more celebrations. We’ll go somewhere very cheap, and fifty-fifty.”

  “Well, I guess not!”

  “Please?” She bent toward him slightly. He could see the clear shining pallor of her skin, the satin texture of her lips, the dark widow’s peak pointing the little triangle on her forehead. “Please—if we’re to be friends?” She added bluntly, “You can’t afford to take me out all the time. This way is better. I won’t go unless you say you understand.”