Skyscraper

by Faith Baldwin

  “Oh, all right.” He was sullen, his male pride wounded. He added eagerly, “But once in a while—every ten days—my party? How about it? Shall we compromise?”

  “Maybe. We’ll see.” Perfectly natural coquetry stirred her to say, of course, “But perhaps in ten days you’ll—”

  “Don’t say it. Not in ten years. Not in ten times ten years!” said Tom.

  She fled laughing into the house, disregarding his ardent eyes, his outstretched hand. Dear Dorothy Dix: When I go out with a young man for the first time, is it proper for me to kiss him? All the boys expect it. Girls who don’t kiss don’t get dates. Little Eva. Dear Little Eva: Of course not. Decent men don’t expect payment for an evening’s good time.

  Tom was decent. Tom was—darling.

  Lynn whistled her way upstairs. She had a quaint way of whistling. Her generous red mouth was not pursed, the whistle was eerie, emanating from an undisturbed face. She went up two flights and entered her room. Nine by something. Bed, bureau, clothes closet, chair. Chintz, a little worn. On the window sill a pot of flowers the Wilkins boy had sent. They were faded. “Poor things,” she said, and poked at the dry soil. She had forgotten to water them.

  Mollie Eames stuck her flyaway head in the door.

  “You sound happy,” said Mollie. “Lend me two bucks, will you? I’m flat broke. Anyone in your frame of mind can afford to be broke. I can’t. Had a heavy date?”

  Lynn replied seriously. “About a hundred and seventy-five pounds, I imagine.”

  “Lord, a truck driver! How about the two?”

  “Help yourself, there’s my purse.”

  “It’s great to be crazy,” said Mollie sourly.

  Crazy? Perhaps. Happy, certainly. Why? Love at first sight? Such things didn’t happen. She’d see him at breakfast tomorrow.

  She wouldn’t like him as well, perhaps, at breakfast tomorrow. He’d sort of taken her off her feet, that’s all. She picked up a book. FINANCIAL SYSTEMS, the gilt lettering read soberly. She opened it. When bonds have a single maturity date—

  She threw it on the floor and went to bed.

  3

  MEN ARE COMPLICATIONS

  SIX WEEKS LATER LYNN, JUST BEFORE CLOSING-time, took the express elevator to the thirtieth floor upon which the Seacoast Company maintained recreation and rest rooms, with a trained nurse in charge for all women workers in the entire building.

  She went there in order to return a book from the loan library also installed by the Seacoast Company for the convenience of its women employees. The lavatories and mirrored washstands were crowded with chattering girls and women. Here friendships were made, here enmities were established, and here the gossip of the day filtered through hundreds of pale or lipsticked mouths, talk of twenty, of forty offices, each with its different activities.

  A cleaning woman went by. Lynn stopped her. “How’s your little boy, Mary?” she asked.

  Mary’s dull eyes brightened; she straightened a wisp of straggly hair. “Much better, miss,” she said gratefully, “and Miss Raines”—she gestured toward the nurse in the rest room—“has promised to come and see him this evening.”

  “That’s nice.” Lynn smiled and went on.

  In the lounge several girls were sitting and talking. The radio was on, full blast. In the rest room the nurse was occupied; a girl was lying there on the long couch. Back of the rest room was the small officelike dispensary.

  Lynn hesitated a moment and then went in. The nurse, a middle-aged woman with a plain, attractive face and startlingly handsome brown eyes, smiled at her. They had struck up an acquaintance some weeks earlier over a particularly good detective story. “Miss Raines?”

  “Yes? What can I do for you?”

  “Nothing. But Mary—her youngster’s sick,” Lynn explained. “She said you were going there tonight.” Lynn fumbled in her bag and put a bill into the nurse’s hands. “It isn’t much, but it might buy them something they need.”

  “I expect it will. That’s good of you. Mary—her husband’s no good, you see. Drinks. Hasn’t a job, of course. She has all she can do to get along.” Miss Raines spoke, tucking the bill into the crisp white uniform pocket.

  The girl on the couch stirred and lifted her heavy lids. She was a tall girl, very beautifully formed, with masses of wheat-gold hair, worn in the prevalent and generally unbecoming bob, but not unbecoming to Jennie Le Grande (née Smith) however, who wore hers bunched and curled on the back of her long white neck and looked like a Manhattan goddess.

  “She’s one of the models from the French wholesale house on the twentieth floor,” explained Miss Raines, low. “She came up here, complained of feeling ill, and fainted, literally, on my hands. She’s been out of it for some time now. She’s all right.”

  Miss Le Grande swung her elegant legs and slender feet to the floor and smoothed back the damp hair from her low broad forehead. “Musta done a flop,” she muttered, disgusted.

  She added—long blue eyes sliding toward the nurse—“That was powerful stuff you handed me. Packed a kick like an army mule.”

  “Spirits of ammonia,” said the nurse, smiling. “Feel all right again?”

  “A little jittery.” Jennie rose and walked toward a mirror on the wall. She sat down abruptly, “Backbone’s jelly,” she complained.

  “You girls don’t eat breakfast properly, or lunch,” diagnosed the nurse severely.

  “We eat all day,” Jennie told her indifferently. “The girl brings us breakfast when we get down to work. This morning I was late. Didn’t get any. Had some lunch, though it didn’t set any too well. Mob of buyers in from the West, had us run ragged, that’s what.” She added glumly and plainly, “I feel like hell!”

  “I’d take you home,” Miss Raines said, worried, “only I promised Mary—and I have to get over to Jersey tonight to see my sister—”

  Her voice trailed off. Lynn nodded to her imperceptibly and, turning, asked the other girl, “Where do you live?”

  “Fifty-eighth, West,” replied Jennie, without much enthusiasm, “and I’d better be ankling along.”

  “That’s right on my way! I was going to take a taxi,” lied Lynn fluently. “I’ll drop you.”

  “Sure you were going to?” asked Jennie shrewdly, and regarded Lynn for the first time, a full direct glance from sleepy, sulky eyes. She was white, under her rouge, pale beneath the coating of lipstick.

  “Sure,” said Lynn. “I’ll look after you. Come along. Think you can make the elevators?”

  Miss Raines said, low, “Thanks a lot,” and Lynn nodded, smiling.

  The rest room was for everybody, all the women. So you met everybody here. Since the building opened Lynn had spoken to dozens of girls who were not employed in the bank. Some she knew by name. But she had never seen Jennie before. Coming up at closing hour or at the noon hour, Lynn always found the rooms crowded, the radio going. Sometimes girls, bringing sandwiches with them, would make up a bridge table for their luncheon hour. Sometimes they danced. Always they employed their free time for anything but resting, Lynn reflected.

  “I don’t approve of it,” said Sarah Dennet firmly, of the rest room. “It’s bound to be a hotbed of gossip! And how do you know whom you’ll meet?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t care. I don’t gossip anyway,” Lynn had laughed in answer. Miss Dennet, in her free moments betook herself to the lounge set aside downstairs for the women officers. But the majority of the women in the building used the building’s conveniences. “Hello Kate,” said Lynn, as she and Jennie went out through the wide door into the hall.

  Kate Marple, filing clerk in Lynn’s section, raised a plucked eyebrow. Where was Lynn going with the model, she wondered.

  “This is certainly white of you,” said Jennie faintly, in the crowded elevator. Lynn looked at her anxiously. Hope she’s not going off again, she thought, and wished, with the shrinking of the healthy lay person from the sick, that Miss Raines had come with them.

  “You’ll feel bette
r in the air,” she suggested, as much to reassure herself as to comfort her companion.

  They reached the street and hailed a cab. Jennie sank back against the upholstery gratefully. She said, “You must let me pay my part,” and peered into her purse. Then she laughed. “I can’t,” she said flatly, “but pay day’s not far off; I’ll meet you up in the rest room then and square myself.”

  “Please,” said Lynn embarrassed. “I was going to taxi anyway.”

  “Well—if you really were,” said Jennie, used to accepting things. She added, “I haven’t seen you before. What’s your name? Work in the building, don’t you?”

  Lynn told her name and her position. Jennie gave hers. “Le Grande,” she said. “I found it in a book. Pretty nifty?” She laughed suddenly. “Over in Brooklyn,” said Jennie, “I’m still Jane Smith!”

  When they reached her destination she asked, completely recovered, “Must you go home now? I’ve got a date but it isn’t till seven-thirty. I’d like you to see my place.”

  Lynn was curious. Moreover, she rather liked this girl with her graceful height and heavy wheaten hair and Viking coloring. She amused her. She was different from anyone she had ever met. And there was no hurry to get back to the club. It was Tom’s night at the Y. She wouldn’t be seeing him tonight. Nights bereft of Tom were pretty blank.

  She climbed the stairs with Jennie. It was a walk-up apartment house, rather dingy. But the little rooms into which Jennie admitted herself and Lynn with a latchkey were pleasant. A bed-and sitting-room, another bedroom, a tiny kitchen, a tiled bath. Very bright and gay with chintz, and fluffy with far too many pillows, and cluttered with long-legged dolls.

  “You live alone?” asked Lynn, looking about. “It’s very attractive.”

  “No, I’ve a girl friend—she’s a model, too, but over in the regular wholesale district—coats and suits,” explained Jennie. “Want a drink? I’ve got some gin.”

  “No, thanks,” said Lynn instantly, and then added, “If you don’t mind—”

  “Don’t bother to apologize or explain,” Jennie said easily. “Lord, my head aches! A little snort wouldn’t do me any harm.” She walked into the kitchenette and came back with a small measure of straight gin in a bar glass in her hand. “Here’s how! And thanks a lot.”

  She went into the bedroom, calling Lynn to follow. She plucked a note from the mirror and frowned at the purple-inked scrawl it contained. “Here’s a swell setup,” said Jennie angrily. “Angie—that’s the girl friend—has walked off with my heavy date for the evening! That leaves me flat!” she mourned. Then she brightened. “Well, it’s all in the day’s work; he’s a washout anyway. Look here, what are you doing this evening? Stay with me, won’t you? We’ll send to the restaurant around the corner and get something to eat. My credit’s good there. Do say you’ll stay,” urged Jennie. “I hate to be alone, it gives me the heebie-jeebies!”

  Lynn stayed. The club was becoming more and more distasteful to her. It was rather fun fussing about the apartment, helping get supper—no, getting all the supper—from the scraps in the ice-box, supplemented by the restaurant service. Jennie drifted about or lay at full length on the bed divan in the living-room, smoking furiously. By the time Lynn left her, a little after ten, she had learned something of Jennie’s background. Twenty-six years old. Born in Brooklyn. A brief stage career—show girl—“But there’s about a million of us out of work now,” Jennie explained, “and this modeling business isn’t so bad. You draw down your forty per and you get your clothes cheap. When they’re taken off the line you buy ‘em, those you want. And sometimes you buy the ones that have been made to your measure—the sample gowns, I mean. Our house does evening and afternoon dresses. I get my suits and coats through Angie—the double-crossing little cat!” said Jennie, with no rancor and less energy. She listened while Lynn, after urging, explained her own work.

  “It’s all too deep for me,” Jennie confessed. “I haven’t the brains. Or the education. Not that I think brains matter getting along. At least they don’t in my line of work. There was a model with us when I first came to Madame Fanchon’s—good-looking,” Jennie admitted, “but not any better-looking than I am. Now she has a couple of Lincolns for the heavy work and a nice little Olds for tea parties. Two sable coats. I suppose she wears one when it’s raining. It wasn’t brains that got her there,” said Jennie.

  “Did she get married?” asked Lynn innocently.

  “Be yourself,” Jennie reproved her, and reached for another cigarette.

  Lynn flushed, furious with herself for her momentary display of unsophistication. She knew all there was to know. Several girls at the club, notably those who went in for the “arts” had vanished, to reappear as visitors in better clothes than they could afford, and not on foot. They weren’t married, either. But Jennie’s recital had been so without whispered eagerness, curiosity, or any of the elements with which the business club had discussed the rise—or fall—of its departed members that Lynn found herself reverting to older and more ignorant days. She said now, firmly, “Well, it doesn’t pay—that sort of thing.”

  “Doesn’t it?” Jennie glinted the long blue eyes at her guest. “I’ll say it does. Better than forty a week anyway. If you’ve sense enough to soak it away,” she added.

  When Lynn left she had a promise from Jennie to come up to the club for dinner some night. “It’s not like anything you ever saw,” Lynn explained, laughing. “You’ll get a big kick out of it.”

  Jennie did, a few days later. “I’d just as soon live in a jail!” she said while she was inspecting Lynn’s quarters after dinner, during which she had withstood the astonished glare of the directress very well indeed.

  “It’s not so hot,” Lynn admitted. “I’m getting pretty fed up with it myself.”

  She found herself meeting Jennie now and then for luncheon in the cafeteria. And then Jennie and the telephone-company engineer—a lanky, attractive lad named Howell—Lynn and Tom went to a movie together. This was repeated at intervals though Tom protested, laughing, after the first occasion: “Where did you pick her up, Lynn? She isn’t your sort.”

  “What’s the matter with her?” Lynn wanted to know, indignant. She liked Jennie. There was something slow and expansive about her, something relaxing. She was almost bovine, in her lazy, effortless movements, in her enjoyment of food, in her tremendous desire never to walk when she could ride, never to stand up when she could sit down, never to sit down when she could lie down. How she kept her amazingly slender figure was more than Lynn could fathom.

  Then too, she never posed, except perhaps when on display and then only physically. Jennie was frankly herself. Take me or leave me, her attitude said, and I don’t give a damn which you do, personally. I’d rather sleep!

  “Nothing,” Tom admitted, “but poor old Slim Howell is crazy about her. He thinks she’s Venus and Mrs. Socrates all rolled into one!”

  “Oh, Tom, not Mrs. Socrates!”

  “Why not? Wasn’t she a smart femme? Well, he thinks Jennie is,” grinned Tom, “and in my opinion she is a perfect vacuum above the neck.” He added, “I like girls with brains.”

  “Meaning me?”

  “You? I don’t know if you have any brains or not,” said Tom, “and I don’t care. I don’t like you, anyway—I’m crazy about you. I love you to death!”

  This was while bus riding, on a freezing night. Lynn snuggled her pointed chin into her collar. Her hand was warm, the hand which Tom held firmly in his overcoat pocket. It wasn’t the first time he had told her that he loved her. It was about the hundred and first. But she wouldn’t take him seriously. Or so she told herself, and him. Without much success, however.

  Miss Dennet asked, “Is it getting serious—young Shepard, I mean?” and asked it with anxiety.

  “Well, of course not,” Lynn answered.

  But it was. It was gay and idiotic and enchanting and sweet and—underneath as serious as life and death. She knew it. She tried to pretend th
at she didn’t know it. She told herself, I like Tom and he likes me. Well perhaps we are crazy about each other. But it doesn’t mean anything. We’ll get over it. Why, I can’t let it mean anything. I don’t want to marry Tom. I don’t want to marry anyone, said Lynn to herself. It’s too much of a risk. And I’m just getting somewhere with my job. Men, sighed Lynn, are complications.

  Yet Tom had not asked her to marry him. It was, as Jennie would say in describing something indefinable, something without words, but nevertheless a fact, “just one of those things.”

  “You’re my girl, aren’t you?” Tom would tell her, ask her, at unexpected moments and in unexpected places. And before Christmas he had kissed her soundly, delightedly, boyishly, and not under the mistletoe either. There are fewer kissing-bridges for unattached and homeless young people in Manhattan than you would think. By homeless I mean just that. Business clubs and Village bedrooms are not homes to people such as Tom and Lynn. And fastidious young people—such as Tom and Lynn—do not embrace avidly in taxicabs unless the compulsion is so strong that they must, or die of it. Once or twice the compulsion was too strong. But they could hold hands, like any other city lovers, in the darkness of the motion-picture theaters, while their eyes were fastened, not quite seeing, on the lighted screen against which the shadows of life and death, love and hatred, formed their simple two-dimensional patterns.

  Lynn thought, sometimes, after Tom had left her, It can’t go on like this—being together a lot, laughing a good deal, talking, kissing, now and then—it can’t go on. I mean, we can’t get married, can we?

  Her people wanted her to come home at Christmas. But the Seacoast Bank was not a boarding-school, it gave no long vacations at holiday seasons. She wrote therefore that she would not be home, and her mother wrote back sorrowfully that she was so disappointed—there would be a tree, and fixin’s, and that after Christmas she and Lynn’s father were really going South.

  Lynn had her Christmas at Sarah Dennet’s, pleasant, homelike, but makeshift with the white-tissue-paper parcels tied with red ribbon, stockings, gloves, a string of beads—and a little table tree, dripping synthetic icicles on the damask cloth. Sarah Dennet and her friend Anna Frank had rather outgrown Christmas. To Sarah it meant persuading people to put bonds in children’s stockings, to turn Santa Claus into a trust fund; while to Anna it denoted a terrific siege of superadvertising, of concentrating the weary mind upon new ways in which to create public demand, public interest, new sprightly methods of loosening public purse strings. They gave to one another costly but sensible gifts and were relieved when it was all over. “Disorganizing,” they said. But Sarah despite an inner reluctance invited Tom for dinner, too, so for a short space there was youth in the quiet, tasteful apartment—and laughter and silly jokes.