Skyscraper

by Faith Baldwin

“Do you mean on her knees?”

  “No, by ’em. As far as I can make out she’s only a fair typist and won’t get much further. But the men in whatever office she’s in like her. See?”

  Lynn had been to Mara’s apartment once or twice and had met Bill, a sulky, stocky young man, terribly aware that it was Mara’s earnings and not his own that were paying rent and grocery bills. Lynn had come away feeling sorry for them both.

  That evening while they were dressing to go out, she spoke to Jennie of her encounter with Mara. Jennie nodded her wise, blond head.

  “Sure, was it a tall guy, sort of T.B.-looking?” And at Lynn’s nod, she went on, “That’s her boss’s nephew, Frank Houghton. She told me about him. He’s been out in Arizona with his wife and kids and now he’s back, working for his uncle. Mara says his wife doesn’t understand him.” Jennie laughed. “Sure, that’s what they all say. He’s been giving her a rush on Bill’s lodge nights and all. His wife writes or something, and sticks around home—they live in Flushing—and looks after the kids.”

  “She must be crazy!” said Lynn indignantly.

  “Who, the wife? Oh, you mean Mara. Crazy like a trained seal. She knows darned well she wouldn’t get anywhere in business without the old S.A. and she doesn’t give a whoop how she holds her job just as long as she holds it. I don’t mean she’d go very far. She hasn’t,” Jennie explained scornfully, “the guts. She’ll just shilly-shally around, and if she’s ever asked to come across she’ll faint, and when she comes to, she’ll yap that she’s a married woman, and ‘Oh, how could you misjudge me so!’ Bill’s a sorehead of course, but I don’t blame him. It isn’t so keen for him, you know, hanging around the flat, waiting for her to come home with the weekly wage.”

  Lynn thought, but all men who marry girls who keep on working don’t take that attitude. Yet she wondered. And after a moment, fluffing powder on her nose, inquired, “But suppose she really likes this Houghton or whoever he is?”

  “Not she. She likes his pull, that’s all. Besides, what’s it to us if she falls by the wayside?” inquired Jennie inelegantly.

  Nothing, Lynn supposed. But she rather liked Mara Burt, the little she had seen of her. She wished somehow that she could be warned. For it was a losing game she was playing. Jennie would laugh at that. Sarah, if consulted, would remark merely, “Apparently the girl has no ambition, no intelligence; she is just ten mechanical fingers and for the rest—conscious sex appeal.” Tom, who had met Mara and her husband, would shrug. She thought, I wonder what David Dwight would say? She would rather like his opinion; some day she’d ask him what he thought, as a purely hypothetical case.

  Jennie was talking about Dwight’s party. She was enchanted. She planned to put some money in the little number 543. “You know, Lynn, the one I told you about—alternate white and black ruffles, simple, swell, stunning. Hope he’s asked a lot of very old men, lousy with money, who have reached the stage where they’re perfectly satisfied to hold your hand!”

  “Lord,” commented Lynn honestly, “what a terrible prospect!”

  “You’re young yet,” said Jennie.

  The party that evening with Tom was a Dutch-treat affair at an unfashionable barroom. Slim was there, and some of the UBC men. Slim took Jennie; there were other girls. Nice, happy-go-lucky crowd, not very noisy but very genial, talking inexplicable shop between drinks, food, and dances. Tom was perfectly happy. “Gee, you look sweet,” he told Lynn, “like strawberry ice cream. I could eat you up!”

  She wore the dusky pink dress. Strawberry ice cream—and a rose-quartz pagoda! She thought wistfully that it was a pity a person as young and dear, as thrilling and beloved as Tom, could not shape his exciting voice into the quaint conceits and phrases that were like little windows opening—as could, say, a man like David Dwight. But of course if Tom talked like David Dwight he wouldn’t be—Tom.

  Guileful girl, she waited to tell Tom of Dwight’s proposed party until this particular party was halfway through, and Tom, his hair ruffled and his eyes bright had just sung, with several others, the bulldog song—“Wow! Wow! Wow!” sang Tom, slamming his glass on the table.

  She has thought he would rebel at the idea. But now, when his humor was expansive, now was the time to tell him.

  She did so. He replied casually, “Swell—soup-and-fish, I suppose? Well, with a sponge and press I can get by.”

  So, after all, he wouldn’t mind going. She was amazed to find herself slightly disappointed. Or was it that just at this moment and in this humor he didn’t mind?

  But the next day he didn’t mind either. Stopping at her desk—“Nice,” he said carelessly, “of the old boy to ask me. Think how it will impress Gunboat.”

  He didn’t mind because he’d be there with her. Together.

  8

  AFTER LAUGHING, TEARS

  RESPLENDENT, HE ARRIVED AT THE GIRLS’ APARTMENT in time to escort Jennie and Lynn—in Dwight’s car—to the party. He leaned back against the upholstery and muttered words of contentment. “This is the life,” said Tom, and added glumly, “only when you get, it you’re too old to enjoy it.”

  Lynn said, laughing, “David Dwight isn’t too old—he isn’t old at all. You have such comic ideas about age, Tom. Anybody over thirty looks like Methuselah to you.”

  Tom digested this in an unhappy silence. She didn’t think Dwight old then. Well, hell’s bells, he wasn’t, of course. But too old for Lynn.

  Jennie shook out her black and white flounces. She looked very handsome, hair like daffodils, eyes like bluebells, Lynn’s old onyx and gold earrings swinging from her ears. She said, “We’re in for a large evening, I think.”

  Lynn wore white. The “too innocent” white, upon which Jennie had passed on the occasion of Dwight’s dinner. Jennie had grunted, observing her as, dressed and ready, she swung away from the mirror, “You need,” Jennie had said critically, “something a little startling. If you tied a blue sash around you now, you’d look like first prize at a baby party. Give me your jewel box.”

  “I haven’t any jewels,” Lynn reminded her, smiling, “just the old stuff grandmother left me.”

  “That’s just what I want. How about the garnets? Knock ‘em dead. That’s what you need, you’ll look virginal, quaint, and sophisticated, all at one and the same time. Here they are. Try ‘em on.”

  A garnet necklace set in intricate gold. Earrings, heavily encrusted, and two wide bracelets. “There,” said Jennie, standing back, “that’s what you needed. You looked like orange juice, straight, before. Granny’s garnets put the kick into it.”

  She handed Lynn a bright, light lipstick, entirely artificial. “Tone up the little old mouth to match the antiques—in color—” advised Jennie, “and you’ll lay ‘em in the aisles like a row of prewar stingers!”

  “Gee,” said Tom, staring, upon his entrance, “you look swell, Lynn.” He added, courteously, “and you, too, Jennie.”

  “Never mind me,” said Jennie complacently. “I know how I look.”

  “Haven’t you got a lot of lipstick on?” was Tom’s next, and natural, remark, his eyes on Lynn’s brilliant mouth.

  Lynn said, worried, “Perhaps. More than usual anyway, but with this white dress—” She started for the bedroom in order to hunt for cleansing tissues; but Jennie caught her arm and swung her around.

  “Leave the face as it is,” she ordered, “remember, Tom isn’t married to you yet. You’re just right—as you are.”

  So, lipstick and all, Lynn went to the party.

  Wilkins opened the door with a special smile for Lynn. The big room was more or less filled with people. The loveliest frocks, the prettiest girls. “I feel like a poor relation,” Lynn whispered to Jennie as they mounted the steps to the temporary dressing-room, Tom having disappeared in Wilkins’s wake.

  The bedroom contained more women. Smoke, laughter, powder clouds, heavy perfume, the smell of cosmetics. Lynn pinched Jennie’s arm until she shrieked, “Hey, what’s the big idea? When I ge
t bruises I sue!”

  “Isn’t that Lillie James—over there taking to the tall girl in black?”

  “So it is,” agreed Jennie, staring, “thought she was in a sanitarium, nervous breakdown—boy or girl?”

  “Jennie, hush, she’ll hear you!”

  When they had descended the stairs Dwight detached himself from a group around the fireplace and came forward to meet them. He took Jennie’s hand in his and measured her with a cool, smiling glance, while Lynn murmured the introductions.

  “Delightful of you to come, Miss Le Grande,” he said formally, but his eyes danced a very little.

  “Jennie to you,” was Jennie’s generous response.

  “Of course, Jennie to me.” He turned to Lynn, and his eyes were not smiling nor were they cool. “Where’s the lucky young man?” he pleasantly wanted to know.

  “There he is. Tom—oh, Tom!” called Lynn, turning to see Tom standing by the door, very tall, very broad, very young, somehow a little ill at ease, with the sulky expression of the small boy who finds the party not quite up to his imagination and expectation.

  Tom came over quickly. Women turned to watch him walk across the floor, not with the feline tread of his host, but the light step of perfect balance and vitality. He and Dwight shook hands and murmured conventionalities. Tom said, with an engaging grin and the courtesy of the junior which so infuriated the other man, “Looks like a grand party, sir.”

  “It will be now,” said Dwight, smiling, his hand lightly on Lynn’s arm. “Let’s circulate, shall we?”

  Lynn couldn’t remember half the names of people. Later the theatrical crowd arrived, straight from their dressing-rooms. Yes, that had been Lillie James, the motion-picture ingénue who has shot into stardom and was now making a new picture on Long Island. There was Mark Manners, the illustrator, who attached himself to Jennie, to Jennie’s later commercial interest. There was George Fane, juvenile lead in “Let’s Be Silly,” and Marise Marr, musical comedy star, and Babe Leonard, who wrote stark tales of the submerged millions and lived on Park Avenue from the proceeds. There were dozens of others, all very gay, all very friendly. There was Ike Kirschbaum, the “new” song writer-composer, who, they said, out-Gershwined Berlin. There were many more.

  There was dancing, singing, with obliging artists doing impromptu turns. There was Gwen Hammond singing her latest melancholy blues song, and “Brownie” Bird, star of “Mulatto Madness,” singing her most famous version of “St. Louis Blues.” There was, very late, Sonny Carter and his gold-plated saxophone and one turn of hired talent, the three adagio dancers who had held all Manhattan breathless in the recent “Roamers Revue.” And, of course, an orchestra.

  Things to eat, things to drink, things to smoke; couples out in the terrace whispering, swinging idly in the great swings leaning on the parapet in the sweet spring night; laughter and the ceaseless murmur of voices. It was two o’clock, and the party was just well under way when Dwight gently but firmly detached Lynn from George Fane, with whom she was dancing; and, after taking her twice about the room, stopped by the terrace doors and led her outside. “Sure you’re warm enough—shall I send for a wrap?” he asked.

  “No, it’s heavenly out here,” she said, looking over the terrace wall, drawing in deep breaths of the night wind, the subtle, small fragrance of earth and green, growing things.

  “Did I annoy you taking you away from Fane? I annoyed him, that was very obvious.”

  “I hardly think so. He’ll find another audience,” she laughed. “He was telling me he couldn’t get a break. “The women stars are always so jealous!”

  “He’s a conceited ass but a good youngster,” Dwight told her, indifferently, “even if he does break all the feminine hearts across the footlights.”

  “He’s not nearly as good looking as Tom,” she said absently, and wondered where Tom was and if he were having a good time. She’d danced with him a little earlier. The orchestra was playing bygone hits by request. “‘I can’t give you anything but love, baby,’” Tom had sung, holding her close—“and that’s no idle jest,” he had added abruptly. “There won’t be any penthouses for a long time, Lynn.”

  “As if I cared!”

  “You do care—for me?”

  “Idiot!” And she had looked up at him, gray eyes shining between the dusky lashes, lips curved in reproach.

  “I want like the devil to kiss you,” Tom told her savagely, and a little sharp tremor of emotion troubled her pulses and sang in her veins and weakened her knees, very sweet, very disturbing. And she swayed a little closer to him and murmured, her breath catching, “Please don’t look at me that way, Tom, I can’t bear it.”

  A moment of pure desire, pure and perfect anguish, pure and ecstatic happiness—

  Then Fane had cut in.

  But something of that pleasant trouble, something of the burden of languor and painful, frustrated delight remained with her now, as she stood on the terrace and Dwight leaned beside her there.

  In the room they had left they were now playing one of Gwen’s great songs and she was singing to it, husky, sweet voice, the high notes fading like the subdued sound of smitten silver bells, drifting over the shuffle of feet, the voices, the piercing violins, the brassy yearning of the saxophones:

  When my man’s away, there ain’t no peace,

  I dunno what to do—

  Can’t sleep, can’t walk, can’t smile, can’t talk,

  Feelin’ so doggoned blue—

  When my man’s away, I just sit and pray,

  God, bring him back to me,

  When my man’s away, for a night, for a day

  There ain’t no peace for me.

  Trivial words and an important truth. The husky voice made magic of the dragging morbidity of the music, invested with the eternal glamor of human longing and the tinsel-tawdry lyric. Only the truth remained, heartbreaking. “Hokum,” commented Dwight and Lynn’s side, “but like most hokum so infernally veracious—”

  She said, in a dreaming voice, “It’s—lovely, so real—”

  “Women feel like that, I suppose,” he told her idly, or with apparent casualness, “and, believe it or not, some men.”

  “Yes.” She clasped her hands on the wall in front of her and stared out into the darkness. There were not many lights at this time of the morning. But the stars were big and very near.

  “It’s a pity things have to be so complicated,” Dwight said, throwing his cigarette to the stone floor, crushing it under his heel. “Pity that love’s so willful. Other women’s men, other men’s girls, we don’t stop to think of that, do we?”

  “I suppose not.” She remembered Mara, for no good reason, and spoke of her. “A girl I know,” she said, confident that he would understand.

  When she had told the little there was to tell he said slowly, looking away from her, looking out to the velvet arch of the heavens.

  “You can’t do anything. Isn’t she just like most of us, caught in a trap of her own contrivance, struggling, hurting herself, trying to manufacture a little happiness, a little escape? She calls it ‘having a good time.’ I spoke to you the other night of the skyscrapers, didn’t I? Sometimes I see them from another angle. Tremendous traps, opening and closing on time signals. I watch the girls and women come out of their doors, evenings, hurrying toward their homes, happy or unhappy, but always preoccupied with the fear of losing their economic independence—if it is independence; leading such disseminated lives—the life of the skyscraper, ordered, patterned, the life of the home—whether it contains the family unit of parents, fraternal relations, or husbands and children.

  “Possibly your friend is disregarding the red light in order to make her life more bearable; possibly, like so many women forced to earn their livings and having little interest in the means, she is simply trying to bend one of the oldest forces in the world to her own small ends—in short, she accepts invitations from a man who may be able to guarantee her job to her. Yet perhaps she is only esca
ping. As for her husband, she probably loves him. But love, the strongest thing in the world, the poets say, is a delicate thing. It bruises with ease, it shatters at a touch. Love in a walk-up”—he laughed a little, quite low—“with lovers trying to budget love the way they budget finances, with little wives working, and coming home disheartened and tired, with bills to think about and a run in the last pair of stockings. With grouchy husbands and fatigued wives, with the smell of cabbage and laundry soap, with babies crying—love nourished upon occasional routine embraces and stereotyped kisses—love has to be stronger than I believe it is to rise above that” he said.

  Lynn drew a deep breath.

  “I suppose you’re right. I hate to think you’re right. I won’t believe it,” she answered childishly. “Tom—Tom and I.” She was silent. He did not disturb her, his heart beat thickly, he held himself in a close and calculated restraint; her voice went on, still dreaming, thinking aloud she was, and he knew it, “Tom and I are different. We must be different. Waiting’s hard,” she said with that unconscious natural cruelty of her, “when you’re young and love each other. Sometimes I don’t know what to think. I can’t see ahead. We’d be plain crazy to marry—now. Perhaps we’d be crazy to marry even if I kept on working. Yet I can’t give up my work. And Tom doesn’t want me, married and working—”

  Dwight said, with a deliberate lightness, “If I were Tom, even if I knew as much as I do now, I’d want you, I suppose, at any price, and at any risk. But possibly he’s right.”

  He touched her hand. He said, on a deepened note, “Lynn, you’re such a dear little person—” He felt her hand move under his, a startled gesture. In the darkness his mouth was ironic. He went on smoothly, “If I had a daughter—” That was damned funny too. He repeated it, savoring its comedy. He had a daughter. Two of them. Large, rawboned girls who had inherited their mother’s plainness and who disapproved of him. Girls he would have disliked if he had met them as strangers, but without a break he went on—“a daughter like you.” There he stopped, his voice effectively breaking. And why not? For a moment, superb actor, always living his part, he saw himself purged of any passional impulse toward this small girl beside him, visualized himself, perfectly paternal, indulging only in the soft, anxious, benevolent paternal emotions.