Skyscraper

by Faith Baldwin

  “Search me,” Tom replied cheerfully, lighting a cigarette and sitting down before the radio. Discovering a speck of dust upon its chaste top he whistled and took out his handkerchief. Dust on a radio was not to be endured. Also Slim had deposited a glove and Hank a sock along with the dust. Tom flung these articles to the floor with an expression of outrage.

  Lynn appeared, a comparatively clean towel tied about her slim waist. She rustled about in the kitchen and while Tom turned dials, smiled or frowned and surrounded himself with blue smoke, there was a running of water, a clatter of dishes, a sound of brooms and of slapping dust cloths.

  “What’s the use?” he demanded as she dashed in and out upon her errands of reconstruction. “It will look worse tomorrow!”

  “I don’t care how it looks tomorrow,” she informed him severely, “I don’t have to see it tomorrow, but if you think I’m going to spend my married life picking up after you, Tom Shepard—”

  Tom grinned. He said mildly, “I wish you could hear this thing on a cold snappy winter night. Summer’s not so hot, in a reception sense.”

  “Tom,” she wailed, “you might at least put these pajamas and things away!”

  She did so herself, and it is on record that Slim, some hours later, searching for his night garb unavailingly for ten minutes, cursed, and went to bed raw.

  “Let’s eat!” suggested Lynn finally after her labors were completed.

  “Happy thought!” Tom leaped up from his beloved obsession to assist her in clearing the long and battered table. After a time coffee bubbled upon the gas stove, and the clean plates were burdened with cold and pleasant fare, including fat dill pickles and the horseradish for Tom’s beef.

  “Gosh, this is great!” He viewed her across the table, “come here—”

  Replete, he pushed his plate away, pushed his chair back, and held out his arms. Lynn came and perched upon his knee happily.

  There was a little silence. “It’s as if we were married,” he told her, after a moment.

  “I know—”

  Darkness outside and the glow of lamps. The still more or less untidy room took on an aspect of mystery and comfort. The noises of Perry Street, children crying, children quarreling, mothers shrieking, cars passing through, faded to a dim murmur, and their own heartbeats were louder than any alien sound. They were fed and warmed and roofed; and they had each other. “A loaf of bread,” commented Tom, who always quoted Omar upon sentimental occasions.

  “They were tea biscuits,” she reminded him, “and we didn’t have any wine. As for boughs—”

  A dog barked in the street below. “There!” said Tom in a silly triumph.

  They laughed together, absurd, young, happy; and recited their worn but never monotonous litany:

  “Do you love me?”

  “You know I do—”

  “How much?”

  “More than all the world; more than you love me.”

  “But that isn’t possible—”

  “Let’s,” said Tom, “let’s get married soon—tomorrow!”

  “Well, no, Tom, I’ve thought it all out. Mother and father, they’ll want me married from home. I thought it couldn’t be managed, but, if we ask to take our vacations at the same time?”

  “Marvelous, dear Sherlock,” said Tom, “We’ll do that little thing. We’ll put in our applications next week. Sarah’s a good old scout, she’ll let you—and perhaps she’ll speak a word to Gunboat for me.”

  “We can go home,” said Lynn dreamily, “and be married—”

  “And go somewhere honeymooning—Where?”

  “What difference where?” she wanted to know ardently; and, then, with recovered practicality, “But we mustn’t go to an hotel or anything and spend money. We can’t afford it. Look here, Tom, mother has a cousin who has the cutest little old place in Virginia. She goes to Maine summers. I think if I asked her, she might let us have her house for ten days or so—Wouldn’t that be perfect?”

  He agreed with her without words, but to the satisfaction of both of them.

  The shadows lengthened. The radio was silent. The street noises grew less. The remains of the picnic supper still sat coldly, dismally, upon the table.

  Lynn stirred in the clasp of Tom’s arms—and the battered sofa upon which they had been sitting for hours protested. She said, pushing her hair from her heavy, bright eyes and laying her hand to a flushed cheek, “It’s getting late, darling, I must clear up—and go home—”

  “Stay a little longer.”

  His voice was very low; it scarcely rippled the surface of the spell in which she was slowly and entrancingly drowning.

  “I must go—”

  It was madness to stay.

  She pulled herself away from him; sat upright, a little dazed, forcing herself back to reality with a finality which a little sickened her. She got to her feet and took the dishes into the kitchen. They clattered slightly, her hands shook so.

  Tom rose and lighted a cigarette and went to the window and started out of it, unseeingly.

  Presently she returned to him, ready for the street. “Going to take me home?”

  “Rather. As if I’d let you run around New York by yourself—you might get lost,” he told her, “or be kidnapped or something. You’re such a little thing.”

  They laughed together, shakily enough, and presently locking the door, went down the narrow steps which creaked furiously in the darkness. At a turn he caught her, halted her, held her against him and kissed her.

  “Some day, soon, we’ll be coming home and—staying home, together,” he said.

  And so it was planned that sometime soon, they would ask for their vacations—Lynn first, in order to enlist Sarah’s sympathy and aid.

  She did so, early in the week, lunching with Sarah looking at her with appeal, across the table.

  “We’ve decided to get married, Tom and I.” She hurried over Sarah’s exclamation of dismay and went on: “Do you think, Sarah, I could have my vacation a little earlier? I know I wasn’t supposed to take it until fall, but if I could, and if Tom would get off at the same time, it would be wonderful. I want to go home to be married,” Lynn said.

  Sarah’s face was grave. She looked, quite suddenly, her actual age. She answered after a moment, “I won’t attempt to dissuade you, Lynn, although you know how I stand on the matter. But of course I will do what I can. Still, I don’t see why you are figuring on vacations—if you intend to resign.”

  “Oh, but I don’t!” Lynn answered radiantly. “I’m going on working. I—we couldn’t afford to marry otherwise, and Tom’s come around to my way of thinking.”

  Sarah said, torn between compassion for the younger woman and her own natural feeling of triumph, “But—I’m afraid it won’t work out.”

  “Oh, why not?” Lynn looked at her unhappily. Was Sarah like Mara? Lynn had seen Mara the night before. Mara had said bitterly, “I think you’re a fool. Any woman’s a fool who works after she’s married. Any woman’s a fool because she doesn’t know what that sort of thing does to men. It’s you own business of course, but I think you’re crazy and, believe me, I know!”

  “Because,” Sarah answered, looking away from the lambent gray eyes, the very red mouth, sobered now, the smile fading, “because the bank isn’t employing married women, because they are letting out the married women they now have.”

  “Sarah, I don’t believe it!”

  “It’s true,” said Sarah stiffly, offended.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that,” Lynn said instantly. “But—why, Sarah—I can’t understand it! I hadn’t heard.”

  She hesitated. No, she hadn’t heard. Yet now she remembered seeing during the last month three women whom she knew slightly, all of them married, from other departments. She had seen them, red-eyed or a little pale in the rest room or corridors and had not seen them since.

  “Why? It’s obvious enough,” Sarah told her immediately. “Unemployment is on the increase. The bank is going to ke
ep everyone it possibly can—single people, heads of families. But when a woman is married and her husband holds a position also, the bank has decided that the woman must go. If a married woman is the sole support of her family, is widowed, or has children, that is different. It isn’t difficult to see the justice of this, Lynn.”

  Lynn was very white. Against the pallor of her face, her lips were astonishingly bright. She asked, “You mean that if Tom and I get married I’ll be—fired?”

  Sarah answered, still looking away from her, “I’m afraid so, Lynn.”

  The red lips trembled, and the small pointed chin shook. Lynn said, low, on a note of heartbreak, “Then all our plans—”

  Sarah’s own heart was a battleground. Her natural and loyal affection for the girl; her antipathy to Lynn’s marriage at this stage of the business game; her own insistence on career rather than marriage for women, that hard shell of protection which she had built up around herself and suffering; her pity for Lynn, looking to her for help, for sympathy, for assurance that it wasn’t, after all, true; and her own quite normal triumph that the course of true love didn’t, in this instance, run smooth—were embattled factions.

  She cleared her throat, absurdly embarrassed, and said, rather brusquely, “If you are not willing to marry Tom Shepard on his present salary—and I don’t blame you for not wanting to—you’ll have to wait, that’s the only solution that I can see. I don’t, of course, know for a hard and fast fact that the bank would take action against you, but it’s my belief that it would.”

  Lynn ignored all this and seized on one sentence only. “Then we’ll have to wait,” she said.

  It was difficult enough before, caring so much for one another and seeing no way out, quarreling over the only way out that appeared feasible, arriving at the impasse, trying to the best of their bewildered abilities to minimize the dangers and delights of propinquity—and then, all at once, coming out into the clear sunlight of a decision, which seemed to point, for better or worse, to a future shared. Having had that for a few days, it was harder than ever to return to the old status of readjustments, of waiting, of uncertainty, of the practically inevitable hostility between them brought about by the situation itself.

  Sarah said, and curiously enough, meant it, turning her eyes to the small and stricken face, “I’m sorry, Lynn—”

  But Lynn’s usual instant response to a tender of friendship and comprehension was lacking today. She interrupted, almost harshly, “Oh, sorry—but where does that get us?” and brooded, looking with distaste at the remains of a luncheon, cool and light and appropriate to the day, which a few minutes before had seemed so delicious.

  She picked up her tall glass of iced coffee. The day was exceptionally warm, but her small, even teeth chattered against the rim of the glass.

  “If,” suggested Sarah, distressed, “if you want to take the chance—”

  “Do you mean, get married and not let anyone know about it except you—I mean, here at the bank?” asked Lynn, life returning to face and lips in a revival of hope.

  “No, no,” Sarah answered slowly, “I didn’t mean that. You know that you couldn’t keep it quiet long. It isn’t possible.” She thought and Lynn knew, that her own loyalty to her employers would not permit her to be party to the virtual deception. “No, I meant if you and Tom want to go ahead and marry and then see—”

  Lynn shook her head. “I don’t think so. There wouldn’t be much happiness in it, would there—waiting for the blow to fall, wondering every day if you ever going to be let out.”

  Sarah argued no more, and as Lynn made no motion to finish her lunch, called for the check.

  She put her hand on the girl’s shoulder with unaccustomed tenderness as they left the restaurant together. If something could be done—if, for instance, David Dwight could help—he had, of course, a personal secretary of many years’ standing, and would probably be unwilling to take on another, and Lynn, for that matter, had not had sufficient training. Tom then? But Tom couldn’t hope for more money elsewhere than he was getting now. These things went through Sarah’s mind as she and Lynn went upstairs, in a sort of vain search for some alleviation, some comfort, although she knew in her heart that to help Lynn out of her present difficulty would be against her own judgment.

  Lynn worked late at the office that day. Returning, Jennie greeted her, “Shopping for the little old trousseau? Better let me help,” offered Jennie generously and sang a snatch of an old song, “I can’t get ’em for you wholesale.”

  “You needn’t bother. I don’t think we’re going to be married.” Lynn pushed her small hat even farther off her forehead and sat down limply in the one big chair. “What?” asked Jennie, rising from the couch. “Haven’t had a row, have you? What about? Margaret Sanger or the family budget?”

  “No,” Lynn smiled faintly. It was impossible to resist Jennie in her idiotic moods. “Sarah just told me they are letting the married women out, that’s all. But it’s enough to keep me single.”

  “Well, the dirty bums!” exclaimed Jennie sincerely. “You poor kid—all keyed up to the blushing bride act and now—bang, once more a spinster! Gee, I’m sorry, Lynn. Couldn’t you get another job?”

  “I’ve thought of that. But it’s too risky, Jennie,” Lynn answered slowly. “You know people aren’t getting hired by the carload. There might not be a place for me in another bank; employers are letting out, not taking in. And I’m not well enough trained for anything else—I mean, I couldn’t get as much money. I’d get a darned sight less, I guess.”

  “That’s so.” Jennie nodded her yellow head. “Have you told Tom?”

  “No. I haven’t seen him. He’s coming up here tonight.”

  “I’ll ankle out,” Jennie offered.

  “It’s not necessary,” Lynn told her wearily, wishing that she would stay. Perhaps if she stayed it would be easier to “tell Tom.”

  “No, but I’ve got a date,” Jennie told her importantly, “and boy, is it hot!”

  “Slim?” asked Lynn with a flicker of interest.

  “Not that kind of hot. A guy named Meyer.”

  “Meyer?”

  “That’s the moniker. Look.” Jennie clasped her arms about the knees and her heavy-lidded, narrow eyes shone between the thick, mascara-ed lashes. “He’s the merchandise man for Meyer and Carberg, the big department store in Chicago that’s giving Marhsall Field a run for its money. He’s a partner, see, the son of the original big shot. He comes on now and then with his buyers to look the town over and see that they don’t shoot too much of his wad. He used to be a buyer himself, when he wasn’t a stock boy and a ribbon clerk and a section manager or what have you.

  “He came into the place this morning with Raeburn, his dress buyer, and maybe Pearline didn’t step around, and Madame herself was on the job. We had some of the good fall numbers. He sat behind the table and tapped on it with a pencil till I thought I’d go goofy. He kept looking at me, see. And when the buyer was talking to Madame this Meyer gives me a buzz. He told me I could model clothes like nobody’s business and wondered why I wasn’t on the stage. I told him I had been, thank you, but if I waited for a show job I’d be the best-looking woman on relief. That handed him a big laugh. He says, ‘How would you like to show me the town tonight, Miss Le Grande?’ and I said, ‘Swell with me.’ He’s coming for me, in a car,” Jennie concluded.

  “I thought,” said Lynn, troubled, “that you girls didn’t go out with the buyers.”

  “We do and we don’t. If we want to and like ‘em, we do. Why not, you only live once? We don’t have to, if that’s what you mean. He isn’t a buyer anyway; he’s just about the whole works. I asked Madame about him afterwards.”

  “What does he look like?” Lynn wanted to know, quite normally.

  “He’s not as tall as I am,” Jennie said regretfully, “but he’s something of a swell dresser. Dark, little mustache, smokes gold tipped cigarettes, had a platinum watch and doesn’t wear rings!”

&nb
sp; “Single?”

  “I didn’t ask, but of course not. He must be about forty-five. No one with his speed and his money is going to get to forty-five without being grabbed off by some little girl trying to get along. But that’s no skin off my nose. Good Lord, I’ll have to get busy! I want to set my hair—had it done day before yesterday in my lunch hour and my hair’s as straight as a string, already!”

  She departed from the bedroom, whistling.

  Lynn rose after a time and took her outdoor things off. She’d get herself a glass of milk and some crackers, and then wait for Tom.

  Wait for Tom? She knew that as far as loving him went she would wait an eternity. But that didn’t promise that you’d be happy or content—waiting.

  He came early, and she knew by the sound of his step on the stair that he was coming to her, happy, eager, full of their plans.

  How should she tell him?

  She did so quite simply, and to her, unexpectedly, by bursting into tears when he walked in the open door, by running to his arms and burying her head on his shoulder to his dismay and astonishment.

  “Hey, what’s up?” he asked, concerned. “Here, easy does it, Lynn—darling—what is it? Not—not bad news from home?”

  “No.” She controlled herself a little; told him.

  There was a silence. After a moment he said heavily, “Well, that tears it. I couldn’t ask you to—”

  She said, after a pause, “Tom, it isn’t that I’m so selfish that I wouldn’t be willing to live on your salary. But things—cost so much. We couldn’t save. You’d be tied down and nervous and worried all the time; you’d never get ahead in the circumstances. You know that.”

  “If—Oh, you’re right,” he told her gloomily. He swore fluently for several seconds; said gruffly, “Sorry—but—”

  After a moment she suggested hesitantly, “I could try—for another job.”

  “Sure, you could,” he agreed, radiant. “If you could do that—get a job where they didn’t have these dumb ideas about married women. Gee, that would be great! I can’t give up hoping,” he told her, low.