Skyscraper (16 page)

“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!”

“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.

“Nor I—”

She forgot in his arms how risky it was to look for the jobs that seemed to be, nowadays, practically nonexistent; and how she had set her heart against the sort of position in which she would not be happy, to which she had not been trained; let, for this moment at least, ambition go by the board; a job,
any
job, that would enable them to live, and live together.

Two weeks went by. A Saturday came, and Jennie asked, crumpling a yellow telegraph blank in her long hand, “Lynn, you look rotten. What have you been doing to yourself?”

“Nothing. Trying to work and look for another job at the same time.”

“Have you asked David Dwight to help you?” Jennie wanted to know. She unfolded the telegram again. Mr. Meyer of Meyer and Carberg would be in town over Sunday, Would Jennie dine with him? Would she? She hadn't had as good a dinner as the first one he'd given her since she was born.

“I hadn't thought of him. Do you suppose he would? Oh no,” said Lynn, “I don't like to ask him.”

“Don't be a sap. He'll find something for you to do,” prophesied Jennie carelessly.

“Is that wire from the Chicago boy friend?

“It is.” Jennie chuckled. Upon the first occasion she had gone out with Meyer to dinner, show, and supper, she had come home to tell Lynn all about it—the food, the liquor, the seats, the service, the favors. “Some spender. Married—but a widower. How's that for a break?”

“Jennie, you wouldn't marry him,” Lynn had gasped.

“Why not? Do you think I want to model the rest of my life? Not that I could. I'd end up scrubbing offices. Not me.”

“But you wouldn't have to marry—”

“Meyer? Well, no, and won't get a chance, more's the pity, I suppose. There are other men, of course. Poor men—and I'd go on working. Or I'd end in a walk-up doing diapers. Not this baby. When I marry, if I do, there has to be money and a wad of it,” Jennie had announced.

There was no arguing with her. Lynn saw Jennie toss the telegraph blank into the waste basket. Then she forgot it. Odd that she had not thought of David Dwight. He had said—what had he said? That he was her friend; that she could count on him. And she had believed him. She had seen him once since the night of the party, one night when he had taken her to dinner and a play. She and Tom had had words about it. Then he had gone away on business—to Washington, she remembered.

She had told him nothing of her present preoccupation.

If he were back now!

She telephoned him at the penthouse that night while Jennie was dressing for her engagement. And he was in.

“Lynn?” his vibrant voice came over the wire. “My dear, how very sweet of you to call me. I'm just back.”

She said hesitantly, “I didn't know—There is something about which I want to ask your advice. I thought perhaps if I could see you—next week? I could come to your office.”

His offices were uptown, in an ivory tower, the builders of which had dedicated themselves to making America castor-oil and talcum-powder conscious.

“But of course. Shall we say Monday? After your work is over? I'll wait for you—and will you dine with me afterward?”

She hung up presently. Jennie, listening poked her head in at the door between living-room and bedroom.

“You're going to see him.”

“Monday.”

“What did I tell you?” And Jennie, now attired, danced out to her duty, which was to make merry on a merchandising man's Saturday night off.

 

 

 

TWO TROUBLED GIRLS
DWIGHT WAS VERY UNDERSTANDING. HIS FACE, like an actor's in that it lent itself readily to illusion, if without the camouflage of grease paint, was perfectly impassive as Lynn stumbled her way through her explanation. At intervals he said “I see,” and fingered an astonishingly small,
round gold clock that stood upon the neat and polished vastness of his desk. It was the first time Lynn had been to his office. He was housed halfway up the great pyramidal height of the uptown business building. Save for the desk there was little of the office about his private room; it was more like a library, and into that atmosphere the desk fitted unobtrusively. There were paneled walls and built-in bookcases, but there was nothing somber about the draperies or the fine oriental carpet on the floor, nothing massively oppressive about the chairs, the occasional furniture. Frankly, a modernistic bar presided with charm over the working quarters of a man at law. Within the desk itself a humidor had been built. Lynn watched him open the department and select a cigar. There were no photographs in the room, but over the fireplace, in which green boughs had been heaped in deference to the season, there was a portrait—not of a woman, curiously enough, but of the little son whom David Dwight and his wife had lost during their first years of marriage.

There were flowers in the room, very gay and fragrant. “From my place on the Island,” he had told her, when upon entering, she had exclaimed over their beauty, sparring a little for time.

His office force, save for his personal secretary, an elderly, narrow-lipped, dour-faced woman, had all gone home by the time Lynn arrived, directly from the bank, having hurried the few intervening blocks through the hot late afternoon, wishing somehow she had not made this appointment.

But Dwight's reception of her had dispelled all of her formless doubts. Now she sat smiling at him faintly through the depths of an armchair, and waiting to hear him speak. If he had sustained a blow she could not know it. He said gently. “I appreciate your situation. I could of course give you letters—a lot of letters. I know so many people, I have a finger in several pies. But as our Sarah has probably told you, as you doubtless know yourself, most concerns are cutting down their staffs. I can, as it happens,” he went on, “offer you a job—a rather anomalous job—and with myself.”

She declined hurriedly, flushing. “Please—I didn't mean that I—why, what,” she asked in open astonishment, “what on earth could you find for me to do? I”—she thrust up her little chin—“I can keep on at the bank perfectly well,” she said.

“Not so fast. You haven't had, I suppose, any secretarial training?”

“None, just typing.”

“I thought so. That's what I should be willing to offer you. You see, I'm writing a book.” He smiled a very little. “I suppose it's a confession of weakness and I have no intention of publishing it now. It might be better, all around, if it were published posthumously. But I need someone whom I can trust to get my notes into shape, to do the first rough typing and eventually the revisions on this egotistical and naturally autobiographical expression of myself. I had thought of giving it to Miss Mays—my secretary—but she has enough to do as it is. Moreover, I have other things that a home secretary could do for me and which would not involve dictation as much as say, bookkeeping, tact, and the ability to use the English language on one's own initiative. I should require you to work at the apartment, and perhaps on Long Island—not here at the office. And I would pay you what the bank now pays you, and a little more.”

She asked, aghast, “But are you very sure—I mean, it doesn't,” she added, with a flash of shrewdness, “seem reasonable!”

“It isn't unreasonable, is it?” he asked her, laughing.

She said after a moment, “If I accept it means—”