Skyscraper (34 page)

But that was still a year away.

“Tom, you must go,” she said. “It's terribly late. What will people think?”

He rose, dumping her unceremoniously, picking her up again to kiss her, not for the first time that evening.

“I don't want to go. But I will. Now that I know I'm coming back,” he said, “and pretty soon. To stay.”

She said wistfully, “I wish Jennie would be with us—when we get married.”

“Jennie?” He frowned. “Don't worry your head about her. Slim, poor devil, he's sunk, drinks too much. He told me you'd seen him.”

“He didn't understand,” she said, low. “She didn't want him to. I'll tell you some day. No,” she said reconsidering, I can't even tell you. But try to believe, Tom, that it wasn't all Jennie's fault.”

“I'll believe anything you say,” he told her, “but we'll have old Slim over a lot, won't we, and try and cheer him up and find some cute little trick to console him? Not as cute as you are,” he added.

He kissed her again.

“Tom, you've got to go,” she said, and then, “I'm so terribly happy. Sure, sure I'm forgiven?”

He was sure; he made her sure. Presently he was gone. Suddenly almost sick with fatigue, she undressed and went to bed.
Lying there in the darkness she tried to think. But her thoughts were kaleidoscopic. Dwight, asking her to marry him—in the spring, in England. She thought, in utter astonishment, is it possible that—that I was even tempted? She thought wonderingly of Sarah—remembering how, the door opening, she had seen her there, waiting, her face a mask of tragedy.

Sarah—

She turned her tired mind from the scene which had followed—then, Tom, the bruise on his cheek, his collar torn, his tie a string, awry—

Tom's arms, Tom's kiss, Tom's proved innocence; her own unconscious guilt, meaning, she discovered with a pang of astonishment and dismay, so much less than his embrace—

“Sarah, if I can make it up to you, show you how grateful I am for what you did for me—” she whispered in the darkness.

 

 

 

THEIR SKYSCRAPER
THE NEXT MORNING, TOM CALLED FOR HER, his hours, as it happened, more or less coinciding with her own, or at least his early hours. They drove uptown in the “new car.”

“It runs,” said Lynn, “like a dream.”

“We'll go honeymooning in it.”

“Tom, I can't get away.”

“Neither can I,” he admittedly cheerfully, “but there'll be next summer—and vacations. Man,” said Tom, addressing the blue back of a traffic policeman, “Man, ain't Nature grand!”

He parked in a great garage not far from the Seacoast Building. They walked—to breakfast and to work, together. Perched on the high stools—“Do you remember?”they asked each other simultaneously, and their coffee cooled while the white jacket attending their needs asked, “What, so early in the morning?” but grinned in sympathy nevertheless.

The great building hummed all around them. “Jennie's gone,” said Lynn, sitting there on the stool, “and Mara.”

“They made a mess of things,”Tom said bluntly. “We won't.”

“Not,” agreed Lynn, “as long as we love each other And that will be always.”

The cafeteria was tilled with clatter and bustle, plates rattled, containers steamed, people tramped in and out. “Golly,” said Lynn, gasping, “I'm late!”

She fled to work. Miss Marple, plucking a pencil from behind a newly exposed ear, asked sourly, “Why the bright and cheerful morning face? Someone left you a million?”

“Two,” Lynn told her solemnly.

Sarah. It would be hard to face Sarah, she thought. Yet somehow it was not. Later, forced to go to her desk on business, she reached it almost with reluctance. Sarah looked up. Lynn stared at her. Sarah, in black, white collar, white cuffs, her eyes preoccupied, her face serene—

“About this report of Mr. Johnson's,” Sarah asked.

Listening, Lynn's eyes were pulled, against her will, to the open door of Norton's office. Norton's small, dark typist sat there, busy. She saw no one else.

Sarah smiled faintly. “I understand Mr. Rawlson is—ill,” she said.

Lynn laughed outright. “And how!” she agreed.

“I've been talking,” said Sarah, “to Mr. Norton. You—needn't look so worried, Lynn. It's all right. He understands everything. And Rawlson will send in his resignation.”

A moment later she watched Lynn leave the room, walking with her easy, light step between the big desks, the pillars. Sarah's eyes were heavy. She thought, it hasn't made any difference to her, as far as I'm concerned. She wont' speak of it again.

Yet she did so, on her wedding day her hand fast in Sarahs'—

Dr. Harding was talking to Tom in the living-room of Sarah's apartment. Mrs. Harding, an older Lynn, was talking to the minister, wiping her pretty eyes, trying to smile—“It seems so strange to have her married—and away from home,” she was saying, “but he seems like a fine boy.”

“If I knew how to thank you,” Lynn murmured, “If I knew how to tell you how grateful I am, Sarah—”

Sarah stooped and kissed her. “You can tell me,” Sarah
answered, “by being happy, always, Lynn.”

It was dusk. A little later Tom and Lynn would go away for their brief honeymoon weekend together.

Alone, after the Hardings had gone to their hotel, Sarah looked from her windows into the darkness of the night. She thought, queer, he should sail, tonight—

She thought of the thing she had done, the loyalty she had shattered forever, for another loyalty. She thought of the look she had seen in David Dwight's eyes, a look of utter astonishment, astonishment too great for reproach. She had realized then that somehow she was an unacknowledged part of him; that without ever giving it consideration he had nevertheless counted upon her as the one stable thing in his shifting world. She had failed him for Lynn. She was not sorry. Yet now she bowed her head and wept, slow, difficult tears. They fell on her clasped hands and she regarded them amazedly—as if she had looked to see blood and saw instead something colorless, and evanescent.

She thought, I'll never see him again.

She loved him—without tenderness, without compassion, without ardor, without honor, or honoring. And she had been his enemy. Yet he was a scar that she must carry to her grave. She thought, there's my work, I've that much left.

Strange, to feel so empty and forlorn, as if something had gone from her when for so many years she had had nothing, nothing but work, and memories and the hope that some day she might see recognition in eyes grown too accustomed to her as she now was. She had seen it, last summer.
“Sarah—Sarita
—” for a blinding moment.

She turned from the window.

Standing on the deck of the biggest of ocean liners, David Dwight sailed for France at midnight. He stood there, coat collar upturned, alone, watching the skyline. In the skyscrapers some of the windows were still lighted, pale gold against black. People moved about in there, did their work, toiled through the night. Scrubwomen had their obscure, ambiguous being. Night and day, there were human beings, active as ants, going about
their varied concerns in these aspiring, terrifying masses of stone and steel.

“Good to be getting away,” commented a pallid man, moving to the rail beside him, “from the incessant fever and fret of commerce and commercial people; good to be going to lands that are still able to dream.”

He was a poet; and traveling first class because he had inherited money. A priceless combination. Dwight turned; the light fell upon his worn face and brilliant eyes. Even poets read newspapers.

“I—I do beg your pardon, you're Dwight, aren't you, David Dwight?”

Stupid, absurd, but a vague comfort. His cold heart warmed, a little. He answered, smiling. “Yes, I'm Dwight—and yet, it is good to be getting away.”

“That's the Seacoast Building, isn't it?” asked the poet. “It's lovely, I think, at night, with those few windows lighted below, and the tower glowing. It looks like a concrete embodiment of man's most magnificent dream. Seeing it from here, one forgets the taint, the imprisoned lies, the scramble for existence.”

It was the Seacoast Building. From those tall towers the nets were woven, nets of speech, of music, and flung all the wide world over. Dwight turned away.

“I've something in my cabin. Care to join me?”

“On Monday,” said the poet, “the Seacoast Building will be—just another skyscraper, just another monument to man's insatiable greed.”

And on Monday Lynn said, sleepily, having arrived in town very late on Sunday night, “Tom—for goodness' sake, wake up. We'll be late!”

On Monday, they made a sketchy breakfast in the little kitchenette and set off together for work. On Monday they stopped in the street and looked up, as if somewhere beyond their craning necks there was a message for them. Lynn said, a little awed, “It makes me feel dizzy, somehow; as dizzy as if I were looking
down
. Isn't it beautiful, Tom?”

“It's swell,” said Tom contentedly.

“I like,” she told him, “being a part of it. I love it, and especially your working ‘way up there in the tower, and me working down below. Under the same roof.”

“There's a lot of us under it, and darned lucky to be there,” Tom said sincerely.

The street was black with hurrying people. The winter sky was clear and cold and blue, the sun pale golden yellow. A plane passed overhead, its engine singing, its wings spread, casting its strange small shadow on the cool sides of the great building.

“Here, get going,” said Tom.

He smiled down into her eyes. “It's great,” he said, “being alive—having our jobs—being together—”.

They vanished, with the hundreds of others into the spaces allotted them beyond the great bronze doors.

Skyscraper. Roots embedded in earth, towers reaching to the far and azure empyrean. Symbol of man's need for stability, for endurance, for progress, for aspiration.
Skyscraper
. . .

F
aith Baldwin (1893-1978) is still aptly described as what her
New York Times
obituary tribute termed “[a] doyenne of American light fiction writers” in a career that spanned seven decades and produced more than sixty novels.
¹
But she also negotiated the tensions between emancipation and conformity; modern and traditional womanhood; vocation and marriage.
²
By the 1920s, when Baldwin published her first novels, the female clerical worker was no longer the imperiled virgin or single-minded temptress, but “an honest, resourceful, hardworking, fun-loving, good girl.”
³
Placing her heroine
Lynn Harding in a volatile work and love environment (the skyscraper is a highly peopled metropolitan society), Baldwin breathes some life into a narrative that praises rather than redirects the astute business girl's ambition to get on in the world without ending up alone in the city crowd. In so doing, Baldwin challenges the hard-edged quality of so many of her contemporary novelists' female breadwinners.

But storytelling, as women's historian Lucy Hughes-Hallett remarked, is never an innocent occupation, and Baldwin remarked of herself that she had always wanted to be “adventurous and independent.”
⁴
How, through tales of Lynn Harding and her coworkers, did Baldwin work out her own fantasies of unlimited freedom? Was that her mass-entertainment appeal? How do modern (re)readings position
Skyscraper
(1931) in the tradition of American “working girl” fiction? Or in the context of the history of American working women? What connections does this pulp novel have to modernist artists and writers? Lastly, how does the book challenge still-powerful patriarchal ideologies about the domestic sphere?

The Baldwin Girl: Roots and Prototypes

The hardships of the early 1930s empowered many formerly dubious literary character types. These were, for the most part, tough-talking blue-collar women, gun molls, feckless or gold-digging chorus girls, and frustrated wives (some erstwhile showgirls themselves) of affluent men, who emerged as sexy heroines of popular fiction. Or rather, they re-emerged, for these types had been fixtures of mass entertainment since the turn of the twentieth century. Yet what was new was the cultural realization that women had to earn money in any way they could to support themselves and, not infrequently, their husbands and children. In this hardscrabble context was born Margaret Mitchell's blockbuster,
Gone With the Wind
(1936).
Implausible but wildly popular, the story of a downwardly mobile plantation belle of the wartime Old South who marries for money twice, covets another woman's husband, murders a Yankee marauder, and savvily manages an exploitative mill business based on convict labor, made perfect economic sense.