The 42nd Parallel (20 page)

Postcards from Joe made her feel like that too. He was a sailor on the battleship
Connecticut.
There’d be a picture of the waterfront at Havana or the harbor of Marseille or Villefranche or a photograph of a girl in peasant costume inside a tinsel horseshoe and a few lines hoping she was well and liked her job, never a word about himself. She wrote him long letters full of questions about himself and foreign countries but he never answered them. Still it gave her a sort of feeling of adventure to get the postcards. Whenever she saw a navy man on the street or marines from Quantico she thought of Joe and wondered how he was getting on. The sight of a gob lurching along in blue with his cap on one side took a funny twist at her heart.

Sundays Alice almost always came out to Georgetown. The house was different now, Joe gone, her mother and father older and quieter, Francie and Ellen blooming out into pretty giggly highschool girls, popular with the boys in the neighborhood, going out to parties, all the time complaining because they didn’t have any money to spend. Sitting at the table with them, helping Mommer with the gravy, bringing in the potatoes or the Brussels sprouts for Sunday dinner, Janey felt grownup, almost an old maid. She was on the side of her father and mother now against the sisters. Popper began to look old and shrunkup. He talked often about retiring, and was looking forward to his pension.

When she’d been eight months with Mrs. Robinson she got an offer from Dreyfus and Carroll, the patent lawyers up on the top floor of the Riggs Building, to work for them for seventeen a week, which was five dollars more than she was getting from Mrs. Robinson. It made her feel fine. She realized now that she was good at her work and that she could support herself whatever happened. On the strength of it she went down to Woodward and Lothrop’s with Alice Dick to buy a dress. She wanted a silk grownup dress with embroidery on it. She was twentyone and was going to make seventeen dollars a week and thought she had a right to one nice dress. Alice said it ought to be a bronzy gold color to match her hair. They went in all the stores down F Street, but they couldn’t find anything that suited that wasn’t too expensive, so all they could do was buy some materials and some fashion magazines and take it home to Janey’s mother to make up. It galled Janey still being dependent on her mother this way, but there was nothing for it; so Mrs. Williams had to make up Janey’s new dress the way she had made all her children’s dresses since they were born. Janey had never had the patience to learn to sew the way Mommer could. They bought enough material so that Alice could have one too, so Mrs. Williams had to make up two dresses.

Working at Dreyfus and Carroll’s was quite different from working at Mrs. Robinson’s. There were mostly men in the office. Mr. Dreyfus was a small thinfaced man with a small black moustache and small black twinkly eyes and a touch of accent that gave him a distinguished foreign diplomat manner. He carried yellow wash gloves and a yellow cane and had a great variety of very much tailored overcoats. He was the brains of the firm, Jerry Burnham said. Mr. Carroll was a stout redfaced man who smoked many cigars and cleared his throat a great deal and had a very oldtimey Southern Godblessmysoul way of talking. Jerry Burnham said he was the firm’s bay window. Jerry Burnham was a wrinklefaced young man with dissipated eyes who was the firm’s adviser in technical and engineering matters. He laughed a great deal, always got into the office late, and for some reason took a fancy to Janey and used to joke about things to her while he was dictating. She liked him, though the dissipated look under his eyes scared her off a little. She’d have liked to have talked to him like a sister, and gotten him to stop burning the candle at both ends. Then there was an elderly accountant, Mr. Sills, a shriveled man who lived in Anacostia and never said a word to anybody. At noon he didn’t go out for lunch, but sat at his desk eating a sandwich and an apple wrapped in waxed paper which he carefully folded afterwards and put back in his pocket. Then there were two fresh errandboys and a little plainfaced typist named Miss Simonds who only got twelve a week. All sorts of people in every sort of seedyrespectable or Peacock Alley clothes came in during the day and stood round in the outer office listening to Mr. Carroll’s rich boom from behind the groundglass door. Mr. Dreyfus slipped in and out without a word, smiling faintly at his acquaintances, always in a great mysterious hurry. At lunch in the little cafeteria or at a soda-fountain Janey ’ud tell Alice all about it and Alice would look up at her admiringly. Alice always waited for her in the vestibule at one. They’d arranged to go out then because there was less of a crowd. Neither of them ever spent more than twenty cents, so lunch didn’t take them very long and they’d have time to take a turn round Lafayette Square or sometimes round the White House grounds before going back to the office.

There was one Saturday night when she had to work late to finish up typing the description of an outboard motor that had to be in at the Patent Office first thing Monday morning. Everybody else had left the office. She was making out the complicated technical wording as best she could, but her mind was on a postcard showing the Christ of the Andes she’d gotten from Joe that day. All it said was:

“To hell with Uncle Sam’s tin ships. Coming home soon.”

It wasn’t signed but she knew the writing. It worried her. Jerry Burnham sat at the telephone switchboard going over the pages as she finished them. Now and then he went out to the washroom; when he came back each time a hot breath of whisky wafted across the office. Janey was nervous. She typed till the little black letters squirmed before her eyes. She was worried about Joe. How could he be coming home before his enlistment was up? Something must be the matter. And Jerry Burnham moving restlessly round on the telephone girl’s seat made her uncomfortable. She and Alice had talked about the danger of staying in an office alone with a man like this. Late like this and drinking, a man had just one idea.

When she handed him the next to the last sheet his eye, bright and moist, caught hers. “I bet you’re tired, Miss Williams,” he said. “It’s a darned shame to keep you in like this and Saturday night too.” “It’s quite all right, Mr. Burnham,” she said icily and her fingers chirruped. “It’s the damned old baywindow’s fault. He chewed the rag so much about politics all day, nobody could get any work done.” “Well, it doesn’t matter now,” said Janey. “Nothing matters any more. . . . It’s almost eight o’clock. I had to pass up a date with my best girl . . . or thereabouts. I bet you passed up a date too, Miss Williams.” “I was going to meet another girl, that’s all.” “Now I’ll tell one . . .” He laughed so easily that she found herself laughing too.

When the last page was done and in the envelope, Janey got up to get her hat. “Look, Miss Williams, we’ll drop this in the mail and then you’d better come and have a bite with me.”

Going down in the elevator Janey intended to excuse herself and go home but somehow she didn’t and found herself, everything aflutter inside of her, sitting coolly down with him in a French restaurant on H Street.

“Well, what do you think of the New Freedom, Miss Williams?” asked Jerry Burnham with a laugh after he’d sat down. He handed her the menu. “Here’s the scorecard . . . Let your conscience be your guide.”

“Why, I hardly know, Mr. Burnham.”

“Well, I’m for it, frankly. I think Wilson’s a big man . . . Nothing like change anyway, the best thing in the world, don’t you think so? Bryan’s a big bellowing blatherskite but even he represents something and even Josephus Daniels filling the navy with grapejuice. I think there’s a chance we may get back to being a democracy . . . Maybe there won’t have to be a revolution; what do you think?”

He never waited for her to answer a question, he just talked and laughed all by himself.

When Janey tried to tell Alice about it afterwards the things Jerry Burnham said didn’t seem so funny, nor the food so good nor everything so jolly. Alice was pretty bitter about it. “Oh, Janey, how could you go out late at night with a drunken man and to a place like that and here I was crazy anxious . . . You know a man like that has only one idea . . . I declare I think it was heartless and light . . . I wouldn’t have thought you capable of such a thing.” “But, Alice, it wasn’t like that at all,” Janey kept saying, but Alice cried and went round looking hurt for a whole week; so that after that Janey kept off the subject of Jerry Burnham. It was the first disagreement she’d ever had with Alice and it made her feel bad.

Still she got to be friends with Jerry Burnham. He seemed to like taking her out and having her listen to him talk. Even after he’d thrown up his job at Dreyfus and Carroll, he sometimes called for her Saturday afternoons to take her to Keith’s. Janey arranged a meeting with Alice out in Rock Creek Park but it wasn’t much of a success. Jerry set the girls up to tea at the old stone mill. He was working for an engineering paper and writing a weekly letter for
The New York Sun.
He upset Alice by calling Washington a cesspool and a sink of boredom and saying he was rotting there and that most of the inhabitants were dead from the neck up anyway. When he put them on the car to go back to Georgetown Alice said emphatically that young Burnham was not the sort of boy a respectable girl ought to know. Janey sat back happily in the seat of the open car, looking out at trees, girls in summer dresses, men in straw hats, mailboxes, storefronts sliding by and said, “But, Alice, he’s smart as a whip. . . . Gosh, I like brainy people, don’t you?” Alice looked at her and shook her head sadly and said nothing.

That same afternoon they went to the Georgetown hospital to see Popper. It was pretty horrible. Mommer and Janey and the doctor and the wardnurse knew that he had cancer of the bladder and couldn’t live very long but they didn’t admit it even to themselves. They had just moved him into a private room where he would be more comfortable. It was costing lots of money and they’d had to put a second mortgage on the house. They’d already spent all Janey’s savings that she had in a bankaccount of her own against a rainy day. That afternoon they had to wait quite a while. When the nurse came out with a glass urinal under a towel Janey went in alone. “Hello, Popper,” she said with a forced smile. The smell of disinfectant in the room sickened her. Through the open window came warm air of sunwilted trees, drowsy Sundayafternoon noises, the caw of a crow, a distant sound of traffic. Popper’s face was drawn in and twisted to one side. His big moustaches looked pathetically silky and white. Janey knew that she loved him better than anybody else in the world . . . His voice was feeble but fairly firm. “Janey, I’m in drydock, girl, and I guess I’ll never . . . you know better’n I do, the sonsobitches won’t tell me . . . Say, tell me about Joe. You hear from him, don’t you? I wish he hadn’t joined the navy; no future for a boy there without pull higher up; but I’m glad he went to sea, takes after me . . . I’d been three times round the Horn in the old days before I was twenty. That was before I settled down in the towboat business, you understand . . . But I been thinkin’ here lyin’ in bed that Joe done just what I’d ’a’ done, a chip of the old block, and I’m glad of it. I don’t worry about him, but I wish you girls was married an’ off my hands. I’d feel easier. I don’t trust girls nowadays with these here anklelength skirts an’ all that.” Popper’s eyes traveled all over her with a chilly feeble gleam that made her throat stiffen when she tried to speak. “I guess I can take care of myself,” she said. “You got to take care of me now. I done my best by you kids. You don’t know what life is, none of you, been sheltered and now you ship me off to die in the hospital.” “But, Popper, you said yourself you thought it would be best to go where you’d get better care.” “I don’t like that night nurse, Janey, she handles me too rough . . . You tell ’em down at the office.”

It was a relief when it was time to go. She and Alice walked along the street without saying anything. Finally Janey said, “For goodness’ sake, Alice, don’t get sulky. If you only knew how I hated it all too . . . oh, goodness, I wish . . .” “What do you wish, Janey?” “Oh, I dunno.”

July was hot that summer, in the office they worked in a continual whir of electric fans, the men’s collars wilted and the girls kept themselves overplastered with powder; only Mr. Dreyfus still looked cool and crisply tailored as if he’d just stepped out of a bandbox. The last day of the month Janey was sitting a minute at her desk getting up energy to go home along the simmering streets when Jerry Burnham came in. He had his shirtsleeves rolled above the elbow and white duck pants on and carried his coat. He asked her how her father was and said he was all excited about the European news and would have to take her out to supper to talk to somebody soothing. “I’ve got a car belongs to Bugs Dolan and I haven’t any driver’s license, but I guess we can sneak round the Speedway and get cooled off all the same.” She tried to refuse because she ought to go home to supper and Alice was always so sulky when she went out with Jerry, but he could see that she really wanted to come and insisted.

They both sat in the front seat of the Ford and dropped their coats in the back. They went once round the Speedway but the asphalt was like a griddle. The trees and the brown stagnant river stewed in late afternoon murk like meat and vegetables in a pot. The heat from the engine suffocated them. Jerry, his face red, talked incessantly about war brewing in Europe and how it would be the end of civilization and the signal for a general workingclass revolution and how he didn’t care and anything that got him out of Washington, where he was drinking himself silly with his brains addled by the heat and the Congressional Record, would be gravy to him, and how tired he was of women who didn’t want anything but to get money out of him or parties or marriage or some goddam thing or other and how cool and soothing it was to talk to Janey who wasn’t like that.

It was too hot so they put off driving till later and went to the Willard to get something to eat. He insisted on going to the Willard because he said he had his pockets full of money and would just spend it anyhow and Janey was very much awed because she’d never been in a big hotel before and felt she wasn’t dressed for it and said she was afraid she’d disgrace him and he laughed and said it couldn’t be done. They sat in the big long gilt dining room and Jerry said it looked like a millionaire morgue and the waiter was very polite and Janey couldn’t find what she wanted to eat on the big bill-of-fare and took a salad. Jerry made her take a gin fizz because he said it was cooling; it made her feel lightheaded and tall and gawky. She followed his talk breathless the way she used to tag along after Joe and Alec down to the carbarns when she was little.