Enchanted Islands (8 page)

“If we take you on, it'll have to be a real commitment,” she said. “You'll have to interview all the way up the ladder. Yes, even for a secretarial position.”

The sign on the side of the building said
MAYS SHIPPING
. I asked her now what it was that the company shipped.

“Let's say paper. Yes, paper, in a way. You seem like a nice, bright girl. Where did you say you come from?”

“Duluth. I mean, Minneapolis.”

“Which is it?” She smiled at me. “No, don't tell me. I don't really need to know. See? Now everything with me is on a need-to-know basis. I don't ask my husband any questions anymore, and you know what? Our marriage is the better for it, would you believe? And you went to secretarial school?”

I was surprised to learn she was old enough to be married. She looked so young. “My certificate was lost in a fire and the school has since closed, but I can prove to you that I know shorthand and typing. I worked at a shipping company before, so I can fill out manifests, reconcile inventories—”

“Here, take down what I'm saying.” She proceeded to dictate the very speech we learned how to take shorthand on. So even though my shorthand was excellent, this demonstration of my talent was impeccable. Then she had me type a letter in carbon copy on the typewriter, which I did in two minutes and fourteen seconds. “Not a record, but quite respectable. And you corrected the spelling here. Nicely done.”

I'd done it unconsciously. I smiled. I enjoyed the praise. I started to think that perhaps my parents hadn't done me such a disservice when they made me attend secretarial school. My chest clenched, a spasm of guilt about my parents. I pushed it down.

My next interview was with my direct supervisor. He didn't stand up, and when he extended his hand, his arm was so short I had to lean to reach across his desk. His skin was the same dull brown as his chair and his suit, so that he was camouflaged against it, sinking into the leather.

“Well, I'll leave you, Mr. Andrews. Will there be anything else?”

“No, thank you, Elsie.”

She closed the door softly behind her. Mr. Andrews made no attempt at conversation. He turned back to the papers on his desk and began to organize them. I sat quietly, unsure what to do. This detente lasted a couple of minutes. Finally he spoke.

“Good, then, you can stand silences. I abhor people who can't stand silence. Silence is natural. Talking is what is unnatural. Don't you agree?”

I nodded.

“You can speak, though, yes?”

“Yes,” I said. “Sir,” I added.

“Splendid. What is your position on the Thirty Days' War?”

I'd never heard of the war he spoke of. “I have none,” I said. “I tend to be interested in history rather than current events.”

“Perfect. You may go. Obviously, I won't see you out.”

I stood up, trying to display my disappointment. I noticed that the room was completely devoid of any photographs or portraits. The walls were covered with bookshelves and maps. One wall was bare, with a light rectangle where a picture must once have hung, and for some time, but there was nothing there now.

I returned to Elsie's desk. “How did it go?” she asked brightly.

“I'm not sure,” I said. Obviously I hadn't gotten the job. Mr. Andrews thought I was an uninformed idiot.

“Don't ever ask about his legs. I should have told you that.”

“What about them?”

The telephone rang. “Mays Shipping,” Elsie answered. “How may I help you?” She nodded and wrote something down on her pad. “I'll let him know. Thank you for calling.” She hung up. “I'll just stick my head in and see how it went. Can you answer the phone if it rings?” I nodded.

Elsie disappeared down the hall. I ran my fingers over her desk, solid mahogany. The feet were curved and decorated, the top inlaid with gold leaf. I would love to have a desk like this. My desire to be Elsie was so strong that I impulsively sat in her chair, held the edges of her paper.

Just as I was reaching for her pencil, the door burst open and in ran a young man about my age, very tall, dressed in dungarees, his fingers stained with ink. “Hello, who are you?” he asked. I struggled to determine how to answer, but he didn't give me a chance. “Are you the new girl?” he asked. “I need to see Mr. Andrews. Is he disposed?”

Without waiting for me to answer, he followed Elsie down the hall. I heard him knock on the door, then Mr. Andrews saying, “What is it?”

Elsie came back out. “Well, Mr. Andrews likes you, but why on earth did you let that boy barge in? Couldn't you have stopped him?”

Just then a very loud buzzing started, in pulsating bursts of deafening sound. I put my hands over my ears automatically. “Break time!” Elsie sang. “Come on, let's get a coffee.”

She took my hand and pulled me down the stairs to a large canteen area where men were lining up for coffee and a roll. Elsie smiled and cut in front of one of the men near the head of the line. He pantomimed pinching her bottom, and I held my breath, but it appeared it was all in good fun because she turned and shook her finger. “Now you know I'm a married woman—”

“Marriage don't got nothing to do with it.”

I was shocked. I had never heard anyone speak that way to a lady. But Elsie shook her head as though he were a little boy who had gotten into some harmless mischief. She whispered to me, “They're a bit rough here, but it's all talk. You'll get used to it.”

When the coffee and roll were offered, I turned them down. “Come on,” Elsie said. “It's free.”

My surprise must have shown on my face.

“Here,” Elsie said. “Sit and I'll explain.”

We sat at a picnic table in the corner of the large room and ate our rolls. Elsie said, “Mr. Mays runs his company according to the principles of Adam Smith. Are you familiar with him?”

I shook my head no. The coffee was strong and hot. My hairline began to sweat.

“I'd never heard of him either. But we're all supposed to be reading him. Not that people do. Half of them can't read. And I couldn't follow it at all. It was like reading the telephone directory. But the gist is that workers and management are all on the same level, it's just that each one is doing what he does best. So, for example, I can't lift a heavy pallet, can I? But I can take shorthand. Jorgensen there can't write his name, but he can load a container so that no square inch of space is wasted. We each have our talents and mine is no better than his.”

This made sense to me, though I had always been raised to understand that a life of the mind was infinitely more important and desirable than liveliness of body. The body was a mere vessel to contain the exalted mind. But why? Why was the mind so important? It can live without nourishment, when the body cannot.

“So,” Elsie continued. “Every day at ten o'clock we break for coffee and a roll. At noon we have half an hour for lunch. That you have to bring. And at two thirty we get an apple and a cup of tea with milk. It's an expense, sure, but Mr. Mays has the loyalest workforce there is. Everyone is fed so everyone works hard. No one ever takes from him, no one ever shirks.”

I looked around the canteen. Men were laughing and smoking, enjoying themselves. At work. My father always returned home beaten in both body and spirit.

“Mr. Mays is a bit of a…what's the word? He thinks we can achieve paradise here…”

“Idealist?” I offered.

“No, it's a strange word, foreign…”

“Utopia?”

“That's it!” Elsie said. “You're a smart one! Yes, he's trying to create a utopia.”

“Admirable,” I said.

“Yes.” Elsie sighed. “He's really quite something. You'll meet him directly.”

The loud buzzing noise sounded. “Back at it,” Elsie said, getting up. She put her tin coffee cup on a table with the hundred or so other empty cups.

There was a great rush up the stairs, so that I couldn't speak to Elsie. I was afraid of losing her. It was like I had imprinted on her, a duckling on its mother, and now I would be motherless again if I lost sight of her. I also had questions. No one had yet told me what I was to do if I were hired here, nor what the wage would be, nor what exactly the Mays Company shipped.

When we got back to the desk, I could no longer contain my questions. “Wait, Elsie. You haven't told me, I mean, I don't know—”

“What you'll be doing, right.” Elsie drew her face into a pout of concentration. “I'll let Mr. Mays tell you. Let me just see if he's ready.”

I stood stock-still, a growing nervousness in my stomach. I imagined this Mr. Mays a political cartoon, a potbelly, three-piece suit, and porkpie hat. When Elsie poked her head around the corner and waved me into the office, I was surprised to see a young man who couldn't have been much older than my brother Joe. He was dressed in a casual suit, the buttons undone. He stuck out his hand to shake.

“I know, I'm young. The original Mr. Mays is retired,” he said. “Please don't hold it against me. You're young too. How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” I lied.

Elsie hovered by—a parent watching her baby meet a dog. I shook his hand.

“Now, Elsie, you can go on back to reception,” Mr. Mays said. “The girl is perfectly safe.”

“Of course she is,” Elsie said. “Call me when you're done.”

Mr. Mays walked to the little sitting area in front of his desk. He hitched his pants and sat down, stretching his arm out indicating that I should sit in the chair opposite. It was a tall chair, and when I sat my feet did not reach the floor. I was wearing borrowed shoes and the left one slid off my heel. I tried desperately to keep the right one on, flexing and pointing my toes, but it was no use. It slipped off, and I tried to decide if I should ignore it or if I should slide down to put it back on. It was this I worried about all through our interview.

“Ostensibly, Miss…”

“Franko—Frank,” I supplied.

He nodded. “We are a paper-shipping company. We work on two legs of a piece of paper's journey. First, we transport logs to mills. Second, we distribute paper. This puts us in a unique position to distribute other things. I have a special fondness for a certain pet issue, and my position allows me to create and disseminate a regular broadsheet.” He paused.

“Oh,” I said, as something needed to be acknowledged.

“This is the part for which I'll need your discretion. You will mostly be assisting Elsie—she has too much to do, poor thing. But sometimes I'll ask you to take down articles for me, and these need to be kept to yourself, do you understand?”

I nodded. I was pleased, truth be told, to be trusted with a task that required discretion. I imagined hinting at the secret but keeping it from Rosalie. I wanted a secret too.

“Um,” I began, not sure how to broach the topic. “What about the…rather…how often…or how much…”

“You want to know about salary,” Mr. Mays said. He uncrossed and recrossed his legs with the other foot on top. I could just see the hint of a sock garter peeking out. “We'll pay $10 a week to start, and we'll reevaluate after three months. Will that be okay?”

Ten dollars a week? I could barely contain myself. I'd never even seen that much money. With that, Rosalie could finish high school and I might be able to take a night class or two. Maybe we could even get our own apartment soon. “I promise I'll do a good job.”

“I'm sure you will,” Mr. Mays said. He examined his nails. “Now go tell Elsie, and she'll get you started.”

That evening I hurried back to the house. “Rosalie,” I shouted, “Rosalie, guess what?”

But she wasn't in our room. I wandered down the hallway. The door to Mrs. Klein's room was ajar, and I could see her in her bed. For a minute I thought she was dead, but then I saw her chest move. I went to the kitchen where I warmed up a can of soup, which I ate sitting on our bed, wondering where Rosalie had gone.

I sat up as late as I could, worried that she'd been kidnapped or raped or sold into slavery, but then fatigue overcame me and I slipped into unconsciousness on top of the covers, stretched diagonally. I woke when Rosalie gently rolled me over, making herself some room.

“Where've you been?” I mumbled.

“Out,” she said. “I'll tell you tomorrow.”

“I got a job,” I said, fighting through sleep to articulate the words.

“That's wonderful. Tell me in the morning.”

But in the morning she was sound asleep, so I tiptoed out the back door. The day was hot already, the sidewalk giving off steam from the previous day, but it couldn't touch me. I had a real job!

The tasks were no better or worse than what I did in Duluth. I did some filing for Elsie, typed up boring correspondence, a couple of bills, and a note to a lawyer. I had already learned not to read what I typed, just to make my fingers type the letters that appeared on the page in front of me. So I could easily know and not know the company's business.

Elsie promised to show me the switchboard after lunch, and we walked together down to the canteen. She pointed out people I should know, but all the names ran together in a cloud of Mikes, Johnnys, Pauls, Sols, Abes, etc.

Elsie took two coffees and two rolls. I smiled at her, acknowledging her greed. “They're for Mr. Andrews,” she said.

“What does Mr. Andrews do?” I asked.

“Make my life difficult,” Elsie said. “Oh, you mean what does he do for the company? Collections, I believe. Sometimes our customers are reluctant to pay, but Andrews is great at getting money from stones.”

“Why doesn't he get his own coffee?” I asked.

Elsie looked at me disapprovingly. “That's not funny.”

“I'm sorry, what did I say?”

“You saw his legs.”

“I didn't,” I said. “What's wrong with them?”

Elsie said, “You're not so observant then.”

“They were hidden behind the desk.”

“He was born without much of them,” she said. “At least, I think he was born like that. They're like old dandelion stems, withered. He can walk on them, but barely, and only with crutches.”

“Poor man,” I said. “How does he live?”

“With his mother, I think,” Elsie said. “But poor man nothing. He is the best collection agent this company has ever seen. People pity him, or fear him, like it's a disease they can catch, and they pay up to avoid contagion. Don't pity him, it's a huge mistake.”

I nodded to say I understood. But how could I not pity him? Imagine if I couldn't walk. Even my father inspired pity, and he only had a limp. No wonder Mr. Andrews was so unpleasant.

Rosalie was out two nights in a row. I sat up until she came home, and I turned on the light right when she let herself in. “You have to tell me,” I said. “You can't keep doing this.”

She sighed heavily and sat down. “I was at the cinema.”

“I don't believe you. What, every night at the movies?”

“I'm cooped up here all day, wiping her bottom,” she hiss-whispered, “and you're out in the world, seeing people, it's not fair.”

“It's not fair?” I asked. I tried to keep my voice down. “I'm working, I'm not out having tea and cakes.”

“Let's not fight.”

“I don't want to fight.” I held my ground. “I want to know where you go.”

Rosalie considered. “I've been taking acting lessons.”

“Until midnight? Come on, Rosie, I'm not an idiot.”

“After the lessons, in exchange for them, I go out dancing with the teacher.”

I was no longer so naïve, and I could read between the lines. “You're his mistress.”

“No,” Rosalie said quickly. “Just out dancing, so he can show me off. Sometimes I sit on his knee or let him kiss my cheek or my hand but that's it. Honestly.”

She saw my expression. Just a few months ago, any thought I had seemed sprung from Rosalie's mind as well. We used to be a hydra, and now we lived on different poles. It was the first time I realized that you could share a bed with someone and yet not know them at all. If I hadn't been so angry, I would have cried at the loss.

“Acting lessons,” I said.

“Yes, he's great. Peter Leigh is his name, and he's taught the best. You know…Lillian Russell, Fanny Templeton…”

“Who?”

“Broadway actresses.”

“Then why's he in Chicago?”

“Everyone starts here. It's widely known that Chicago has the best regional theater.” Rosalie sounded like she was reading from a promotional poster. “It feeds into Broadway.”

Rosalie's enthusiasm was infectious. I began to soften.

“And are you any good, Rosie?” I asked.

She paused. “I think maybe so,” she said. “At least, Peter says I am. But then, he has ulterior motives.” She giggled.

Then I smiled too. “But what would Melvin Shumwitz say?”

This made her stuff a pillow in her mouth not to laugh so loudly she'd wake Mrs. Klein. I laughed too, until tears began to stream down my face. It felt good.

I hadn't been working at Mays Shipping a dozen days when it fell to me to do some of Mr. Mays's “other work.” The young man I'd seen earlier, the one wearing coveralls, with ink on his fingers, had a printing press in a room off the warehouse floor. I'd never have known it was there until Elsie showed me. It was hidden behind a shelf of bits and pieces of things, metal joints and odd curved pipes, which swung away neatly at a mere touch to reveal a door inside.

Elsie said, “Zeke, this is Frances Frank.”

He didn't look up from his work. He was seated on a rolling stool, bowed over a beast of a machine whose purpose I could not discern in its large rolls and clamping jaws.

“Do you know how to use one of these?” he asked.

“I'm afraid not.” I shook my head. I hoped Elsie would say something to prove my worthiness, but she had slipped out, closing the door behind her. The room was quiet, windowless, and smelled of ink and something musty I couldn't identify.

“Why does he send me these girls who can't use the press?” Zeke asked, a question that was not addressed to me.

“I'm a quick study, Mr….”

He ignored my prompting for his name. “And me under deadline. Okay, here's what we'll do. You
do
know how to spell, right?” I refused to rise to the bait of his barb. I found him unpleasant, and that was the nicest adjective that came to mind. “Read the proof sheets against the master and tell me where I went wrong. I'd say, ‘if I went wrong,' but there hasn't been an edition yet in which Mr. Mays hasn't pointed out a mistake. So here you are to correct my spelling like I'm back in the third grade.”

Finally he looked at me. He had brown eyes beneath bushy eyebrows. They reflected off of a hidden light source and were smooth like he'd never set foot in the sun. His high cheekbones made him look intelligent, buoyed by all that he read.

“Don't stare,” he said. “Didn't your mother tell you it's not polite? Here, read this.” He thrust a broadsheet and a piece of typewritten paper into my hand. The broadsheet had just been printed; the ink was still damp. I looked around for a work surface. Zeke cleared off part of the table by sweeping his forearm across it, sending pieces of type and awls and a mallet to the other side of the desk. He straightened a chair for me.

“Mademoiselle,” he said mockingly.

When I proofread, the whole of the piece barely registers. Instead I see the individual words on islands of their own and judge them accordingly. Sometimes I look for their neighbors, in the case of homonyms, but I leave a text as ignorant of its contents as before I approached it. So I had no idea what I was reading now, and I assumed all the foreign words—
Eretz Yisrael, Hovevei Tziyon
—were spelled properly in the original.

He sat glumly paring his nails while I worked, but I refused to hurry. This was going into print and I was still proving myself at the office. I found three mistakes. At one point Zeke had set “the” as “teh”; he spelled “possibility” with only one “s”; and he had transposed two words.

I circled the errors with the pencil he provided and handed the pages back to him. He didn't say thank you, just sighed heavily. He pulled out the type and carefully rearranged the letters. The word “possibility” made him groan, then curse—it forced him to reset five lines of type until he could make up the space lost. All the while I stood there, waiting for further instructions. I'd never seen a printing press before and had never considered where newspapers came from. It made sense, now that I saw it. Put in letters, ink plates, pass a sheet of paper over it. How had it taken so long for civilization to invent it?

“Don't touch that,” Zeke said, though I wasn't going to.

He neither looked at nor spoke to me while he ran through another sheet of paper. “Check this,” he said.

By this time I was a little annoyed. “You could say ‘please.' ”

“I could,” he said. And for the first time, I saw the edges of his mouth twitch in what might have been a grin, which made me warm to him a bit. I told him it was ready.

“Who reads this?” I asked him. “Where does it go?”

He didn't answer me, just cranked the handle. The machine roared to life, creating enough racket to be forging metal instead of merely pressing paper.

That became my regular chore, then, to proofread the broadsheets on Mondays before they went to print. I remained ignorant of their destination, if not their contents. I couldn't keep reading them without absorbing at least their subject matter, but I didn't ask questions.

Mr. Mays, and also Zeke, if I could tell by his grouchy enthusiasm for the task, were active in the Zionist movement. I knew a little bit about it from Rosalie's parents, who were followers of Nathan Birnbaum. That Mr. Mays had tendencies toward socialism, I could tell by the way he ran his company, but no one levied that charge against him. We were all happy with his largesse, his rolls and coffee and fair wages.

I got used to Rosalie's schedule and no longer woke up when she came in at night. She seemed happy. On Sundays we went to the municipal pool and swam lazy laps in the deep end, stopping by the soda fountain on the way home for brown cows, our only splurge. Other than that, it was cheese sandwiches and carrots most of the time, with occasional forays into the poorest cuts of lamb shank or bones for broth. Sometimes Rosalie would buy extra meat with the money she used for Mrs. Klein's food, and we ate it greedily. I would not call my days in Chicago enjoyable, exactly, but they were busy, which, as the old adage has it, keeps one from brooding too much.

At the end of July, Mr. Mays treated everyone to a picnic by the lake. The beach chosen was a short walk from the warehouse, and when the bell rang at one o'clock, we all tramped over there. Some men had been sent ahead to get the fire going, and it appeared they'd also got the keg tapped, for a few of them were already pretty jolly. The other occupants of the park were Negroes, who liked to spend time by the lake when the temperature rose. Usually when it was this warm, the Eastern Europeans and other Caucasians stayed indoors. There was a nice breeze off the lake, and I began to think the Negroes had it right.

Even Mr. Andrews had come out for the event. He had a chair with four wheels, two large ones in back and two smaller ones in front, and one of the men from the loading floor pushed him as he held on. I hadn't yet had the chance to see his legs, and they were as Elsie described them, like the last little shrunken carrots in the bin in the cellar when spring has already arrived. I looked away before he could see me cringe.

I had some lemonade and set out my dish, a melting gelatin mold with cream-cheese filling. Though I'd packed it with ice, the day was too hot. No one tasted it, and it sunk slowly until it was a soup on a plate.

“Which one's yours?” I heard a voice behind me. It was Zeke, grumpy and dismissive. But his interest in soliciting my opinion was new. I'd never seen him outside the printing room after that first day, though I'd spent plenty of time in there, and in the light he looked smaller somehow, less fierce. His eyes shone even brighter.

I turned as red as the gelatin and pointed to the failed dish.

He laughed and put his hand on the back of my shoulders, leading me to the other table. He showed me a noodle kugel, perfectly browned and golden with bits of sugar. “Wow,” I said. “You made that?”