Skyscraper (2 page)

It is all in the point of view.

On Sundays the street is empty. Now and then a car goes by. Now and then a man walks past, talking to his companion. The Seacoast Building stands half in sun and half in shade. The offices of the banks are closed. The other offices are closed also—insurance, wholesale sport clothes, lecture bureau, publishing, investment securities, lawyer, cafeteria, luncheonette, restaurant. Only in the towers are people active, in studios and control rooms, imparting news of the world, secular and church music, sermons, jazz to other people who, slippered, sit at home, the Sunday papers in confusion about them, cartoon and comic, inky sheets, staining the hands which turn them. Who knows when someone will say, “See if you can get UBC, will you? Let's catch a little music—”

This is on Sunday. But Monday releases some spring, animating the routine gestures of men and women. Monday begins the workers' week, and the Seacoast Building opens its doors of green bronze set in black marble and invites them within, to struggle, to attain, to fail, to succeed, to love and to hope, to laugh and to weep, to suffer and rejoice, to envy and wound, to hate and to pity.

In short, to work for their existence.

In the Grand Central district the subway trains jolted to a screaming stop, the doors opened, the people eddied out upon the platform. “Watch your step,” intoned the guard. The guard, in the midway car, by pushing a button which manipulated levers, was, for the moment, a demi-deity. Small, dark, a youthful
man, in whose veins the South European blood retained memories of laughter and knives, slow, hot sunlight and twisted vines dripping the purple, hazy flesh of grapes, he stood in a swaying car and, as it slid to a stop, reached out a swarthy hand and touches the mechanical contrivance which opens a cage and lets forth an amorphous mass of human beings; a mass which, upon reaching the platform, resolved itself into separately moving, breathing, sometimes thinking, atoms.

“Hey—where the hell do you think you're going?”

“What's your hurry, sister?”

“Out—let me out—let me
out
—!”

A hysterical voice, the last. Some women always became slightly hysterical when their stations were reached. For three minutes prior to the halt they sat tense on the edge of their seats, or, rising, swayed and stumbled, fighting their way toward the doors—“I'm getting off here—
will
you let me out?”

Men; young men, elderly men, old men. Women; fat and thin, of all ages. Fur coats, too warm, too bulky for this autumnal morning; sleazy, thin coasts collared with the protesting pelt of some unfortunate cat, coats too thin for the brisk October winds. Stockings, silk, all grades. Shoes; oxfords, pumps, sandals; repressed but not conquered flesh flowing thickly over straps, building from fantastically cut-out leather; sturdy heels, run-down heels. Powder, paint, lipstick, permanents; perfume, hot, cheap, permeating. Tabloids rustling. Jaws moving in their automatic bovine manner over wads of gum. Worried people; people worried over money, jobs, sickness, sweethearts, women, men, rent, mortgages, life—crushed together by the doors, two lovers, their bodies pressed closely together, his arm in the shabby serge sleeve around her thin shoulder. They were not talking very much. They were smiling, dimly, savoring this intimate moment, a little faint with insufficient breakfasts, with the morning dogtrot to their respective stations, with the fear that they would miss one another, with the beginning of a new working day.

Other people, are closely allied physically, but strangers. A marriage of strange knees, a welding of limbs, a brief encounter
of arms, breasts, shoulders. Breathing each other's breath, sensing each other's personal odors, aware of the texture of each other's skin, the fabric of each other's garments. Revolting, yet impersonal—as a rule.

The floor of the car had become a welter of paper; it looked like the city room in a newspaper office.

In the car there was no knowledge of weather, of rain, snow, sun, shade, warmth, cold. In the car there was nothing to indicate the day. These people were for a little time moles, involuntarily burrowing their way beneath the earth. In the car there lived, also temporarily, huddled together, every type, every kind of human being, one by one and two by two: a modern Noah's ark. In the car there pulsed insanely every sort of human passion, hope and fear—

Forty-Second Street—

The doors opened. “Let ‘em off,” shouted the guard, knowing that he shouted in vain.

Pushing, elbowing, the small stampede began.

Lynn Harding, arriving by the grace of God and two hundred pounds of masculine avoirdupois against her back, upon the platform, shook herself cautiously, as a kitten might, to see if she was all there. She was a small girl, beautifully and firmly made. She settled the trim lines of her coast about her, sank her pointed chin into the fur collar, and fled lightly up the stairs, weaving her way past slower stair-climbers, with something of the fleet intensity of a female halfback, and skirting her way about the intricacies of the upper strata, passing shops and restaurants and the alluring archways to train levels, made her way up and out into the street.

Here there was space, in comparison with what she had left behind her for eight hours or more. Here was air, tainted perhaps with carbon monoxide but by comparison, of a pristine freshness; cold and clear. Here was sunlight, slanting down from tall buildings, but not wholly conquered. Here were hurrying people like herself, and under her feet asphalt.

She was on her way to work. She was on her way to the Seacoast Building where, in the trust department of the Seacoast
Bank and Trust Company, she was employed to do a job, impressively known as “sales research.” She had held the position for a year, starting in the old offices of the company, moving with them two months previously to the new building. She was paid $1,900 a year, she lives uptown in a business club for girls, she liked her work, she looked forward to a bigger and better job someday, she was twenty-two years old and pretty enough to arrest the preoccupied attention of more than one passerby, hurrying with the insane speed of Monday morning toward his dull or exciting or stop-gap job.

It was early. Lynn was also on her way to breakfast. She had been depressed for months by the cafeteria breakfasts at the club, the girls yawning their way downstairs to the clatter of utensils and thick cups and saucers, serving themselves, selecting cereals with a lackluster eye and balancing their selected calories and vitamins upon tin trays, bearing them to the painted tables, crowded against the painted walls. So, since the bank had moved into the new building, Lynn, arriving earlier than necessary, had breakfasted during her twenty minutes' leisure in the bigger and sunnier cafeteria in the building. She rather liked climbing on the high stool and winding her slim legs about it for support, rather liked the nonchalant, automatically flirtatious attitude of the redheaded young man in the white jacket who always waited on her and was never at a loss for a flung missile of pert conversation between orders. She liked the hurry and confusion, viewed with security from her little perch.

At the club, where she had lived since her arrival more than a year before in New York, she had no intimates. She knew most of the girls, she called them by their given names. She knew their jobs and, in some cases, their aspirations. She was privy to the love affairs of several. But she had no close friends. And there was something about the slightly institutional atmosphere, hedged about with rules and regulations, something about the pussy-faced, too, too sweet housemother or directress, something about the heavy feminine aura of the place, against which she rebelled. The Marlow Business Club for Girls—heavily endowed by a philanthropic woman who had never lived with
forty other women, who had never obeyed a regulation in her life—accepted for a weekly sum business girls of “good character” and “respectable background,” and “employed in remunerative positions” from the ages of eighteen to thirty. Prior to eighteen years of age you did not exist, for the club; nor, it appeared, after thirty. Within the narrow brownstone walls the invisible emanations from forty female personalities clashed and warred and struggled—frivolous desires, stifling desires, frustrations, disappointments, terrors—

At night Lynn didn't mind. She was usually too tired or too indifferent after a day's work. But to rise refreshed, elastic in her youth and excellent health, looking forward as only youth may, to the unknown astonishments of a new day, and then to come into the crowded dining room and be smitten full in the face by this intangible atmosphere of caged femininity made her melancholy. Therefore, she elected to breakfast in noise and confusion, surrounded by women, to be sure, but women in whom she was not forced to take a companionable interest and by the healthy loud-voiced argumentative masculinity of, for the most part, freshly shaven and shoe-shined men.

Today she gave her usual order. Orange juice, buttered toast, coffee—but added, because it was Monday and a splendid blue and golden day, a soft-boiled egg. No cereal. The business club was afflicted with cereals—one hot, two cold. And at night, if the hot cereal had not been demolished in the morning, like as not it would appear again in some quaint fried and sweetened guise.

Lynn raised the heavy white coffee cup to her lips.

“Swell day,” commented the white jacket flashing back to the enormous steaming containers of coffee.

“Swell,” agreed Lynn, contentedly.

Back somewhere in Lynn's Midwestern ancestry there must have been a lithe and laughing Irish girl, a dark-haired, blue-eyed pioneer to new lands, with the soft, breathless voice such girls possess, a voice with the lilt in it. Such was Lynn's voice, and if the “Western” accent about which her companions at the club occasionally ragged her had been superseded by a hint of
New Yorkese the lilt remained; and a young man sitting next to her turned from his own high stool to survey her, jogged, quite by accident, her elbow and changed her for a split second into a startled lady performing sleight of hand with a coffee cup.

“Oh, gosh, I'm sorry,” said the young man in contrition, “Did—did I spill it?”

He mopped distractedly in her general direction with a paper napkin. Lynn laughed and set down the cup.

“No, it didn't upset; it's quite all right,” she told him, her small dark face sparkling from the loosened collar of fur.

“Lord, I'm always doing something clumsy,” he bemoaned. He observed her, an open, direct glance, and was in no haste to remove his eyes. He asked, a little hesitantly, “Haven't I seen you before—aren't you in the trust department?”

But, of course! She remembered suddenly who he was. She had met him, about a week ago; Miss Dennet, her chief, had presented him to her one morning when, as she had stood at Miss Dennet's desk, a young man had paused briefly beside it. He was young Shepard—Tom Shepard—wasn't it? The new confidential secretary to Norton, vice-president in charge of the trust department.

“Miss Dennet introduced us,” Lynn helped him out, “I'm Lynn Harding. In sales research.”

Tom Shepard grinned at her. He couldn't, he thought, have looked at her very closely that distant morning or he would never have forgotten her, even temporarily. The white jacket, overhearing, remarked with cheerfulness and envy, “Fast work, brother!” and passed on. Tom Shepard and Lynn looked at one another.

Lynn laughed outright. “Just what I was thinking,” she admitted.

“Been with the outfit long?” he wanted to know.

“About a year,” she answered.

“Cripes, that's too bad!” he told her sincerely.

His eyes were very blue over the rim of the coffee cup. His hair was of that color which begins as practically flaxen and sobers to a neutral and respectable brown. That it waved
slightly was one of his minor burdens. He had a very square jaw, a crooked nose, a sensitive, finely modeled mouth, close-set ears, and very broad shoulders. He was tall, she remembered. He had also the biggest hands she had ever seen in her life, and she watched them, in fascination, manipulating a fork and knife.

Ugly-good-looking, decided Lynn silently. She liked them—ugly-good-looking.

“You haven't been with us long,” she stated rather than inquired. “And what did you mean by ‘too bad'?”

He waved a fork perilously. All about them people came in, ordered, rose, paid their checks, departed. All about them was noise and confusion. They sat however on their high stools, heedless of people, of arrivals or departures, and consumed their breakfasts, when they remembered them, and observed each other, and were aware that they were young and that the world was a pretty decent sort of place on a Monday morning in October.

“Oh, I don't know,” said Tom, “I'm always sorry when I see a—a girl”—he restrained himself from the qualifying adjective, not sure anyway whether it should be beautiful or charming or merely pretty—“slaving her life away in the toils of a soulless corporation,” he ended solemnly.

Lynn laughed again. “I like my slavery,” she confessed. “Don't you like yours?”

“Oh, it's all right,” he mumbled awkwardly, a little shocked by the talent of all women for the abruptly and purely personal. He added hastily, “Do you always eat in this dump?”

“Breakfasts,” she told him, “and generally lunch. I haven't graduated to the luncheonette,” she concluded, “nor the Gavarin.”