Skyscraper (25 page)

“Hum,” said Jennie, “don't get mixed up with him; that's all I have to offer. You steer clear. You'll make it up with Tom, all right. Don't feel yourself falling in another direction, do you?” Her words were light, but her eyes were anxious.

“Jennie, no, not in a million years!”

“Make it two million. The first million to pass so quickly,” murmured Jennie. “Watch the traffic lights, Lynn; you aren't the type to cross against them.”

“What do you mean, the type? Who is?” asked Lynn.

“I am,” said Jennie, and turned her eyes away.

Lynn stared at her. Jennie was different, somehow, less sure of herself, ill at ease.

“Look here,” said Jennie, “I've been away for the weekend, too.”

“You have?” Lynn took it blindly enough. “Jennie, where?”

“Where do you think? Atlantic City!” Jennie laughed, herself mordantly amused and aware of the sly humor of the situation. “It's always Atlantic City, isn't it, where girls go, good, and come back—”

“Jennie!”

“This is the time to call me by my right name,” Jennie advised. “Say, ‘Jane Smith!'” with expression. Register horror.
Leave your lunch. Leave the room. Leave me, sunk in sin, to pay the check!”

“Don't be an idiot,” Lynn advised her crossly. She pushed her plate away and leaned forward, arms on the table. “Jennie, did you go to Atlantic City with—?”

“I did. Meyer. Jake. I—he's not a bad guy,” said Jennie wistfully, “and he's liberal. Suites. You know.” She put her handbag on the table, opened it, and thrust her long hand inside. The hand came out again and dripped, down on the sedate damask, several glittering objects; a plain gold wedding ring; a linked bracelet of diamonds; a solitaire.

Lynn stared, tore her eyes away, dropped them and started again. “You're not—married?” she asked, hoping, but very faintly, against hope.

“No,” answered Jennie. “Be your age. Of course I'm not married. All that glitters is not wedding rings.” She pushed the gold band aside disdainfully. “The usual scenery,” Jennie explained.

“But,” Lynn said helplessly, “he isn't married—He can perfectly well—”

“No, he can't. Money. His wife's money, tied up in the firm. When he marries, if he does, it will be someone they pick out for him. Eighth cousin, twice removed. Nothing doing. His wife knew,” said Jennie, “when she died that she had him where she wanted him; in perhaps the next best place to the grave. He—I'd like you to know that he told me—before I went. He's decent, that way.”

Lynn thought, I'm not shocked. I ought to be shocked. But I'm not. I'm
afraid
, that's all. For Jennie. She asked, low, “Jennie, do you love him?”

“No,” replied Jennie judiciously, “I don't love him. I like him. I like him a lot. I like his money. What it can buy. We made our bargain. I'll play square, see. No two-timing. I owe him that much, don't I?”

“Are you—going to Chicago?” asked Lynn, sick at heart.

“Well, no. He has too much sense. I'll stay here; he'll come on, once a month, maybe twice. Then there'll be vacations,
carefully managed—”

“I see.” But she didn't. “Jennie,” she cried,
“why
—why?”

“You wouldn't understand. Here, go ‘way,” she said petulantly to the hovering waiter. “When we want you, brother, we'll let you know!”

“Try and make me,” said Lynn.

“I'm not like you,” Jennie told her somberly. “I don't give a damn for jobs. I haven't any ambition. The stage, modeling, all the rest, a way of earning my way. As for marriage—I haven't any ambition in that direction either. You knew about Slim. I'm not saying I did not like him. But I had sense enough to quit seeing him. As a housewife, with a couple of kids and an electric washing machine, I'd be a flop. I can't help it if I was born with that breakfast-in-bed feeling, can I? I don't want to do anything but eat three, or maybe four, square meals a day and have good clothes and facials, and a decent flat somewhere. All right, go on, say it, I might get those things by myself. Don't be dumb! I wouldn't last ten days on any job but the one I have now, and that wouldn't be birdseed, let alone a gilded cage. Men? If there are any men wandering around with money and looking for a nice blond wife, I haven't seen 'em.

“We girls have to have opportunities to meet men, don't we? They don't float in at the window with the influenza, do they? You don't find 'em on your doorstep with the morning News. In my job I meet men. But they aren't having any. See? Now and then a guy like Slim comes along, all set to go to the minister. That's something else again. He'd hate me in a year; I'd hate him in a month. I'm sick of seeing girls I know run through the lights—when they do it in a Rolls. If you've got what people call character and ambition and all the rest of it, I suppose it pays to stay what people call good. If you haven't, it doesn't. Not, at least, as far as I'm concerned. I expect to be faithful to Jake Meyer. I'll amuse him, I'll entertain him, I have looks, a figure; he can hang me with clothes—and no wholesale numbers either—and jewelry and take me out and be proud of me. Men are, you know; they throw expensive junk like this at you”—she touched the bracelet—“and show you off. ‘Listen,
world, I made her—and what she is today is none of your damned business!”

“But, Jennie—do you think you'll be happy?”

“I don't know. I suppose so. Why not? I'll be safe,” said Jennie.

“No—”

“Yes. I'll make it my business to be, see? Salt it all away, as much as I can. A girl's a fool who doesn't.” After a minute she questioned, “I won't be seeing much of you, I suppose?”

“Why not?” asked Lynn with indignation.

“Tom—that's why.”

“Oh, Tom—! Do you think I'd tell Tom?”

“No, but he'll find out. Kid, if he does, give me the gate. You have to play safe too. I'll understand,” said Jennie, with the closet approach to sentiment Lynn had ever seen in her.

Lynn's eyes were misty. Jennie said, “I'll pull out of the flat, of course. I'll pay my share there until you find someone to go in with you. That's only right.”

“Jennie, I couldn't—it wouldn't be fair—and besides,” Lynn floundered.

“You don't want to have Jake's money helping pay your rent?” asked Jennie shrewdly. “Scorn the wages of sin, what?”

“I didn't say it—”

“You didn't have to. Well, it won't. I'll pay my share, till things are straightened out, out of my earnings as usual.”

“You're going on working!” gasped Lynn.

“Sure. Why not? I'd go goofy sitting around all day alone, nothing to do but cut coupons and shine up the diamonds,” Jennie said, with her slow, wicked grin. “Jake would rather I worked.”

“I'll never understand you! You said, you practically said, that it was because you didn't want to work—”

“Check,” agreed Jennie pleasantly. “Not when work was all I had to look forward to. But if you have a side line”—she cocked an eyebrow at her friend—“then the sort of stuff I strut is fun. Besides, it won't hurt Jake. I can tip him off, you know, when the hot numbers come in.”

“But Madame Fanchon?”

“It works both ways. She'll know, but she'll never say so. She'll be glad to keep me on at present rates, knowing I won't ever hit her for a raise. She'll think I'll keep the home fires burning as far as Jake's firm is concerned. She'll be right.”

“When,” asked Lynn very forlornly, “when are you—leaving?”

Jennie grew constrained. She said hesitantly, “I thought you'd want me to go—at once. I figured on taking a room in a hotel. But Jake's got to go West. He said we'd fix it up about the flat after he came back.”

Lynn said stubbornly. “I don't want you to go—until—”

“Thanks.” Jennie looked down at her untouched plate. With astonishment she saw before her food which she was not eating. She asked, “When are you going on vacation?”

“September.”

“Going home?”

“I supposed so.”

“Before you go,” said Jennie, “maybe you'll find someone to live with you. When you come back, I'll be gone.”

And all Lynn said was, sincerely, “I'll miss you so, Jennie.”

But back at work her mind was on anything but the blue cards. Jennie, how wrong, how mistaken, how entirely mad! Jennie, how rock-bottom decent. Decent, that was Jennie's own word. What was the matter with her anyway? What did she lack? Moral sense? Could a girl lack moral sense who was so integrally true to her friends, who had her own small yet inflexible code?

Lynn thought, It's economic; it has to do, somehow, with the entire economic system. I don't know, I can't understand.

Other girls, like Jennie, hundreds of them, thousands of them, good fellows, brutally frank, brutally on the make, willing to pay for what they wanted. Other girls, not like Jennie, struggling alone, fighting, existing, earning their livings—

Something awfully wrong somewhere.

Her head ached. It seemed to her as she bent over her desk that the entire weight of the massive building was upon it, that
she was oppressed, burdened, hemmed in. The stone and steel closed about her, there was no air, no light, no way to get free, to get clear, to soar upward spiritually with the defiant and escaping towers—

Tom came that night, repentant, more than a little sorry. Jennie was out. “Believe it or not,” she told Lynn, “I'm going to sit up with a sick friend!”

Tom said, “Lynn, I'm sorry. I'm an ass. Why shouldn't you go to Dwight's with Sarah? This summer's been hard on you, hot as the devil, no chance to get away.”

She said, instantly responsive to his mood, his authentic plea for pardon, “That's all right, I should have told you before. Only, Tom, you've made me so self-conscious about David Dwight. There's no reason for me to be, you understand that, don't you?”

She was soft, appealing; she went to his arms and clung there, seeking, perhaps unconsciously, haven, protection. Jennie's decision had shaken her terribly, more perhaps than she knew. She felt ignorant and lost and miserable. Things were not clear-cut. Things were not black and white. If only she could feel that they were; could feel that Jennie was pariah, outcast, could dismiss Jennie from her life, all that she stood for, and forget her!

But she could not. Her liking, her actual affection, for Jennie was not altered.

If things were black and white, yes and no, right and wrong, life would be so much simpler;
was
simpler for people who could see things without compromise, without appeal, without mitigation.

“I do love you so much, Tom.”

“Enough to—do something for me?”

“Of course! Anything. You know that.” She looked at him, eager, radiant, gray eyes shining.

“It isn't doing anything exactly. It's agreeing with me. Lynn, I can get forty-five a week at UBC. I know it's not much, I know you won't think there's as much future in it as in the bank. But, God, Lynn, I hate the bank! I'm bored with it, the whole outfit
drives me crazy. I want to work at something I'm”—he remembered Hank's words—“something I'm keen on. If—would you be terribly disappointed in me if I gave up my job with the Sea-coast, and went—upstairs?”

She said, “No,” slowly. She would be, she had counted on Tom's making good in the banking business. But if he were unhappy?

“No,” she said again, “you must do what you like, of course—”

If she were not enthusiastic it was because she was thinking. Why
now?
Why is he suddenly so eager—to leave? She said, on the heels of suspicion, “Tom, you did see Bob Rawlson, didn't you?”

That was a sore spot. And how! thought Tom. He mumbled awkwardly, hastily, “Oh, sure, I saw him, that's all right. We fixed it up.”

Never let Lynn know the humiliation of pride he had undergone seeing Bob. The remembrance of it shifted his eyes, thickened his tongue.

Lynn looked at him, terribly uneasy.

He said, hurriedly, “I—gee, Lynn, I hoped you'd get to see things my way. I took out my license, you know, down at the Sub-treasury. You've got to have a license; it's better, you see, in case you fool about with transmitters. I—gosh, I'm glad. I'll go to see Hank's buddy today.”

His subsequent embrace was all boyish, if bearlike, gratitude. In his arms she thought, confused, he has seen Rawlson, he said so—

He had seen him. But someone else was to see him in a day or so. Dwight, talking with Sarah over a luncheon table. “It was good of you to come with me, Sarah, to prove that if you haven't forgiven me it's at least armistice. I've been something of a fool,” he confessed, deploring it insincerely, and believing it not at all. “I—I'd do anything rather than quarrel with you—We've been through so much—” His eyes were gay and wistful, imploring her to forget, forgive.