Skyscraper (5 page)

“Oh, Tom!” she regarded him, delighted. “Banking?”

“No, radio, at the Y. M. C. A.”

“Radio!”

“It all comes natural to me,” he confessed, “Gee, I'm nuts about it. I could eat it up! I started to get my M. E. degree at Sheff, you know. Radio! Girl, I've a set I built myself in my rooms that will get anything from here to heaven, and sometimes when the static is bad, a bit of the other place, too. You'll have to come and listen to it,” he told her.

She said instantly, “I'd love to.” She asked, “I suppose you're always tearing it to pieces? Father has one. It's his only hobby. It never works because he is always doing something to it.”

“I know a guy up in the UBC control room,” Tom told her. “I sneak up there a lot, and, gosh, it's great stuff.” His eyes were suddenly no longer gay; they were wistful. He said, “Well, such is life. It's always the way. Rising young banker longs to be a radio-service man.”

She argued with animation, “But—banking? That's constructive, marvelous—necessary. A grand job, I think. Your finger on the very pulse of the world.”

“Like a ticker tape?” he demanded. “Not for me! Radio, isn't that constructive too?”

His eyes were blazing with enthusiasm. He ruffled his hair so that, more unruly than ever, it stood up in crests and waves, untidy, attractive. He looked, she thought, about ten years old. She said, dissatisfied, “Somehow I don't see you as an announcer.”

“Oh—announcing—” He dismissed it with a wave of his big hand. “I don't want to do that.” He grinned. “Me! Imagine trying to pronounce jawbreakers and getting dirty letters: ‘Dear sir, last night you said
bin
instead of bean!' Hell's bells, that's the bunk, not but what some of ‘em aren't swell guys at that. No, but the control room—the lab—that's where I'd like to be, digging out new ways, short cuts, learning, discovering.”

He was off. By the time they had reached the fluffy stuff in a glass she knew more—and less—about radio than she had ever
known. Her head whirled. Coils, condensers, high frequency, ground circuits, filaments, oscillation—was there no end to this jargon which contained such mysteries as Nemos and cranking gains? She felt as if she had been transported to a new world and there, had heard an entirely alien language.

He said, “You're bored to death!” A mild, but sorrowful accusation.

“No, I'm not. I don't understand half of what you're saying,” she admitted, “but go on, I like it!”

It was perfectly true. She did like it. She liked watching him; liked the grave twisting of his mouth, the changing color of his enthusiastic eyes, the gestures of the big hands which looked so awkward and which must be so deft, so adept with wires and little finicking important things.

Presently over coffee, large, over their companionable cigarettes, he was telling her that he lived in a “dump” not far from where they were sitting, with another man, an engineer with the telephone company. He was telling her of the Long Island town where he had been born, where he had gone to high school. “Used to be all farms, that town; my great-granddad owned most of ‘em. Didn't hold on though, more's the pity.” Telling her of fishing in Peconic Bay, of swimming, of his first stolen airplane flight with a commercial pilot. “Pancaked right into mother's hen house. No, we weren't hurt, but maybe I didn't get a trimming!”

It was past ten o'clock when he deposited her on the narrow brownstone steps of the club. “Tomorrow night?” he asked. “And I'll see you at breakfast?”

She stood a step above him and looked down; hatless, he returned her regard under the dim light shining from the glass of the hall door. “No,” she answered, “I mean, yes, for breakfast, but not tomorrow night; I promised one of the girls I'd go to the movies with her.”

“Wednesday then?”

“I'm going to dinner at Miss Dennet's.”

“Thursday?” He was grave and stubborn.

She gave in, laughing. “Thursday, then,” she agreed, “but
no more celebrations. We'll go somewhere very cheap, and fifty-fifty.”

“Well, I guess not!”

“Please?” She bent toward him slightly. He could see the clear shining pallor of her skin, the satin texture of her lips, the dark widow's peak pointing the little triangle on her forehead. “Please—if we're to be friends?” She added bluntly, “You can't afford to take me out all the time. This way is better. I won't go unless you say you understand.”

“Oh, all right.” He was sullen, his male pride wounded. He added eagerly, “But once in a while—every ten days—my party? How about it? Shall we compromise?”

“Maybe. We'll see.” Perfectly natural coquetry stirred her to say, of course, “But perhaps in ten days you'll—”

“Don't say it. Not in ten years. Not in ten times ten years!” said Tom.

She fled laughing into the house, disregarding his ardent eyes, his outstretched hand.
Dear Dorothy Dix: When I go out with a young man for the first time, is it proper for me to kiss him? All the boys expect it. Girls who don't kiss don't get dates. Little Eva. Dear Little Eva: Of course not. Decent men don't expect payment for an evening's good time
.

Tom was decent. Tom was—darling.

Lynn whistled her way upstairs. She had a quaint way of whistling. Her generous red mouth was not pursed, the whistle was eerie, emanating from an undisturbed face. She went up two flights and entered her room. Nine by something. Bed, bureau, clothes closet, chair. Chintz, a little worn. On the window sill a pot of flowers the Wilkins boy had sent. They were faded. “Poor things,” she said, and poked at the dry soil. She had forgotten to water them.

Mollie Eames stuck her flyaway head in the door.

“You sound happy,” said Mollie. “Lend me two bucks, will you? I'm flat broke. Anyone in your frame of mind can afford to be broke. I can't. Had a heavy date?”

Lynn replied seriously. “About a hundred and seventy-five pounds, I imagine.”

“Lord, a truck driver! How about the two?”

“Help yourself, there's my purse.”

“It's great to be crazy,” said Mollie sourly.

Crazy? Perhaps. Happy, certainly. Why? Love at first sight? Such things didn't happen. She'd see him at breakfast tomorrow.

She wouldn't like him as well, perhaps, at breakfast tomorrow. He'd sort of taken her off her feet, that's all. She picked up a book.
FINANCIAL SYSTEMS
, the gilt lettering read soberly. She opened it.
When bonds have a single maturity date
—

She threw it on the floor and went to bed.

 

 

 

MEN ARE COMPLICATIONS
SIX WEEKS LATER LYNN, JUST BEFORE CLOSING-time, took the express elevator to the thirtieth floor upon which the Seacoast Company maintained recreation and rest rooms, with a trained nurse in charge for all women workers in the entire building.

She went there in order to return a book from the loan library also installed by the Seacoast Company for the convenience of its women employees. The lavatories and mirrored washstands were crowded with chattering girls and women. Here friendships were made, here enmities were established, and here the gossip of the day filtered through hundreds of pale or lipsticked mouths, talk of twenty, of forty offices, each with its different activities.

A cleaning woman went by. Lynn stopped her. “How's your little boy, Mary?” she asked.

Mary's dull eyes brightened; she straightened a wisp of straggly hair. “Much better, miss,” she said gratefully, “and Miss Raines”—she gestured toward the nurse in the rest room—“has promised to come and see him this evening.”

“That's nice.” Lynn smiled and went on.

In the lounge several girls were sitting and talking. The radio was on, full blast. In the rest room the nurse was occupied; a girl was lying there on the long couch. Back of the rest room was the small officelike dispensary.

Lynn hesitated a moment and then went in. The nurse, a middle-aged woman with a plain, attractive face and startlingly handsome brown eyes, smiled at her. They had struck up an acquaintance some weeks earlier over a particularly good detective story. “Miss Raines?”

“Yes? What can I do for you?”

“Nothing. But Mary—her youngster's sick,” Lynn explained. “She said you were going there tonight.” Lynn fumbled in her bag and put a bill into the nurse's hands. “It isn't much, but it might buy them something they need.”

“I expect it will. That's good of you. Mary—her husband's no good, you see. Drinks. Hasn't a job, of course. She has all she can do to get along.” Miss Raines spoke, tucking the bill into the crisp white uniform pocket.

The girl on the couch stirred and lifted her heavy lids. She was a tall girl, very beautifully formed, with masses of wheat-gold hair, worn in the prevalent and generally unbecoming bob, but not unbecoming to Jennie Le Grande (née Smith) however, who wore hers bunched and curled on the back of her long white neck and looked like a Manhattan goddess.

“She's one of the models from the French wholesale house on the twentieth floor,” explained Miss Raines, low. “She came up here, complained of feeling ill, and fainted, literally, on my hands. She's been out of it for some time now. She's all right.”

Miss Le Grande swung her elegant legs and slender feet to the floor and smoothed back the damp hair from her low broad forehead. “Musta done a flop,” she muttered, disgusted.

She added—long blue eyes sliding toward the nurse—“That was powerful stuff you handed me. Packed a kick like an army mule.”

“Spirits of ammonia,” said the nurse, smiling. “Feel all right again?”

“A little jittery.” Jennie rose and walked toward a mirror on the wall. She sat down abruptly, “Backbone's jelly,” she complained.

“You girls don't eat breakfast properly, or lunch,” diagnosed the nurse severely.

“We eat all day,” Jennie told her indifferently. “The girl brings us breakfast when we get down to work. This morning I was late. Didn't get any. Had some lunch, though it didn't set any too well. Mob of buyers in from the West, had us run ragged, that's what.” She added glumly and plainly, “I feel like hell!”

“I'd take you home,” Miss Raines said, worried, “only I promised Mary—and I have to get over to Jersey tonight to see my sister—”

Her voice trailed off. Lynn nodded to her imperceptibly and, turning, asked the other girl, “Where do you live?”

“Fifty-eighth, West,” replied Jennie, without much enthusiasm, “and I'd better be ankling along.”

“That's right on my way! I was going to take a taxi,” lied Lynn fluently. “I'll drop you.”

“Sure you were going to?” asked Jennie shrewdly, and regarded Lynn for the first time, a full direct glance from sleepy, sulky eyes. She was white, under her rouge, pale beneath the coating of lipstick.

“Sure,” said Lynn. “I'll look after you. Come along. Think you can make the elevators?”

Miss Raines said, low, “Thanks a lot,” and Lynn nodded, smiling.

The rest room was for everybody, all the women. So you met everybody here. Since the building opened Lynn had spoken to dozens of girls who were not employed in the bank. Some she knew by name. But she had never seen Jennie before. Coming up at closing hour or at the noon hour, Lynn always found the rooms crowded, the radio going. Sometimes girls, bringing sandwiches with them, would make up a bridge table for their luncheon hour. Sometimes they danced. Always they employed their free time for anything but resting, Lynn reflected.

“I don't approve of it,” said Sarah Dennet firmly, of the rest room. “It's bound to be a hotbed of gossip! And how do you know whom you'll meet?”

“Don't know. Don't care. I don't gossip anyway,” Lynn had laughed in answer. Miss Dennet, in her free moments betook
herself to the lounge set aside downstairs for the women officers. But the majority of the women in the building used the building's conveniences. “Hello Kate,” said Lynn, as she and Jennie went out through the wide door into the hall.

Kate Marple, filing clerk in Lynn's section, raised a plucked eyebrow. Where was Lynn going with the model, she wondered.

“This is certainly white of you,” said Jennie faintly, in the crowded elevator. Lynn looked at her anxiously. Hope she's not going off again, she thought, and wished, with the shrinking of the healthy lay person from the sick, that Miss Raines had come with them.

“You'll feel better in the air,” she suggested, as much to reassure herself as to comfort her companion.

They reached the street and hailed a cab. Jennie sank back against the upholstery gratefully. She said, “You must let me pay my part,” and peered into her purse. Then she laughed. “I can't,” she said flatly, “but pay day's not far off; I'll meet you up in the rest room then and square myself.”

“Please,” said Lynn embarrassed. “I was going to taxi anyway.”