Skyscraper (6 page)

“Well—if you really were,” said Jennie, used to accepting things. She added, “I haven't seen you before. What's your name? Work in the building, don't you?”

Lynn told her name and her position. Jennie gave hers. “Le Grande,” she said. “I found it in a book. Pretty nifty?” She laughed suddenly. “Over in Brooklyn,” said Jennie, “I'm still Jane Smith!”

When they reached her destination she asked, completely recovered, “Must you go home now? I've got a date but it isn't till seven-thirty. I'd like you to see my place.”

Lynn was curious. Moreover, she rather liked this girl with her graceful height and heavy wheaten hair and Viking coloring. She amused her. She was different from anyone she had ever met. And there was no hurry to get back to the club. It was Tom's night at the Y. She wouldn't be seeing him tonight. Nights bereft of Tom were pretty blank.

She climbed the stairs with Jennie. It was a walk-up apartment
house, rather dingy. But the little rooms into which Jennie admitted herself and Lynn with a latchkey were pleasant. A bed-and sitting-room, another bedroom, a tiny kitchen, a tiled bath. Very bright and gay with chintz, and fluffy with far too many pillows, and cluttered with long-legged dolls.

“You live alone?” asked Lynn, looking about. “It's very attractive.”

“No, I've a girl friend—she's a model, too, but over in the regular wholesale district—coats and suits,” explained Jennie. “Want a drink? I've got some gin.”

“No, thanks,” said Lynn instantly, and then added, “If you don't mind—”

“Don't bother to apologize or explain,” Jennie said easily. “Lord, my head aches! A little snort wouldn't do me any harm.” She walked into the kitchenette and came back with a small measure of straight gin in a bar glass in her hand. “Here's how! And thanks a lot.”

She went into the bedroom, calling Lynn to follow. She plucked a note from the mirror and frowned at the purple-inked scrawl it contained. “Here's a swell setup,” said Jennie angrily. “Angie—that's the girl friend—has walked off with my heavy date for the evening! That leaves me flat!” she mourned. Then she brightened. “Well, it's all in the day's work; he's a washout anyway. Look here, what are you doing this evening? Stay with me, won't you? We'll send to the restaurant around the corner and get something to eat. My credit's good there. Do say you'll stay,” urged Jennie. “I hate to be alone, it gives me the heebie-jeebies!”

Lynn stayed. The club was becoming more and more distasteful to her. It was rather fun fussing about the apartment, helping get supper—no, getting all the supper—from the scraps in the ice-box, supplemented by the restaurant service. Jennie drifted about or lay at full length on the bed divan in the living-room, smoking furiously. By the time Lynn left her, a little after ten, she had learned something of Jennie's background. Twenty-six years old. Born in Brooklyn. A brief stage career—show girl—“But there's about a million of us out of work now,”
Jennie explained, “and this modeling business isn't so bad. You draw down your forty per and you get your clothes cheap. When they're taken off the line you buy ‘em, those you want. And sometimes you buy the ones that have been made to your measure—the sample gowns, I mean. Our house does evening and afternoon dresses. I get my suits and coats through Angie—the double-crossing little cat!” said Jennie, with no rancor and less energy. She listened while Lynn, after urging, explained her own work.

“It's all too deep for me,” Jennie confessed. “I haven't the brains. Or the education. Not that I think brains matter getting along. At least they don't in my line of work. There was a model with us when I first came to Madame Fanchon's—good-looking,” Jennie admitted, “but not any better-looking than I am. Now she has a couple of Lincolns for the heavy work and a nice little Olds for tea parties. Two sable coats. I suppose she wears one when it's raining. It wasn't brains that got her there,” said Jennie.

“Did she get married?” asked Lynn innocently.

“Be yourself,” Jennie reproved her, and reached for another cigarette.

Lynn flushed, furious with herself for her momentary display of unsophistication. She knew all there was to know. Several girls at the club, notably those who went in for the “arts” had vanished, to reappear as visitors in better clothes than they could afford, and not on foot. They weren't married, either. But Jennie's recital had been so without whispered eagerness, curiosity, or any of the elements with which the business club had discussed the rise—or fall—of its departed members that Lynn found herself reverting to older and more ignorant days. She said now, firmly, “Well, it doesn't pay—that sort of thing.”

“Doesn't it?” Jennie glinted the long blue eyes at her guest. “I'll say it does. Better than forty a week anyway. If you've sense enough to soak it away,” she added.

When Lynn left she had a promise from Jennie to come up to the club for dinner some night. “It's not like anything you ever saw,” Lynn explained, laughing. “You'll get a big kick out
of it.”

Jennie did, a few days later. “I'd just as soon live in a jail!” she said while she was inspecting Lynn's quarters after dinner, during which she had withstood the astonished glare of the directress very well indeed.

“It's not so hot,” Lynn admitted. “I'm getting pretty fed up with it myself.”

She found herself meeting Jennie now and then for luncheon in the cafeteria. And then Jennie and the telephone-company engineer—a lanky, attractive lad named Howell—Lynn and Tom went to a movie together. This was repeated at intervals though Tom protested, laughing, after the first occasion: “Where did you pick her up, Lynn? She isn't your sort.”

“What's the matter with her?” Lynn wanted to know, indignant. She liked Jennie. There was something slow and expansive about her, something relaxing. She was almost bovine, in her lazy, effortless movements, in her enjoyment of food, in her tremendous desire never to walk when she could ride, never to stand up when she could sit down, never to sit down when she could lie down. How she kept her amazingly slender figure was more than Lynn could fathom.

Then too, she never posed, except perhaps when on display and then only physically. Jennie was frankly herself.
Take me or leave me
, her attitude said,
and I don't give a damn which you do, personally. I'd rather sleep!

“Nothing,” Tom admitted, “but poor old Slim Howell is crazy about her. He thinks she's Venus and Mrs. Socrates all rolled into one!”

“Oh, Tom, not Mrs. Socrates!”

“Why not? Wasn't she a smart femme? Well, he thinks Jennie is,” grinned Tom, “and in my opinion she is a perfect vacuum above the neck.” He added, “I like girls with brains.”

“Meaning me?”

“You? I don't know if you have any brains or not,” said Tom, “and I don't care. I don't like you, anyway—I'm crazy about you. I love you to death!”

This was while bus riding, on a freezing night. Lynn snuggled
her pointed chin into her collar. Her hand was warm, the hand which Tom held firmly in his overcoat pocket. It wasn't the first time he had told her that he loved her. It was about the hundred and first. But she wouldn't take him seriously. Or so she told herself, and him. Without much success, however.

Miss Dennet asked, “Is it getting serious—young Shepard, I mean?” and asked it with anxiety.

“Well, of course not,” Lynn answered.

But it was. It was gay and idiotic and enchanting and sweet and—underneath as serious as life and death. She knew it. She tried to pretend that she didn't know it. She told herself, I like Tom and he likes me. Well perhaps we are crazy about each other. But it doesn't mean anything. We'll get over it. Why, I can't let it mean anything. I don't want to marry Tom. I don't want to marry anyone, said Lynn to herself. It's too much of a risk. And I'm just getting somewhere with my job. Men, sighed Lynn, are complications.

Yet Tom had not asked her to marry him. It was, as Jennie would say in describing something indefinable, something without words, but nevertheless a fact, “just one of those things.”

“You're my girl, aren't you?” Tom would tell her, ask her, at unexpected moments and in unexpected places. And before Christmas he had kissed her soundly, delightedly, boyishly, and not under the mistletoe either. There are fewer kissing-bridges for unattached and homeless young people in Manhattan than you would think. By homeless I mean just that. Business clubs and Village bedrooms are not homes to people such as Tom and Lynn. And fastidious young people—such as Tom and Lynn—do not embrace avidly in taxicabs unless the compulsion is so strong that they must, or die of it. Once or twice the compulsion was too strong. But they could hold hands, like any other city lovers, in the darkness of the motion-picture theaters, while their eyes were fastened, not quite seeing, on the lighted screen against which the shadows of life and death, love and hatred, formed their simple two-dimensional patterns.

Lynn thought, sometimes, after Tom had left her, It can't go on like this—being together a lot, laughing a good deal, talking,
kissing, now and then—it can't go on. I mean, we can't get married, can we?

Her people wanted her to come home at Christmas. But the Seacoast Bank was not a boarding-school, it gave no long vacations at holiday seasons. She wrote therefore that she would not be home, and her mother wrote back sorrowfully that she was so disappointed—there would be a tree, and fixin's, and that after Christmas she and Lynn's father were really going South.

Lynn had her Christmas at Sarah Dennet's, pleasant, homelike, but makeshift with the white-tissue-paper parcels tied with red ribbon, stockings, gloves, a string of beads—and a little table tree, dripping synthetic icicles on the damask cloth. Sarah Dennet and her friend Anna Frank had rather outgrown Christmas. To Sarah it meant persuading people to put bonds in children's stockings, to turn Santa Claus into a trust fund; while to Anna it denoted a terrific siege of superadvertising, of concentrating the weary mind upon new ways in which to create public demand, public interest, new sprightly methods of loosening public purse strings. They gave to one another costly but sensible gifts and were relieved when it was all over. “Disorganizing,” they said. But Sarah despite an inner reluctance invited Tom for dinner, too, so for a short space there was youth in the quiet, tasteful apartment—and laughter and silly jokes.

Tom had brought them all presents from the five-and-ten. He'd been their guest for dinner before. Lynn had asked sweetly, “Some night, may I bring Tom?” and so he knew his hostesses and their Barbadian maid. He brought them egg beaters and tiny trucks and jointed wooden toys. He brought Lynn innumerable idiocies, a pair of woolen socks to keep her feet warm, a pair of rubbers which would fold up into a handbag, doll's clothespins, and, of all things, because she liked a glass of milk at night, a doll's refrigerator. Lynn who had spent more than she could afford upon the cigarette case and lighter she gave him, was not in the least disappointed. She was enchanted—because he had told her early in the evening, “I've got something for you—very special—but it needn't have publicity.”

He gave it to her, going back to the club in a taxi. A ring it
was, modest, twinkling, a good small stone. She said, “Tom, you shouldn't.”

And he asked, “Don't you like it, darling? I hoped you would like it.”

She cried, “I
love
it!” and let him put it on her finger, let him touch with his boy's hard mouth her own parted and surrendering lips, and later asked, breathless, drawing away, “But—what does it
mean?
”

He was sobered, after his moment of blind ecstasy. He repeated stupidly, “Mean?” He said, less stupidly, “Why,
you
, of course—and me—that we belong. We do, don't we?”

They did, of course. Their love affair had run a natural and normal course with the most prosaic of wavelike temperature charts. There had been small quarrels, and swift yieldings, and differences of opinion and hours of unity; but as yet none of the dangers or complications or obstacles which constitute crises.

She told him, still breathless, “But—we can't bind ourselves to anything now. We—we're too young, Tom. You've your way to make. I've mine. Can't you see?”

He could see. He had to see on the fifty dollars a week the bank was paying him. He said, “I know—I don't mean to bind you, you know that. I thought you'd wear it for now, because we belonged.”

She wore it, on her right hand, as a concession.

Jennie commented, looking at the ring, her narrow eyes widening. “That's Tom, of course. When are you going to get hitched?”

“We aren't—that is—not now. We aren't really even engaged.”

“I see.” Jennie didn't, quite. When girls wore diamonds and weren't going to be married and weren't even really engaged, they wore larger diamonds. Such was her simple lexicon. She added, yawning, “Slim's getting pretty goofy. He's a great kind, but not for me. I'd rather struggle along on the forty per, thank you.”

“Has he—?” began Lynn.

“He has. He wants to make a down payment on a house in
Jersey, oh, migod!” said Jennie. “Can you tie that?”