The End of a Primitive (7 page)

They considered the clean, shining, bright building a profanation, a veritable tower of Babel, in which, as events have proved, they were not so far wrong. They sharpened their tealeaves and bided their time.

But when the old stone Godwin Mansion was given over to the India Institute, and the reservation was invaded by its rabble of employees, Jews from Brooklyn, Italians from the Bronx, Irish from Hell’s Kitchen, blacks from Harlem, foreign Americans from such outlandish places as Akron Ohio, Gary Indiana, Tulsa Oklahoma, that was the bitter end. Now the old ladies walk their cats and dogs with veiled eyes and closed ears, seeing only the glory of the past and hearing only the quiet gentility of remembrance, the faint shape of bitterness in the puckers of their old lips, perhaps of sadness, of sorrow that they should have lived to see the day.

Kriss liked the old ladies. She always smiled at them and sometimes spoke. She would stop to rub the arched back of a sleek fat spoiled blue Persian cat, cooing with genuine admiration, “Oh, isn’t he lovely! He’s the loveliest thing!” Or she would grin sympathetically at some old blind Scottie that had mistaken a gentleman’s leg for a lamp post and was about to make a faux pas; and would be seized by an almost incontrollable impulse to say, “No, no, darling, that’s a man’s leg,” and guide it gently to the proper edifice.

The old ladies liked her. “She is the only real gentle lady of the lot,” they had informed themselves. “It’s too bad she had to associate with such trash, poor thing.”

But there were no old ladies about this morning and Kriss had to be content with the greetings of a few old fat pigeons that moved aside grudgingly to let her pass.

It was twenty minutes after nine when she ascended the worn stone stairs and entered the Godwin mansion. By this time the employees were all at their places and the huge reception hall with its marble fountain, the focal point of pre-work congregation, was deserted. Water no longer cascaded from the four mouths of the marble Brahma in timeless, uncreated, immaterial and illitimable streams upon the bevy of frolicking cherubins in the empty basin, but the four faces of the supreme soul looked down upon all who entered with benign intelligence and bliss. Kriss had once flirted with the Brahmanic concept, years before when she was a freshman at Chicago University and had tried sleeping with a Hindu; and many times of late, when passing beneath the four faces of this bastard monstrosity, she had the strange feeling that perhaps after all life was but a dream.

The mansion, built in the shape of a U about an inner court devoted to a formal garden, was a weird combination of Renaissance architecture, Indian impressionism, English pretentiousness, adapted to the basic idea of American plumbing, lighting and comfort. It gave a fairly accurate reflection of the personality of old Marcus Cornelius Godwin who had erected it. By incorporating in both England and the United States, M. Cornelius Godwin had taken a fabulous fortune out of India during the nineteenth century and had died in 1905 at the age of eighty-nine an avowed Brahman—although this latter had not been taken seriously by his family who had given him a decent Episcopalian burial. Old Godwin had loved India but had been greatly impressed by the cold-blooded commercialism and upper-class idolatry of the British aristocracy. However, in his later years he had discovered, somewhat to his chagrin, that he had lost his enthusiasm for monocles, ice-cold castles, the correct thing, and conversations conducted in a smaller vocabulary then that employed by an English-speaking Zulu. So, in the 1880s he had built this monstrosity to pass his declining years in both style and comfort. It was not comfortable in the modern connotation of the word, but it had been warm, heated by a steam furnace that consumed in the winter an average of two tons of coal a day, and it had been lived-in despite the rococo decor, the gilded mirrors at every turn apprising him of approaching death, the lifesize angels in full flight about the ceilings of the rooms ready to bear him off at a moment’s notice, the English drawing room with its leaded windows looking out on Madison Avenue, a concession to his youthful awe of titles. He had entertained many of the great and famous there, distant neighbours from Fifth Avenue, old cronies from Gramercy Park. There was a full length portrait of the old boy on the landing facing the double stairway.

Most of the employees poked fun at the stern, bewhiskered visage of the erect, somewhat soldierly old pirate, dubbing it the Face on the Gold Room Floor. But Kriss revered the venerable old man and when no one was about, ofttimes stood for minutes before his portrait. He reminded her of her great grandfather, whom she vaguely remembered seeing when she was five or six. He had the same stern look and a great white forest of whiskers, and his eyes were the ice cold blue of the Godwin in the portrait. Her mother had always maintained that her great grandfather was a bona fide German count, but as a little girl Kriss had thought of him as God.

However, this morning she didn’t pass the portrait but continued quickly along a side hall toward the elevator.

There were four floors given over to the Institute personnel, including the basement. The main floor with its formal garden was unused, being maintained as a museum. And the servants’ quarters in the rear of the right wing were closed and empty, except for a suite occupied by the superintendent.

Kriss’s office was on the third floor, in what had once been a guest bedroom, but was now partitioned into three small offices, of which hers was the centre. Along the inner wall a corridor had been fashioned by enclosing the cubicles with a glass and wallboard screen, such as might be found in banks. There was no privacy, and audibility between the three offices were unencumbered by the thin partitions.

On her way past, Kriss smiled and said hello to Dorothy Stone, Kirby’s secretary, who had the office to her left. Dorothy gave her a scintillating smile in return, looking as if she had scads of things to talk about. But Kriss didn’t stop. Dot’s personality was not the type to start the day off right.

From beyond, in the far office, came the rapid clatter of an old upright typewriter. Benny Field, the accountant, was hard at work. Kriss didn’t disturb him.

Her office was furnished with a glass-top desk on which lay several stacks of typed pages, her telephone, an inkwell, an empty porcelain vase, and a small bright glass globe of the world; a metal typewriter stand holding a new plastic-covered upright typewriter; a new desk chair and two leather upholstered straight-back chairs, leftovers from the original furnishings. On the deep window edge at her back, a pigeon had built a nest and was now sitting on four eggs. Kriss made a soft clucking sound and the pigeon looked at her indignantly. She gave a little girl’s laugh—her private laugh reserved for animals, children and television comedians. “Go on,” she whispered. “I don’t want to sit on your old eggs.” The pigeon stirred nervously. “Now you know how I felt when you used to stand there and stare at me by the hour,” Kriss said, then hung her coat on the tree in the corner, and sat at her desk. She looked at the stacks of summaries before her, some to be proofread before mailing, others to be corrected and re-typed. One stack was more or less just data to be correlated, organized and summarized. Across her desk passed the entire program of the Institute.

The Institute had its origin in a foundation left by Godwin for the purpose of bringing ambitious Indian students to the United States to study. For more than twenty-five years it had been directed by a small staff of elderly women, retired school teachers and the like, who had played nursemaids to a small select group of high caste Hindus through the Ivy League universities. But following the war, during India’s crusade for independence, it had assumed a startling stature as a source of reference and a point of contact, not only in the field of education, but for the federal government, private enterprise, and all other major foundations as well. So the trustees had reorganized, and expanded the personnel to over two hundred. Having soon outgrown the modest fund of eleven million dollars left by M. Cornelius Godwin, the new India Institute was subsidized by more than a dozen other foundations and indirectly by the Federal Government. M. Cornelius Godwin III, seeing it slip away from the family name, donated the use of the family mansion, and proposed to the trustees that it be changed to Godwin Institute or Godwin Foundation or even Godwin India Institute. But by then nine-tenths of the funds for its operation came from other sources and they could not very well do this.

Kriss had started four and a half years ago at a salary of fifty dollars a week, when the staff had been comparatively small. Now her salary was six thousand dollars a year and she had the title of assistant director. She wrote the summaries of the Institute projects which were sent, as prospectuses, to all of the subsidizing foundations and to the U.S. State Department. They were subject of course to approval by the directors, there being a director for each of the four major divisions of the Institute’s program, a director of personnel, and the director, Kirby Reynolds. As a consequence she sat in on all policy meetings. She was important, well-liked and permanently situated.

And yet she had liked her temporary job at the Chicago Foundation far more. This morning, as every morning, on facing the dull tedious work, she remembered her office in the old mansion in Chicago overlooking the spacious grounds that had formed a circle of exclusiveness, the leisurely, personalized routine, the president’s morning kiss—of course, after she had begun sleeping with him—lunch on the terrace, bridge in the card room before dinner, conversation and drinking afterward, always the visitors, good-looking black professionals, artists, writers, college deans and presidents, the excitement of choosing the one she wanted for the night, which was the only reason she ever had to return to her apartment at all in those days. The memory lasted but a moment, but left a definite block. She was still alert, still eager, still confident, but her mind didn’t want to engage in the task before her.

For fifteen minutes she read the morning paper, after which she sorted her work, called her secretary from the floor below and gave her the pages to be typed, and rapidly read the completed summaries for typographical errors. She was an expert proofreader with a complete command of punctuation and grammatical construction, and in addition a very excellent writer of clear, explanatory prose. Her sentences were always concise and to the point, never ambiguous, and were phrased with amazing simplicity and conclusiveness and in perfect logical sequence. No man would ever believe a woman wrote such prose until taken into her office and confronted with the fact. Then they wanted to date her.

At ten o’clock she began composing in longhand and continued without interruption for an hour, by which time she had written nine pages.

Anne Sayers, her assistant, came in to ask if she wanted coffee.

“Yes, dear, thank you,” she replied without looking up.

Anne was a huge young woman, over six feet tall, with a round pleasant face, a mop of tan curls, and was smart as a whip. She compiled the data for the summaries, checked the facts and figures with the sources. Her office was similar to Kriss’s but was located in the wing overlooking the court. There were only women in that section and something like a boarding school atmosphere prevailed. Anne had a sideboard in her office where she kept tea, coffee, tea biscuits, cocktail crackers, jars of cheeses, tins of hors d’oeuvres, and usually a bottle of claret and a bottle of sherry; and, of course, cups and saucers, sugar and—if she thought to bring it—cream, an electric coffee pot, a cocktail service, and a set of silverware. Kriss’s only concession to office refreshment was a silver flask of Scotch she kept in her desk drawer; but coffee was always welcome at this time. With it she could take another pill.

A few minutes later Anne returned with a flaming face. “Goddammit!” she choked furiously.

Kriss looked up in surprise. “Why—what’s the trouble, Anne?”

“That damned Watson again!”

Watson was the personnel director. He disapproved of the girls making coffee and toast in the big pleasant bathroom across the corridor, and had wanted to post a notice forbidding it, but Kirby had said no. So he had initiated a campaign which couldn’t be refuted. Every day at eleven, when the girls began making tea and toast and coffee, he had to answer the call of nature. He would stand patiently beside the door, merely waiting his turn, until the girls cleared out, then he would enter and lock the door. They despised him.

“Seems he could shit somewhere else while we’re making coffee!” Anne flared.

“He’s a son of a bitch if ever there was one,” Kriss murmured consolingly.

“I’m going to curse that man yet,” Anne declared.

Dorothy heard them talking about Watson and came from next door. “Kirby says he’s going to have a water closet installed in Watson’s office,” she said, grinning at Kriss.

“Well, I’m going back and knock,” Anne said defiantly. “He’s had time enough.”

Kriss chuckled. “He’s not a duck, dear.”

Anne had to laugh. When she left, Dorothy came around the desk and looked over Kriss’s shoulder. But instead of commenting on the work, she tenderly fingered Kriss’s curls and said, “Your hair always looks so fresh.”

Kriss was slightly embarrassed. She didn’t like women to touch her. But Dorothy was different. She knew that Dorothy had a crush on her that amounted almost to worship. Dot was forever complimenting her on her dress, her carriage, her poise, telling her how pretty she was, how brilliant everyone considered her. Every now and then she wondered if Dot were a lesbian. She was disconcertingly affectionate, and awfully jealous. Whenever another woman came to Kriss’s office—even Anne, who was as soft as butter about men—Dot would find some excuse to come in too. But she liked Dot. And it paid to be nice to her. As Kirby’s confidential secretary she had inside information about everything that went on at the executive level—and she told Kriss everything she wanted to know, in strictest confidence of course. Besides which, Kriss felt sorry for her. She was such a shy woman and so sensitive, so easily hurt; really a virgin at heart despite the fact she was almost as old as Kriss. She had such an enormous capacity for emotion; she wanted to be loved violently, but was petrified with fear by the very thought of it. Kriss often wondered if Dot had ever slept with a man. Probably so! She’d never heard of the stone lions roaring when Dot passed the library at 42nd and Fifth, which they did whenever a virgin passed.