I crumpled the note up and threw it in the wastebasket and opened the window again. There wasn’t any air either inside or outside now, and my fingers splashed on the typewriter keys. As soon as I would get to the last of a large stack of the PRA’s another appeared in its place. I had to stop and think whether
C
came after or before
E
and there were sharp shooting pains between my shoulderblades.
Noticing that several of the typists were hunt-and-peckers, I tried to tell myself, “Look, that’s their problem. They should have gone to nightschool.” But I knew that these people were desperate for work and there wasn’t going to be enough to go around. One of the hunt-and-peck typists was as old as my mother and had a gentle, most unbusinesslike face. I smiled at her and she smiled back and just before we went home she gave me a recipe for a one-egg cake. On the streetcar I prayed that there would be some sort of a permanent filing job for her.
That night we had supper with our neighbors in their backyard. Everyone was eager to hear about my new job and I was eager to tell everything. When I reached the part about the woman gripping Anne Marie’s arm and the note on my desk, Mary said, “Communists undoubtedly. They are everywhere. We’re tottering right on the edge of a revolution.”
Rhodsie, our dear little neighbor, said, “I thought that revolution was averted when Roosevelt closed the banks.”
Mary said, “Just held up temporarily. Frankly, I think we should put cots in the basement and lay in groceries.”
“Why should we lay in
groceries when we’ve got cots?” Dede asked and Mary gave her a cold look.
Mother said, “I think everything is going to be all right from now on.”
I said, “Well, there’s certainly room for improvement. Why Anne Marie Offenbach, a girl who sits in front of me, ran a whole
office
for a year for only eight dollars a week.”
Mary said, “And I hate her because she did. It’s the Anne Maries of this world who cause depressions. People are just so constituted that if they can get some little Kick-Me-Charlie to run their whole offices for them for eight dollars a week they are not going to hire you or me and pay us twenty-five dollars a week.”
“Now they are,” I said. “They’ve all signed pledges saying they will. Anyway, Anne Marie isn’t a Kick-Me-Charlie. She’s smart, pretty and very independent. She just couldn’t get another job.”
Mary said, “Nonsense. Anybody can find a job.”
I said, “They can not. You know very well if it hadn’t been for you we would have stayed home and starved to death.”
“Which,” said Dede, “would have been a welcome change from some of the jobs Mary got
me.”
Alison said, “Lorene, a girl in my room at school, says her mother and father are Communists. She says they go to meetings all the time and they say that the bricks on the Federal Office Building where you work, Betty, are only stuck together with chalk and the whole building’s going to crumble any day and the relief shoes are made of cardboard and the commissaries give people horsemeat.”
Mary said, “You tell Lorene that if she really wants to taste awful food she should go to Russia and if her mother
and father are so sure about the chalk instead of mortar in the Federal Office Building they must have put it there.”
Dede said, “Let’s not get an X put on our gate or whatever Communists do to mark their enemies. Alison, you tell Lorene that every cloud has a silver lining and hard work never hurt anybody.”
Alison said, “Lorene says her father doesn’t ever work. He just makes beer and hits her mother.”
Cleve said, “Sounds like a natural executive to me. Surely you could fit him into your program somewhere, Mary.”
Alison said, “Lorene says that when the Communists take over everything she is going to have an ice skating costume with white fur on the skirt and white figure skates that cost twenty-three dollars.”
Mary said, “You tell Lorene that when the Communists take over all she’ll get will be a job in a factory, cabbage soup and a book on birth control.”
Mother said, “Do you really think the NRA can do any good?”
I said, “Well, of course I’ve only worked there seven hours.”
Cleve said, “Plenty long enough for a Bard to become an expert.”
I said, “Well right now it seems to be mostly a matter of everybody signing the President’s Re-employment Agreement and singing ‘America the Beautiful’ but later on there will be wage and hour and fair trade practice laws.”
Mary said, “A man who sat next to me at the Ad Club luncheon yesterday, said that it is too late for the NRA and we might as well give up, because Standard Oil owns everything. He said they own Standard Brands, which in turn own Safeway Stores, which in turn own Pacific Fruit and Produce, which in turn has mortgages on all the farms. He says they are responsible for all the wars and that we are all just slaves being allowed to exist until the time comes
when we can go into the trenches to protect Standard Oil.”
Dede said, “Eeny, meeny, miney, mo, Standard Oil or the Communists—what do you want: a soldier’s uniform or white fur on your skating costume?”
Mother said, “In Butte people used to say there was no use going on because the IWW’s controlled everything.”
Cleve said, “There was an old fellow in Alaska who stayed drunk for three years because the German Jews owned everything. He said he’d invented a cure for cancer and the American Medical Association wouldn’t accept it. He said it was a mixture of ground beets and whale blubber and all you had to do was rub it on the cancer and pouff, it disappeared. I asked him how he knew it would cure cancer and he said he’d used it on his mother. I asked him where his mother was and he said she was dead and began to sob. ‘She was killed by them German Jews. The Jews own everything. They even own the American Medical Association lock, stock and barrel.’”
“What did his mother die of?” we asked.
Cleve said, “Some say she died of cancer, but I think she died in self-defense because you see she had cancer of the stomach and the only way Sonny could get his magic formula on her cancer was to make her eat the ground-up beets mixed with whale blubber.”
Rhodsie said, “Let’s heat up the coffee and have one more cup before we go in. We’ll drink to the New Deal for America and Betty’s new job.”
Mother said, “That’s a fine idea. Alison, you and Anne and Joan start carrying in the dishes.”
While we waited for the coffee we sat at the cluttered picnic table and watched a thin little moon come up over the fir trees at the end of the alley. Shrill cries of “Alle, alle outs in free” came winging over from the children playing in the next street and overhead the leaves of Rhodsie’s cherry tree rubbed against each other with soft rustling noises like
old tissue paper. The air, fragrant with new-cut grass, rose up from the ground thick and warm like steam from the dishpan.
Suddenly from three houses down the street a radio ripped apart the soft summer evening with the strident cheerful strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The children sang as they carried in the dishes.
“Oh, say can you see
Any red bugs on me
If you do, take them off
They make very good broth. . . .”
Rhodsie said, “Well, you’ve got the world by the tail now. You’re all healthy and Betty’s got a job with the Government. Government jobs are awful good for women. You get sick leave and annual leave and you can cash your checks anywhere.”
Dede said, “The only flaw I can find is that I’ll have to take Betty’s place with Mary. I can hear her now. ‘Dede, dear, stop whatever you are doing and come right downtown immediately. I have a marvelous job for you. It’s working for a perfectly darling man in a diamond mine in South Africa and the cattle boat leaves Sunday morning.’”
Mary said, “A job like that would be too good to give away, I’d take it myself.”
Everybody laughed but I felt sad. As sad as a poor but carefree girl who has married a big, dull, rich man and knows that security can never take the place of romance.
I stayed with the NRA until the office closed on December 31, 1935, and true to Mary’s predictions I rose from a four-dollar a day typist to a one-hundred-and-twenty dollar a month secretary, to a clerk at $135 a month and finally to a labor adjuster at $1,800 per annum.
Those were vital, exciting times, my work was intensely interesting, I could bask in the warmth and security of accumulative annual and sick leave and old age retirement,
and best of all, better than anything, I was at last on the other end of the gun. Somebody else was now worrying about getting my thoughts down in her notebook. That to me was success.
I could tell the day I started to work there that the Treasury Department and I were worlds apart. In the first place they had people working for them
who had never made a mistake;
in the second place they chose to ignore all previous experience not gleaned in
the department and started everyone, no matter who they were or what they had done, even brilliant former labor adjusters who had their own secretaries, at the very bottom, and in the third place they thought that all Treasury Department employees, even those crawling around on the bottom, owed loyalty and should be at attention ready for a call twenty-four hours a day.
But it was the Government with sick and annual leave and they seemed to have no objection to employees with broken legs, so I filled out, in triplicate, all the forms accounting for every minute of my time since birth, took my oath of office and set to work abstracting bids at $100 a month.
“We do not allow mistakes,” I was told and so my hands shook and I made lots of mistakes. All mistakes were immediately noticeable because the wrong person got the bid and the angry low bidder pounded on the counter in the outer office and wanted to know what in hell was going on around there.
This was the Procurement Division of the Treasury Department and we were buying supplies and letting contracts for the WPA, which was a very large order.
Every day for weeks and weeks from eight-thirty to four-thirty or seven-thirty or ten-thirty I entered names and prices on big sheets of paper and tried to find a comfortable position for my broken leg.
From the Award Section I progressed very slowly to the Contract Section where the atmosphere was much freer but there was ten million times more work and no more money.
Even though we worked a great deal of overtime, we were always behind in our work and got many little penciled letters on lined paper, addressed to the Treasurer of the United States and pleading for the money long overdue for rental of a team. “I can’t buy no more oats and I need new harness. Please send me my money,” Charlie Simpson would write and I would get tears in my eyes as I took out his file and found that we were returning his invoice for the fourth time because he had only sent one copy, or had not put on the certification or hadn’t signed it.
For months I worked overtime and almost gave myself ulcers trying to make our contractors do things the Treasury way and trying to make the Treasury do things in a way not quite as frenziedly hurried as glacial movement but not quite as slow as the decomposition of ferns into coal.
Then finally I became resigned and became a regular but happier Treasury employee. When a pitiful letter came in pleading for long overdue payment, instead of getting choked up and running from department to department, I would callously toss it into the enormous ready-for-payment stack, say, “Old X-3458962 is screaming for his money again,” and go out for coffee.
I found that I had to have an entirely different sense of values in the Treasury Department. There, the big issues were not that we were spending millions of dollars in an effort to rehabilitate Americans; not the fact that Charlie Jones hadn’t been paid for months and was in danger of losing his truck; not that the money we were spending was actually our own and it was up to us to see that it was put to the best possible use; but, whether the files should be kept by purchase order number, by requisition number or by voucher number; whether invoices should be in six or three
copies; whether being late should be knocked off our annual leave; or whether we should turn in the stubs of our old pencils when we got new ones.
I had been working for the Treasury Department a little less than a year when it came time to make my Christmas cards. I drew a nice little design, bought an enormous stack of paper that would take water color, obtained permission from the office boy to use the office mimeoscope and stylii, one stencil and the office mimeograph, and one night my friend Katherine and I stayed on after work and ran off my Christmas cards. The paper I had bought was too thick and had to be fed through the machine by hand so by the time I had run off my usual four or five hundred cards, which I wouldn’t have time to paint and didn’t have enough friends to send to, it was after midnight and all the janitors and watchmen had gone home.
The next morning when I arrived at the office, flushed with accomplishment and bearing a painted sample of my art work, I was greeted by furtive looks and whispered conferences. “What in the world’s going on?” I asked, thinking they had at last uncovered some enormous bribe or misappropriation of funds.
“Someone broke into the building and used the mimeograph last night,” a frightened co-worker whispered. “They’re holding a conference about it downstairs now.”
“Well I used the mimeograph,” I said. “I got permission from the office boy. I’d better go tell them.”
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” she said. “It’s a pretty serious offense and everybody’s very upset.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “I’m going right down.”
Just then the office boy came tearing into the office. He was pale and frightened. “Don’t tell them I gave you permission,” he gasped. “Please don’t.”
“Okay,” I said. “But why?”
“There’s a big meeting going on downstairs,” he said. “They’re going to send for you in a minute.”
They did and I went down and was confronted with the evidence—a spoiled Christmas card saying “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year—Betty Bard.”
“What do you know about this?” the officer in charge of mimeographing said.