“Do they require a diploma before shipment?” Andy asked, and Mary said, “You wouldn’t do anything about a white slave ring if it was operating in your desk drawer,” and slammed out of the office. She was very pleased the next day to be able to call Andy and report that the Better Business Bureau had called her and told her that Mr. Plumber had checked out of the hotel, minus his brace of secretaries who could dance, and had left no forwarding address.
The next morning, I was in the store closet under the basement stairs, covered with cobwebs and surrounded by old dance programs, photographs, boxes of broken beads, all my college art work and all our old sheet music, reading an embarrassingly pompous theme I had written for college freshman English entitled “Literary Debris” which took to task every writer since Shakespeare with the possible exception of James Branch Cabell and Upton Sinclair, the crumbs of whose works were obviously still around my mouth, when Mary called and said, “Well, I’ve found you the perfect job.”
“Any campfires or dancing?” I asked, my spirits soaring out of my early morning black despair like eagles released from a dark cage.
“It’s at the Western Insurance Company being private secretary to a perfectly darling man named Welton Brown,” Mary said. “Welton puts out the monthly magazine for the
insurance company and I went in this morning to see him about an ad and he told me his secretary is leaving and offered me the job. I told him I already had a job but you didn’t and so he asked about you and I told him and he told me about his job and we both decided that you are perfect for it.”
“Is it a regular secretarial job?” I asked.
“No,” said Mary a trifle too enthusiastically, “and that’s what makes it so interesting and why, because you’re so talented, you are the only person who can do it.”
Instantly alerted for trouble whenever Mary started telling me how talented I was, I tried to keep my voice normal as I asked, “Just what have you told this Welton Brown I could do, Mary?”
Mary said, “Stop interrupting and you’ll find out. Because Welton gets out a magazine, his secretary has to be able to type and take shorthand, know all about insurance, be familiar with advertising and layouts, draw well enough to illustrate the magazine and be able to write and edit articles. He’d really prefer someone who has been published.”
“Well,” I said,
“A—
I’m only mediocre to rotten in shorthand and typing;
B—
I
don’t know anything about advertising or layouts;
C
—I majored in art in college but we never drew anything but plaster casts;
D—
I can’t write and I’ve never had anything published and all my insurance information is mixed up with chickens.”
Mary said, “Listen, Betty, I’ve known you for twenty-four years and you’ve never thought you could do ANYTHING! Now there’s a depression and jobs are hard to find and you’ve got two children to support and it’s about time you grew up and changed your thinking to things you can do instead of things you can’t do. Mull over your talents and build up your ego.
A—
You have to know insurance—you were married to an insurance salesman;
B—
You have to know
advertising—you don’t but I do and I can teach you;
C—
You have to be able to draw and you say you can only draw plaster casts—and what may I ask, could be more ideal training for an insurance company with all their accidents?
D—
Shorthand and typing—if Welton Brown thinks he can get a court reporter who can do all those things he’s a bigger jackass than I think he is.
E
—You have to be able to write and that is one thing you have to admit you can do. What about your children’s stories—what about ‘Sandra Surrenders’—I’ll bet the
Ladies’ Home Journal
would snap it up if we ever finished it.”
I said, “I’ll go down and I’ll meet you for lunch afterwards.”
After I had dressed in my office clothes, I told Mother about the job and asked her if she honestly thought that a tiny bit of talent and a great eagerness to learn might satisfy Welton Brown. Mother, who with the children was in the kitchen making vegetable soup, listening to Ma Perkins and being unbearably hard to leave, said, “The way I feel is that anybody with a name like Welton could easily be a stinker but the job sounds interesting. However, if he doesn’t hire you it’s his loss, now taste this soup and see if it has enough salt.”
It was raining when I left the house. A driving, drenching rain that lifted up my tweed coat and soaked the backs of my stockings, yanked straggly pieces of hair out from under my hat and made it very difficult for me to fan the meagre flame of my self-confidence.
I walked to the corner and flattened myself against a building to wait for the streetcar but the rain and the wind followed me, clawing and nipping like playful puppies. The street around the car stop was littered with its regular debris of old transfers, gum wrappers, empty cigarette packages and sodden scattered pages from the morning paper. The gutters were filled with brown water that ran into the sewer
with a strange metallic clink-clank as though it crystallized at the gratings. The downspout on an old frame apartment building was broken and rain water, with a loud gargling noise, was bubbling out and running into the entryway of the drugstore on the corner. A woman with a black umbrella pulled down over her shoulders and turned against the wind, came struggling crabwise across the street, stepped into the entrance of the drugstore and when the water covered her ankles, gave a small scream and looked accusingly at me. I said, “It’s from the broken downspout up there,” but she apparently didn’t hear me because she gave me another “Well!” look and went into the drugstore, banging the door behind her.
Feeling as soggy and unappetizing as leftover salad, I moved closer to the building and searched the horizon anxiously for the streetcar. There was nothing in sight but wet pavement and wet sky. I thought longingly of Mother and her hot vegetable soup and warm cozy kitchen and had just about convinced myself that my talents showed to much better advantage when dry, when the streetcar came racketing along and I climbed aboard.
The streetcar, warm and almost empty, was littered and still heavy with crowded morning smells of wet raincoats, hard-boiled egg
sandwiches, bad breath and perfume. I shuddered and opened the window a crack. Instantly rain began oozing across the sill and onto the seat. I moved over toward the aisle but the water followed me, so, putting my nose to the crack, I took a deep final breath of fresh air and closed the window.
The car stopped in the University district and a large woman with two shopping bags and an enormous wet orange fur collar that looked as if she had dipped a collie in water and flung it around her neck, lumbered on and squeezed herself into the seat beside me. “This seat’s wet and I can’t move over any farther,” I said, looking meaningly at all the
empty seats. The woman paid no attention, settled down heavily beside me, clumped her shopping bags, which seemed to be filled with old flatirons, on my feet, and leaned well back so that we shared equally in her wet collie.
A block before I got off the streetcar, I noted my bedraggled appearance in my pocket mirror, wiped off the runny mascara from under my eyes, poked some of the wet hair under my hat and comforted myself with the knowledge that most terribly talented people look as if they had just crawled out of a manhole.
Welton Brown confirmed all my worst fears about job-hunting by first giving me a talk on what a happy family they were at old Western; how they really didn’t care half as much about their employees’ work as they did about their fitting into the “family”; how you didn’t just work at Western you “lived Western”; then suddenly thrusting a shorthand notebook at me saying, “A little test on that shorthand, just routine but part of the requirements,” and dictating very rapidly in a monotone, a long very hard article on the Stock Market.
Pride made me pretend to take the shorthand and like stenographers in the movies I filled and flipped over the notebook pages with meaningless scratches and amazing rapidity, even cleverly seeming to hesitate over certain words. When I finished, Welton handed me a single sheet of yellow copy paper and told me to go to the typewriter in the corner and transcribe my notes.
To kill time and because I didn’t have any notes, I took off my coat, carefully adjusted it on the back of the chair, smoothed out the fingers of my gloves, and laid them just so beside my purse, monkeyed a lot with the margin setter on the typewriter and slowly fed the single sheet of paper into the machine and adjusted its evenness to a millionth of an inch.
Finally when there was nothing left to do but to start
typing, I turned and asked, “Wasn’t that article from the
Financial World?”
“Yes,” said Welton not looking at me. “I knew it,” I said gaily as though I were already “living Western.” “At the lumber office where I used to work, I had to read the
Financial World
every week and incorporate the articles in a financial bulletin we sent to the lumbermen.”
“So?” said Welton, about as enthusiastically as if he had just found a fly in his coffee. Humbly I turned back to the typewriter and had just begun to type my name and the date very fast and so unevenly that all the keys stuck together, when the door opened and the secretary came in and informed Welton, in a low spy voice, that “somebody upstairs” wanted to see him. Murmuring they went out and closed the door behind them.
Quick as a flash, I leaped to my feet, grabbed the
Financial World
from Welton’s desk, rushed back to the typewriter and in my hurry copied the wrong article, It didn’t make any difference because when Welton returned he didn’t even look at the article but told me the job paid $75 a month and my skirt was unzipped.
Mary said I should have said, “So are your trousers,” and marched out. I didn’t. I said, “Only seventy-five dollars a month for someone who knows shorthand, typing, insurance and advertising and can draw and write too.”
He said, “There is a depression. We are letting many of our people go.”
“How, by unlocking their leg irons?” I said to myself.
After lunch I walked back to Mary’s advertising office with her and she said, “I don’t see why you don’t sell advertising with me. You’ll certainly make more than seventy-five dollars a month and you won’t have to carry your toe shoes or your old report cards.”
7: “Aren’t We Going to Recognize Genius?”
There is no getting around the fact that being poor takes getting used to. You have to adjust to the fact that it is no longer a question of what you eat but if you eat. That when you want to go to a movie you can stay home and read the book. That when you want to go dancing you can stay home and make fudge. That when you want to go for a drive in a convertible you can go for a walk in the park. When you want to go to a concert you can play Chinese checkers with Mother.
This adjustment period didn’t bother Dede and Alison and Anne and Joan because it came when they were young and pliable, or Mother, who was selfless, or me, who still grew faint at the excitement of seeing one other lighted window besides my own, but Mary grew restless.
First she became engaged to a Christian Scientist, joined the church, smiled when she was being nasty, and threw away all our medicines; then she became engaged to a Jewish boy, insisted that Mother’s great-grandmother’s name was not Tholimer but Tolheimer, whipped us all to a white heat against race prejudice, which we never had, and spent most of her evenings at the Temple de Hirsch; then she met our old ballet teacher on the street and started taking lessons again, only now she called it “auditing the classes,” until
one day she sprained her knee and for a week or two kept it enormously bandaged and dragging it behind her like a little wagon; then she became engaged to an actor, joined the repertory Playhouse, took up fencing, used Standard English even at home and began casting a speculative eye over the family for hidden talent.
Fortunately for the rest of us, the eye lit first on Sister Dede, who had, when she was fourteen, made up her mind, and Dede making up her mind is a process akin to pouring cement, that she was going to sing on the radio and for at least a year before Mary got arty, Dede had been going downtown after high school, forcing herself into radio studios and making them let her sing on the radio.
At that time she imitated Bessie Smith and was very particular about the words, which she enunciated carefully. She used to call me at Mr. Webster’s and at Mr. Chalmers’ and tell me when she was going to sing and I would run down to the cigar store, where they had a radio, and listen, telling anyone who would pay attention that that was my little sister singing, or, more truthfully, enunciating in a low voice. Dede sang “Mountain Top Blues,” “Louisiana Low Down Blues,” “St. Louis Blues,” and other low down chants in her deep husky voice. She also had an enormous record collection, seemed to know the name of every musician in every band on the radio, and kept the radio or the record player going full blast night and day.
One night after dinner, she was as usual sitting by the radio listening to hot music with the volume turned as high as it would go and singing (we knew she was singing because we could see her lips moving); Mary, “with one free night from the Playhouse, thank God,” was sitting by the fire reading Spengler’s
Decline of the West,
and the rest of us were playing Chinese checkers, when Mary suddenly held up a hand, signaling silence from us checker players who weren’t saying anything, and yelled at Dede, “Take that last
note again!” Dede apparently did but nobody heard it because the radio was so loud.
Mary tossed her big boring “terribly important” book onto the coffee table, turned to us and said, “Maybe you don’t realize it but Dede has a marvelous blues voice. She also has perfect pitch and why we’re all sitting around here wasting our time instead of helping her, I don’t know.” She got up, stalked out to the dining room and imperiously snapped off the radio. Dede snapped it on again, Mary turned it off. Dede turned it on. Mary turned it off and holding her hand on the switch said, “Listen, bonehead, do you want to sing on Fanchon and Marco or don’t you?” Dede reaching for the switch said, “I’m already singing on the radio.” Mary brushed this aside as being too unimportant to even mention. “Radio,” she said. “Waste of time, just a fad. Now I know a man who knows the booking agent for Fanchon and Marco and I think I can get you a spot. Now let me hear you sing.”
She sat down at the piano and began to play a pure Mary Bard medley of “Body and Soul,” “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans” and “Mississippi Mud.” Dede, firmly removing Mary’s hands from the piano keys, said, “I’ll sing without accompaniment,” and she sang “Louisiana Low Down Blues” like Bessie Smith. Mary clenched her teeth like a movie director and said, “Goot. Veree goot.” She pronounced it “goot” because she was now Dede’s agent and her critic.
The wonderful thing about Mary is that only five minutes before, she had been taking Mother to task because she let a perfectly magnificent book like
The Decline of the West
lie around the house unopened while she, the matriarch, the leader of her tribe, the example for her children, read novels and the
Saturday Evening Post,
Mother had said, “I’m tired at the end of the day and I’m not going to bore myself to death with that depressing old fool of a Spengler.” Mary had sighed mightily, picked up Spengler
and said, “Well it’s a good thing that one of us is willing to try and keep up the standards in this family.”
Now the question before the house seemed to be not: “Are we going to let our mother slothfully ignore Spengler?” but, “How many people in this room belong on the stage and why in hell aren’t they there?”
When Dede finished her song, Mary rushed to the telephone and called someone named Bill. With clenched teeth, she said, “Listen, Bill, my sister Dede is terrific. Simply terrific. She sings just like Helen Morgan.” This certainly surprised all of us who knew that Dede had never liked Helen Morgan and never imitated her. Mary went on, “Her voice is clear and true and she is small and dark and I think [she paused dramatically] that [another dramatic pause] with the right makeup, back drop, spots and business she’s really big time.” Dede looked scared. It was one thing to be sixteen years old and singing little afternoon spots on the small radio stations but it was something else again to be a headliner on Fanchon and Marco, who put on gorgeous stage shows at our largest movie house.
As Mary talked on and on to Bill about rehearsals, traveling time, salaries and the tryout time, we crowded excitedly below her on the stairs, where the telephone was. Except Mother, that is.
She continued to sit on the couch, reading, smoking and drinking her fourth after-dinner cup of coffee. Mother never paid any attention to Mary’s brainstorms, until the fateful day when she awoke to find herself writing and directing a radio serial. But that is another story.
When Mary finally hung up the phone, she was no longer Mary pretending to be Dede’s manager. She was Dede’s manager. She blinked her eyes quite a lot, kept her teeth clenched and ordered us around like stagehands. The first gesture she made toward her new position was to stalk out to the dining room and brush everything off the top of the piano, which was quite a gesture, as our piano had on its
top all of the music which one of our music teachers, who had died, had left us, all of the hats and gloves which we were wearing that season, all of Alison’s and Dede’s school books, any games which were in vogue, like Monopoly and Chinese checkers, and a large red Chinese lacquer bowl into which, when we cleaned, were tossed bills, spools of thread, nail polish, keys, poker chips, beads, clips, pins, pencils, and odd crayons and toys belonging to my two babies.
Next, Mary took the front off the piano, made little testing noises on the strings, and ordered Dede to climb up and sit on the top. Dede said, “I don’t want to.” Mary said, “Now, my dear, it is not a question of what you want to do. It is a question of what Fanchon and Marco want you to do.” (I’ll bet that would have surprised Fanchon and Marco.) “Now GET UP ON THAT PIANO!” She folded her arms imperiously and her amber eyes flashed.
Dede’s gray eyes turned black with determination. She said in her firm, deep voice, “I won’t sit on the piano. I don’t like Helen Morgan and anyway she doesn’t sit on an upright.”
Mary said, “My dear little girl, it is not the make of the piano she sits on that has made Helen Morgan great!”
Mother said, “I think that the long hard climb to the top of an upright piano might get more attention than the singing.”
Mary looked at Mother speculatively and then, apparently tossing Helen Morgan down the drain, turned to Dede and asked her whose singing she admired.
Dede said, “Bessie Smith.”
Mary said, “But, darling, you are so cunning and little and pretty that you aren’t suited to that stuff. You should be soft and beguiling, feminine, appealing.” I thought for a moment she was going to break into French, she had suddenly become so terribly soft and feminine. It wasn’t French, it was a Southern accent. She sat on the corner of the dining
room table, swung one leg and sang “Judy” in a soprano voice with a Southern accent and lots of fluttery gestures.
“If you heah heh call, in a soft Southehn drawl,
That’s Judy, Man, Judy!
When you heah heh sing, it’s the voice of Spring,
That’s Judy, Mah, Judy!”
Mary was getting all the words and the tune wrong and “Judy” was one of Dede’s favorite songs, so she gave in. She said that she would sing “Tea for Two” instead of “Louisiana Low Down Blues” and she would sing in her natural voice instead of the low down roar.
They rehearsed a little that night and for the ten nights before Dede was to try out. At each rehearsal Mary got stronger and Dede weaker until finally she was singing two octaves higher than normal and Mary had her promise to sit on the edge of the stage with her feet dangling into the footlights.
At last it was the night of the tryout. Mary brought home her makeup box from the Playhouse and said that, as she had had extensive training, she would make up Dede down at the theatre. She also picked Dede’s costume, an old party dress of mine, pink taffeta with a large silver-lace bertha collar. Normally Mary would have had to chloroform Dede to stuff her into that ugly dress, but Dede had been constantly under her influence for ten days now and she was mesmerized. I will never know why Mary chose that dress. We had neither of us ever liked it and it was now old, slightly dirty and out of style, but she was in that old Southern groove and so instead of looking in the closets she had rummaged in the trunks and that was the first thing she found.
When we arrived at the theatre, at 12:30 p.m., we found that Dede’s tryout was not the only one as Mary had led us to believe, but that this was the semi-annual tryout night for all Fanchon and Marco acts. Dede was very scared. Mary
was in her glory. She knew everybody. She knew the piano player, who turned out to be Bill; the theatre manager whom she called “Jerry, honey,” and most of the acts. This puzzled me. Mary sold advertising but had only sold it for about six months and I’m sure she wasn’t handling Fanchon and Marco’s stuff. I don’t know where she met these people. Everybody adored her, though, and she swept back and forth backstage, laughing and talking and organizing. Dede followed her for a while then became discouraged and came and sat down in the front row with us.
There were several groups of dark men with cigars sitting in different parts of the theatre, who we supposed were friends of Fanchon and Marco, and we were, therefore, very embarrassed when Mary, carrying her makeup box, came out on the stage in front of the curtain and demanded of the darkened theatre, “Where is Dede? Dede where are you? I have to make you up!”
Unfortunately, she saw us all just then and immediately began distributing us over the theatre like handbills. “Sydney [she had stopped calling Mother, “Mother,” and called her “Sydney” as being indicative of the theatah tradition] you go to the back; Betty this side, Cleve—over by that exit; Alison, you stay with Mother.” We objected but she brushed us aside with, “How can we possibly tell how her voice sounds if you are all crouching in the front row?” The men with the cigars laughed and we all wanted to choke Mary. All except Sydney who said, “Wait until she goes backstage and we’ll all move together again.”
Dede crept up on the stage, Mary jerked her backstage and the tryouts began. First there were some adagio dancers, who had on dirty long underwear and breathed heavily; then an oily man who wore loose trousers and told dirty jokes; then a poor little juggler who dropped his tenpins and broke most of the footlights.
Then from the wings came what looked like a little raccoon, for Mary, the dramatic student, the makeup artist, had heavily blackened the underneath part of Dede’s eyes as well as the lids, and had drawn Dede’s dark curly hair back tight and oiled it with brilliantine. I glanced at Mary, who had slipped into a seat beside me and was smoking furiously. But she seemed well-satisfied with her work so I said nothing.
Dede walked timidly over and sat down on the edge of the stage, crossed her legs, as Mary had taught her, was immediately enveloped in the pink taffeta—all but hex head—and began to sing, in the voice Mary had taught her. It was thin and eerie like cries carried on the wind and the accompaniment by “Bill honey,” was the loudest thing I’ve ever heard outside of Sousa’s band.
As soon as it was over, and it seemed like hours, we left. Dede was crying and we were all pretty mad at Mary. Suddenly Mary turned to Mother and said, “You see, Sydney, that’s the trouble with having so many children. Having children is a form of selfishness like collecting jewelry, growing orchids. In your day it was fashionable—it was the thing to do. But, did you ever stop to think how or if you were going to educate them? Did you stop to think of the possibility of one of your children being a genius? How you would pay for his musical education?”
Dede had stopped crying and we were all listening to Mary, for we knew she had launched one of her attacks and it would lead to something interesting. She said, “Well, Sydney, is the entire burden of using the tremendous talent in this family to fall on me?”
Mother said, “Let’s get a hamburger.”