MARGY GREW UP learning to accept things as they were. She learned to make the best of things. She was grateful for little concessions and considered herself lucky when things went her way. She had her few moments of bitterness and rebellion when she thought that things ought to be better; that her parents should have more understanding and proceed on the premise that she was not a bad girl when she misbehaved or was disobedient; but that she was merely thoughtless and stupid when she did things that angered her mother.
In thoughtful moments she grieved at the continuous antagonism between her father and mother. But most of the time she figured her parents’ way of life was the way of all life; the way that folks lived along together.
She knew always the pinch of poverty but seldom the stranglehold of actual want. She endured the tight, nervous discipline of her home, knowing the compensating freedom of her school life. (At least school seemed free in comparison with home.)
So at seventeen, with two years of high school behind her, she felt ready to lick the world. She had the optimism of the young to whom all of life shines endlessly ahead; the young who are sure they can make their own proud destiny in spite of the tritely spoken wisdom of the older people who have had their chance at licking life and have come out of the unequal fight with bloody and bowed souls.
When Margy set out to find her first job, her father made a little speech. He spoke out of his own experience and told her that the two most heartbreaking chores of life were looking for a new flat and for a new job. He said that nothing beat you down like being dispossessed or having to give up living quarters because you couldn’t pay an unexpected or arbitrary rent increase, and then going out to walk the streets to find another flat within your means. Maybe you found it, only to be turned down because the landlord didn’t think your job was good enough to guarantee the rent. Or you were turned down because you had committed the economic crime of having children. Not, explained Henny in all fairness, that you could blame the landlord. Kids did wreck a place.
It was the same with looking for a job. If you had never worked before, you were tagged “inexperienced” and few bosses wanted to bother about breaking in a new hand. If you had worked before, the question hardest to answer was: Why had you left your last job? If you had been fired, you had no proper references, and bosses were leery of hiring you. If you had left of your own accord, you were considered a troublemaker or a sorehead; a dissatisfied worker. And what boss wanted such a man in his shop?
That’s why, Henny explained, he had clung to the job he hated. He knew the odds were against his finding a better one. And that’s why, he told Margy, she shouldn’t get the idea that looking for a new job was all pie.
Margy listened but she didn’t believe a word he said. She had finished her formal education the last Friday in June and was all for going out the next day and starting to work. Her parents urged her to wait a little while; she’d have to work long enough in her time; that the transition from schooldays to workdays should be made slowly. Margy gave in to them. She made the transition slowly. She didn’t start looking for a job until the following Monday, three days later.
She set forth equipped with a neatly clipped HELP WANTED FEMALE column from the Sunday classified ad section of the newspaper, and two letters—one from her high-school principal saying she was intelligent and industrious and one from her parish priest saying she was intelligent and decent. The priest’s letter was more important than the principal’s. It proved definitely that she was a Gentile. It eliminated her having to clear the hurdle of intolerance.
She tried the Manhattan ads first because she wanted to work in New York. She thought of it as a glamorous place. She dreamed of a new world; of the daily ride to and from Brooklyn over the Williamsburg Bridge which spanned the East River, the River she had read about in her history course in high school.
She had another foolish, sentimental dream. It was about getting paid on Saturday in New York, and buying a box of Loft’s Special Candy out of her pay and bringing it home to her mother. She dramatized her mother’s pleasure; how Flo would wait each Saturday for the weekly treat. And some weeks the treat would be “parleys” which were very wonderful, indeed.
These warm dreams got a thorough douche of icy water after she had replied to two ads. The two jobs she had tried first had been filled hours before she arrived. The man at the second place explained that thousands of boys and girls who had participated at hundreds of high-school graduation exercises over the last week end were loose in New York—avid for jobs; any kind of jobs. He went out of his way to tell her this because he had a daughter who had just graduated from Girls’ High in Brooklyn and he knew how it was.
The third ad marked on her list said: General Clerical Worker Wanted. It was a small office consisting of one hard-looking woman, a desk, chair and typewriter. The woman asked Margy could she take dictation directly on a typewriter. Margy looked blank. Thereupon the woman said that she dictated very slowly and motioned Margy to sit down to the machine. Margy said she guessed she could type from dictation. Of course she didn’t know how to type but it looked easy. You merely hit the letters to spell out words, she thought. The woman gave her a sheet of paper, then lit a cigarette while waiting for Margy to get set. Much to Margy’s embarrassment, she couldn’t put the paper in the typewriter. She tried and tried but the gadgets about the roller confused her. The woman watched her a moment half sneeringly, half pityingly. Then she spoke. She spoke in a tired, tough voice.
“You put up a good bluff, sister, and I love a gal what puts up a good bluff. But you couldn’t follow through. You just couldn’t follow through. I need somebody I can count on and you looked like that somebody—a little dumb but honest. But you don’t make the grade. Let me give you a tip, sister. Forget about working for a living. Glaum on to some guy who’ll marry you and support you. Have a couple of kids and forget the business world. And now,” the woman said, bored and tired, “beat it!”
Margy backed out of the place. In a way she was glad she hadn’t been hired. Yet she would have liked to work there a while just to see what the business was. There had been a half-written letter on the typewriter desk. The heading said: Mail Service. Daily Tip. Then the letter started out: Why throw good money after bad? Widow of famous jockey, having important connections . . . That’s all she had been able to read.
Margy had a nickel left out of the half-dollar her mother had given her. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. No use answering any more ads. Everyone would know she was a failure—had spent the whole morning in a fruitless search for work. Else why would she still be looking in late afternoon?
When she got home and made her report, Flo was full of I-told-you-so’s. “I told you not to go to New York,” said Flo. “I told you you’d stand a better chance in Brooklyn. I told you it was silly to go so far away from home to work. I told you that there’s everything in Brooklyn that you could ever find or see in New York. But did you listen? No! So now you found out your mother was right.”
Flo was one of those loyal Brooklynites whose fighting loyalty to her birthplace had been inherited from her parents. They and their neighbors had seriously considered setting up cannon and ramparts to fight a civil war for Brooklyn’s liberty back in the old days when Brooklyn, a great American city in its own right, was absorbed by census-hungry New York City and demoted to “borough.”
Margy had no antagonism toward Manhattan. But like her mother, she considered it a separate city and she looked upon it as any outsider would: a distant, unknown, glamorous place. She sure would have liked to work there.
Well, she had tried to get a job there and failed. Now she thought of Brooklyn fondly. She worked up a feeling of honesty, uprightness and civic pride and decided that Brooklyn was the only place to work in. She left for her second day’s hunt for a job with a clipping from the Standard Union, Brooklyn’s own paper, in her purse. The ad stated that the mail-order firm of Thomson-Jonson wanted mail readers, no experience required, but willing to learn.
The Thomson-Jonson Mail Order House had its warehouses and offices in downtown Brooklyn. Margy was to learn later that it was a small concern catering to small farm owners in Long Island and New Jersey.
A trolley could take her to within a block of it. She got off at the wrong stop on purpose so that she could detour by way of Fulton Street and walk to the place where the wonderful big department stores were. She wanted to look at the windows of the stores. She walked as slowly as dared a job-hunting citizen, and thoroughly enjoyed the hats and dresses exhibited behind the big plate-glass windows. She stopped a long time before Abraham & Straus’s window admiring an Empress Eugenia hat. Then she turned into a narrow side street on her way to Thomson-Jonson’s.
She was about to pass a tiny flower shop with most of its stock exhibited on the narrow strip of sidewalk before the store when a sign in the window stopped her. GIRL WANTED, it said, and for the moment, Margy forgot about the mail-order house. Margy thought how wonderful it would be to work in a flower store; to handle beautiful flowers all day long; pick them out for customers—to receive the compliment: “I leave the order in your hands”; to arrange the order artistically and wrap the flowers up in that soft, shiny, green paper. And as she stood staring at the sign, she began to dream. Maybe on a Saturday the man would let her take home some roses almost full bloom, that wouldn’t keep over Sunday. How wonderful to take home a bunch of flowers to her mother each Saturday! That would be almost as good as Loft’s Special.
She entered the store. It was no larger than an ordinary bathroom. Cut flowers in green pails were set on the floor on either side of a narrow aisle leading to an icebox. A small table, on which were a cash register and a roll of thin, green, waxed paper, stood in front of the icebox. A dark, gaunt youngish-looking man stood at the table, working. Several dozen full-blown red roses were on the table. The man was pulling off the outside petals of a rose until nothing but the core remained. He put the core on its long stem into a pail from which dangled a sign: ROSEBUDS, 50¢ A DOZEN. He looked up as she came in, finished plucking a rose and wiped his hands on his black apron.
He thought she was a customer. “What’s yours?” he asked.
“I happened to be passing by,” she began.
“I got some nice glads, guaranteed to open up. . . .”
“No. I don’t want to buy anything. I happened to see the sign in the window, girl wanted, and since I’m looking for a job . . .”
He stared at her intently for a second, then he picked up a rose and depetaled it before he answered, “The job’s filled.”
He did need an assistant and Margy had been the first one to apply. In his brief second of scrutiny he had decided that she wouldn’t do. She looked honest and intelligent but she wasn’t the type he had in mind. You see, he had a wife home. The lady shared his board greedily but, for reasons best known to herself, sneeringly refused to share his bed. That made life lonesome and dreary for him. Now he didn’t exactly expect to get a partner in adultery for ten dollars a week. But he did want a curvy, sweet-smelling girl; someone he could stand close to at the table while together they made new flowers out of old; someone he could accidentally brush against as they passed each other in the brief, narrow aisle. In short, he wanted a girl who would flood the small cubicle with a definite aura of tremulous yielding femininity—someone with a curl to her hair and bows on her dress and slow-swinging legs with high-heeled, rosetted slippers at the ends of them. Certainly this plainly dressed, neatly combed girl wasn’t the type.
Margy couldn’t let loose of her dream all in an instant. “But you still got the sign in the window,” she argued.
“I didn’t get around to taking it out yet,” he lied.
“I see,” she said inadequately. “But thank you just the same.”
“That’s all right,” he answered graciously, glad to have the episode finished so quickly and amicably.
Margy walked out slowly, staring covetously at the pails of flowers. She walked around the block slowly and came back to the store. The sign was still in the window. An unexplained feeling of anger gave her the courage to enter the store again.
What’s yours? he started to say when he looked up and recognized her. “I told you I don’t need no girl.”
“Then why do you fool people by keeping that sign in your window?”
“Just because I feel like it, maybe. Anyhow, it’s none of your business.”
“All right,” acknowledged Margy in defeat. “But do me a favor.”
“What?” he asked grudgingly.
“Tell me why you don’t want me to work for you?” The question took him by surprise. “You see,” she explained, “I have to get a job. And if there’s something wrong with me, it would be a favor if you’d let me know so that I can fix it, and not have so much trouble getting a job.”
“Well, for some jobs, you’d do fine,” he said. “Like for instance in a office. But for a job like this, where you meet the public, you got to have class.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, you ain’t classy enough. That’s all.”
“I see. Well, thank you.”
“That’s all right.”
I haven’t got class, she thought, walking over toward Thomson-Jonson. That means, I’m not smart looking; no style, no personality. And it’s my clothes. If Mama would let me buy my own clothes, I’d have class, all right. I wouldn’t buy this tacky blue suit and these shoes with sensible heels if I were picking out my own clothes. Well, when I get a job and bring home pay each week, Mama will have to let me go out and buy my own clothes.
She daydreamed, as lonely but hopeful young people will. She dreamed she was wearing one of those very low-waisted short dresses. It would be old-rose Georgette crepe with an accordion-pleated skirt whose hem would dip in under her knees as she walked. There’d be a big bunch of purple artificial violets on the shoulder; black net stockings with high-heeled, patent-leather opera pumps—more classy to have them plain, no bows on the toes. The hat would be a purple cloche to match the color of the violets and a black patent-leather handbag to match the shoes. And Quelques Fleurs perfume.
She saw herself walking into the little flower store and saying casually, “I understand you need a girl. Will I do?”
“Yes, yes,” the man would answer eagerly. “You’re exactly the type I’m looking for.”
“All right. Take the sign out of the window.”
“You bet!” He’d take it out.
“Now tear it up, please.” He’d tear it in two. After the sign was torn up, she’d tap her foot, look around and say coldly, “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think I’d care to work here.”
“Do me a favor and tell me why?” he’d ask humbly.
“Well, if you want to know, this store hasn’t any class. I’d like to work in a more classy place, if you know what I mean.”
“I see,” he’d answer, a broken man. “Thanks for telling me.”
“That’s all right,” she’d say, and maybe she’d add a debonair, “Any time.” Then she’d swing out of the store on her patent-leather, high-heeled pumps leaving behind a memory of Quelques Fleurs perfume to haunt him until such a time as it was absorbed among the scents of the roses, lilies and carnations or whatever seasonable blooms were in stock at the time.
IT SAID ON the door: LEGAL DEPARTMENT. Under that it said: MANAGER OF CORRESPONDENCE DEPARTMENT. The third line was EMPLOYMENT DEPARTMENT. Way off down in the corner of the glass door was the aloof name of WAYNE PRENTISS. It was a small mail-order house and Mr. Prentiss was three departments by himself.
Margy’s first impression of Mr. Prentiss was that he was polite and nice looking but rather old. Why he must be all of thirty, she guessed.
After a few routine questions, he gave Margy a blank to fill out. She stared down at the sheet wondering what to do. She didn’t have a fountain pen! He saw her dilemma and took his own fountain pen from his pocket, uncapped it and handed it to her point end toward him. That’s what gave Margy the impression that he was polite.
Margy wrote backhand instinctively. But they had taught her the Spencerian method in school. She held the pen in the approved fashion, wrist on paper and made the prescribed warming-up circles. She touched the pen to the paper and instead of an M the pen gave birth to a huge sprawling blot. She dropped the pen in a panic and made the blot worse when she pressed the fresh, white, oblong bit of blotter on it that Mr. Prentiss handed her. When she picked up the pen again, her hand was trembling so much that she couldn’t rest her wrist on the paper. Mr. Prentiss got up and went over and stood in the niche formed by the open office door and the wall.
“Come here,” he ordered.
Margy stopped trembling and turned ice cold. It was going to happen! Her mother had warned her! A man will try to take advantage of a girl looking for a job, Flo had said. Then her mother had given her instructions. In being interviewed, advised Flo, always stand between the doorway and the man so that you can turn around and run out at the first sign of the man trying to make love to you. And never, warned Flo, set foot inside an office in which there is a couch. Say, politely, that you changed your mind, or that you’ll come back tomorrow: any kind of excuse. Then get out of the building as fast as you can.
Margy wondered desperately if there was a couch that she had overlooked, in the room. Without moving her head, she rolled her eyes in all directions looking for the couch. She decided it was behind the door. She was trapped!
“Come here, please,” repeated Mr. Prentiss.
And Margy went to him. Her mother had taught her to be wary of men, but she had trained her also to obey orders instantly and without question. So obedience triumphed over fear.
There was no couch behind the door and Mr. Prentiss looked anything but lecherous, bending over the water cooler which was the only piece of furniture behind the door. He was filling a paper cup with ice water.
“Drink this slowly,” he advised. She obeyed. He took the emptied cup from her and said, “Now stand up straight and take three deep breaths.” She breathed quiveringly. He wasn’t satisfied. “Breathe from the diaphragm. Like me.” He gave a demonstration. She breathed according to his theory.
As they walked back to his desk, he said, “Now don’t be nervous. Remember this: You have your services to sell and we are in the market to buy service.”
He put a fresh application blank before her and placed the pen by its side. She stared down at the blank. Instead of putting her at her ease, his kindness confused her, made her uneasy. She couldn’t understand why any boss needed to be considerate when there were so many people looking for work. She suspected an ulterior motive in his kindness.
He felt her confusion and being a kindly person he tried to help her out. “Everyone has to get his first job,” he explained. “Everyone has to start somewhere. Even I had to go out with my law diploma under my arm—figuratively speaking, of course—and walk the streets hunting for my first job.” He smiled at her and she tried to smile back.
As she filled out the blank, he thought of his own experiences getting a job. He was the son of a widow. His father, who had been manager of a small department store, left his widow a small trust fund and a mortgage-free house in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The boy, Wayne, had finished two years of college and was working as apprentice bookkeeper in a mercantile house when he was drafted in the First World War. After getting out of the Army, he had used the little money he had saved to go to a New York law school at night. Often he and his mother discussed how fortunate he was to be able to finish his education, in spite of the war.
A few years ago, he, too, had answered a Thomson-Jonson ad for a young man with some knowledge of law. He had started at twenty-five dollars a week, and by dint of industry, as the success stories have it, he had made himself indispensable in various departmental ways and now was earning thirty-five dollars a week. Mr. Prentiss considered that he had had a very lucky break; getting a good law education and a nice interesting job immediately on passing the bar exam. He felt that he had to pay for this lucky break in some way. He was considerate of other job hunters who came under his power.
Margy filled out the blank but left the top line empty. She looked up at him hesitantly.
“Stuck?” he asked.
“It’s about my name. I don’t know . . .”
“Last name first . . .”
“I mean I was christened Margaret but everyone calls me Margy.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because Margy’s easier to say than Margaret. No matter what name you have,” she explained, “in Brooklyn, they change it to end with y or ie.”
“In some parts of Brooklyn,” he amended.
“Yes,” she agreed, worried that she had said too much.
“Well, what’s in a name,” he quoted. “Shakespeare said that,” he explained.
Margy hunted around for a tactful reply. If she said, yes, he might think she was smart-alecy. If she said, did he? Mr. Prentiss might be flattered that he knew so much. On the other hand, he might consider her stupid. She straddled the issue.
“Shakespeare said a lot of smart things,” she said.
“He hit the nail on the head every time. Every single time.” Thus Mr. Prentiss evaluated the great playwright.
The application blank was filled out at last. Margy, more at ease now, was sorry that the episode was finished. She had begun to like Mr. Prentiss very much. She thought he was learned and kind.
He signed his name on the blank, clipped her two letters to it, put it in his desk drawer and stood up.
“Twelve dollars a week to start,” he said. “Hours, eight-thirty to five.” Since it was an old-fashioned office without pushbuttons, he raised his voice and called out, “Miss Barnick?”
A plain, lean, dark-faced woman of forty or fifty walked into the office on silent rubber-heeled shoes.
“This is Miss Shannon,” he said. “We’re trying her out as reader.” To Margy, he explained, “Miss Barnick will be your supervisor.”
“Follow me,” ordered Miss Barnick.
“No use starting her in today,” said Mr. Prentiss.
“I thought I’d show her around so she won’t waste time in the morning.”
“A good idea, Miss Barnick,” approved Mr. Prentiss. “Report at eight-thirty tomorrow morning, Miss Shannon.”
“Thank you,” said Margy. “Thank you very much.”
“Good luck,” he called after her.
It was a big office with broad, flat-topped desks end to end. “This will be your desk,” explained Miss Barnick.
Margy fell in love with the desk. It was so big and shiny and neat. There were half a dozen wire baskets in a neat row at the far end and a glass bowl filled with strong pins. In front of each basket were placed pads with paper of various bright colors: White slips with ROUTINE printed on them; yellow, INQUIRIES; pink, COMPLAINTS; and the dark blue bore the startling word, THREAT! There was also a pad of gummed mailing stickers.
“Ruthie, here, who sits next to you, will break you in,” said Miss Barnick. Ruthie and Margy smiled at each other. Miss Barnick sailed across the room followed by Margy. “This is the washroom,” she said. “I’ll leave you now.”
“Eight-thirty tomorrow,” checked Margy.
“It would be better if you got here ten minutes before. The person that gets ahead in business,” pronounced Miss Barnick somberly, “is the one who comes to work ten minutes ahead of time and leaves ten minutes after closing time. I might as well tell you that we don’t like clock watchers here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Margy respectfully.
Miss Barnick went away. Margy, because she thought it was expected of her, went into the washroom. She pulled off her hat and ran her comb through her hair. There was another girl in the washroom. Margy deduced that she had just been hired, too, because the girl wore a hat. She was powdering her nose. The two girls sized up each other in the mirror.
The other girl had a nice hair style, Margy thought. It was shingled boyishly in the back and the sides frizzed out from under her hat in a permanent wave.
The girl submitted to the scrutiny for a while, then turned to smile at Margy. A gold-capped front tooth winked wetly.
“Didn’t you ever see a doll before?” the other girl challenged good-naturedly.
“I was just admiring the way you got your hair done,” explained Margy.
The girl pulled off her hat. Her ash-blond hair was smooth and shiny in the back where it was unwaved, and cloudily dull and confused at the sides where it stood out in two bushes.
“It’s lovely,” breathed Margy.
“Thanks,” said the other girl. “You just been hired?”
“Yes.”
“Me, too. I was walking out of what’s-his-name’s office when you came in.”
“I didn’t notice you,” said Margy.
“You looked too scared to notice anything.”
“I think this is going to be a nice place to work,” said Margy.
“A job’s a job.” The girl shrugged.
“I had a little trouble with my name,” said Margy, awkwardly getting around to making a friend. “I finally put down Margy Shannon.”
“What is your name?”
“Margy Shannon.”
“You can’t have trouble with that unless they don’t like the Irish here.” The girls laughed. “My name’s Irene. You know, Reenie for short. Reenie O’Farron. Irish Protestant,” she added.
“I’m Irish Catholic,” revealed Margy.
Both girls had a pang of disappointment because they were not of the same faith.
“I go out with a Catholic feller,” said Reenie, meaning to show that she was liberal.
“So do I,” said Margy. She didn’t, of course, but she felt that she had to exchange confidence for confidence. “Not steady,” she added.
“What are you doing this afternoon?” asked Reenie.
“I thought I’d go home.”
“You can always go home when there’s no place else to go.”
“That’s true.”
“Let’s take in a show,” suggested Reenie.
Margy did some quick mental arithmetic. She had forty-five cents in her purse. A nickel would have to be saved for carfare home. A sandwich might cost a dime. Her mother might ask what she did with the money. She could say that she had to go to a lot of places before she found the job. . . .
“Let’s!” agreed Margy recklessly.
MARGY WAS VERY happy. It had been a wonderful day. She knew she was going to like the job. She thought Mr. Prentiss was wonderful and Reenie was going to be a very exciting friend. She shuddered at the idea that the florist might have hired her and that she might never have set foot in Thomson-Jonson and might have missed out on everything. In a way, she thought, I’m glad I’m not classy.