John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

There was one Saturday night when she had to work late to finish up typing the description of an outboard motor that had to be in at the Patent Office first thing Monday morning. Everybody else had left the office. She was making out the complicated technical wording as best she could, but her mind was on a postcard showing the Christ of the Andes she’d gotten from Joe that day. All it said was:

“To hell with Uncle Sam’s tin ships. Coming home soon.”

It wasn’t signed but she knew the writing. It worried her. Jerry Burnham sat at the telephone switchboard going over the pages as she finished them. Now and then he went out to the washroom; when he came back each time a hot breath of whisky wafted across the office. Janey was nervous. She typed till the little black letters squirmed before her eyes. She was worried about Joe. How could he be coming home before his enlistment was up? Something must be the matter. And Jerry Burnham moving restlessly round on the telephone girl’s seat made her uncomfortable. She and Alice had talked about the danger of staying in an office alone with a man like this. Late like this and drinking, a man had just one idea.

When she handed him the next to the last sheet his eye, bright and moist, caught hers. “I bet you’re tired, Miss Williams,” he said. “It’s a darned shame to keep you in like this and Saturday night too.” “It’s quite all right, Mr. Burnham,” she said icily and her fingers chirruped. “It’s the damned old baywindow’s fault. He chewed the rag so much about politics all day, nobody could get any work done.” “Well, it doesn’t matter now,” said Janey. “Nothing matters any more…. It’s almost eight o’clock. I had to pass up a date with my best girl… or thereabouts. I bet you passed up a date too, Miss Williams.” “I was going to meet another girl, that’s all.” “Now I’ll tell one…” He laughed so easily that she found herself laughing too.

When the last page was done and in the envelope, Janey got up to get her hat. “Look, Miss Williams, we’ll drop this in the mail and then you’d better come and have a bite with me.”

Going down in the elevator Janey intended to excuse herself and go home but somehow she didn’t and found herself, everything aflutter inside of her, sitting coolly down with him in a French restaurant on H Street.

“Well, what do you think of the New Freedom, Miss Williams?” asked Jerry Burnham with a laugh after he’d sat down. He handed her the menu. “Here’s the scorecard… Let your conscience be your guide.”

“Why, I hardly know, Mr. Burnham.”

“Well, I’m for it, frankly. I think Wilson’s a big man… Nothing like change anyway, the best thing in the world, don’t you think so? Bryan’s a big bellowing blatherskite but even he represents something and even Josephus Daniels filling the navy with grapejuice. I think there’s a chance we may get back to being a democracy… Maybe there won’t have to be a revolution; what do you think?”

He never waited for her to answer a question, he just talked and laughed all by himself.

When Janey tried to tell Alice about it afterwards the things Jerry Burnham said didn’t seem so funny, nor the food so good nor everything so jolly. Alice was pretty bitter about it. “Oh, Janey, how could you go out late at night with a drunken man and to a place like that and here I was crazy anxious… You know a man like that has only one idea… I declare I think it was heartless and light… I wouldn’t have thought you capable of such a thing.” “But, Alice, it wasn’t like that at all,” Janey kept saying, but Alice cried and went round looking hurt for a whole week; so that after that Janey kept off the subject of Jerry Burnham. It was the first disagreement she’d ever had with Alice and it made her feel bad.

Still she got to be friends with Jerry Burnham. He seemed to like taking her out and having her listen to him talk. Even after he’d thrown up his job at Dreyfus and Carroll, he sometimes called for her Saturday afternoons to take her to Keith’s. Janey arranged a meeting with Alice out in Rock Creek Park but it wasn’t much of a success. Jerry set the girls up to tea at the old stone mill. He was working for an engineering paper and writing a weekly letter for The New York Sun. He upset Alice by calling Washington a cesspool and a sink of boredom and saying he was rotting there and that most of the inhabitants were dead from the neck up anyway. When he put them on the car to go back to Georgetown Alice said emphatically that young Burnham was not the sort of boy a respectable girl ought to know. Janey sat back happily in the seat of the open car, looking out at trees, girls in summer dresses, men in straw hats, mailboxes, storefronts sliding by and said, “But, Alice, he’s smart as a whip…. Gosh, I like brainy people, don’t you?” Alice looked at her and shook her head sadly and said nothing.

That same afternoon they went to the Georgetown hospital to see Popper. It was pretty horrible. Mommer and Janey and the doctor and the wardnurse knew that he had cancer of the bladder and couldn’t live very long but they didn’t admit it even to themselves. They had just moved him into a private room where he would be more comfortable. It was costing lots of money and they’d had to put a second mortgage on the house. They’d already spent all Janey’s savings that she had in a bankaccount of her own against a rainy day. That afternoon they had to wait quite a while. When the nurse came out with a glass urinal under a towel Janey went in alone. “Hello, Popper,” she said with a forced smile. The smell of disinfectant in the room sickened her. Through the open window came warm air of sunwilted trees, drowsy Sundayafternoon noises, the caw of a crow, a distant sound of traffic. Popper’s face was drawn in and twisted to one side. His big moustaches looked pathetically silky and white. Janey knew that she loved him better than anybody else in the world… His voice was feeble but fairly firm. “Janey, I’m in drydock, girl, and I guess I’ll never… you know better’n I do, the sonsobitches won’t tell me… Say, tell me about Joe. You hear from him, don’t you? I wish he hadn’t joined the navy; no future for a boy there without pull higher up; but I’m glad he went to sea, takes after me… I’d been three times round the Horn in the old days before I was twenty. That was before I settled down in the towboat business, you understand… But I been thinkin’ here lyin’ in bed that Joe done just what I’d ’a’ done, a chip of the old block, and I’m glad of it. I don’t worry about him, but I wish you girls was married an’ off my hands. I’d feel easier. I don’t trust girls nowadays with these here anklelength skirts an’ all that.” Popper’s eyes traveled all over her with a chilly feeble gleam that made her throat stiffen when she tried to speak. “I guess I can take care of myself,” she said. “You got to take care of me now. I done my best by you kids. You don’t know what life is, none of you, been sheltered and now you ship me off to die in the hospital.” “But, Popper, you said yourself you thought it would be best to go where you’d get better care.” “I don’t like that night nurse, Janey, she handles me too rough… You tell ’em down at the office.”

It was a relief when it was time to go. She and Alice walked along the street without saying anything. Finally Janey said, “For goodness’ sake, Alice, don’t get sulky. If you only knew how I hated it all too… oh, goodness, I wish…” “What do you wish, Janey?” “Oh, I dunno.”

July was hot that summer, in the office they worked in a continual whir of electric fans, the men’s collars wilted and the girls kept themselves overplastered with powder; only Mr. Dreyfus still looked cool and crisply tailored as if he’d just stepped out of a bandbox. The last day of the month Janey was sitting a minute at her desk getting up energy to go home along the simmering streets when Jerry Burnham came in. He had his shirtsleeves rolled above the elbow and white duck pants on and carried his coat. He asked her how her father was and said he was all excited about the European news and would have to take her out to supper to talk to somebody soothing. “I’ve got a car belongs to Bugs Dolan and I haven’t any driver’s license, but I guess we can sneak round the Speedway and get cooled off all the same.” She tried to refuse because she ought to go home to supper and Alice was always so sulky when she went out with Jerry, but he could see that she really wanted to come and insisted.