John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

So next day at eight Eleanor was on her way down to Marshall Field’s again and there she stayed for several years. She got the raise and the percentages on commissions and she and Mr. Spotmann got to be quite thick, but he never tried to make love to her and their relations were always formal; that was a relief to Eleanor because she kept hearing stories about floorwalkers and department heads forcing their attentions on the young girl employees and Mr. Elwood of the furniture department had been discharged for that very reason, when it came out that little Lizzie Dukes was going to have a baby, but perhaps that hadn’t been all Mr. Elwood’s fault as Lizzie Dukes didn’t look as if she was any better than she should be; anyway it seemed to Eleanor as if she’d spend the rest of her life furnishing other people’s new drawingrooms and diningrooms, matching curtains and samples of upholstery and wallpaper, smoothing down indignant women customers who’d been sent an oriental china dog instead of an inlaid teak teatable or who even after they’d chosen it themselves weren’t satisfied with the pattern on that cretonne.

She found Eveline Hutchins waiting for her one evening when the store closed. Eveline wasn’t crying but was deathly pale. She said she hadn’t had anything to eat for two days and wouldn’t Eleanor have some tea with her over at the Sherman House or anywhere.

They went to the Auditorium Annex and sat in the lounge and ordered tea and cinnamon toast and then Eveline told her that she’d broken off her engagement with Dirk McArthur and that she’d decided not to kill herself but to go to work. “I’ll never fall in love with anybody again, that’s all, but I’ve got to do something and you’re just wasting yourself in that stuffy department store, Eleanor; you know you never get a chance to show what you can do; you’re just wasting your ability.”

Eleanor said that she hated it like poison but what was she to do? “Why not do what we’ve been talking about all these years… Oh, people make me so mad, they never will have any nerve or do anything that’s fun or interesting… I bet you if we started a decorating business we’d have lots of orders. Sally Emerson’ll give us her new house to decorate and then everybody else’ll just have to have us to be in the swim… I don’t think people really want to live in the horrible stuffy places they live in; it’s just that they don’t know any better.”

Eleanor lifted her teacup and drank several little sips. She looked at her little white carefully manicured hand with pointed nails holding the teacup. Then she said, “But where’d we get the capital? We’d have to have a little capital to start on.”

“Dad’ll let us have something, I think, and maybe Sally Emerson might; she’s an awfully good sport and then our first commission’ll launch us… Oh, do come on, Eleanor; it’ll be such fun.”

“‘Hutchins and Stoddard, Interior Decorating,’” said Eleanor, putting down her teacup, “or maybe ‘Miss Hutchins and Miss Stoddard’; why, my dear, I think it’s a grand idea!” “Don’t you think just ‘Eleanor Stoddard and Eveline Hutchins’ would be better?”

“Oh, well, we can decide on the name when we hire a studio and have put it in the telephone book. Why don’t we put it this way, Eveline dear… if you can get your friend Mrs. Emerson to give us the decorating of her new house, we’ll go in for it, if not we’ll wait until we have a genuine order to start off on.” “All right; I know she will. I’ll run right out and see her now.” Eveline had a high color now. She got to her feet and leaned over Eleanor and kissed her. “Oh, Eleanor, you’re a darling.” “Wait a minute, we haven’t paid for our tea,” said Eleanor.

The next month the office was unbearable, and the customers’ complaints and leaving the Ivanhoe in a hurry every morning and being polite to Mr. Spotmann and thinking up little jokes to make him laugh. Her room at the Ivanhoe seemed small and sordid and the smell of cooking that came up through the window and the greasesmell of the old elevator. Several days she called up that she was sick and then found that she couldn’t stay in her room and roamed about the city going to shops and moving pictureshows and then getting suddenly dead tired and having to come home in a taxi that she couldn’t afford. She even went back to the Art Institute once in a while, but she knew all the pictures by heart and hadn’t the patience to look at them any more. Then at last Eveline got Mrs. Philip Paine Emerson to feeling that her new house couldn’t do without a novel note in the diningroom and they got her up an estimate much less than any of the established decorators was asking, and Eleanor had the pleasure of watching Mr. Spotmann’s astonished face when she refused to stay even with a raise to forty a week and said that she had a commission with a friend to decorate the new Paine Emerson mansion in Lake Forest.

“Well, my dear,” said Mr. Spotmann, snapping his square white mouth, “if you want to commit suicide of your career I won’t be the one to stop you. You can leave right this minute if you want to. Of course you forfeit the Christmas bonus.” Eleanor’s heart beat fast. She looked at the gray light that came through the office, and the yellow cardcatalogue case and the letters on a file and the little samples dangling from them. In the outer office Ella Bowen the stenographer had stopped typing; she was probably listening. Eleanor sniffed the lifeless air that smelt of chintz and furniturevarnish and steamheat and people’s breath and then she said, “All right, Mr. Spotmann, I will.”

It took her all day to get her pay and to collect the insurance money due her and she had a long wrangle with a cashier about the amount, so that it was late afternoon before she stepped out into the driving snow of the streets and went into a drugstore to call up Eveline.

Eveline had already rented two floors of an old Victorian house off Chicago Avenue, and they were busy all winter decorating the office and showrooms downstairs and the apartment upstairs where they were going to live, and doing Sally Emerson’s diningroom. They got a colored maid named Amelia who was a very good cook although she drank a little, and they had cigarettes and cocktails at the end of the afternoon and little dinners with wine, and found a downattheheels French dressmaker to make them evening gowns to wear when they went out with Sally Emerson and her set, and rode in taxis and got to know a lot of really interesting people. By Spring when they finally got a check for five hundred dollars out of Philip Paine Emerson they were a thousand dollars in the hole, but they were living the way they liked. The diningroom was considered a little extreme, but some people liked it, and a few more orders came. They made many friends and started going round with artists again and with special writers on The Daily News and The American who took them out to dinner in foreign restaurants that were very smoky and where they talked a great deal about modern French painting and the Middle West and going to New York. They went to the Armory Show and had a photograph of Brancusi’s Golden Bird over the desk in the office and copies of the Little Review and Poetry among the files of letters from clients and unpaid bills from wholesalers.

Eleanor went out a great deal with Tom Custis who was an elderly redfaced man, fond of music and chorusgirls and drinking, who belonged to all the clubs and for years had been a great admirer of Mary Garden. He had a box at the opera and a Stevens-Duryea and nothing to do except go to tailors and visit specialists and occasionally blackball a Jew or a newcomer applying for membership in some club he belonged to. The Armours had bought out his father’s meatpacking concern when he was still a college athlete and he hadn’t done a stroke of work since. He claimed to be thoroughly sick of social life and enjoyed taking an interest in the girls’ decorating business. He kept in close touch with Wall Street and would occasionally turn over to Eleanor a couple of shares that he was trading in. If they rose it was her gain, if they fell it was his loss. He had a wife in a private sanitarium and he and Eleanor decided they’d be just friends. Sometimes he was a little too affectionate coming home in a taxicab in the evening, but Eleanor would scold him and he’d be very contrite the next day, and send her great boxes of white flowers.