John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

He called once or twice to see Mr. McGill at his office in the Frick Building. Each time he was away on a business trip. He’d have a little chat with the girl at the desk while waiting and then go away reluctantly, saying, “Oh, yes, he said he was going on a trip,” or, “He must have forgotten the appointment,” to cover his embarrassment when he had to go away. He was loath to leave the brightly lit office anteroom, with its great shiny mahogany chairs with lions’ heads on the arms and the tables with lions’ claws for feet and the chirrup of typewriters from behind partitions, and telephone bells ringing and welldressed clerks and executives bustling in and out. Down at the newspaper office it was noisy with clanging presses and smelt sour of printer’s ink and moist rolls of paper and sweating copyboys running round in green eyeshades. And not to know any really nice people, never to get an assignment that wasn’t connected with working people or foreigners or criminals; he hated it.

One day in the Spring he went to the Schenley to interview a visiting travel lecturer. He felt good about it as he hoped to wheedle a byline out of the city editor. He was picking his way through the lobby crowded by the arrival of a state convention of Kiwanians when he ran into Mr. McGill. “Why, hello, Moorehouse,” said Mr. McGill in a casual tone as if he’d been seeing him all along, “I’m glad I ran into you. Those fools at the office mislaid your address. Have you a minute to spare?” “Yes, indeed, Mr. McGill,” said Ward. “I have an appointment to see a man but he can wait.” “Never make a man wait if you have an appointment with him,” said Mr. McGill. “Well, this isn’t a business appointment,” said Ward, looking up into Mr. McGill’s face with his boyish blue-eyed smile. “He won’t mind waiting a minute.”

They went into the writing room and sat down on a tapestried sofa. Mr. McGill explained that he had just been appointed temporary general manager to reorganize the Bessemer Metallic Furnishings and Products Company that handled a big line of byproducts of the Homestead Mills. He was looking for an ambitious and energetic man to handle the advertising and promotion. “I remember that booklet you showed me in Paris, Moorehouse, and I think you’re the man.” Ward looked at the floor. “Of course that would mean giving up my present work.” “What’s that?” “Newspaper work.” “Oh, drop that; there’s no future in that… We’d have to make someone else nominal advertising manager for reasons we won’t go into now… but you’ll be the actual executive. What kind of a salary would you expect?”

Ward looked Mr. McGill in the eyes, the blood stopped in his ears while he heard his own voice saying casually:

“How about a hundred a week?”

Mr. McGill stroked his moustache and smiled. “Well, we’ll thrash that out later,” he said, getting to his feet. “I think I can advise you strongly to give up your present work… I’ll call up Mr. Bateman about it… so that he’ll understand why we’re taking you away from him… No hard feelings, you understand, on account of your resigning suddenly… never want hard feelings… Come down and see me tomorrow at ten. You know the office in the Frick Building.”

“I think I’ve got some valuable ideas about advertising, Mr. McGill. It’s the work I’m most interested in doing,” said Ward. Mr. McGill wasn’t looking at him any more. He nodded and went off. Ward went on up to interview his lecturer, afraid to let himself feel too jubilant yet.

The next day was his last in a newspaper office. He accepted a salary of seventyfive with a promise of a raise as soon as returns warranted it, took a room and bath at the Schenley, had an office of his own in the Frick Building where he sat at a desk with a young man named Oliver Taylor who was a nephew of one of the directors who was being worked up through the organization. Oliver Taylor was a firstrate tennis player and belonged to all the clubs and was only too glad to let Moorehouse do the work. When he found that Moorehouse had been abroad and had had his clothes made in England he put him up at the Sewickley Country Club and took him out with him for drinks after officehours. Little by little Moorehouse got to know people and to be invited out as an eligible bachelor. He started to play golf with an instructor on a small course over in Allegheny where he hoped nobody he knew would go. When he could play a fair game he went over to Sewickley to try it out.

One Sunday afternoon Oliver Taylor went with him and pointed out all the big executives of the steel mills and the mining properties and the oil industry out on the links on a Sunday afternoon, making ribald remarks about each one that Ward tittered at a little bit, but that seemed to him in very bad taste. It was a sunny May afternoon and he could smell locustblossoms on the breeze off the fat lands along the Ohio, and there were the sharp whang of the golfballs and the flutter of bright dresses on the lawn round the clubhouse, and frazzles of laughter and baritone snatches of the safe talk of business men coming on the sunny breeze that still had a little scorch of furnace smoke in it. It was hard to keep the men he was introduced to from seeing how good he felt.

The rest of the time he did nothing but work. He got his stenographer, Miss Rodgers, a plainfaced spinster who knew the metal products business inside out from having worked fifteen years in Pittsburgh offices, to get him books on the industry that he read at his hotel in the evenings, so that at executive conferences he astonished them by his knowledge of the processes and products of the industry. His mind was full of augerbits, canthooks, mauls, sashweights, axes, hatchets, monkeywrenches; sometimes in the lunch hour he’d stop in to a hardware store on the pretext of buying a few brads or tacks and talk to the storekeeper. He read Crowds Jr and various books on psychology, tried to imagine himself a hardware merchant or the executive of Hammacher Schlemmer or some other big hardware house, and puzzled over what kind of literature from a factory would be appealing to him. Shaving while his bath was running in the morning he would see long processions of andirons, grates, furnace fittings, pumps, sausagegrinders, drills, calipers, vises, casters, drawerpulls pass between his face and the mirror and wonder how they could be made attractive to the retail trade. He was shaving himself with a Gillette; why was he shaving with a Gillette instead of some other kind of razor? “Bessemer” was a good name, smelt of money and mighty rolling mills and great executives stepping out of limousines. The thing to do was to interest the hardware buyer, to make him feel a part of something mighty and strong, he would think as he picked out a necktie. “Bessemer,” he’d say to himself as he ate breakfast. Why should our cotterpins appeal more than any other cotterpins, he’d ask himself as he stepped on the streetcar. Jolting in the straphanging crowd on the way downtown, staring at the headlines in the paper without seeing them, chainlinks and anchors and ironcouplings and malleable elbows and unions and bushings and nipples and pipecaps would jostle in his head. “Bessemer.”

When he asked for a raise he got it, to $125.

At a country club dance he met a blond girl who danced very well. Her name was Gertrude Staple and she was the only daughter of old Horace Staple who was director of several corporations, and was reputed to own a big slice of Standard Oil stock. Gertrude was engaged to Oliver Taylor, though they did nothing but quarrel when they were together, so she confided to Ward while they were sitting out a dance. Ward’s dress suit fitted well and he looked much younger than most of the men at the dance. Gertrude said that the men in Pittsburgh had no allure. Ward talked about Paris and she said that she was bored to tears and would rather live in Nome, Alaska, than in Pittsburgh. She was awfully pleased that he knew Paris and he talked about the Tour d’Argent and the Hotel Wagram and the Ritz bar and he felt very sore that he hadn’t a car, because he noticed that she was making it easy for him to ask her to let him take her home. But next day he sent her some flowers with a little note in French that he thought would make her laugh. The next Saturday afternoon he went to an automobile school to take lessons in driving a car, and strolled past the Stutz sales agency to see what kind of terms he could get to buy a roadster on.