John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

One day Oliver Taylor came into the office with a funny smile on his face and said, “Ward, Gertrude’s got a crush on you. She can’t talk about anything else… Go ahead; I don’t give a damn. She’s too goddam much trouble for me to handle. She tires me out in a half an hour.”

“It’s probably just because she doesn’t know me,” said Ward, blushing a little.

“Too bad her old man won’t let her marry anything but a millionaire. You might get some lovin’ out of it, though.”

“I haven’t got the time for that stuff,” said Ward.

“It don’t leave me time for anything else,” said Taylor. “Well, so long… You hold down the fort; I’ve got a luncheon date with a swell girl… she’s a warm baby an’ she’s dancing in the ‘Red Mill,’ first row, third from the left.” He winked, and slapped Ward on the back and went off.

The next time that Ward went to call at the big house of the Staples that lay back from the trees he went in a red Stutz roadster that he’d taken out on trial. He handled it well enough, although he turned in too quickly at the drive and slaughtered some tulips in a flowerbed. Gertrude saw him from the library window and kidded him about it. He said he was a rotten driver, always had been and always would be. She gave him tea and a cocktail at a little table under an appletree back of the house and he wondered all the time he was talking to her whether he ought to tell her about his divorce. He told her about his unhappy life with Annabelle Strang. She was very sympathetic. She knew of Dr. Strang. “And I was hoping you were just an adventurer… from plowboy to president, you know… that sort of thing.”

“But I am,” he said and they both laughed and he could see that she was really crazy about him.

That night they met at a dance and walked down to the end of the conservatory where it was very steamy among the orchids, and he kissed her and told her that she looked like a pale yellow orchid. After that they always sneaked off whenever they got a chance. She had a way of going limp suddenly in his arms under his kisses that made him sure that she loved him. But when he got home after those evenings he’d be too nervous and excited to sleep, and would pace up and down the room wanting a woman to sleep with, and cursing himself out. Often he’d take a cold bath and tell himself he must attend to business and not worry about those things or let a girl get under his skin that way. The streets in the lower part of town were full of prostitutes, but he was afraid of catching a disease or being blackmailed. Then one night after a party Taylor took him to a house that he said was thoroughly reliable where he met a pretty dark Polish girl who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, but he didn’t go there very often as it cost fifty dollars, and he was always nervous when he was in the place for fear there’d be a police raid and he’d have blackmail to pay.

One Sunday afternoon Gertrude told him that her mother had scolded her for being seen about with him so much on account of his having a wife in Philadelphia. The notice of the decree had come the morning before. Ward was in high spirits and told her about it and asked her to marry him. They were at the free organ recital in Carnegie Institute, a good place to meet because nobody who was anybody ever went there. “Come over to the Schenley and I’ll show you the decree.” The music had started. She shook her head, but patted his hand that lay on the plush seat beside her knee. They went out in the middle of the number. The music got on their nerves. They stood talking a long while in the vestibule. Gertrude looked miserable and haggard. She said she was in wretched health and that her father and mother would never consent to her marrying a man who didn’t have as much income as she did and she wished she was a poor stenographer or telephone girl that could do as she liked and that she loved him very much and would always love him and thought she’d take to drink or dope or something because life was just too terrible.

Ward was very cold and kept his jaw set square and said that she couldn’t really care for him and that as far as he was concerned that was the end and that if they met they’d be good friends. He drove her out Highland Avenue in the Stutz that wasn’t paid for yet and showed her the house he’d lived in when he first came to Pittsburgh and talked of going out West and starting an advertising business of his own and finally left her at a friend’s house in Highland Park where she’d told her chauffeur to pick her up at six.

He went back to the Schenley and had a cup of black coffee sent up to his room and felt very bitter and settled down to work on some copy he was getting out, saying, “To hell with the bitch,” all the time under his breath.

He didn’t worry much about Gertrude in the months that followed because a strike came on at Homestead and there were strikers killed by the mine guards and certain writers from New York and Chicago who were sentimentalists began to take a good deal of space in the press with articles flaying the steel industry and the feudal conditions in Pittsburgh as they called them, and the progressives in Congress were making a howl, and it was rumored that people wanting to make politics out of it were calling for a congressional investigation. Mr. McGill and Ward had dinner together all alone at the Schenley to talk about the situation, and Ward said that what was necessary was an entirely new line in the publicity of the industry. It was the business of the industry to educate the public by carefully planned publicity extending over a term of years. Mr. McGill was very much impressed and said he’d talk around at directors’ meetings about the feasibility of founding a joint information bureau for the entire industry. Ward said he felt he ought to be at the head of it, because he was just wasting his time at the Bessemer Products; that had all simmered down to a routine job that anybody could take care of. He talked of going to Chicago and starting an advertising agency of his own. Mr. McGill smiled and stroked his steelgray mustache and said, “Not so fast, young man; you stay around here a while yet and on my honor you won’t regret it,” and Ward said that he was willing, but here he’d been in Pittsburgh five years and where was he getting?

The information bureau was founded, and Ward was put in charge of the actual work at $10,000 a year and began to play stocks a little with his surplus money, but there were several men over him earning larger salaries who didn’t do anything but get in his way, and he was very restless. He felt he ought to be married and have an establishment of his own. He had many contacts in different branches of the casting and steel and oil industries, and felt he ought to entertain. Giving dinners at the Fort Pitt or the Schenley was expensive and somehow didn’t seem solid.

Then one morning he opened his newspaper to find that Horace Staple had died of angina pectoris the day before while going up in the elevator of the Carnegie Building, and that Gertrude and her mother were prostrated at their palatial residence in Sewickley. He immediately sat down in the writing room, although it would make him late at the office, and wrote Gertrude a note:

DEAREST GERTRUDE:

In this terrible moment of grief, allow me to remind you that I think of you constantly. Let me know at once if I can be of any use to you in any way. In the valley of the shadow of death we must realize that the Great Giver to whom we owe all love and wealth and all affection around the jocund fireside is also the Grim Reaper…

After staring at the words, chewing the end of the pen a minute, he decided that it was a bit thick about the Grim Reaper and copied the note out again leaving out the last sentence, signed it “Your Devoted Ward,” and sent it out to Sewickley by special messenger.