John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

Eleanor found that she had to have many interviews with Ward Moorehouse as the work went on. She had him to dinner at her place on Eighth Street and she had her Martinique maid Augustine cook sauté chicken with red peppers and tomatoes. They had cocktails with absinthe in them and a bottle of very good burgundy and Ward Moorehouse enjoyed sitting back on the sofa and talking and she enjoyed listening and began to call him J. W. After that they were friends quite apart from the work on the house at Great Neck.

He told Eleanor about how he’d been a boy in Wilmington, Delaware, and the day the militia fired on the old darkey and thought it was the Spanish fleet and about his unhappy first marriage and about how his second wife was an invalid and about his work as a newspaperman and in advertising offices, and Eleanor, in a gray dress with just a touch of sparkly something on one shoulder and acting the discreet little homebody, led him on to explain about the work he was doing keeping the public informed about the state of relations between capital and labor and stemming the propaganda of sentimentalists and reformers, upholding American ideas against crazy German socialistic ideas and the panaceas of discontented dirtfarmers in the Northwest. Eleanor thought his ideas were very interesting, but she liked better to hear about the stockexchange and how the Steel Corporation was founded and the difficulties of the oil companies in Mexico, and Hearst and great fortunes. She asked him about some small investment she was making, and he looked up at her with twinkly blue eyes in a white square face where prosperity was just beginning to curve over the squareness of the jowl and said, “Miss Stoddard, may I have the honor of being your financial adviser?”

Eleanor thought his slight southern accent and oldschool gentlemanly manners very attractive. She wished she had a more distinctivelooking apartment and that she’d kept some of the crystal chandeliers instead of selling them. It was twelve o’clock before he left, saying he’d had a very pleasant evening but that he must go to answer some longdistance calls. Eleanor sat before the mirror at her dressingtable rubbing cold cream on her face by the light of two candles. She wished her neck wasn’t so scrawny and wondered how it would be to start getting a henna rinse now and then when she got her hair washed.

raining in historic Quebec it was raining on the Château in historic Quebec where gallant Wolfe in a three cornered hat sat in a boat in a lithograph and read Gray’s “Elegy” to his men gallant Wolfe climbing up the cliffs to meet gallant Montcalm in a threecornered hat on the plains of Abraham with elaborate bows and lace ruffles on the uniforms in the hollow squares and the gallantry and the command to fire and the lace ruffles ruined in the mud on the plains of Abraham

but the Château was the Château Frontenac world-famous hostelry historic in the gray rain in historic gray Quebec and we were climbing up from the Saguenay River Scenic Steamer Greatest Scenic Route in the World the Chautauqua Lecturer and his wife and the baritone from Athens Kentucky where they have a hill called the Acropolis exactly the way it is in Athens Greece and culture and a reproduction of the Parthenon exactly the way it is in Athens Greece

stony rain on stony streets and out onto the platform and the St. Lawrence people with umbrellas up walking back and forth on the broad wooden rainy platform looking over the slatepointed roofs of Quebec and the coalwharves and the grainelevators and the ferries and the Empress of Ireland with creamcolored funnels steaming in from the Other Side and Levis and green hills across the river and the Isle of Orléans green against green and the stony rain on the shining gray slatepointed roofs of Quebec

but the Chautauqua Lecturer wants his dinner and quarrels with his wife and makes a scene in the historic diningroom of the historic Château Frontenac and the headwaiter comes and the Chautauqua Lecturer’s a big thick curlyhaired angry man with a voice used to bawling in tents about the Acropolis just like it is in Athens Greece and the Parthenon just like it is in Athens Greece and the Winged Victory and the baritone is too attentive to the small boy who wants to get away and wishes he hadn’t said he’d come and wants to shake the whole bunch

but it’s raining in historic Quebec and walking down the street alone with the baritone he kept saying about how there were bad girls in a town like this and boys shouldn’t go with bad girls and the Acropolis and the bel canto and the Parthenon and voice culture and the beautiful statues of Greek boys and the Winged Victory and the beautiful statues

but I finally shook him and went out on the cars to see the falls of Montmorency famous in song and story and a church full of crutches left by the sick in St. Anne de Beaupré

and the gray rainy streets full of girls

In the second year of the European War Mr. Carroll sold out his interest in the firm of Dreyfus and Carroll to Mr. Dreyfus and went home to Baltimore. There was a chance that the state Democratic convention would nominate him for Governor. Janey missed him in the office and followed all the reports of Maryland politics with great interest. When Mr. Carroll didn’t get the nomination Janey felt quite sorry about it. Round the office there got to be more and more foreigners and talk there took on a distinctly pro-German trend that she didn’t at all like. Mr. Dreyfus was very polite and generous with his employees but Janey kept thinking of the ruthless invasion of Belgium and the horrible atrocities and didn’t like to be working for a Hun, so she began looking round for another job. Business was slack in Washington and she knew it was foolish to leave Mr. Dreyfus but she couldn’t help it so she went to work for Smedley Richards, a realestate operator on Connecticut Avenue, at a dollar less a week. Mr. Richards was a stout man who talked a great deal about the gentleman’s code and made love to her. For a couple of weeks she kept him off, but the third week he took to drinking and kept putting his big beefy hands on her and borrowed a dollar one day and at the end of the week said he wouldn’t be able to pay her for a day or two, so she just didn’t go back and there she was out of a job.

It was scary being out of a job; she dreaded having to go back to live at her mother’s with the boarders and her sisters’ noisy ways. She read the ads in The Star and The Post every day and answered any she saw, but someone had always been there ahead of her, although she got to the address the first thing in the morning. She even put her name down at an employment agency. The woman at the desk was a stout woman with bad teeth and a mean smile, she made Janey pay two dollars as a registration fee and showed her the waiting list of expert stenographers she had and said that girls ought to marry and that trying to earn their own living was stuff and nonsense because it couldn’t be done. The bad air and the pinched faces of the girls waiting on benches made her feel quite sick so she went and sat a little while in the sun in Lafayette Square getting her courage up to tell Alice, who was still at Mrs. Robinson’s, that she hadn’t found a job yet. A young man with a red face sat down beside her and tried to start talking to her, so she had to walk on. She went into a drugstore and had a chocolate milk, but the sodajerker tried to kid her a little, and she burst out crying. The sodajerker looked scared to death and said, “Beg pardon, miss, I didn’t mean no offence.” Her eyes were still red when she met Alice coming out of the Riggs Building; Alice insisted on paying for a thirtyfive cent lunch for her at The Brown Teapot, although Janey couldn’t eat a thing. Alice had an Itoldyouso manner that made Janey mad, and she said that it was too late now for her to try to go back to Mrs. Robinson’s because Mrs. Robinson didn’t have work for the girls she had there as it was. That afternoon Janey felt too discouraged to look for work and roamed round the Smithsonian Institution trying to interest herself in the specimens of Indian beadwork and war canoes and totempoles, but everything gave her the creeps and she went up to the room and had a good cry. She thought of Joe and Jerry Burnham and wondered why she never got letters from them, and thought of the poor soldiers in the trenches and felt very lonely. By the time Alice came home she’d washed her face and put on powder and rouge and was bustling briskly about their room; she joked Alice about the business depression and said that if she couldn’t get a job in Washington she’d go to Baltimore or New York or Chicago to get a job. Alice said that sort of talk made her miserable. They went out and ate a ham sandwich and a glass of milk for supper to save money.