John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

They didn’t have a private car after Laredo and the trip wasn’t so nice. They went straight through to New York. She had a lower in a different car from J. Ward and his friends, and in the upper berth there was a young fellow she took quite a fancy to. His name was Buck Saunders and he was from the panhandle of Texas and talked with the funniest drawl. He’d punched cows and worked in the Oklahoma oilfields and had saved up some money and was going to see Washington City. He was tickled to death when she said she was from Washington and she told him all about what he ought to see, the Capitol and the White House and the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and the Old Soldiers’ Home and Mount Vernon. She said to be sure to go out to Great Falls and told him about canoeing on the canal and how she’d been caught in a terrible thunderstorm once near Cabin John’s Bridge. They ate several meals together in the dining car and he told her she was a dandy girl and awful easy to talk to and how he had a girl in Tulsa, Ok., and how he was going to get a job in Venezuela, down at Maracaibo in the oilfields because she’d thrown him over to marry a rich dirtfarmer who struck oil in his cowpasture. G. H. Barrow kidded Janey about her fine handsome pickup and she said what about him and the redheaded lady who got off in St. Louis, and they laughed and she felt quite devilish and that G. H. Barrow wasn’t so bad after all. When Buck got off the train in Washington he gave her a snapshot of himself taken beside an oilderrick and said he’d write her every day and would come to New York to see her if she’d let him, but she never heard from him.

She liked Morton, the cockney valet, too, because he always spoke to her so respectfully. Every morning he’d come and report on how J. Ward was feeling, “’E looks pretty black this mornin’, Miss Williams,” or, “’E was whistlin’ while ’e was shavin’. Is ’e feelin’ good? Rath-er.”

When they got to the Pennsylvania Station, New York, she had to stay with Morton to see that the box of files was sent to the office at 100 Fifth Avenue and not out to Long Island where J. Ward’s home was. She saw Morton off in a Pierce Arrow that had come all the way in from Great Neck to get the baggage, and went alone to the office in a taxicab with her typewriter and the papers and files. She felt scared and excited looking out of the taxicab window at the tall white buildings and the round watertanks against the sky and the puffs of steam way up and the sidewalks crowded with people and all the taxicabs and trucks and the shine and jostle and clatter. She wondered where she’d get a room to live, and how she’d find friends and where she’d eat. It seemed terribly scary being all alone in the big city like that and she wondered that she’d had the nerve to come. She decided she’d try to find Alice a job and that they’d take an apartment together, but where would she go tonight?

When she got to the office, everything seemed natural and reassuring and so handsomely furnished and polished so bright and typewriters going so fast and much more stir and bustle than there’d been in the offices of Dreyfus and Carroll; but everybody looked Jewish and she was afraid they wouldn’t like her and afraid she wouldn’t be able to hold down the job.

A girl named Gladys Compton showed her her desk, that she said had been Miss Rosenthal’s desk. It was in a little passage just outside J. Ward’s private office opposite the door to Mr. Robbins’ office. Gladys Compton was Jewish and was Mr. Robbins’ stenographer and said what a lovely girl Miss Rosenthal had been and how sorry they all were in the office about her accident and Janey felt that she was stepping into a dead man’s shoes and would have a stiff row to hoe. Gladys Compton stared at her with resentful brown eyes that had a slight squint in them when she looked hard at anything and said she hoped she’d be able to get through the work, that sometimes the work was simply killing, and left her.

When things were closing up at five, J. Ward came out of his private office. Janey was so pleased to see him standing by her desk. He said he’d talked to Miss Compton and asked her to look out for Janey a little at first and that he knew it was hard for a young girl finding her way around a new city, finding a suitable place to live and that sort of thing, but that Miss Compton was a very nice girl and would help her out and he was sure everything would work out fine. He gave her a blueeyed smile and handed her a closely written packet of notes and said would she mind coming in the office a little early in the morning and having them all copied and on his desk by nine o’clock. He wouldn’t usually ask her to do work like that but all the typists were so stupid and everything was in confusion owing to his absence. Janey felt only too happy to do it and warm all over from his smile.

She and Gladys Compton left the office together. Gladys Compton suggested that seeing as she didn’t know the city hadn’t she better come home with her. She lived in Flatbush with her father and mother and of course it wouldn’t be what Miss Williams was accustomed to but they had a spare room that they could let her have until she could find her way around that it was clean at least and that was more than you could say about many places. They went by the station to get her bag. Janey felt relieved not to have to find her way alone in all that crowd. Then they went down into the subway and got on an expresstrain that was packed to the doors and Janey didn’t think she could stand it being packed in close with so many people. She thought she’d never get there and the trains made so much noise in the tunnel she couldn’t hear what the other girl was saying.

At last they got out into a wide street with an elevated running down it where the buildings were all one or two stories and the stores were groceries and vegetable and fruit stores. Gladys Compton said, “We eat kosher, Miss Williams, on account of the old people. I hope you don’t mind; of course Benny — Benny’s my brudder — and I haven’t any prejudices.” Janey didn’t know what kosher was but she said of course she didn’t mind and told the other girl about how funny the food was down in Mexico, so peppery you couldn’t hardly eat it.

When they got to the house Gladys Compton began to pronounce her words less precisely and was very kind and thoughtful. Her father was a little old man with glasses on the end of his nose and her mother was a fat pearshaped woman in a wig. They talked Yiddish among themselves. They did everything they could to make Janey comfortable and gave her a nice room and said they’d give her board and lodging for ten dollars a week as long as she wanted to stay and when she wanted to move she could go away and no hard feelings. The house was a yellow twofamily frame house on a long block of houses all exactly alike, but it was well heated and the bed was comfortable. The old man was a watchmaker and worked at a Fifth Avenue jeweler’s. In the old country their name had been Kompshchski but they said that in New York nobody could pronounce it. The old man had wanted to take the name of Freedman but his wife thought Compton sounded more refined. They had a good supper with tea in glasses and soup with dumplings and red caviar and gefültefisch and Janey thought it was very nice knowing people like that. The boy Benny was still in highschool, a gangling youth with heavy glasses who ate with his head hung over his plate and had a rude way of contradicting anything anybody said. Gladys said not to mind him, that he was very good in his studies and was going to study law. When the strangeness had worn off a little Janey got to like the Comptons, particularly old Mr. Compton, who was very kind and treated everything that happened with gentle heartbroken humor.