Mr Webber, the rabbit grower, who was tall and thin and had a high-domed forehead like pictures of the Disciples, was raising Chinchilla rabbits and trying to organize the other growers. For two weeks he laboriously wrote out reports and letters in longhand and I copied them. In the afternoons he made tea over an alcohol stove and as we drank it he told me how much he admired Mary. He said that she was a flame in this burned-out world.
Mr Webber was as gentle and soft as his rabbits and never ever pointed out my mistakes but secretly, behind his arms, wrote over them in ink. At the end of the two weeks he gave me a cheque for seventy-five dollars, which was twenty-five dollars more than I expected. The extra money, I knew, was a tribute to Mary rather than an appreciation of my efficiency.
After Mr Webber, I was out of work for three days but I wasn’t as sad as I might have been because of that extra money, so I painted the kitchen, using a very remarkable yellow paint which never dried. It looked very nice but it grew more and more irritating as weeks and weeks went by and we still had to pry dishes off the drainboards and peel the children out of the breakfast nook.
On Wednesday night Mary told me she had found me a job with a darling old lawyer. I protested that I didn’t know anything about legal forms but Mary said they were easy. All you had to do was go through the files and copy. She also explained that the old lawyer used a dictaphone and gave me a demonstration on the coffee table of how to use one, which wasn’t too helpful as I’d never even seen one.
However, the next morning I reported for work at Mr O’Reilly’s law office, which was in an old but very respectable building in the financial district. Mr O’Reilly had thick grey hair, an oily manner and a most disconcerting habit of appearing behind me suddenly and soundlessly.
By the trial and error method I got the dictaphone to work, learned about legal forms and phraseology, but I needn’t have bothered. Mr O’Reilly had very little work and the little he did have he didn’t attend to. All he really wanted me there for was to talk about sex. He edged into it gracefully and gradually and by constantly referring to cases tried to make it seem as if he were merely discussing business. When I left he promised to mail me my salary but he never did.
Mary finally admitted that she had never seen Mr O’Reilly but had been told about the job by an elevator starter in another building.
Then I went to work in a credit bureau typing very dull reports implying that everybody in Seattle but the President of the First National Bank had rotten credit. One day when my boss was out of his office I sneaked over and looked up our family’s credit. We took up almost a whole drawer and from what I read it sounded as if the credit bureau not only wouldn’t recommend us for credit, they wouldn’t even let us pay cash. This, however, didn’t make me feel too badly because I knew they didn’t like anybody.
The next job Mary got for me was taking dictation on a dock for a purse seiner, who was trying to settle an estate involving hundreds of relatives all named Escvotrizwitz and Trckvotisztz and Krje and living in places called Brk, Pec, Plav and Klujk. My shorthand, feeble enough in English, collapsed completely under Mr Ljubovija’s barrage of Serbo-Croat mixed with a few ‘By Gollies’ and ‘Okays’, which he fondly thought was English. Finally, I told him that if he’d give me a general idea of what he wanted to say and would spell out all the names, I would write the letters.
I could not understand why he wanted the letters in English when there was a good chance that, as none of the family, including him, spoke it, not one would be able to read it, but he was insistent. To him, writing in English was synonymous with success. He was a very nice man and I loved sitting in the sun on the dock listening to the raspy-throated gulls, smelling the nice boaty smells of creosote and tar and watching the purse seiners work on their nets.
I ate my sandwiches on the dock and then walked up to a little log restaurant for coffee. The restaurant, run by two enormously fat blonde women, who dressed in stiff white uniforms like nurses and always had beads of sweat on their upper lips, catered for the fishermen and specialized in Swedish Meat Balls, Veal Sylta, Potatis Pankaka, Ugnspannkaka, Mandel Skorpor, Kringlor, Hungarian Goulash and terrible little fruit salads filled with nuts and marshmallows and canned grapes, which they served with every order and seemed to believe gave the place an air of refinement.
My next job was working for a public stenographer, a large woman who wore wide patent leather belts around her big waist and had a most disconcerting habit of sniffing her armpits, reaching in her bottom drawer for her deodorant and applying it via the neck of her dress, when she was talking to clients.
The first time I saw Mrs Pundril go through this little routine was when she was talking to a lumberman from Minnesota. He was in the midst of explaining a report, when suddenly she sniffed her right armpit, grabbed out her Mum, took off the lid, gouged some out with her right forefinger and with a great deal of manoeuvring managed to apply it even though her blouse had a very high neck. As he watched, the lumberman’s face turned a dull red. I laughed so hard I had to stuff my handkerchief in my mouth and Mrs Pundril was as unconcerned as though she were filling her pen.
After one week, Mrs Pundril fired me. She said I wasn’t fast enough for public stenography and I made too many errors. She pronounced them ‘eeroars’. I didn’t blame her for firing me, but it didn’t do my self-confidence any good. Then for a few weeks I typed bills for a florist, a dentist and a laboratory and then Mary got me the job with the gangster.
His name was Murray Adams, he had an office in a funny old building that housed beaded-bag menders, dream interpreters, corn removers and such, and I still don’t know what he intended to do. He was big and dark and handsome and wore an oyster-white fedora and a tan camel’s-hair overcoat even in the office, which was hot.
Mary met him in some oil promoter’s office and he asked her if she knew of a girl to sit in his office and answer his phone. Mary naturally said of course she did, her sister Betty, and so there I was. Murray, he told me to call him that, told me that he’d been a member of a mob in Chicago and a rum runner on the Atlantic Coast and had ‘a bucket of ice in hock in Washington, D.C.’ He was very sweet to me and used to take me out for coffee and tell me about different ‘dirty deals’ he had got from different ‘babes’ but he used to make me nervous when he sat by the office window, which was on the second floor, pretending that he was holding a Tommy gun and mowing down the people in the street.
“Look at that bunch of slobs”, he’d say. “Not one of ’em got anything on the ball. Jeeze I’d like to have a machine gun and ah,ah,ah,ah,ah,ah (he’d make motions of moving a machine gun back and forth), I’d let them all have it. Especially the dames.”
I don’t know why Murray had me and I certainly don’t know why he had a telephone because, whenever he left the office he told me to tell whoever called that he wasn’t in, and whenever he was in the office he said to tell whoever called that he was out. I had a typewriter but nothing to type so I wrote letters to everyone I had ever known. Murray paid me in crisp new bills, twenty dollars a week, for three weeks and then left town owing his rent, telephone bill, and for his furniture. I never heard of him again.
“This is the best job I’ve ever got you”, Mary said. “You get twenty-five dollars a week for being Mr Wilson’s private secretary and you have a chance to make thousands more on the dime cards.”
So I went to work for Mr Wilson and his dime card scheme, which was the depression version of the present-day Pyramid Clubs. Mr Wilson, an advertising man, thought up the dime card scheme and if Seattle hadn’t been such a stuffy city he might have made a million dollars, and I might have made about ten thousand.
The idea, as I remember it, was that you bought a printed share in Prosperity for two dollars—you turned your share and a dollar more into the Prosperity office, where I worked, and got an envelope containing a dime card (cards with round slots for ten dimes each and ten places for signatures)—and two more printed shares in prosperity. Yo
u sold your two shares for two dollars each, kept three of the four dollars to pay yourself back for the two dollars you spent on your original share, plus the one dollar turned into the office, had the other dollar changed into dimes, inserted them in the dime card and passed it to the person you bought your share from. That person took one dime from the card, signed his name and passed it back to the person he bought from. That person did the same, etc. etc. etc.
Because I was the originator of several chains I got ninety cents from the first four, eighty cents from the next eight, seventy cents from the next sixteen and so forth. As each share was turned into the office I entered the name on a chart so that I knew who had bought from whom and where the dimes were or weren’t.
After the first week the office was a madhouse, and I had to hire four girls to help me and every night at home all the family sat around and picked dimes out of Mary’s and my dime cards. One night we counted seventy-two dollars’ worth of dimes. All day long people stormed into the office demanding a share in Prosperity and then rushed out again to sell their shares and start their chains.
I knew that there had to be an end to this delightful game some time because Seattle only had about 300,000 citizens, but I didn’t anticipate how or when it would come.
One day after the office had been running for about six weeks, a fat man came in and asked me to explain the dime card game to him. I did, slowly and succinctly and he said, “That’s it, sister. I’m closing up this joint!” Whereupon he called in a huge task force of policemen, who came loping in swinging their billy clubs. All the girls who were working for me began to bawl, and I tried vainly to locate Mr Wilson, who had gone to the bank.
“I’m from the D.A.’s office and I’m going to take you all to the station house”, the fat man said. I said, “You are not. We only work here and anyway what’s the matter?” “Plenty’s the matter”, said the fat man.
Then a photographer took a lot of pictures of the policemen seizing the files, which was pretty ridiculous as nobody was holding on to them. Finally in an hour or so a small pleasant grey-haired man appeared, dismissed the fat man, sent all of us home, and that was that.
“Crime is too nerve-racking”, I told Mary. “Just get me a plain job.” So she did. Typing estimates for an engineer. The work was dull and so was the engineer but it was a job.
9
‘All the World’s a Stage and by God Everybody in this Family is going to the Foreign Movies and Like Bach’
IT SEEMS TO ME as I look back, that when we were the poorest we had the most fun. Our ability to enjoy ourselves in the face of complete adversity was astounding to the people who believed that you had to have money to have fun; appalling to those others who believed that it is an effrontery for the poor to laugh. I am not sure that individually we would have been so ‘happy in spite of it all’, but together we felt we could survive anything and did.
The world was a very sad place, in those days. The people who had jobs were so obsessed with the fear of losing them that they balanced precariously on each day of employment like a hummock in a quicksand bog, and the people who didn’t have jobs had their eyes so dimmed by the fear of hunger, sickness and cold that they walked right over golden opportunities without seeing them. I belonged to the latter group—Mother and Mary to neither.
Mary, one of those fortunate people who are able to bring forth great reserves of strength and fortitude during times of stress, accepted the depression as a personal challenge. She always had a job, she tried to find jobs for her family and hundreds of friends and, while she was looking, propped up everyone’s limp spirits by defying big corporations.
When the telephone company threatened to disconnect our telephone because the bill hadn’t been paid, Mary marched right down to see the president and told him that if he cut off our phone and left us with no communication with the outside world, she was going to sue him personally. Her exact words, which she recounted to our amusement at the dinner table, were, ‘I told him a telephone and telegraph company is a public service operating under a special grant from the state. If you cut off my telephone you will not be performing a public service and I will sue you. In fact from this day on I’m going to be known as the biggest suer in the city of Seattle.’ It did keep the telephone from being disconnected and it certainly bolstered our morale. She tried the same thing with the power and light company, but they turned off the lights anyway and for a week or so left us to burn old Christmas candles and not iron.
During this interlude, Mary, who was inclined to keep up with our friends of private school days, brought home to dinner a terribly snobbish young man who remarked, as we sat down to our candle-lit vegetable soup, “You Bards absolutely delight me. You have a simple meal of vegetable soup and toast and then you make it elegant by serving it by candlelight.” He was so elegant, of course, that he didn’t go out into the kitchen to note that we were also washing the dishes by candlelight. When he left he amused us greatly by standing by the front door for a full ten minutes flipping the switches and trying to make the porch light go on. Finally he called to Mother, “Sydney darling, I hate to mention it but your porch light’s burned out. Have one of the great beasts who come to court your daughters put a new one in.” When we all laughed he thought he’d been witty and repeated his asinine remark.
When we ran out of firewood, Mary unearthed a bucksaw and marched us all down to a city park two blocks away, where we took turns sawing up fallen logs. We were just splitting up the first cut on our first log when two park gardeners came up and asked us what the hell we thought we were doing. Mary told them exactly what we were doing and why we were doing it, and to our surprise and relief they helped us saw and carry the wood up to the house, and after that saved logs and bark for us.
During the depression we all came home right after work and Mary brought home to dinner, to stay all night, or to live with us, everybody she met whom she felt sorry for. Some of these people were brilliant, talented and amusing. Some were just ordinary people. Some unconscionable bores. Mary didn’t care. They were alive, or at least pretended to be.
Every night for dinner we had from two to ten extra people to tax Mother’s ingenuity in stretching the meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, chilli, tuna fish and noodles, vegetable soup, park wood and beds. After dinner we played bridge or charades or Chinese checkers or the piano, rolled old cigarette butts into new cigarettes on our little cigarette-rolling machine, drank gallons of coffee which was seventeen cents a pound, ate cinnamon toast, read aloud Mark Twain, made fun of each other and all our friends, sang songs, played records, followed the dance marathons on the radio, and complained because our bosses tried to stifle our individuality by making us work.
We were in love most of the time but being in love in those days didn’t seem to be such a crystallized state as it is to-day. Nobody had enough money to get off by themselves, let alone get married, so grand passions flamed and were spent in front of the fireplace reading Rupert Brooke, listening to ‘Body and Soul’ on the radio, or walking up by the reservoir to watch, across its flat black surface, the lights of the city made teary by the rain.
Every Saturday in the fall, Mother made a huge kettle of chilli and we all sat around and listened to the football games. Mother, an ardent fan, kept a chart, groaned in agony over the stupidity of the announcers who commented on the crowd and didn’t tell where the ball was and invariably told us that there was no football spirit in the West, we should go to a Yale-Harvard game. When our side made a touchdown we all shouted at the top of our voices, which made the dogs bark, the children wake up from their naps and bawl and our neighbours pull aside their curtains and peer over at us.
I always looked forward to Saturday. I loved the tight expectant feeling I had as I opened the front door and wondered who would be there. I loved Saturday’s dusk with the street lights as soft as breath in the fog or rain, the voices of the children filtering home from the matinée, clear and high with joy and silline
ss; the firm thudding comforting sound of front doors closing and shutting the families in, the world out; the thick exciting sound of a car door slamming in front of the house; the exuberance of the telephone bell. Everybody came over Saturday night, brought friends and stayed until three or four Sunday morning.
Sundays were always marked by a strong smell of petrol and meatloaf and tremendous activity. First we got the children ready for Sunday School, which always meant a wild hunt for matching socks, misplaced mite boxes and Sunday School lessons, then we all pitched in and cleaned the house, Mother made an enormous meatloaf (hamburger was only twelve cents a pound), then Mother and Dede left for church, while Mary and I repaired to a small covered areaway by the basement door, filled a little washtub with cleaning fluid and sloshed our office dresses, our skirts, even our coats in it, then hung them slightly less spotty and dripping petrol, on a line under the porch. The cleaning fluid was twenty-five cents a gallon and could be strained through flannel and used over and over again; and doing our own cleaning, beside being an economic necessity, burned our hands and made us feel so virtuous that we often cleaned things that didn’t need it.
Big washings gave me the same terrific feeling of godly accomplishment and sometimes I’d get so carried away I’d wash old oriental rugs, doll clothes, big lumpy comforters and a pair of Bagdad portières we never used, just to be sure that every single thing in the house was clean.
By dinner-time the house had been scrubbed and the smells of shampoo and scorch from the iron were mingled with the petrol and meatloaf.