Mrs Johnson told me immediately that her ankles swelled and everything she ate talked back to her but she was going ‘up the Sound’ to get recruits for Jesus. I told her that I was going to Seattle to work in an office.
She said, “The city is a wicked place full of the works of the Devil. Stay on the farm. Jesus is on the farm.” I said that I had heard that He was everywhere but I hadn’t noticed Him on our farm. Mrs Johnson, who was busily fishing the lettuce out of her hamburger and putting it on a napkin beside her plate, said, “Praise His name! Praise His name! You can always count me out when it comes to greens. Just like ground glass in my intestynes.”
I said, “I’m going to live with my family.” She gestured with her fork and one eye toward Anne and Joan, who were quietly eating scrambled eggs, and said, “The Devil is in the city. Have those poor little tykes been babtyzed?” I said no and she said, “Throw them in. Throw them in! Wash their sins away. Praise His name.”
Just then the waitress brought her apple pie à la mode and my coffee. Tapping on my cup with her spoon she said, “I like coffee but it don’t like me. Binds me up tighter’n a drum. Without it I keep regular as clockwork, but let me drink one cup and I’m threw off for a week.” She fixed her great big good eye on me and waited and I was not sure whether she expected me to say, “Praise His name, praise His name”, or to retaliate with a list of foods that bound me up, so I said, “Wasn’t it funny on the bus when the Indian fell in the aisle?”
Mrs Johnson swelled her nostrils until they were like twin smudge pots and said, “I am going to report that driver to headquarters. He took the name of the Lord Jesus our God in Heaven in vain.” I said, “Well, he has a boil on his neck.” She said, “Poison coming out of his system. Blasphemy is a stench in the nostrils of God and I’m going to report that driver.”
I was pleased to note, when the ferry docked an hour or so later and we all climbed aboard the bus, that the only seat left for Mrs Johnson, who was late, was way at the back with the Indians, by then much drunker and much noisier and destined to be a stench in the nostrils of both Mrs Johnson and God before we reached Seattle.
It was dark and still raining when we landed. The water was grey and rough and the ferry banged into the dolphins and backed up several times before it was able to edge into the slip and the deckhands could let down the flimsy chain that had presumably kept the bus from plunging off the deck into the water.
As we rumbled on to the dock a train, bleating mournfully, and with the beam from its terrible fiery eye swinging across the water, came hurtling along the shore. The children, who had never seen a train before, were terrified. “What is it? What is it?” wailed Anne, as it streaked past, clackety, clackety, clackety, woooooo, woooooo, its lighted windows a ribbon of light in the rainy evening. “It’s a train, darling. A nice choo-choo train”, I told her comfortingly. She said, “It is not. It’s a Mickaboo full of Bojanes.”
To Anne all frightening things were Bojanes and Bojanes lived in Mickaboos, which were nailholes or tiny cracks in the floor. Now apparently Bojanes flew through the night inside fiery dragons. Anne wailed, ‘Take it away, Betty, take it away.” And I did. I shooed it around another curve and it went wooo-wooing off into the night, jerking its red tail lights along behind it. When the red warning light by the tracks stopped blinking and the gates were raised, the bus gave a lurch and we were off.
‘Going home, going home.’ I hummed to myself as the bus nosed its way along in the thin early evening traffic, its tyres saying shhhhh, shhh to the nervous wet highway, its lights making deep hollows and sudden mounds out of shadows on the smooth pavement. We went slowly and carefully through the little town by the ferry landing, then for miles and miles the road was dark with only an occasional lonely little house peering out of the night, and we sailed swiftly along.
When we hit the main highway, small boxy houses with petrol stations attached flashed by and showed cheerful glimpses of family life—mother, father and children eating supper in the breakfast nook—father reading the paper in the parlour—a baby silhouetted at the window watching the cars go by in the rain. On the highway small tacky grocery stores and vegetable stands, open late to catch an extra dribble of trade, littered the spaces between the petrol stations. Every few hundred yards or so a palely-lighted sign pleaded ‘Bud’s Good Eats’ or ‘Ma’s Home Cooking’ or ‘Mert and Bet’s Place.’
Some of the petrol stations also cosily announced ‘Wood and Coal’, and I could just make out the untidy, uncosy outlines of wet slab wood and soggy sacks of coal stacked near the petrol pumps. When the houses began to be closer together and neater and whiter, the dreary petrol pumps became lighted petrol stations, and finally once in a while the bus would stop and pant at an intersection while a traffic light, geared for a busier time of day, stopped the hurrying impatient north and south traffic and kept it teetering for a full minute at the edge of an empty highway.
At each such stop the Indians’ pushing and shoving and giggling became audible but the bus driver, though he muttered angrily, kept the bus moving back and forth like a runner making false starts before a race and, to my intense relief, didn’t take the name of Lord Jesus our God in Heaven in vain, at least not so Mrs Johnson could hear.
Both children were now asleep, their bodies warm and soft like dough against me, and I must have dozed too, for suddenly we were in down-town Seattle and lights were exploding around me like skyrockets on the Fourth of July. Red lights, blue lights, yellow lights, green, purple, white, orange, punctured the night in a million places and tore the black satin pavement to shreds. I hadn’t seen neon lights before. They had been invented, or at least put in common use, while I was up in the mountains and in that short time the whole aspect of the world had changed. In place of dumpy little bulbs sputteringly spelling out Café or Theatre, there were long swooping spirals of pure brilliant colour.
A waiter outlined in bright red with a blazing white napkin over his arm flashed on and off over a large Café. Puget Sound Power and Light Company cut through the rain and darkness, bright blue and cheery. Cafês, theatres, cigar stores, stationery stores, real estate offices with their names spelled out in molten colour, welcomed me to the city. The bus terminal was ringed in light. Portland, New York, San Francisco, Bellingham, Walla Walla, it boasted in bright red. How gay and cheerful and prosperous and alive everything looked. What a wonderful contrast to the bleak, snag-ridden, dark, rainy, lonely vista framed for four long years by the farm windows.
The children had awakened and their glazed, sleepy eyes reflected the lights as they flashed by. Then the faces of Mary and Dede appeared right outside our windows and that was the brightest rocket of all, the piêce de résistance of the entire show.
According to real estate standards Mother’s eight-room, brown-shingled house in the University district was just a modest dwelling in a respectable neighbourhood, near good schools and adequate for an ordinary family. To me that night, and always, that shabby house with its broad welcoming porch, dark woodwork, cluttered dining-room plate rail, large fragrant kitchen, easy book-filled firelit living-room, four elastic bedrooms—one of them always ice cold—roomy old-fashioned bathrooms and huge cluttered basement, represents the ultimate in charm, warmth and luxury. It’s something about Mother, who with one folding chair and a plumber’s candle, could make the North Pole homey, and it’s something about the warmth and loyalty and laughter of a big family.
It’s a wonderful thing to know that you can come home any time from anywhere and just open the door and belong. That everybody will shift until you fit and that from that day on it’s a matter of sharing everything. When you share your money, your clothes and your food with a mother, a brother and three sisters, your portion may be meagre, but by the same token when you share unhappiness, loneliness and anxiety about the future with a mother, a brother and three sisters, there isn’t much left for you.
Two things I noticed immediately. Mother still smelled like violets an
d Mary still believed that accomplishment was merely a matter of will power.
“I hear that we are sliding into a depression and that jobs are very hard to find”, I told Mary about three o’clock the next morning as she and Mother and I sat in the breakfast nook eating hot cinnamon toast and drinking coffee.
Mary said, “There are plenty of jobs but the trouble with most people, and I know because I’m always getting jobs for my friends, is that they stay home with their covers pulled up over their heads waiting for some employer to come creeping in looking for them. Anyway, what are you worrying about, you’ve got a job as private secretary to a mining engineer.”
I said, “But, Mary, I don’t know shorthand and I can only type about twenty words a minute.” Mary clunked her coffee cup into her saucer and looked directly at me with flashing amber eyes. “Leave the ninety words on the typewriter and the one hundred fifty words a minute in shorthand to the grubs who like that kind of work”, she said. “You’re lucky. You have a brain. Use it! Act like an executive and you get treated like an executive!” (And usually fired, she neglected to add.)
It was very reassuring, in spite of a sneaking suspicion I had that if put to a test I would always prove to be the grub type, not the executive, and that only by becoming so proficient in shorthand that I could take down thoughts, would I be able to hold down even a very ordinary job.
“I have been planning to go to night school”, I told Mary.
“Not necessary at all”, she said. “Experience and self-confidence are what you need and you’ll never find them at night school. Have you ever taken a look at what goes to night school? No? Well, they aren’t executives, I’ll tell you that. Now go to bed and forget about shorthand. I’ll always be able to find us jobs doing something and whatever it is I’ll show you how to do it.”
That was Mary’s slogan at home. Down town it was, ‘Just show me the job and I’ll produce a sister to do it.’ And for some years until Dede and Alison were old enough to work and she had figured how to fit Mother into her programme, I was it. That night I dreamed I was going to play in one of Miss Welcome’s recitals and I hadn’t practised and didn’t know my piece.
From two o’clock Saturday afternoon until two o’clock Monday morning, the house was filled with people. Mary, who was very popular, was being intellectual so her friends were mostly musicians, composers, writers, painters, readers of hard dull books and pansies. They took the front off the piano and played on the strings, they sat on the floor and read aloud the poems of Baudelaire, John Donne and Rupert Brooke, they put loud symphonies on the record player and talked over them, they discussed politics and the state of the world, they all called Mother ‘Sydney’ and tried in vain to convince her that she was prostituting her mind by reading the Saturday Evening Post. Mother said, “Yes?” and ignored them.
One of Mary’s favourite friends, a beautiful, brilliant Jewish boy, played With a Song in My Heart, on the strings of the piano and told me I had a face like a cameo and I grew giddy with excitement. Anne and Joan loved the laughter and the people too, and Saturday night when I was putting them to bed, Anne said, “Oh, Betty, I just love this family!”
Sunday afternoon, Mary’s new boss, a Mr Chalmers, who was coming to Seattle to instil some new methods into the lumber industry, called from New Orleans and talked to Mary for almost an hour. The conversation left her overflowing with enthusiasm.
“At last I’ve found the perfect job”, she said. “Mr Chalmers is much more of an executive thinker than I am. ‘Don’t bother me with details and hire all the help you need’, he said. He also asked me to find him a bootlegger, one who handles Canadian liquor, put his daughters in school, send for his wife, introduce him to the right people, have his name put up at the best clubs, get him an appointment with a dentist to make him a new bridge, open charge accounts with the Yellow Cab Company, a florist, a stationery store, an office furniture company and a catering service, and I’m to rent him a suite of offices in a building in the financial district.”
We all listened to Mary with admiration and I asked her if in this new wonderful well-paid secretarial job, typing and shorthand had been requirements.
Before answering, Mary lit a cigarette, pulling her mouth down at one corner in true executive fashion, a new gesture, then said, “Betty, for God’s sake stop brooding about shorthand. There were hundreds of applicants for this job, among them many little white-faced creeps who could take shorthand two hundred words a minute and could type so fast the carriage smoked, but who cares? Do they know a good bootlegger?”
“Do you?” someone asked, and Mary said, “No, but I will by the time Chalmers gets here. To get back to shorthand, the world is crawling with people who can take down and transcribe somebody else’s good ideas. We’re lucky, we’ve got ideas of our own.”
It was certainly nice of her to say ‘we.’
3
Mining is Easy
MONDAY MORNING MY HANDS trembled like jelly as I adjusted the neat white collar on the sage-green woollen office dress Mary had lent me. I was very thin, pale with fright and with my long red hair parted in the middle and pulled tightly back into a knot on the nape of my neck, I thought I looked just like one of the white-faced creeps Mary had derisively described. Mary said I looked very efficient and very sophisticated. Mother, as always, said that we both looked beautiful and not to worry about a thing. I kissed the children, who didn’t cling to me as I had expected, and started out of the front door to catch a streetcar.
I had been anticipating just this moment over and over and over ever since I had got Mary’s wire. I knew exactly how I would feel waiting on the corner with the other people who were going to work. Breathing the cool, wet spring air and listening to the busy morning sounds of cars starting with tight straining noises, of children calling to each other as they left for school, dogs barking and being called home, a nickel clickety-clacking into the paper box, footsteps hurrying grittily on cement. I was going to swing on a strap, sway with the streetcar and think about my wonderful new job. Life was as neatly folded and full of promise as the morning newspaper.
My reverie was interrupted by Mary, who called out, “Where are you going?” “To catch a streetcar”, I said. “Come back”, she said. “From now on we ride to work in taxis. Mr Chalmers wants us to.” “Not me”, I said. “Only you,” Mary said. “Betty, Mr Chalmers couldn’t have me for his private secretary if it weren’t for you. Don’t you forget that and I’ll see that he doesn’t. Now sit down and relax, I’ve called the cab.” And that is the way we set off to inject our personalities and a few of our good ideas into the business world.
The mining engineer’s office, where I was to work, was on the top floor of a building in the financial district. The other occupants of the building were successful lawyers, real estate men, brokers and lumbermen, most of whom Mary seemed to know quite well.
In the lobby she introduced me to about fifteen assorted men and women and explained that she had just brought me down out of the mountains to take her place as private secretary to Mr Webster. In her enthusiasm she made it sound a little as though she had to wing me to get me down out of the trees, and I felt that I should have taken a few nuts and berries out of my pocket and nibbled on them just to keep in character.
When we got out of the elevator, I took Mary to task for this. “Listen, Mary”, I said. “I have little enough self-confidence, and your introducing me to all those people in the lobby as the little Mowgli of the Pacific Coast didn’t help any.” Mary said, “You’re just lucky I didn’t ask you to show them some of your old arrow wounds. Anyway, what difference does it make? Most of those people have such dull lives I feel it my duty to tell them a few lies every morning just to cheer them up.”
Mr Webster’s offices were luxuriously furnished in mahogany and oriental rugs and had a magnificent view of the docks, Puget Sound, some islands and the Olympic Mountains. My little office was also the reception-room, and after Mary had showed me
where to put my hat and coat and how to get the typewriter to spring up out of the desk, I wanted to sit right down and begin to practise my typing.
Mary would have none of it. Sitting herself down at Mr Webster’s desk and lighting a cigarette, she said, “Stop being so nervous and watch me. Learn how to act in an office.” I said, “I wouldn’t be so nervous if I knew what time Mr Webster gets here.” Mary said, “Oh, he’s out of town and won’t be back for two weeks.” My sigh of relief almost blew some rocks off his desks. “Does he know about me?” I asked. “Nope”, said Mary, opening the mail, glancing at it and throwing most of it in the waste-basket. ‘You’re going to be a surprise.”
The phone rang. Mary answered it in a low well-modulated voice and Standard English. “Mr Webster’s office, Miss Bahd speaking”, she said. Somebody on the other end of the wire said something and Mary said, “Well, you big stinker, what do you expect when you don’t call until eight-thirty Saturday night?”
While she talked to the big stinker, who she later said could take her to lunch, I roamed around the office, examining the files, looking into drawers, opening cupboards, unrolling maps, reading the titles of some of the books in the enormous mining library and looking at the view.
When someone came into the reception-room, Mary, still on the phone, waved to me imperiously to see who it was. It was a large fat man who held up a little canvas bag and shouted, “Where’s Webster?” I said, “Mr Webster is out of town, may I help you?” The fat man said, “Sister, I got the richest placer property the world has ever seen!” He went on and on and on about available water, smelter reports, equipment needs, etc., and finally handing me the little bag and a business card, said, “Just give this sample of ore to Webster and tell him to call me the minute he gets in town”, and left.
I waited until Mary had finished three more telephone calls, one to the manager of a building across the street, demanding a suite of offices with a good view, one to a florist giving a standing order for daily fresh flowers for the new office, the other to an office supply firm for two executives’ desks, largest size, and then I gave her the business card and the ore sample.