Big Money

by John Dos Passos

  It gave her quite a turn to hear the band playing in the casino for the teadance and to see the colored lights and feel the quiet warmth of the hotel halls and the air of neat luxury in her mother’s room. Mother was pretty peevish and said what was the use of her daughter’s coming home if she neglected her like this. “I had to do some things for Daddy,” was all Mary said. Mother started talking a blue streak about her campaign to put German women out of the Woman’s Tuesday Lunch Club. It went on all through supper. After supper they played cribbage until Mother began to feel sleepy.

  The next day Mother said she felt fine and would sit up in a chair. Mary tried to get Daddy on the phone to see if she ought to but there was no answer from the office. Then she remembered that she’d said she’d be there at nine and rushed downtown. It was eleven o’clock and the waitingroom was full before Daddy came in. He’d evidently just been to a barbershop to get shaved but he looked deadtired. “Oh, Daddy, I bet you haven’t been to bed.” “Sure, I got a couple of hours in one of the interne’s rooms at the hospital. We lost a couple of cases last night.”

  All that week Mary sat at the desk in the waitingroom of Daddy’s office, answering the phone through the gauze mask, telling frightened flushed men and women who sat there feeling the aches beginning in their backs, feeling the rising fever flush their cheeks, not to worry, that Doc French would be right back. At five she’d knock off and go to the hotel to eat supper and listen to her mother talk, but Daddy’s work would be just beginning. She tried hard to get him to take a night off for sleep every other night. “But how can I? McGuthrie’s laid up and I’ve got all his practice to handle as well as my own. . . . This damn epidemic can’t last indefinitely. . . . When it lets up a little we’ll go out to the Coast for a couple of weeks. How about it?” He had a hacking cough and looked grey under the eyes but he insisted he was tough and felt fine.

  Sunday morning she got downtown late because she’d had to go to church with Mother and found Daddy dozing hunched up in a chair. When she came into the office he jumped up with a guilty look and she noticed that his face was very flushed. “Been to church, eh, you and your mother?” he said in a curious rasping voice. “Well, I’ve got to be gettin’ about my business.” As he went out the door with his soft felt hat pushed far down over his eyes it crossed Mary’s mind that perhaps he’d been drinking.

  There didn’t seem to be many calls that Sunday so she went back home in time to take a drive with her mother in the afternoon. Mrs. French was feeling fine and talking about how Mary ought to make her debut next fall. “After all, you owe it to your parents to keep up their position, dear.” Talk like that made Mary feel sick in the pit of her stomach. When they got back to the hotel she said she felt tired and went to her room and lay on the bed and read The Theory of the Leisure Class.

  Before she went out next morning she wrote a letter to Miss Addams telling her about the flu epidemic and saying that she just couldn’t go back to college, with so much misery going on in the world, and couldn’t they get her something to do at Hull House? She had to feel she was doing something real. Going downtown in the streetcar she felt rested and happy at having made up her mind; at the ends of streets she could see the range of mountains white as lumps of sugar in the brilliant winter sunshine. She wished she was going out for a hike with Joe Denny. When she put her key in the office door the carbolic iodiform alcohol reek of the doctor’s office caught her throat. Daddy’s hat and coat were hanging on the rack. Funny, she hadn’t noticed his car at the curb. The groundglass door to the consultingroom was closed. She tapped on it. “Daddy,” she called. There was no answer. She pushed the door open. Oh, he was asleep. He was lying on the couch with the laprobe from the car over his knees. The thought crossed her mind, how awful if he was dead-drunk. She tiptoed across the room. His head was jammed back between the pillow and the wall. His mouth had fallen open. His face, rough with the grey stubble, was twisted and strangled, eyes open. He was dead.

  Mary found herself going quietly to the telephone and calling up the emergency hospital to say Dr. French had collapsed. She was still sitting at the telephone when she heard the ambulance bell outside. An interne in a white coat came in. She must have fainted because she next remembered being taken in a big car out to the Broadmoor. She went right to her room and locked herself in. She lay down on her bed and began to cry. Some time in the night she called up her mother’s room on the phone. “Please, Mother, I don’t want to see anybody. I don’t want to go to the funeral. I want to go right back to college.”

  Mother made an awful rumpus but Mary didn’t listen to what she said and at last next morning Mother gave her a hundred dollars and let her go. She didn’t remember whether she’d kissed her mother when she left or not. She went down to the depot alone and sat two hours in the waitingroom because the train east was late. She didn’t feel anything. She seemed to be seeing things unusually vividly, the brilliant winter day, the etched faces of people sitting in the waitingroom, the colors on the magazines on the newsstand. The porter came to get her for the train. She sat in the pullman looking out at the snow, the yellow grass, the red badlands, the wire fences, the stockcorrals along the track standing up grey and yellowish out of the snow, the watertanks, the little stations, the grainelevators, the redfaced trainmen with their earflaps and gauntlets. Early in the morning going through the industrial district before Chicago she looked out at the men, young men old men with tin dinnerpails, faces ruddy and screwed up with the early cold, crowding the platforms waiting to go to work. She looked in their faces carefully, studying their faces; they were people she expected to get to know, because she was going to stay in Chicago instead of going back to college.

  The Camera Eye (45)

  the narrow yellow room teems with talk under the low ceiling and crinkling tendrils of cigarettesmoke twine blue and fade round noses behind ears under the rims of women’s hats in arch looks changing arrangements of lips the toss of a bang the wise I-know-it wrinkles round the eyes all scrubbed stroked clipped scraped with the help of lipstick rouge shavingcream razorblades into a certain pattern that implies

  this warmvoiced woman who moves back and forth with a throaty laugh head tossed a little back distributing with teasing looks the parts in the fiveoclock drama

  every man his pigeonhole

  the personality must be kept carefully adjusted over the face

  to facilitate recognition she pins on each of us a badge

  today entails tomorrow

  Thank you but why me? Inhibited? Indeed goodby

  the old brown hat flopped faithful on the chair beside the door successfully snatched

  outside the clinking cocktail voices fade

  even in this elderly brick dwellinghouse made over with green paint orange candles a little tinted calcimine into

  Greenwich Village

  the stairs go up and down

  lead through a hallway ranked with bells names evoking lives tangles unclassified

  into the rainy twoway street where cabs slither slushing footsteps plunk slant lights shimmer on the curve of a wet cheek a pair of freshcolored lips a weatherlined neck a gnarled grimed hand an old man’s bloodshot eye

  street twoway to the corner of the roaring avenue where in the lilt of the rain and the din the four directions

  (the salty in all of us ocean the protoplasm throbbing through cells growing dividing sprouting into the billion diverse not yet labeled not yet named

  always they slip through the fingers

  the changeable the multitudinous lives)

  box dizzingly the compass

  Mary French

  For several weeks the announcement of a lecture had caught Mary French’s eye as she hurried past the bulletinboard at Hull House: May 15 G. H. Barrow, Europe: Problems of Post-war Reconstruction. The name teased her memory but it wasn’t until she actually saw him come into the lecturehall that she remembered that he was the nice skinny redfaced lecturer who talked about how it wa
s the workingclass that would keep the country out of war at Vassar that winter. It was the same sincere hesitant voice with a little stutter in the beginning of the sentences sometimes, the same informal way of stalking up and down the lecturehall and sitting on the table beside the waterpitcher with his legs crossed. At the reception afterwards she didn’t let on that she’d met him before. When they were introduced she was happy to be able to give him some information he wanted about the chances exsoldiers had of finding jobs in the Chicago area. Next morning Mary French was all of a fluster when she was called to the phone and there was Mr. Barrow’s voice asking her if she could spare him an hour that afternoon as he’d been asked by Washington to get some unofficial information for a certain bureau. “You see, I thought you would be able to give me the real truth because you are in daily contact with the actual people.” She said she’d be delighted and he said would she meet him in the lobby of the Auditorium at five.

  At four she was up in her room curling her hair, wondering what dress to wear, trying to decide whether she’d go without her glasses or not. Mr. Barrow was so nice.

  They had such an interesting talk about the employment situation which was not at all a bright picture and when Mr. Barrow asked her to go to supper with him at a little Italian place he knew in the Loop she found herself saying yes without a quiver in spite of the fact that she hadn’t been out to dinner with a man since she left Colorado Springs after her father’s death three years ago. She felt somehow that she’d known Mr. Barrow for years.

  Still she was a bit surprised at the toughlooking place with sawdust on the floor he took her to, and that they sold liquor there and that he seemed to expect her to drink a cocktail. He drank several cocktails himself and ordered red wine. She turned down the cocktails but did sip a little of the wine not to seem too oldfashioned. “I admit,” he said, “that I’m reaching the age where I have to have a drink to clear the work out of my head and let me relax. . . . That was the great thing about the other side . . . having wine with your meals. . . . They really understand the art of life over there.”

  After they’d had their spumoni Mr. Barrow ordered himself brandy and she drank the bitter black coffee and they sat in the stuffy noisy restaurant smelly of garlic and sour wine and tomatosauce and sawdust and forgot the time and talked. She said she’d taken up socialservice work to be in touch with something real but now she was beginning to feel coopedup and so institutional that she often wondered if she wouldn’t have done better to join the Red Cross overseas or the Friends Reconstruction Unit as so many of the girls had but she so hated war that she didn’t want to do anything to help even in the most peaceful way. If she’d been a man she would have been a C.O., she knew that.

  Mr. Barrow frowned and cleared his throat: “Of course I suppose they were sincere, but they were very much mistaken and probably deserved what they got.” “Do you still think so?” “Yes, dear girl, I do. . . . Now we can ask for anything; nobody can refuse us, wages, the closed shop, the eighthour day. But it was hard differing with oldfriends . . . my attitude was much misunderstood in certain quarters. . . .”

  “But you can’t think it’s right to give them these dreadful jail sentences.”

  “That’s just to scare the others. . . . You’ll see they’ll be getting out as soon as the excitement quiets down . . . Debs’s pardon is expected any day.”

  “I should hope so,” said Mary.

  “Poor Debs,” said Mr. Barrow, “one mistake has destroyed the work of a lifetime, but he has a great heart, the greatest heart in the world.” Then he went on to tell her about how he’d been a railroadman himself in the old days, a freightagent in South Chicago; they’d made him the businessagent of his local and he had worked for the Brotherhood, he’d had a hard time getting an education and suddenly he’d waked up when he was more than thirty, in New York City writing a set of articles for the Evening Globe, to the fact that there was no woman in his life and that he knew nothing of the art of life and the sort of thing that seemed to come natural to them over there and to the Mexicans now. He’d married unwisely and gotten into trouble with a chorusgirl, and a woman had made his life a hell for five years but now that he’d broken away from all that, he found himself lonely getting old wanting something more substantial than the little pickups a man traveling on missions to Mexico and Italy and France and England, little international incidents, he called them with a thinlipped grin, that were nice affairs enough at the time but were just dust and ashes. Of course he didn’t believe in bourgeois morality but he wanted understanding and passionate friendship in a woman.

  When he talked he showed the tip of his tongue sometimes through the broad gap in the middle of his upper teeth. She could see in his eyes how much he had suffered. “Of course I don’t believe in conventional marriage either,” said Mary. Then Mr. Barrow broke out that she was so fresh so young so eager so lovely so what he needed in his life and his speech began to get a little thick and she guessed it was time she was getting back to Hull House because she had to get up so early. When he took her home in a taxi she sat in the furthest corner of the seat but he was very gentlemanly although he did seem to stagger a little when they said goodnight.

  After that supper the work at Hull House got to be more and more of a chore, particularly as George Barrow, who was making a lecturetour all over the country in defense of the President’s policies, wrote her several times a week. She wrote him funny letters back, kidding about the oldmaids at Hull House and saying that she felt it in her bones that she was going to graduate from there soon, the way she had from Vassar. Her friends at Hull House began to say how pretty she was getting to look now that she was curling her hair.

  For her vacation that June Mary French had been planning to go up to Michigan with the Cohns, but when the time came she decided she really must make a break; so instead she took the Northland around to Cleveland and got herself a job as countergirl in the Eureka Cafeteria on Lakeside Avenue near the depot.

  It was pretty tough. The manager was a fat Greek who pinched the girls’ bottoms when he passed behind them along the counter. The girls used rouge and lipstick and were mean to Mary, giggling in corners about their dates or making dirty jokes with the busboys. At night she had shooting pains in her insteps from being so long on her feet and her head spun from the faces the asking mouths the probing eyes jerking along in the rush hours in front of her like beads on a string. Back in the rattly brass bed in the big yellowbrick roominghouse, a girl she talked to on her boat had sent her to, she couldn’t sleep or get the smell of cold grease and dishwashing out of her nose; she lay there scared and lonely listening to the other room ers stirring behind the thin partitions, tramping to the bathroom, slamming doors in the hall.

  After she’d worked two weeks at the cafeteria she decided she couldn’t stand it another minute, so she gave up the job and went and got herself a room at the uptown Y.W.C.A. where they were very nice to her when they heard she’d come from Hull House and showed her a list of socialservice jobs she might want to try for, but she said No, she had to do real work in industry for once, and took the train to Pittsburgh where she knew a girl who was an assistant librarian at Carnegie Institute.

  She got into Pittsburgh late on a summer afternoon. Crossing the bridge she had a glimpse of the level sunlight blooming pink and orange on a confusion of metalcolored smokes that jetted from a wilderness of chimneys ranked about the huge corrugated iron and girderwork structures along the riverbank. Then right away she was getting out of the daycoach into the brownish dark gloom of the station with her suitcase cutting into her hand. She called up her friend from a dirty phonebooth that smelled of cigarsmoke. “Mary French, how lovely!” came Lois Speyer’s comical burbling voice. “I’ll get you a room right here at Mrs. Gansemeyer’s, come on out to supper. It’s a boardinghouse. Just wait till you see it. . . . But I just can’t imagine anybody coming to Pittsburgh for their vacation.” Mary found herself getting red and nervous right there in th
e phonebooth. “I wanted to see something different from the socialworker angle.”

  “Well, it’s so nice the idea of having somebody to talk to that I hope it doesn’t mean you’ve lost your mind . . . you know they don’t employ Vassar graduates in the openhearth furnaces.”

  “I’m not a Vassar graduate,” Mary French shouted into the receiver, feeling the near tears stinging her eyes. “I’m just like any other workinggirl. . . . You ought to have seen me working in that cafeteria in Cleveland.” “Well, come on out, Mary darling, I’ll save some supper for you.” It was a long ride out on the streetcar. Pittsburgh was grim all right.

  Next day she went around to the employment offices of several of the steelcompanies. When she said she’d been a socialworker they looked at her awful funny. Nothing doing; not taking on clerical or secretarial workers now. She spent days with the newspapers answering helpwanted ads.

  Lois Speyer certainly laughed in that longfaced sarcastic way she had when Mary had to take a reporting job that Lois had gotten her because Lois knew the girl who wrote the society column on the Times-Sentinel.

  As the Pittsburgh summer dragged into August, hot and choky with coalgas and the strangling fumes from blastfurnaces, blooming-mills, rollingmills that clogged the smoky Y where the narrow rivervalleys came together, there began to be talk around the office about how red agitators had gotten into the mills. A certain Mr. Gorman said to be one of the head operatives for the Sherman Service was often seen smoking a cigar in the managingeditor’s office. The paper began to fill up with news of alien riots and Russian Bolshevists and the nationalization of women and the defeat of Lenin and Trotzky.