by Fiona Davis
“I’m doing quite well, thank you.” Her illustration class, which began the term with a full herd of thirty, had dwindled down to five, like her first term in reverse. But this time the troubles were financial—fewer students could afford the tuition—and had nothing to do with her gender. “The students who’ve remained are quite enthusiastic and talented, I’m happy to report.”
By the summer, she hoped, the city would be recovered and hum again like it had in the fall. In the meantime, her contract with Vogue hadn’t been renewed. Which was to be expected, even without the stock market crash. Most illustrators went in and out of fashion, the editors rotating the cover artists so that their readers didn’t get bored with one particular look. While all agreed her designs were smashing, one didn’t need to see the signature at the bottom of the page to know that it was a Clara Darden. Her distinctive style meant that her tenure was shorter than most.
On to bigger and better things.
Mr. Lorette fiddled with the papers on his desk before holding up some forms. “Three more students dropped out of the illustration course today. I’m sorry, but we’ll lose money if we keep you on. It’s only for this semester, until the economy rights itself. I hope you understand.”
“Of course.” Only one semester. She’d have more time to branch out, pursue alternate avenues of income. But she’d miss mingling with the other teachers and students. Only then did she grasp how much she counted on the place to alleviate her loneliness. “Will you be all right? The school, I mean.”
He chewed on his bottom lip. “I can’t say. Let’s hope we pull out of this quickly. There’s a chance we’d have to shut down for the coming term, then reinstate the program next fall. That would be the worst-case scenario.”
“You’d shut down the entire school?” She hadn’t expected anything that drastic. Her heart drummed with anxiety.
Mr. Lorette leaned back in his chair. “Art means nothing when someone is out of work. We’re a luxury.”
“Maybe it’s times like these when art is most crucial.”
He smiled. “That’s exactly what Levon said. Let’s hope you’re both right, in any event.”
“What will you and Mrs. Lorette do?”
“We’ll head to Europe, escape from the dreariness of all this. Don’t you worry about us.” Another teacher appeared at the door, looking pale. The next victim.
That evening, she met Mr. Bianchi over dinner to discuss the new line for Studebaker. She’d drawn a dozen sketches on a pad and brought it with her, determined to excite him with the possibilities and prove her value.
Inside Barbetta, on Forty-Sixth Street, the ceiling dripped with crystal chandeliers. The cool salmon-colored walls offered a protective cocoon for the diners who could still afford it. Somewhere to forget the dreary outside world and indulge.
“The best-paid woman artist.” Mr. Bianchi gave a tight-lipped smile as they sat down.
“Well, now, I doubt it’s actually true. I’m not exactly sure how they did their research. It’s not like there’s a list of women artists and their earnings published anywhere. You know newspapers, all that hyperbole.”
“Of course. You’re right about that.”
During the first course, she waited for him to bring up the new line, but he danced around the subject, speaking of their competitors, the need to address the current mood of the country in their advertising. She offered up several ideas, but none seemed to take.
By the time they were drinking coffee—he’d waved away the dessert menu—a hard stone had lodged in her stomach.
He sighed. “I’m afraid I have bad news.”
Not twice in one day. She braced herself.
“We can’t afford to keep you on, Miss Darden. You can imagine, the kind of pressure we’re under.”
If she lost this job, she’d have nothing. No covers, no classes, no cars. Her voice shook. “I understand that things have changed. But you’ve seen, I can adapt.”
“I’m sure you can. But it’s all about public perception. We featured you in the ads: Interiors designed by Clara Darden. Who’s now the highest-paid woman artist. It’s not good for business. We can’t afford to seem wasteful, not when four million people are out of work. We’ll alienate whatever customers are left.”
“You don’t have to pay me as much. I can do more for you. I have additional time now, you see.”
“We’ve decided to keep everything in-house.”
“May I ask who’ll be taking over?”
“Benjamin Mortimer—you remember him?”
She nodded. He was an engineer by trade, with no creative abilities whatsoever.
Mr. Bianchi called for the check. “In any event, he has a family to feed. It’s either let you go or fire him, and I can’t do that to a man with responsibilities.” He put a meaty hand over hers. “You don’t want me to put a man out of work, now, do you?”
She pulled her hand away and resisted the impulse to wipe it on her napkin. “I don’t mean to be rude or contradict what you’re saying, but the company’s obviously still doing well, right?” She gestured around the room. “If you can afford a fancy dinner at Barbetta, things can’t be so bad, can they?”
“You may know about art and design, but you don’t know about running a company. It’s all about appearances. We need to appear both successful and frugal. Not an easy task.” He pulled out some bills and left them on the table. He rose. “But it’s just for the time being. By the fall, all the worry will be over and we won’t be able to keep up with the demand. I assure you. Trust me, will you, Miss Darden?”
As if she had a choice.
* * *
By October 1930, Clara had stopped going by the magazine editors’ offices with mock illustrations in hand, keeping her tone as light as possible to prevent her desperation from seeping through. There was no point. They weren’t going to hire her, and the walk to and from the offices only made her hungry.
She was one of the lucky ones, able to scrape by on her savings, as long as she was thrifty. When she remembered the silly trinkets she and Oliver had bought on a whim, spending hundreds of dollars at a time, she felt sick. They’d enjoyed an expensive lifestyle, and very little of that remained.
Her apartment, now empty besides a few boxes and her two suitcases, was no longer possible on her tight budget. In the living room, her maid, Angela, folded up the curtains.
“Miss Darden, what would you like done with these?”
“Please take them. You can make clothes out of them, if you like.”
The curtains had a metallic sheen that at the time epitomized all things art deco. Now they seemed outlandish, useless. What was she thinking?
“Never mind, I have no idea what I’m saying.” Clara couldn’t help but laugh, and Angela joined in.
“I’m sure I’ll find a use for them, Miss Darden. Unless you’d like to take them with you? To decorate your new place?”
Clara shoved at one of the boxes with her foot. “No, it’ll be fine.” She wandered through the rooms for the last time. Without Oliver to insist Clara go out of her studio, she’d succumbed to a hermit-like existence. Which was fine when she had hours of work on her plate, but not so much now that her days were empty.
The letter she’d sent to her parents in Arizona had been returned, marked NO FORWARDING ADDRESS. Clara hadn’t kept up contact, and she added that to her many regrets. Not that she’d go running to them for comfort; that wasn’t her aim. But she’d wanted to know that they were all right, to confirm they all retained a connection, however tenuous.
Levon had also fallen out of touch. His April show had been a success, but since then, the city had folded in on itself, retreated from art, from music. No doubt he was suffering financially as much as Clara was, if not more so. The Grand Central School of Art had indeed been forced to shut its doors until the situation improved. The on
ce-dazzling art scene of New York was like a golden sarcophagus locked away in a dark tomb.
What if, as rumors suggested, the current economic disaster was permanent? The daily breadline just down the street at St. Vincent’s Hospital had doubled in length from last summer; newspaper accounts put it at five hundred people and growing as the weather worsened.
Angela broke into her morbid thoughts. “May I ask where you’re going, Miss Darden?”
“Don’t worry about me; I’ll be fine.” Clara took Angela’s hands in hers. “Off you go, and thank you.”
“Best of luck, Miss Darden.”
“You, too.”
She took a last look into each room, remembering the silly times they’d had, when what to wear for Oliver’s dinner parties had been the most important decision of the day. She hoped he was well and his family’s fortune safe.
Her two suitcases sat in the foyer. One was filled with her art supplies, her livelihood. The other contained her clothes, what remained after she’d taken dresses to the consignment shop in the summer. To keep her hopes up for a return to better times, she’d held on to the dress Oliver had bought her for the May Ball. Maybe one day she’d wear it again, appreciate it anew.
The October air sliced into her lungs as she covered the eight blocks to her new home on East Seventeenth Street, the unimaginatively named Hotel 17. A man leaning on crutches scooted out of the way as she walked up the front steps. Inside, she handed over a month’s rent to a grizzled woman behind the front desk and took the elevator up to room 35.
She busied herself setting up her meager possessions, which took only five minutes. At least the hotel had good bones. The dark moldings were handsome, and with some polish she’d be able to make them gleam again. The room had once been larger, but now a shoddily constructed partition divided it in half. She tried not to think too much about the occupant on the other side.
There was nothing to be done about the sink, as no amount of soap would scrub away the rusty stains encircling the drain. Sure, the place was a dump, but it was cheaper than a boardinghouse. She’d manage. She always had.
A burst of sunlight came through the lone window beside the bed. For a moment, she considered asking for another room, one with northern exposure. But the feeble warmth changed her mind.
For now, she lifted her face, closed her eyes, and basked in the light.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
December 1974
Virginia ran into one of the phone booths at the end of her lunch hour the Monday after Thanksgiving, and rang the Lorettes to find out what the art expert had said. Mr. Lorette told her that their friend Sammy was quite intrigued by her find, but that it would take a few weeks.
Intriguing. That sounded promising. Newly energized, Virginia grabbed a bottle of Windex and spent the next few hours wiping down the glass windows that encircled the information booth. After all her hard work, the place was looking spiffy, if she did say so herself, and one of the supervisors had even remarked on the difference. Terrence kindly gave Virginia all the credit, and the supervisor had shaken her hand.
She had a final section to wipe down, including Totto’s window, and she worked as quickly as possible. “You’ll like this, I promise,” she said to him. “You’ll be able to see your customers much better.”
“Why would I want to see them better?” He flipped over the WINDOW CLOSED sign and pulled out the newspaper.
“Virginia?”
Virginia froze. She knew that voice anywhere. Betsy.
She turned, clutching the Windex and rag close to her body, as if that would stop Betsy from noticing.
“I thought that was you. What on earth are you wearing? And what are you doing here?” Betsy’s hair fell in perfect sausage curls along her cheeks; her eyelids shimmered a glittery blue. Virginia, meanwhile, was lost in her too-big blazer, her face bare.
“Hi, Betsy.” She accepted an air kiss on one cheek, stammering for a suitable reply to her question. None came. Better to redirect. “What are you doing here?”
Betsy pointed to her umbrella. “It’s pouring out there, and I figured I’d take my chances and cut through Grand Central, try to get a cab on the other side.” She gasped. “Oh my God. Now it all makes sense. I was at the Carlyle over the weekend with some of the girls from the PONY committee and swore I saw Ruby working as a barmaid. I thought, ‘That can’t possibly be.’ And now here you are, a cleaning lady at Grand Central? You must be in terrible straits. Divorced and now this? What can I do?”
“I’m fine. Really.” What else was there to say? Her humiliation was complete. By the end of the day, everyone would know that she’d fallen on hard times. A cleaning lady whose daughter worked in a bar.
“I’m so sorry for you, Virginia. If you needed a cleaning job, I could have used you in the penthouse. Lucinda just quit. With no advance notice, I might add.” She looked about, her mouth curling with disgust. “This place is revolting. I hope you’re careful, with all the rats and roaches and dirty people wandering around.”
“Hey. Watch it, lady. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Virginia turned around. Totto was leaning forward on his counter, his arms crossed.
“What?” Betsy looked from Totto to Virginia. “Who’s that?”
“Get off your high horse, lady,” Totto snapped. “Don’t you come in here with your ugly blue eyeshadow and bad-mouth this place. We’ve gotta work here, day in and day out, and your attitude doesn’t help one bit.”
“Totto, enough,” said Virginia.
“Miss Clay.” Winston had come out of the booth and took the Windex and rag from her. “I’m so sorry to have forgotten these. I hope you won’t tell the stationmaster.”
Virginia stared, speechless.
“Miss Clay is running the whole place these days, you know, as the chief information officer.” Winston addressed Betsy with his laconic southern accent. “She’s a tough taskmaster, but we don’t know what we’d do without her.”
Betsy gaped at Virginia. “Chief information officer?”
“Well, yes.” Virginia tried to sound confident. “Thought I’d see what I could do to help out, something to do with my free time.” She looked over at Winston, who nodded in encouragement. “I decided there should be more to my life than shopping and going out to lunch.”
“Well, isn’t that something? I had no idea.” Betsy nodded at Virginia. “I’ll let you get back to work, then. I’m very impressed. Just wait until I tell the ladies of PONY.”
After Betsy had trotted up the staircase and disappeared from view, Virginia followed Winston back into the booth. “Thank you, both, for that. For standing up for me.”
“I was standing up for the terminal, not you,” said Totto, switching his sign back around. “People like that make me want to scream.”
“And scream you did.” Winston handed back the Windex and rag and climbed onto his stool. “What a horrible woman. Is she one of your friends?”
“Ex-friends. Again, you guys were great.” She kissed Winston on the cheek and patted Totto’s arm. “Now back to work, both of you!”
“Don’t push it.”
Virginia could have sworn Totto smiled.
* * *
Grand Central exuded a completely different atmosphere on weekends. The people who wandered through did so at a more leisurely pace, which offered Virginia the opportunity to show off her workplace to Ruby without being trampled by passengers.
“You’re practically giddy, Mom,” said Ruby. “This is hilarious.”
Virginia didn’t care that she was coming off as a train geek. “You have to imagine what it was like back when it opened in 1913. Imagine this railing all painted and clean.” She waited while Ruby snapped a couple of photos of the brass filigree. “And over here, check out the timetable in this waiting room. It’s still a blackboard.”
Ruby stepped back to fit it in the frame. “Those sconces on either side are glorious.” More clicks.
Together, they meandered through the terminal, Ruby shooting not only the beautiful but also the ruined, like a Botticino marble water fountain filled with garbage. To Virginia’s surprise, her daughter stopped a few of the workers, including a train conductor and a janitor, and convinced them to let her take their portraits.
“These doors, you’ve got to see these doors.” Virginia brought her to the entrance to the small police station Dennis had taken her to. She’d read in the trainee handbook that it used to be a grand office called the Campbell Apartment.
In the hands of metal artisans, the heavy wrought-iron double doors looked like Irish lace, with an interlocking pattern of four-leaf clovers. They were massive and solid but somehow came off as weightless and transparent.
A woman’s voice rose from behind them. “It’ll work better close up. You’ll get less reflection.”
“Doris?” Virginia smiled and gave her coworker an awkward half hug. “Doris! What are you doing here on a Saturday?” She introduced her to Ruby.
“Nice to meet you.” Doris looked tired, with dark rings under her eyes. Her wig was slightly askew. “I’m taking extra shifts. My husband got laid off.”
Virginia understood the pressures she was under all too well. “I’m so sorry.”
“Well, what are you gonna do? What’s with the photos?” She gestured toward Ruby’s camera.
“We’re doing a little project. Trying to show the prettier side of the terminal. Ruby’s studying photography.”
“Hey, that’s great. Good for you.”
“Do you know a lot about photography?” asked Ruby. “You’re right, the doors are even better close up.”
“Nah. Just made sense, is all.”
“Can I take your photo?”
Doris put one hand to her hair. “You want a photo of me?”