Skyscraper

by Faith Baldwin

  At night Lynn didn’t mind. She was usually too tired or too indifferent after a day’s work. But to rise refreshed, elastic in her youth and excellent health, looking forward as only youth may, to the unknown astonishments of a new day, and then to come into the crowded dining room and be smitten full in the face by this intangible atmosphere of caged femininity made her melancholy. Therefore, she elected to breakfast in noise and confusion, surrounded by women, to be sure, but women in whom she was not forced to take a companionable interest and by the healthy loud-voiced argumentative masculinity of, for the most part, freshly shaven and shoe-shined men.

  Today she gave her usual order. Orange juice, buttered toast, coffee—but added, because it was Monday and a splendid blue and golden day, a soft-boiled egg. No cereal. The business club was afflicted with cereals—one hot, two cold. And at night, if the hot cereal had not been demolished in the morning, like as not it would appear again in some quaint fried and sweetened guise.

  Lynn raised the heavy white coffee cup to her lips.

  “Swell day,” commented the white jacket flashing back to the enormous steaming containers of coffee.

  “Swell,” agreed Lynn, contentedly.

  Back somewhere in Lynn’s Midwestern ancestry there must have been a lithe and laughing Irish girl, a dark-haired, blue-eyed pioneer to new lands, with the soft, breathless voice such girls possess, a voice with the lilt in it. Such was Lynn’s voice, and if the “Western” accent about which her companions at the club occasionally ragged her had been superseded by a hint of New Yorkese the lilt remained; and a young man sitting next to her turned from his own high stool to survey her, jogged, quite by accident, her elbow and changed her for a split second into a startled lady performing sleight of hand with a coffee cup.

  “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry,” said the young man in contrition, “Did—did I spill it?”

  He mopped distractedly in her general direction with a paper napkin. Lynn laughed and set down the cup.

  “No, it didn’t upset; it’s quite all right,” she told him, her small dark face sparkling from the loosened collar of fur.

  “Lord, I’m always doing something clumsy,” he bemoaned. He observed her, an open, direct glance, and was in no haste to remove his eyes. He asked, a little hesitantly, “Haven’t I seen you before—aren’t you in the trust department?”

  But, of course! She remembered suddenly who he was. She had met him, about a week ago; Miss Dennet, her chief, had presented him to her one morning when, as she had stood at Miss Dennet’s desk, a young man had paused briefly beside it. He was young Shepard—Tom Shepard—wasn’t it? The new confidential secretary to Norton, vice-president in charge of the trust department.

  “Miss Dennet introduced us,” Lynn helped him out, “I’m Lynn Harding. In sales research.”

  Tom Shepard grinned at her. He couldn’t, he thought, have looked at her very closely that distant morning or he would never have forgotten her, even temporarily. The white jacket, overhearing, remarked with cheerfulness and envy, “Fast work, brother!” and passed on. Tom Shepard and Lynn looked at one another.

  Lynn laughed outright. “Just what I was thinking,” she admitted.

  “Been with the outfit long?” he wanted to know.

  “About a year,” she answered.

  “Cripes, that’s too bad!” he told her sincerely.

  His eyes were very blue over the rim of the coffee cup. His hair was of that color which begins as practically flaxen and sobers to a neutral and respectable brown. That it waved slightly was one of his minor burdens. He had a very square jaw, a crooked nose, a sensitive, finely modeled mouth, close-set ears, and very broad shoulders. He was tall, she remembered. He had also the biggest hands she had ever seen in her life, and she watched them, in fascination, manipulating a fork and knife.

  Ugly-good-looking, decided Lynn silently. She liked them—ugly-good-looking.

  “You haven’t been with us long,” she stated rather than inquired. “And what did you mean by ‘too bad’?”

  He waved a fork perilously. All about them people came in, ordered, rose, paid their checks, departed. All about them was noise and confusion. They sat however on their high stools, heedless of people, of arrivals or departures, and consumed their breakfasts, when they remembered them, and observed each other, and were aware that they were young and that the world was a pretty decent sort of place on a Monday morning in October.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Tom, “I’m always sorry when I see a—a girl”—he restrained himself from the qualifying adjective, not sure anyway whether it should be beautiful or charming or merely pretty—“slaving her life away in the toils of a soulless corporation,” he ended solemnly.

  Lynn laughed again. “I like my slavery,” she confessed. “Don’t you like yours?”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” he mumbled awkwardly, a little shocked by the talent of all women for the abruptly and purely personal. He added hastily, “Do you always eat in this dump?”

  “Breakfasts,” she told him, “and generally lunch. I haven’t graduated to the luncheonette,” she concluded, “nor the Gavarin.”

  The luncheonette was a drug-and-soda, blue-plate, small glass-topped-table affair. The Gavarin was an excellent and moderately expensive restaurant. All three were in the basement of the building.

  Shepard nodded. “Me too,” he said; and added facetiously, “but I suppose you’ll be lunching in trust-officer elegance some day.”

  He referred to the private dining-rooms for the officers of the bank, which occupied the fifty-third floor in magnificent privacy and undisputed beauty.

  “I hope so,” said Lynn sincerely, to his inner amazement. She climbed down from the stool, sliding her modest tip under the saucer. “It’s late,” she said, and looked at the immense clock ticking inexorably.

  Tom absorbed the last dregs of the coffee into his inner man in one large intake of breath, dropped a Croesus-like quarter on the counter to the startled wonder of the white jacket and snatched his check. He reached for Lynn’s also. “Here, let me.”

  But she shook her head. “I’d rather not,” she said.

  Rebuffed but not cast down, he walked with her to the cashier’s desk, unconsciously squaring his shoulders and looking down at her from the physical superiority of his great height. She thought, as they stood at the desk together, bet he’s played football—

  She asked him.

  “Scrub. And in my junior year on the team. Yale,” he explained and added, his gay young face momentarily shadowed, “I didn’t finish.”

  They made their way upstairs out of the cafeteria and, wandering in what were literally marble halls, located their right elevator and went sedately to the third floor where the trust department was situated. In the elevator pressed close together he observed her from the corner of his blue eyes. Small, dark, reaching to his heart. Oh, well, perhaps a little more, but let it go at that. Curly dark hair rebelling against the little beret, growing, as he was able to see, in a widow’s peak upon her forehead. A smooth and olive skin, faintly flushed, and the lovely accent of gray eyes, the color of a quiet rainy day, rimmed with dark lashes, shining under the thin, fine curve of black brows. Another accent was her mouth, frankly lipsticked into a charming and impossible scarlet. And near one satiny corner there was a tiny, jet-black mole.

  He thought, it’s a damned shame that pretty women have to work.

  Now they were walking into the trust department. Here they would separate, she to go to the big room in the corner of which she had her desk, he to enter the more magnificent surroundings of the trust officers’ room, and finally his own small anteroom off Norton’s private office. He lingered, however. He said, “Look here, you won’t think me fresh or anything—how about lunch?”

  She was genuinely sorry. She said so. “I have,” she said, “an engagement.”

  “Breakfast then?” asked Tom, with a grin.

  She laughed, gestured toward her wrist watch and fled in
to her room. She was still laughing when she reached there, five minutes late. “What’s the joke at this time in the morning?” inquired the blond Miss Marple, a little sourly turning from her files.

  The room was flanked with files. It was a strictly utilitarian room. There were no splendid draperies, no massive furniture, no murals, no inches-thick carpet in this room; nor were there any little quiet anterooms where tactful men and women interviewed swathed, draped, and sometimes weeping widows or bewildered orphans. Yet in this room where Lynn worked were filed the futures of widows and orphans; row upon row of green metal files.

  In a corner a girl was checking stock quotations with the help of another. Miss Marple, at a file, was looking up something relative to the estate of one Jonathan Smith. Someone else was filing carbons. Lynn, her outdoor things disposed of, sat down at her own desk by the window on the far side of one wall and looked over the work which was set aside for today. In her desk lay, and would lie, the not-so-private lives of many unsuspecting men, neatly docketed upon little blue cards.

  Here on a card, one David Whitmore’s name, plainly typed. Here, his probable income, his clubs, his family relations, his business connections. Today Lynn would give this card, upon which Mr. Whitmore’s financial life and prospects were displayed in cold print, to an eager young salesman. And that salesman would presently call upon Mr. Whitmore and endeavor to interest him in the many and diverse facilities of the trust department, so completely at Mr. Whitmore’s disposal and service.

  Lynn jotted down a name upon a pad, reached for a copy of Bradstreet and opened the social register. Her day had begun.

  2

  HIS KIND OF GIRL

  A LITTLE BEFORE NOON SHE MADE HER WAY INTO the officers’ room and to Miss Dennet’s desk. Lynn always entered this room and approached this desk with a sense of subdued excitement. The room was enormous, it was pillared. Heavy velvet carpeting lay upon the floor. The walls were treated with costly and beautiful simplicity. The flat-topped desks, mahogany, were less businesslike in appearance than Lynn’s own. There were perhaps twelve of them in the room, amply spaced. Down the middle of the room ran an equally well-spaced aisle of smaller desks, trademarked by typewriters; the desks of the secretaries to the trust officers. The room was subdued. People moved quietly, made little noise. Miss Dennet’s secretary, sitting by Miss Dennet’s desk, nodded at Lynn, smiled, and slipped away. Miss Dennet reached out a strong white hand and replaced a volume—some one or other on “Bonds”—in its usual position. Lynn laid a card on the desk.

  “We slipped up on this,” she reported guiltily.

  Sarah Dennet was forty-eight and looked thirty-six. A well-groomed woman, tall, her hair brushed severely, her face well-washed but slightly powdered, she had large severe features and very gentle eyes behind rimmed spectacles. She wore a miraculously well-cut dress, black, white collar, white cuffs. She smiled at Lynn, and her large mouth had curves of unexpected merriment and amiability.

  “That can’t be helped,” she said. “I expect it.” She pushed aside some of Lynn’s own blue cards, the salesmen’s reports firmly clipped to them, and asked, “Nearly lunch time, isn’t it?”

  Lynn nodded.

  “I’ll meet you outside,” Sarah told her, “and we’ll go to the Gavarin.”

  Lynn smiled and looked past Miss Dennet’s desk, the desk of that trust officer in charge of “new business,” to open the door of the anteroom leading into the vice-president’s private office. She saw a pair of broad shoulders and the back of a brown head. She hadn’t been quite truthful when she had told Tom Shepard that she had not graduated to the Gavarin. She went there, perhaps once a week, with Miss Dennet.

  Fifteen minutes later she and her chief were facing each other across the small table in the corner of the rather consciously elegant restaurant. The older woman commented after they had ordered,” Haven’t been to see me in weeks, Lynn. Been busy?”

  “Not very. A movie now and then. Except—Ken Wilkins—from home, you know. He was in town last week. He gave me a whirl. Theater every night.”

  “Is that Amy Wilkins’s boy?” asked Sarah, interested.

  “The same. He wouldn’t thank you for calling him a boy. You should see him in New York. He wrote that place!” laughed Lynn.

  “Amy was like that,” commented Sarah vaguely, over chicken cutlet; but Lynn, who had been brought up next door to the Wilkins family, understood perfectly and lifted amused gray eyes to her friend’s.

  “What do you hear from your mother?” Sarah asked her. “She hasn’t written to me in ages.”

  “Oh, she’s all right; a little rheumatism, now and then, and trouble getting a cleaning woman. She always has that,” Lynn declared, “for no one she gets ever satisfies father. He howls at the sight of one of them.” She was silent, smiling, thinking of her father’s untidy, medicinally odorous office on the first floor of their frame house. She remembered when that house had stood in the country, rather than in the town proper. She remembered hearing the wheels of the rig drive out, night after night, on the errands of mercy, of success or failure. She remembered the first car, which had replaced the rig. She remembered the encroaching growth of the small, busy, energetic town.

  “Your father works himself to death,” Sarah announced, attacking her salad. She hated salad but always ate it, every day, for her health. “He and your mother should get away, for a rest.”

  “They’re talking about going to Florida this winter. Father hates to turn over his practice, though. The new young doctor is clever, he says,” Lynn told her, a little resentful of the recent Johns Hopkins graduate and his “cleverness.” “But father thinks people depend on him. And he’s right,” she said proudly.

  “Of course he’s right,” agreed Sarah, out of her long loyal friendship with the Hardings. She had been Janet Harding’s closet friend, back in that town where both were born. She was Lynn’s godmother. And it was she who had poured soothing syrup on the troubled family waters when young Lynn, after less than a year at her state university, had decided she had been enough expense to the family and must therefore come to New York and make her own fortune and seek her own adventure. It was Sarah who had met Lynn at the train, who had found the job for her, and who had urged her to stay with her, at least for the first few months, in the small, charming apartment she shared with another woman, a head of advertising in a large department store.

  But Lynn had refused. “There isn’t room,” she said flatly, “and I’d only be putting you and Miss Frank out. Besides, I couldn’t pay my share. And moreover,” went on Lynn, small, pointed chin slightly elevated, “you’d think it your bounden duty to look after me—and I don’t want to be looked after, Sarah darling! Or rather, I want to look after myself—and live on my own salary—and fight my own battles. You’d make things too easy,” she announced.

  So Sarah, with many misgivings and several lengthy letters sent via air mail to the Middle West, had given in, and eventually hearing of the business club, had inspected it with, it must be confessed, a slight sinking of the heart, and had sent Lynn there.

  During office hours their relations were pleasant, friendly, and co-operative; but Lynn, determined never to overstep the bounds, out of her deep gratitude to her mother’s friend, had acquired a businesslike formality toward the older woman which amused and rather touched her. Once a week or so they lunched together, and Lynn came to the apartment for dinner now and then. But she never intruded upon Sarah. She realized that the other had her own interests, her own friends and relaxations, acquired after many years in New York, and it would be impossible for Lynn herself to enter in Sarah Dennet’s private life to any great extent. Lynn, wrote Sarah to Lynn’s mother, treats me with a curious mixture of attitudes—family friend, sometimes confidante, occasional adviser, and Big Chief.

  “Mother,” said Lynn, sighing, “still wants me to come home and teach or something. She’s always writing and asking if I haven’t had enough of city life!”


  “And haven’t you had enough?” asked Sarah.

  “Well, no. I’m just beginning!”

  Sarah thought, looking at the glowing face, the steady lambent gray eyes, of course, you’re just beginning. She thought also, here sitting opposite me and crumbling her bread on the table sits possibly my successor. But she felt no special pang of envy at the other’s youth, her prospects, her ambitions, her future. She was in fact imperceptibly grooming Lynn Harding for her own job some day. If she doesn’t go off the deep end and marry some young idiot first and ruin her business future, thought Sarah, who having survived one disastrous love affair twenty years ago was not given to dwelling with admiration on men, as husbands or as lovers. Yes, Lynn should be groomed for her job, for Miss Dennet had no intention of staying where she was forever.

  “By the way,” said Lynn, a little too carelessly, “at breakfast this morning in the cafeteria, I sat next to Mr. Shepard—you know, Mr. Norton’s new secretary.”

  “You did? He seems a nice boy,” Sarah admitted ungrudgingly, “a little too much all hands and feet, I suppose. I understand that Mr. Norton is satisfied with him so far.”

  “How on earth did he happen to get the job?” asked Lynn. “He doesn’t look the type.”

  “Must there be a type?” the older woman wanted to know.

  “Oh, I suppose not. But nowadays you don’t see many men secretaries—at least not ex-football players, all, you say, hands and feet.”

  “I believe,” said Sarah, not particularly interested, “that he was studying engineering at Yale when his mother, his last surviving relative, died. What money she had was left in trust—Mr. Norton is an old friend of the family’s.”

  “Oh, I see—a direct legacy to the Seacoast Trust Company.” Lynn’s eyes danced. “But why didn’t they let him go on with his engineering?” she demanded.