The Best of Everything

by Rona Jaffe

Caroline hurried back to her desk, called the coffee shop, went back to take dictation, was interrupted in her filing to take another letter, was interrupted in her typing of the letters to do more filing. Amanda Farrow seemed to have anything but an orderly mind; the minute she thought of something she wanted to have done immediately she thought of something else she wanted done more immediately. Every time the phone rang Caroline had to run out of the office, if she was filing, and answer it at her own desk. Once in a while Miss Farrow would stroll out of her office and come to peer over Caroline's shoulder. The first time she did this it made Caroline so nervous she made two mistakes.

  "I thought you were supposed to be a good typist," Miss Farrow said.

  At twelve noon on the dot, having been in the office two hours, Miss Farrow went out to lunch.

  "How do you like your new boss?" Mary Agnes asked.

  "I hope she's only going to be my temporary boss," Caroline said worriedly.

  "She's had twelve secretaries in three years," Mary Agnes said. She took a sandwich wrapped in brown paper out of her desk drawer and put on a white orlon sweater with glass beads sewn on it. "Come on, I'll ride you down in the elevator."

  "Can you tell me where I can get a Social Security card?"

  "There's a place two blocks from here. You'd better eat first, it will take you hours to get one."

  "Oh, but I only have an hour for lunch," Caroline said.

  "She doesn't come back until three-thirty. She'll never know. Just get back by three."

  "How does she get any work done?" Caroline asked. "Or is that a naive question?"

  "Executives don't do the work," Mary Agnes said. "The higher up you get the less you have to do. Until you're the top man, and then you have to make decisions, and that's hard. It's the ones just under the top who have the best deal."

  When Mary Agnes had gone off in the direction of the subway Caroline strolled down Fifth Avenue looking around. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry to get somewhere, meet someone, do some-

  thing. The girls trying to do some hasty lunch-hour shopping in the department stores, the messengers shuffling along to get the envelope or the package to its destination before the recipient went out to lunch, tibe executives rushing to embrace that first Martini. On the steps of St, Patrick's Cathedral were some tourists, focusing leather-encased cameras on each other, beaming in front of the historic architecture. A flock of pigeons rose up with a dry, snapping sound from the top step, like white wood shavings flung into the cold air. The sun had come out and everything was glittering.

  Caroline was suddenly taken with excitement. It was her first day at a new job, she was going to make fifty dollars a week. It seemed like a fortune. She was still living with her parents, in Port Blair, New York, and she had almost no expenses except for clothes, lunches and commuter tickets. Perhaps by summer she would get a raise, and then she could rent an apartment in New York with another girl. There must be a hundred girls working at Fabian, she thought, and I'll certainly find someone I'll really like who'll want to share an apartment with me. She jostled her way along with the stream of people, blinking in the unexpected winter sunshine, and she realized that she had been smiling, because a delivery boy in a leather jacket grinned at her and said, "Hi Beautiful."

  He thinks he's being so fresh, she thought; if I turned around and said, Hello, yourself, he'd probably faint. She laughed. She was still used to the friendly informality of a small college town, where in the fifteen minutes it took you to walk from the dorms to classes your face could get stiff from smiling greetings to all your casual acquaintances. And of course in Port Blair everyone knew everyone else, if not in person, then at least through gossip.

  She found the grimy-looking gray building that housed the Social Security ofiice and went upstairs. She realized that she had forgotten to stop for lunch, but she was too excited to eat anyway. The small room was crowded with people, sitting dully in rows of straight-backed wooden chairs. She took her place at the end of the line and looked around.

  What a group of unhappy-looking people! All of them looked as if they were waiting in line to pour out their troubles to Miss Lonelyhearts. Perhaps it was only because they had all been waiting in line for a long time, boredom has a tendency to bring out the worst in people's faces. She looked at their clothes. Most of them

  were frayed at the cuff and run down at the heel. It made her feel self-conscious with her raccoon collar and clean kid gloves. Where were all the happy, comfortably-off people? Didn't they work? Or were the people in this room the ones who had not worked for a long time? Perhaps she had come to the Social Security office for failures, and there was another one uptown or downtown for successes.

  I'll never look like that, she thought firmly. No matter what, I'll never let myself look like that. As long as I have to work, I'm going to get something out of it. These people look as if they have—just jobs. They don't look as if they particularly like their work, they look as if they can't help themselves. I don't want to look like them, I want my job to be one of the happy things in my life.

  "Next," said the bored man behind the counter. The line moved up one. It's like musical chairs, Caroline thought, except no one is having a good time and they all want to get out of here soon so they won't be fired. She looked at her watch and began to glance through a leaflet the woman ahead of her had left on her chair.

  Protect your future, the leaflet said. Sixty-five years old for women. It seemed so long away. Caroline could hardly imagine what she would be like at twenty-five. Last year, even six months ago, she had been sure. Now the future was a mystery. She wondered whether it could ever be for her the same thing it once was going to be.

  She came back to her desk at two o'clock with her lunch in a paper bag, her Social Security card in her wallet, and Miss Farrow's dusting powder (gift-wrapped) in a gold-and-white-striped box. Mary Agnes was sitting at her own desk, looking contented. Brenda was talking animatedly on the telephone, making use of the office to save on her personal phone bill. The desk next to Caroline's, which had been unoccupied that morning, now bore a straw handbag with flowers sewn on it and a pair of white cotton gloves with a hole in one of the fingers.

  "Hi," Mary Agnes said. "Did you get everything all right?"

  "Yes," said Caroline. "Is Miss Farrow back yet?"

  "Are you kidding?"

  She sat down at her desk and began to eat her sandwich. The coffee container had already leaked through the bottom of the bag and now was making rings on her new blotter. Looking at them, she began to feel as if she'd been at this desk for a long time.

  "The third new girl finally came," Mary Agnes said, gesturing toward the other desk. "She told Mr. Rice she was sick this morning and he was very nice about it. But she told me that she forgot to set her alarm clock! Can you imagine such a scatterbrain? I was up all night the day before I went to my first job."

  "Oh, is it her first job too?"

  "Yes, and she's only been in New York for a few weeks. She comes from Springs, Colorado. She just got out of junior college."

  Mary Agnes, the Louella Parsons of the thirty-fifth floor, Caroline thought.

  "Her name is April Morrison," Mary Agnes went on. "Tliat's a pretty name, isn't it—April. That's her with the long hair."

  She nodded toward a girl crossing the bullpen from one of the side offices to another, carrying a shorthand pad, one of the oddest girls Caroline had ever seen. April Morrison had an almost breath-takingly beautiful face, and she wore no make-up except for some pale-pink lipstick. But her hair, which was a tawny gold, cascaded down her back to the middle of her shoulder blades, thick and tangled, making her look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. She wore a shiny baby-blue gabardine suit. She had big blue eyes and freckles on her delicately sculptured nose, and Caroline almost expected to see her carrying a sunbonnet.

  "It's lucky for her she hasn't got your job," Mary Agnes whispered, as April went into an office and closed the door. "Miss Farrow would eat her alive
."

  "Well, thank you," Caroline said. "You mean I look like I could hold my own against Miss Farrow?"

  "You should be able to if anyone can. But if she asks you if you want to be promoted out of the typing pool to be her private secretary, say no, no, no."

  What would I ever have done without someone to give me tips and advice on my first day, Caroline thought gratefully.

  "Were you ever her secretary?"

  "Oh, I worked for her a few times from the pool, that's all. But everyone knows what a terror she is."

  "What were her regular secretaries like?"

  "Sophisticated," said Mary Agnes. "Like you, a little. College graduates. Usually pretty. She always hires a secretary who has the

  qualities to make a successful career women eventually and then she always hates the poor girl's guts."

  "I guess working for Miss Farrow is kind of like hell week for getting into a sorority, is that it?"

  "Hey," said Mary Agnes, "that's cute."

  "Doesn't anyone else need a private secretary right now?"

  "Uh-uh. All the other girls like their jobs. See, being a private secretary is a good deal around here because from there you can get into editorial work. If you're interested, that is. Me, I wouldn't want to be a reader, even though they pay seventy-five dollars a week to start. I like to read magazines but I wouldn't know where to begin to criticize them."

  I would, Caroline thought. I'd start with My Secret Life and tell them tliat "My Two Days in an Attic with a Sex-Mad Criminall" is the worst piece of trash I ever read. And I bet they'd sell more copies if they didn't have covers that people were ashamed to have lying around their living rooms.

  "Look sharp," Mary Agnes said, and bent over her work with a diligent expression. Miss Farrow, pink of cheek and long of breath, was walking dreamily toward her office. Caroline picked up the box of dusting powder and followed her.

  "Here's your powder. Miss Farrow. I charged it to you."

  "What's tlie matter, didn't you have any money?" It was obvious that Miss Farrow's lunch-hour euphoria did not extend to her treatment of the office help.

  "As a matter of fact, I didn't."

  Miss Farrow raised her eyebrows. "That's funny. I thought, to look at you, that you were another one of those Vassar girls who wants to be an editor just because she majored in English."

  "Radcliffe. And I did major in English." Caroline smiled.

  "I suppose you think it's easy to be an editor."

  "I'm not even sure it's easy to be a secretary."

  Miss Farrow looked at her sharply to determine if she was being sarcastic or serious. Caroline tried to keep a very bland, amused and slightly humble expression on her face, and not to look frightened.

  "It's not easy to be my secretary," Miss Farrow said finally.

  "I'll try to do the best I can until your regular secretary comes."

  "How much are you making now?"

  "Fifty dollars a week."

  "No experience, eh?"

  "I've just finished six weeks of a business and secretarial coiu-se. So my shorthand is better than a girl's who hasn't been working for a while."

  "Private secretaries start here at sixty-five, you know. Are you ambitious?" What a look of dislike and mistrust this woman has on her face, Caroline thought with surprise. What in the world does she think I might do to her?

  "Well, sixty-five sounds a lot better than fifty," Caroline answered gently.

  The look of mistrust softened a little. "I haven't looked for a permanent replacement for my other girl yet. Maybe I won't have to. We'll see if your typing improves."

  It will if you stop peering over my shoulder, Caroline thought. "I have some letters at my desk for you to sign," she said. "I'll bring them in. Is that all for now?"

  "Yes," Miss Farrow said with a little half-smile. "That's all for now."

  The rest of the afternoon went by as rapidly as the morning had, with Miss Farrow firing her disjointed commands and Caroline trying to follow them as weU as she could. She felt like a girl who knows she is going to be invited to a dance by the football hero who also happens to be the notorious class wolf, and has to decide what she really wants. She didn't know what she wanted. A pleasant job, yes, but to be in a rut like Mary Agnes, no. Something in between would be ideal, but she was already beginning to realize that the working world was more complicated than she had ever dreamed. She knew that although right now she found the office routine exciting and tiring, that was only because it was new to her, and in a few weeks she would find it boring. Her mind wanted more creative work. But most important of all, if she found herself mired down in a job that bored her, she would be thinking about Eddie and what might have been, and that was what she had come here to escape.

  At a quarter to five Miss Farrow came out of her oflBce pulling on her gloves. "There's an editorial report on my desk," she said. "Type it up for me, double-spaced. That's all for today unless you have some work left over. Good night."

  "Good night. Miss Farrow."

  "Ooh . . . what next?" Mary Agnes whispered in righteous indig-

  nation. "She's the only editor who doesn't type her own reading reports. She's probably afraid she'll mess up her nail polish."

  Caroline laughed and went into Miss Farrow's oflBce. It was already dark outside the huge window that made up the entire fourth wall, and through the opened blinds Caroline could see the lights of the city. She pulled up the bUnd and stood there for a moment. Every square of light was an oflBce, and in every office all over the twilit city there were girls much like herself, happy or disappointed, ambitious or bored, covering their typewriters hastily and going o£E to meet people they loved, or delaying the minutes of departure because home meant the loneliness of a long dark night. Suddenly her throat hurt so that she could hardly swallow. She turned to Miss Farrow's desk and picked up the manuscript.

  It was a heavy manuscript, of loose sheets of white typing paper held together with a thick rubber band. She leafed through the first few pages curiously. The top sheet was headed Derby Books. Comment Sheet.

  She read Miss Farrow's comments, which had been scrawled in a large, ostentatious hand. It was a rave review: "Clever writing, plot held me from beginning to end." She typed the review neatly on a clean comment sheet and attached the typed copy to the manuscript. From St. Patrick's outside, bells were chiming five o'clock.

  Mary Agnes opened the office door and looked in. She was already wearing her sweater and coat and was carrying her pinrse. "Good night, Caroline."

  "Good night."

  "Don't stay here all night. Ha-ha." Mary Agnes waved and started to leave.

  "Mary Agnes . . ."

  "What?"

  "Do you think it would be all right if I took this manuscript home with me tonight to read? I mean, are there any rules about it?"

  "You want to read it? On your own time?"

  "I think it would be exciting—to read a book that's this good, before it's even been published!"

  Mary Agnes shrugged. "Help yourself. There are some big red envelopes in that filing cabinet."

  "Thank you."

  "So long."

  The door shut and Caroline found an envelope and put the manuscript carefully into it. Then she gathered her things together and walked to the elevator. At five minutes past five the bullpen was empty; it had cleared out as rapidly as if an air-raid alarm had sounded. From a lone office down the hall she could hear the sound of a typewriter. It had been a long day, and she was just beginning to realize how tired she was. She remembered, riding down in the elevator, that Miss Farrow had never gotten around to taking her on the introduction tour Mary Agnes had promised. It didn't matter. She'd had quite an introduction anyway. And she could hardly wait to read the novel she'd found. She hugged the manuscript unde>' her arm as she walked quickly to catch the five-twenty-nine.

  Chapter 2

  New York is a city of constant architectural change, buildings lading torn down, new ones being p
ut up in their places, streots being torn up, fenced off, signs proclaiming politely Sorry! We aioe making WAY FOR A GROWING New York. Its inhabitants, more likely than not, live in recently converted houses—converted brownstones, converted whitestones, converted rococo mansions, all partitioned off into two- and three-room apartments and what is euphemistically called "the one-and-a-half." April Morrison, waking up in her new apartment at seven o'clock on a Thursday morning in January, lived in a "one-and-a-half." Her apartment building was a converted tenement, just north of Columbus Circle.

  It was a walk-up apartment, three stories above what the landlord called a "winter garden," which was really a kind of small enclosed courtyard with metal chairs piled upside down on one another and going to rust, and a patch of dirt where someone might someday plant flowers. It consisted of one large room with a kitchen that was in a closet and a bed that came out of the wall and had an uncoiled spring that made her sleep in a fetal position. The uncoiled spring did not bother her sleep particularly, however, because April was an extremely relaxed and healthy girl. There was also a bathroom in

  this apartment, with a makeshift shower in the bathtub, and a fair-sized closet.

  On this morning the moment her alarm clock went off April was out of bed and standing on her feet. The day before had been the first day of her first job in New York, and excited as she was she had forgotten to set her alarm and had gotten to tlie office at noon. It wasn't going to happen again.

  Heating water for her instant coffee in a pot from the five-and-ten, April sang a little song she hadn't remembered in years. It was a song she had learned in Sunday school. Her two older sisters back home in Springs had both been Sunday-school teachers before their early marriages, and when April had announced that she wanted to go to dramatic school instead, they had laughed. After all, there were thousands of pretty girls with long gold hair who wanted to go to Hollywood, they had told her, and even though she'd always had the lead in the high-school plays, if she had any sense she would forget that nonsense in a hurry. "Why?" her father had said. "Why shouldn't April be an actress?" But fathers always thought their youngest daughters were rather special.