The Best of Everything

by Rona Jaffe

  In junior college she had studied speech, ballet and singing, and, to appease the family, t)'ping and shorthand. For a graduation present her parents gave her a train ticket to New York and five hundred dollars. She was to stay in New York for as long as the money lasted and do as she pleased—go to the theater, sight-see, go to museums, look up a high-school classmate of her mother's who had married a man from Brooklyn and had gone there to live. April arrived just after Thanksgiving and did all these things for three days. On the fourth day she read in the newspaper of a chorus call for girl dancers for a new musical. She went to it, with mingled hope and terror, had her turn with what seemed like at least five hundred other girls, and was told politely that she would hear. She never heard anything. At the end of the second week she had been in New York she answered a call for girl singers.

  Most of the singers were quite unattractive, she noticed with private hope, they seemed much less pretty than the dancers had been. Why were tlie singers in shows never as pretty as the dancers? She discovered why very soon. With their trained voices, these girls did not have to be pretty, you could listen to them and you didn't have to look too closely. With her semi-trained voice (chrurch choir

  and the two years at junior college) April didn't stand a chance. She was thanked for coming and told politely that she would hear. The next day she went to a chorus call at the Copacabana. At least she could walk straight.

  When she got to the Copa she felt like a midget. All the girls were six feet tall, or at least they looked that large to her. April was five feet three in her bare feet. They didn't even ask her to show her legs, for which she was just as glad, because she decided at the last minute that she would never be able to explain it at home if she became a showgirl. Her parents thought aU night-club chorus girls were kept women on the side.

  What should she do? The five hundred dollars was not lasting as long as she had thought it would—there was that hansom-cab ride (who would have thought it would be so expensive?), and having a facial, and that bottle of perfume she couldn't help buying, and then all those taxis. She had a feeling the taxi drivers took her on a longer route than was absolutely necessary. She knew one thing, though. She was going to take the subway, and eat at the Automat, and stay in New York if it meant being a sales clerk at the five-and-ten. The hotel was too expensive, so she found this small apartment.

  How she loved New York! She had never seen anything like it in her entire life. It wasn't as if she would die if she couldn't become an actress. Back home in Springs being an actress had seemed both glamorous and obtainable, because it had been part of a dream world. She had read all the plays of Eugene O'Neill and J. M. Barrie and Kaufman and Hart, and she had said the hnes aloud in the privacy of her own room. That didn't give her any more right to be a successful actress, she realized, than cutting out recipes gave one a right to be a chef at the Waldorf. Being an actress had been part of a fantasy, a picture, which had included tall buildings in the blue twilight and the fountain in front of the Plaza, seeing Marlene Dietrich buying handkerchiefs at Bonwit's, and Frank Sinatra coming out of Lindy's, and beautiful women no one had ever heard of wearing white mink and diamonds and being escorted by handsome older men. The body of the fantasy was true, she was walking in it and looking at it, breathlessly. And the actress part of it? She hadn't realized until she had actually been walking past those tail buildings in the blue twilight how insignificant she really was. Where could she ever begin to attack a fortress like New York? She didn't even

  want to. She only wanted to stay there until she herself was part of it, one of those well-groomed, well-attended women, and she half realized that was a fantasy too. She only had to walk up the three flights to her dingy room to know what a fantasy it was. Nevertheless, she was very happy, and every moment brought something new and exciting. Nobody else back home had been rejected in person by Mr. George Abbott.

  An employment-agency ad in The New York Times interested her. She went to the agency, and was sent to Fabian Publications. She had wanted one of the ninety-dollar-a-week jobs, but this was her first, and she was told to take it and be glad for the experience. Everyone at home had read My Secret Life avidly in high school-she herself had outgrown it only three years before. To tell the truth she was quite thrilled to be working at the very source of a magazine which had helped build up much of her present misinformation. Her grandmother read The Cross, too. She wrote home about her new job immediately, and also broke the news that she was not coming back, at least not for a long time.

  She drank her coffee standing up and dressed hastily. Here it was eight-thirty and she had been daydreaming again. As she emerged into the street she caught sight of her reflection in the window of a dehcatessen next door to her apartment house. Her coat was too short—or was it? She remembered the girl in the tweed suit with the raccoon collar who had been working at the desk next to hers yesterday afternoon at Fabian. What a sophisticated-looking girl! Something about her looked—right. Was it the leather gloves? Perhaps white cotton gloves looked terrible in January. They were her best gloves, and so she had never given them a second thought. She looked down at them and noticed for the first time the hole in the finger. She pulled them off and stuffed them into her purse and walked quickly to the subway.

  She was still rather frightened of the subway and never could bring herself to run for a train the way the other people did, for fear one of the huge doors would close on her and leave her half in and half out, screaming as the car bore her away to a mysterious and horrible death in the darkness of the tunnel. She watched the people scurrying and pushing one another as the sound of an approaching train grew louder, and she delayed for a moment in front of the change booth counting out her money for a token.

  "Good morning," she said pleasantly to the man behind the bars. He was one of the few people in New York whom she had seen more than once, and this gave her a rather friendly feeling toward him. She always said good morning to him, it made her feel less lonely.

  "How are you today?"

  "Just fine," she said. She fished up her token and turned to leave.

  "Wait a m.inute," he whispered. He looked around and took hold of her wrist with fingers that were surprisingly strong. "I got somC' thing to show you,"

  "To show me?"

  "Look," he said. He slid a photograph, picture side down, through the change door. She looked at him curiously and picked it up.

  At first she didn't realize what it was, it seemed like two people in a strained and unaccustomed posture, wrestlers perhaps. Then she saw it was a man and a woman, and when she discovered what they were doing to each other she felt her face redden and her hand began to shake so hard she could scarcely push the picture back through the slot. She turned to flee.

  "Hey," he called after her, and then more loudly, indignantly: "Hey!"

  She looked back for one instant.

  "What's the matter?" he called. "I thought we was friends. Ha-ha, ha-ha." He laughed raucously, angrily, insulted and wanting to hurt her. "Where ya going?"

  She pushed her way through the turnstile, and for the first time in her life jumped aboard a subway train the instant its doors started to close. A fat man took her arm to help her as the rubber-tipped jaws snapped shut.

  "What's your hurry?" he said. "You'll get yourself killed someday. Crazy New York girls!"

  New York girls, she thought, and her fright began to slip away from her. He thought she was a New York girl; did that mean she looked as if she belonged? Perhaps that terrible man in the change booth had thought she was a native New Yorker too, and hadn't realized that back home you spoke to everybody and it didn't mean a thing. She pushed her way to a seat, edging her way between two men who were dashing for it. She received a sharp elbow in the ribs, achieved the seat triumphantly, and when she saw her two competitors collide into each other she could barely keep back her

  smile. She was groping, but she was going to get along. Today in the oflBce she was going to speak to
that smart-looking girl in the raccoon collar, maybe they could even have lunch together someday.

  At her desk, she was busy typing addresses on stickers for rejected manuscripts and looking around for Caroline when Miss Farrow came out of her oflSce and headed for her. April was secretly fascinated by Miss Farrow; she wondered whether she had ever been married and what kind of men she saw outside the office.

  "You'll have to go in and help Mr. Shalimar today," Miss Farrow said without even a good-morning. "His secretary is out sick. It's that large oflBce over there with the closed door. You can give the rest of those stickers to the manuscript clerk to finish."

  "Yes, ma'am," April said, trying to conceal her delight with a mask of office dignity. She swept all the stickers together and nearly ran down the hall to the room where manuscripts were registered and handed out to readers. Mr. Shalimar was the editor-in-chief of Derby Books! She had only glimpsed him through his half-opened door, a tall, older man with a grayish face and strongly hewn features, and she had never thought she would be lucky enough to meet him. Mary Agnes had told her that Mr. Shalimar had kno%Ti Eugene O'Neill.

  "I can't help you with any more of tliese today," she told the manuscript girl excitedly. "I'm working for Mr. Shalimar."

  The manuscript clerk stood there impassively in her book-lined room and snapped her chewing gum. "We all have our troubles," she said finally.

  April looked at her, surprised, and then shrugged and hinried down the hall to the office with the closed door. She tapped on it timidly. There was no answer. She stood for a moment wnth her ear against the door, trying to hear if there was a conference going on inside, but she heard nothing, so she turned the knob and went in.

  It was a huge, plush office, with a soft, tliick carpet on tlie floor, a black leather sofa, and rows of bookcases lined with paperback books. In front of the wall of windows was a great wooden desk. The bHnds were closed against the early-morning sunlight. In the desk chair, with his feet crossed on the blotter and his chin on his chest, was Mr. Shalimar, snoring gently. She stood in tlie doorway, not knowing what to do. Mr. Shahmar snorted in his sleep, tossed his head furiously like a dog shaking itself, and woke up.

  "What? What?" he said. He lowered his feet from the desk, swiv-

  eled around in his chair, and pulled the cord of the Venetian blinds, flooding the office with light.

  "I'm sorry I disturbed you," she said timidly.

  "Oh, I take a rest now and then. For a minute." He looked at her more closely. "Come over here."

  She stood in front of his enormous desk, feeling as if she were being interviewed all over again.

  "New here, aren't you?"

  She nodded.

  "What's your name?"

  "April Morrison."

  He interlocked his fingers on the desk in front of him. "Do you know that for this job you have we turned away fifteen other girls?"

  "No, sir."

  "What do you want to do—get married? Be an editor?"

  "I . . . don't know yet."

  His brows drew together. "What makes you think you have more of a right to be here than any of those fifteen other girls?"

  She put her hands behind her back so he would not see them trembling. "I don't know, sir," she said. "I haven't met them."

  "What makes you think you ought to be here instead of, say, a salesgirl in a dress shop?"

  At that moment she would much rather have been a salesgirl in a dress shop, but she said bravely, "I don't think I'd be a very good salesgirl."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I'm not interested in it."

  "And you're interested in books?"

  "Yes."

  He leaned back, put his hands behind his head, and laughed. For a moment she thought he was laughing at her and her eyes filled with angry tears. "Don't mind," he said. "I always ask the same question of every new girl. I like to see how they think. You'd be surprised the wacky answers some of them give me."

  "Well," April said. She was so relieved she couldn't help smiling. "I hope I didn't give you a wacky answer."

  "Not at all," he said. "You're sensible as well as pretty."

  His compliment made her feel more at ease. "Anyway, I don't think it was fair," she said. "After all, I'm only a typist here."

  22

  "Is that your ambition?"

  "No, I really . . . wanted to be an actress."

  *Xike to read plays?"

  "Very much."

  He leaned on the desk and a faraway look came over his face. "I used to say to Eugene O'Neill ... I knew him well, you know. In the old days, that is. Before he was famous. He was a protege of mine."

  "You don't seem old enough."

  "But he had respect for my opinion. I used to encom-age him." He smiled at her. "I'll tell you some stories someday. I was considered quite a boy genius as an editor, you know. That's before your time."

  "My goodness," April said, "I'd love to hear them."

  "Sometime when we have more time," he said gently. "I have a load of work to do today. How are you fixed for this afternoon? Could you stay till ... six o'clock if we have to? My girl is sick just when I was going to do the monthly report on aU our books. Could you stay?"

  'Td be glad to."

  "If it runs any later than six 111 give you money for dinner. All right?"

  "All right."

  "Now, shut my door, will you, please? And turn the key. There's one thing you'll have to learn right away, and that's how to keep the pests out."

  I'm keeping the pests out of Mr. Shalimar's private office, she thought, and it seemed so much more an elevated position than licking manuscript stickers that her heart began to pound with joy. A girl could do a lot worse on her second day in the working world.

  What an exciting feeling to answer the telephone and recognize the name given to her as one of a famous author. She knew most of these only vaguely, as names she had heard somewhere before, but she memorized them all instantiy. When Mr. Shalimar went out to lunch at the Algonquin with a Hollywood writer she closed his door and read everything on his desk. Then she went downstairs to the coffee shop in the building.

  The coffee shop, which doubled as a bar at night, was brightly lighted now and crowded with girls and women who all seemed to be talking at once at the top of their lungs. Six at a time would be

  jammed into a booth, hunched over their hamburgers and dissectmg the other office personnel with venom or hilarity. Four or five harried waitresses in limp uniforms pushed their way through the crowd with plates lined along their arms from wiist to shoulder. They looked like jugglers. Every seat at the curving counter was occupied, mostly by guls, with two or three men scattered among them looking trapped behind their newspapers and greasy platters. April saw one of tliese men standing up to leave, and she maneuvered her way quickly to his vacant seat, feeling as if she were still on the subway. The counter in front of her, with a grease-spotted, balled-up napkin thrown into the plate, a streak of catsup where she tried to put her elbow, and some change scattered in a puddle of spilled water, made her almost lose her appetite. She turned around and saw that the gill sitting next to her was Caroline Bender.

  She was wearing a black suit today and she looked like a model in a fashion magazine. Her dark hair was cut just to her ear lobes, turned under sleekly, with a fringe of bangs, and she was wearing blue eye shadow. April tried to think of something to say to her, glancing at her profile out of the corner of her eye and thinking, How sad she looks. Caroline was staring ahead at the shelf of apple and custard pies and looking right through them. Then she turned her head.

  "Hi," she said, as if she were really glad to see someone she knew, even though they didn't actually know each other. "I know you."

  "We sit next to each other in tiie office, and now here," April said. "We should at least introduce ourselves. I'm April."

  "I'm Caroline." Caroline held out her hand and they shook hands, each of them laughing a little for no particular reason except
perhaps embarrassment and relief. "What do you do?"

  The waitiess cleared away the counter in front of them, looking even more repelled than the customers. She put down two gravy-stained menus.

  "I'm a typist, I guess," April said. "But right now I'm working for Mr. Shalimar as his secretary."

  "Good for you. Do you want to be an editor eventually?"

  "Why does everybody ask me that?" April said. "I just took this job because I needed the money, and when I set foot in Mr. Shalimar's office he gave me the tliird degree. Is it true there are all these girls battling for my little job?"

  "That's what I was told at the employment agency. They're all college girls with good educational backgrounds and no experience and they're willing to work for practically nothing. That's why Fabian can pay so little and get away with it. And fifty dollars is good for our kind of job. Most places start their girls at forty."

  "Do you want to be an editor?"

  Caroline smiled. "Everyone asks me that too. I'm working for Miss Farrow temporarily and she looks at me as if I might turn around any minute and bite her jugular vein. But I think I'm beginning to understand why she does. There's something catching about ambition."

  The waitress brought their sandwiches and they ate for a minute or two in silence. "You come from New York, don't you?" April said.

  "Port Blair. That's about forty minutes away."

  "Is that like the country?"

  "Well, most of the Westchester towns are. In fact. Port Blair is the only one that isn't. You have all the disadvantages of a long train ride and then when you get there you have all the disadvantages of a dii-ty little city."

  "Do you live with your family?"

  "That's the only reason for living in a place like Port Blair."

  "I come from Colorado," April said.