Prose (19 page)

However, there was a slight catch to that. For a while, at least, I would have to fulfill my duties at the school under the name of Fred G. Margolies, which had been the name, not of my predecessor, but of the one before the one before that. It developed that some of Mr. Margolies's students were still taking the course and had to receive their corrected lessons signed by him, and I would have to be Mr. Margolies until they had all graduated. Then I could turn into myself again, and steer new students. I felt I'd probably like to keep on being Mr. Margolies, if I could. He had had something published, too, although I never succeeded in delving deep enough into the history of the school to find out what it was. And he or they must have been good letter writers, or even fuller of idle curiosity than I was, or just very kindhearted men, to judge by the tone of the letters I received in our name. In fact, for a long time afterwards I used to feel that the neurotically “kind” facet of my personality
was
Mr. Margolies.

The school was on the fourth floor, the top floor, of an old tumble-down building near Columbus Circle. There was no elevator. I had accepted—although “accept” cannot be the right word—the job in the late fall, and it seems to me now that it was always either raining or snowing when I emerged mornings from the subway into Columbus Circle, and that I was always wearing a black wool dress, a trench coat, and galoshes, and carrying an umbrella. In the dark hallway there were three flights of steps, which sagged and smelled of things like hot iron, cigars, rubber boots, or peach pits—the last gasps of whatever industries were dying behind the lettered doors.

The U.S.A. School consisted of four rooms: a tiny lobby where one girl sat alone, typing—typing exactly what her colleagues were typing in the big room behind her, I discovered, but I suppose she was placed there to stave off any unexpected pupils who might decide to come to the school in person. The lobby had a few photos on the wall: pictures of Sinclair Lewis and other non-graduates. Then came the big room, lit grayly by several soot-and-snow-laden skylights, lights going all the time, with six to a dozen girls. Their number varied daily, and they sat at very old-model typewriters, typing the school's “lessons.” At the other end of this room, overlooking the street, were two more tiny rooms, one of which was Mr. Black's office and the other Mr. Margolies and Mr. Hearn's office.

Mr. Hearn was a tall, very heavy, handsome woman, about thirty years old, named Rachel, with black horn-rimmed glasses, and a black mole on one cheek. Rachel and I were somewhat cramped in our quarters. She smoked furiously all the time, and I smoked moderately, and we were not allowed to keep our door open because of the poor transient typists, who were not allowed to smoke and might see us and go on strike, or report us to the nearest fire station. What with the rain and fog and snow outside and the smoke inside, we lived in a suffocating, woolly gray isolation, as if in a cocoon. It smelled like a day coach at the end of a long train trip. We worked back to back, but we had swivel chairs and spent quite a bit of our time swung around to each other, with our knees almost bumping, the two cigarettes under each other's nose, talking.

At first she was horrid to me. Again in my innocence I didn't realize it was, of course, because of my Vassar stigmata and my literary career, but her manner soon improved and we even got to like each other, moderately. Rachel did most of the talking. She had a great deal to say; she wanted to correct all the mistakes in my education and, as so many people did in those days, she wanted to get me to join the Party. In order to avoid making the trip to headquarters with her, to get my “card,” something we could have done easily during any lunch hour, once I'd put an end to my nonsense and made the decision, I told her I was an anarchist. But it didn't help much. In spite of my principles, I found myself cornered into defending Berkman's attempt to assassinate Andrew Carnegie's partner, Henry Frick, and after that, I spent evenings at the Forty-second Street Library taking out books under “
An,
” in desperate attempts to shut Rachel up. For a while I was in touch with an anarchist organization (they are hard to locate, I found) in New Jersey, and received pamphlets from them, and invitations to meetings, every day in my mail.

Sometimes we went out to lunch together at a mammoth Stewart's Cafeteria. I liked cafeterias well enough, but they afflict one with indecision: what to eat, what table to sit at, what chair at the table, whether to remove the food from the tray or eat it on the tray, where to put the tray, whether to take off one's coat or keep it on, whether to abandon everything to one's fellow diners, and go for the forgotten glass of water, or to lug it all along. But Rachel swept me ahead of her, like a leaf from the enchanter fleeing, toward the sandwich counter. The variety of sandwiches that could be made to order like lightning was staggering, and she always ate three: lox and cream cheese on a bun, corned beef and pickle relish on rye, pastrami and mustard on something-or-other. She
shouted
her order. It didn't matter much, I found, after a few days of trying to state my three terms loudly and clearly; the sandwiches all tasted alike. I began settling for large, quite unreal baked apples and coffee. Rachel, with her three sandwiches and three cups of black coffee simultaneously, and I would seat ourselves in our wet raincoats and galoshes, our lunches overlapping between us, and she would harangue me about literature.

She never attempted politics at lunch, I don't know why. She had read a lot and had what I, the English major, condescendingly considered rather pathetic taste. She liked big books, with lots of ego and emotion in them, and Whitman was her favorite poet. She liked the translations of Merezhkovski, all of Thomas Wolfe that had then appeared, all of Theodore Dreiser, the Studs Lonigan series of James Farrell, and best of all she liked Vardis Fisher. She almost knew by heart his entire works to date. A feeling of nightmare comes over me as I remember those luncheons: the food; the wet, gritty floor under my hot feet; the wet, feeding, roaring crowd of people beneath the neon lights; and Rachel's inexorable shout across the table, telling me every detail of Vardis Fisher's endless and harrowing autobiography. She may have worked in some details from her own, I'm not sure; I made up my mind then never to read the books, which she offered to loan me, and I never have. I remember her quoting the line and a half from “Modern Love” from which Fisher had taken three titles in a row: “
In tragic life, God wot, / No villain need be! Passions spin the plot…”
and my wondering dazedly in all the hubbub why he had neglected the possibilities of “God wot,” or if he'd still get around to it. I had recently come from a line analysis of
The Waste Land,
and this bit of literary collage failed to impress me.

“Realism” and only “realism” impressed
her.
But if I tried to imply, in my old classroom manner, that there was “realism” and “realism,” or ask her what she
meant
by “realism,” she would glare at me savagely, her eyes glittering under Stewart's lighting fixtures, and silently stretch her large mouth over the bulging tiers of a sandwich. Her mole moved up and down as she chewed. At first I was afraid of those slap-like glares, but I grew used to them. And when one day, back in our office, she asked me to read one of her sentences to see if the grammar was right, I knew that she had begun to like me in spite of my bourgeois decadence and an ignorance of reality that took refuge in the childishness of anarchism. I also knew she had already sensed something fishy about my alleged political views.

Overbearing, dishonest, unattractive, proud of being “tough,” touchy, insensitive, yet capable of being kind or amused when anything penetrated, Rachel was something new to me. She had one rare trait that kept me interested: she never spoke of herself at all. Her salary was twenty-five dollars a week. Her clothes were shabby, even for Stewart's in those days, and dirty as well. The only thing I learned about her was that she had a sister in a state tuberculosis sanatorium whom she went to see once a month, but whom she didn't particularly like; the reason seemed to be because she was sick, and therefore “no good.” Rachel herself had tremendous strength and I soon realized that she inspired fear, almost physical fear, in everyone at the so-called school, including President Black. I also soon realized that she was the entire brains of the place, and afterwards I even suspected that in her power and duplicity perhaps it was she who really owned it, and was using Mr. Black as a front. Probably not, but I never knew the truth about anything that went on there.

Her cigarettes were stolen for her somewhere by a “man” she knew—how, or who the man was, I never discovered. From time to time other objects appeared—a new bag, a fountain pen, a lighter—from the same source or perhaps a different “man,” but she never spoke of love or romance, except Vardis Fisher's. She should have hated me; my constant gentle acquiescence or hesitant corrections must have been hard to take; but I don't think she did. I think we felt sorry for each other. I think she felt that I was one of the doomed, enjoying my little grasshopper existence, my “sense of humor,” my “culture,” while I could, and that perhaps at some not very future date, when the chips were down, she might even put in a good word for me if she felt like it. I think that later she may well have become a great business success—probably a shady business, like the writing school, but on a much larger scale. She seemed drawn toward the dark and crooked, as if, since she believed that people were forced into being underhanded by economic circumstances in the first place, it would have been dishonest of her not to be dishonest. “Property is theft” was one of her favorite sayings.

Poor Rachel! I often disliked her; she gave me a
frisson,
and yet at the same time I liked her, and I certainly couldn't help listening to every word she said. For several weeks she was my own private Columbus Circle orator. Her lack of a “past,” of any definable setting at all, the impression she gave of power and of something biding its time, even if it was false or silly, fascinated me. Talking with her was like holding a snapshot negative up to the light and wondering how its murks and transparencies were actually going to develop.

The course we offered on “How to Write” was advertised in the cheapest farm magazines, movie and Western magazines. It was one of those “You, too, can earn money by your pen” advertisements, glowingly but carefully worded. We could instruct anyone, no matter what his or her education, in any branch of the writing art, from newspaper reporting to advertising, to the novel, and every student would receive the personal attention and expert advice of successful, money-making authors like Mr. Hearn and Mr. Margolies. There were eight lessons, and the complete course, payable in advance, cost forty dollars. At the time I worked there, the school had only about a hundred and fifty “students” going, but there had been a period, just before, when it had had many, many more, and more were expected again, I gathered, as soon as the courses had been “revised.” There had been a big upheaval in the recent past, entailing the loss of most of the student body, and for some reason, everything, all the circulars, contract blanks, and “lessons,” had to be revised immediately and printed all over again. That was why, off and on, so many typists were employed.

All these revisions, including the eight new lessons, were being done by Rachel. She sat with the school's former “literature” cut into narrow strips, and clipped together in piles around her. There were also stacks of circulars from rival correspondence schools, and a few odd textbooks on composition and short-story writing, from which she lifted the most dogmatic sentences, or even whole paragraphs. When she did work, she worked extremely rapidly. It sounded like two or three typewriters instead of one, and the nervous typists kept running in from the big skylighted room and back again with the new material like relay racers. But she talked to me a great deal of the time, or stared gloomily out the window at the falling snow. Once she said, “Why don't you write a pretty poem about
that
?” Once or twice, smelling strongly of whiskey, she buried herself sulkily in a new proletarian novel for an entire afternoon.

We scarcely saw Mr. Black at all. He received a good many callers in his office, men who looked just like him, and he served them the George Washington instant coffee he made on a Sterno stove, which smelled unpleasantly through the partition into our room. Once in a while he would bring us both coffee, in ten-cent-store cups of milky green glass with very rough edges you could cut yourself on. He would ask, “And how's the Vassar girl?” and look over my shoulder at the letter I was slowly producing on the typewriter with three or four fingers, and say, “Fine! Fine! You're doing fine! They'll love it! They'll love it!” and give my shoulder an objectionable squeeze. Sometimes he would say to Rachel, “Take a look at this. Save it; put the carbon in your file. We'll use it again.” Rachel would give a loud groan.

It was here, in this noisome place, in spite of all I had read and been taught and thought I knew about it before, that the mysterious, awful power of writing first dawned on me. Or, since “writing” means so many different things, the power of the printed word, or even that capitalized Word whose significance had previously escaped me but then made itself suddenly, if sporadically, plain.

Our advertisements specified that when an applicant wrote in inquiring about the course, he was to send a sample of his writing, a “story” of any sort, any length, for our “analysis,” and a five-dollar money order. We sent him the “analysis” and told him whether or not he really did have the right stuff in him to make a successful writer. All applicants, unless analphabetic, did. Then he was supposed to complete the first lesson, I think it was either “Straight Reporting” or “Descriptive Writing,” within a month and send it back to us with the remaining thirty-five dollars. We “analyzed” that and sent it back along with lesson number two, and he was launched on the course.