The Best of Everything (2 page)

Eddie had always hated anything unpleasant. Perhaps he thought marriage to Helen Lowe would solve everything, she was sophisticated and poised and intelhgent and pretty, and her father owned oil wells. You couldn't say much against oil wells. Or perhaps he had been just like those other lonely college boys in Paris sitting in the cafes (or in his case on shipboard) looking for a familiar face. Perhaps Caroline had overestimated him. So Helen and her parents accompanied him back on the ship to America, and a month later there was a monstrously expensive wedding in Dallas.

Having finished summer school, Caroline did not have another term of college to help her occupy herself, so she took a business and shorthand course and the day after she was graduated she took the first job she was oflFered. It didn't make much difference to her, really, as long as it was something from nine to five, which meant eight hours less to think about herself. She was rather glad, however, when it turned out to be a job in pubUshing. She bought three of the Fabian magazines and read them from cover to cover the night before her first day at Fabian, and she couldn't make up her mind who seemed more startling—the people who read such trash or the people who pubhshed it. The strange thing was, though, that lately whenever she read a story with a happy ending she found herself crying.

Tou're the new secretary? I'm Amanda Farrow."

Caroline jumped to her feet, shaking off her daydream. The woman in front of her desk was in her late thirties, tall and slim with bright copper hair pulled back into a chignon. She was cool and polished and fashionably dressed. She even wore a little hat, two fluffy feathers really, with a tiny black veil. "My name's Caroline Bender."

"You can come into my office in a moment. Number nine."

She watched Amanda Farrow disappear into Office Nine and then found a shorthand pad and some pencils in the drawer of her new desk. From her investigation in the early morning Caroline knew that Amanda Farrow's office was one of the executive ones, one rank lower than the offices with carpets. She saw the overhead lights go on in Number Nine and waited a moment more, then opened the door and went in.

Amanda Farrow was seated behind her large desk. She was still wearing her hat, and she was busy applying nail poUsh to her fingernails. There was a large filing cabinet against one wall, and two armchairs in front of the desk.

"First you can order me some coffee, black with sugar," Amanda Farrow said. "All the filing to be done is in this box here. My secretary left last week and the place is a mess. The mail comes four times a day, you open it, and anything that requires a personal answer goes in this box. Some of the letters you can answer yourself, if they're from cranks, for instance. But show me everything you write before you send it out. Do you have a Social Security card?"

"Not yet."

"Well, you'll have to get it on your lunch hour. Mr. Fabian is very strict about employees working without their Social Security cards. You get one hour for lunch and I want you back here on time so you can answer my phone. Oh, and if you have time you can pick up a box of dusting powder for me at Saks."

Caroline was beginning to dislike this woman, she talked so fast it was hard to follow her. She sat down in one of the armchairs beside Amanda Farrow's desk and picked up the telephone receiver to dial the coffee shop.

"Not herel" Miss Farrow said in annoyance, capping her bottle of nail polish. "You use your phone outside. You always answer my telephone at your desk and say 'Miss Farrow's office.' After you've

ordered my co£Fee you can come back in here and take some dictation."

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."