The Early Ayn Rand (16 page)

“Oh! Yes! . . . Yes, it’s true!” confirmed Laury enthusiastically, for he would not have denied it, even if he could.

“Oh, Laury!” cried Mr. Scraggs with admiration. “And to think that he works on our paper!”

“The headlines, Mr. Scraggs,” said Jinx to the Editor, “the headlines will be: ‘Society Beauty Elopes with Our Own Reporter!’ ”

“Don’t thank me, you helpless, unimaginative sap of a criminal!” Jinx whispered to Laury, squeezing his hand, as they walked down the steps and his arm encircled her in the darkness of the narrow jail stair way. “So you wanted to give them sensational news, didn’t you? Now think of the sensation
my
news is going to give them!”

 

 

Editor’s Preface

This brief story seems to have been written in 1929, the year Ayn Rand married Frank O’Connor. One of his earliest gifts to her was a pair of small, stuffed lion cubs, christened Oscar and Oswald, who soon became to the young couple a private symbol of the “benevolent universe.” Every Christmas the cubs were brought out, dressed in colorful hats, to preside over the gaiety of the season.

I mention this because “Escort,” in manuscript, is signed by one “O. O. Lyons.” This means, I take it, that the story is intended as humor, the kind of fine, twinkling humor that Ayn Rand associated with her husband, and with Oscar and Oswald.

Ayn Rand by this time had read a great deal of O. Henry. She admired his cheerful lightheartedness and virtuoso plot ingenuity. “Escort” (and “The Night King”) may be read as her own private salute to O. Henry, her own attempt at his kind of twist ending.

—L. P.

Before he left the house, Sue asked:

“You won’t be back until morning, dear?”

He nodded dejectedly, for he had heard the question often and he wished his wife would not ask it. She never complained, and her blue eyes looked at him quietly and patiently, but he always felt a sadness in her voice, and a reproach. Yet tonight, the question and the voice seemed different somehow. Sue did not seem to mind. She even repeated:

“You won’t be back until the small hours?”

“God knows, darling,” he protested. “I don’t like it any better than you do. But a job’s a job.”

He had explained it so many times so very carefully: shipping clerks in warehouses could not choose their hours; and since he could not choose jobs, he had to work nights, even though he knew how wistfully she looked at the women whose husbands came home each evening, after the day’s work, to a bright dinner table under a bright lamp. And Sue had done such a grand job of their little house with less than nothing to go on. He had not noticed how the dreary shack they had rented had turned into a bright, warm little miracle, with rows of red-and-white-checkered dishes gleaming in the kitchen, and Sue among them in a wide, starched dress of red and white checks, slim and blond and gay as a child among toys. It was the third year of their marriage, and such a far cry from the first, when he had come, fresh from college, to these same rooms, then full of dust and cracked paint and desolation, when he had brought his young bride here, with nothing to offer her save the menacing monster of rent to be paid, which stared at them each month and which they could not pay. When he thought of those days, his lips tightened grimly and he said:

“I’ve got to hang on to this job, sweetheart, much as you hate it. I hate it too, but I won’t let you go through what we’ve been through ever again.”

“Yes,” said Sue, “of course.” But she seemed to be looking past him, without hearing his voice.

He kissed her and hurried to the door, but Sue stopped him.

“Larry,” she reminded him sweetly, “it’s Saturday.”

So it was. He had forgotten. He groped for his billfold and slipped her weekly allowance into her hand. Her hand seemed much too eager as it closed over the bills.

Then she smiled at him, her gay, impish smile, her eyes sparkling and open and innocent. And he left.

He raised the collar of his neat, modest gray overcoat against the thin drizzle of the street. He looked back once, with regret, at the light over their door, over the number 745, his number, his home, 745 Grant Street. Then he hurried to the subway.

When he alighted upon the milling platforms of Grand Central, Larry Dean did not walk to an exit. He hurried to a locker room instead, opened a locker, took from it a neat suitcase, and then walked to the men’s room. Fifteen minutes later, he emerged from it, and the fat black attendant looked with respectful admiration at his tall, slender figure in full dress clothes, trim and resplendent from the tips of his shining pumps to his shining top hat set at the right careless angle of a dazzling man of the world bent upon a gay evening. He put the suitcase with his modest working clothes back in the locker, snapped his fingers lightly, and walked to an exit, carelessly, without hurry.

The gold-braided doorman at a magnificent entrance on Park Avenue greeted Larry with a respectful bow denoting a long acquaintance. Larry entered the elevator with just the right touch of nonchalant swagger. But he stopped and his gay smile vanished before an imposing door marked: CLAIRE VAN NUYS ESCORT BUREAU.

Larry hated the place and he hated his job. Each evening, night after night, he had to accompany fat dowagers, rich spinsters, and foolish, giggling out-of-town matrons on an endless round of dinners, suppers, dances, nightclubs. He had to bow gracefully, and smile enchantingly, and laugh, and dance, and throw tips to waiters as if he were a millionaire. He had to keep going an endless stream of charming, entertaining drivel, and listen to more drivel in answer, and try to know what he was talking about, while his thoughts ran miserably miles away, to a quiet little room and Sue’s lonely shadow under the lamp.

At least, Sue did not know of this and she would never know. He would rather die than let her guess the kind of job he really had. It was respectable enough, oh yes, most respectable! Miss Van Nuys saw to that. But it was no job for a man, Larry felt. Still, he had to be grateful, for it was a job and it kept the little house at 745 Grant Street going.

Sue must never know of his sacrifice, the shy, quiet Sue who would be horrified at the thought of a nightclub and who had never seen one. At first, she had asked him timidly to take her out some night, but his anger had made her drop the subject, and she never asked it again. He could not let her enter one of those vile, noisy places where he was so well known, and his job as well. Besides, he was sick of the glitter, of the jazz, of the waiters.

He sighed, squared his shoulders for the night’s ordeal, and walked into Miss Van Nuys’ office. . . .

When Larry had left his house, Sue stood for a long time looking at the closed door, the money clutched in her hand. Then she took out the little tin box hidden deep in a kitchen drawer, and added the last dollar to her secret fund. It was a hundred dollars now, an even hundred, and this was the night she had been waiting for.

She had saved the money out of the household allowance, so carefully, with such painstaking little economies, for such a long time. Now she was ready. She went to a closet and took out her evening gown, her lovely blue, shimmering evening gown, which she had had no chance to wear for two years. She laid it out cautiously on the bed, and stood looking at it happily. For one night, for just one night, she would wear it, and dance, and laugh, and see one of those brilliant nightclubs she had heard so much about ever since she came to New York. She was deceiving Larry, she thought, but it was such a harmless deception! Just a few hours of dancing and some innocent fun, which Larry would not understand, the earnest, hardworking Larry who never thought of such things. She loved him so much, she was so happy in their little home, but the lonely evenings were so long, and she was still young, and she looked so pretty in her blue evening gown. Just one night . . . there was no harm in that, and Larry need never know.

It would be different if she allowed some man to take her out. But she wasn’t going to. She was going to pay for it herself, and do it right, one hundred dollars for one grand, reckless smash. She had heard how it could be arranged safely and respectably. Her heart beating, she went to the phone.

In the office on Park Avenue, a trimly permanented, efficient secretary looked up at Larry Dean standing before her desk.

“Your assignment for tonight, Mr. Dean,” she said, “will be dinner, dancing, best place in town, full dress clothes. You are to call in an hour for Mrs. Dean—no relation, I presume?—at 745 Grant Street.”

 

 

Editor’s Preface

“Her Second Career” seems to date from 1929. It was probably written soon after Ayn Rand had begun working in the office of the RKO wardrobe department (a job she hated, but had to hold for three years, until she began to earn money by writing).

The subject matter of “Her Second Career” remains, in a broad sense, that of the early stories: the importance of values in human life. But here the focus is on the negative, on those who do not live life but merely posture at it, those who do something
other
than pursue values.

By 1929, Ayn Rand had a fund of observations on this subject: she had been working in and around Hollywood for three years. She respected the potential of the film medium, and she loved certain movies (her favorites were the great German Romantic silent films, with stars such as Conrad Veidt and Hans Albers, and directors such as Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang). But she rejected out of hand the syrupy, platitudinous stories enshrining mediocrity, offering odes to “the boy next door” or “the sweet maiden next door.” She despised what she saw as Hollywood’s trite values, its undiscriminating taste, its “incommunicable vulgarity of spirit,” as she put it in
The Romantic Manifesto.

Unlike most critics, however, Ayn Rand did not ascribe the movies’ low estate to “commercialism” or “box-office chasing.” She singled out as the basic cause an inner mental practice or default, described by the hero in this story as follows:

The Fountainhead
would not appear in print for fourteen years; but here is its author’s first recognition in writing of the psychology of Peter Keating, the secondhander, the man who abdicates his inner sovereignty, then lives without real thought or values, as a parasite on the souls of others. Claire Nash in this story—again, a woman in the central role—is Peter Keating’s earliest ancestor; she is the antonym of Irene in “The Husband I Bought”; she is the woman who does not even know that values exist.

“Her Second Career” is not, however, a psychological study or a serious analysis of secondhandedness. It is a satire and, like “Good Copy,” an essentially jovial, lighthearted piece. (This story, too, is signed by “O. O. Lyons.”) Claire, despite her character, is a mixed case, with enough virtue to be attracted to the hero. Moreover, events reveal that there is, after all, a place for merit, even in Hollywood, and this functions as a redeeming note, making the satire a relatively gentle element in the context of a romantic story, rather than a biting denunciation or a bitter commentary.

This story, I believe, is the last of the preliminary pieces composed by Miss Rand before she turned to her first major literary undertaking, her novel
We the Living.
Several signs of her increasing maturity are apparent. Winston Ayers and Heddy Leland are more recognizably Ayn Rand types of hero and heroine than any of the figures in earlier stories. Though there is still a certain foreign awkwardness and, as in “Good Copy,” an overly broad tone at times, the writing as a whole is more assured. Parts of the story, especially on the set during the filming, are genuinely funny. Above all, “Her Second Career” presents, for the first time in the early pieces, an element essential to the mature Ayn Rand: an intriguing plot situation, integrated with the broader theme. On the whole, the logic of the events has been carefully worked out (although I have some doubt about Claire’s motivation in accepting Ayers’ wager, and about an element of chance that occurs near the end).

With developments such as these, the period of private writing exercises draws to a close. Ayn Rand is now ready for professional work.

A note on the text: three pages of the original manuscript are missing. To preserve the continuity, I have inserted in their place several paragraphs—about one-third the length of the missing pages—from an earlier version of the story which happens to have been preserved. The inserted material runs from the sentence “She reached the little hotel she was living in” through the sentence “. . . I am sure that I could not have found a better interpreter for my story.”

—L. P.

“
Heart’s Desire
narrowly misses being the worst picture of the year. The story is mossgrown and the direction something we had better keep charitably silent about. BUT . . . but Claire Nash is the star. And when this is said, everything has been said. Her exquisite personality illuminates the picture and makes you forget everything but her own matchless magic. Her portrayal of the innocent country maiden will make a lump rise in the most sophisticated throat. Hers is the genius that makes Screen History. . . .”

The newspaper hanging lightly, rustling between two pink-nailed fingertips, Claire Nash handed it to Winston Ayers. Her mouth, bright, pink, and round as a strawberry, smiled lightly her subtlest smile of indulgent pity. But her eyes, soft violets hidden among pine needles of mascara, watched closely the great Winston Ayers reading.