Mary finds work

February 1928.

The promoter’s office is above a white-shoes-looking restaurant called Vernon’s, up a long dirty stairway to a brown ridged rubber mat at the landing.  A long corridor with glass doors along it: Fitzsimmons & Co – Promoters. is the second door.  Mary knocks and enters a waiting room.  A tiny older man with a face like a bruised peach, soft and stained in places, peers at her as he is hunched over arranging magazines on the center-table.  “You’re the girl,” he says.  His hair is brilliantined to his head and he wears a comfortable gray flannel suit and a dark blue tie.

“Yes,” she says.  “For Mr. Howe.”

“Well then I’ll see if he’s At Home today.”  The old man taps the magazines together and jabs a forefinger at a chair.  “You sit.”

She settles into the chair, her purse on her lap and her hat comfortably forward.  She touches the ceiling with the tusk then draws a line left-to-right across it, gently, so as not to mark the paint.  There is a secretary’s desk here, empty, a brass spittoon in a corner with a brown bulge of tarnish around its belly, and a poster of an old-fashioned boxer with his bare knuckles raised and a pennant above him that reads Jas. Roberts Takes All Comers.

“Okay.”  The little man peeks from around a door jamb.  “You can come on in here.”

She stands and enters a bigger windowless room with two schoolhouse lights hanging from the rafters and a partner’s desk jammed with papers and posters sliding off it onto the linoleum and three telephones standing up out of the mess and beyond this, on the far wall, two more office doors, one of which is open.  She follows the little man to this door and he waves her in.  “He’ll be here in a minute,” the little man says.

She sits.  This office is tidy.  A window onto a brick wall.  Before her is a bronze-colored metal desk with a telephone and a bronze cigar-lighter and a big green blotter upon which is laid a stout black fountain pen at perfect parallel with the the blotter’s edge.  As she waits a telephone rings down the corridor.  There is a murmur of voices.  From the restaurant downstairs she hears pots banging.

Footsteps approach.  A man stops in the doorway, filling it.

“Hello,” she says.

“Aw, nuts.”  He leans in, lifts an eyebrow.  “Another pretty girl.  You must be here to remind me it’s almost my birthday again.”

“You look like the type who owns a calendar, anyway,” she says.

“Sure.  But I guess you can’t type.”

“I think I’ve heard of typing somewhere before,” she says, “but I’m only up to 65 words a minute personally.”

“Aw go on.”  Edward Howe comes into the room: broad shouldered, a thick block of a head, a smashed-down nose, a heavy five o’clock shadow already.  He lifts a big haunch onto the corner of his desk and sits on it, facing her.  “It’s okay, I can’t type either.”

“I also know Gregg and Standard Mechanical.”

“Well,” he says, “ain’t that interesting.  I guess you live somewhere?”

“With my brother.”

“Brother.  Well, that’s not so bad.  I guess he’s a fireman or a leopard hunter or something.”

“Not lately.”

“Barnstorm pilot?  Captain in the submarine corps?  I’d have heard of him if he was a prizefighter.”

“No.  And I don’t know a thing about boxing either, but you’ll find I’m very fast.”

Fast, are you? She hears the words and Mr. Howe hears them too and turns them aside.  “Well, all right.  You look pretty young.”

“Twenty-four.”

“You can’t be.”

“Well I guess we’re going to get along just lousy,” she says.  “You always making comments and me always following up with some one-legged remark.”

He blinks.  “Well, gee, sister, we’re just having a gas.”

“Is this an interview or what is it, anyway?  Because I’ve got a car to catch if it’s just a getting-to-know you session.”

He stands up and reaches into the trash can and pulls out an envelope and hands her the fountain pen.  “Let me see your handwriting.  Write your name down here.”

She leans forward to set the envelope on the edge of the desk and uncaps the pen and writes, The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. She does have swift, tight, lovely writing.  The ink flows from the pen and the urge fills her to suck on it, with the idea suddenly that the ink will enter the tusk somehow.  She caps the pen and hands it back and the envelope.  He looks at it.

“You met Dobson?  The little one.”

She nods.

When can you start?” he asks.

“I started five minutes ago,” she tells him, “but you can have that first little bit for free.”

The job is not that hard: sitting at the receptionist’s desk, picking up the telephone when it rings, aranging her mouth into a certain shape in order to say the words properly.  And typing letters.  No one comes in who does not work there.  The partner’s desk in the middle room belongs to everyone.  There are six or seven men who are employed by Fitzsimmons but who do not spend any time in the office, it seems, except to breeze in with their hats back on their heads around four in the afternoon, and for the first few days they blow low appreciative whistles as they pass, and from their fat lapel pockets they pull newspaper clippings dabbled over with pencil marks and arrows and question marks and hand them over to her with beery concentration.  From the clippings she is directed to write a paragraph describing whether someone’s coverage was decent or not and maybe why or why not.

After a few days of her nodding obligingly at everyone and passing only the occasional smart remark Edward comes and thunks two huge hands on her desk and says, “You work for me, okay?  Anybody else gives you anything to do you hand it right back to him and tell him to go climb up a rope.”

“Well they just seemed so sad, some of them.  Some of them don’t even get to drink until lunchtime.”

He grimaces: it is his smile.  He seems unhappy.  “You just throw it out if it lands on your desk and it isn’t from me.  How’s your brother?”

“What you’ve got against my brother I don’t know.  He works harder than ten of you put together.  What do you do besides go to fights and sit around with your feet up tossing the air with Dobson.”

“Me?  I don’t do a thing.  Look at me.  What’m I good for, anyway?”  He is a great bull of a man in his huge blue suits, his torso a bulwark of pinstriped wool.  But she likes his fat broken hands, his square head, his drooping, friendly, brown eyes, the big knot of his patterned silk tie snugged hard against his broad, seamed throat.

“Nothing,” she decides.  “Not a thing.”

He sighs, a big gust of disappointment.  “That’s what I was thinking you’d say,” he tells her.  He heaves himself up, shaking her desk, and turns around and shambles hugely back to his office, stirring the air as he goes.