Anybody Can Do Anything (5 page)

The children had awakened and their glazed, sleepy eyes reflected the lights as they flashed by. Then the faces of Mary and Dede appeared right outside our windows and that was the brightest rocket of all, the
pièce de résistance
of the entire show.

According to real estate standards Mother’s eight-room brown-shingled house in the University district was just a modest dwelling in a respectable neighborhood, near good schools and adequate for an ordinary family. To me that night, and always, that shabby house with its broad welcoming porch, dark woodwork, cluttered dining-room plate rail, large fragrant kitchen, easy book-filled firelit living room, four elastic bedrooms—one of them always ice cold—roomy old-fashioned bathrooms and huge cluttered basement, represents the ultimate in charm, warmth and luxury. It’s something about Mother, who with one folding chair and a plumber’s candle, could make the North Pole homey, and it’s something about the warmth and loyalty and laughter of a big family.

It’s a wonderful thing to know that you can come home anytime from anywhere and just open the door and belong. That everybody will shift until you fit and that from that day on it’s a matter of sharing everything. When you share your
money, your clothes and your food with a mother, a brother and three sisters, your portion may be meagre but by the lame token when you share unhappiness, loneliness and anxiety about the future with a mother, a brother and three sisters, there isn’t much left for you.

Two things I noticed immediately. Mother still smelled like violets and Mary still believed that accomplishment was merely a matter of will power.

“I hear that we are sliding into a depression and that jobs are very hard to find.” I told Mary about three o’clock the next morning as she and Mother and I sat in the breakfast nook eating hot cinnamon toast and drinking coffee.

Mary said, “There are plenty of jobs but the trouble with most people, and I know because I’m always getting jobs for my friends, is that they stay home with the covers pulled up over their heads waiting for some employer to come creeping in looking for them. Anyway, what are you worrying about, you’ve got a job as private secretary to a mining engineer.”

I said, “But, Mary, I don’t know shorthand and I can only type about twenty words a minute.” Mary clunked her coffee cup into her saucer and looked directly at me with flashing amber eyes, “Leave the ninety words on the typewriter and the one hundred fifty words a minute in shorthand to the grubs who like that kind of work,” she said. “You’re lucky. You have a brain. Use it! Act like an executive and you get treated like an executive!” (And usually fired, she neglected to add.)

It was very reassuring, in spite of a sneaking suspicion I had that if put to a test I would always prove out the grub type, not the executive, and that only by becoming so proficient in shorthand that I could take down thoughts, would I be able to hold down even a very ordinary job.

“I have been planning to go to nightschool,” I told Mary.

“Not necessary at all,” she said. “Experience and self-confidence are what you need and you’ll never find them at nightschool. Have you ever taken a look at what goes to nightschool? No? Well, they aren’t executives, I’ll tell you that. Now go to bed and forget about shorthand. I’ll always be able to find us jobs doing something and whatever it is I’ll show you how to do it.” That was Mary’s slogan at home. Downtown it was, “Just show me the job and I’ll produce a sister to do it.” And for some years, until Dede and Alison were old enough to work and she had figured how to fit Mother into her program, I was it. That night I dreamed I was going to play in one of Miss Welcome’s recitals and I hadn’t practiced and didn’t know my piece.

From two o’clock Saturday afternoon until two o’clock Monday morning, the house was filled with people. Mary, who was very popular, was being intellectual so her friends were mostly musicians, composers, writers, painters, readers of hard dull books and pansies. They took the front off the piano and played on the strings, they sat on the floor and read aloud the poems of Baudelaire, John Donne and Rupert Brooke, they put loud symphonies on the record player and talked over them, they discussed politics and the state of the world, they all called Mother “Sydney” and tried in vain to convince her that she was prostituting her mind by reading the
Saturday Evening Post.
Mother said, “Yes?” and ignored them.

One of Mary’s favorite friends, a beautiful brilliant Jewish boy, played “With a Song in My Heart,” on the strings of the piano and told me I had a face like a cameo and I grew giddy with excitement. Anne and Joan loved the laughter and the people too, and Saturday night when I was putting them to bed, Anne said, “Oh, Betty, I just love this fambly!”

Sunday afternoon, Mary’s new boss, a Mr. Chalmers, who was coming to Seattle to instill some new methods into the lumber industry, called from New Orleans and talked to
Mary for almost an hour. The conversation left her overflowing with enthusiasm.

“At last I’ve found the perfect job,” she said. “Mr. Chalmers is much more of an executive thinker than I am. ‘Don’t bother me with details and hire all the help you need,’ he said. He also asked me to find him a bootlegger, one who handles Canadian liquor, put his daughters in school, send for his wife, introduce him to the right people, have his name put up at the best clubs, get him an appointment with a dentist to make him a new bridge, open charge accounts with the Yellow Cab Company, a florist, a stationery store, office furniture company and a catering service, and I’m to rent him a suite of offices in a building in the financial district.”

We all listened to Mary with admiration and I asked her if in this new wonderful well-paid secretarial job, typing and shorthand had been requirements.

Before answering, Mary lit a cigarette, pulling her mouth down at one corner in true executive fashion, a new gesture, then said, “Betty, for God’s sake stop brooding about shorthand. There were hundreds of applicants for this job, among them many little white-faced creeps who could take shorthand two hundred words a minute and could type so fast the carriage smoked, but who cares? Do they know a good bootlegger?” “Do you?” someone asked, and Mary said, “No, but I will by the time Chalmers gets here. To get back to shorthand, the world is crawling with people who can take down and transcribe somebody else’s good ideas. We’re lucky, we’ve got ideas of our own.” It was certainly nice of her to say we.

3: “Mining is Easy”

Monday morning my hands trembled like Jello as I adjusted the neat white collar on the sage-green woolen office dress Mary had lent me. I was very thin, pale with fright, and with my long red hair parted in the middle and pulled tightly back into a knot on the nape of my neck, I thought I looked just like one of the white-faced creeps Mary had derisively described. Mary said I looked very efficient and very sophisticated. Mother, as always, said that we both looked beautiful and not to worry about a thing. I kissed the children, who didn’t cling to me as I had expected, and started out the front door to catch a streetcar.

I had been anticipating just this moment over and over and over ever since I had gotten Mary’s wire. I knew exactly how I would feel waiting on the corner with the other people who were going to work. Breathing the cool, wet spring air and listening to the busy morning sounds of cars starting with tight straining noises, of children calling to each other as they left for school, dogs barking and being called home, a nickel clickety-clacking into the paper box, footsteps hurrying grittily on cement. I was going to swing on a strap, sway with the streetcar and think about my wonderful new job. Life was as neatly folded and full of promise as the morning newspaper.

My reverie was interrupted by Mary, who called out, “Where are you going?” “To catch a streetcar,” I said. “Come back,” she said. “From now on we ride to work in taxis. Mr. Chalmers wants us to.” “Not me,” I said. “Only you.” Mary said, “Betty, Mr. Chalmers couldn’t have me for his private secretary if it weren’t for you. Don’t you forget that and I’ll see that he doesn’t. Now sit down and relax, I’ve called the cab.” And that is the way we set off to inject our personalities and a few of our good ideas into the business world.

The mining engineer’s office, where I was to work, was on the top floor of a building in the financial district. The other occupants of the building were successful lawyers, real estate men, brokers and lumbermen, most of whom Mary seemed to know quite well.

In the lobby she introduced me to about fifteen assorted men and women and explained that she had just brought me down out of the mountains to take her place as private secretary to Mr. Webster. In her enthusiasm she made it sound a little as though she had had to wing me to get me down out of the trees and I felt that I should have taken a few nuts and berries out of my pocket and nibbled on them just to keep in character.

When we got out of the elevator, I took Mary to task for this. “Listen, Mary,” I said. “I have little enough self-confidence, and your introducing me to all those people in the lobby as the little Mowgli of the Pacific Coast didn’t help any.” Mary said, “You’re just lucky I didn’t ask you to show them some of your old arrow wounds. Anyway, what difference does it make? Most of those people have such dull lives I feel it my duty to tell them a few lies every morning just to cheer them up.”

Mr. Webster’s offices were luxuriously furnished in mahogany and oriental rugs and had a magnificent view of the docks, Puget Sound, some islands and the Olympic Mountains. My little office was also the reception room and after Mary had showed me where to put my hat and coat and how to get the typewriter to spring up out of the desk, I wanted to sit right down and begin to practice my typing.

Mary would have none of it. Sitting herself down at Mr. Webster’s desk and lighting a cigarette, she said, “Stop being so nervous and watch me. Learn how to act in an office.” I said, “I wouldn’t be so nervous if I knew what time Mr. Webster gets here.” Mary said, “Oh, he’s out of town and won’t be back for two weeks.” My sigh of relief almost blew some rocks off his desks. “Does he know about me?” I asked. “Nope,” said Mary, opening the mail, glancing at it and throwing most of it in the wastebasket. “You’re going to be a surprise.”

The phone rang. Mary answered it in a low well-modulated voice and Standard English. “Mr. Websteh’s office, Miss Bahd speaking,” she said. Somebody on the other end of the wire said something and Mary said, “Well, you big stinker, what do you expect when you don’t call until eight-thirty Saturday night?”

While she talked to the big stinker, who she later said could take her to lunch, I roamed around the office, examining the files, looking into drawers, opening cupboards, unrolling maps, reading the titles of some of the books in the enormous mining library and looking at the view.

When someone came into the reception room, Mary, still on the phone, waved to me imperiously to see who it was. It was a large fat man who held up a little canvas bag and shouted, “Where’s Webster?” I said, “Mr. Webster is out of town, may I help you?” The fat man said, “Sister, I got the richest placer property the world has ever seen!” He went on and on and on about available water, smelter reports, equipment needs, etc., and finally handing me the little bag and a business card said, “Just give this sample of
ore to Webster and tell him to call me the minute he gets in town,” and left.

I waited until Mary had finished three more telephone calls, one to the manager of a building across the street, demanding a suite of offices with a good view, one to a florist giving a standing order for daily fresh flowers for the new office, the other to an office supply firm for
two
executives’ desks, largest size, and then I gave her the business card and the ore sample.

“The man said that this is the greatest placer property the world has ever seen,” I said excitedly. “Do you suppose we should telegraph Mr. Webster?” Mary glanced at the card and with a bored look dropped both it and the sample of ore into the wastebasket.

“Mary Bard,” I said, “what are you doing?” She said, “I’m doing just what Mr. Webster would have done. In other words I’m saving him trouble, which is the first duty of a good private secretary. Now I’m going to pound a few facts into that humble little head of yours. In the first place you have
two
of the
greatest assets
a mining engineer’s secretary could possibly have.
A,
your father was a mining engineer;
B,
you have seen a mine and when Webster talks about an assay you don’t think he’s referring to a literary composition. The rest is all a matter of common sense and practice. Here’s the telephone number of the smelter, here’s Webster’s address. Open and read all the mail and keep a record of all telephone calls.”

“What about visitors like the fat man?” I asked. Mary said, “For a while you can keep all that trash and show it to Webster, after you get more used to things you’ll be able to tell the crackpots from the real mining men. Or at least you can pretend you can,” she added honestly.

“What about the home office,” I said. “They’re one of the richest corporations in the world. How will they feel about me?” “They’ll never know about you,” said Mary. “We’re
both Miss Bard and to the richest corporation in the world, a Miss Bard more or less at one hundred dollars a month in the Seattle office isn’t that much.” She snapped her fingers and we went out for coffee.

In spite of Mary’s vehement and reiterated assurance that I possessed the
two greatest assets
the secretary of a mining engineer could possibly have, I had an uneasy feeling that Webster’s reaction to a secretary who could neither type nor take shorthand, might be that of a hungry man who day after day opens his lunch box and finds it empty.

So, with feverish intensity, I tried to remedy the situation. I practiced my typing, I studied shorthand, I memorized the number of spaces to indent on a letter, I tried to remember which was the right side of the carbon paper and I prayed that Mr. Webster would begin every letter with weareinreceiptofyoursofthe, the way all John Robert Gregg’s business friends did.

Mary said it was all a waste of time. She told me to read some of the geology books, to study the maps, to thumb through the files and to try and get the feeling of mining. I suggested that I might buy a miner’s lamp and wear it in the office and she said it would go further with Mr. Webster than that scared look I put on every time I opened the office door.

I couldn’t help the scared look, I felt like an impostor, and as the days succeeded each other and the return of Mr. Webster grew more and more imminent, every morning when I took out my key and inserted it in the lock of the door marked menacingly
CHARLES WEBSTER, MINING ENGINEER,
I drew a deep quivering breath and prayed that Mr. Webster’s office would be empty.

Then one morning when I opened the office door there in Mr. Webster’s office, sitting at Mr. Webster’s big mahogany desk was Mr. Webster. I almost fainted. Mr. Webster had very brown skin and nice bright blue eyes and he called out, “Who are you?” So scared I had tears in my eyes, I
said, “Well, ah, well, ah, I’m Mary’s sister Betty and I’m your new secretary.” He said, “Where’s Mary?” “Oh, she’s in an office right across the street,” I said, adding hurriedly, “She said that if you wanted to dictate to call her and she’d come right over.” He said, “This all sounds very much like Mary. Well, as long as she’s deserted me she doesn’t deserve the present I’ve brought her. Here,” and he handed me a huge green barley sugar Scottie dog.

I took the dog and because I was nervous and felt guilty, I was too effusive in my thanks and kept saying over and over and over, “Oh, Mr. Webster, you shouldn’t have done it!” as though he were trying to force a diamond anklet on me. Then, God knows why, but in an effort to offer further proof of my gratitude, I bit into the candy dog and one whole enormous green leg came off in my mouth just as Mr. Webster, who by this time was sick to death of me and obviously trying to think of some kind way to get rid of me, looked up to ask if there had been any mail or calls. I couldn’t answer, I just stood there in my hat and coat, trying desperately to maneuver the huge leg around in my mouth, my eyes full of tears and green drool running down my chin. It was not a sight to inspire confidence in my efficiency. In fact, if I had been Mr. Webster I wouldn’t have kept me if I’d been able to produce degrees in shorthand, typing, mining, geology and map drawing, but Mr. Webster was very kind and had been a good friend of Daddy’s so he went over and looked out the windows at the mountains while I pulled myself together.

As I look back on it now, it would have been cheaper and less of a strain for Mr. Webster to have dispensed with me and hired a cleaning woman, because, eager though I was to help, all I could do well was to dust the furniture and his ore samples and clean out cupboards. I typed a few letters but I was so nervous that I made terrible mistakes, used reams
of paper and the finished product usually had little holes in it where my eraser had bitten too deeply.

Mr. Webster, upset by the holes in his letters but not wanting to hurt my feelings, said I was much too thin and ordered a quart of milk to be delivered to the office every morning and at ten and three came out and stood over me while I drank a glass. This embarrassed me so I gulped the milk down in huge glurping swallows, which brought on terrible gas pains and several times made me belch loudly into the telephone when I was following Mary’s instructions and trying to use Standard English.

The first day Mr. Webster was back he took Mary and me to lunch at a small French restaurant in an alley. While we ate goslings en casserole and drank Chablis, Mary told him that he had nothing to worry about because she had figured out everything. Whenever he wanted to dictate he was to tell me and I would call her on the phone and while she took his dictation I would go over and answer her phone. To my intense relief Mr. Webster laughed and said that he thought it was a wonderful scheme, and it did work out very well until Mary’s very demanding boss arrived in town and it became harder and harder for her to get away.

Then Mr. Webster suggested that I take his easier dictation and I did and one morning when I had written “dead sir” and “kinkly yours” on a letter, he offered to send me to nightschool to learn shorthand and typing. I told him that I would like to go but I didn’t think that Mary would approve and he said, “Betty, my dear girl, you and Mary are entirely different personalities and anyway she is a whizz in both shorthand and typing.”

So,
I went to nightschool, which Mr. Webster paid for at the rate of fifteen dollars a month, and studied shorthand and typing. My shorthand teacher, a small sandy man with a nasal voice and thin yellow lips, seemed to be an excellent shorthand teacher because at the end of three months everyone in the class but me could take down and transcribe business letters and little stories.

I couldn’t learn shorthand. I got
p’s
and
b’s
mixed up, I couldn’t tell
m
from
n
and even when I could write it I couldn’t read it back. I didn’t have too much trouble with Mr. Webster’s letters because he dictated very slowly and I knew what he was talking about but I was such a miserable failure at nightschool that the only thing that kept me from shooting myself was the amazing fact that, although everyone in the class, and there were forty-two of them, was an expert typist and shorthand dynamo, I was the only one with a job. When I told Mary, she said, “Naturally. I told you you wouldn’t find any executives at nightschool.”

I never did get to feel like an executive and I never did conquer my obsession that there was a mysterious key to office work which, like holding a letter written in lemon juice over a candle, would one day be revealed to me all at once; but by the end of June I had stopped getting tears in my eyes when Mr. Webster called me for dictation; the letters I typed had fewer, smaller holes in them, I occasionally got the right side of the carbon paper so the copy was on onion skin instead of inside out on the back of the original letter; I could sometimes find things in the files and I had almost finished the maps.

The maps and the files were the worst things I did to dear, kind Mr. Webster. I never was able to figure out the filing system; why letters were sometimes filed by the name of the man who wrote them, sometimes by the name of a mine, sometimes in a little black folder marked
Urgent
and sometimes in a drawer marked
Hold.