Anybody Can Do Anything (6 page)

Of course, if I’d stopped batting around the office like a moth around a nightlight, had read the correspondence and asked a few intelligent questions, I might have learned the secret of the filing system, but I didn’t. I operated on the theory that always hurrying wildly, never asking questions
and shutting up Mr. Webster with “I know, I know,” any time he tried to volunteer any information, were proof of great efficiency on my part. Because of this unfortunate state of affairs, Mr. Webster is still looking for things.

I’d pick up a letter, notice that the letterhead was Fulton Mining Company or that it was signed by a man named Thompson, so eeny, meeny, miney, mo—it would go either in
F
or
T.
Then Mr. Webster would ask for that letter on the Beede Mine and I would look under
B,
under
Urgent,
under
Hold,
under
M,
under my desk, under his, and finally days later, quite by accident, would find it under
T
or
F
because the Fulton Mining letter, written by Thompson, was
about
the Beede Mine.

It is hard now, for me to believe that I was that stupid, but I was, and it was easy for me. Take the matter of the maps.

One rainy, dull morning, when Mr. Webster was away on a short trip and I was flitting around the office, I happened to bump into the map case. Now there was a messy thing. Thousands of maps all rolled sloppily and stuffed in the case every which way.

“How does poor dear Mr. Webster ever find anything?” I said, opening the glass door and settling myself for a good thorough cleaning job. Now, a mining engineer’s maps, like an architect’s drawings or a surgeon’s living patients, are the visual proof that he did graduate from college, has examined the property and does know what he is doing.

“Here is the ore deposit,” Mr. Webster would say, spreading out his maps and indicating little specks. “By tunneling through this mountain, changing the course of this river, bringing a railroad in here and putting a smelter here . . .”

So, I unrolled all the maps, cleaned the smudges off them with an artgum eraser, and rolled them all up again, each one separately and each one with an elastic band around it. Then I sorted them according to size, the littlest ones on the
top shelf, the medium-sized ones on the next shelf, the biggest one on the bottom. I was very tired and dirty when I finished but I glowed with accomplishment.

That night at dinner I told Mary about my wonderful progress at Mr. Webster’s; how I took dictation, found things in the files and had even sorted his maps. Mary said, “I told you mining was easy.”

Then Mr. Webster returned from his trip, accompanied by an important man from Johannesburg, South Africa, and for the first time since I had been working there, asked me to find him some maps. “Get me those maps on the Connor mine,” he said and I jogged happily over to the map case but when I got there I realized that with my new filing system, it wasn’t the name of the map that counted but the size.

I called to Mr. Webster, “What size is the Conner map?”

He answered rather testily, “What do you mean, ‘what size’? It’s that big bundle near the front on the bottom shelf.”

My spirits fell with a thud that rattled the glass doors of the map case as I suddenly realized that the big bundle near the front on the bottom shelf was now about twenty-five bundles on all the shelves. So Mr. Webster, who had heretofore always filed the maps and knew exactly where each one had been, the man from Johannesburg and I spent the rest of the day on the floor by the map case unrolling maps. We had found most of the Conner mine by eight-thirty and I was released.

The next morning there was a note on my desk. “Betty: Have gone to Denver, will be back Monday—please return maps to their original confusion—Webster.” Before I finished, however, the home office closed the Seattle office and mining was over.

4: “So Is Lumber”

“You thought you couldn’t learn mining,” Mary told me when she installed me as her assistant in the office across the street. “There’s nothing to lumber, it’s just a matter of being able to divide everything by twelve.”

“What about Mr. Chalmers?” I asked. “Does he know you’ve hired me?”

“He knows that I’ve hired an extremely intelligent young lady who has spent the last four years practically living in logging camps in the greatest stand of timber in the United States and anyway what’s it to him? You’re my assistant. Go sharpen this pencil.”

I was worried. I hadn’t yet met Mr. Chalmers and, though I knew that he didn’t want to be bothered with details, I had no assurance that he would consider Mary’s new assistant at $125 a month, a detail; especially when he learned that in Seattle most female office workers were paid from seven to twenty dollars a week and $125 a month was considered a
man’s
salary, except in a few rare instances where a woman with years of experience showed terrific and unusual efficiency.

I was quite sure that as soon as Mr. Chalmers found out about me he would fire me, but what worried me more was a fear that he would also fire Mary for having hired me. Of
course, I was reckoning without Mary or Mr. Chalmers. Mr. Chalmers was not a figment of Mary’s imagination, requiring Joe Doner to prove him, but was a real, unique individual whose sole aim actually was to be the biggest-time executive that had ever hit Seattle, no matter what it cost the lumbermen, and in Mary he had certainly chosen the right person to help him.

About ten-thirty Mr. Chalmers made his entrance into, or rather descent upon, the office. The door to the outer office crashed open and banged shut; the door to the conference room crashed open and banged shut; the door to his private office crashed open and banged shut; then the buzzer on Mary’s desk began to buzz with short angry bursts like a bee in a tin can. I flinched nervously at each slamming door and jumped to my feet at the first ring of the buzzer.

Mary, who was checking some lumber reports, didn’t even look up. The angry buzzing continued. Finally, anxiously I asked, “Do you want me to see what he wants?” Mary said, “I already know what the old stinker wants. He wants somebody to yell at because he is nasty in the morning. Come on, let’s get a cup of coffee. He’ll be pleasanter when we get back.”

She picked up the phone, pressed a bell at the side of the desk and said, “Mr. Chalmers, I’m going out for coffee, will you please take any calls?” There was a roar from the inner office and the phone sputtered like water on a hot stove, but Mary put it back on the hook, beckoned to me and we skittered out of the office and down the stairs to the next floor to wait for the elevator. While we waited we could hear via the elevator shaft and the stairwell, Mr. Chalmers charging around on the floor above, slamming doors and bellowing, “Miss Bard! Miss BARD!”

I certainly did not look forward to meeting him and couldn’t understand how Mary could laugh and talk and
eat a butterhorn in the coffee shop while that monster waited for her upstairs. She said not to worry, he would be cooled off by the time we got back, and he was.

Mary dragged me, quivering, in to introduce me, and Mr. Chalmers, looking like a hair seal with a cigar in its mouth, smiled at me kindly and said, “Humph!” For the next two or three days he buzzed for me (my signal was two short) to get him drinks of water, to open and close the windows, to pick up scraps of paper off the floor, to lower the Venetian blinds four inches and to unlock the safe and get him his whisky. Once he asked me some questions about logging on the Olympic Peninsula and when I was able to answer he seemed terribly pleased and retaliated with stories of logging in the cypress swamps.

I still don’t know exactly what Mr. Chalmers was doing or what the office was for but it was a very pleasant place to work. When I wasn’t answering the buzzer and ministering to the many little personal needs of Mr. Chalmers, I was in the outer office typing reports for Mary, learning to cut stencils, running the mimeograph or working on a story we were writing, called “Sandra Surrenders.”

Then one day Mr. Chalmers buzzed for me and when I came eagerly in, dustcloth in hand, instead of ordering me to kill a fly or empty the ash trays, he announced that starting the next morning, I was to spend all my time in the Seattle Public Library reading everything that had been written on the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

He didn’t tell me what he had in mind and I was too timid to ask him, so I asked Mary. She wrinkled her forehead in a puzzled way and said, “It sounds as if I might have told him that you had studied law. Oh, well, don’t worry about it, you’ve got as good a brain as he has, which isn’t saying much for you. Go on up and read everything you can find, take notes and write a report. He’ll never look at it but he’ll be very pleased at your industry.”

So, for the next week or two, feeling as though I were still in college trying for straight A’s, I dutifully spent my days - in the library reading and taking notes and when I handed Mr. Chalmers an original and two copies of the voluminous report, he, obviously having forgotten who I was or what I was doing, glanced at it and put it in the bottom drawer of his desk then gave me a long lecture on Pitman shorthand, which he wrote and I didn’t.

A week after the Sherman Anti-Trust laws had been disposed of, Mr. Chalmers announced one morning that from then on I was to read the
Wall Street Journal, The Banker’s Digest
and a couple of other financial papers, pick out all items of importance and interest and relay them weekly, by means of an
interesting,
he stressed this word vehemently, bulletin to all the lumbermen in the State of Washington. Friday I was to assemble my material, write it up and leave it on his desk for him to peruse and digest (and confuse and insert “point of fact” every other word); Saturday morning I was to cut the stencils, run them off on the mimeograph and assemble and mail the bulletin.

In actual fact, I read all the boring financial magazines, but I shook everything I had read up in a big bag and issued in my own words and well-seasoned with my own personal prejudices, a bulletin as to the state of the world’s finances. I remember one bulletin that I headed, “War with Japan Inevitable!” I don’t know where this dope got that dope.

Mr. Chalmers, who never took the trouble to read any of the magazines or to check my facts, used to make huge blue-pencil marks around single words and then quote Matthew Arnold and Emerson at me to prove that other words would more accurately convey the exact shade of meaning I had in mind. I was reasonably sure that none of the lumbermen read my dull bulletin and I was also reasonably sure that no one of them would come storming into the office and demand a showdown because I had said money instead of
pelf, or Mammon or lucre, but I didn’t dare argue with Mr. Chalmers, who was at his worst on Saturday morning.

In the meantime, or interim or interregnum, Mary took Mr. Chalmers’ dictation, arranged bouquets of lovely out-of-season flowers for his desk and hers, ordered his whisky from Joe the bootlegger and left me alone with him in the office more and more,

He would buzz for her and I would answer and he would roar, “Where’s Mary?” and I would tell him that she was out paving the way for him to meet the right people and he would say, “Humph, well as long as you’re here, lower that Venetian blind three and five-eighths inches, empty this ash tray and fill my pen.” When I had finished, he would say, “Betty, did I ever tell you about the time I organized the lumber industry in Louisiana?” and I would say no and he would say, “Sit down,” and I would and hours later when Mary returned, he would be pouring little drinks of bourbon and tap water and I would be listening to Volume XVII, Chapter 33 of
Mr. Chalmers Is Smarter Than Anyone in the World, Living or Dead.
Lumber was a lot of fun.

Occasionally Mr. Chalmers became mildly irritated at Mary and me and threatened to tear us apart, tendon by tendon. One such outburst was precipitated by his being unusually unreasonable and hateful all week long, then leaving for Chicago by plane without his teeth, which he had carelessly left at his club. “Go to Athletic Club and airmail me bridge,” he wired Mary. “You can starve to death, you disagreeable old bastard,” said Mary, throwing the telegram in the wastebasket. “Mary, send bridge or you are fired!” was the next wire. Mary crumpled it up and threw it out the window. “Am calling tonight,” was the next wire so Mary airmailed his teeth that afternoon and when he called that evening she was like honey and told him that she had mailed his teeth the minute she had gotten
his first wire and she did hope he was chewing and having a good time.

The very closest we came to being fired was on the occasion of Mr. Chalmers’ visit to New Orleans and arrival back at the office a week ahead of schedule. It was a very hot summer afternoon and Mary and I, who had received a rather unexpected invitation to dine on board a battleship, were in Mr. Chalmers’ private office freshening up. We had removed and washed out our underwear and stockings and pinned them to the Venetian blinds to dry. We had steamed out the wrinkles in our silk print office dresses by holding them over Mr. Chalmers’ basin while we ran the hot water full force, and had hung them on hangers on the Venetian blinds.

We had washed and pinned up our hair and finally in bare feet and petticoats were taking refreshing sponge baths in Mr. Chalmers’ basin, when there were knocks on the outer door, which we had locked. Mary called through the transom, “Mr. Chalmers is in conference—who is it?” It was a telegram so she told the boy to put it through the mail slot. A little later, Mr. Chalmers’ lawyer knocked and she told him that she had torn her dress and was in her petticoat mending it and he laughed and said that he had some papers for Chalmers but she could get them in the morning.

“Everything is just working out perfectly,” we exulted as we felt our underwear and stockings, which were almost dry, and I ran the water for my bath. Suddenly there was a loud pounding at the outer door. “Shall I call through the transom?” I asked, taking my right foot out of the basin full of warm suds. “No,” Mary said, “it’s almost five. We’ll pretend we’ve gone home.” But the knocking continued, getting louder and louder and even sounding, to my sensitive ears, as if it might be accompanied by hoarse shouts. “Maybe I’d better put on my coat and see who it is,” I said nervously. “I wouldn’t if I were you,” Mary said, “it might be some
out-of-town lumberman who has read your financial bulletin.” We both laughed gaily but I was very relieved when the knocking finally stopped.

Mary was patting eau de Cologne on her neck and shoulders and I was drying my left thigh on the last of Mr. Chalmers’ hand towels, when I thought I heard the outer-office door open and voices. “Did you hear the door open?” I asked Mary. “No,” she said.

I heard voices again and this time they sounded as if they were coming from the conference room. “Mary,” I said, “do you hear anything?” Spreading her makeup out on Mr. Chalmers’ desk, she said, “Stop being so nervous! You know we’re going to a lot of trouble considering the fact that all the Navy men I’ve ever met were liars, short and married.” We both laughed.

Just then the door of Mr. Chalmers’ office opened and in charged Mr. Chalmers like a bull from a chute at the rodeo. His face was pomegranate-colored, his cigar hung from his lips like brown fringe, and his voice was a hoarse croak as he roared, “Who locked the door? What in Hell’s going on here?”

Behind him stood the building office manager, swinging some keys and looking embarrassed. Mary, sitting at Mr. Chalmers’ desk in petticoat and pin curls with all her makeup spread out on his blotter and her pocket mirror propped against his inkstand, said quite calmly, “You’re not supposed to be here.”

Mr. Chalmers dropped his briefcase and his suitcase and yelled hoarsely, “I’m not supposed to be here? What in hell’s going on?”

Mary said, “You said you weren’t coming back until next week.”

Chalmers said, “I wired you this morning.”

Mary said, “I didn’t get it.”

He said, “Of course you didn’t. I found it unopened
under the door. Here,” and he threw the telegram at her. “Now clean up this Goddamn Chinese laundry and get out! You’re fired!” He tripped over his briefcase, kicked it and slammed through the door.

Mary and I finished dressing, wiped up the spilled bathwater and eau de Cologne, lowered the Venetian blinds, put Mr. Chalmers’ mail on his desk and prepared to leave. Perhaps because Mr. Chalmers was hot and tired and we looked so clean and fresh, he rescinded the order about firing and in gratitude we took him to dinner with us on board the battleship, where he had some excellent Scotch and sat next to the Executive Officer, who turned out to be a bigger “and then I said to Andrew Mellon” and “Otto Kahn said to me” than Mr. Chalmers.

By the end of six months, Mr. Chalmers’ office force had been increased to include, besides Mary and me, a certified public accountant and a liaison man between Mr. Chalmers and the lumbermen. I was still killing Mr. Chalmers’ flies and filling his fountain pen but I had to take dictation for the liaison man and so Mr. Chalmers was sending me to nightschool for fifteen dollars a month.

For reasons of pride I did not go back to the nightschool Mr. Webster had sent me to, but chose one further uptown, nearer to my streetcar. My teacher, a nice motherly woman, grew exasperated with my inability to read my notes and made me read them back aloud in front of the whole class, night after dreary night,

I grew to dread nightschool and probably would have quit if it hadn’t been for the woman who sat across from me. She worked for an insurance company, dressed in black crepe, musky perfumes and big hats and told me that every single good job in the city of Seattle required that the girl also sleep with her boss. “And they won’t get me to do that for eighty dollars a month,” she told me as she furiously practiced her shorthand. “But they might get me for a lot
less!” I told myself, as I tried desperately to figure out whether I had written pupil, purple, purposeless, billious, blurb or babble.