The Best of Everything

For Phyllis, Bob, Jaij, Jerry and Jack

1799478

YOU DESERVE

THE BEST OF EVERYTHING

The best job, the best surroundings, the best pay, the best contacts.

—From an ad in the new york times

Chapter 1

You see them every morning at a quarter to nine, rushing out of the maw of the subway tunnel, fihng out of Grand Central Station, crossing Lexington and Park and Madison and Fifth avenues, the hundreds and hundreds of girls. Some of them look eager and some look resentful, and some of them look as if they haven't left their beds yet. Some of them have been up since six-thirty in the morning, the ones who commute from Brooklyn and Yonkers and New Jersey and Staten Island and Connecticut. They carry the morning newspapers and overstuffed handbags. Some of them are wearing pink or chartreuse fuzzy overcoats and five-year-old ankle-strap shoes and have their hair up in pin curls underneath kerchiefs. Some of them are wearing chic black suits (maybe last year's but who can tell?) and kid gloves and are carrying their lunches in violet-sprigged Bon-wit Teller paper bags. None of them has enough money.

At eight-forty-five Wednesday morning, January second, 1952, a twenty-year-old girl named Caroline Bender came out of Grand Central Station and headed west and uptown toward Radio City. She was a more than pretty girl with dark hair and light eyes and a face with a good deal of softness and intelHgence in it. She was wearing a gray tweed suit, which had been her dress-up suit in college, and was carrying a small attache case, which contained a wallet with five dollars in it, a book of commuter tickets, some make-up, and three magazines entitled respectively The Cross, My Secret Life, and Americas Woman.

It was one of those cold, foggy midwinter mornings in New York, the kind that makes you think of lung ailments. Caroline hurried along with the rest of the crowd, hardly noticing anybody, nervous and frightened and slightly elated. It was her first day at the first job she had ever had in her hf e, and she did not consider herself basically a career girl. Last year, looking ahead to this damp day in January, she had thought she would be married. Since she'd had a fiance it

seemed logical. Now she had no fiance and no one she was interested in, and the new job was more than an economic convenience, it was an emotional necessity. She wasn't sure that being a secretary in a typing pool could possibly be engrossing, but she was going to have to make it so. Otherwise she would have time to think, and would remember too much. . . .

Fabian Publications occupied five air-conditioned floors in one of the modern buildings in Radio City. On this first week of the new year the annual hiring had just been completed. Three secretaries had left the typing pool, one to get married, the other two for better jobs. Three new secretaries had been hired to start on Wednesday, the second of January. One of these was Caroline Bender.

It was five minutes before nine when Caroline reached the floor where the typing pool was located, and she was surprised to find the large room dark and all the typewriters still neatly covered. She had been afraid she would be late, and now she was the fij*st one. She found the switch that turned on the ceihng lights and prowled around waiting for someone to appear. There was a large center room with rows of desks for the secretaries, and on the edges of this room were the closed doors of the oflBces for editors. Tinsel Christmas bells and red bows were still taped to some of the doors, looking bedraggled and sad now that the season was over.

She looked into several of the oflBces and saw that they seemed to progress in order of the occupant's importance from small tile-floored cubicles with two desks, to larger ones with one desk, and finally to two large oflfices with carpet on the floor, leather lounging chairs, and wood-paneled walls. From the books and magazines lying around in them she could see that one of these belonged to the editor of Derby Books and the other to the editor of The Cross. She heard voices then in the main room, and the sound of laughter and greetings. Stricken with a sudden attack of shyness, she came slowly out of the editor's oflfice.

It was nine o'clock and the room was suddenly filling up with girls, none of whom noticed her presence at all. The teletype operator was combing her hair out of its pin curls, one of the typists was going from desk to desk collecting empty glass jars and taking coffee orders. Covers were being pulled off typewriters, coats hung up, newspapers spread out on desks to be read, and as each new arrival came in she was greeted with delighted cries. It sounded as though

they had all been separated from one another for four weeks, not four days. Caroline didn't know which desk was hers and she was afraid to sit at someone else's, so she kept standing, watching, and feeling for the first time that morning that she was an outsider at a private club.

A lone man came in then, briskly, with an amused, rather self-conscious look, as if he were intruding on a ladies' tea. At the sight of him some of the girls sat up and tried to look more businesslike. He was in his late forties, of medium height but wiry so that he looked smaller, with a pale, dissipated face that looked even more ravaged because there were signs that it had once been very handsome. He stopped at the water fountain and drank for a long time, then he straightened up and went on into one of the editors' offices. He was wearing a camel's-hair coat with a large cigarette bum on the lapel.

"Who's that?" Caroline asked the girl nearest her.

"Mr. Rice, editor of The Cross. You're new, aren't you?" the girl said. "My name is Mary Agnes."

Tm Caroline."

"I hope you like it here," Mary Agnes said. She was a thin, plain-looking girl with wavy dark hair, and she wore a black wool skirt and a transparent white nylon blouse. She was extremely flat-chested.

"I hope so too," Caroline said.

"Well, you can have either of those two desks over there if you want to put anything away. You'll be working for Miss Farrow this week, because her secretary quit on her. She usually comes in around ten o'clock. She'll take you around and introduce you to everybody. Would you like some coffee?"

"I'd love some," Caroline said. She put her attach^ case and gloves into the drawer of one of the empty desks and hung her jacket over the back of the chair.

Mary Agnes waved over the girl who was taking coffee orders. "Brenda, this is Caroline."

"Hi," Brenda said. She was a plump, quite pretty blonde, but when she smiled there was a tooth conspicuously absent on either side, giving her the look of a werewolf. "How do you want your coffee? You'd better take it in a jar instead of a paper container."

"Thank you," Caroline said.

Brenda walked back to her desk with a twitch of her hips. "Watch out for her," Mary Agnes said conspiratorially when she was out of earshot. "She makes you pay for the coffee and the jar, and then she gives back tlie jars and keeps all the deposit money. Don't let her get away with it."

"I'll try not to," Caroline said.

"Do you have a key to the ladies' room?"

"No."

"Well, you can use mine until you get one. Just ask. Did you notice her teeth?"

"Whose?"

"Brenda's. She's engaged to be married and she's having all her bad teeth pulled so her husband will have to pay for the new ones. Did you ever hear of such a thing?" Mary Agnes giggled and began putting sheets of carbon paper and letter paper into the roller of her typewriter.

"What's Mr. Rice—is that his name? What's he like?" asked Caroline. She liked camel's-hair coats on men, they reminded her of The Front Page.

A genuinely stricken look of piety came over Mary Agnes' plain face. "It's very sad," she said. "I always feel sorry for a person like him. I wish somebody could help him."

"What's the matter with him?"

"Wait till you read that magazine he puts out. It will sicken you."

"You mean he writes that stuff because he believes it, is that it?"

"Worse," said Mary Agnes. "He writes it because he doesn't believe in anything. Those articles he writes sound very pious but they're just a lot of words. I feel sorry for the poor souls who believe them, but I feel sorrier for Mr. Rice. I often think he must be very lonely." She smiled ruefully. "Well, don't get me started on Mr. Rice's lack of faith, it's a subject I feel very strongly about and right now I've got to get tliese letters typed."

"Maybe you and I can have lunch together," Caroline suggested.

"Oh, that would have been fun . . . but I can't. I always have lunch witli my boy friend. That is, some days he brings his lunch up here and eats it with me, and some days I bring my sandwiches downtown and eat them with him. He works downtown in a furniture factory. We're saving up to get married. We're getting married a year from this coming June."

"That's a long time from now," Caroline said.

1 know," Mary Agnes said matter-of-factly. "But it could have been even longer,"

"I certainly wish you luck," Caroline said. She went over to her desk and sat down. She'd come here to get away from thoughts of marriage, and the first two girls she had met were engaged. Well, she would clean out the drawers of this desk, and then Miss What's-her-name would arrive and give her more work probably than she could handle, nervous as she was on her first day, and soon her mind would be so filled with office problems that there would be no room for remembering things she shouldn't.

She had a mental list now of things she had to keep out of her mind, but it was hard because they were everyday things for anyone else and they kept cropping up. Boys named Eddie. Paris. Almost any Noel Coward song. Three or four particular restaurants. Any book or story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Chianti. W. B. Yeats. Steamships going to Europe. Steamships coming back from Europe.

She didn't really want to forget all of it, because it had all meant happiness at the time it happened. She only wanted to be able someday to remember without finding it painful. That was the trick, to keep all the good things from tlie past and cast away the ones that hurt.

She had been a junior at RadclifFe when she met Eddie Harris. He was a senior at Harvard. He was a marvelous, funny, appealing-looking boy, he played jazz piano, he read books none of the others had even heard of, he had a sense of humor that could keep her laughing for hours. He had moody spells too, when he walked around his room in a turtleneck sweater and khaki pants and bare feet and played Noel Coward songs on the phonograph and wouldn't talk to anyone but her for days. He got all A's in school with a minimum of study, it seemed, and his family had money. She couldn't really believe it was happening to her, a girl of eighteen who had never met a boy she cared about at all, and now Eddie Harris was in love with her and she adored him.

She was quite sure that she loved him more than he loved her, but he was a man, after all, and men had other things to worry about.

They planned to get married the autumn after he was graduated from Harvard. Meanwhile she was to go to summer school and get her diploma. It was something her parents insisted upon, she was

only nineteen then and they told her she would regret it someday if she had gone this far toward a degree and then given it up. Girls of nineteen didn't have to rush into marriage, they told her, although they were as pleased about her engagement to Eddie as she was. Eddie encouraged her, and of course she would do anything he wanted, although she couldn't really see how another few months of classes could make any difference when simply being near Eddie made her so much more aware of everything she read and heard and saw that she felt like a different person. College was supposed to make you think, wasn't it? Well, Eddie made her think, and what she really wanted out of life was to be a good and interesting wife for him and make him happy, not cram down another hundred lines of Shakespeare.

Anyway, she went to summer school. And Eddie's parents sent him to Europe for a graduation present. She thought it would have been nicer if they had waited and then let Eddie and her go there on their honeymoon, but the thought struck her as so selfish that she didn't even mention it to him. There had been a big boom in world travel at Harvard and Radcliffe in those years; everyone went. Travel was a new experience for their generation those early years after the war, and Caroline had already grown tired of the constant cocktail-party conversation which consisted mainly of place-dropping. She kept her mouth shut and everyone said to her, "You've been to Europe, of course, haven't you?" She thought the college boys who ran to Paris and then sat around in cafes looking for American girls whom they had known at home were very funny. She knew Eddie would get a lot more out of his trip than that.

When she saw him off on the ship she gave him a bottle of champagne and a brave smile, although all the time they were kissing goodbye she wanted to cry out, "Take me with you, don't go alone." He told her it would be only six weeks, that the time would go quickly, that he would think of her all the time. He told her, "Miss me a little" (smiling), when they both knew he meant she should miss him a great deal, and that she would whether he told her to or not. On the deck he discovered the parents of a girl he had known years ago when he was in prep school, Helen Lowe, and he latched onto the father. See, his smile said comfortingly to Caroline as the ship pulled away from the harbor, here I am with this nice middle-aged man, see how well I'm keeping out of trouble.

Helen had been on the ship too, she had been down in her stateroom with four of her classmates from Sarah Lawrence getting drunk together. She was a tall, slim, bosomy girl with the kind of ash-blond hair that looks almost gray and was not a really popular color until several years later. She had a white French poodle and she had taken French lessons before she left on the ship.

When the six weeks were finally over, a letter arrived for Caroline on the day Eddie's ship came in to New York without him.

"I don't know how to tell you this," the letter began. "This is the fourth time I've tried to write you about it, the other three ejfforts I've torn up." He sounded rather sorry for himself because he had to tell her. He probably thought. What a mess, what a mess. How much easier to declare love than to withdraw it, especially from someone you still like very much. He sounded even sorrier for himself and his unpleasant predicament than he was for her, who only had to read what he had written and see her future and her happiness shatter quietly around her.