The Job (Lewis)/Man and Woman/Chapter 16

FOR two years Una Golden Schwirtz moved amid the blank procession of phantoms who haunt cheap family hotels, the apparitions of the corridors, to whom there is no home, nor purpose, nor permanence. Mere lodgers for the night, though for score on score of tasteless years they use the same alien hotel room as a place in which to take naps and store their trunks and comb their hair and sit waiting—for nothing. The men are mysterious. They are away for hours or months, or they sit in the smoking-room, glancing up expectant of fortunes that never come. But the men do have friends; they are permitted familiarities by the bartender in the café. It is the women and children who are most dehumanized. The children play in the corridors; they become bold and sophisticated; they expect attention from strangers. At fourteen the girls have long dresses and mature admirers, and the boys ape the manners of their shallow elders and discuss brands of cigarettes. The women sit and rock, empty-hearted and barren of hands. When they try to make individual homes out of their fixed molds of rooms—the hard walls, the brass bedsteads, the inevitable bureaus, the small rockers, and the transoms that always let in too much light from the hall at night—then they are only the more pathetic. For the small pictures of pulpy babies photographed as cupids, the tin souvenirs and the pseudo-Turkish scarves draped over trunks rob the rooms of the simplicity which is their only merit.

For two years—two years snatched out of her life and traded for somnambulatory peace, Una lived this spectral life of one room in a family hotel on a side street near Sixth Avenue. The only other dwelling-places she saw were the flats of friends of her husband.

He often said, with a sound of pride: “We don’t care a darn for all these would-be social climbers. The wife and I lead a regular Bohemian life. We know a swell little bunch of live ones, and we have some pretty nifty parties, lemme tell you, with plenty poker and hard liquor. And one-two of the bunch have got their own cars—I tell you they make a whole lot more coin than a lot of these society-column guys, even if they don’t throw on the agony; and we all pile in and go up to some road-house, and sing, and play the piano, and have a real time.”

Conceive Una—if through the fumes of cheap cigarettes you can make out the low lights of her fading hair—sitting there, trying patiently to play a “good, canny fist of poker”—which, as her husband often and irritably assured her, she would never learn to do. He didn’t, he said, mind her losing his “good, hard-earned money,” but he “hated to see Eddie Schwirtz’s own wife more of a boob than Mrs. Jock Sanderson, who’s a regular guy; plays poker like a man.”

Mrs. Sanderson was a black-haired, big-bosomed woman with a face as hard and smooth and expressionless as a dinner-plate, with cackling laughter and a tendency to say, “Oh, hell, boys!” apropos of nothing. She was a “good sport” and a “good mixer,” Mr. Schwirtz averred; and more and more, as the satisfaction of having for his new married mistress a “refined lady” grew dull, he adjured the refined lady to imitate Mrs. Sanderson.

Fortunately, Mr. Schwirtz was out of town two-thirds of the time. But one-third of the time was a good deal, since for weeks before his coming she dreaded him; and for weeks after his going she remembered him with chill shame; since she hadn’t even the whole-hearted enthusiasm of hating him, but always told herself that she was a prude, an abnormal, thin-blooded creature, and that she ought to appreciate “Ed’s” desire to have her share his good times, be coarse and jolly and natural.

His extravagance was constant. He was always planning to rent an expensive apartment and furnish it, but the money due him after each trip he spent immediately and they were never able to move away from the family hotel. He had to have taxicabs when they went to theaters. He would carol, “Oh, don’t let’s be pikers, little sister—nothing too good for Eddie Schwirtz, that’s my motto.” And he would order champagne, the one sort of good wine that he knew. He always overtipped waiters and enjoyed his own generosity. Generous he really was, in a clumsy way. He gave to Una all he had over from his diversions; urged her to buy clothes and go to matinées while he was away, and told it as a good joke that he “blew himself” so extensively on their parties that he often had to take day-coaches instead of sleepers for a week after he left New York.... Una had no notion of how much money he made, but she knew that he never saved it. She would beg: “Why don’t you do like so many of the other traveling-men? Your Mr. Sanderson is saving money and buying real estate, even though he does have a good time. Let’s cut out some of the unnecessary parties and things—”

“Rats! My Mr. Sanderson is a leet-le tight, like all them Scotch laddies. I’m going to start saving one of these days. But what can you do when the firm screws you down on expense allowances and don’t hardly allow you one red cent of bonus on new business? There’s no chance for a man to-day—these damn capitalists got everything lashed down. I tell you I’m getting to be a socialist.”

He did not seem to be a socialist of the same type as Mamie Magen, but he was interested in socialism to this extent—he always referred to it at length whenever Una mentioned saving money.

She had not supposed that he drank so much. Always he smelled of whisky, and she found quart bottles of it in his luggage when he returned from a trip.

But he never showed signs of drunkenness, except in his urgent attentions to her after one of their “jolly Bohemian parties.”

More abhorrent to her was the growing slackness in his personal habits.... He had addressed her with great volubility and earnestness upon his belief that now they were married, she must get rid of all her virginal book-learned notions about reticence between husband and wife. Such feminine “hanky-panky tricks,” he assured her, were the cause of “all these finicky, unhappy marriages and these rotten divorces—lot of fool clubwomen and suffragettes and highbrows expecting a man to be like a nun. A man’s a man, and the sooner a female gets on to that fact and doesn’t nag, nag, nag him, and let’s him go round being comfortable and natural, the kinder he’ll be to her, and the better it’ll be for all parties concerned. Every time! Don’t forget that, old lady. Why, there’s J. J. Vance at our shop. Married one of these up-dee-dee, poetry-reading, finicky women. Why, he did everything for that woman. Got a swell little house in Yonkers, and a vacuum cleaner, and a hired girl, and everything. Then, my God! she said she was lonely! Didn’t have enough housework, that was the trouble with her; and darned if she doesn’t kick when J. J. comes in all played out at night because he makes himself comfortable and sits around in his shirt-sleeves and slippers. Tell you, the first thing these women have gotta learn is that a man’s a man, and if they learn that they won’t need a vote!”

Mr. Schwirtz’s notion of being a man was to perform all hygienic processes as publicly as the law permitted. Apparently he was proud of his God-given body—though it had been slightly bloated since God had given it to him—and wanted to inspire her not only with the artistic vision of it, but with his care for it.... His thick woolen undergarments were so uncompromisingly wooleny.

Nor had Mr. Schwirtz any false modesty in his speech. If Una had made out a list of all the things she considered the most banal or nauseatingly vulgar, she would have included most of the honest fellow’s favorite subjects. And at least once a day he mentioned his former wife. At a restaurant dinner he gave a full account of her death, embalming, and funeral.

Una identified him with vulgarity so completely that she must often have been unjust to him. At least she was surprised now and then by a reassertion that he was a “highbrow,” and that he decidedly disapproved of any sort of vulgarity. Several times this came out when he found her reading novels which were so coarsely realistic as to admit the sex and sweat of the world.

“Even if they are true to life,” he said, “I don’t see why it’s necessary to drag in unpleasant subjects. I tell you a fella gets too much of bad things in this world without reading about’em in books. Trouble with all these ‘realists’ as you call’em, is that they’re such dirty-minded hounds themselves that all they can see in life is the bad side.”

Una surmised that the writers of such novels might, perhaps, desire to show the bad side in the hope that life might be made more beautiful. But she wasn’t quite sure of it, and she suffered herself to be overborne, when he snorted: “Nonsense! These fellas are just trying to show how sensational they can be, t’ say nothing of talking like they was so damn superior to the rest of us. Don’t read’em. Read pure authors like Howard Bancock Binch, where, whenever any lady gets seduced or anything like that, the author shows it’s because the villain is an atheist or something, and he treats all those things in a nice, fine, decent manner. Good Gawd! sometimes a fella’d think, to see you scrooge up your nose when I’m shaving, that I’m common as dirt, but lemme tell you, right now, miss, I’m a darn sight too refined to read any of these nasty novels where they go to the trouble of describing homes that ain’t any better than pig-pens. Oh, and another thing! I heard you telling Mrs. Sanderson you thought all kids oughta have sex education. My Gawd! I don’t know where you get those rotten ideas! Certainly not from me. Lemme tell you, no kid of mine is going to be made nasty-minded by having a lot of stuff like that taught her. Yes, sir, actually taught her right out in school.”

Una was sufficiently desirous of avoiding contention to keep to novels which portrayed life—offices and family hotels and perspiratory husbands—as all for the best. But now and then she doubted, and looked up from the pile of her husband’s white-footed black-cotton socks to question whether life need be confined to Panama and Pemberton and Schwirtz.

In deference to Mr. Schwirtz’s demands on the novelists, one could scarce even suggest the most dreadful scene in Una’s life, lest it be supposed that other women really are subject to such horror, or that the statistics regarding immoral diseases really mean anything in households such as we ourselves know.... She had reason to suppose that her husband was damaged goods. She crept to an old family doctor and had a fainting joy to find that she had escaped contamination.

“Though,” said the doctor, “I doubt if it would be wise to have a child of his.”

“I won’t!” she said, grimly.

She knew the ways of not having children. The practical Mr. Schwirtz had seen to that. Strangely enough, he did not object to birth-control, even though it was discussed by just the sort of people who wrote these sensational realistic novels.

There were periods of reaction when she blamed herself for having become so set in antipathy that she always looked for faults; saw as a fault even the love for amusements which had once seemed a virtue in him.

She tried, wistfully and honestly, to be just. She reminded herself constantly that she had enjoyed some of the parties with him—theater and a late supper, with a couple just back from South America.

But—there were so many “buts”! Life was all one obliterating But.

Her worst moments were when she discovered that she had grown careless about appearing before him in that drabbest, most ignoble of feminine attire—a pair of old corsets; that she was falling into his own indelicacies.

Such marionette tragedies mingled ever with the grander passion of seeing life as a ruined thing; her birthright to aspiring cleanness sold for a mess of quick-lunch pottage. And as she walked in a mist of agony, a dumb, blind creature heroically distraught, she could scarce distinguish between sordidness and the great betrayals, so chill and thick was the fog about her.

She thought of suicide, often, but too slow and sullen was her protest for the climax of suicide. And the common sense which she still had urged her that some day, incredibly, there might again be hope. Oftener she thought of a divorce. Of that she had begun to think even on the second day of her married life. She suspected that it would not be hard to get a divorce on statutory grounds. Whenever Mr. Schwirtz came back from a trip he would visibly remove from his suit-case bunches of letters in cheaply pretentious envelopes of pink and lavender. She scorned to try to read them, but she fancied that they would prove interesting to the judges.

§ 2

When Mr. Schwirtz was away Una was happy by contrast. Indeed she found a more halcyon rest than at any other period since her girlhood; and in long hours of thinking and reading and trying to believe in life, the insignificant good little thing became a calm-browed woman.

Mrs. Lawrence had married the doctor and gone off to Ohio. They motored much, she wrote, and read aloud, and expected a baby. Una tried to be happy in them.

Una had completely got out of touch with Mr. and Mrs. Sessions, but after her marriage she had gone to call on Mamie Magen, now prosperous and more earnest than ever, in a Greenwich Village flat; on Jennie Cassavant, sometime of the Home Club, now obscurely on the stage; on curly-haired Rose Larsen, who had married a young lawyer. But Una had fancied that they were suspiciously kind to her, and in angry pride she avoided them. She often wondered what they had heard about Mr. Schwirtz from the talkative Mrs. Lawrence. She conceived scenes in which she was haughtily rhapsodic in defending her good, sensible husband before them. Then she would long for them and admit that doubtless she had merely imagined their supercilious pity. But she could not go back to them as a beggar for friendship.

Also, though she never admitted this motive to herself, she was always afraid that some day, if she kept in touch with them, her husband would demand: “Why don’t you trot out these fussy lady friends of yours? Ashamed of me, eh?”

So she drifted away from them, and at times when she could not endure solitariness she depended upon the women of the family hotel, whom she met in the corridors and café and “parlor.”

The aristocrats among them, she found, were the wives of traveling salesmen, good husbands and well loved, most of them, writing to their wives daily and longing for the time when they could have places in the suburbs, with room for chickens and children and love. These aristocrats mingled only with the sound middle-class of the hotel women, whose husbands were clerks and bookkeepers resident in the city, or traveling machinery experts who went about installing small power-plants. They gossiped with Una about the husbands of the déclassé women—men suspected to be itinerant quack doctors, sellers of dubious mining or motor stock, or even crooks and gamblers.

There was a group of three or four cheery, buxom, much-bediamonded, much-massaged women, whose occasionally appearing husbands were sleek and overdressed. To Una these women were cordial. They invited her to go shopping, to matinées. But they stopped so often for cocktails, they told so many intimate stories of their relations with their husbands, that Una was timid before them, and edged away from their invitations except when she was desperately lonely. Doubtless she learned more about the mastery of people from them, however, than from the sighing, country-bred hotel women of whom she was more fond; for the cheerful hussies had learned to make the most of their shoddy lives.

Only one woman in the hotel did Una accept as an actual friend—Mrs. Wade, a solid, slangy, contented woman with a child to whom she was devoted. She had, she told Una, “been stuck with a lemon of a husband. He was making five thousand a year when I married him, and then he went to pieces. Good-looking, but regular poor white trash. So I cleaned house—kicked him out. He’s in Boston now. Touches me for a ten-spot now and then. I support myself and the kid by working for a department store. I’m a wiz at bossing dressmakers—make a Lucile gown out of the rind of an Edam cheese. Take nothing off nobody—especially you don’t see me taking any more husbands off nobody.”

Mostly, Una was able to make out an existence by herself.

She read everything—from the lacy sentimentalism of Myrtle Read to Samuel Butler and translations of Gorky and Flaubert. She nibbled at histories of art, and was confirmed in her economic theology by shallow but earnest manuals of popular radicalism. She got books from a branch public library, or picked them up at second-hand stalls. At first she was determined to be “serious” in her reading, but more and more she took light fiction as a drug to numb her nerves—and forgot the tales as soon as she had read them.

In ten years of such hypnotic reading Mrs. Una Golden Schwirtz would not be very different from that Mrs. Captain Golden who, alone in a flat, had read all day, and forgotten what she had read, and let life dream into death.

But now Una was still fighting to keep in life.

She began to work out her first definite philosophy of existence. In essence it was not so very different from the blatant optimism of Mr. S. Herbert Ross—except that it was sincere.

“Life is hard and astonishingly complicated,” she concluded. “No one great reform will make it easy. Most of us who work—or want to work—will always have trouble or discontent. So we must learn to be calm, and train all our faculties, and make others happy.”

No more original than this was her formulated philosophy—the commonplace creed of a commonplace woman in a rather less than commonplace family hotel. The important thing was not the form of it, but her resolve not to sink into nothingness.... She hoped that some day she would get a job again. She sometimes borrowed a typewriter from the manager of the hotel, and she took down in shorthand the miscellaneous sermons—by Baptists, Catholics, Reformed rabbis, Christian Scientists, theosophists, High Church Episcopalians, Hindu yogis, or any one else handy—with which she filled up her dull Sundays.... Except as practice in stenography she found their conflicting religions of little value to lighten her life. The ministers seemed so much vaguer than the hard-driving business men with whom she had worked; and the question of what Joshua had done seemed to have little relation to what Julius Schwirtz was likely to do. The city had come between her and the Panama belief that somehow, mysteriously, one acquired virtue by enduring dull sermons.

She depended more on her own struggle to make a philosophy.

That philosophy, that determination not to sink into paralyzed despair, often broke down when her husband was in town, but she never gave up trying to make it vital to her.

So, through month on month, she read, rocking slowly in the small, wooden rocker, or lying on the coarse-coverleted bed, while round her the hotel room was still and stale-smelling and fixed, and outside the window passed the procession of life—trucks laden with crates of garments consigned to Kansas City and Bangor and Seattle and Bemidji; taxicabs with passengers for the mammoth hotels; office-girls and policemen and salesmen and all the lusty crew that had conquered the city or were well content to be conquered by it.