The Job (Lewis)/Man and Woman/Chapter 18

SO long as Mr. Schwirtz contrived to keep his position in the retail paint-store, Una was busy at home, copying documents and specifications and form-letters for a stenographic agency and trying to make a science of quick and careful housework.

She suspected that, now he had a little money again, Mr. Schwirtz was being riotous with other women—as riotous as one can be in New York on eighteen dollars a week, with debts and a wife to interfere with his manly pleasures. But she did not care; she was getting ready to break the cocoon, and its grubbiness didn’t much matter.

Sex meant nothing between them now. She did not believe that she would ever be in love again, in any phase, noble or crude. While she aspired and worked she lived like a nun in a cell. And now that she had something to do, she could be sorry for him. She made the best possible dinners for him on their gas-range. She realized—sometimes, not often, for she was not a contemplative seer, but a battered woman—that their marriage had been as unfair to him as it was to her. In small-town boy-gang talks behind barns, in clerkly confidences as a young man, in the chatter of smoking-cars and provincial hotel offices, he had been trained to know only two kinds of women, both very complaisant to smart live-wires: The bouncing lassies who laughed and kissed and would share with a man his pleasures, such as poker and cocktails, and rapid motoring to no place in particular; and the meek, attentive, “refined” kind, the wives and mothers who cared for a man and admired him and believed whatever he told them about his business.

Una was of neither sort for him, though for Walter Babson she might have been quite of the latter kind. Mr. Schwirtz could not understand her, and she was as sorry for him as was compatible with a decided desire to divorce him and wash off the stain of his damp, pulpy fingers with the water of life.

But she stayed home, and washed and cooked, and earned money for him—till he lost his retail-store position by getting drunk and being haughty to a customer.

Then the chrysalis burst and Una was free again. Free to labor, to endeavor—to die, perhaps, but to die clean. To quest and meet whatever surprises life might hold.

§ 2

She couldn’t go back to Troy Wilkins’s, nor to Mr. S. Herbert Ross and the little Pemberton stenographers who had enviously seen her go off to be married. But she made a real business of looking for a job. While Mr. Schwirtz stayed home and slept and got mental bed-sores and drank himself to death—rather too slowly—on another fifty dollars which he had borrowed after a Verdun campaign, Una was joyous to be out early, looking over advertisements, visiting typewriter companies’ employment agencies.

She was slow in getting work because she wanted twenty dollars a week. She knew that any firm taking her at this wage would respect her far more than if she was an easy purchase.

Work was slow to come, and she, who had always been so securely above the rank of paupers who submit to the dreadful surgery of charity, became afraid. She went at last to Mamie Magen.

Mamie was now the executive secretary of the Hebrew Young Women’s Professional Union. She seemed to be a personage. In her office she had a secretary who spoke of her with adoring awe, and when Una said that she was a personal friend of Miss Magen the secretary cried: “Oh, then perhaps you’d like to go to her apartment, at —— Washington Place. She’s almost always home for tea at five.”

The small, tired-looking Una, a business woman again, in her old tailor-made and a new, small hat, walked longingly toward Washington Place and tea.

In her seven years in New York she had never known anybody except S. Herbert Ross who took tea as a regular function. It meant to her the gentlest of all forms of distinction, more appealing than riding in motors or going to the opera. That Mamie Magen had, during Una’s own experience, evolved from a Home Club girl to an executive who had tea at her apartment every afternoon was inspiriting; meeting her an adventure.

An apartment of buff-colored walls and not bad prints was Mamie’s, small, but smooth; and taking tea in a manner which seemed to Una impressively suave were the insiders of the young charity-workers’ circle. But Mamie’s uncouth face and eyes of molten heroism stood out among them all, and she hobbled over to Una and kissed her. When the cluster had thinned, she got Una aside and invited her to the “Southern Kitchen,” on Washington Square.

Una did not speak of her husband. “I want to get on the job again, and I wish you’d help me. I want something at twenty a week (I’m more than worth it) and a chance to really climb,” was all she said, and Mamie nodded.

And so they talked of Mrs. Harriet Fike of the Home Club, of dreams and work and the fight for suffrage. Una’s marriage slipped away—she was ardent and unstained again.

Mamie’s nod was worth months of Mr. Schwirtz’s profuse masculine boasts. Within ten days, Mamie’s friend, Mr. Fein, of Truax & Fein, the real-estate people, sent for Una and introduced her to Mr. Daniel T. Truax. She was told to come to work on the following Monday as Mr. Truax’s secretary, at twenty-one dollars a week.

She went home defiant, determined to force her husband to let her take the job.... She didn’t need to use force. He—slippered and drowsy by the window—said: “That’s fine; that’ll keep us going till my big job breaks. I’ll hear about it by next week, anyway. Then, in three-four weeks you can kick Truax & Fein in the face and beat it. Say, girlie, that’s fine! Say, tell you what I’ll do. Let’s have a little party to celebrate. I’ll chase out and rush a growler of beer and some wienies—”

“No! I’ve got to go out again.”

“Can’t you stop just long enough to have a little celebration? I—I been kind of lonely last few days, little sister. You been away so much, and I’m too broke to go out and look up the boys now.”

He was peering at her with a real wistfulness, but in the memory of Mamie Magen, the lame woman of the golden heart, Una could not endure his cackling enthusiasm about the job he would probably never get.

“No, I’m sorry—” she said, and closed the door. From the walk she saw him puzzled and anxious at the window. His face was becoming so ruddy and fatuous and babyish. She was sorry for him—but she was not big enough to do anything about it. Her sorrow was like sympathy for a mangy alley cat which she could not take home.

She had no place to go. She walked for hours, planlessly, and dined at a bakery and lunch-room in Harlem. Sometimes she felt homeless, and always she was prosaically footsore, but now and then came the understanding that she again had a chance.