Bad for Business

Chapter 1

Amy Duncan said to herself, aloud, in a tone of withering sarcasm, “Heaven protect the poor working girl! I’ll go get me a job at the five and ten, something decent and domestic like the kitchenware counter. Wah!”

She squeezed the rinse water from the stockings she had been washing, hung them in a neat row along the shower-curtain rail, dried her hands, and left the bathroom to enter the modest little living room of the apartment on Grove Street which she shared with a friend. Facing south, it was often a cheerful little room with the sun slanting in through the two windows, but now the dim November gloom of an overcast day was no more cheerful than she was. As she picked up her watch from the table at one end of the sofa and fastened it to her wrist, she frowned at it. It said twelve o’clock, and since her lunch engagement at the Churchill with the man who either was or wasn’t trying to blackmail Mrs. V. A. Grimsby was for one o’clock, and it would take only twenty minutes to get there, and she intended to be fifteen minutes late, there was nearly an hour ahead of her and nothing to do with it that she felt like doing.

She wandered into the bedroom and got her gray fur coat from the closet and made another start at the urgent problem of whether to spend eighty-three dollars having it remodeled. She certainly couldn’t afford the eighty-three dollars, but just look at it, and anyway she should never have bought the thing, with her light brown hair and the faint coloring of her skin and her outlandish chartreuse eyes. Eighty-three dollars! She shrugged and said something, not complimentary, to the coat.

She returned to the living room and sat on the sofa with a magazine which she didn’t open. As far as the lunch engagement with the blackmailer was concerned, it was not at all certain that she was going to keep it. She was faced with a problem even more urgent than the remodeling of the fur coat. She had taken the job, about a year ago, because (a) it had been offered to her, (b) it had sounded exciting, (c) the lawyer whose secretary she was had just proposed to her for the fifth time and it was getting scrummy, and (d) she was tired of writing “... this agreement, entered into this day of January, 1939, by the Corrigan Construction Company, hereinafter called...” And now what? Well, it had certain aspects. There was something sneaky — but no, she would be honest, that wasn’t it. The reason she felt the way she did about it was quite specific.

She wanted to quit. But she couldn’t just quit, because there were things like rent and food and clothes to be considered. How did people save money, anyhow? There must be some kind of a trick to it. She got up to a hundred dollars in a savings bank once, but then that girl in the office had got into trouble, and poof it went, and how were you going to avoid things like that? Of course if you were a skunk—

The bell rang. With her mind still on her problem, she went to the kitchenette and pushed the button to release the latch of the vestibule door downstairs, and then came back to open the door from the living room to the outer hall. She stood on the threshold, hearing footsteps ascending the flight of stairs and supposing in an inactive corner of her mind that it would be laundry or something; but saw that it wasn’t when a man in well-tailored brown reached her level and came at her along the poorly lit hall. Her fingers tightened around the doorknob they were grasping, but that could not be seen.

“For heaven’s sake,” she said, and felt that she should have cleared her throat before trying to speak.

“Good afternoon.” The man took his hat off and faced her with a grin which might have been called sheepish but for the fact that all other evidence was against any such assumption. Though saved from being offensively handsome by a rather wide mouth and a nose too broad to be called noble, he was thoroughly presentable, and there was a comfortable, even faintly aggressive, assurance in the set of his shoulders and the action of all his muscles, walking and standing. Nevertheless, the grin could undeniably have been called sheepish.

She had cleared her throat and still had a tight grasp on the doorknob. “I suppose it is,” she admitted. “I mean it’s after noon. But I thought you were a big executive. Don’t tell me you’re peddling provisions and beverages from door to door.”

“That’s a nice dress,” he said. “I could see it better in there where there’s more light. I just want to — I won’t keep you long.”

“You certainly won’t.” She made room for him to pass within, shut the door, turned to him, and glanced at her watch. “I haven’t time to show you any etchings, because I have to leave in about a minute to keep an engagement. And I’m sorry, but I don’t need any beans or flour or canned peaches—”

“If I only have a minute,” he cut her off, “I want to use it. What has happened?”

“Happened?” She smiled at him. “Well, Norway has taken the Germans off of the City of Flint and interned them, and President Roosevelt—”

“Please!” he begged. He wasn’t grinning. “What are you trying to do, have some fun with me?”

“Good heavens, no.” His eyes required to be met, and she met them, keeping, she hoped, an easy dancing smile in hers. “I wouldn’t dream of trying to have fun with one of the ablest and shrewdest—”

“Oh, you wouldn’t.” He took a step toward her. “I don’t know about my being able and shrewd, but I’m pretty well occupied during business hours. Do you think I’m in the habit of running off in the middle of the day to beg a girl to go to a football game?”

“Certainly not,” she laughed. “You don’t have to. You just snap your fingers, and scads of girls—”

“Excuse me. I came because it’s — well, it’s important to me. I mean you are. You phone and tell me casually that you can’t have dinner with me tomorrow and you can’t go to the game with me Saturday. You say things interfere but you won’t say what things. You only stammer—”

“I didn’t stammer!”

“Well, I don’t mean stammer. I mean you didn’t even bother to make up a plausible excuse. You just more or less give me to understand that all dates are off. And that doesn’t make sense unless something has happened, because you certainly gave me the impression that you liked me and enjoyed being with me. Of course we’ve only been together five times in the three weeks since we met, and I don’t mean necessarily that you liked me in the way I was beginning to like — I don’t mean beginning either — I mean you know very well the kind of impression — for instance, I have never missed a Yale-Harvard game since I graduated twelve years ago, and I don’t like to go to a football game with a girl, I like to go with men and always have until now—”

“I appreciated it deeply, Mr. Cliff, really I did—”

“You see? ‘Mr. Cliff!’ You were calling me Leonard. And now ‘Mr. Cliff with sarcasm, and you won’t see me tomorrow and you won’t go to the game Saturday and you won’t say what has happened, and I have a right to expect—”

“Right?” Her brows went up. “Oh? Have you got rights?”

“Yes, I... but I don’t... yes, I have!” His color was rising. “Now look — didn’t you give me a reason to suppose — weren’t we friends? Weren’t we friends enough so that if you decide to go to a football game with me and then suddenly decide not to go, I have a right to ask you why? Tell me that!”

“I’m not going,” said Amy firmly, with a frozen smile.

“Why not?”

She shook her head. “I just don’t want to.” She looked at her wrist, which was all right as a gesture, though she didn’t see the time. “And really I mustn’t be late—”

“You won’t tell me?”

“There’s nothing to tell.” The smile cracked a little. “You seem to assume that if a girl decides she isn’t going somewhere with you, something terrible must have happened. Don’t you admit the possibility that she merely doesn’t care to go?”

“Why, I— but you—” He was stuttering. He stopped abruptly, and stood staring at her, his color slowly deepening. After a moment her eyes dropped from his.

“I beg your pardon,” he said stiffly. “I seem to have made some kind of mistake.” He walked to the door and opened it, and was gone.

Amy stood, with no other movement than turning her head, until steps from the hall were no longer heard. Then she clattered into the bedroom, grabbed up the gray fur coat, threw it down again, sat on the edge of the bed, and stared at the top of the dressing table.

She muttered to herself, aloud, “I did a swell job of that, didn’t I, though? And my voice is trembling. You admit your voice is trembling, do you, Miss Duncan? What, no tears? Supreme effort of the will, huh? He’ll take a girl to the ball game, by golly, or he’ll know the reason why. You’ll fix your face, my fine girl, that’s what you’ll do, and you’ll go to work, and you’ll like it!”

She opened her compact.

At a few minutes before three that afternoon she emerged from the 54th Street entrance of the Churchill in the company of a slender smiling elegant middle-aged man, was handed by him into a taxi, and waved through the window at him as the taxi rolled away. The s.s.e.m. man was Mrs. Grimsby’s blackmailer. The lunch with him had been barren of results, for she had been too much preoccupied with her own affairs to function effectively. Now, having made a decision, she was acting upon it without loss of time. She leaned forward and told the driver to go to the 59th Street station of the Ninth Avenue El. Since she regarded this excursion as private business and therefore the fare could not be put on her expense account, forty or fifty cents made a difference.

Leaving the El at 23rd Street, she walked three short blocks north and a long one west. The three-story brick building she stopped in front of was old and grimy-looking, with a cobbled driveway for trucks tunneled through its middle, and there was nothing there or at the pedestrian entrance to proclaim its status or reason for existence, but anyone tilting his head a little from across the street could have seen stretched along the expanse of the bricks of the upper story, enormous letters in dingy white paint:

Inside was a dingy hall and a dingy and dilapidated staircase, the deep hollows in the treads witnesses of thousands of impatient feet up and down through many patient years. On the floor above was a good deal of noise: the hum of machinery from behind wooden partitions to the ceiling, and, as Amy passed through a door in still another partition to the left, a clatter of typewriters and other sounds of a busy office. It was only an anteroom; more partitions confronted her; and through a window in one of them a gray-haired man peered out and told her in a cracked voice that he thought Mr. Tingley was somewhere in the building. Amy forgave his rheumy old eyes for not recognizing her, and was about to tell him her name when she heard it pronounced from another direction by a young man who had emerged from a nearby door, glanced at her, and altered his intended course to approach the window.

“Amy? Sure it is! Hello there!”

“Hello, Phil.” She let his long bony fingers wrap themselves around the knuckles of her outstretched hand, and slanted her eyes up to the altitude of his bony face with its hollowed cheeks, hoping that her own face was not betraying the vague discomfort, the mild repulsion, she had always felt at the sight of him, especially his mouth with its hint of strain at the down-turning corners — the mouth, properly, of a fanatic or a fiend stoically enduring unheard of and ceaseless torture.

She smiled at him. “I haven’t seen you for ages. How’s technocracy?”

“Technocracy?” He frowned. “My God, I don’t know. Somewhere on a junk heap, I guess.”

“Oh.” Amy was apologetic. “I thought it was the road to happiness or wealth. Or both.”

“No, no. Never. It was perhaps a step in education. But truth, like life, is dynamic.” He pulled a pamphlet from his pocket. “Here, read that. You’ll have to read it several times to understand it...”

Amy took it and glanced at it. On its printed cover the most prominent word, in large black type, was WOMON. She looked up at him in astonishment.

“Woman?” she demanded. “Women? Phil! Don’t tell me you’ve gone in for matriarchy! Or even — sex? My sex?”

“Of course not,” he denied indignantly. “It has nothing to do with women or sex either. WOMON means WORK-MONEY. The basis of the world economic structure is money. The basis of money is — has been — gold. It is antiquated and unsound, it no longer functions. What does a dollar of our currency represent? A speck of gold. Ridiculous! It has been proposed to base the dollar on commodities instead of gold. On potatoes and wool and iron! Even more ridiculous! Commodities are even more unstable than gold. The basis of money must be stable, solid, unalterable. What is stable? What is the most stable thing in the world?”

He tapped her on the shoulder with a forefinger. “The work of a man! That’s stable!” He stretched out his arms. “What these hands can do!” He tapped his temple. “What this head can do! That’s the basis, the only sound basis, for the world’s money! Work-Money! We call it Womon!”

“I see,” Amy nodded. “It sounds sensible, but I still think it looks and sounds too much like woman. You’ll have trouble with that, see if you don’t.” She stuffed the pamphlet into her bag. “I’ll read this over. I don’t know about several times, but I’ll read it. Is Uncle Arthur in his office?”

“Yes. I just left him. I’d be glad to send you a bunch of those, if you’d care to pass them around.”

“I’d better read it first. I might not like it.” Amy offered a hand. “Nice to see you again. Hooray for happiness and wealth.”

That was indiscreet, for it started him on Womon’s explanation of the true nature of wealth, but after a few minutes she succeeded in heading him off. Soon after he had gone, through a door that led toward the hum of machinery, word came for her to penetrate to Mr. Tingley’s office. To get there she had to pass through two or three more partitions, exchange greetings with women and girls at desks who called her Amy, and traverse a long wide passageway. As she stopped at a door on the frosted glass panel of which THOMAS TINGLEY was inscribed, her shoulders moved with a little shiver of discomposure. She had forgotten about that. There was no Thomas Tingley and had not been for all of her twenty-five years and then some. It was his grandson she was calling on. To keep his name painted there on the door had always struck her — she shrugged the shiver off, and entered.

Though Thomas Tingley no longer occupied that room, certainly his office furniture did. The old-fashioned roll-top desk was battered and scarred, the varnish on the chair seats had long since been rubbed away, and the ancient massive safe was anything but streamlined. Wherever shelves and cabinets left enough wall space for a large framed photograph, one was there, the oldest and most faded, of a hundred or more men and women in strange and ludicrous costumes, bearing the hand-printed legend: Tingley’s Titbits Employees Picnic, Colton Beach, Long Island, July 4th, 1891. A large folding screen of green burlap, at Amy’s right as she entered, concealed, as she knew, a marble wash basin with hot and cold running water which, say what you please about it, had once been so de luxe as to be next door to sybaritic.

She knew all three of the people whose conversation her entrance had interrupted. The plump fussy-looking man at the desk, with hair not really gray but showing signs of it, was Arthur Tingley, grandson of the name on the door. The one with hair completely gray, even white, standing like a parson with his hands behind his back and four buttons on his coat, all buttoned, was Sol Fry, the sales manager. The woman, somewhere between the two men as to age, who in case of need could have been transformed instantly into the commanding officer of a Women’s Battalion by merely buying her a uniform, was G. Yates, devoid of title in the unincorporated firm, but actually in charge of production. No one was supposed to know that the G. stood for Gwendolyn; Amy had learned it inadvertently from Phil Tingley.

They greeted her, Sol Fry and G. Yates amicably enough though without exuberance, Arthur Tingley with a frown of irritation and a voice to match. The greetings over, he demanded brusquely:

“I suppose that Bonner woman sent you here? Have you accomplished anything?”

Amy counted three, as she had decided to do, knowing in advance that this interview would require self-control in the face of provocation. “I’m afraid,” she said calmly and, she hoped, not aggressively, “we haven’t accomplished much. But Miss Bonner didn’t send me. I came personally — I mean not officially — not from Miss Bonner. There’s something I think I ought to tell you.” She glanced at the other two. “Privately.”

“What do you mean?” He was glancing at her. “Do you mean a private matter? What kind of a private matter? This is a business firm and these are business hours!”

“We’ll go,” said G. Yates in a decided but surprisingly soprano voice. “Come on, Sol—”

“No!” Tingley snapped. “You stay.”

But the woman had Sol Fry’s elbow and was steering him to a door; not the one Amy had entered by. As she opened it she turned:

“She’s your niece and she wants to talk with you. We ought to be taking a look anyhow.”

The closing door rattled the partition. Tingley frowned at it, then at his niece, and snapped. “Well? Now that you’ve interrupted an important conference to bother me with your private affairs—”

“I didn’t say it was my private affair. I didn’t know I was interrupting a conference. I was told to come on in.”

“Certainly you were! I wanted to tell you something! I wanted to tell you that I learned only this morning that it was you who had been put to work on this thing, and I told that Bonner woman that I didn’t trust you and I wouldn’t have it!” Tingley slapped the desk with his palm. “And I won’t! If she has already told you and that’s what you came to see me about, I’ll give you three minutes by my watch!” He pulled it from his vest pocket.

Amy felt that she was trembling, and knew that she was beyond the point where counting three would help any. He was simply too impossible. But though she had failed to control her adrenaline, she would at all events control her voice, and she succeeded. “You may be my mother’s brother,” she said firmly and clearly, “but you’re a troglodyte,” and turned and left the room, paying no attention to the sputtering behind her.

She retraced her way through the labyrinth of partitions, on through the anteroom, to the head of the creaky old stairs, and descended to the street, and walked east at a brisk and determined pace. She was good and mad. So the miserable creature had told Miss Bonner he didn’t trust her, had he? But that was nothing worse than a minor irritation, since she had explained things to Miss Bonner when the assignment had been given her. She considered that for a block, and passed on to other aspects. At Seventh Avenue she turned south and, getting warm, unfastened the gray fur coat to let in some air.

If she lost her job, that would be bad. She had to have a job, and this was a pretty good one. But it was a very complicated and confused situation. Very. In spite of that, she had decided what to do, and had gone to do it, and had failed because she had got mad at Uncle Arthur when he had acted as she had known he would act. Now it was just as complicated and confused as ever.

Preoccupied, buried in her problem, she bumped into people twice, which wasn’t like her. At Fourteenth Street she did something more perilous. Stepping down from the curb and emerging incautiously from behind a parked taxi, she walked smack into the bumper of a passing car and was knocked flat.