The 42nd Parallel

Eleanor Stoddard

When she was small she hated everything. She hated her father, a stout redhaired man smelling of whiskers and stale pipetobacco. He worked in an office in the stockyards and came home with the stockyards stench on his clothes and told bloody jokes about butchering sheep and steers and hogs and men. Eleanor hated smells and the sight of blood. Nights she used to dream she lived alone with her mother in a big clean white house in Oak Park in winter when there was snow on the ground and she’d been setting a white linen tablecloth with bright white silver and she’d set white flowers and the white meat of chicken before her mother who was a society lady in a dress of white samite, but there’d suddenly be a tiny red speck on the table and it would grow and grow and her mother would make helpless fluttering motions with her hands and she’d try to brush it off but it would grow a spot of blood welling into a bloody blot spreading over the tablecloth and she’d wake up out of the nightmare smelling the stockyards and screaming.

When she was sixteen in highschool she and a girl named Isabelle swore together that if a boy ever touched them they’d kill themselves. But that fall the girl got pneumonia after scarlet fever and died.

The only other person Eleanor liked was Miss Oliphant, her English teacher. Miss Oliphant had been born in England. Her parents had come to Chicago when she was a girl in her teens. She was a great enthusiast for the English language, tried to get her pupils to use the broad “a” and felt that she had a right to some authority in matters pertaining to English literature due to being distantly related to a certain Mrs. Oliphant who’d been an English literary lady in the middle nineteenth century and had written so beautifully about Florence. So she’d occasionally have her more promising pupils, those who seemed the children of nicer parents, to tea in her little flat where she lived all alone with a sleepy blue Persian cat and a bullfinch, and talk to them about Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson’s pithy sayings and Keats and cor cordium and how terrible it was he died so young and Tennyson and how rude he’d been to women and about how they changed the guard at Whitehall and the grapevine Henry the Eighth planted at Hampton Court and the illfated Mary Queen of Scots. Miss Oliphant’s parents had been Catholics and had considered the Stuarts the rightful heirs to the British throne, and used to pass their wineglasses over the waterpitcher when they drank to the king. All this thrilled the boys and girls very much and particularly Eleanor and Isabelle, and Miss Oliphant used to give them high grades for their compositions and encourage them to read. Eleanor was very fond of her and very attentive in class. Just to hear Miss Oliphant pronounce a phrase like “The Great Monuments of English Prose,” or “The Little Princes in the Tower” or “St. George and Merrie England” made small chills go up and down her spine. When Isabelle died, Miss Oliphant was so lovely about it, had her to tea with her all alone and read her “Lycidas” in a clear crisp voice and told her to read “Adonais” when she got home, but that she couldn’t read it to her because she knew she’d break down if she did. Then she talked about her best friend when she’d been a girl who’d been an Irish girl with red hair and a clear warm white skin like Crown Darby, my dear, and how she’d gone to India and died of the fever, and how Miss Oliphant had never thought to survive her grief and how Crown Darby had been invented and the inventor had spent his last penny working on the formula for this wonderful china and had needed some gold as the last ingredient, and they had been starving to death and there had been nothing left but his wife’s wedding ring and how they kept the fire in the furnace going with their chairs and tables and at least he had produced this wonderful china that the royal family used exclusively.

It was Miss Oliphant who induced Eleanor to take courses at the Art Institute. She had reproductions on her walls of pictures by Rossetti and Burne-Jones and talked to Eleanor about the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She made her feel that Art was something ivory white and very pure and noble and distant and sad.

When her mother died of pernicious anaemia Eleanor was a thin girl of eighteen, working days in a laceshop in the Loop and studying commercial art evenings at the Art Institute. After the funeral she went home and packed her belongings and moved to Moody House. She hardly ever went to see her father. He sometimes called her up on the phone but whenever she could she avoided answering. She wanted to forget all about him.

In the laceshop they liked her because she was so refined and gave the place what old Mrs. Lang who owned the store called “an indefinable air of chic,” but they only paid her ten dollars a week and five of that went for rent and board. She didn’t eat much, but the food was so bad in the dining hall and she hated sitting with the other girls so that sometimes she had to get an extra bottle of milk to drink in her room and some weeks she’d find herself without money to buy pencils and drawingpaper with and would have to go by to see her father and get a couple of dollars from him. He gave it to her gladly enough, but somehow that made her hate him more than ever.

Evenings she used to sit in her little sordid cubbyhole of a room with its ugly bedspread and ugly iron bed, while a sound of hymnsinging came up from the common hall, reading Ruskin and Pater out of the public library. Sometimes she would let the book drop on her knees and sit all evening staring at the dim reddish electriclight bulb that was all the management allowed.

Whenever she asked for a raise Mrs. Lang said, “Why, you’ll be marrying soon and leaving me, dear; a girl with your style, indefinable chic can’t stay single long, and then you won’t need it.”

Sundays she usually took the train out to Pullman where her mother’s sister had a little house. Aunt Betty was a quiet housewifely little woman who laid all Eleanor’s peculiarities to girlish fancies and kept a bright lookout for a suitable young man she could corral as a beau for her. Her husband, Uncle Joe, was foreman in a rolling mill. Many years in the rolling mill had made him completely deaf, but he claimed that actually in the mill he could hear what was said perfectly. If it was summer he spent Sunday hoeing his gardenpatch where he specialized in lettuce and asters. In winter or in bad weather he’d be sitting in the front room reading The Railroad Man’s Magazine. Aunt Betty would cook an elaborate dinner from recipes out of The Ladies’ Home Journal and they’d ask Eleanor to arrange the flowers for them on the dinnertable. After dinner Aunt Betty would wash the dishes and Eleanor would wipe them, and while the old people took their nap she would sit in the front room reading the society section of The Chicago Tribune. After supper if it was fine the old people would walk down to the station with her and put her on the train, and Aunt Betty would say that it was a shocking shame for a lovely girl like her to be living all alone in the big city. Eleanor would smile a bright bitter smile and say that she wasn’t afraid.

The cars going home would be crowded Sunday nights with young men and girls sticky and mussed up and sunburned from an outing in the country or on the dunes. Eleanor hated them and the Italian families with squalling brats that filled the air with a reek of wine and garlic and the Germans redfaced from a long afternoon’s beer-drinking and the drunk Finn and Swedish workmen who stared at her with a blue alcoholic gleam out of wooden faces. Sometimes a man would try to start something and she’d have to move into another car.

Once, when the car was very crowded a curlyhaired man rubbed himself up against her suggestively. The crowd was so thick she couldn’t pull herself away from him. She could hardly keep from screaming out for help; it was only that she felt it was so vulgar to make a fuss. Uncontrollable dizziness came over her when she finally forced her way out at her station, and she had to stop at a drugstore on the way home for a little aromatic spirits of ammonia. She rushed through the hall of Moody House and up to her room still trembling. She was nauseated and one of the other girls found her being sick in the bathroom and looked at her so queerly. She was very unhappy at times like that and thought of suicide. She had painful cramps during her monthly periods and used to have to stay in bed at least one day every month. Often she felt miserable for a whole week.

One Fall day she had phoned Mrs. Lang that she was sick and would have to stay in bed. She went back up to her room and lay down on the bed and read Romola. She was reading through the complete works of George Eliot that were in the Moody House library. When the old scrubwoman opened the door to make the bed she said, “Sick… I’ll clean up, Mrs. Koontz.” In the afternoon she got hungry and the sheets were all rumply under her back and although she felt rather ashamed of herself for feeling able to go out when she’d told Mrs. Lang she was too sick to move she suddenly felt she would suffocate if she stayed in her room another minute. She dressed carefully and went downstairs feeling a little furtive. “So you’re not so sick after all,” said Mrs. Biggs, the matron, when she passed her in the hall. “I just felt I needed a breath of air.” “Too bad about you,” she heard Mrs. Biggs say under her breath as she went out the door. Mrs. Biggs was very suspicious of Eleanor because she was an art student.

Feeling a little faint she stopped at a drugstore and had some aromatic spirits of ammonia in water. Then she took a car down to Grant Park. A tremendous northwest wind was blowing grit and papers in whirls along the lakefront.

She went into the Art Institute and up into the Stickney Room to see the Whistlers. She liked the Art Institute better than anything else in Chicago, better than anything else in the world, the quiet, the absence of annoying men, the smooth smell of varnish from the paintings. Except on Sundays when the crowd came and it was horrid. Today there was no one in the Stickney Room but another girl welldressed in a gray fox neckpiece and a little gray hat with a feather in it. The other girl was looking fixedly at the portrait of Manet. Eleanor was interested; she rather pretended to look at the Whistlers than look at them. Whenever she could she looked at the other girl. She found herself standing beside the other girl also looking at the portrait of Manet. Suddenly their eyes met. The other girl had palebrown almondshaped eyes rather far apart. “I think he’s the best painter in the world,” she said combatively as if she wanted somebody to deny it. “I think he’s a lovely painter,” said Eleanor, trying to keep her voice from trembling. “I love that picture.” “You know that’s not by Manet himself, that’s by Fantin-Latour,” said the other girl. “Oh, yes, of course,” said Eleanor.

There was a pause. Eleanor was afraid that would be all, but the other girl said, “What other pictures do you like?” Eleanor looked carefully at the Whistler; then she said slowly, “I like Whistler and Corot.” “I do, too, but I like Millet best. He’s so round and warm… Have you ever been to Barbizon?” “No, but I’d love to.” There was a pause. “But I think Millet’s a little coarse, don’t you?” Eleanor ventured. “You mean that chromo of the Angelus? Yes, I simply loathe and despise religious feeling in a picture, don’t you?” Eleanor didn’t quite know what to say to that, so she shook her head and said, “I love Whistler so; when I’ve been looking at them I can look out of the window and everything looks, you know, pastelly like that.”

“I have an idea,” said the other girl who had been looking at a little watch she had in her handbag. “I don’t have to be home till six. Why don’t you come and have tea with me? I know a little place where you can get very good tea, a German pastry shop. I don’t have to be home till six and we can have a nice long chat. You won’t think it’s unconventional of me asking you, will you? I like unconventionality, don’t you? Don’t you hate Chicago?”

Yes, Eleanor did hate Chicago and conventional people and all that. They went to the pastryshop and drank tea and the girl in gray, whose name was Eveline Hutchins, took hers with lemon in it. Eleanor talked a great deal and made the other girl laugh. Her father, Eleanor found herself explaining, was a painter who lived in Florence and whom she hadn’t seen since she was a little girl. There had been a divorce and her mother had married again, a business man connected with Armour and Company, and now her mother was dead and she had only some relatives at Lake Forest; she studied at the Art Institute but was thinking of giving it up because the teachers didn’t suit her. She thought living in Chicago was just too horrible and wanted to go East. “Why don’t you go to Florence and live with your father?” asked Eveline Hutchins.

“Well, I might some day, when my ship comes in,” said Eleanor.

“Oh, well, I’ll never be rich,” said Eveline. “My father’s a clergyman

… Let’s go to Florence together, Eleanor, and call on your father. If we arrived there he couldn’t very well throw us out.”

“I’d love to take a trip some day.”

“It’s time I was home. By the way, where do you live? Let’s meet tomorrow afternoon and look at all the pictures together.”

“I’m afraid I’ll be busy tomorrow.”

“Well, maybe you can come to supper some night. I’ll ask mother when I can have you. It’s so rare to meet a girl you can talk to. We live on Drexel Boulevard. Here’s my card. I’ll send you a postcard and you’ll promise to come, won’t you?”

“I’d love to, if it’s not earlier than seven… You see I have an occupation that keeps me busy every afternoon except Sunday, and Sundays I usually go out to see my relatives in…”

“In Lake Forest?”

“Yes… When I’m in town I live at a sort of Y.W.C.A. place, Moody House; it’s plebeian but convenient… I’ll write down the address on this card.” The card was of Mrs. Lang’s, “Imported Laces and Hand-Embroidered Fabrics.” She wrote her address on it, scratched out the other side and handed it to Eveline. “That’s lovely,” she said, “I’ll drop you a card this very night and you’ll promise to come, won’t you?”

Eleanor saw her onto the streetcar and started to walk slowly along the street. She had forgotten all about feeling sick, but now that the other girl had gone she felt let down and shabbily dressed and lonely picking her way through the windy evening bustle of the streets.

Eleanor made several friends through Eveline Hutchins. The first time she went to the Hutchinses she was too awed to notice much, but later she felt freer with them, particularly as she discovered that they all thought her an interesting girl and very refined. There were Dr. and Mrs. Hutchins and two daughters and a son away at college. Dr. Hutchins was a Unitarian minister and very broadminded and Mrs. Hutchins did watercolors of flowers that were declared to show great talent. The elder daughter, Grace, had been at school in the East, at Vassar, and was thought to have shown ability in a literary way, the son was taking postgraduate Greek at Harvard and Eveline was taking the most interesting courses right there at Northwestern. Dr. Hutchins was a softvoiced man with a large smooth pinkish face and large smooth white deadlooking hands. The Hutchinses were all planning to go abroad next year which would be Dr. Hutchins’ sabbatical. Eleanor had never heard talk like that before and it thrilled her.

Then one evening Eveline took her to Mrs. Shuster’s. “You mustn’t say anything about Mrs. Shuster at home, will you?” said Eveline as they were coming down from the Elevated. “Mr. Shuster is an art dealer and my father thinks they’re a little too Bohemian… It’s just because Annie Shuster came to our house one night and smoked all through dinner…. I said we’d go to the concert at the Auditorium.”

Eleanor had made herself a new dress, a very simple white dress, with a little green on it, not exactly an evening dress, but one she could wear any time, for the occasion, and when Annie Shuster, a dumpy little redhaired woman with a bouncy manner of walking and talking helped them off with their wraps in the hall she exclaimed how pretty it was. “Why, yes, it’s lovely,” said Eveline. “In fact, you’re looking pretty as a peach tonight, Eleanor.” “I bet that dress wasn’t made in this town… Looks like Paris to me,” said Mrs. Shuster. Eleanor smiled deprecatingly and blushed a little and looked handsomer than ever.

There were a great many people packed into two small rooms and cigarette smoke and coffeecups and smell of some kind of punch. Mr. Shuster was a whitehaired grayfaced man with a head too large for his body and a tired manner. He talked like an Englishman. There were several young men standing round him; one of them Eleanor had known casually when she had studied at the Art Institute. His name was Eric Egstrom and she had always liked him; he was tow-haired and blue-eyed and had a little blond mustache. She could see that Mr. Shuster thought a lot of him. Eveline took her around and introduced her to everybody and asked everybody questions that seemed sometimes disconcerting. Men and women both smoked and talked about books and pictures and about people Eleanor had never heard of. She looked around and didn’t say much and noticed the Greek silhouettes on the orange lampshades and the pictures on the walls which looked very odd indeed and the two rows of yellowbacked French books on the shelves and felt that she might learn a great deal there.

They went away early because Eveline had to go by the Auditorium to see what the program at the concert was for fear she might be asked about it, and Eric and another young man took them home. After they’d left Eveline at her house they asked Eleanor where she lived and she hated to say Moody House because it was in such a horridlooking street, so she made them walk with her to an Elevated station and ran up the steps quickly and wouldn’t let them come with her, although it scared her to go home alone as late as it was.

Many of Mrs. Lang’s customers thought Eleanor was French, on account of her dark hair, her thin oval face and her transparent skin. In fact, one day when a Mrs. McCormick that Mrs. Lang suspected might be one of “the” McCormicks asked after that lovely French girl who waited on her before, Mrs. Lang got an idea. Eleanor would have to be French from now on; so she bought her twenty tickets at the Berlitz School and said she could have the hour off in the morning between nine and ten if she would go and take French lessons there. So all through December and January Eleanor studied French three times a week with an old man in a smelly alpaca jacket and began to slip a phrase in now and then as unconcernedly as she could when she was talking to the customers, and when there was anybody in the shop Mrs. Lang always called her “Mademoiselle.”

She worked hard and borrowed yellowbacked books from the Shusters to read in the evenings with a dictionary and soon she knew more French than Eveline did who had had a French governess when she was little. One day at the Berlitz School she found she had a new teacher. The old man had pneumonia and she had a young Frenchman instead. He was a thin young man with a sharp blueshaved chin and large brown eyes with long lashes. Eleanor liked him at once, his thin aristocratic hands and his aloof manner. After half an hour they had forgotten all about the lesson and were talking English. He spoke English with a funny accent but fluently. She particularly liked the throaty way he pronounced “r.”

Next time she was all tingling going up the stairs to see if it would be the same young man. It was. He told her that the old man had died. She felt she ought to be sorry but she wasn’t. The young man noticed how she felt and screwed his face up into a funny half laughing, half crying expression and said, “Vae victis.” Then he told her about his home in France and how he hated the conventional bourgeois life there and how he’d come to America because it was the land of youth and the future and skyscrapers and the Twentieth Century Limited and how beautiful he thought Chicago was. Eleanor had never heard anyone talk like that and told him he must have gone through Ireland and kissed the blarney stone. Then he looked very aggrieved and said, “Mademoiselle, c’est la pure vérité,” and she said she believed him absolutely and how interesting it was to meet him and how she must introduce him to her friend Eveline Hutchins. Then he went on to tell her how he’d lived in New Orleans and how he’d come as a steward on a French Line boat and how he’d worked as dishwasher and busboy and played the piano in cabarets and worse places than that and how much he loved Negroes and how he was a painter and wanted so much to get a studio and paint but that he hadn’t the money yet. Eleanor was a little chilled by the part about dishwashing and cabarets and colored people, but when he said he was interested in art she felt she really would have to introduce him to Eveline and she felt very bold and unconventional when she asked him to meet them at the Art Institute Sunday afternoon. After all if they decided against it they wouldn’t have to go.

Eveline was thrilled to death but they got Eric Egstrom to come along too, on account of Frenchmen having such a bad reputation. The Frenchman was very late and they began to be afraid he wasn’t coming or that they’d missed him in the crowd but at last Eleanor saw him coming up the big staircase. His name was Maurice Millet — no, no relation of the painter’s — and he shocked them all very much by refusing to look at any paintings in the Art Institute and saying that he thought it ought to be burned down and used a lot of words like cubism and futurism that Eleanor had never heard before. But she could see at once that he had made a great hit with Eveline and Eric; in fact, they hung on his every word and all through tea neither of them paid any attention to Eleanor. Eveline invited Maurice to the house and they all went to supper to Drexel Boulevard where Maurice was very polite to Dr. and Mrs. Hutchins, and on to the Shusters afterwards. They left the Shusters together and Maurice said that the Shusters were impossible and had very bad paintings on their walls, “Tout ça c’est affreusement pompier,” he said. Eleanor was puzzled but Eveline and Eric said that they understood perfectly that he meant they knew as little about art as a firemen’s convention, and they laughed a great deal.

The next time she saw Eveline, Eveline confessed that she was madly in love with Maurice and they both cried a good deal and decided that after all their beautiful friendship could stand even that. It was up in Eveline’s room at Drexel Boulevard. On the mantel was a portrait Eveline was trying to do of him in pastels from memory. They sat side by side on the bed, very close, with their arms round each other and talked solemnly about each other and Eleanor told about how she felt about men; Eveline didn’t feel quite that way but nothing could ever break up their beautiful friendship and they’d always tell each other everything.

About that time Eric Egstrom got a job in the interior decorating department at Marshall Field’s that paid him fifty a week. He got a fine studio with a northlight in an alley off North Clark Street and Maurice went to live with him there. The girls were there a great deal and they had many friends in and tea in glasses Russian style and sometimes a little Virginia Dare wine, so they didn’t have to go to the Shusters any more. Eleanor was always trying to get in a word alone with Eveline; and the fact that Maurice didn’t like Eveline the way Eveline liked him made Eveline very unhappy, but Maurice and Eric seemed to be thoroughly happy. They slept in the same bed and were always together. Eleanor used to wonder about them sometimes but it was so nice to know boys who weren’t horrid about women. They all went to the opera together and to concerts and art exhibitions — it was Eveline or Eric who usually bought the tickets and paid when they ate in restaurants — and Eleanor had a better time those few months than she’d ever had in her life before. She never went out to Pullman any more and she and Eveline talked about getting a studio together when the Hutchinses came back from their trip abroad. The thought that every day brought June nearer and that then she would lose Eveline and have to face the horrid gritty dusty sweaty Chicago Summer alone made Eleanor a little miserable sometimes, but Eric was trying to get her a job in his department at Marshall Field’s, and she and Eveline were following a course of lectures on interior decorating at the University evenings, and that gave her something to look forward to.

Maurice painted the loveliest pictures in pale buffs and violets of longfaced boys with big luminous eyes and long lashes, and longfaced girls that looked like boys, and Russian wolfhounds with big luminous eyes, and always in the back there were a few girders or a white skyscraper and a big puff of white clouds and Eveline and Eleanor thought it was such a shame that he had to go on teaching at the Berlitz School.

The day before Eveline sailed for Europe they had a little party at Egstrom’s place. Maurice’s pictures were around the walls and they were all glad and sorry and excited and tittered a great deal. Then Egstrom came in with the news that he had told his boss about Eleanor and how she knew French and had studied art and was so goodlooking and everything and Mr. Spotmann had said to bring her around at noon tomorrow, and that the job, if she could hold it down, would pay at least twentyfive a week. There had been an old lady in to see Maurice’s paintings and she was thinking of buying one; they all felt very gay and drank quite a lot of wine, so that in the end when it was time for goodbyes it was Eveline who felt lonesome at going away from them all, instead of Eleanor feeling lonesome at being left behind as she had expected.

When Eleanor walked back along the platform from seeing the Hutchinses all off for New York the next evening, and their bags all labelled for the steamship Baltic and their eyes all bright with the excitement of going East and going abroad and the smell of coalsmoke and the clang of engine bells and scurry of feet, she walked with her fists clenched and her sharppointed nails dug into the palms of her hands, saying to herself over and over again: “I’ll be going, too; it’s only a question of time; I’ll be going, too.”