The 42nd Parallel

Eleanor Stoddard

Working at Marshall Field’s was very different from working at Mrs. Lang’s. At Mrs. Lang’s she had only one boss but in the big store she seemed to have everybody in the department over her. Still she was so refined and cold and had such a bright definite little way of talking that although people didn’t like her much, she got along well. Even Mrs. Potter and Mr. Spotmann, the department heads, were a little afraid of her. News got around that she was a society girl and didn’t really have to earn a living at all. She was very sympathetic with the customers about their problems of homemaking and had a little humble-condescending way with Mrs. Potter and admired her clothes, so that at the end of a month Mrs. Potter said to Mr. Spotmann, “I think we have quite a find in the Stoddard girl,” and Mr. Spotmann without opening his white trap of an old woman’s mouth said, “I’ve thought so all along.”

When Eleanor stepped out on Randolph one sunny afternoon with her first week’s pay envelope in her hand she felt pretty happy. She had such a sharp little smile on her thin lips that a couple of people turned to look at her as she walked along ducking her head into the gusty wind to keep her hat from being blown off. She turned down Michigan Avenue towards the Auditorium looking at the bright shop windows and the verypale blue sky and the piles of dovegray fluffy clouds over the lake and the white blobs of steam from the locomotives. She went into the deep amberlit lobby of the Auditorium Annex, sat down all by herself at a wicker table in the corner of the lounge and sat there a long while all by herself drinking a cup of tea and eating buttered toast, ordering the waiter about with a crisp little refined monied voice.

Then she went to Moody House, packed her things and moved to the Eleanor Club, where she got a room for seven-fifty with board. But the room wasn’t much better and everything still had the gray smell of a charitable institution, so the next week she moved again to a small residential hotel on the North Side where she got room and board for fifteen a week. As that only left her a balance of three-fifty — it had turned out that the job only paid twenty, which actually only meant eighteen-fifty when insurance was taken off — she had to go to see her father again. She so impressed him with her rise in the world and the chances of a raise that he promised her five a week, although he was only making twenty himself and was planning to marry again, to a Mrs. O’Toole, a widow with five children who kept a boardinghouse out Elsdon way.

Eleanor refused to go to see her future stepmother, and made her father promise to send her the money in a moneyorder each week, as he couldn’t expect her to go all the way out to Elsdon to get it. When she left him she kissed him on the forehead and made him feel quite happy. All the time she was telling herself that this was the very last time.

Then she went back to the Hotel Ivanhoe and went up to her room and lay on her back on the comfortable brass bed looking round at her little room with its white woodwork and its pale yellow wallpaper with darker satiny stripes and the lace curtains in the window and the heavy hangings. There was a crack in the plaster of the ceiling and the carpet was worn, but the hotel was very refined, she could see that, full of old couples living on small incomes and the help were very elderly and polite and she felt at home for the first time in her life.

When Eveline Hutchins came back from Europe the next Spring wearing a broad hat with a plume on it, full of talk of the Salon des Tuileries and the Rue de la Paix and museums and art exhibitions and the opera, she found Eleanor a changed girl. She looked older than she was, dressed quietly and fashionably, had a new bitter sharp way of talking. She was thoroughly established in the interior decorating department at Marshall Field’s and expected a raise any day, but she wouldn’t talk about it. She had given up going to classes or haunting the Art Institute and spent a great deal of time with an old maiden lady who also lived at the Ivanhoe who was reputed to be very rich and very stingy, a Miss Eliza Perkins.

The first Sunday she was back Eleanor had Eveline to tea at the hotel and they sat in the stuffy lounge talking in refined whispers with the old lady. Eveline asked about Eric and Maurice, and Eleanor supposed that they were all right, but hadn’t seen them much since Eric had lost his job at Marshall Field’s. He wasn’t turning out so well as she had hoped, she said. He and Maurice had taken to drinking a great deal and going round with questionable companions, and Eleanor rarely got a chance to see them. She had dinner every evening with Miss Perkins and Miss Perkins thought a great deal of her and bought her clothes and took her with her driving in the park and sometimes to the theater when there was something really worth while on, Minnie Maddern Fiske or Guy Bates Post in an interesting play. Miss Perkins was the daughter of a wealthy saloon keeper and had been played false in her youth by a young lawyer whom she had trusted to invest some money for her and whom she had fallen in love with. He had run away with another girl and a number of cash certificates. Just how much she had left Eleanor hadn’t been able to find out, but as she always took the best seats at the theater and liked going to dinner at expensive hotels and restaurants and hired a carriage by the half day whenever she wanted one, she gathered that she must still be well off.

After they had left Miss Perkins to go to the Hutchinses for supper, Eveline said: “Well, I declare — I don’t see what you see in that… that little old maid… And here I was just bursting to tell you a million things and to ask you a million questions… I think it was mean of you.”

“I’m very devoted to her, Eveline. I thought you’d be interested in meeting any dear friend of mine.”

“Oh, of course I am, dear, but, gracious, I can’t make you out.” “Well, you won’t have to see her again, though I could tell by her manner that she thought you were lovely.”

Walking from the Elevated station to the Hutchinses it was more like old times again. Eleanor told about the hard feelings that were growing between Mr. Spotmann and Mrs. Potter and how they both wanted her to be on their side, and made Eveline laugh, and Eveline confessed that on the Kroonland coming back she had fallen very much in love with a man from Salt Lake City, such a relief after all those foreigners, and Eleanor teased her about it and said he was probably a Mormon and Eveline laughed and said, No, he was a judge, and admitted that he was married already. “You see,” said Eleanor, “of course he’s a Mormon.” But Eveline said that she knew he wasn’t and that if he’d divorce his wife she’d marry him in a minute. Then Eleanor said she didn’t believe in divorce and if they hadn’t gotten to the door they would have started quarrelling.

That winter she didn’t see much of Eveline. Eveline had many beaux and went out a great deal to parties and Eleanor used to read about her on the society page Sunday mornings. She was very busy and often too tired at night even to go to the theater with Miss Perkins. The row between Mrs. Potter and Mr. Spotmann had come to a head and the management had moved Mrs. Potter to another department and she had let herself plunk into an old Spanish chair and had broken down and cried right in front of the customers and Eleanor had had to take her to the dressing room and borrow smelling salts for her and help her do up her peroxide hair into the big pompadour again and consoled her by saying that she would probably like it much better over in the other building anyway. After that Mr. Spotmann was very goodnatured for several months. He occasionally took Eleanor out to lunch with him and they had a little joke that they laughed about together about Mrs. Potter’s pompadour wobbling when she’d cried in front of the customers. He sent Eleanor out on many little errands to wealthy homes, and the customers liked her because she was so refined and sympathetic and the other employees in the department hated her and nicknamed her “teacher’s pet.” Mr. Spotmann even said that he’d try to get her a percentage on commissions and talked often about giving her that raise to twenty-five a week.

Then one day Eleanor got home late to supper and the old clerk at the hotel told her that Miss Perkins had been stricken with heartfailure while eating steak and kidney pie for lunch and had died right in the hotel dining room and that the body had been removed to the Irving Funeral Chapel and asked her if she knew any of her relatives that should be notified. Eleanor knew nothing except that her financial business was handled by the Corn Exchange Bank and that she thought that she had nieces in Mound City, but didn’t know their names. Their clerk was very worried about who would pay for the removal of the body and the doctor and a week’s unpaid hotel bill and said that all her things would be held under seal until some qualified person appeared to claim them. He seemed to think Miss Perkins had died especially to spite the hotel management.

Eleanor went up to her room and locked the door and threw herself on the bed and cried a little, because she’d been fond of Miss Perkins.

Then a thought crept into her mind that made her heart beat fast. Suppose Miss Perkins had left her a fortune in her will. Things like that happened. Young men who opened church pews, coachman who picked up a handbag; old ladies were always leaving their fortunes to people like that.

She could see it in headlines MARSHALL FIELD EMPLOYEE INHERITS MILLION.

She couldn’t sleep all night and in the morning she found the manager of the hotel and offered to do anything she could. She called up Mr. Spotmann and coaxed him to give her the day off, explaining that she was virtually prostrated by Miss Perkins’s death. Then she called up the Corn Exchange Bank and talked to a Mr. Smith who had been in charge of the Perkins estate. He assured her that the bank would do everything in its power to protect the heirs and the residuary legatees and said that the will was in Miss Perkins’s safe deposit box and that he was sure everything was in proper legal form.

Eleanor had nothing to do all day, so she got hold of Eveline for lunch and afterwards they went to Keith’s together. She felt it wasn’t just proper to go to the theater with her old friend still lying at the undertaker’s, but she was so nervous and hysterical she had to do something to take her mind off this horrible shock. Eveline was very sympathetic and they felt closer than they had since the Hutchinses had gone abroad. Eleanor didn’t say anything about her hopes.

At the funeral there were only Eleanor and the Irish chambermaid at the hotel, an old woman who sniffled and crossed herself a great deal, and Mr. Smith and a Mr. Sullivan who was representing the Mound City relatives. Eleanor wore black and the undertaker came up to her and said, “Excuse me, miss, but I can’t refrain from remarking how lovely you look, just like a Bermuda lily.” It wasn’t as bad as she had expected and afterwards Eleanor and Mr. Smith and Mr. Sullivan, the representative of the law firm who had charge of the interests of the relatives, were quite jolly together coming out of the crematorium.

It was a sparkling October day and everybody agreed that October was the best month in the year and that the minister had read the funeral service very beautifully. Mr. Smith asked Eleanor wouldn’t she eat lunch with them as she was mentioned in the will, and Eleanor’s heart almost stopped beating and she cast down her eyes and said she’d be very pleased.

They all got into a taxi. Mr. Sullivan said it was pleasant to roll away from the funeral chapel and such gloomy thoughts. They went to lunch at de Yonghe’s and Eleanor made them laugh telling them about how they’d acted at the hotel and what a scurry everybody had been in, but when they handed her the menu said that she couldn’t eat a thing. Still when she saw the planked whitefish she said that she’d take just a little to pick to pieces on her plate. It turned out that the windy October air had made them all hungry and the long ride in the taxi. Eleanor enjoyed her lunch very much and after the whitefish she ate a little Waldorf salad and then a peach melba.

The gentlemen asked her whether she would mind if they smoked cigars and Mr. Smith put on a rakish look and said would she have a cigarette and she blushed and said no, she never smoked and Mr. Sullivan said he’d never respect a woman who smoked and Mr. Smith said some of the girls of the best families in Chicago smoked and as for himself he didn’t see the harm in it if they didn’t make chimneys of themselves. After lunch they walked across the street and went up in the elevator to Mr. Sullivan’s office and there they sat down in big leather chairs and Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Smith put on solemn faces and Mr. Smith cleared his throat and began to read the will. Eleanor couldn’t make it out at first and Mr. Smith had to explain to her that the bulk of the fortune of three million dollars was left to the Florence Crittenton home for wayward girls, but that the sum of one thousand dollars each was to the three nieces in Mound City and that a handsome diamond brooch in the form of a locomotive was left to Eleanor Stoddard and, “If you call at the Corn Exchange Bank some time tomorrow, Miss Stoddard,” said Mr. Smith, “I shall be very glad to deliver it to you.”

Eleanor burst out crying.

They both were very sympathetic and so touched that Miss Stoddard should be so touched by the remembrance of her old friend. As she left the office, promising to call for the brooch tomorrow, Mr. Sullivan was just saying in the friendliest voice, “Mr. Smith, you understand that I shall have to endeavor to break that will in the interests of the Mound City Perkinses,” and Mr. Smith said in the friendliest voice, “I suppose so, Mr. Sullivan, but I don’t see that you can get very far with it. It’s an ironclad, copper-riveted document if I do say so as shouldn’t, because I drew it up myself.”

So next day at eight Eleanor was on her way down to Marshall Field’s again and there she stayed for several years. She got the raise and the percentages on commissions and she and Mr. Spotmann got to be quite thick, but he never tried to make love to her and their relations were always formal; that was a relief to Eleanor because she kept hearing stories about floorwalkers and department heads forcing their attentions on the young girl employees and Mr. Elwood of the furniture department had been discharged for that very reason, when it came out that little Lizzie Dukes was going to have a baby, but perhaps that hadn’t been all Mr. Elwood’s fault as Lizzie Dukes didn’t look as if she was any better than she should be; anyway it seemed to Eleanor as if she’d spend the rest of her life furnishing other people’s new drawingrooms and diningrooms, matching curtains and samples of upholstery and wallpaper, smoothing down indignant women customers who’d been sent an oriental china dog instead of an inlaid teak teatable or who even after they’d chosen it themselves weren’t satisfied with the pattern on that cretonne.

She found Eveline Hutchins waiting for her one evening when the store closed. Eveline wasn’t crying but was deathly pale. She said she hadn’t had anything to eat for two days and wouldn’t Eleanor have some tea with her over at the Sherman House or anywhere.

They went to the Auditorium Annex and sat in the lounge and ordered tea and cinnamon toast and then Eveline told her that she’d broken off her engagement with Dirk McArthur and that she’d decided not to kill herself but to go to work. “I’ll never fall in love with anybody again, that’s all, but I’ve got to do something and you’re just wasting yourself in that stuffy department store, Eleanor; you know you never get a chance to show what you can do; you’re just wasting your ability.”

Eleanor said that she hated it like poison but what was she to do? “Why not do what we’ve been talking about all these years… Oh, people make me so mad, they never will have any nerve or do anything that’s fun or interesting… I bet you if we started a decorating business we’d have lots of orders. Sally Emerson’ll give us her new house to decorate and then everybody else’ll just have to have us to be in the swim… I don’t think people really want to live in the horrible stuffy places they live in; it’s just that they don’t know any better.”

Eleanor lifted her teacup and drank several little sips. She looked at her little white carefully manicured hand with pointed nails holding the teacup. Then she said, “But where’d we get the capital? We’d have to have a little capital to start on.”

“Dad’ll let us have something, I think, and maybe Sally Emerson might; she’s an awfully good sport and then our first commission’ll launch us… Oh, do come on, Eleanor; it’ll be such fun.”

“‘Hutchins and Stoddard, Interior Decorating,’” said Eleanor, putting down her teacup, “or maybe ‘Miss Hutchins and Miss Stoddard’; why, my dear, I think it’s a grand idea!” “Don’t you think just ‘Eleanor Stoddard and Eveline Hutchins’ would be better?”

“Oh, well, we can decide on the name when we hire a studio and have put it in the telephone book. Why don’t we put it this way, Eveline dear… if you can get your friend Mrs. Emerson to give us the decorating of her new house, we’ll go in for it, if not we’ll wait until we have a genuine order to start off on.” “All right; I know she will. I’ll run right out and see her now.” Eveline had a high color now. She got to her feet and leaned over Eleanor and kissed her. “Oh, Eleanor, you’re a darling.” “Wait a minute, we haven’t paid for our tea,” said Eleanor.

The next month the office was unbearable, and the customers’ complaints and leaving the Ivanhoe in a hurry every morning and being polite to Mr. Spotmann and thinking up little jokes to make him laugh. Her room at the Ivanhoe seemed small and sordid and the smell of cooking that came up through the window and the greasesmell of the old elevator. Several days she called up that she was sick and then found that she couldn’t stay in her room and roamed about the city going to shops and moving pictureshows and then getting suddenly dead tired and having to come home in a taxi that she couldn’t afford. She even went back to the Art Institute once in a while, but she knew all the pictures by heart and hadn’t the patience to look at them any more. Then at last Eveline got Mrs. Philip Paine Emerson to feeling that her new house couldn’t do without a novel note in the diningroom and they got her up an estimate much less than any of the established decorators was asking, and Eleanor had the pleasure of watching Mr. Spotmann’s astonished face when she refused to stay even with a raise to forty a week and said that she had a commission with a friend to decorate the new Paine Emerson mansion in Lake Forest.

“Well, my dear,” said Mr. Spotmann, snapping his square white mouth, “if you want to commit suicide of your career I won’t be the one to stop you. You can leave right this minute if you want to. Of course you forfeit the Christmas bonus.” Eleanor’s heart beat fast. She looked at the gray light that came through the office, and the yellow cardcatalogue case and the letters on a file and the little samples dangling from them. In the outer office Ella Bowen the stenographer had stopped typing; she was probably listening. Eleanor sniffed the lifeless air that smelt of chintz and furniturevarnish and steamheat and people’s breath and then she said, “All right, Mr. Spotmann, I will.”

It took her all day to get her pay and to collect the insurance money due her and she had a long wrangle with a cashier about the amount, so that it was late afternoon before she stepped out into the driving snow of the streets and went into a drugstore to call up Eveline.

Eveline had already rented two floors of an old Victorian house off Chicago Avenue, and they were busy all winter decorating the office and showrooms downstairs and the apartment upstairs where they were going to live, and doing Sally Emerson’s diningroom. They got a colored maid named Amelia who was a very good cook although she drank a little, and they had cigarettes and cocktails at the end of the afternoon and little dinners with wine, and found a downattheheels French dressmaker to make them evening gowns to wear when they went out with Sally Emerson and her set, and rode in taxis and got to know a lot of really interesting people. By Spring when they finally got a check for five hundred dollars out of Philip Paine Emerson they were a thousand dollars in the hole, but they were living the way they liked. The diningroom was considered a little extreme, but some people liked it, and a few more orders came. They made many friends and started going round with artists again and with special writers on The Daily News and The American who took them out to dinner in foreign restaurants that were very smoky and where they talked a great deal about modern French painting and the Middle West and going to New York. They went to the Armory Show and had a photograph of Brancusi’s Golden Bird over the desk in the office and copies of the Little Review and Poetry among the files of letters from clients and unpaid bills from wholesalers.

Eleanor went out a great deal with Tom Custis who was an elderly redfaced man, fond of music and chorusgirls and drinking, who belonged to all the clubs and for years had been a great admirer of Mary Garden. He had a box at the opera and a Stevens-Duryea and nothing to do except go to tailors and visit specialists and occasionally blackball a Jew or a newcomer applying for membership in some club he belonged to. The Armours had bought out his father’s meatpacking concern when he was still a college athlete and he hadn’t done a stroke of work since. He claimed to be thoroughly sick of social life and enjoyed taking an interest in the girls’ decorating business. He kept in close touch with Wall Street and would occasionally turn over to Eleanor a couple of shares that he was trading in. If they rose it was her gain, if they fell it was his loss. He had a wife in a private sanitarium and he and Eleanor decided they’d be just friends. Sometimes he was a little too affectionate coming home in a taxicab in the evening, but Eleanor would scold him and he’d be very contrite the next day, and send her great boxes of white flowers.

Eveline had several beaux, writers and illustrators and people like that, but they never had any money and ate and drank everything in the house when they came to dinner. One of them, Freddy Seargeant, was an actor and producer temporarily stranded in Chicago. He had friends in the Shubert office and his great ambition was to put on a pantomime like Reinhardt’s Sumurun, only based on Maya Indian stories. He had a lot of photographs of Maya ruins, and Eleanor and Eveline began to design costumes for it and settings. They hoped to get Tom Custis or the Paine Emersons to put up money for a production in Chicago.

The main trouble was with the music. A young pianist whom Tom Custis had sent to Paris to study began to write it and came and played it one night. They had quite a party for him. Sally Emerson came and a lot of fashionable people, but Tom Custis drank too many cocktails to be able to hear a note and Amelia the cook got drunk and spoiled the dinner and Eveline told the young pianist that his music sounded like movie music and he went off in a huff. When everybody had gone Freddy Seargeant and Eveline and Eleanor roamed around the ravaged apartment feeling very bad indeed. Freddy Seargeant twisted his black hair, slightly splotched with gray, in his long hands and said he was going to kill himself, and Eleanor and Eveline quarrelled violently.

“But it did sound like movingpicture music and, after all, why shouldn’t it?” Eveline kept saying. Then Freddy Seargeant got his hat and went out saying, “You women are making life a hell for me,” and Eveline burst out crying and got hysterical and Eleanor had to send for a doctor.

The next day they scraped up fifty dollars to send Freddy back to New York, and Eveline went back to live at the house on Drexel Boulevard, leaving Eleanor to carry on the decorating business all alone.

Next Spring Eleanor and Eveline sold for five hundred some chandeliers that they had picked up in a junk shop on the west side for twentyfive dollars and were just writing out checks for their more pressing debts when a telegram arrived.

SIGNED CONTRACT WITH SHUBERTS PRODUCTION RETURN OF THE NATIVE WILL YOU DO SCENERY COSTUMES HUNDRED FIFTY A WEEK EACH MUST COME ON NEW YORK IMMEDIATELY MUST HAVE YOU WIRE IMMEDIATELY HOTEL DES ARTISTES CENTRAL PARK SOUTH FREDDY

“Eleanor, we’ve got to do it,” said Eveline, taking a cigarette out of her handbag and walking round the room puffing at it furiously. “It’ll be a rush, but let’s make the Twentieth Century this afternoon.” “It’s about noon now,” said Eleanor in a trembly voice. Without answering Eveline went to the phone and called up the Pullman office. That evening they sat in their section looking out of the window at the steelworks of Indiana Harbor, the big cement works belching puttycolored smoke, the flaring furnaces of Gary disappearing in smokeswirling winter dusk. Neither of them could say anything.