The 42nd Parallel

J. Ward Moorehouse

In Pittsburgh Ward Moorehouse got a job as a reporter on The Times Dispatch and spent six months writing up Italian weddings, local conventions of Elks, obscure deaths, murders and suicides among Lithuanians, Albanians, Croats, Poles, the difficulties over naturalization papers of Greek restaurant keepers, dinners of the Sons of Italy. He lived in a big red frame house, at the lower end of Highland Avenue, kept by a Mrs. Cook, a crotchety old woman from Belfast who had been forced to take lodgers since her husband, who had been a foreman in one of the Homestead mills, had been crushed by a crane dropping a load of pigiron over him. She made Ward his breakfasts and his Sunday dinners and stood over him while he was eating them alone in the stuffy furniture-crowded diningroom telling him about her youth in the north of Ireland and the treachery of papists and the virtues of the defunct Mr. Cook.

It was a bad time for Ward. He had no friends in Pittsburgh and he had colds and sore throats all through the cold grimy sleety winter. He hated the newspaper office and the inclines and the overcast skies and the breakneck wooden stairs he was always scrambling up and down, and the smell of poverty and cabbage and children and washing in the rattletrap tenements where he was always seeking out Mrs. Piretti whose husband had been killed in a rumpus in a saloon on Locust Street or Sam Burkovich who’d been elected president of the Ukrainian singing society, or some woman with sudsy hands whose child had been slashed by a degenerate. He never got home to the house before three or four in the morning and by the time he had breakfasted round noon there never seemed to be any time to do anything before he had to call up the office for assignments again. When he had first gotten to Pittsburgh he had called to see Mr. McGill, whom he’d met with Jarvis Oppenheimer in Paris. Mr. McGill remembered him and took down his address and told him to keep in touch because he hoped to find an opening for him in the new information bureau that was being organized by the Chamber of Commerce, but the weeks went by and he got no word from Mr. McGill. He got an occasional dry note from Annabelle Marie about legal technicalities; she would divorce him charging nonsupport, desertion and cruelty. All he had to do was to refuse to go to Philadelphia when the papers were served on him. The perfume on the blue notepaper raised a faint rancor of desire for women in him. But he must keep himself clean and think of his career.

The worst time was his weekly day off. Often he’d stay all day sprawled on the bed, too depressed to go out into the black slush of the streets. He sent to correspondence schools for courses in journalism and advertising and even for a course in the care of fruit trees on the impulse to throw up everything and go West and get a job on a ranch or something; but he felt too listless to follow them and the little booklets accumulated week by week on the table in his room. Nothing seemed to be leading anywhere. He’d go over and over again his whole course of action since he’d left Wilmington that day on the train to go down to Ocean City. He must have made a mistake somewhere but he couldn’t see where. He took to playing solitaire, but he couldn’t even keep his mind on that. He’d forget the cards and sit at the table with a gingerbread-colored velveteen cloth on it, looking past the pot of dusty artificial ferns ornamented with a crepe paper cover and a dusty pink bow off a candybox, down into the broad street where trolleycars went by continually scraping round the curve and where the arclights coming on in the midafternoon murk shimmered a little in the black ice of the gutters. He thought a lot about the old days at Wilmington and Marie O’Higgins and his piano lessons and fishing in an old skiff along the Delaware when he’d been a kid; he’d get so nervous that he’d have to go out and would go and drink a hot chocolate at the sodafountain on the next corner and then go down town to a cheap movie or vaudeville show. He took to smoking three stogies a day, one after each meal. It gave him something he could vaguely look forward to.

He called once or twice to see Mr. McGill at his office in the Frick Building. Each time he was away on a business trip. He’d have a little chat with the girl at the desk while waiting and then go away reluctantly, saying, “Oh, yes, he said he was going on a trip,” or, “He must have forgotten the appointment,” to cover his embarrassment when he had to go away. He was loath to leave the brightly lit office anteroom, with its great shiny mahogany chairs with lions’ heads on the arms and the tables with lions’ claws for feet and the chirrup of typewriters from behind partitions, and telephone bells ringing and welldressed clerks and executives bustling in and out. Down at the newspaper office it was noisy with clanging presses and smelt sour of printer’s ink and moist rolls of paper and sweating copyboys running round in green eyeshades. And not to know any really nice people, never to get an assignment that wasn’t connected with working people or foreigners or criminals; he hated it.

One day in the Spring he went to the Schenley to interview a visiting travel lecturer. He felt good about it as he hoped to wheedle a byline out of the city editor. He was picking his way through the lobby crowded by the arrival of a state convention of Kiwanians when he ran into Mr. McGill. “Why, hello, Moorehouse,” said Mr. McGill in a casual tone as if he’d been seeing him all along, “I’m glad I ran into you. Those fools at the office mislaid your address. Have you a minute to spare?” “Yes, indeed, Mr. McGill,” said Ward. “I have an appointment to see a man but he can wait.” “Never make a man wait if you have an appointment with him,” said Mr. McGill. “Well, this isn’t a business appointment,” said Ward, looking up into Mr. McGill’s face with his boyish blue-eyed smile. “He won’t mind waiting a minute.”

They went into the writing room and sat down on a tapestried sofa. Mr. McGill explained that he had just been appointed temporary general manager to reorganize the Bessemer Metallic Furnishings and Products Company that handled a big line of byproducts of the Homestead Mills. He was looking for an ambitious and energetic man to handle the advertising and promotion. “I remember that booklet you showed me in Paris, Moorehouse, and I think you’re the man.” Ward looked at the floor. “Of course that would mean giving up my present work.” “What’s that?” “Newspaper work.” “Oh, drop that; there’s no future in that… We’d have to make someone else nominal advertising manager for reasons we won’t go into now… but you’ll be the actual executive. What kind of a salary would you expect?”

Ward looked Mr. McGill in the eyes, the blood stopped in his ears while he heard his own voice saying casually:

“How about a hundred a week?”

Mr. McGill stroked his moustache and smiled. “Well, we’ll thrash that out later,” he said, getting to his feet. “I think I can advise you strongly to give up your present work… I’ll call up Mr. Bateman about it… so that he’ll understand why we’re taking you away from him… No hard feelings, you understand, on account of your resigning suddenly… never want hard feelings… Come down and see me tomorrow at ten. You know the office in the Frick Building.”

“I think I’ve got some valuable ideas about advertising, Mr. McGill. It’s the work I’m most interested in doing,” said Ward. Mr. McGill wasn’t looking at him any more. He nodded and went off. Ward went on up to interview his lecturer, afraid to let himself feel too jubilant yet.

The next day was his last in a newspaper office. He accepted a salary of seventyfive with a promise of a raise as soon as returns warranted it, took a room and bath at the Schenley, had an office of his own in the Frick Building where he sat at a desk with a young man named Oliver Taylor who was a nephew of one of the directors who was being worked up through the organization. Oliver Taylor was a firstrate tennis player and belonged to all the clubs and was only too glad to let Moorehouse do the work. When he found that Moorehouse had been abroad and had had his clothes made in England he put him up at the Sewickley Country Club and took him out with him for drinks after officehours. Little by little Moorehouse got to know people and to be invited out as an eligible bachelor. He started to play golf with an instructor on a small course over in Allegheny where he hoped nobody he knew would go. When he could play a fair game he went over to Sewickley to try it out.

One Sunday afternoon Oliver Taylor went with him and pointed out all the big executives of the steel mills and the mining properties and the oil industry out on the links on a Sunday afternoon, making ribald remarks about each one that Ward tittered at a little bit, but that seemed to him in very bad taste. It was a sunny May afternoon and he could smell locustblossoms on the breeze off the fat lands along the Ohio, and there were the sharp whang of the golfballs and the flutter of bright dresses on the lawn round the clubhouse, and frazzles of laughter and baritone snatches of the safe talk of business men coming on the sunny breeze that still had a little scorch of furnace smoke in it. It was hard to keep the men he was introduced to from seeing how good he felt.

The rest of the time he did nothing but work. He got his stenographer, Miss Rodgers, a plainfaced spinster who knew the metal products business inside out from having worked fifteen years in Pittsburgh offices, to get him books on the industry that he read at his hotel in the evenings, so that at executive conferences he astonished them by his knowledge of the processes and products of the industry. His mind was full of augerbits, canthooks, mauls, sashweights, axes, hatchets, monkeywrenches; sometimes in the lunch hour he’d stop in to a hardware store on the pretext of buying a few brads or tacks and talk to the storekeeper. He read Crowds Jr and various books on psychology, tried to imagine himself a hardware merchant or the executive of Hammacher Schlemmer or some other big hardware house, and puzzled over what kind of literature from a factory would be appealing to him. Shaving while his bath was running in the morning he would see long processions of andirons, grates, furnace fittings, pumps, sausagegrinders, drills, calipers, vises, casters, drawerpulls pass between his face and the mirror and wonder how they could be made attractive to the retail trade. He was shaving himself with a Gillette; why was he shaving with a Gillette instead of some other kind of razor? “Bessemer” was a good name, smelt of money and mighty rolling mills and great executives stepping out of limousines. The thing to do was to interest the hardware buyer, to make him feel a part of something mighty and strong, he would think as he picked out a necktie. “Bessemer,” he’d say to himself as he ate breakfast. Why should our cotterpins appeal more than any other cotterpins, he’d ask himself as he stepped on the streetcar. Jolting in the straphanging crowd on the way downtown, staring at the headlines in the paper without seeing them, chainlinks and anchors and ironcouplings and malleable elbows and unions and bushings and nipples and pipecaps would jostle in his head. “Bessemer.”

When he asked for a raise he got it, to $125.

At a country club dance he met a blond girl who danced very well. Her name was Gertrude Staple and she was the only daughter of old Horace Staple who was director of several corporations, and was reputed to own a big slice of Standard Oil stock. Gertrude was engaged to Oliver Taylor, though they did nothing but quarrel when they were together, so she confided to Ward while they were sitting out a dance. Ward’s dress suit fitted well and he looked much younger than most of the men at the dance. Gertrude said that the men in Pittsburgh had no allure. Ward talked about Paris and she said that she was bored to tears and would rather live in Nome, Alaska, than in Pittsburgh. She was awfully pleased that he knew Paris and he talked about the Tour d’Argent and the Hotel Wagram and the Ritz bar and he felt very sore that he hadn’t a car, because he noticed that she was making it easy for him to ask her to let him take her home. But next day he sent her some flowers with a little note in French that he thought would make her laugh. The next Saturday afternoon he went to an automobile school to take lessons in driving a car, and strolled past the Stutz sales agency to see what kind of terms he could get to buy a roadster on.

One day Oliver Taylor came into the office with a funny smile on his face and said, “Ward, Gertrude’s got a crush on you. She can’t talk about anything else… Go ahead; I don’t give a damn. She’s too goddam much trouble for me to handle. She tires me out in a half an hour.”

“It’s probably just because she doesn’t know me,” said Ward, blushing a little.

“Too bad her old man won’t let her marry anything but a millionaire. You might get some lovin’ out of it, though.”

“I haven’t got the time for that stuff,” said Ward.

“It don’t leave me time for anything else,” said Taylor. “Well, so long… You hold down the fort; I’ve got a luncheon date with a swell girl… she’s a warm baby an’ she’s dancing in the ‘Red Mill,’ first row, third from the left.” He winked, and slapped Ward on the back and went off.

The next time that Ward went to call at the big house of the Staples that lay back from the trees he went in a red Stutz roadster that he’d taken out on trial. He handled it well enough, although he turned in too quickly at the drive and slaughtered some tulips in a flowerbed. Gertrude saw him from the library window and kidded him about it. He said he was a rotten driver, always had been and always would be. She gave him tea and a cocktail at a little table under an appletree back of the house and he wondered all the time he was talking to her whether he ought to tell her about his divorce. He told her about his unhappy life with Annabelle Strang. She was very sympathetic. She knew of Dr. Strang. “And I was hoping you were just an adventurer… from plowboy to president, you know… that sort of thing.”

“But I am,” he said and they both laughed and he could see that she was really crazy about him.

That night they met at a dance and walked down to the end of the conservatory where it was very steamy among the orchids, and he kissed her and told her that she looked like a pale yellow orchid. After that they always sneaked off whenever they got a chance. She had a way of going limp suddenly in his arms under his kisses that made him sure that she loved him. But when he got home after those evenings he’d be too nervous and excited to sleep, and would pace up and down the room wanting a woman to sleep with, and cursing himself out. Often he’d take a cold bath and tell himself he must attend to business and not worry about those things or let a girl get under his skin that way. The streets in the lower part of town were full of prostitutes, but he was afraid of catching a disease or being blackmailed. Then one night after a party Taylor took him to a house that he said was thoroughly reliable where he met a pretty dark Polish girl who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, but he didn’t go there very often as it cost fifty dollars, and he was always nervous when he was in the place for fear there’d be a police raid and he’d have blackmail to pay.

One Sunday afternoon Gertrude told him that her mother had scolded her for being seen about with him so much on account of his having a wife in Philadelphia. The notice of the decree had come the morning before. Ward was in high spirits and told her about it and asked her to marry him. They were at the free organ recital in Carnegie Institute, a good place to meet because nobody who was anybody ever went there. “Come over to the Schenley and I’ll show you the decree.” The music had started. She shook her head, but patted his hand that lay on the plush seat beside her knee. They went out in the middle of the number. The music got on their nerves. They stood talking a long while in the vestibule. Gertrude looked miserable and haggard. She said she was in wretched health and that her father and mother would never consent to her marrying a man who didn’t have as much income as she did and she wished she was a poor stenographer or telephone girl that could do as she liked and that she loved him very much and would always love him and thought she’d take to drink or dope or something because life was just too terrible.

Ward was very cold and kept his jaw set square and said that she couldn’t really care for him and that as far as he was concerned that was the end and that if they met they’d be good friends. He drove her out Highland Avenue in the Stutz that wasn’t paid for yet and showed her the house he’d lived in when he first came to Pittsburgh and talked of going out West and starting an advertising business of his own and finally left her at a friend’s house in Highland Park where she’d told her chauffeur to pick her up at six.

He went back to the Schenley and had a cup of black coffee sent up to his room and felt very bitter and settled down to work on some copy he was getting out, saying, “To hell with the bitch,” all the time under his breath.

He didn’t worry much about Gertrude in the months that followed because a strike came on at Homestead and there were strikers killed by the mine guards and certain writers from New York and Chicago who were sentimentalists began to take a good deal of space in the press with articles flaying the steel industry and the feudal conditions in Pittsburgh as they called them, and the progressives in Congress were making a howl, and it was rumored that people wanting to make politics out of it were calling for a congressional investigation. Mr. McGill and Ward had dinner together all alone at the Schenley to talk about the situation, and Ward said that what was necessary was an entirely new line in the publicity of the industry. It was the business of the industry to educate the public by carefully planned publicity extending over a term of years. Mr. McGill was very much impressed and said he’d talk around at directors’ meetings about the feasibility of founding a joint information bureau for the entire industry. Ward said he felt he ought to be at the head of it, because he was just wasting his time at the Bessemer Products; that had all simmered down to a routine job that anybody could take care of. He talked of going to Chicago and starting an advertising agency of his own. Mr. McGill smiled and stroked his steelgray mustache and said, “Not so fast, young man; you stay around here a while yet and on my honor you won’t regret it,” and Ward said that he was willing, but here he’d been in Pittsburgh five years and where was he getting?

The information bureau was founded, and Ward was put in charge of the actual work at $10,000 a year and began to play stocks a little with his surplus money, but there were several men over him earning larger salaries who didn’t do anything but get in his way, and he was very restless. He felt he ought to be married and have an establishment of his own. He had many contacts in different branches of the casting and steel and oil industries, and felt he ought to entertain. Giving dinners at the Fort Pitt or the Schenley was expensive and somehow didn’t seem solid.

Then one morning he opened his newspaper to find that Horace Staple had died of angina pectoris the day before while going up in the elevator of the Carnegie Building, and that Gertrude and her mother were prostrated at their palatial residence in Sewickley. He immediately sat down in the writing room, although it would make him late at the office, and wrote Gertrude a note:

DEAREST GERTRUDE:

In this terrible moment of grief, allow me to remind you that I think of you constantly. Let me know at once if I can be of any use to you in any way. In the valley of the shadow of death we must realize that the Great Giver to whom we owe all love and wealth and all affection around the jocund fireside is also the Grim Reaper…

After staring at the words, chewing the end of the pen a minute, he decided that it was a bit thick about the Grim Reaper and copied the note out again leaving out the last sentence, signed it “Your Devoted Ward,” and sent it out to Sewickley by special messenger.

At noon he was just leaving for lunch when the office boy told him there was a lady on his phone. It was Gertrude. Her voice was trembly but she didn’t seem too terribly upset. She begged him to take her out to dinner that night somewhere where they wouldn’t be seen because the house and everything gave her the creeps and that she’d go mad if she heard any more condolences. He told her to meet him in the lobby of the Fort Pitt and he’d run her out to some little place where they could be quiet and talk.

That evening there was an icy driving wind. The sky had been leaden all day with inky clouds driving out of the northwest. She was so muffled up in furs that he didn’t recognize her when she came into the lobby. She held out her hand to him and said, “Let’s get out of here,” as soon as she came up to him. He said he knew a little roadhouse on the way to McKeesport but thought the drive would be too cold for her in his open roadster. She said, “Let’s go; do let’s… I love a blizzard.” When she got into the car she said in a trembling voice, “Glad to see your old flame, Ward?” and he said, “God, Gertrude, I am; but are you glad to see me?” And then she said, “Don’t I look glad?” Then he started to mumble something about her father, but she said, “Please let’s not talk about that.”

The wind was howling behind them all the way up the Monongahela valley, with occasional lashing flurries of snow. Tipples and bessemer furnaces and tall ranks of chimneys stood out inky black against a low woolly sky that caught all the glare of flaming metal and red slag and the white of arcs and of locomotive headlights. At one crossing they almost ran into a train of coalcars. Her hand tightened on his arm when the car skidded as he put on the brakes.

“That was a narrow squeak,” he said through clenched teeth.

“I don’t care. I don’t care about anything tonight,” she said.

He had to get out to crank the car as he had stalled the motor. “It’ll be all right if we don’t freeze to death,” he said. When he’d clambered back into the car she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Do you still want to marry me? I love you, Ward.” The motor raced as he turned and kissed her hard on the mouth the way he’d kissed Annabelle that day in the cottage at Ocean City. “Of course I do, dear,” he said.

The roadhouse was kept by a French couple, and Ward talked French to them and ordered a chicken dinner and red wine and hot whisky toddies to warm them up while they were waiting. There was no one else in the roadhouse and he had a table placed right in front of the gaslogs at the end of a pink and yellow diningroom, dimly lit, a long ghostly series of empty tables and long windows blocked with snow. Through dinner he told Gertrude about his plans to form an agency of his own and said he was only waiting to find a suitable partner and he was sure that he could make it the biggest in the country, especially with this new unexploited angle of the relations between capital and labor. “Why, I’ll be able to help you a lot with capital and advice and all sorts of things, once we’re married,” she said, looking at him with flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes. “Of course you can, Gertrude.”

She drank a great deal during dinner and wanted more hot whiskies afterwards, and he kissed her a great deal and ran his hand up her leg. She didn’t seem to care what she did and kissed him right in front of the roadhouse keeper. When they went out to get in the car to go home the wind was blowing sixty miles an hour and the snow had blotted out the road and Ward said it would be suicide to try to drive to Pittsburgh a night like that and the roadhouse keeper said that he had a room all ready for them and that monsieur et madame would be mad to start out, particularly as they’d have the wind in their faces all the way. At that Gertrude had a moment of panic and said she’d rather kill herself than stay. Then she suddenly crumpled up in Ward’s arms sobbing hysterically, “I want to stay, I want to stay, I love you so.”

They called up the Staple house and talked to the nightnurse who said that Mrs. Staple was resting more easily, that she’d been given an opiate and was sleeping quietly as a child, and Gertrude told her that when her mother woke to tell her she was spending the night with her friend Jane English and that she’d be home as soon as the blizzard let them get a car on the road. Then she called up Jane English and told her that she was distracted with grief and had taken a room at the Fort Pitt to be alone. And if her mother called to tell her she was asleep. Then they called up the Fort Pitt and reserved a room in her name. Then they went up to bed. Ward was very happy and decided he loved her very much and she seemed to have done this sort of thing before because the first thing she said was: “We don’t want to make this a shotgun wedding, do we, darling?”

Six months later they were married, and Ward resigned his position with the information bureau. He’d had a streak of luck on the Street and decided to take a year off for a honeymoon in Europe. It turned out that the Staple fortune was all left to Mrs. Staple in trust and that Gertrude would only have an annuity of fifteen thousand until her mother died, but they were planning to meet the old lady at Carlsbad and hoped to coax some capital out of her for the new advertising agency. They sailed in the bridal suite on the Deutschland to Plymouth and had a fine passage and Ward was only seasick one day.