Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(13)
My mother would not let me forget that although the World’s Tallest Building was in New York, President Hoover had pushed the button to turn on its lights remotely from my old hometown of Washington, D.C. She always wanted me to come back to stay, but I never would. One might be able to control the electricity of the World’s Tallest Building from the nation’s capital, but there one could not work, as I did, at the World’s Largest Store.
I hurried on, among all the other workers out on their lunch breaks. The skyscraper was already being called the Empty State Building because of its lack of renters. And they couldn’t land dirigibles there as they’d planned because of the updrafts caused by the building’s very height. But I thought that its beauty outweighed its folly, and that a little grandiosity in the Depression wasn’t actively harming anyone, even if it wasn’t necessarily helping, either.
In truth, I suppose I identified myself with that skyscraper, and my fortunes with its own, rising while others foundered and fell. Each new triumph that I achieved became at once more dear and more private every time I descended from my snug apartment or my bustling office to step into the desperate street, where a dog whistle of raw panic seemed to quiver increasingly in the air. The creeping disaster that had started on Wall Street—part sickness, part madness, like a peril from Poe—had come finally to infect the whole country. People lost jobs and stopped buying. Prices plunged. Those lucky enough to still be working hoarded their pay, reluctant to buy today what they knew would be cheaper tomorrow, until the contagion took their jobs, too, and they joined the crowds wondering where this year’s Thanksgiving dinner would come from. Among many other things, the Depression changed how I felt about crowds: When I first came to the city, a line of people often helped me discover an exciting premiere or a big sale; in 1931, such queues more often ended at soup kitchens or collapsing banks.
The lines of automobiles on Sixth Avenue, however, still struck me as merry. It was pleasing to be alongside the stream of cars as they rushed uptown and down—or tried to rush. I have always been comforted by vehicle traffic, by being near but not in it. Taxis kept honking, trying to see if I wanted a lift, but I kept waving them away. What I wanted was that walk: slate and windy, the sky overcast but not threatening rain.
I enjoyed walking outside even in bad weather. I took my lunchly strolls even when the snow was hard and sharp—little ice pellets flying at one’s face like fingernail clippings—as it had been that first year here, back in 1926.
I spent my first Christmas in the city alone. Alone, but not lonely; in the state of being solitary but not the condition of wishing myself otherwise. Solitude enrobed me like a long, warm coat.
Eating Christmas dinner by myself in a restaurant far from home and hearth, I wondered whether lightning would strike me if I dared to take mushrooms and a steak instead of turkey, cranberries, and buttered rolls. I ate the steak. I ate it rare. Mother could not care about what Mother did not know. Depraved, depraved. But Christmas was the copywriter’s most frantic season—Saks and Hearns and R.H. Macy’s, of course, all hitching their copy to the Star of Bethlehem. Profane, profane. On subsequent holidays I’d been able to head southward to the welcoming bosom of family once more, but that first year, a mere forty-dollar-a-week assistant, I’d wanted most of all to impress my employers, and impress them I did. What an extravagance that steak had seemed! And yet how meager compared to the bounty spread on nearby tables, where supped financiers and stock operators. Five years later those fellows were all gone, their capital vanished like so much cigar smoke, while I churned out the only commodities that still held their value: courage, poise, humor, and hope.
If I’d kept walking down Sixth, past the turnoff to my editor Artie’s office, I’d have hit Ladies’ Mile, the department stores which Artie, a sharp but nostalgic man, still called dry goods stores. Faint and fading, R.H. Macy’s aging competitors. But of course I turned left at Twenty-Third Street to head for my destination: the sixteen-story Beaux-Arts building in which Dutton made its home.
I admired E.P. Dutton as a publisher inherently, or else I’d never have sent them Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises. I also admired their current president, Mr. John Macrae, who embodied the sort of up-by-the-bootstraps narrative that is so appealing—and so vanishingly rare, when one actually considers who else has done it. My father found his rags-to-riches story of greater interest, or at least greater ease of understanding, than the basic fact that my book was to be published. So did my mother, as she disliked my poetry writing even more than my writing advertising. “You sound so unhappy in those poems!” she would say. My father was proud, my mother embarrassed.
Macrae had started as an office boy at the company in the 1880s and remained aboard in various increasingly lofty capacities until Dutton himself died in 1923, at which point Macrae ascended to the presidency. His commitment to taking the press in a more refined direction was why my books had a home there. I never dealt with him personally, but his staff was superb.
Artie was waiting for me, and I was happy to see him, his drooping, almost totally gray mustache betraying his age, which was better concealed by his Brilliantined hair, still abundant and mostly black. His mustache and adroit civility reminded me of my father, though Father was an attorney and not a man of letters.
My editor’s given name was Arthur Eugene Stanley, and he went by A.E. professionally. So Housmanian, I’d told him upon our first meeting, and he’d smiled at the comparison: It turned out he’d studied Classics with Housman, very briefly when he was a scholar abroad at Cambridge. But he was always Artie to me, even though in his formality he rarely called me anything but “my fair Miss Boxfish,” courtliness being the gear that his engine idled in. He was as courteous to the office boys as he was to me, but he also managed to make me see that I was as dear to him as he was to my own heart.