Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(6)

Gian is not wrong about the great decline. Even Murray Hill is shabbier than it should be. The sycamores looking sickly, trash gathered at their roots.

I have half a mind, next time we talk, to ask Gian to secure as my epitaph that most poetic of the signs planted in the parks back when I first arrived in this city:

Let no one say and say it to your shame

That all was beauty here until you came.





3

Your Brain Is Showing

In my reckless and undiscouraged youth, I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street.

When I arrived in Manhattan in 1926, I scrimped along on help from my parents and pittances from ballet performances until I landed the job at R.H. Macy’s: Forty dollars a week as a lowly assistant copywriter.

From the first moment I took to my desk and touched a needle-sharp pencil to a steno pad, I felt a sense of correctness that I have never known before or since. I would look down at the streams of strangers moving up and down Seventh Avenue, at the fog of their breath beneath their black and gray and brown hats, and I knew by instinct just how to buttonhole them. In my little walnut nook I was like a human cannonball, snug and ready to be launched above the unsuspecting crowd.

By one muggy morning in hot, late August 1931, I’d become a salaried institutional copywriter for that great department store, and the highest-paid advertising woman in America.

I had a front-page article in the New York World-Telegram to prove it: “Personality, Understanding, Interest: Those Are Keys to Success Says Mere Girl Who’s Found It,” read the headline.

I carried it with me up to the thirteenth floor, lucky number thirteen, with my coffee in one hand and, in my bag, an apple that I’d bought from one of the apple sellers on the street. Lucky, truly, not to be one of them, tattered and desperate in Herald Square, in the midst of the Depression. Lucky to be cast as the plucky starlet of a human-interest puff piece, a spry and spritely gal getting over in spite of everything, making it sound so effortless—making no mention of the drudgery I sometimes felt, grateful though I was to have the chance to be a drudge.

That headline calling me “girl,” even in my early thirties, made me think of my mother back home in Georgetown. I’d be sending her a copy later, because it would fill her with complicated pride: happiness that I wasn’t starving, and disapproval at what she’d perceive as my being showy and immodest.

Quoth the subhead: “Lillian Boxfish, Who Upset Advertising Ideas to Win Executive Recognition Found Personality and Sense of Humor Helped Her to Goal.”

I resolved, as ever, to maintain my good humor as I approached Chester Everett to ask for a raise.

The days the copywriters put in, 8:30 to 6, were long, but mine were usually longer, and I was there that morning before almost anyone else, which had been my plan. Chester, too, was already in; as I unlocked my office I could see him wedged behind his desk, morning light ablaze in the thick, white hair of the small, wide head that topped his former-football-lineman’s frame. My boss’s appearance, while not entirely unhandsome, evoked an icebox crowned by a cauliflower.

Chester was a good egg, by and large. He had no gift for writing copy but knew that about himself. He did, however, have an unerring sense of what would and wouldn’t work: what approaches would attract, inspire, confuse, or offend our prospective shoppers. He was a good manager, too, in an environment resistant to being managed. Our office was a field richly seeded with volatile and mercurial temperaments, and Chester’s firm but gentle hand was adept at selectively pruning them such that they would flourish rather than wither. I liked him because he ran a tight ship; he liked me because I was both creative and even-keeled. Overall we got along well. Then again, overall I rarely demanded much of him.

I set down my things—all but the newspaper—and headed toward Chester’s open door.

To my chagrin, he already had a visitor. Olive Dodd—simpering, unctuous, not-quite-evil Olive—was perched on one of his two visitors’ chairs. Too late now to turn around and wait. I walked in.

“Chester, darling, good morning to you,” I said. “Olive, lovely to see you, too.”

Olive, with her prim posture, her ungainly manner, and her reliance on elaborate fashions inappropriate for the office, strongly resembled a fancy pigeon: a creature bred out of its dignity across many generations. Although pretty enough by the standards of the day, with a voluptuous figure and a pleasant if somewhat shapeless face, she always gave an impression of bigness, as if poorly fitted to any locale. Whenever I encountered her I thought I could detect an agitated quaver, as if she might be on the verge of bursting into laughter or tears or, God help us, song. I hadn’t yet been able to work out whether she was like this all the time or only when I was around.

My dim hope that Olive might let me speak with Chester alone guttered when I saw what was in her hand: the same edition of the World-Telegram that I held in my own. “Oh, Lillian,” she said, “I was just showing Mr. Everett your wonderful news.”

Olive was twenty-eight or twenty-nine if she was a day, but her cloying insistence on “mister”-ing Chester made her seem younger—not youthful, but simply unformed. Her early arrival to show Chester the story gave her the air of a tattletale, though I couldn’t see how what I’d achieved might be punishable.

The store below us had just installed a state-of-the-art air-cooling system, but upstairs we still made do with oscillating fans. The one in Chester’s open window riffled the edges of the newspaper that Olive spread before him.