U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [399]
She got into Pittsbutgh late on a summer afternoon. Crossing the bridge she had a glimpse of the level sun-light blooming pink and orange on a confusion of metal-colored smokes that jetted from a wilderness of chimneys ranked about the huge corrugated iron and girderwork structures along the riverbank. Then right away she was getting out of the daycoach into the brownish dark gloom of the station with her suitcase cutting into her hand. She cal ed up her friend from a dirty phonebooth that smel ed of cigarsmoke. " Mary French, how lovely!." came Lois Speyer's comical burbling voice. "I'l get you a room right here at Mrs. Gansemeyer's, come on out to supper. It's a boardinghouse. Just wait til you see it. . . . But I just can't imagine anybody coming to Pittsburgh for their vacation." Mary found herself getting red and nervous right there in the phonebooth. "I wanted to see something dif-ferent from the socialworker angle."
"Wel , it's so nice the idea of having somebody to talk to that I hope it doesn't mean you've lost your mind . . . you know they don't employ Vassar graduates in the open-hearth furnaces."
"I'm not a Vassar graduate," Mary French shouted into the receiver, feeling the near tears stinging her eyes. "I'm just like any other workinggirl. . . . You ought to have seen me working in that cafeteria in Cleveland.""Wel , come on out, Mary darling, I'l save some supper for
-131-you." It was a long ride out on the streetcar. Pittsburgh was grim al right. Next day she went around to the employment offices of several of the steelcompanies. When she said she'd been a socialworker they looked at her awful funny. Nothing doing; not taking on clerical or secretarial workers now. She spent days with the newspapers answering helpwanted ads.
Lois Speyer certainly laughed in that longfaced sarcastic way she had when Mary had to take a reporting job that Lois had gotten her because Lois knew the girl who wrote the society column on the Times-Sentinel.
As the Pittsburgh summer dragged into August, hot and choky with coalgas and the strangling fumes from blast-furnaces, bloomingmil s, rol ingmil s that clogged the smoky Y
where the narrow riverval eys came together, there began to be talk around the office about how red agitators had gotten into the mil s. A certain Mr. Gorman said to be one of the head operatives for the Sherman Serv-ice was often seen smoking a cigar in the managingeditor's office. The paper began to fil up with news of alien riots and Russian Bolshevists and the nationalization of women and the defeat of Lenin and Trotzky. Then one afternoon in early September Mr. Healy
cal ed Mary French into his private office and asked her to sit down. When he went over and closed the door tight Mary thought for a second he was going to make indecent proposals to her, but instead he said in his most tired fatherly manner, "Now, Miss French, I have an assign-ment for you that I don't want you to take unless you real y want to. I've got a daughter myself and I hope when she grows up she'l be a nice simple wel broughtup girl like you are. So honestly if I thought it was demeaning I wouldn't ask you to do it . . . you know that. We're strictly the family newspaper . . . we let the other fel ers pul the rough stuff. . . . You know an item never goes
-132-through my desk that I don't think of my own wife and daughters, how would I like to have them read it." Ted Healy was a large round blackhaired man with a rol ing grey eye like a codfish's eye. "What's the story, Mr. Healy?" asked Mary briskly; she'd made up her mind it must be something about the whiteslave traffic.
"Wel , these damned agitators, you know they're trying to start a strike. . . . Wel , they've opened a publicity office downtown. I'm scared to send one of the boys down . . . might get into some trouble with those goril as . . . I don't want a dead reporter on my front page. . . . But sending you down . . . You know you're not working for a paper, you're a socialservice worker, want to get both sides of the story. . . . A sweet innocentlooking girl can't