Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [411]
II
His indecision grew as he stood sheltered in the entrance to the Nation Oil Building, watching the rain ink the boulevard, seeing people hurry by. Automobiles and motor busses passed, their tires swishing.
Across the street Grant Park was desolate, and over it was the heavy, downward sky.
He wanted to forget everything. If it was only a decent day, he knew he would feel better and maybe be able to look for a job with more confidence. He began to grow nervous, and wondered if the elevator starter was noticing him and would suddenly tell him that loitering in the building was not allowed. Now, what the hell would he say when he got upstairs? Maybe it would be useless to try here.
He compressed his lips, turned, approached the middle-aged uniformed elevator starter whose face was forbidding.
“Where is the employment department for the service stations?” he asked.
“Personnel Department, eighth floor. Take the last elevator,” the starter said coldly, pointing as he spoke.
Entering the elevator he felt ashamed, because the starter knew his purpose. Three young fellows followed him and he wondered were they also looking for a job.
“Late today,” the runty elevator man said as a pretty girl, wearing a blue raincoat, stepped into the car.
“Who wouldn’t be in this weather?”
He closed the gates and the elevator shot upward. “It’s a bad day out, all right,” the elevator man told the girl.
“Is it! Say, I could hang myself out on the line today, I’m so wet.”
The girl left the car at the third floor. Studs became more and more anxious as one of the other fellows walked out at the fifth floor. The other two followed Studs out at the eighth floor. He walked along the narrow, tiled corridor, hearing the clicking of typewriters from behind glazed glass doors. Finding the door to the Personnel Department, he entered, followed by the other two fellows.
It was a wide office with dark rubber flooring. A freckle-faced office boy sat behind a closed gate, within which there were two large, unused desks. A line of applicants sat waiting on the two benches panelling the walls outside the gate, and seeing them, Studs’ hopes again sank, and he wished that he had tried some other place. He walked hesitantly toward the office boy, permitting the two fellows who had entered with him to speak first, and then he immediately cursed himself for having let them get ahead of him.
“Is the Personnel Manager in?” he asked when his turn came.
“Want a job?” the office boy asked. Studs nodded his head.
“There isn’t much chance. We’re not hiring,” the office boy said officially, handing Studs a card. “Fill that out and return it to me.”
After waiting for the fellows ahead of him to fill in cards, Studs sat at a small desk in the corner by a water cooler and wrote in his name, age and address. The blank space for the reason he wanted to work with the Nation Oil Company stumped him. He noticed that another applicant was behind him, also waiting to fill out a card, and, feeling a mounting pressure within him, he wrote down in semi-legible handwriting that he needed a job with the prospect of a future in it. He returned the card.
“Take a seat,” the office boy said, and Studs frowned, resenting this punk’s snotty manner.
He noticed that the applicants on the benches were nervous and anxious. A gray-haired man with a kindly, friendly face sat in the center of the bench by the right wall, and beside him a thin-faced chap. From his looks, Studs decided he was a wise-guy bastard. Studs sat at the end of the opposite bench, and noticing the bull-necked applicant on the left of the wiry-looking skinny fellow, he guessed he must be in his thirties. He was dark-haired, with big ears and thick brows, a straight, long nose, and wide, thin, irregularly slanting lips. He sat as