Kitchen Privileges Read online

  “Miss Higgins, you were a dreadful math student,” she said severely.

  I swept into a curtsey. “God bless your memory, Reverend Mother.”

  * * *

  My first attempt to sell a short story came when I was sixteen. Having studied the market, I decided that everything True Confessions magazine published was so bad that they might even accept something from me. However, “Give Love a Chance” and “I, with My Guilt” came back by return mail, so I decided I needed a little more life experience before I attacked the publishing world again.

  At the same time, I decided that babysitting didn’t pay enough and began to work three afternoons after school and weekends as a switchboard operator at the old Shelton Hotel on Forty-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. For an aspiring writer, it was an absolutely fantastic job. I quickly mastered the ability to listen in on conversations undetected. Usually undetected, that is.

  The way it worked was that if my switchboard wasn’t busy with incoming or outgoing calls, I would pull the master cord partly out of the socket. That meant I could open the key without the telltale clicking sound that alerted people to the fact that a busybody operator was enjoying their conversation.

  My favorite eavesdropee was Ginger Bates, a lady of easy virtue who was a permanent resident of the Shelton. I loved listening to her chat with her various and plentiful admirers. One day I obviously had not pulled out the master switch far enough because she suddenly told her caller, “Don’t say another word. That damn operator is listening in.”

  “I am not,” I said indignantly, then in horror disconnected the call before it could be traced to my board. A moment later, the chief operator bellowed, “Who just had Ginger Bates?”

  The picture of innocence, I was busy responding to an incoming call. “Hotel Shelton, good afternoon.”

  Knowing it was useless, the chief operator did not pursue her search for the culprit. “For God’s sake, girls, if you’re going to listen in, at least be smart about it,” she snapped.

  I was very careful when I listened in on Tennessee Williams, that would-be playwright with the crazy name, as the senior operators described him. At that time he had the cheapest room in the hotel—thirty dollars a month, less than a dollar a day, as one of them pointed out.

  But I didn’t hear anything that fascinated me. Years later, when a mutual friend gave Williams a copy of the manuscript for Where Are the Children?, which had just been sold to Simon & Schuster, his comment was, “I have a lot of friends who can write better than that,” so I guess I didn’t fascinate him either. We’ll call it a draw.

  On the days I worked at the Shelton, I would take the bus to the train and ride to downtown Manhattan. If I made good time, I’d scurry over to Fifth Avenue and slowly walk down the ten blocks from Fifty-ninth to Forty-ninth Street, windowshopping, choosing the clothes I would buy when I was a successful writer. I’d linger at Bergdorf Goodman, then Tailored Woman, and Bonwit Teller and DePinna and Saks, carefully selecting my future wardrobe.

  Now, on the first Tuesday of every month, I have dinner with a dozen fellow mystery-suspense writers in a restaurant on Forty-ninth Street. From our private, second-floor dining room, I can look across the street at the employees’ entrance of the Shelton and, directly overhead, the windows of the switchboard room where I toiled all those afternoons and weekends. It doesn’t seem that long ago.

  By the time I was completing my sophomore year at the Villa, our tenants the Fields-Keeners had departed. Miss Mills had found an apartment near her school. The war economy had opened new jobs, and Herbie Katz, too nearsighted to pass the army physical, was working in a defense factory on Long Island. He never did come back to collect all the funeral music he had played for us so often. I wonder if by then he was sick of it, too.

  In spite of all our concerted efforts, the roomers who came and went, my work at the Shelton, Mother’s baby-sitting jobs and Joe’s newspaper route, we couldn’t keep up the overhead on Tenbroeck Avenue, and finally we lost the house. Mother was urged to take Joseph out of school and put him to work, but she refused. “Education is more important than any house,” she said firmly. “Joseph will get his diploma.”

  I have not been in the Tenbroeck Avenue house since, but it is still fresh in my mind. I can clearly see the soft ivory walls of the living room, the carpet with the center design that made a perfect goal when we shot marbles. The Horace Waters piano is in place again near the staircase. I can feel the comfort of the overstuffed velour chairs by the fireplace, where Joe and I companionably sprawled side by side with our books. Again I stand on the landing on the staircase where I staged the plays I wrote, and where little Johnny would patiently recite his lines. I am propped up in bed in my little room, hearing my Mother calling, “Mary, is the light off?”

  “Yes,” I honestly answer—but I am reading the book by the streetlight that conveniently streams onto my pillow.

  Our next stop was a three-room apartment near the trolley line, and into it Mother moved the full contents of the six rooms we’d had formerly, sure that someday our fortunes would change and we’d get our house back. We never did, though, and whenever she returned from visiting the old neighborhood, her eyes would shine with unshed tears as she remarked how beautifully her roses had grown.

  Joe turned eighteen, graduated from high school in 1944, and promptly enlisted in the navy.

  The war had broken out three years earlier, and even though the Villa was a small school, with increasing frequency morning prayers began with the announcement, “We will pray for the repose of the soul of Anita’s brother, John…of Mother St. Margaret’s nephew, Danny…” And then it was my turn: “We will pray for the repose of the soul of Mary Higgins’s brother, Joseph.”

  Mother could have claimed Joe as her sole support and kept him out of service. Instead she let him enlist in the navy with his friends. Six months later, she took the only long trip of her life, a plane ride to California to be at Joe’s deathbed in the Long Beach Naval Hospital. While in training school, he had contracted spinal meningitis. To the people who fumbled for words of sympathy, she said, “It is God’s will. I couldn’t let Joseph go when he was sick the other time, but now God wants him even more than I do.”

  That June when I graduated from the Villa, she threw a party for me where she allowed no hint of sadness. It was my day, and nothing was going to spoil it. Johnny graduated from grammar school a few weeks later and he, too, had all the aunts and uncles and cousins and friends there to celebrate. She bought a black-and-white print dress to wear to both occasions. She felt her black mourning dress was out of place those two days.

  We three siblings had been so close, Joseph, Mary, and John. J.M.J. Joe’s death multiplied a thousand times the sense of loss that I’d felt since that May morning five years earlier when I came home to the news that “Daddy’s dead.”

  That sense of loss had a lot to do with my deciding to go to secretarial school rather than college. I wanted to grow up. I wanted to earn money. I wanted to marry young and have children. As I had welcomed our paying guests to help fill the void in our house left by my father, now I was looking forward to that future family, the husband who at the end of the day would turn his key in the lock and call, “I’m home,” the grandchildren who would fill my mother’s arms.

  I came across a fragment of a poem I wrote that first year after Joe died: “I was dressed in garments thin, I was the outsider looking in…”

  Dreadful poetry, but I remember the moment I wrote it. I was on my way home one evening from the job at the Shelton. It was a winter night and terribly cold on the platform as I got off the train and hurried down the steps and through the cavernous station to wait, shivering, for the trolley. Other people had fathers waiting to pick them up and family dinners on the table at home, with everyone together. I wanted to recreate that kind of world for us.

  Looking back, I could easily have gotten a scholarship to several colleges but instead elected to acce
pt the partial scholarship offered by Wood Secretarial School. It would only cost me two hundred and fifty dollars rather than four hundred for the one-year term. When I got there and compared notes with the other students, we could find only one girl who was paying the full four hundred. All the rest of us had received “partial scholarships.”

  A year later, now equipped with reasonably good office skills, I was given a list of places to go for job interviews. The first one was a dingy office way downtown where they manufactured window shades. I was offered the job immediately, thirty-five dollars a week, two weeks vacation. “You’ll love it here, Miss Higgins. You’d be surprised how interesting the window-shade business can be. Something new comes up every minute!”

  Not wanting to hurt the feelings of the enthusiastic office manager, I accepted the job and went onto the next interview, which was with a tool-and-dye manufacturer. Once again I was offered the job, and for exactly the same money. Once again, not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings, I accepted it.

  The third stop was at Remington Rand, the premium typewriter–office equipment producer. But this situation was different. The company had its own in-house advertising agency, and the minute I got off the elevator at the eleventh floor, I knew that this was where I wanted to be. Except for the private corner office of the Advertising Manager, the whole floor was open, divided into waist-high cubicles. I could see copywriters pounding their typewriters, artists sketching, runners hurrying to the area marked There was a sense of electricity in the air, and I wanted to be part of it.

  The job was secretary to the creative director, who was second in command of the department. Sterling Jessup Hiles was a tall, lean man whose glasses seemed to be part of his face. I liked him immediately. I liked the way he talked to the people who ran in to interrupt him during our interview: “Jess, sorry to butt in, but I need a fast okay on this change…”

  “Jess, will you take a quick look at this caption…”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Higgins,” he would apologize as he attended to the interruptions. As I observed his unflappable, easygoing manner, I knew that I desperately wanted that job. Unlike my earlier experiences that day, I was not hired on the spot. “This is a pretty responsible job, Miss Higgins,” he said. “I’m afraid eighteen is a bit young for it.”

  I earnestly assured him I could handle it but left worrying about the other candidates he would be interviewing. I was to call him the next day at three o’clock.

  I left the Remington Rand offices knowing that whether I got the job or not, I didn’t want to be mesmerized by how interesting the window-shade business could be, nor did I want to increase my knowledge of the tool-and-die industry. I called and begged off from those opportunities for gainful employment.

  The next twenty-four hours passed with agonizing slowness. Finally it was three o’clock on the following day, and with fervent prayers to all my favorite saints, I made the call.

  The following Monday, I reported to work at Remington Rand. Even the starting salary was better than my other two job offers: $37.50 a week.

  I was on my way in the business world.

  As Sterling Hiles’s secretary, I sat in on all the creative meetings. I didn’t realize it, but I was getting a tutorial in advertising and promotion. I was learning why this ad campaign worked and why another was less successful, why one slogan caught on and another one did not, why this caption didn’t cut the mustard while another one sold thousands of typewriters or adding machines.

  At night I began taking courses at the Advertising Club and began to get assignments to write small items of catalog copy.

  When I’d been two years at Remington, John William Kean the Ninth, a thirty-year-old copywriter, asked me to join him for a drink after work. Of average height with dark hair, a mustache, and a deep, knowing chuckle, he seemed to me to be the epitome of worldliness.

  His last job had been as an attaché at the American Embassy in Greece. Since I passionately longed to travel and considered anyone who had made it out of the tristate area a seasoned explorer, Jack’s former employment enhanced his man-about-town image for me.

  Remington Rand was on the corner of Twenty-third Street and Fourth Avenue. We met at the front door and walked from there to Eddie’s Aurora, a small Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village. Its backroom was the hangout of Jack’s arty friends.

  There I met Dorothea, a widow in her early thirties, still deeply mourning the husband who had died in service, and Joe Carroll, her patient and steadfast admirer. Also in the group were a number of struggling artists and actors, a few of the people from Jack’s diplomatic corps days, and some unpublished writers.

  I was dazzled by their worldliness, and Jack and I started to go there several times a week. The regulars all had fine voices, and toward the end of the evening, when they were quite mellow, they would begin to sing. Arias from operas, George Gershwin melodies, hit songs of the day. They always wound up the evening with a spirited rendition of “Waltzing Matilda.”

  Jack disdained my order of “rye and ginger ale, please,” and ordered me my first scotch. Halfway through each evening, a flower lady who must have been eighty years old came in and went from table to table selling gardenias for fifty cents. He always bought one and pinned it on my shoulder with elaborate courtliness.

  My mother, although she hadn’t laid eyes on him, worried about my dating Jack. She thought that “from the sound of him” he was too sophisticated for me. And he wasn’t Catholic. That was a huge no-no.

  We dated on and off for about six months; then I invited him to a family party. The old girls looked him over. One of them called me aside. “Take a look, dear,” she whispered. “He has small feet, and you know, dear, small feet, small understanding.”

  The others nodded solemnly, agreeing that Jack was not the right person for me. I am sure they must have made a flying novena to St. Jude to break up the budding romance because the next week Jack called me at home, slightly in his cups, to announce happily that he’d made up with his old girlfriend. Since he had never taken her picture out of his wallet, I wasn’t all that surprised.

  Actually he didn’t call me at home. We didn’t have a telephone, and even though we had applied for one now that I was working, we were on a long waiting list for installation. Alice, who had the candy store around the corner liked me and agreed that if it didn’t happen too often, I could get a call there. Jack was one of the few who had the number, so I had to swallow my pride and listen to his ecstatic ramblings while standing in the phone booth of a candy store.

  Not wanting to be considered the dumpee, I told him it was fine with me if we stopped seeing each other and added, “There’s someone I’ve always liked. His name is Warren Clark. He’s twenty-nine and always thought of me as a kid, but now I understand he’s been asking about me. I see him every week in church at the 12:15 Mass.”

  That last part at least was true. I did see Warren Clark at the 12:15 Mass, but any attraction was on my part, not his. Warren attended Mass with his mother and two brothers. The younger one, Ken, was Johnny’s best friend. Mrs. Clark was a stately, elegant woman; Allan, the middle brother, was always crisply groomed; Ken looked perpetually sleepy; and Warren, whom I later learned always got out of bed at the last minute, was often adjusting his tie.

  I made it my business to greet Mrs. Clark every Sunday after Mass, and she said in passing to my brother that I was a very attractive girl. Then one Sunday she asked John, “Didn’t I hear that your sister is engaged to be married?”

  “Who’d marry your sister?” Warren asked Johnny, laughing.

  John and Ken were inseparable, and my brother spent a great deal of time in the Clark home. He was always quoting Warren, saying how funny he was and how the girls were calling him all the time.

  John couldn’t wait to relay the conversation that related to me. He didn’t need to tell me that Warren was joking, but I made a silent vow: You’ll want to marry me someday, pal. Just wait and see.

 
I was philosophic about my breakup with Jack Kean. I knew he wasn’t right for me. In my diary I wrote: “Jack, you will always remind me of being twenty. The taste of scotch. The scent of a gardenia. And the sound of ‘Waltzing Matilda.’”

  My best friend at Remington was Joan Murchison. Blond and very pretty, she was a copywriter for the electric shaver division and at the time was dating Dennis James, who was a rising star in the infant television industry.

  He broadcast the immensely popular wrestling matches, and had his own daytime series as well, entitled, God help us, Okay, Mother. He was also the host of a Sunday evening talent show, Chance of a Lifetime.

  Joan and he broke up right at the time Jack and I went kaput, so we tried to get the word around the company that we were eminently available for dates. But you can’t very well wear a sign to that effect, so many evenings we’d have a Coke or a glass of wine together, lamenting our dateless state. Then she’d go to the Barbizon Hotel for Women where she lived, and I’d take the subway home to the Bronx.

  I liked my job, but I was becoming increasingly restless. I was being given catalog copy to write, and I was also asked to model for some of the company brochures. Incidentally, I was in good company there. The future actress Grace Kelly was also picking up extra money modeling for those catalogs, and soon-to-be novelist Joe Heller was a junior copywriter.

  I didn’t really want to write catalog copy, though. I wanted to be a short-story writer. I began to study the market, the slicks as the popular women’s magazines of the day were called: Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Woman’s Home Companion, Redbook, Family Circle, Woman’s Day, Collier’s. And of course there was the crème de la crème of popular fiction, The Saturday Evening Post. I longed to be one of the contributors to any of those magazines. I started attempting to write, but knew that what I was doing wasn’t on target. Just as when I received my rejections from True Confessions, I knew I needed to know more about life and the world around me.