Skyscraper Read online

  SKYSCRAPER

  Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-twentieth century. From mysteries to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era.

  Faith Baldwin

  SKYSCRAPER

  Vera Caspary

  BEDELIA

  LAURA

  Dorothy B. Hughes

  THE BLACKBIRDER

  IN A LONELY PLACE

  Gypsy Rose Lee

  THE G-STRING MURDERS

  MOTHER FINDS A BODY

  Evelyn Piper

  BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING

  Olive Higgins Prouty

  NOW, VOYAGER

  Valerie Taylor

  THE GIRLS IN 3-B

  STRANGER ON LESBOS

  Tereska Torrés

  WOMEN’S BARRACKS

  BY CECILE

  SKYSCRAPER

  FAITH BALDWIN

  AFTERWORD BY LAURA HAPKE

  THE FEMINIST PRESS

  AT THE CITY UNIVERSITY NEW YORK

  NEW YORK CITY

  Published in 2012 by the Feminist Press

  at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center

  365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

  New York, NY 10016

  feministpress.org

  First Feminist Press edition, 2003

  Copyright © 1931, 1959 by Faith Baldwin

  Afterword copyright © 2003 by Laura Hapke

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Originally published in 1931 by Dell Publishing Company. This edition published by arrangement with The Faith Baldwin Literary Estate.

  Cover and text design by Drew Stevens

  Cover photo

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baldwin, Faith, 1893–1978

  Skyscraper / Faith Baldwin; afterword by Laura Hapke.—1st Feminist Press ed. Originally published in 1931.

  p. cm. — (Femmes fatales: women write pulp)

  eISBN 978-155861-787-2

  1 Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 2. Women—Employment—Fiction. 3. Separated people—Fiction. 4. Women employees—Fiction. 5. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 6. Skyscrapers—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.

  PS3503.U97S55 2003

  813'.52.dc21

  2003013433

  This book is for Major and Mrs. Percival Wren

  in friendship and gratitude for friendship.

  To my friends in the trust department of a great bank, to the buyer in a Fifth Avenue store, to the control-room engineer of a radio corporation and to all others who helped me so materially, my acknowledgments and thanks.

  Contents

  1 SOARING STEEL

  2 HIS KIND OF GIRL

  3 MEN ARE COMPLICATIONS

  4 FINISHED—OR BEGINNING?

  5 ANYTHING YOU WISH, DAVID

  6 HARMLESS AS A SERPENT

  7 ON THE KNEES OF THE GODS

  8 AFTER LAUGHING, TEARS

  9 ON A NOTE OF HEARTBREAK

  10 TWO TROUBLED GIRLS

  11 MARA’S WAY OUT

  12 THE PERFECT HOST

  13 A SECRET BETRAYED

  14 DWIGHT GIVES HIS WORD

  15 JENNIE’S BARGAIN

  16 A GNAWING SUSPICION

  17 “MEN MAKE ME SICK!”

  18 FAREWELL TO JENNIE

  19 SARAH TAKES ACTION

  20 HIS ARMS, HIS KISS

  21 THEIR SKYSCRAPER

  AFTERWORD

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM FEMINIST PRESS: FEMME FATAL SERIES

  ABOUT FEMINIST PRESS

  1

  SOARING STEEL

  MIDTOWN IN MANHATTAN, THE SEACOAST BUILDING rose steadily in a series of sculptured setbacks for more than eight hundred feet, to challenge the imagination, to utter the most recent, but probably not the last, word in structural engineering.

  From the lowest caisson anchored on a rock, to the tall tapering of the final soaring tower, incredible tons, impossible masses of steel and stone had been shaped, shrieking their protest, into a pattern of progress, into a concrete expression of man’s upward striving.

  Here upon this site, not many months ago, a group of brick buildings, irregular and dingy, had stood. Demolished, they have been torn apart, vanishing into dust. Then had come an ordered confusion, earth ripped open, earth in a long travail, earth in the preparatory throes of deliverance of a monster. Enamored of the antlike activities of swarming workmen, the crowds had stood still, pausing from their futile, their important, personal affairs to gape dully at the exposed bowels, the torn womb of earth; to watch hour upon hour the heavy open jaws of the steam shovels digging their relentless way through earth to quicksand and running water, through quicksand and running water to the mammoth, the dinosaurian bones of solid rock.

  Men. Architects—engineers—contractors—job runners— timekeepers—marble-setters—ironworkers—carpenters—plasterers—masons—painters—glaziers. And back of them, invisible, the forests, the quarries, the mills, and the kilns.

  Noise. The discordant hymn attending these gargantuan rites, from the bell signals to the donkey engines, from the clatter of tools to the machine-gun staccato of the riveting-gun. The precise madness of the riveters’ gang holds the watching crowd breathless—rivet boys and heater, the magnificently nonchalant catcher, the bucker-up with his dolly bar, the gun man with his pneumatic hammer, are to the audience the star performers of this theatrical spectacle played out against the backdrop of an indifferent, challenged sky.

  Two thousand workmen—a dozen languages—tools of all trades—laughter—profanity—and, when the whistle blows, complete and arrogant relaxation over a wedge of pie, a can of coffee; lean backs, broad backs squared against the wooden temporary structures, legs stretched negligently, laughter—Some kid!—Hey, baby, what you doing tonight?

  Still legs flash by, a chin is lifted in repudiation. The workmen laugh, belly-laughter—

  Cement and sand; hoists and derricks; here comes a foreman—listen to the foreman if you are not too sensitive—

  Skyscraper—not so many months ago.

  Now the workmen have vanished. Now the finished building stands; soon the public wonder will concentrate on other miracles. Now the sight-seeing cusses make a detour so that the visitors to Manhattan may view the tallest building in town—“On your right, ladies and gentlemen, the Seacoast Building, eight hundred and forty feet high, seventy-two stories, the home of the Seacoast Bank and Trust Company, of the United Broadcasting Company. Hundreds of offices, thousands of workers. Express elevators—and from the towers the finest view of the city obtainable. On your right, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Statisticians, professional and amateur, contend with one another for space in the instructive press. “If the bricks used in the construction of the Seacoast Building were laid end to end—” “If the steel used in the construction of the Seacoast Building—” “It is estimated that through the bronze portals of the Seacoast Building so-and-so many thousands of people pass, every day—”

  A clerk in the minor building opposite turns from his files and thinks of the Seacoast Building in terms of dollars and cents. If I had that much money—a tenth—a twentieth—he dreams in envy. God, if he had that much money, would he put it into steel and stone? Not he!

  An architect,
writing for a business magazine, defines the Seacoast Building in terms of the blueprint. He speaks of vertical masses, the absence of cornices and of horizontal accents. “In the Eliel Saarinen tradition,” says the architect, for so soon, so swiftly with the passage of inexorable time do the most recent flowerings of the visionary mind become tradition.

  A historian, passing by, on foot, looks up. He is dizzy with looking up; is there no end to this building, which to his restricted and tortured vision appears to lean, perilously balanced? He thinks of the lost towers of Babylon, craning his thin neck, while the building slants above him.

  From Jersey, a sightseeing airplane soars over Manhattan and skims like a sliver dragonfly high above the tallest tower of the Seacoast Building. The guide murmurs his little lesson: “We are now passing over the Seacoast Building—” The passengers in the plane look down. They see a finger pointing into the sky, they see a pinnacle falling leagues short of its arrogant endeavor. They see a pyramid, built from the blocks of some gigantic child, blocks placed one upon another, setback, step-off. They see something small and aspiring, lifting itself above the striving of other buildings yet never attaining that blue height which their pilot, chewing gum, his hand easy upon the stick, attains. They feel confident and secure. They look down upon this insolence of steel, and it is dwarfed. They are above it.

  It is all in the point of view.

  A poet is riding in a fractious taxi, at the expense of his broker friend. The poet leans from the window and looks upward; the poet thinks, vaguely, in terms of light and shadow, he sees in the Seacoast Building an immaculate beauty, with menace at the core. He thinks of the coinage of the country symbolized by the bank on the lower floors. He thinks of people and what money will do for them and what it will not do for them. He thinks of greed and lust, of rescue and rapture. He thinks of the broadcasting station in the towers, topless from a taxi window. He thinks of countries linked by mystery and of the strange dreaming voices of the ether which no man-made filament has yet captured. He wonders if he can get it down on paper. He knows that he cannot—being a poet, he says, “Let’s go somewhere and get a drink.”

  It is all in the point of view.

  On Sundays the street is empty. Now and then a car goes by. Now and then a man walks past, talking to his companion. The Seacoast Building stands half in sun and half in shade. The offices of the banks are closed. The other offices are closed also—insurance, wholesale sport clothes, lecture bureau, publishing, investment securities, lawyer, cafeteria, luncheonette, restaurant. Only in the towers are people active, in studios and control rooms, imparting news of the world, secular and church music, sermons, jazz to other people who, slippered, sit at home, the Sunday papers in confusion about them, cartoon and comic, inky sheets, staining the hands which turn them. Who knows when someone will say, “See if you can get UBC, will you? Let’s catch a little music—”

  This is on Sunday. But Monday releases some spring, animating the routine gestures of men and women. Monday begins the workers’ week, and the Seacoast Building opens its doors of green bronze set in black marble and invites them within, to struggle, to attain, to fail, to succeed, to love and to hope, to laugh and to weep, to suffer and rejoice, to envy and wound, to hate and to pity.

  In short, to work for their existence.

  In the Grand Central district the subway trains jolted to a screaming stop, the doors opened, the people eddied out upon the platform. “Watch your step,” intoned the guard. The guard, in the midway car, by pushing a button which manipulated levers, was, for the moment, a demi-deity. Small, dark, a youthful man, in whose veins the South European blood retained memories of laughter and knives, slow, hot sunlight and twisted vines dripping the purple, hazy flesh of grapes, he stood in a swaying car and, as it slid to a stop, reached out a swarthy hand and touches the mechanical contrivance which opens a cage and lets forth an amorphous mass of human beings; a mass which, upon reaching the platform, resolved itself into separately moving, breathing, sometimes thinking, atoms.

  “Hey—where the hell do you think you’re going?”

  “What’s your hurry, sister?”

  “Out—let me out—let me out—!”

  A hysterical voice, the last. Some women always became slightly hysterical when their stations were reached. For three minutes prior to the halt they sat tense on the edge of their seats, or, rising, swayed and stumbled, fighting their way toward the doors—“I’m getting off here—will you let me out?”

  Men; young men, elderly men, old men. Women; fat and thin, of all ages. Fur coats, too warm, too bulky for this autumnal morning; sleazy, thin coasts collared with the protesting pelt of some unfortunate cat, coats too thin for the brisk October winds. Stockings, silk, all grades. Shoes; oxfords, pumps, sandals; repressed but not conquered flesh flowing thickly over straps, building from fantastically cut-out leather; sturdy heels, run-down heels. Powder, paint, lipstick, permanents; perfume, hot, cheap, permeating. Tabloids rustling. Jaws moving in their automatic bovine manner over wads of gum. Worried people; people worried over money, jobs, sickness, sweethearts, women, men, rent, mortgages, life—crushed together by the doors, two lovers, their bodies pressed closely together, his arm in the shabby serge sleeve around her thin shoulder. They were not talking very much. They were smiling, dimly, savoring this intimate moment, a little faint with insufficient breakfasts, with the morning dogtrot to their respective stations, with the fear that they would miss one another, with the beginning of a new working day.

  Other people, are closely allied physically, but strangers. A marriage of strange knees, a welding of limbs, a brief encounter of arms, breasts, shoulders. Breathing each other’s breath, sensing each other’s personal odors, aware of the texture of each other’s skin, the fabric of each other’s garments. Revolting, yet impersonal—as a rule.

  The floor of the car had become a welter of paper; it looked like the city room in a newspaper office.

  In the car there was no knowledge of weather, of rain, snow, sun, shade, warmth, cold. In the car there was nothing to indicate the day. These people were for a little time moles, involuntarily burrowing their way beneath the earth. In the car there lived, also temporarily, huddled together, every type, every kind of human being, one by one and two by two: a modern Noah’s ark. In the car there pulsed insanely every sort of human passion, hope and fear—

  Forty-Second Street—

  The doors opened. “Let ‘em off,” shouted the guard, knowing that he shouted in vain.

  Pushing, elbowing, the small stampede began.

  Lynn Harding, arriving by the grace of God and two hundred pounds of masculine avoirdupois against her back, upon the platform, shook herself cautiously, as a kitten might, to see if she was all there. She was a small girl, beautifully and firmly made. She settled the trim lines of her coast about her, sank her pointed chin into the fur collar, and fled lightly up the stairs, weaving her way past slower stair-climbers, with something of the fleet intensity of a female halfback, and skirting her way about the intricacies of the upper strata, passing shops and restaurants and the alluring archways to train levels, made her way up and out into the street.

  Here there was space, in comparison with what she had left behind her for eight hours or more. Here was air, tainted perhaps with carbon monoxide but by comparison, of a pristine freshness; cold and clear. Here was sunlight, slanting down from tall buildings, but not wholly conquered. Here were hurrying people like herself, and under her feet asphalt.

  She was on her way to work. She was on her way to the Seacoast Building where, in the trust department of the Seacoast Bank and Trust Company, she was employed to do a job, impressively known as “sales research.” She had held the position for a year, starting in the old offices of the company, moving with them two months previously to the new building. She was paid $1,900 a year, she lives uptown in a business club for girls, she liked her work, she looked forward to a bigger and better job someday, she was twenty-two years ol
d and pretty enough to arrest the preoccupied attention of more than one passerby, hurrying with the insane speed of Monday morning toward his dull or exciting or stop-gap job.

  It was early. Lynn was also on her way to breakfast. She had been depressed for months by the cafeteria breakfasts at the club, the girls yawning their way downstairs to the clatter of utensils and thick cups and saucers, serving themselves, selecting cereals with a lackluster eye and balancing their selected calories and vitamins upon tin trays, bearing them to the painted tables, crowded against the painted walls. So, since the bank had moved into the new building, Lynn, arriving earlier than necessary, had breakfasted during her twenty minutes’ leisure in the bigger and sunnier cafeteria in the building. She rather liked climbing on the high stool and winding her slim legs about it for support, rather liked the nonchalant, automatically flirtatious attitude of the redheaded young man in the white jacket who always waited on her and was never at a loss for a flung missile of pert conversation between orders. She liked the hurry and confusion, viewed with security from her little perch.

  At the club, where she had lived since her arrival more than a year before in New York, she had no intimates. She knew most of the girls, she called them by their given names. She knew their jobs and, in some cases, their aspirations. She was privy to the love affairs of several. But she had no close friends. And there was something about the slightly institutional atmosphere, hedged about with rules and regulations, something about the pussy-faced, too, too sweet housemother or directress, something about the heavy feminine aura of the place, against which she rebelled. The Marlow Business Club for Girls—heavily endowed by a philanthropic woman who had never lived with forty other women, who had never obeyed a regulation in her life—accepted for a weekly sum business girls of “good character” and “respectable background,” and “employed in remunerative positions” from the ages of eighteen to thirty. Prior to eighteen years of age you did not exist, for the club; nor, it appeared, after thirty. Within the narrow brownstone walls the invisible emanations from forty female personalities clashed and warred and struggled—frivolous desires, stifling desires, frustrations, disappointments, terrors—