I do not light up the room. I am the secretary in this strange little office.
The history of this office is complex, is a blur, is a puzzle, has been erased from the frame. Please know that I have been framed. At the time of this telling, my day begins at nine o’clock, and I am at my desk on time every morning. Promptness, neatness, orderliness — in the first few minutes of every day, I display the attributes of a very good secretary. This is due to my training, and reflects my commitment to our business achieving the highest success.
Of course, the arrangement of supplies in my desk necessitates a quick check to be sure I have what I need to perform, and I keep on the desk only the supplies that I need for the day. I remove all the rest and place those items in the top drawer, which locks with a very small key I wear on my neck on a gold chain.
With my place of business in order, I begin to organize the day for myself and for my employer, Mr. Chelikowsky, by referring to my invaluable calendar pad and typing up an hourly schedule. I record the names of people who have appointments during the day — these never are many, and mostly are none — and I also prepare memoranda and reminders for Mr. Chelikowsky, whom I always call Mr. C., though he has requested that I call him by his full name, so this is my one act of rebellion. I don’t mean to rebel, and in fact I am not rebelling, because my teachers at secretarial college always referred to employers by just an initial — Mr. B., Mr. Q., Mr. R., depending on which lesson we were on for that unit. I have explained this to him and that it is difficult to unlearn certain habits of administrative behavior.
I place the schedule on Mr. C.’s desk before he arrives. Soon after, Marge Quinn, office stenographer and my coworker, arrives.
Yes, I can easily clarify this distinction between a stenographer and a secretary. A stenographer takes dictation, transcribes, and types; she may also do billing and filing and operate machines like a duplicator, adding machine, etcetera. At times a stenographer may also operate the switchboard, but we don’t have a switchboard. We’re a small operation, but we don’t deal in small things. Either way, a secretary assumes much more responsibility than a stenographer and she contributes much more to the potential success of her employer — in this case Mr. C. I have worked with him long enough to know that he’ll be successful — that he and I will be successful — in this, our daily routine, which amounts to everything, just as each moonrise and sunrise is everything too, but I’m getting ahead of myself here. A secretary can’t get ahead of herself — not only is it impossible, practically speaking, but it is inadvisable.
At the same time each day the morning mail is distributed, and sorting it is one of my responsibilities. I separate out the personal letters from the business correspondence — all of this is first opened in the mailroom, if a business has a mailroom. We don’t have a mailroom. Mailrooms are not the tradition in Hell’s Kitchen, and in our trade, we prefer direct delivery. And I should mention that of all my responsibilities, I take this separating out of the personal letters from the business correspondence most seriously, though I take all the work seriously.
Office work is very serious business.
When the office was established, I was there to arrange it: the desk needed to go next to the window, for one thing, that I knew. Mr. C.’s mother thought the desk should face the door — there were notes in Mr. C.’s desk to this effect. I filed them under “Chelikowsky, Mother.” She never liked me, but I liked her. Her perfume was amazing: Sumatra. Whispered romance. You wouldn’t expect it, was the thing, from someone like her. If a woman thinks there is something improper about a woman and a man working in close quarters, you can pretty much guarantee there is something improper about her. Like I said, I liked her — I like women with secrets. But she never liked me.
When I was hired, the notes were all willy-nilly. Personal mixed in with business, and that’s never smart. An outsider might think that personal business is business, but there’s business and there’s business, and this is one thing that employers (e.g., Mr. C.) don’t understand but secretaries do. Marge Quinn, stenographer, does not understand this due to her inexperience and also due to her figure. What I mean is, her personal self comes into the work. When she stands at the file cabinet she’s not filing, she’s also standing — it’s hard to explain to an outsider.
Even buying a coffee at the newspaper stand to bring to the office, steaming and hot, twenty-five cents with heavy cream added, one sugar, is personal business that she considers business, because it goes on her desk. You can see by the way she caresses the cardboard with her buttery fingers. My fingers aren’t buttery — they’re more like matchsticks. Not brittle — more like delicate — and effective for making a pass. But there’s nothing personal about me at work, or at least I maintain that impression, which takes discipline and technique.
What goes on my desk — and I keep my desk bare as I can, just as I keep my body under my clothes — is all business, and the personal matters go in a drawer, or if not suitable there, in a file marked “Personal” (no subheading), and there’s a secret drawer for those files too, but enough of that now, that’s for later, or never.
It is my job to train Quinn. I’ve never met anyone like her. I’d take a nickname like Quinn. Chan isn’t much of a nickname. No one ever uses nicknames for me.
The last stenographer — well, we didn’t have one, but the girl who would have been a stenographer, if we’d needed a stenographer, wasn’t anything like Quinn, not one bit! She was all angles and business. She had few responsibilities apart from being sure the phone stopped ringing in time. I don’t think she had a personal life. She lived in the low numbers, if you know what I mean, where I would have lived if my father would have let me, but I lived at home, because he needed someone to take care of his business (all personal, and I would rather not go into details). That was two years ago, before I moved into the hotel. It wasn’t the Barbizon — not that I couldn’t have afforded it on my salary; Mr. C. treats me well — but it wasn’t my cup of tea. I wanted my cup of tea my way, not the Barbizon way, and by that I mean I wanted my birds. Not caged birds, but pigeons — they mainly eat on the sills, but if they want to come in I don’t mind, and I wanted to live somewhere that didn’t mind either, and I didn’t want to sign in and out every time I left for a sandwich — egg salad, thank you, with iceberg lettuce and mayo on white. The receipts are all there in the filing cabinet. I take liberties only with this — keeping my personal affairs filed at work. “Sandwich Receipts,” all in order; you won’t find a single one missing.
The trouble with being a secretary is training new stenographers to understand that there are some phone calls that must go unanswered, and some letters that will never be filed and some that will never be taken out of the files, will never be seen — there is only so much I can tell her, and it is quite clear from the way that she dresses that she doesn’t like to be told anything. So even when I am being evasive, because I don’t trust her, she thinks I am telling her something and wants to rebel. This shows in her thighs.
If you’d like an example, I should not have shared with her the name of my tailor, the Latvian woman on Twentieth Street, Mrs. Lurenski. She’s a genius with wool. I can ring her up on a Friday and have the suit that I need by the following Monday — a Following Suit. These are the most difficult patterns, and they need to be frequently changed for success in the office and on the street, where some of our work takes us — especially down to the pickle district, and that is no joke.