He had to go down to the Battery to turn around, and then was when I heard newsboys screaming the name Harris and saw the big headlines. I bought a paper out of the cab window and there it was:
Underneath was a big picture of Grant, with the caption Heir to Railroad Millions, and a smaller picture of a girl named Muriel Van Hoogland, with a brief item in very big type saying their engagement was announced last June, the wedding to take place in September, but that when she flew in from California that morning, she found he had just two hours before married me. I began to see things a little more clearly, or thought I did. I looked to see if there was any more, but there wasn’t except for a small item about the Karb strike. It had started, apparently, only a few minutes before I drove up there. The demands adopted at the big meeting had been presented to the management, which refused even to consider them at all, whereupon the girls had been called out on strike.
By now, I realized that except for the coffee at the shack, I hadn’t had anything to eat, so instead of going at once to the apartment, I had the driver let me out at Times Square, and went in a restaurant for a sandwich. But while that was coming I went to the phone booth and called NBC and checked on the programs that had gone on ahead of Bergen on that station. And one of them was the young man who does interviews with people boarding planes at Lockheed Airport, in Burbank, California.
When I came out on the streets again there were later editions, with longer items in them. One was an interview with Muriel Van Hoogland, in which she said she didn’t care a bit, and then burst out crying and slammed the door in the reporters’ faces. One was about me and my work at Karb’s and in the headline of that occurred for the first time the nickname, Modern Cinderella, which stuck. So by now I was not only feeling miserable, but afraid and worried, and I wanted time to think. I didn’t feel glad I had married a rich man. That part hardly entered my head, important though I hold money to be. I merely felt in some bitter way that I had been made a fool of, and when I ate my sandwich I walked up to the Newsreel Theatre and went in and sat down. There was nothing about me on the screen that day. I suppose it was too soon, though there was plenty later. I don’t know how long I sat there, but finally it all seemed to focus that I had to have it out with Grant, and yet I even hated the idea of going back to the apartment. So after a long time I left the theatre, and it must have been three or four o’clock.
When I came out into the sunshine, I was startled to see my own picture in the papers, very big, with Grant’s picture much smaller, and Muriel Van Hoogland’s just a little circle down at one side. It was the picture I had had taken when I graduated from high school in Nyack, and that meant it must have come from there, and that frightened me. And sure enough, there was a whole long item about the orphan asylum, and being a waitress in the hotel, and all the rest of it that I had wanted to keep to myself.
But what made something turn over inside of me was the big headline at the top of the page:
And the main story was all about how Clara Gruber said I had absconded with the union funds, and had sworn a warrant out for my arrest.
I went to a drug store and called the Solon, and told them I was quitting. I didn’t take a cab over to the apartment. I didn’t want to go that fast. I went clumping over on my two feet, and the nearer I got the slower I went. I went up in the elevator, let myself in, and Grant was in the bedroom making a phone call. It took several minutes, and seemed to be about somebody that was ill, whom I took to be Muriel Van Hoogland, but that was a mistake. I sat down and waited. He hung up, and came out and began marching around again, and seemed to be under a great strain. He went to the window and looked out. “It’s hot.”
“Quite.”
“By the way, I was thinking of something else this morning when you went out and didn’t realize what you meant. You don’t have to bother about that job. There’s no need for you to work.”
“I didn’t.”
“You — oh. That’s good. It’s terribly hot.”
“They’re on strike.”
“Who?”
“The girls. The slaves. Remember?”
“Oh. Oh, yes.”
The bell rang, and he answered. It was a reporter who had come up without being announced. “Well — I suppose you’d better come in.”
I remembered what Muriel Van Hoogland had done, and thought that was a pretty good idea myself. I went and slammed the door in the reporter’s face, then went back and took my seat again. “Now — suppose you begin.”
“About what?”
“About all of it.”
“I don’t quite know what you mean. If there’s something on your mind suppose you begin.”
“Who was that you were so concerned about just now?”
“My mother. This thing seems to have upset her.”
“You mean your marriage?”
“Yes, of course.”
“To a waitress?”
“—All right, to a waitress, but if I’m not complaining, I don’t see that we have anything to discuss.”
“I do, so we’ll discuss. Who are you, anyway?”
“I told you my name. In case you’ve forgotten it, you’ll find it on the marriage certificate. I believe you took it.”
“You seem to be a little more than Grant Harris, Esquire. May I ask who the Harrises are — why the newspapers, for example, give so much space to the marriage of a Harris to — a waitress?”
“U. S. Grant Harris, my grandfather, was perhaps the worst scalawag in American history. He stole a couple of railroads, made a great deal of money — $72,000,000, I believe was the exact figure — and died an empire builder, beloved and respected by all who knew him slightly — or at any rate by the society editors. He left two children — my father, Harwood Harris, who died when I was five years old, and my uncle, George Harris, head of Harris, Hunt and Harris, where I have the honor to be employed. My uncle carries on my grandfather’s mighty work — he stole a railroad in Central America only last week, come to think of it. I could have told him the locomotive won’t run, now that all the wood along the right-of-way got burned off in a mountain fire a few months ago, but he didn’t consult me, and—”
“Never mind the mountain fire. Whose house was that — where we spent the day yesterday?”
“...My sister’s, Mrs. Hunt’s.”
“Why did you say it belonged to a friend?”
“Well — of course, it really belongs to her husband. I hope I can call Hunt a friend.”
“I’d call him a brother-in-law.”
“I guess he is, but I never think of him that way.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all this sooner?”
“Well — you never asked me, and—”
“And, in addition to that, there was this little matter of — Miss Muriel Van Hoogland. Who is she?”
“Just a girl.”
“Whom you had promised to marry?”
“That was all my uncle’s doing. My uncle continues another pleasing custom of my grandfather’s, by the way — the negotiation of what he calls favorable alliances, meaning marrying his nephews off to girls who have money. It wouldn’t have meant anything except that my mother let the wool be pulled over her eyes and before I knew it, mainly to make her happy, I had got myself into something pretty serious.”