When I got back to the conveyer belt, he was rolling a log off toward the woodpecker. He squinted down at me from where he stood on the platform, sunlight slabbing his eyes, and said, “What’d Moreland want?”
“I’ve been canned,” I said.
“Why?” Allen asked, looking genuinely shocked.
I did not think it would be difficult to find another job.
We were in the midst of what seemed like lasting prosperity, and even though some gloomy forecasters were predicting a full-scale depression before the end of the year (based, I supposed, upon the recent collapse of farm prices) I could not imagine unemployment walking hand-in-hand with inflation. So in that second week of a Chicago May that quickened my step and elevated my spirits, I put on my best suit each morning, with a clean white shirt and collar, tic held in place by a stickpin made from a pearl my mother had given me as a wedding present, and went off to seek work. I left the house early every day, trying to get to as many mills as possible, but I was usually home by two or three o’clock, and it was Nancy who suggested that the Grzyimeks downstairs must have thought I was a gangster selling illegal whiskey or something, since I kept such elegant hours. I encouraged this idea all during my second week of job-hunting, tipping my hat to Mrs. Grzymek whenever I met her in the hallway, affecting the air of a very successful if somewhat shady businessman off to a strategy meeting, after which I would have lunch at the Commercial Club and then come home in time for an afternoon nap. But at the end of the second futile week of hunting, Mrs. Grzymek ran into Nancy at the butcher’s, and asked, “Has your husband found work yet?” puncturing even that balloon. We had fifty-six dollars in the bank when I lost the job, and by the last week in May, we were down to thirty-two. I was getting just a trifle nervous. Moreover, Nancy was beginning to nag me about not having seen the Garretts in all this time. Sounding like a phonograph record of my own arguments, and probably ticking off the points on her fingers one by one (we were in bed when she treated me to this particular sermon, and I could not see her in the dark) she explained that (1) I was reacting quite hysterically to a climate of suspicion and fear, (2) I was behaving as abominably as Mr. Moreland had, and (3) I was condemning and hanging poor Allen without even giving him the opportunity to defend himself. I politely said, “Pardon?” and rolled over and went to sleep. I had more pressing things on my mind than Allen Garrett’s supposedly injured feelings.
It was raining when I woke up the next morning. The bedroom was chilly and damp. I did not want to get out of bed. I did not want to travel in the rain to Ogden Avenue, where I had a job interview with a Mr. McInerny of Dill-Holderness International. But I thought of those thirty-two dwindling dollars in the bank, and I thought of how tempted I had recently been by a recurring classified advertisement in the Tribune for a washroom attendant at the Blackstone Theater. So I pulled on a pair of trousers over my cotton nightshirt, and went into the hall to perform my morning toilette, even as Bertram A. Tyler might have done in Paris, France, before leaving for his highly profitable automobile agency on the Avenue Neuilly. Then I shaved and dressed myself in the clothes that had so successfully fooled Mrs. Grzymek, kissed Nancy on the cheek, and went out into the rain. I was drenched before I reached the streetcar depot.
Mr. McInerny was a tolerable old bore who apprised me of the fact that forest products ranked seventh in the United States industry in this year of our Lord 1920, and would no doubt rise even higher on the scale in years to come. There are unlimited opportunities in paper for a young man who’s not afraid of hard work, he said. I assured him that I was not afraid of hard work, and then told him of my not inconsiderable experience in lumbering — the font, so to speak, of the paper industry (Ah, yes, the font indeed, Mr. McInerny said, nodding) — and of my apprenticeship at Ramsey-Warner, all of which seemed to impress him favorably. But at last he got around to the part of the interview I was dreading, “Why did you leave your last place of employment, Mr. Tyler?”
“I was let go,” I said.
“Why were you let go?” Mr. McInerny asked.
I had coped with this question on every interview I’d had during the past three weeks, debating whether I should lie in answer to it, knowing it would take nothing more than a telephone call to ascertain the truth of whatever I said, and finally developing a sort of compromise answer, a lie that wasn’t quite a lie, a truth that wasn’t quite that either.
“There was a personality conflict with another employee,” I said.
Mr. McInerny looked at me very closely. “What kind of personality conflict?” he asked, surprising me. On my last several interviews, the clever answer I’d evolved had not been challenged. I sat now in silence, wondering what to say next. “What kind of personality conflict?” Mr. McInerny asked again in his gentle boring voice.
“A man I worked with was making false accusations about me,” I said, and realized I would now have to define the accusations and do a dissertation besides on innocence defiled, realized in short that I’d already lost the job.
“What kind of accusations?” Mr. McInerny predictably asked.
“Well,” I said, figuring honesty was the best policy, “they thought I was a radical.”
“Who thought so?”
“Mr. Moreland who fired me.”
“Are you a radical?”
“No, sir.”
“How do I know you’re not?”
Throwing caution entirely to the winds, I said, “How do I know you’re not, Mr. McInerny?”
“I‘m not looking for work,” he answered.
We stared at each other in polite silence, Mr. McInerny smiling in his bored and gentle way, I knowing for certain that the smoke had gone all the way up the flue. Mr. McInerny shook hands with me, and promised to let me know his decision by the end of the week, but I knew I had not got the job. My suit, which had begun to dry out a little in his office, got soaked all over again the moment I stepped outside. With my luck, I was sure it would shrink to half its size before I got home. It had cost me thirty-five dollars and ninety-five cents less than a year ago.
It was still raining when I got off the streetcar. A tall slender girl wearing a white raincape was standing on the front stoop of my building, her dark head bent, studying the falling raindrops in the sidewalk puddles. She looked up as I approached, seemingly on the verge of glancing away again immediately, as though she had wrongly greeted too many strangers during her wait and was now ready to reject even the person she expected.