LETTER VI
IN WHICH I PUT ON THE GLAD RAGS
Dear Mom:
Well I am glad the family finds my letters interesting these things is sure different from anything that ever happened to me before and I guess to any girl from Camden New Jersey.
Well, I am having a funny time right now in the Elite Beauty Parlors. The girls is just ate up with curiosity they know I have got some big fellow on my string somebody seen me with him somewhere and they cant make out why I wont tell. They say I’m a boob to think I can hide him they will sure track him down but I just laugh at them. There is an extension phone in Madame Lafferty’s private office and whenever I am asked to the phone she is always listening in but all she hears is that a gentleman named Mr. Brown says for me to meet him at the usual place and that dont tell her much. Sometimes I write these little notes to you in between customers, and of course that intreegs the girls a lot too and Ada Huggins—her that has changed her name to Adaire the silly fool—she says, “What is it Mame are you writing your mamewars?” That is supposed to be smart but it aint so very.
Well just now the phone rung and it was Mr. Edgerton, and he asked me if I could get off at five this afternoon and meet him and of course that wasnt easy because it is our busiest hour but he said it was a very urgent matter so I said I would try my best to be there. And then I went to ask the Madame and gee she was sour she says, “What is this that I am running a beauty parlor or a date ranch?” You see she pretends the girls aint supposed to meet the customers outside but gee what a howl there would be if I was to ask for enough wages to buy my own dinners! And we all know she goes out herself and meets a gent with a glass in one eye and his hair plastered over his bald head, he calls himself Count Skrimsky but I’m telling you he’s no count in any way you mean it. Well I says she can dock my pay or I’ll stay two hours of my afternoon off and then she tries to find out who is the gentleman and I tell her it is a government matter and I have been forbid to say and you can imagine how much pleased that makes her!
P. S. Oh Mom I have just had the most wonderful adventure that ever happened to a girl. Mr. Edgerton knew just what he had in mind when he got me to meet him at five o’clock it was to get to some store before it shut up! Oh Mom he must of saw that my purse was empty the last time we went out and he must of got sorry about it. Anyhow we strolled down the street and there was the Bon Ton Store with all the lovely things in the windows and he kind of led me over to look and he says, “They make lots of pretty things now-a-days dont they.” And I says, “Yes, they do,” but kind of feeble because I wouldnt have him think I was thinking I would ever like to own such things. But he says, “Let’s us go in and have a look at them.”
So we went in and he went to the suit department and he says to the clerk, “My daughter finds the winters in Washington more severe than she expected and she wants to get something nice and warm,” he says, just like that and gee I nearly faints at the nerve of him. But of course I have got to go through with it so I says, “Oh, no, Papa, not now!” but he says, “Yes, right now, I insist.”
So the girl takes one look at him and starts to bringing out the expensive things and I gasps, “Oh, that will cost too much!” But he says, “You let me tend to this daughter,” and so of course all I can do is to stand there. And so he gets me a tailored suit brown like I had on but oh what a difference there can be in clothes! It is soft and fuzzy andwarm like it was an overcoat and yet it is lighter than my old suit!
And then he says, “We shall have to have a hat and things to match this suit,” and then I starts to argue that my old hat will do but he says it wont and before I get through he takes me round to the shoe department and the glove counter—it is after the hours and the place is closed and the clerks is tired and looking cross but he cheers them up with a tip and so we finish the rounds. And I keep them all on and when I am going out you would not know it is the same girl that come in. The clerk wants to know where they shall send the old things and I don’t dare to give the address because you see it had ought to be the name of some swell hotel so I says I am moving and I will send for them; and of course I will send myself tomorrow.
Well, Mom, I am so rattled I can hardly talk and I says, “Mr. Edgerton, this aint right I hadnt ought to of let you do it.” But he says real serious that the ideas I have give him is worth what he has paid and there wasnt no other way he could of got them. “But I didnt expect to be paid for them,” I says and he says, “Well I am paid for them myself and why should you work for nothing?” he says. “I have got to keep close to the great heart of the plain people,” he says, “and to know how they feel and talk and how else am I to do it? The only thing you got to be sure is that getting fixed up swell dont spoil you so that you forget how the plain people feel.”
But I says, “No you dont need to worry about that,” I says, “because I got my mother and father and my kid brothers and sisters back in the gas-house district of Camden New Jersey and how could I forget how they feel?”
“Well then,” says he, “it’s all right and you can go on telling me and I will tell it to the Spokesman and He will tell it to the newspaper reporters and they will tell it to the papers and the papers will tell it to the gas house district of Camden New Jersey.”
“But,” says I, “What will the missus think about it your spending so much money on a manicure girl?”
“She aint going to know about it,” he says. “I have paid cash and I dont suppose you will tell her.”
“Trust me!” I says. “But some of your friends—”
“If my friends was to see me with you now it would be easier for me to get away with it I could say you was the daughter of some famous diplomat or of a senator at the very least.” And of course that made me feel happy andjust then we come to a movie parlor and he says, “We have got to learn how to wear our good clothes,” he says, “so let’s go in and see the latest thing in Hollywood manners.”
So in we go and there is a picture oh Mom the loveliest story about a poor miners’ daughter in the hills that is kidnapped by a moonshiner that is an old-fashioned name for a boot-legger and she is rescued by the handsome young son of the mine-owner that happens to be visiting the mine and he comes to love her in the end and they get married in the loveliest palace all white with sunshine and roses. And if I had of saw that yesterday I would of said it was too good to be true but now it all seemed like it was me and I felt such thrills running over me and I felt so warm and I whispered to Mr. Edgerton to thank him several times and I felt just like he really was my father like he said.
But then I got scared because of course he aint my father but he’s a man that aint happy with his wife and I am a girl that is promised to be married some day a long ways off to a poor but honest shipping-clerk in Camden New Jersey. And so I have got to keep telling myself that my job with Mr. Edgerton is to educate him so that he can educate the Spokesman that is the greatest Man in the whole world and has the job of educating the greatest people in the whole world.
But oh Mom it is hard to be a girl and to be young and to love pretty things and never to be able to have none unless you go without your lunch every day for a month or two. I go up to that little box of a room that I live in, and fry myself a frankfurter or some hamburger on a tiny oil stove and gee I get sorry for myself and I get sorry for poor Walter that thinks I am going to marry him some day and I am of course but oh Mom us plain people do have to pay a lot for what we learn!
Well we went into a restaurant and as soon as Mr Edgerton had ordered some dinner I says real determined, “We have got to get down to business now because I will not feel happy unless I give you some real good ideas to pay for all this money you have spent.” So he says that the Spokesman likes my ideas about the Reds and how to hold them down, but He thinks that just now it would be better not to hammer them too hard because this country has got a lot of machinery and things that it has got to sell and them Bolshivikis has got a lot of gold and crown jewels that they want to exchange for ten thousand tractors that is made bya friend of the Spokesman that helped him a lot to get elected.
“Gee,” I says, “I thought them Roossian fellers had got all them gold and jewels by stealing them!”
And Mr. Edgerton says that is so and perhaps we hadnt ought to take it but the trouble is if we dont sell the tractors the tractor factory will have to shut down and that will leave a lot of good honest American working people to starve in the middle of the winter. “And so you see,” says he, “how complicated these here international affairs is.”
And I says, “My God I hardly know how to think my way around in such a mix-up. That is almost worse than the problem about getting the debts paid,” I says, “for I was going to say that to make up with them Bolshivikis would be like shaking hands with murder.” And Mr. Edgerton says, “Yes, it was Lord George that said that a few years ago over in England.” And gee Mom you have sure got to keep Pop from sending me old ones else I’ll have to stop using his ideas and think them all up for myself.
Well I done the best I could in a hurry. He said the Spokesman was very unhappy because of the way the prohibitionists was fussing because the boot-leggers wasnt stopped the dries didnt like it because the job of enforcing the law was left to that banker that is in the cabinet—I never can remember his name but I keep thinking of Cantelope though that dont sound right. Well anyhow this Mr. Cantelope is the biggest manufacturer of whiskey in the country and the prohibitionists dont seem to think that he is the best one to catch the bootleggers and I says, “Well, you have heard the old saying about setting a thief to catch a thief.” And Mr. Edgerton thought that was clever but he didnt think it was just the way the Spokesman would want to defend His friend the great banker in the cabinet.
And so there it was Mom I couldnt think of nothing else so I have fell down complete and Mr. Edgerton will think that getting these new clothes has made me stop being able to feel with the plain people. So please ask Pop to see if he can think of any reason why a great whisky-maker should be hired by the government to stop the whisky-business, and if he can, to write it to me quick. But please dont let him send nothing that he has read in the papers about it because Mr. Edgerton is sure to say that is old stuff.
P. S. Again I been thinking it over and this idea has hit me that maybe Pop aint really got any ideas at all exceptwhat he gets out of the papers and if so I have got to do this job all alone. I am going to talk it over with the girls in the beauty parlor because I am sure they dont read nothing in the papers except the divorces and the crimes and the beauty hints the same as what I done before I was invited to help the Spokesman with his speeches.
Your anxious
Mame.