Chapter 13

My compartment came first, directly next the dishes. Next me was a beautiful chef with his white cap set on at just the chef angle. He was an artist, with a youngster about fifteen as his assistant. Some day that youngster will be a more beautiful chef than his master and more of an artist. His master, I found out in my slack hours that first afternoon, was French, with little English at his command, though six years in this country. I know less French than he does English, but we got to be good friends over the low partition which separated us. There was nothing at all fresh or affectionate about that French chef. I showed my gratitude for that by coming over in the afternoon and helping him slice hot potatoes for potato salad while my floor got washed. Every day I made him a bow and said, "_Bon jour, Monsieur le Bon Chef_," which may be no French at all. And every day he made me a bow back and said, "_Bon jour_" something or other, which I could tell was nice and respectful, but--I can't write it down. Monsieur Le Bon Chef made splendid cold works of art in jellies, and salads which belonged to another realm than my poor tomatoes and lettuce. Also, he and his assistant--the assistant was Spanish--made wonder sandwiches. They served jellied soups from their counter. Poor humble me would fill "One order graham crackers, little one!" But to Monsieur Le Bon Chef it would be "Two Cream of Cantaloupes!" "One chicken salad!" "One (our hotel) Plate!" (What a creation of a little of everything that was!) Monsieur Le Bon Chef taught me some tricks of the trade, but this is no treatise on domestic science.

I will tell you about Monsieur Le Bon Chef, though by no means did I learn this all my first afternoon. I only picked up a little here and there, now and then. He came to this country a French immigrant from near Toulouse six or so years ago, his heart full of dreams as to the opportunities in America. Likely as not we might now have to add that, after many searchings, he landed a job peeling potatoes at fifteen dollars a month. Monsieur Le Bon Chef was no Bon Chef at all when he landed--knew none of the tricks of "chefness" to speak of. His first day in America he sought out an employment office. Not a word of English could he speak. While the employment agent was just about to shake his head and say, "Nothing to-day," a friend, or at least a countryman, dashed up. "I have a job for you," said the countryman, and he led my Bon Chef to New York's most aristocratic hotel. Monsieur Le Bon Chef could not know there was a cooks' strike on. Down to the kitchen they led him, and for some weeks he drew ten dollars a day wages and his room and board right there at the hotel. To fall from Toulouse into a ten-dollar-a-day job! And when one knew scarce more than how to boil potatoes!

Of course, when the strike was over, there were no such wages paid as ten dollars a day. Nothing like that was he earning these six years later when he could make the beauteous works of art in jelly. I asked him if he liked his work. He shrugged his shoulders and brushed one side of his rather bristly blond mustache. "Na--no like so much--nothing in it but the moaney--make good moaney." He shrugged his shoulders again and brushed up the other side of his mustache. "No good work just for tha moaney." You see he really is an artist. He was my quiet, nice friend, Monsieur Le Bon Chef. Indeed, one night he gave me a wondrously made empty cigar box with a little lock to it. "Ooh La-la!" I cried, and made a very deep bow, and said in what I'm sure was correct French--because Monsieur Le Bon Chef said it was--"Thank you very much!"

So then, all there was on our side of the kitchen was my little compartment and the not quite so little compartment of Monsieur Le Bon Chef, whose confines reached around the corner a bit. Around that corner and back a little way were two fat Porto-Rican women who washed glasses and spoke no English. Beyond them, at the right of the stairs going up to the main kitchen, were clean dishes. They came on dumb-waiters from some place either above or below.

At the left of the stairs were some five chefs of as many nationalities--Italian, Spanish, South American, French, Austrian, who filled hot orders, frying and broiling and roasting. Around the corner and opposite the Bon Chef and me were first the two cashiers, then my special friends, the Spanish dessert man and the Greek coffee and tea man. That is, they were the main occupants of their long compartment, but at the time of lunch rush at least six men worked there. Counting the chore persons of various sorts and not counting waiters, we had some thirty-eight working in or for our café--all men but the two fat Porto-Rican glass washers and me.

Bridget, the dear old soul, came down that first afternoon to see how I was getting along. I had cleaned up spick and span after the Spanish woman--and a mess she always managed to leave. The water was out of the egg-boiling machine and that all polished; the heat turned off in the toasting machine and that wiped off; lemons sliced; celery "Julietted"; and I was peeling a tubful of oranges--in the way the steward had showed me--to be sliced by Spanish Mary for breakfast next morning.

"I'm sure gettin' along swell," I told Bridget.

"God bless ye," said my dear old guide, and picked her way upstairs again.

It was plain to see that down our way everybody's work eased up between 3.30 and 5. Then everyone visited about, exchanged newspapers, gossiped over counters. We changed stewards at three. Kelly, the easy-going, jovial (except at times) Irishman, took himself off, and a narrow-shouldered, small, pernickety German Jew came on for the rest of my time. When we closed up at nine he went to some other part of the hotel and stewarded.

My first afternoon Schmitz sauntered about to see what he could find out. Where did I live, what did I do evenings, what time did I get up mornings, what did I do Sundays? One question mark was Schmitz. One thing only he did not ask me, because he knew that. He always could tell what nationality a person was just by looking at him. So? Yes, and he knew first thing what nationality I was. So? Yes, I was a Turk. But the truth of it was that at the hotel I was part Irish and part French and part Portuguese, but all I could talk was the Irish because my parents had both died while I was very young. Another day, my Greek friend, the coffee man, said he was sure there was a little Greek in me; and an Austrian waiter guessed right away I was a bit Austrian; and every Spaniard in the kitchen--and the hotel was full of them--started by talking a mile-a-minute Spanish at me. So a cosmopolitan, nondescript, melting-pot face is an asset in the labor world in our fair land--all nationalities feel friendly because they think you are a countryman. But a Turk--that stretched boundaries a bit.

For every question Schmitz asked me I asked him one back. His wife and daughter, sixteen, were in France for three months, visiting the wife's parents. As Schmitz's pernicketyness became during the next days more and more impossible to ignore, I solaced my harassed feelings with the thought of how much it must mean to Mrs. Schmitz to be away from Mr. Schmitz and his temperament and disposition for three blessed months. Perhaps the daughter, sixteen, had spoken of that phase of the trip to Mrs. Schmitz. Mrs. Schmitz, being a dutiful wife who has stood Mr. Schmitz at least, we surmise, some seventeen years, replied to such comments of her sixteen-year-old daughter, "Hush, Freda!"

At five minutes to five Schmitz graciously told me I might go up to my supper, though the law in the statute books stood five. Everybody upstairs in the main kitchen, as I made my way to the service elevator, spoke kindly and asked in the accents of at least ten different nationalities how I liked my job. Hotel folk, male and female, are indeed a friendly lot.

The dining room for the help is on the ballroom floor, which is a short flight of steps above the third. It is the third floor which is called the service floor, where our lockers are, and the chambermaids' sleeping quarters, and the recreation room.

There are, it seems, class distinctions among hotel help. The chefs eat in a dining room of their own. Then, apparently next in line, came our dining room. I, as pantry girl, ranked a "second officer." We had round tables seating from eight to ten at a table, table cloths and cafeteria style of getting one's food. The chefs were waited upon. In our dining room ate the bell boys, parlor maids, laundry workers, seamstresses, housekeepers, hotel guards and police, the employment man, pantry girls--a bit of everything. To reach our dining room we had to pass through the large room where the chambermaids ate. They had long bare tables, no cloths, and sat at benches without backs.

As to food, our dining room but reflected the state of mind any and every hotel dining room reflects, from the most begilded and bemirrored down. Some thought the food good, some thought it awful, some thought nothing about it at all, but just sat and ate. One thing at least was certain--there was enough. For dinner there was always soup, two kinds of meat, potatoes, vegetables, dessert, ice tea, milk, or coffee. For supper there was soup again, meat or fish, potatoes, a salad, and dessert, and the same variety of drinkables to choose from. Once I was late at lunch and ate with the help's help. The woman who dished up the vegetables was in a fearful humor that day. People had been complaining about the food. "They make me sick!" she grunted. "They jus' oughta try the ---- Hotel. I worked in their help's dinin' room for four years and we hardly ever seen a piece of meat, and as for eggs--I'm tellin' ya a girl was lucky if she seen a egg them four years."

The people in our dining room were like the people in every dining room: some were sociable and talked to their neighbors, some were not sociable at all. There was no regular way of seating. Some meals you found yourself at a table where all was laughter and conversation. The next meal, among the same number of people, not one word would be spoken. "Pass the salt" would grow to sound warm and chummy.

Half an hour was the time allowed everyone for meals. With a friendly crowd at the table that half hour flew. Otherwise, there was no way of using up half an hour just eating. And then what?

After a couple of days, some one mentioned the recreation room. Indeed, what's in a name? Chairs were there, two or three settees, a piano, a victrola, a Christy picture, a map of South America, the dying soldier's prayer, and three different sad and colored pictures of Christ. Under one of these was pinned a slip of paper, and in homemade printing the worthy admonition:

"No cursing no stealing when tempted look on his kindly face."

There were all these things, but no girls. Once in a while a forlorn bunch of age would sit humped in a chair, now and then a victrola record sang forth its worn contents, twice the piano was heard. After some ten days my large fat friend from the help's pantry informed me that she and I weren't supposed to be there--the recreation room was only for chambermaids and like as not any day we'd find the door locked. Sure enough, my last day at the hotel I sneaked around in the middle of the afternoon, as usual, to see what gossip I could pick up, and the door was locked. But I made the recreation room pay for itself as far as I was concerned. Every day I managed to pick up choice morsels of gossip there that was grist to my mill.

After my first supper I could find nothing to do or no one to talk to, so back I went to work--feeling a good deal like teacher's pet. About four o'clock it was my business to tell Schmitz what supplies we were out of and what and how much we'd need for supper. When I got back from supper there were always trays of food to be put in the ice chest, salads to be fixed, blackberries to dish out, celery to wash, and the like. By the time that was done supper was on in our café. That is, for some it was supper; for others, judging by the looks of the trays which passed hurriedly by my compartment, stopping only long enough for sliced lemon for the ice tea, it was surely dinner. Dinner _de luxe_ now and then! Such delectable dishes! How did anybody ever know their names enough to order them?

From 6 to 7.30 was the height of the supper rush. What a variable thing our patrons made of it! Some evenings there would be a regular run on celery salads, then for four nights not a single order. Camembert cheese would reign supreme three nights in succession--not another order for the rest of the week. Sometimes it seemed as if the whole of creation sat without, panting for sliced tomatoes. The next night stocked up in advance so as to keep no one waiting--not a human being looked at a tomato.

At eight o'clock only stragglers remained to be fed, and my job was to clear out the ice chest of all but two of each dish, send it upstairs to the main kitchen, and then start scrubbing house. Schmitz let it be known that one of the failings of her whose place I was now filling, the one who was asked to leave the Friday night before the Monday morning I appeared, was that she was not clean enough. At first, a year and a half ago, she was cleanly and upright--that is, he spoke of such uprightness as invariably follows cleanliness. But as time wore on her habits of cleanliness wore off, and there were undoubtedly corners in the ice box where her waning-in-enthusiasm fingers failed to reach. But on a night when the New York thermometer ranges up toward the nineties it is a pure and unadulterated joy to labor inside an ice box. I scrubbed and rinsed and wiped until Schmitz almost looked approving. Only it was congenital with Schmitz that he never really showed approval of anything or anybody. Schmitz was the kind (poor Mrs. Schmitz with her three months only of freedom) who always had to change everything just a little. There would echo down the line an order, "One Swiss cheese, little one" (that referred to me, not the cheese). Schmitz would stroll over from where he was trying to keep busy watching everyone at once, enter the very confines of my compartment, and stand over me while I sliced that Swiss cheese. It was always either too big, in which case he took the knife from my hands and sliced off one-sixteenth of an inch on one end; or too small, in which case Schmitz would endeavor to slice a new piece altogether. The chances were it would end in being even smaller than the slice I cut. In that case, Schmitz would say, "Led it go, anyway." And then, because he would always be very fair, he stood and explained at length why the piece was too big, if it were too big, or too small, if too small. "You know, it's dis vay--" My Gawd! not once, but every night. There was always one slice too many or too few on the sliced-tomato order. Schmitz would say, "There must be five slices." The next time I put on five slices Schmitz stuck that nose of his around the waiter's shoulder.

"Hey, vhat's dat? Only five slices? De guests won't stand for dat, you know. Dey pay good money here. Put anoder slice on."

I was wont to get fearfully exasperated at times.

"But," I remonstrated, "last time I had on six and you told me to put on five!"

"Yes, yes, but I expect you to use your common sense!"

That was his invariable comeback. And always followed by his patient:

"You see, it's dis vay--If you put on too much the hotel, vhy, dey lose money, and of course you see it's dis vay: naturally" (that was a pet word of Schmitz's), "naturally the hotel don't vant to lose money--you can see dat for yourself. Now on the odder hand if you don't put on enough, vhy of course you see it's dis vay, naturally a guest vants to get his money's vorth, you can see dat for yourself--you've just got to use your common sense, you can see dat for yourself." Not once, but day after day, night after night. Poor, poor Mrs. Schmitz! Verily there are worse things than first-degree murder and intoxication.

But for all that Schmitz deigned not to allow it to be known that my scrubbings found favor in his sight, my own soul approved of me. The shelves and the sink I scrubbed. Then every perishable article in my ice chest or elsewhere got placed upon trays to go upstairs. By this time it was two minutes to nine. Schmitz, always with his hands clasped behind him, except when he was doing over everything I did, said, "You can go now."

Upstairs among the lockers on the third floor the temperature was like that of a live volcano, only nothing showed any signs of exploding. Fat women who could speak little or no English were here and there puffily dismantling, exchanging the hotel work-uniform for street garments. Everyone was kindly and affectionate. One old Irishwoman came up while I was changing my clothes.

"Well, dearie, and how did it go?"

"Sure it went swell."

"That's good. The Lord bless ye. But there's one bit of advice I must be giving ye. There's one thing you must take care of now. I'm tellin' ye, dearie, you must guard your personality! I'm tellin' ye, there 're the men y' know, but guard y' personality!"

I thanked her from the bottom of my heart and said I'd guard it, surest thing she knew.

"Oh, the good Lord and the Virgin Mary bless ye, child!" And she patted me affectionately on the back.

Indeed, I had been getting affectionate pats most of the time, though the majority of them were from the male help. The composite impression of that first day as I took my way home on the sticky Subway was that the world was a very affectionate place, nor was I quite sure just what to do about it.

The second morning I was given a glimpse of what can be done about it. As I was waiting for the elevator on the service floor to be taken down to work, a very attractive girl came along and immediately we became chummy. She had been at the hotel three weeks; her job was to cut fruit. Had she done this sort of work long? Not in this country, but in Europe. Just one year had she been in America. At that moment two youths passed. I saw nothing, but quick as a flash my new friend flared up, "You fresh guy--keep your hands to yourself!" So evidently that's the way it's done. I practiced it mentally. "Lots o' fresh guys round here," I sniffed. "You said it," muttered the still ruffled fruit cutter.

Downstairs, Kelly was waiting with a welcoming nod--Kelly, the unpernickety steward. Everyone was as friendly as if we had been feeding humanity side by side these many years. During the rush the waiters called out as they sped by: "Hi there, little one!" "There's the girlie!" "Ah there, sweetheart!" Verily the world is an affectionate place. If a waiter had an order to give he passed the time of day as he gave it and as he collected his order.

"And how's the little girl to-day?"

"Tiptop--and yourself?"

"A little low in spirits I was to-day until I seen you'd come--an' then. You love me as much as you did yesterday?"

"Move on there. W'at y' a-doin' talkin' to my girl! Now, honey, I'm tellin' you this here guy is too fresh for any lady. I'd like one order of romaine lettuce, bless your sweet heart, if it won't be tirin' your fingers too much. That's the dearie--I'm back in a moment."

Across the way, arms resting on the counter, head ducked under the upper shelf, leaned a burly redheaded helper to the Greek.

Every time the pantry girl looked his way he beamed and nodded and nodded and beamed. "How you lak?" "Fine!" More beams and nods. Soon a waiter slipped a glass of ice coffee, rich in cream and sugar, under my counter. Beams and nods fit to burst from the assistant coffee man across the way. Beams and nods from the pantry girl. Thus every day. Our sole conversation was, "How you lak?" "Fine!" He said the rest with coffee.

With the lunch rush over, Kelly sneaked around my entrance and jerked his head sidewise. That meant, naturally, that I was to approach and harken unto what he had to say. When Kelly imparted secrets--and much of what Kelly had to impart was that sort of information where he felt called upon to gaze about furtively to make sure no one was over-hearing--when he had matters of weight then to impart he talked down in his boots and a bit out of the corner of his mouth.

"Say, kid"--Kelly jerked his head--"want to tell you about this eatin' business. Y'know, ain't no one supposed to eat nothin' on this floor. If the boss catches ya, it's good-by dolly. Sign up over the door sayin' you'll be dismissed _at once_ if you eat anything--see? But I'm givin' ya a little tip--see? I don't care how much ya eat--it's nothin' to me. I say eat all ya got a mind to. Only for Gawd's sake don't let the Big Boss catch ya." (The Big Boss was the little chief steward, who drew down a fabulous salary and had the whole place scared to death.) "See--pull a cracker box out so and put what ya got to eat behind it this way, then ya can sit down and sorta take your time at it. If the boss does come by--it's behind the cracker box and you should worry! Have a cup of coffee?"

I was full up of coffee from my gentleman friend across the way, so declined Kelly's assistance in obtaining more. Every day, about 2.30, Kelly got in a certain more or less secluded corner of my compartment and ate a bit himself. "Been almost fired a couple of times for doin' this--this place is full o' squealers--gotta watch out all the time. Hell of a life I say when a fella has to sneak around to eat a bit of food."

That second afternoon, Kelly stopped in the middle of a gulp of coffee.

"Say, w'at t' hell's a girl like you workin' for, anyhow? Say, don't you know you could get married easy as--my Gawd! too easy. Say, you could pick up with one of these waiters just like that! They're good steady fellas, make decent pay. You could do much worse than marry a waiter. I'm tellin' ya there's no sense to a girl like you workin'."

That was an obsession with Kelly. He drilled it into me daily. Kelly himself was a settled married man. Of his state we talked often. I asked Kelly the very first day if he ever went to Coney Island.

"Ustta--'ain't been for ten years."

"Why not for ten years?"

Kelly looked at me out of the corner of his eyes. "Got married ten years ago."

"Well, and w'at of it? Don't you have no more fun?"

"You said it! I'm tellin' ya there's no more fun. Gee! I sure don't know myself these ten years. I was the kind of a fella"--here Kelly was moved in sheer admiration to do a bit of heavy cursing--"I was the kind of fella that did everything--I'm tellin' ya, _everything_. Bet there ain't a thing in this world I 'ain't done at least once, and most of 'em a whole lot more 'n that. An' now--look at me now! Get up at four every mornin', but Sundays, get down here at six" (Kelly was a suburbanite), "work till three, git home, monkey with my tools a bit or play with the kids, eat dinner, sit around a spell, go to bed."

A long pause. "Ain't that a hell of a life, I'm askin' ya?"

Another pause in which Kelly mentally reviewed his glowing past. He shook his head and smiled a sad smile. "If you could 'a' seen me ten years ago!"

Kelly told me the story of his life more or less in detail some days later. I say advisedly "more or less." Considering the reputation he had given himself, I am relieved to be able to note that he must have left some bits out, though goodness knows he put enough in. But Kelly's matrimonial romance must be told.