"Small Ironies: a novel"
Chapter Twelve
From The International Thesaurus of Quotations:
"Every path has its puddle." English Proverb
There was a time, when was it exactly - I want to be accurate - I can’t remember, but I will, when Tooie and I almost called it quits. We were man and wife at that point for ten or twelve years. It was an even number of years, I know that, because I remember saying to her "why do odd things happen in even years?" If it was twelve years, and I believe now that it was, than it was 1939 and that must be right because it was the year that Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz were playing and I know that was year of great movies was the year of our difficulty.
Tooie had taken a job working for Sachs Fifth Avenue as a gift-wrapper. She had a gift for it, and she had devised and designed a whole array of gift-wrap bows that no one else could create. She had gotten rather famous for it, and I was proud of her. People would come to Sachs for their present, just so Tooie could put the finishing touch on the package they took off to some loved one, or would-be loved one. Her bow was the final grace said over their offerings. Sachs was grateful, they were no fools over there, and they rewarded her with bonuses and in-house endowments of all kinds.
All of that would have been just fine if it hadn’t been for Hattie Marshall. When Tooie took the job, Hattie Marshall was her boss, the supervisor from Hell. Sachs had a standard gift-wrap, a standard ribbon and bow. She wouldn’t put up with Tooie making any changes to the way things had always been done, but when Tooie began slipping in one or two of her own designs, and Hattie caught her at it, all Hell did indeed break loose.
Tooie was reprimanded a dozen times, her pay was docked and she was threatened with loss of her job if she didn’t stop making things look different. But in New York, and this may not surprise anyone, word spread pretty quickly that a girl named Tooie could make your package something really special and she became the department store speakeasy, so to speak. You had to pretty much ‘knock three times and whisper low" before having your package done by anyone in the department. If you were in the know you waited for the lady with funny name badge that said "Tooie" before you left your gift to be assembled.
There were five women in the department and Hattie Marshall supervised them all. She was the big Number Six. Even though she wasn’t always there, she seemed to have spies among the other four and not even days off prevented Hattie Marshall from catching Tooie breaking the rules.
That’s the thing about Tooie: she breaks rules. It doesn’t matter if they’re personal or professional, she breaks them. Look at us. Look at our marriage. Not exactly traditional, right? So, anyway, Hattie Marshall.
It finally got to the point where Tooie was getting really frustrated by Hattie’s attitude and at her constant berating of her. She knew she was worth something more than just a modest clerk’s salary. She had heard the sales girls on the floor talking about patron’s questions before they bought a watch, or perfume, or something even more personal like a nightie. "Is Tooie working today?" patrons would ask and the sales girls would call the department to see if she was in or not. Sometimes the customers would hand back the item and say they’d come back another time. That’s what moved this whole fracas to another level.
So, in May of 1939, Tooie got summoned to the personnel department and told she was fired. That didn’t go down very well with Tooie.
"What’s that about?" she demanded to know from Mr. Jimmy Nolan.
"Mrs. Compton, there are too many complaints from your supervisor. You don’t do your work."
"I do my work. I do my work better than anyone else and I do more of it."
"Customers are leaving the store empty-handed because of you, Mrs. Compton."
"The Hell they are!" Tooie apparently slammed her fist down on his desk and upset the picture of his wife and two dogs at home.
"Watch yourself, Mrs. Compton, or I’ll dock your final check."
"You wouldn’t dare, Mr. Nolan. You wouldn’t damn dare."
"Wouldn’t I?" A smirk crossed his face. "And watch your language, young lady."
"Don’t be calling me a Lady!" She hit the desk again. She could tell she had frightened him and she always liked to do that with men who tried to push her around.
"Must I call security?"
"No. You don’t have to worry about being hurt by my. Not you, Mr. Nolan."
"Are you making a threat against Miss Marshall?"
"Her? I wouldn’t sit on her face and fart. No. The only threat is to the future of Sachs. You’re throwing me out and I’m a customer draw. Where I go, they will follow, Mr. Nolan. You tell me they walk out with buying anything because I’m not here to wrap for them? Well, that tells me a lot. I’ll get another job where they like what I do and I’ll take out ads in the New York Times, the Herald-Tribune and the Daily News. I’ll tell the world where I am, I’ll tie in a ribbon with a pretty unusual bow, and I’ll send it home to the millions. How do you like them apples?"
"You wouldn’t do that," he shouted at her. Calmer, he said it again, "you really wouldn’t do that."
"Watch me."
She stood up and turned to leave his office, but he dashed up from behind and then around his desk, planting himself in front of her.
"Mrs. Compton, please wait here a moment, will you?" He was cooing at her and being very nice, suddenly. "I’ll be back, right back, in a moment, okay?" He urged her back to her chair and Tooie, being Tooie, stood her ground, holding onto the chair’s high back.
"I’ll wait, but I won’t sit. Not yet."
Nodding, nodding, nodding, Nolan backed out of his office. When the door had closed tightly after him, Tooie took a deep breath and let out a typically Tooie-like chuckle. She turned away and picked up the photo she had knocked over of Nolan, his wife and the two dogs.
"Fag," she said. "No kids and a trophy wife."
He wasn’t long away and she was still holding his family photo when he came back into the room. He was accompanied by another man, a bigger, darker, older man in a baggier, stripier, older suit.
"Mrs. Compton, this is Mr. Arnold. He’s the manager of this department. I told him about your plight and about our difficulty with Miss Marshall."
"Our difficulty?" Tooie was grinning as she said it. "That old sow needs replacing, that’s the difficulty."
"Yes. And Mr. Nolan here thinks you’re the woman to do it," Arnold said quickly. Too quickly for Tooie.
"What’s the offer, Mr. Arnold? This guy here just gave me my walking papers."
"That’s in the past, of course. An oversight. A mis-step in the world of judgement."
"I am sorry about that," Nolan added. "But all I had was the bare facts."
"All you had, buster, was the bare fears," Tooie said. "You heard that woman’s insecurities is what you heard."
"Yes, I suppose so."
"What we’re proposing at this juncture, Tooie...I may call you Tooie, mayn’t I?" Arnold asked her. She nodded. "What we’re proposing at this juncture, then, Tooie, is that you take over the department as supervisor, that you create your wonderful bows and ribbons and wraps and that you teach your craft to the five women working under you."
"Say, if I’m the supervisor then there are only four women under me."
"No, no. We’d keep Miss Marshall on in the capacity of ribbon clerk, your old job."
"I can’t do that to her," Tooie said. "I can replace her but I can’t boss her. I tell you it wouldn’t be right, ‘cause I couldn’t be fair to her or about her."
"What are you saying," Arnold asked.
"You’ll have to fire her, I guess. If you want me, you’ll have to get rid of her and quick." She took a breath. "I’ve already got a few other offers here on Fifth Avenue."
Arnold leaped into the breach. "It’s as good as done." He held out his right hand to shake hers, but Tooie wasn’t done yet.
"It’s got to be today. And I’ve got to have a raise, a good one. I’m not just a supervisor, I’m a designer. People are gonna see my stuff and know it’s a Sachs original. That’s gotta be worth something."
"Yes, of course," Arnold agreed glaring at Nolan over Tooie’s head. "We’ll get that all worked out to your satisfaction, I’m sure."
"Okey dokey, then. It’s a deal."
So, Tooie got the big job and Hattie Marshall was out. You wonder how this affected us, Tooie and Me. That’s the really interesting part.
She came home from work and told me the story about her promotion but she left out one major section of the story which I learned a few weeks later. When I did I really hit the ceiling and Tooie and I had one of the few major rows in our relationship, one that brought us to the brink of disaster. And it was all on account of her treatment of Hattie Marshall, a woman I never even met, or saw, but only heard about, mostly in relation to this story I just told you.
Oh, Tooie had mentioned her a few times before this firing and hiring incident. She would come home pissed at the way she’d been treated by Hattie Marshall. She’d rail and cry and carry on, but I always took it to be a work-related thing and not something personal. That’s where I was wrong. So very wrong it hurts me to admit even now, so much later, so far away from it all.
It seems that Tooie and Hattie had a thing. Usually when Tooie found a new friend to play with, she’d tell me about it, let me know. But with Hattie it was something secret and to me that meant it meant something that could threaten our happiness together. That’s not a good thing. Our marriage was based on an openness that was special. It included the threesomes, of course, but each of us was free to find a person, now and then, to be with. The agreement between us was no secrets, though. We told each other about it right away. That was there was no threat.
She heard about my fling with Virginia Woods. She heard about my little romance with the woman down the hall from us which lasted a few weeks. She told me about her own little affairs with women named Judy, Ramona and Sallie (Sallie turned out to be a guy, but that’s another story). But with Hattie Marshall she kept mum.
How I found out about it was this. Maybe three weeks after she got the new job at Sachs, the really good one replacing Hattie Marshall, I was on the subway going to my office just off Wall Street, when this woman came up to me and poked me in the arm. I usually ignore such things on public conveyances, but this time she was persistent and I realized she wasn’t just poking, she was saying my name.
"I got to talk to you Mr. Compton," she was saying.
"Say, do I know you?"
"No, you don’t. But your wife does."
"Well, what goes on between my wife and her lady friends is no concern of mine," I said, not meaning it, but making it sound like I did.
"You’re gonna wanna know about this," she said. Her voice was like acid on glass, you could hear the hissing sound it made, smell the smoke, too.
"Well, what is this about?" I said in frustration, almost in anger.
"She cost me my job, that bitch did, and all because I threw her over."
"What are you talking about?" We were off the train now, on the platform on a bench. In true New York fashion people were hurrying by us, paying no attention and I liked that.
"My name is Hattie Marshall. Does that mean anything to you?"
"I know the name. I’ve heard it mentioned."
"Well, your wife, Mr. Compton, your wife came on to me hard. She got me alone and she stuck her tongue in my mouth and she touched me where no one should and she got me going."
"Yeah, she’s good at that. What of it?"
"She and me went together for a while. It was good. But then she got over me, I guess and she left me."
"Good for her. You weren’t exactly nice to her in a business sense."
"You don’t know, do you?" she said. "You bought into the story."
"What do you mean?"
"She was going to leave you for me," Hattie Marshall said. "She told me she would leave you and live with me. We were going to revolutionize the place at Sachs. We were going to be partners in the designs. But she pulled out on me, left me for someone else."
"What are you talking about?"
"Sure I was hard on her, after that. I was hard because I was betrayed by her."
"You’re nuts," I said. "Tooie’s not like that."
"You don’t know her," she said to me. "You don’t know the kind of woman she really is."
With that she got up off the bench and ran down to the other end of the platform where the other exit is. I sat there a moment thinking about what she said, and then I went up the stairs, crossed over to the uptown platform and went to see Tooie.
When I told her about the confrontation she didn’t laugh like I wanted her to. She sat still and silent and looked at me, no tears in her eyes, no remorse in her face, nothing at all to tell me that she was sorry, or that the story was a fake.
"I should have told you Vinnie," she said quietly. "I should have been honest with someone, especially with you."
"It’s true, then?"
"Yeah. Sort of. Mostly."
"What am I supposed to know that I don’t, Tooie?"
"There’s no one else. I promise you that."
"So she was wrong about that?"
"She was wrong. Period."
"I don’t know. I think... I don’t know."
I left her at Sachs and I went to the movies. That’s how I remember it was 1939, twelve years into the marriage. I went to see "Gone with the Wind." I hadn’t read the book, so it was a new story to me and it was four hours long and when it was over I remembered to call my office and tell them I wouldn’t be in. They already guessed that, I think.
It was Scarlett O’Hara that changed me a bit. Something about the way she lied to everyone, especially to the men in her life about the men in her life. There was something about that woman that made me realize that Tooie had simply made a mistake, well two mistakes, getting involved with Hattie Marshall and then not telling me about it. I thought I’d better go see her again and tell her that I’d been thinking, had an epiphany.
She saw me coming up to the counter with a package in my hand. I put it on the counter. She stood there looking at me.
"It’s a special present for someone I care about," I said. "Can you do something really special with it, please."
Tooie nodded at me. This time I saw a tear in her eye, but she held it firm, wouldn’t let it drop off her cheek.
"I was gonna leave you," I said. "I don’t stand for lies. Remember Lainie?"
She nodded, but kept her eyes on the package she was wrapping for me.
"But I went to the movies instead of the apartment. I packed in a lot of technicolor drama instead of a suitcase or two."
She didn’t respond to me yet. She kept on with the ribbons now, multi-colored ones, all wrapped together into a tight rope ribbon.
"Scarlett O’Hara is a bitch, Tooie. You’re just a fool. There’s a difference I figured out about three hours into it."
She was working on the bow. It was building up in layers, four of them all looped in different directions. It was like a big zinnia. Beautiful.
"What you’ve got is ambition, Tooie, ambition and talent. You just took the wrong word to success. I can handle that if you promise me you won’t lie about things, not to me."
She handed me the finished package. It was sensational, beautiful, erotic even, and I was so proud of her work, so proud of her.
"In my way, I love you, Tooie."
I handed her back the package.
"Don’t you like the way it looks?" she asked me.
"I love it, but it’s not mine." She looked up at me. "It’s yours."
That’s what saved our marriage in that perilous time of the lie. She did it all, just like she always did for me. No straight, dry paths for us. But we jumped the puddle.
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