Skyscraper by Faith Baldwin Read Free Book Online Page B

him. Without much success, however.
    Miss Dennet asked, “Is it getting serious—young Shepard, I mean?” and asked it with anxiety.
    â€œWell, of course not,” Lynn answered.
    But it was. It was gay and idiotic and enchanting and sweet and—underneath as serious as life and death. She knew it. She tried to pretend that she didn’t know it. She told herself, I like Tom and he likes me. Well perhaps we are crazy about each other. But it doesn’t mean anything. We’ll get over it. Why, I can’t let it mean anything. I don’t want to marry Tom. I don’t want to marry anyone, said Lynn to herself. It’s too much of a risk. And I’m just getting somewhere with my job. Men, sighed Lynn, are complications.
    Yet Tom had not asked her to marry him. It was, as Jennie would say in describing something indefinable, something without words, but nevertheless a fact, “just one of those things.”
    â€œYou’re my girl, aren’t you?” Tom would tell her, ask her, at unexpected moments and in unexpected places. And before Christmas he had kissed her soundly, delightedly, boyishly, and not under the mistletoe either. There are fewer kissing-bridges for unattached and homeless young people in Manhattan than you would think. By homeless I mean just that. Business clubs and Village bedrooms are not homes to people such as Tom and Lynn. And fastidious young people—such as Tom and Lynn—do not embrace avidly in taxicabs unless the compulsion is so strong that they must, or die of it. Once or twice the compulsion was too strong. But they could hold hands, like any other city lovers, in the darkness of the motion-picture theaters, while their eyes were fastened, not quite seeing, on the lighted screen against which the shadows of life and death, love and hatred, formed their simple two-dimensional patterns.
    Lynn thought, sometimes, after Tom had left her, It can’t go on like this—being together a lot, laughing a good deal, talking,kissing, now and then—it can’t go on. I mean, we can’t get married, can we?
    Her people wanted her to come home at Christmas. But the Seacoast Bank was not a boarding-school, it gave no long vacations at holiday seasons. She wrote therefore that she would not be home, and her mother wrote back sorrowfully that she was so disappointed—there would be a tree, and fixin’s, and that after Christmas she and Lynn’s father were really going South.
    Lynn had her Christmas at Sarah Dennet’s, pleasant, homelike, but makeshift with the white-tissue-paper parcels tied with red ribbon, stockings, gloves, a string of beads—and a little table tree, dripping synthetic icicles on the damask cloth. Sarah Dennet and her friend Anna Frank had rather outgrown Christmas. To Sarah it meant persuading people to put bonds in children’s stockings, to turn Santa Claus into a trust fund; while to Anna it denoted a terrific siege of superadvertising, of concentrating the weary mind upon new ways in which to create public demand, public interest, new sprightly methods of loosening public purse strings. They gave to one another costly but sensible gifts and were relieved when it was all over. “Disorganizing,” they said. But Sarah despite an inner reluctance invited Tom for dinner, too, so for a short space there was youth in the quiet, tasteful apartment—and laughter and silly jokes.
    Tom had brought them all presents from the five-and-ten. He’d been their guest for dinner before. Lynn had asked sweetly, “Some night, may I bring Tom?” and so he knew his hostesses and their Barbadian maid. He brought them egg beaters and tiny trucks and jointed wooden toys. He brought Lynn innumerable idiocies, a pair of woolen socks to keep her feet warm, a pair of rubbers which would fold up into a handbag, doll’s clothespins, and, of all things, because she liked a glass of milk at night, a