Overbearing, dishonest, unattractive, proud of being “tough,” touchy, insensitive, yet capable of being kind or amused when anything penetrated, Rachel was something new to me. She had one rare trait that kept me interested: she never spoke of herself at all. Her salary was twenty-five dollars a week. Her clothes were shabby, even for Stewart’s in those days, and dirty as well. The only thing I learned about her was that she had a sister in a state tuberculosis sanatorium whom she went to see once a month, but whom she didn’t particularly like; the reason seemed to be because she was sick, and therefore “no good.” Rachel herself had tremendous strength and I soon realized that she inspired fear, almost physical fear, in everyone at the so-called school, including President Black. I also soon realized that she was the entire brains of the place, and afterwards I even suspected that in her power and duplicity perhaps it was she who really owned it, and was using Mr. Black as a front. Probably not, but I never knew the truth about anything that went on there.
Her cigarettes were stolen for her somewhere by a “man” she knew — how, or who the man was, I never discovered. From time to time other objects appeared — a new bag, a fountain pen, a lighter — from the same source or perhaps a different “man,” but she never spoke of love or romance, except Vardis Fisher’s. She should have hated me; my constant gentle acquiescence or hesitant corrections must have been hard to take; but I don’t think she did. I think we felt sorry for each other. I think she felt that I was one of the doomed, enjoying my little grasshopper existence, my “sense of humor,” my “culture,” while I could, and that perhaps at some not very future date, when the chips were down, she might even put in a good word for me if she felt like it. I think that later she may well have become a great business success — probably a shady business, like the writing school, but on a much larger scale. She seemed drawn toward the dark and crooked, as if, since she believed that people were forced into being underhanded by economic circumstances in the first place, it would have been dishonest of her not to be dishonest. “Property is theft” was one of her favorite sayings.
Poor Rachel! I often disliked her; she gave me a frisson, and yet at the same time I liked her, and I certainly couldn’t help listening to every word she said. For several weeks she was my own private Columbus Circle orator. Her lack of a “past,” of any definable setting at all, the impression she gave of power and of something biding its time, even if it was false or silly, fascinated me. Talking with her was like holding a snapshot negative up to the light and wondering how its murks and transparencies were actually going to develop.
The course we offered on “How to Write” was advertised in the cheapest farm magazines, movie and Western magazines. It was one of those “You, too, can earn money by your pen” advertisements, glowingly but carefully worded. We could instruct anyone, no matter what his or her education, in any branch of the writing art, from newspaper reporting to advertising, to the novel, and every student would receive the personal attention and expert advice of successful, money-making authors like Mr. Hearn and Mr. Margolies. There were eight lessons, and the complete course, payable in advance, cost forty dollars. At the time I worked there, the school had only about a hundred and fifty “students” going, but there had been a period, just before, when it had had many, many more, and more were expected again, I gathered, as soon as the courses had been “revised.” There had been a big upheaval in the recent past, entailing the loss of most of the student body, and for some reason, everything, all the circulars, contract blanks, and “lessons,” had to be revised immediately and printed all over again. That was why, off and on, so many typists were employed.
All these revisions, including the eight new lessons, were being done by Rachel. She sat with the school’s former “literature” cut into narrow strips, and clipped together in piles around her. There were also stacks of circulars from rival correspondence schools, and a few odd textbooks on composition and short-story writing, from which she lifted the most dogmatic sentences, or even whole paragraphs. When she did work, she worked extremely rapidly. It sounded like two or three typewriters instead of one, and the nervous typists kept running in from the big skylighted room and back again with the new material like relay racers. But she talked to me a great deal of the time, or stared gloomily out the window at the falling snow. Once she said, “Why don’t you write a pretty poem about that?” Once or twice, smelling strongly of whiskey, she buried herself sulkily in a new proletarian novel for an entire afternoon.
We scarcely saw Mr. Black at all. He received a good many callers in his office, men who looked just like him, and he served them the George Washington instant coffee he made on a Sterno stove, which smelled unpleasantly through the partition into our room. Once in a while he would bring us both coffee, in ten-cent-store cups of milky green glass with very rough edges you could cut yourself on. He would ask, “And how’s the Vassar girl?” and look over my shoulder at the letter I was slowly producing on the typewriter with three or four fingers, and say, “Fine! Fine! You’re doing fine! They’ll love it! They’ll love it!” and give my shoulder an objectionable squeeze. Sometimes he would say to Rachel, “Take a look at this. Save it; put the carbon in your file. We’ll use it again.” Rachel would give a loud groan.
It was here, in this noisome place, in spite of all I had read and been taught and thought I knew about it before, that the mysterious, awful power of writing first dawned on me. Or, since “writing” means so many different things, the power of the printed word, or even that capitalized Word whose significance had previously escaped me but then made itself suddenly, if sporadically, plain.
Our advertisements specified that when an applicant wrote in inquiring about the course, he was to send a sample of his writing, a “story” of any sort, any length, for our “analysis,” and a five-dollar money order. We sent him the “analysis” and told him whether or not he really did have the right stuff in him to make a successful writer. All applicants, unless analphabetic, did. Then he was supposed to complete the first lesson, I think it was either “Straight Reporting” or “Descriptive Writing,” within a month and send it back to us with the remaining thirty-five dollars. We “analyzed” that and sent it back along with lesson number two, and he was launched on the course.
I forget all the lessons now, but “Advertising” was fitted in somewhere. The students were required to write advertisements for grapefruit, bread, and liquor. Why the emphasis on food and drink, I don’t know, unless that too was a sign of the times. Also included were a short story and a “True Confession” lesson. Almost all the students had the two genres hopelessly confused. Their original “samples” were apt to fall into the True Confession form, too. This sample, expanded or cut, censored or livened up, and the first letter to Mr. Margolies that accompanied it constituted the most interesting assignment for all concerned. My job was to write an analysis of each lesson in five hundred words, if I could, and as many of them a day as I possibly could, using a collection of previous lessons and analyses as models. I also had to write a short personal reply to the inevitable letter that arrived with each lesson. I was to encourage the student if he was feeling hopeless, and discourage him firmly if he showed any signs of wanting his money back.