The Fifth Wheel: A Novel

by Olive Higgins Prouty

Ever since I have been allowed alone on a railroad train, the Y. W. C. A. has been preached to me as a perfectly safe place to ask advice in case of being stranded in a strange city. So I trudged down there one late afternoon and procured a list of several lodging-houses, where my mother's young parlor-maid could stay for a week with safety while we were moving from our summer house. I didn't know whether I could bring myself really to undress and get into the little cot in the room which I finally engaged, but at least the room had a window. I could sit by that. I had been assured that the place was reputable. I moved down there in a taxicab one rainy Saturday afternoon. Lucy had sent me my trunk, and I had to convey it somehow. I didn't sleep at all the first night. There was a fire-escape immediately outside my open window, and there was not a sign of a lock on the door. On Monday I bought a screw-eye and hook for fifteen cents, and put nails in the sash for burglar stops.

At first I used to crawl back to that smelly little hall bedroom at the earliest sign of dusk; at first, if a man on the street spoke to me, I would tremble for five minutes afterward; at first the odor of the continual boiling of mutton bones and onions that met me every time I opened the door of Mrs. Plummet's lodging-house used to make me feel sick to my stomach. I became hardened as time went on, but at first it was rather awful. I don't like to recall those early experiences of mine.

I learned a great deal during my first fortnight at Mrs. Plummet's. I never knew, for instance, that one meal a day, eaten at about four o'clock in the afternoon, takes the place of three, very comfortably, if aided and abetted in the morning by crackers spread with peanut butter, and a glass of milk, a whole bottle of which one could buy for a few cents at the corner grocery store. The girl who roomed next door to me gave me lots of such tips. I had no idea that there were shops on shabby avenues, where one could get an infinitesimal portion of what one paid for a last season's dinner-gown; that furs are a wiser investment than satin and lace; and that my single emerald could be more easily turned into dollars and cents than all the enameled jewelry I owned put together. The feeling of reënforcement that the contents of my trunk gave me did a lot in restoring confidence. The girl next door and I reckoned that their value in secondhand shops would see me through the summer, at least. Surely, I could become established somewhere by fall.

I didn't know how to approach my problem. I didn't know what advertisements in the newspapers were the false ones. I felt shy about applying for work at stores and shops. For whom should I ask? To what department present myself? What should I say first? One day I told a benevolent-looking woman, one of the officers at the Y. W. C. A., the truth about myself, that I, and not my mother's parlor-maid, was occupying the room in the lodging-house. Not until that woman put her hand kindly on my shoulder and advised me to go home—did I realize how determined I had become. New York had not devoured me, the lodging-house had not harmed me. I had found I could sleep, and very well, too, on the lumpy, slumped-in cot with the soiled spread. No one climbed the fire-escape, no one tried my locked door at night. I had pawned my last winter's furs, but my character seemed quite clean and unsmirched. Go home! Of course I wasn't going home. Not yet. The lady gave me a list of reputable employment agencies at last. If Mrs. Plummet's hadn't daunted me, employment offices couldn't either, I said. I was told to provide suitable references.

Now references were just what I couldn't very well provide. I had left home under disagreeable circumstances. I tried to make it clear without too much detail that, except for my sister, my connections with my people were severed, and I couldn't apply to Lucy. I hadn't even given her my actual address. She would be sure to come looking me up, or send some one in her place. Very likely she would ask my brother Malcolm to drop in on me sometime. I was in deadly fear I would run across him on the street, and if Malcolm had ever smelled the inside of the house where I roomed, I fear his nose never would have come down. If Lucy had ever seen the dirt on the stairs she would have pronounced the house disreputable, and dragged me home. Secrecy was my only chance for success, at least for a while. I would have to discover what could be done without references.

It was due to a little new trick I learned of looking on at myself that it was not impossible for me to seek a position through an employment agency. I had become, you see, one of those characters I had read about in short stories dozens of times before—an unemployed girl in New York, even to the hall-bedroom, the handkerchiefs stuck on my window-pane in process of ironing, the water-bugs around the pipes in the bath-room. It was this consciousness of myself that made many of the hardships bearable—this and the grim determination not to give up.

I told the lady in charge of the intelligence office where I first applied that I was willing to try anything, but thought I was best suited as a mother's-helper, or a sort of governess. She shrugged when I told her I had no reference, but occasionally she gave me an opportunity for an interview.

There was something about me that, lacking a reference, impressed my would-be employers unfavorably; possibly it was the modish cut of the hundred-dollar spring suit I wore, or the shape of my hat. Anyhow, they all decided against me. If I had persisted long enough, I might have found some sort of place, but on the fourth or fifth day of my ordeal in intelligence offices, something happened.

I was sitting with the rest of my unemployed sisters in the little inner room provided for us off the main office, when I glanced through the door to see Henrietta Morgan and her mother. I looked hastily away. Here I had been avoiding Fifth Avenue and the region of shops, for fear some of my old friends about New York (and I have many) might run across me, and stupidly I had walked into the very place infested by them. I accomplished my escape easily enough. Naturally Mrs. Morgan wasn't looking for me in such a place, but I didn't take the chance again.

I was lonely and discouraged many times during that first bitter summer of mine in New York. I felt no charity for Edith, no forgiveness for Tom. I hadn't wanted to leave home—not really—I hadn't sought an experience like this. They had forced me to it. If only Tom hadn't treated me like a naughty child! If only Bob—oh if only Bob—(no, there were some things I could not dwell upon. It was wiser not to). Some pains are dull and steady. One can endure them and smile. Others recur at intervals, occasioned by some unimportant detail like a man on the street selling roasted chestnuts, which reminds one of saffron woods in late October. Such pain is like the stab of a sharp stiletto.