–-I will have this out with Neil—things like this happening all because of him. I haven’t complained much, but I’ve got to go to town on the whole business. We’ve got to move away and change our name and I’d see to it that Neil never pulled the brave-Negro-pioneer junk again. And this morning I woke up confused and tried to think what crime I’d committed and then I realized that I’m married to a Negro, that I’m up against it. Oh, dear God!
Thus, while the delightful Eliot shook and tasted and babbled and smiled.
Chapter 45
Had he not known that to a great many people job-hunting was a heavier part of life than job-holding; more nervous, more humiliating and entirely unpaid.
On foot, to save bus fares, he trudged from office building to factory to warehouse, slipping on the glassy pavements. It had been so cold, this late February, that the First Duty of the high-minded citizen and householder—to clean his walks—was reversed, for if he shoveled them off instead of leaving them in soft lumps of snow for a footing, after the slightest melting of the snow-banks along them the walks became sheets of clear ice through which you could see the cement, and on them everybody in town, practically, broke an ankle or at least sat down hard and looked around indignant.
As the thermometer was depressed to fifteen below, seventeen below, twenty-five below, the citizens appeared in voluminous buckled overshoes, and earmuffs below felt hats, and wished that they had not yielded to fashion and given away the scrofulous sealskin caps they had inherited from their warmer and worthier sires.
Chippewa Avenue, the Corso of the town, which had seemed busy and almost stately in October, was floored with streaky ice, and at each curb was a low wall of caked and dirty snow turning to a gray barrier over which you had to climb, after you had unhappily left the warm bus. There were no crimson awnings now, nor window-displays of summery dresses and red canoes, but just stoves and flannel and cough-medicine. Grand Republic had lost the air of a brisk and confidently growing city, and the buildings seemed low and shabby and scattered, under a drained sky that would never shine blue again. There were sleds and skis and healthy children in red caps, but not in the dolorous industrial districts where Neil looked for work.
Never had he so longed for spring to come again, for the soft air, the friendly sun. He was like an old man wondering how many more times he will see the blessed summer.
As he plodded through this limbo of unrelieved gray, from door to unwelcoming door, he did now and then have an offer of work, but always of such lowly clerical labor that (or so he thought) to take it would prejudice his future. “I’m no longer ashamed of any kind of work, but this would be a bad precedent,” he assured himself, as he trudged on.