Everybody Loves Somebody Read Online Free Page A

or the establishment. He told her to quit, insisting that if
     their parents found out what she was doing they’d drag her back to New Jersey. She refused to quit without another job lined
     up, and Frank promised to find something for her.
    She asked about Boylston Simms. Frank said that he had fallen in love with an upstate girl and was working for a newspaper
     in Albany. What about the finches? Boylston Simms had bought two new finches for his grandmother, who believed them to be
     the same birds she’d left in his care.
    Frank returned to the cabaret three days later to inform his sister that he’d found her a place at the Biltmore as a receptionist,
     a classy job with an unclassy salary. She worked there straight through Christmas and New Year’s, worked ten, sometimes twelve
     hours a day in order to earn enough money to buy silk stockings and silk blouses to wear to work. On her breaks she smoked
     Chesterfield cigarettes and chewed Wrigley’s Spearmint, often at the same time. She had the use of a stove in the boardinghouse
     and liked to prepare simple dinners of sandwiches and canned soup with some of the other girls. Once every two months she
     went home to New Jersey for the weekend.
    S HE MET PLENTY OF MEN in her job—fancy young men who would lay it on thick and windy old men who would yammer at her while she was trying to add
     up a bill. One middle-aged Greek man invited her to lunch in the Biltmore’s restaurant. She ate roast beef and mashed potatoes
     and then with a giggle declined his offer to see his penthouse room. A retired jeweler who lived in the hotel gave her a tip
     of five dollars one day, and she went out and got herself a puffy Nestle wave. At work the next day the reception manager
     told her to brush her hair properly or else to leave and not come back. So she left. That was that. It was a cold, drizzly
     March morning and she was out on the street.
    She spent the next couple of hours at the nearest el station, standing close to the potbellied stove and trying to figure
     out where to go next. She decided to go to her brother’s apartment. That same day he helped her find a job at the Roxy theater,
     a movie palace where Frank was an usher and wore a uniform with polished buttons. Ruth worked as a ticket taker for three
     months and saw
The Crowd
seventeen times.
    She left the Roxy for better pay at the Rivoli, the Rivoli for the Rialto. She grew older and more confident. She wrote to
     Vitagraph for autographed pictures of Mae Marsh and Norma Talmadge. She dated a man who looked just like Buddy Rogers and
     after she’d spent the night with him a couple of times she asked him to marry her, but he confessed that he was already engaged.
    Why were all the men she’d ever known always already engaged? A month passed, and then another month. One day Ruth thought
     anything was possible, and the next day she realized her fate had been sealed when she wasn’t looking. All the men in the
     world were always and already engaged.
    She slept with any man who would have her. A medical student, a policeman, and her boss at the Rialto, who had no patience
     for contemporary picture shows and quoted Mary Pickford as evidence: “Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick
     on the Venus de Milo.” She wondered when she’d fall in love. She told her boss she loved him, just to try out the sentence,
     and he told her he was—
    “Not already engaged!” she interrupted.
    “No. Already married.”
    She quit her job at the Rialto. She worked as a secretary for a stockbroker. She worked as a waitress. One by one her friends
     in the rooming house on 103rd Street moved away, so Ruth decided to move too. She rented a studio apartment for herself on
     Jane Street. She quit her waitressing job and found a ten-dollar-a week position at Woolworth’s, which is where she met Mr.
     Freddie Harvey the Third.
    S ITTING ON THE SODA-FOUNTAIN COUNTER one day after work, she was arguing with another