Mr. Gonzalez turned the lights on in the small office and lit the gas heater beside his desk. In the twenty years that he had been working for Levy Pants, he had always been the first person to arrive each morning.
“It was still dark when I got here this morning,” Mr. Gonzalez would say to Mr. Levy on those rare occasions when Mr. Levy was forced to visit Levy Pants.
“You must be leaving home too early,” Mr. Levy would say.
“I was standing out on the steps of the office this morning talking to the milkman.”
“Oh, shut up, Gonzalez. Did you get my plane ticket to Chicago for the Bears' game with the Packers?”
“I had the office all warm by the time everybody else came in for work.”
“You're burning up my gas. Sit in the cold. It's good for you.”
“I did two pages in the ledger this morning when I was in here all by myself. Look, I caught a rat near the water cooler. He didn't think anybody was around yet, and I hit him with a paper weight.”
“Get that damned rat away from me. This place depresses me enough. Get on the phone and make my hotel reservations for the Derby.”
But the criteria at Levy Pants were very low. Promptness was sufficient excuse for promotion. Mr. Gonzalez became the office manager and took control of the few dispirited clerks under him. He could never really remember the names of his clerks and typists. They seemed, at times, to come and go almost daily, with the exception of Miss Trixie, the octogenarian a**istant accountant, who had been copying figures inaccurately into the Levy ledgers for almost half a century. She even wore her green celluloid visor on her way to and from work, a gesture that Mr. Gonzalez interpreted as a symbol of loyalty to Levy Pants. On Sundays she sometimes wore the visor to church, mistaking it for a hat. She had even worn it to her brother's funeral, where it was ripped from her head by her more alert and slightly younger sister-in-law. Mrs. Levy, though, had issued orders that Miss Trixie was to be retained, no matter what.
Mr. Gonzalez rubbed a rag over his desk and thought, as he did every morning at this time when the office was still chilly and deserted and the wharf rats played frenetic games among themselves within the walls, about the happiness that his a**ociation with Levy Pants had brought him. On the river the freighters gliding through the lifting mist bellowed at one another, the sound of their deep foghorns echoing among the rusting file cabinets in the office. Beside him the little heater popped and cracked as its parts grew warmer and expanded. He listened unconsciously to all the sounds that had begun his day for twenty years and lit the first of the ten cigarettes that he smoked every day. When he had smoked the cigarette down to its filter, he put it out and emptied the ashtray into the wastebasket. He always liked to impress Mr. Levy with the cleanliness of his desk.
Next to his desk was Miss Trixie's rolltop desk. Old newspapers filled every halfopened drawer. Among the little spherical formations of lint under the desk a piece of cardboard had been wedged under one corner to make the desk level. In place of Miss Trixie, a brown paper bag filled with old pieces of material, and a ball of twine occupied the chair. Cigarette bu*ts spilled out of the ashtray on the desk. This was a mystery which Mr. Gonzalez had never been able to solve, for Miss Trixie did not smoke. He had questioned her about this several times, but had never received a coherent answer. There was something magnetic about Miss Trixie's area. It attracted whatever refuse there was in the office, and whenever pens, eyegla**es, purses, or cigarette lighters were missing they could usually be found somewhere in her desk. Miss Trixie also hoarded all of the telephone books, which were stored in some cluttered drawer in her desk.
Mr. Gonzalez was about to search Miss Trixie's area for his missing stamp pad when the door of the office opened and she shuffled in, scuffing her sneakers across the wooden floor. She had with her another paper bag that seemed to contain the same a**ortment of material and twine, aside from the stamp pad which was sticking out of the top of the bag. For two or three years Miss Trixie had been carrying these bags with her, sometimes accumulating three or four by the side of her desk, never disclosing their purpose or destination to anyone.
“Good morning, Miss Trixie,” Mr. Gonzalez called in his effervescent tenor. “And how are we this morning?”
“Who? Oh, hello, Gomez,” Miss Trixie said feebly and drifted off toward the ladies' room as if she were tacking into a gale. Miss Trixie was never perfectly vertical; she and the floor always met at an angle of less than ninety degrees.
Mr. Gonzalez took the opportunity of her disappearance to retrieve his stamp pad from the bag and discovered that it was covered with what felt and smelled like bacon grease. While he was wiping his stamp pad, he wondered how many of the other workers would appear. One day a year ago only he and Miss Trixie had shown up for work, but that was before the company had granted a five-dollar monthly increase. Still, the office help at Levy Pants often quit without even telephoning Mr. Gonzalez. This was a constant worry, and always after Miss Trixie's arrival he watched the door hopefully, especially now that the factory was supposed to begin shipment of its spring and summer line. The truth of the matter was that he needed office help desperately.
Mr. Gonzalez saw a green visor outside the door. Had Miss Trixie gone out through the factory and decided to reenter through the front door? It was like her. She had once gone to the ladies' room in the morning and been found by Mr. Gonzalez late that afternoon asleep on a pile of piece goods in the factory loft. Then the door opened, and one of the largest men that Mr. Gonzalez had ever seen entered the office. He removed the green cap and revealed thick black hair plastered to his skull with Vaseline in the style of the 1920s. When the overcoat came off, Mr. Gonzalez saw rings of fat squeezed into a tight white shirt that was vertically divided by a wide flowered tie. It appeared that Vaseline had also been applied to the mustache for it gleamed very brightly. And then there were the unbelievable blue and yellow eyes laced with the finest tracing of pinkish veins. Mr. Gonzalez prayed almost audibly that this behemoth was an applicant for a job. He was impressed and overwhelmed.
Ignatius found himself in perhaps the most disreputable office that he had ever entered. The naked light bulbs that hung irregularly from the stained ceiling cast a weak yellow light upon the warped floorboards. Old filing cabinets divided the room into several small cubicles, in each of which was a desk painted with a peculiar orange varnish. Through the dusty windows of the office there was a gray view of the Poland Avenue wharf, the Army Terminal, the Mississippi, and, far in the distance, the drydocks and the roofs of Algiers across the river. A very old woman hobbled into the room and bumped into a row of filing cabinets. The atmosphere of the place reminded Ignatius of his own room, and his valve agreed by opening joyfully. Ignatius prayed almost audibly that he would be accepted for the job. He was impressed and overwhelmed.
“Yes?” the dapper man at the clean desk asked brightly.
“Oh. I thought that the lady was in charge,” Ignatius said in his most stentorian voice, finding the man the only blight in the office. “I have come in response to your
advertisement.”
“Oh, wonderful. Which one?” the man cried enthusiastically. “We're running two in the paper, one for a woman and one for a man.”
“Which one do you think I'm answering?” Ignatius hollered.
“Oh,” Mr. Gonzalez said in great confusion. “I'm very sorry. I wasn't thinking. I mean, the s** doesn't matter. You could handle either job. I mean, I'm not concerned
with s**.”
“Please forget it,” Ignatius said. He noticed with interest that the old woman was beginning to nod at her desk. Working conditions looked wonderful.
“Come sit down, please. Miss Trixie will take your coat and hat and put them in the employees' locker. We want you to feel at home at Levy Pants.”
“But I haven't even spoken with you yet.”
“That's all right. I'm sure that we'll see eye to eye. Miss Trixie. Miss Trixie.”
“Who?” Miss Trixie cried, knocking her loaded ashtray to the floor.
“Here, I'll take your things.” Mr. Gonzalez was slapped on the hand when he reached for the cap, but he was permitted to have the coat. “Isn't that a fine tie. You see very few like that anymore.”
“It belonged to my departed father.”
“I'm sorry to hear that,” Mr. Gonzalez said and put the coat into an old metal locker in which Ignatius saw a bag like the two beside the old woman's desk. “By the way, this is Miss Trixie, one of our oldest employees. You'll enjoy knowing her.”
Miss Trixie had fallen asleep, her white head among the old newspapers on her desk.
“Yes,” Miss Trixie finally sighed. “Oh, it's you, Gomez. Is it quitting time already?”
“Miss Trixie, this is one of our new workers.”
“Fine big boy,” Miss Trixie said, turning her rheumy eyes up toward Ignatius. “Well fed.”
“Miss Trixie has been with us for over fifty years. That will give you some idea of the satisfaction that our workers get from their a**ociation with Levy Pants. Miss Trixie worked for Mr. Levy's late father, a fine old gentleman.”
“Yes, a fine old gentleman,” Miss Trixie said, unable to remember the elder Mr. Levy at all anymore. “He treated me well. Always had a kind word, that man.”
“Thank you, Miss Trixie,” Mr. Gonzalez said quickly, like a master of ceremonies trying to end a variety act that had failed horribly.
“The company says it's going to give me a nice boiled ham for Easter,” Miss Trixie told Ignatius. “I certainly hope so. They forgot all about my Thanksgiving turkey.”
“Miss Trixie has stood by Levy Pants through the years,” the office manager explained while the ancient a**istant accountant babbled something else about the turkey.
“I've been waiting for years to retire, but every year they say I have one more to go. They work you till you drop,” Miss Trixie wheezed. Then losing interest in retirement, she added, “I could have used that turkey.”
She began sorting through one of her bags.
“Can you begin work today?” Mr. Gonzalez asked Ignatius.
“I don't believe that we have discussed anything concerning salary and so forth. Isn't that the normal procedure at this time?” Ignatius asked condescendingly.
“Well, the filing job, which is the one you'll have because we really need someone on the files, pays sixty dollars a week. Any days that you are absent due to sickness, etcetera, are deducted from your weekly wage.”
“That is certainly far below the wage that I had expected.” Ignatius sounded abnormally important. “I have a valve which is subject to vicissitudes which may force me to, lie abed on certain days. Several more attractive organizations are currently vying for my services. I must consider them first.”
“But listen,” the office manager said confidentially. “Miss Trixie here earns only forty dollars a week, and she does have some seniority.”
“She does look rather worn,” Ignatius said, watching Miss Trixie spread the contents of her bag on her desk and sort through the scraps. “Isn't she past retirement?”
“Sshh,” Mr. Gonzalez hissed. “Mrs. Levy won't let us retire her. She thinks it's better for Miss Trixie to keep active. Mrs. Levy is a brilliant, educated woman. She's taken a correspondence course in psychology.” Mr. Gonzalez let this sink in. “Now, to return to your prospects, you are very fortunate to start with the salary I quoted. This is all part of the Levy Pants Plan to attract new blood into the company. Miss Trixie, unfortunately, was hired before the plan went into effect. It was not retroactive, and therefore doesn't cover her.”
“I hate to disappoint you, sir, but I am afraid that the salary is not adequate. An oil magnate is currently dangling thousands before me trying to tempt me to be his personal secretary. At the moment, I am trying to decide whether I can accept the man's materialistic worldview. I suspect that I am going to finally tell him, ‘Yes.'”
“We'll include twenty cents a day for carfare,” Mr. Gonzalez pleaded.
“Well. That does change things,” Ignatius conceded. “I shall take the job temporarily. I must admit that the ‘Levy Pants Plan' rather attracts me.”
“Oh, that's wonderful,” Mr. Gonzalez blurted. “He'll love it here, won't he, Miss Trixie?”
Miss Trixie was too preoccupied with her scraps to reply.
“I find it strange that you have not even asked for my name,” Ignatius snorted.
“Oh, my goodness. I completely forgot about that. Who are you?”
That day one other office worker, the stenographer, appeared. One woman telephoned to say that she had decided to quit and go on relief instead. The others did not contact Levy Pants at all.