The American Aristocracy

ANONYMOUS

I

As even the most modest of explorers is bound to map the scene for those who come after, I record an adventure when, through no intention of my own, I discovered something new to American life and destined to become very important — the American aristocracy.

For classes do exist, even in this great country. And in our still imperfect social organization some are privileged to hire others to do work for them which they do not want to do themselves, such as cooking and housework. It is not that we who seek to hire think these forms of labor are too low. It is only that there are things for which we feel better fitted. I speak, not as a woman who decides where to spend each season, but as one who must decide quickly how to spend each minute. I am the one who waits at suburban stations, engine running, for my husband’s train; who feeds three children in a tearoom while I chat about dentists; whose fur coat is worn in the middle of the back.

Not that there is no longer a real servant class, proud of its skill, of its places, of what it came from and did for itself. But it is mainly foreign-born and it is dwindling. Immigration laws are seeing to it that no more fresh Irish country girls take the jobs of potential cooks from deserving Americans. No more Italian gardeners and German butlers, fabulous vintners and brewers of the prohibition era, are to preëmpt the places of stalwart American men. Scotch nursemaids, Swedish laundresses . . . those names from old employment advertisements ... all are gone. So are the million jokes of thirty years ago that began, ‘“Bridget,” said her mistress one morning . . . ’

But Americans do not want the jobs the foreigners filled with consistent eagerness, if varying skill. Not, it appears, under any conditions. The would-be mistress may do what she will to make the work attractive, easy, profitable. She would do better to learn to do it herself. ‘Mistress’ is an unknown word in these days when agencies advertise ‘American Protestant’ (the one who wants a refined home with a small family and will do a little light housework in return). ‘Servant,’ also, is not a word to be used. Nor ‘wages.’ If you telephone an agency for a nursegirl now, you must feel equal to a long conversation with a Golden Eaglet with a hope chest who will assure you that she does not really need to work and ask if she may inquire what the salary is. And it is not a job or a place — it is a position. ‘“Bridget,” said her mistress,’ indeed!

If statistics are in order, they can be obtained. The daughters of so many cooks are hairdressers . . . the sons of so many gardeners are factory workers . . . last year the sons and daughters of so many families on relief refused to leave home to do housework. . . . But we have been made to groan too often at the millions of freight cars encircling the globe at the equator to care what they are loaded with this time — even if it is cooks. To-day the individual’s own story is in vogue — with a full-length portrait and a name and address. I would give mine but for the question of getting anyone to work for me afterward.

II

I began housekeeping with eagerness in 1929, in what I suppose the suave young encyclopædia salesmen call the two-car, two-maid class. I remembered a childhood where faithful Irish maids stayed on to help nurse through scarlet fever, where intoxicated encumbrances were borne away by an accustomed police, where mysterious shifts took place until another standby was found with a spangled picture of Killarney which hung on the same wall for years. I knew one had to endure much before the right one was found, — and that silently, because the so-called servant problem was conversationally taboo, — but I was rather looking forward to a good spangled Killarney.

Eventually I found two nice maids and settled down happily for three years and two babies. We moved to the country for the children and I took care of them myself — which is to say, I did what required thought and Bridey what needed muscle. Everything worked well. And then the depression caught up with us. When we finally escaped to the haven of our parents, Bridey went into a convent, paying a thousand dollars for the privilege. The cook found another place where, as no car was kept for her, she bought one of her own. Apparently they had been well paid. And they were worth it.

As soon as we were out of debt and had saved some money I wanted to begin housekeeping again, so little is one able to resist the flame. But this time I resolved to keep ahead of the depression — no more worry about paying bills on time and keeping up wages. I found a little house where there would be no work apart from that actually inevitable — no turning down of beds or bringing in tea or waiting on table. I would hire someone to come in by the day.

It was a tiny house — three rooms downstairs, two and a half upstairs, and a bath. The kitchen had room for my washing and ironing machines. One could stand in the dining room and reach upstairs for the children and into the kitchen for their breakfast without changing a foot. There was no room for a maid to sleep in, so I knew I could not weaken. Everything was going to be as simple as possible, freed from all anxiety.

The house stood on the corner of a large estate on the outskirts of a city of about thirty thousand. It was to have been a gardener’s cottage, but the gardener had a house he liked better and a car to go and come in. We faced a big road and a line of prettily painted small houses with foundation planting, lawn ornaments, and electrified effects at Christmas. Farther down the road the estate ended at an unpaved street with a collection of less fancy cottages. There, I thought, would be the people who would want our work. I had heard the men were all jobless. I had been told, by Bridey and others, that I was ‘nice to work for.’ It was 1933, and I felt like the harbinger of better times.

As a matter of diplomacy I asked the gardener who did not care for the cottage himself if he knew of a good person. I would pay twelve to fourteen dollars a week. As I expected, someone had asked him to get the place for her — a fine woman, husband an electrician out of work, two daughters in high school, home of her own, nice American stock, as everyone around there said approvingly of everyone else. No foreigners. I went to see her in a house much bigger and better than mine and liked her. She came and stayed three days. She was an excellent cook and wanted to help her husband, but he could not bear to have her doing that sort of work, and it hurt her daughters’ pride, too, so she went to work for less in the ten-cent store.

There was a boy of eighteen who had helped to move us in and to build the henhouse. He asked if his stepmother could have the place. His father was a painter out of work and she wanted to help him. She came and we found that she could make place cards out of pipe cleaners and pine cones and a white silk lily that looked for all the world like a white silk lily, but she could not cook and she was not used to housework. At home she got up in the morning, did all the cooking for the day, and went back to bed. Macaroni, she said, was filling for boys. In the evenings she sat to her husband for her portrait. He was really a painter of houses, but he filled his long period of unemployment with the lighter branches of his profession. Her feet were tender and she found my floors hard. I engaged her stepson to help her, but he refused to hang out a washing because it was beneath his dignity, and left, though not before he had lectured me on making a slave of his mother. He even invoked the blue eagle — all those hours for fourteen dollars. . . . Obviously they had all been getting very angry at home over the macaroni. I had been ordering meat for him at noon and seeing that his stepmother cooked it. I felt that she neglected him. And I had suggested that she go home for a few hours every afternoon, but she said it was too far to be worth-while. But I did not make a slave out of either of them. Just as I had become used to doing her heavy work for her she left because I took the table linen out of the machine where she was washing underclothes. She walked straight out of the house and I never saw her again, although she lived five hundred yards away. She was terribly angry.

I had tried to get the stepson to work for ten dollars a week — vacuuming rugs, taking the little boys for walks and so on. I had showed him how I would help him go to the state agricultural school the next year. But he said the other boys (the neighborhood was full of idle boys just out of high school) would make fun of him if he came inside the house or was seen with the children. So his girl turned up to ask if she could take care of the children. She was a large and handsome girl with illusions. I recognized Joan Crawford’s toss of the head and the slow wide smile. Her family was out of work and she seemed pleasant. I told her she could try, and explained about the children’s meals and their washing. But she said her mother would not allow her to work like that — cook and wash. She thought I would cook and wash while she played with the children. She went away. She never even washed dishes at home, she said. I heard the boy was very angry to think I had asked her to cook and wash. I seemed to be making everyone furious.

I see now how tactless I was in assuming that people who needed money would be glad of work, and that there was nothing degrading about housework. A woman who came in to iron told me that she and her husband, who was laying curbstones to nowhere on a relief job, had been offered a position as a couple. When I rejoiced for her she looked stricken to see that I could even consider the idea of her husband doing work in a house. They would never be so desperate. I learned how to make conversation about how one goes out only because things are dull at home. Too much ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ makes for a strained relationship. ‘Let’s’ is the word, and let’s it is. As someone I managed to please said, revealingly, ‘The reason I don’t mind working for you is that you do half the work yourself. Mrs. M. just sits.’ So she had left her good, steady, well-paid job with Mrs. M. And these, I may say, are not the grand, gaunt, New England stock, with attics full of Chippendale, whom shallow summer visitors insult in novels of the soil. These people come of mixed antecedents, and few of them want to own anything beyond the latest and most impressive gadgets half purchased on the installment plan. But they are American, and legion, shaping into a great new class.

III

If you are wondering why I did not call up employment agencies, charitable organizations for finding work, and the little places where the poor but proud leave their thoroughly reliable names, I can say I combed the city, first lightly and then briskly. I even called the hospital. But in all that bitter winter of manufactured jobs, to preserve the self-respect of unemployed welders and bookkeepers, no women had put in their names for regular housework. When pretty girls came round with government questionnaires about whether we had to take boarders I always asked them if there was anyone they knew . . . But obviously they were the brighter birds in a bigger cage. They seemed to think I lacked enterprise as I dried my hands on my apron.

In a panic we built a maid’s room in the attic, but in spite of dash and charm it did not seem adequate as more than a guestroom for intellectual triends. So I learned to cook. I learned from experience, so falsely called the best teacher, and from a real cook, an Englishwoman with a past that included the cordon bleu and twenty years in an English household where she had five kitchen maids. She had retired to one of the pretty houses across the way, and no one in the neighborhood ‘knew’ her because she had been a cook.

Reënforced by my new accomplishment, I felt that I had escaped in part from the watchful eyes which, I sensed, were waiting to see me collapse in my false pride, tie my children to the clothesline, and buy my meals at a delicatessen. But I could not do all the work and still take good and amusing care of the children. So a kind friend on a big estate sent me her farmer’s daughter. Julia was charming, with lovely clothes and her own car, and she could do simple cooking. She was frail, but a pleasure to have in the house. I paid her my usual fourteen dollars, took care of the children, and got our dinner at night when Julia had gone home — where her mother had a special meal ready for her, as she did not care for her own cooking. Her mother, in common with all the mothers I could see who themselves had worked, had brought her up to be a lady. She was engaged to a young man who was making good wages, but not enough, she felt, to be married on. And she would not marry him and work too.

Julia found someone to help her with the work. A woman who had once been a chambermaid in New Jersey, and admitted it, so she could fall no farther in the neighborhood’s eyes, took over our washing. Her son came to help Julia with the stove. He brought his sister to help with the children when I was not there. It was very expensive. Wages were three times the rent.

I became intimately acquainted with the family of the three who worked for me. The daughter was a sophomore in high school, with a constant permanent wave. She took music and tap-dancing lessons and thought of being a trained nurse, but her mother felt a beauty parlor offered a more genteel career. The boy was a senior in high school, and his mother gave him a driving license for Christmas so that he could take girls out. He did not like girls or want to take them out, but his mother had read articles for parents in magazines and she wanted him to feel free. And all this with the house royally mortgaged and so many payments on a newer washing machine, and a diningroom suite for an engaged daughter who could not afford to be married, that frequently meals were uncertain.

And here my exploration of American standards of living, said to be the highest in the world, ended. I gave up. I found no solution — except a resolve to teach my daughter to cook well and like it, and my sons too, in case the mothers of the girls they marry have not been so forehanded. And from sentiment I shall teach them those earlyAmerican beliefs that debt is to be avoided and a good worker respected, whatever his work may be. . . .

For the upshot was that I had to move into a larger house to save money. With room for a ‘real’ maid I got my old cook back. Her car is newer than ours and her fur coat sleeker than mine, but she does not expect me to do heavy work for her and she respects her profession. As I do. Still, she is foreign-born. The time will come when I shall again be dependent on the airs and vapors of the American aristocracy. And the American aristocracy will have no time for me, or all the others like me, because it has discovered the secret of eternal joy.

For you cannot deprive Americans of their rights. They know, from election promises, advertisements, and suave assumptions on the radio and screen, that something somewhere owes them a living — and a gay one. And it does not depend on working and saving. Who ever sees or hears those old-fashioned pulpit words to-day?

American men, handsome giants in roadside advertising, insist on short hours, high wages, a full dinner pail, and a pretty wife. And the pretty wives expect a lot, too. Breakfast in a jiffy at the gas range, picnicking in the meadows by the latest-model car. Keep your hands lovely. Insist on the best. Don’t let yourself go. A mate, not a martyr. And if actual life falls short of these ideals in five colors, do not bend to it. Better to let one’s spirit stand in evening dress in the moonlight, despising the commonplace, adding that final touch. Marshmallow on pineapple, a cherry on marshmallow. The whole on a banana.

Perhaps in time the Great White Father of the government, tired of creating jobs, will throw an aura of desirability about those already existing. He might do worse than dignify houseworkers with a union, buttons to wear and a code. Or, better still, the shinier magazines could cry lip the social advantages of housework, its inestimable value as an aid to beauty, to charm. Ultimately it would be pictured as an aphrodisiac, the climax in all our advertising. And then the moving pictures would show someone really working.

But in the meantime only slaves are seen to bend the knee. Only men in the Foreign Legion perspire. Wash a floor with the new patent mop or not at all. And then sit down to relax and stay young. Let the radio whisper flattery while you turn those elaborately illustrated pages where Princess Something tells how to give a party for royalty and Baroness Else tells what she does to make hot days taste different. So she thinks she’s better than me, does she? Let her do her own housework, if she thinks she’s so good. (Baroness Else grinds her peanuts into the whipped cream.) We’ll give ourselves that new clay pack facial, and to-night we’ll go to the movies. It’s amateur night and Mama can clog.