Meet Polly Powell, aged twenty-six, the cashier at the Automat just across the alleyway from the venerable Hotel St Crispian.
Polly has worked here at the Automat ever since she came to the city, shortly after graduating summa cum laude from Bryn Mawr, in that glorious summer of 1945, when the world seemed full of promise and hope.
Her intention upon moving to the city had been to follow in the footsteps of Jane Austen, of the Brontës, of the Georges Sand and Eliot, of Colette, of Virginia Woolf, and to create a “body of work” that would establish her as the American equivalent of the aforementioned authoresses.
For far too long in Polly’s opinion the American literary world had been dominated by men. It was time for a woman to assume a place in the front rank, and not as a writer of mere “women’s fiction”, but of so-called “literary fiction”, fiction that would one day be a mainstay of American Literature departments, and not just in women’s colleges like Bryn Mawr and Mount Holyoke and Smith, but even in Harvard and Yale and Princeton.
Only one obstacle stood in the way of Polly’s ambitions as she got off the bus at the Port Authority that first sunny day in June, and that was her almost complete ignorance of the world outside of books and movies. She had spent most of her girlhood reading books in her bedroom in her family’s sprawling comfortable stone house in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, a house which the people in the town called a mansion, but which her father (Irving St. John Powell, the noted professor of epistemology, and heir to the Powell Shipping Company fortune) called a “cottage”, and her education at the Shipley School and at Bryn Mawr had done little to teach her the ways of the world beyond the Main Line.
And so, in order to learn the ways of the world, and despite the fact that she received two hundred dollars-a-week allowance from her family — more than enough to allow her to live quite comfortably in her own apartment on Jane Street — she had worked for the past five years at the Automat.
Polly always worked the night shift, and she preferred it that way. For one thing, the restaurant was slower at night, especially late at night, which meant she had to spend very little time actually doing her job. For another thing working nights allowed her to sleep late, and to go to matinées at the movies or the theatre. And lastly, and perhaps most important of all, the people who came in to the Automat at night were simply more interesting than the daytime clientèle. These people, the night people, these were the people she needed to watch and to observe and listen to if she were ever to finish her groundbreaking first novel, which she had tentatively titled Automat Dreams.
Polly envisioned this book as a mammoth verbal tapestry of life in the big city, and by extension, of all life everywhere, perhaps even on other planets or in other dimensions. So far she had not actually written a single word of this proposed epic, but that didn’t matter, because in the meantime she was taking it all in, gathering material, listening, watching, absorbing. And when she got bored with observing and listening she could always just read a book, for instance the one she was reading now, one of her favorites, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.
Suddenly Polly had a brainwave, and she closed the book on her carefully manicured finger.
Daniel Deronda.
Daniel Deronda was a man, even if George Eliot was a woman.
A man.
Suddenly it had come to Polly, a great revelation: nearly every one of her favorite books had men in them, in fact many of them had men as their central characters. And so it stood to reason that if Polly were to write a great novel herself, then she would have to learn something about men, which was another subject that Shipley and Bryn Mawr had taught her precious little about.
Perhaps she had been wrong to spend all her free time since she came to the city in reading books and going to movies and plays. Perhaps she had been wrong to turn down the dozens of young men (and old men) who had asked her for a date or who had simply made her a bold and brazen proposition.
Perhaps it would be good for her art if she were to go out on a date, or even “dates”, with one or more of these men.
Polly decided then and there she would agree to the next request for a date she received, provided the man was not too ugly or too seemingly boring.
Hopefully she cast her eye around the Automat. Unfortunately she saw only the usual outcasts from life’s rich feast, for instance those two seedy men who addressed each other mutually as “Bill”, that ragged woman called “Bowery Betty”, and the usual assortment of louche late-night habitués — with the exception of those two young women over there at Table 27.
She didn’t recognize the one woman, but the other one was the actress Hyacinth Wilde, whom Polly had seen in several plays, e.g., How Grey Was the Sky, Gasoline Rainbow, Moonbeams on the Hudson, and Ramparts of Destiny. The other woman looked like a career-girl of some sort, but of what sort Polly hadn’t the faintest idea.
Both the young women were eating quite heartily, pausing between bites to smoke cigarettes, and it seemed to Polly that the career-girl was questioning the actress.
Could it be that they were lesbians?
Polly had heard overheard whispers about suspected lesbians, both at Shipley and at Bryn Mawr. What exactly did lesbians do with one another? Polly had no idea, just as she had only the vaguest notion of what men and women “did” with one another.
Perhaps she should consider becoming a lesbian? At least then one wouldn’t be expected to go to football games. However, if she became a lesbian then she wouldn’t learn anything about men…
Oh, but wait, the career-girl was getting up, and approaching the cash register.
Polly quickly opened up Daniel Deronda and pretended to read.
82. "the gen"
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