DC By the Book

Excerpt: When Janey was little she lived in an old flatface brick house a couple of doors up the hill from M Street in Georgetown. The front part of the house was always dark because Mommer kept the heavy lace curtains drawn to and the yellow linen shades with lace inset bands down. Sunday afternoons Janey and Joe and Ellen and Francie had to sit in the front room and look at pictures or read books. Janey and Joe read the funnypaper together because they were the oldest and the other two were just babies and not old enough to know what was funny anyway. They couldn’t laugh outloud because Popper sat with the rest of The Sunday Star on his lap and usually went to sleep after dinner with the editorial section crumpled in one big blueveined hand. Tiny curds of sunlight flickering through the lace insets in the window shade would lie on his bald head and on one big red flange of his nose and on the droop of one mustache and on his speckled sundayvest and on the white starched shirtsleeves with shiny cuffs, held up above the elbow by a rubber band. ---------- Character Janey Williams and her siblings might have lived in one of these seven row houses (1213-1225 30th St) constructed in 1866 on the former stables for the Union Hotel. Each one cost $1,000 to construct ($16,000 in 2014). In 2013, 1219 30th was listed for sale at $1.4 million. Located at 30th and M, the Union Hotel was considered the largest and most prestigious hotel in Washington when it opened in 1796. A reception was held for President John Adams at the hotel in 1800 and it served an illustrious clientele that included Jerome Bonaparte, Prince Talleyrand of France, future king of France Louis Philippe, Washington Irving, and Francis Scott Key. It was demolished in 1935 for construction of a gas station.

Excerpt: Winters the brick sidewalks were icy and there were colored women out spreading cinders outside their doors when the children went to school mornings. Joe never would walk with the rest of them because they were girls, he lagged behind or ran ahead. Janey wished she could walk with him but she couldn't leave her little sisters who held tight onto her hands. One winter they got in the habit of walking up the hill with a little yaller girl who lived directly across the street and whose name was Pearl. Afternoons Janey and Pearl walked home together. Pearl usually had a couple of pennies to buy bullseyes or candy bananas with at a little store on Wisconsin Avenue, and she always gave Janey half so Janey was very fond of her. One afternoon she asked Pearl to come in and they played dolls together under the big rose of sharon bush in the back yard. When Pearl had gone Mommer’s voice called from the kitchen. Mommer had her sleeves rolled up on her faded pale arms and checked apron on and was rolling piecrust for supper so that her hands were covered with flour. “Janey, come here,” she said. Janey knew from the cold quaver in her voice that something was wrong. “Yes, Mommer.” Janey stood in front of her mother shaking her head about so that the two stiff sandy pigtails lashed from side to side. “Stand still, child, for gracious sake... Jane I want to talk to you about something. That little colored girl you brought in this afternoon....” Janey’s heart was dropping. She had a sick feeling and felt herself blushing, she hardly knew why. “Now, don’t misunderstand me; I like and respect the colored people; some of them are fine self-respecting people in their place . . . But you musn’t bring that little colored girl in the house again. Treating colored people kindly and with respect is one of the signs of good breeding... You musn’t forget that your mother’s people were wellborn every inch of them... Georgetown was very different in those days. We lived in a big house with most lovely lawns... but you must never associate with colored people on an equal basis. Living in this neighborhood it’s all the more important to be careful about those things... Neither the whites nor the blacks respect those who do... That’s all, Janey, you understand, now run out and play, it’ll soon be time for your supper.” Janey tried to speak but she couldn't. She stood stiff in the middle of the yard on the grating that covered the drainpipe, staring at the back fence.

Excerpt: In July Alice and Janey got jobs in the office of Mrs. Robinson, public stenographer in the Riggs Building, to replace girls away on their vacations. Mrs. Robinson was a small gray-haired pigeonbreasted woman with a Kentucky shriek in her voice, that made Janey think of a parrot's. She was very precise and all the proprieties were observed in her office. "Miss Williams," she would chirp, leaning back from her desk, "that em ess of Judge Roberts's has absolutely got to be finished today.... My dear, we've given our word and we'll deliver if we have to stay till midnight. Noblesse oblige, my dear," and the typewriters would trill and jingle and all the girls' fingers would go like mad typing briefs, manuscripts of undelivered speeches by lobbyists, occasional overflow from a newspaperman or a scientist, or prospectuses from real estate offices or patent promoters, dunning letters for dentists and doctors.

Excerpt: when everybody went away for a trip Jeanne took us out to play every day in Farragut Square and told you about how in the Jura in winter the wolves come down and howl through the streets of the villages and sometimes we’d see President Roosevelt ride by all alone on a bay horse and once we were very proud because when we took off our hats we were very proud because he smiled and showed his teeth like in the newspaper and touched his hat and we were very proud and he had an aide de camp

Excerpt: Still she got to be friends with Jerry Burnham. He seemed to like taking her out and having her listen to him talk. Even after he'd thrown up his job at Dreyfus and Carroll, he sometimes called for her Saturday afternoons to take her to Keith's. Janey arranged a meeting with Alice out in Rock Creek Park but it wasn't much of a success. Jerry set the girls up to tea at the old stone mill. He was working for an engineering paper and writing a weekly letter for The New York Sun. He upset Alice by calling Washington a cesspool and a sink of boredom and saying he was rotting there and that most of the inhabitants were dead from the neck up anyway. When he put them on the car to go back to Georgetown Alice said emphatically that young Burnham was not the sort of boy a respectable girl ought to know. Janey sat back happily in the seat of the open car, looking out at trees, girls in summer dresses, men in straw hats, mailboxes, storefronts sliding by and said, "But, Alice, he's smart as a whip. . . . Gosh, I like brainy people, don't you?" Alice looked at her and shook her head sadly and said nothing.

Excerpt: "But it's so interesting, mommer," Janey would say when her mother bewailed the fact that she had to work. "In my day it wasn't considered ladylike, it was thought to be demeaning." -- "But it isn't now," Janey would say getting into a temper. Then it would be a great relief to get out of the stuffy house and the stuffy treeshaded streets of Georgetown and to stop by for Alice Dick and go down to the moving pictures and to see the pictures of foreign countries, and the crowds on F Street and to stop in at a drugstore for a soda afterwards, before getting on the Georgetown car, and to sit up at the fountain talking about the picture they'd seen and Olive Thomas and Charley Chaplin and John Bunny. She began to read the paper every day and to take an interest in politics. She began to feel that there was a great throbbing arclighted world somewhere outside and that only living in Georgetown where everything was so poky and oldfashioned, and Mommer and Popper were so poky and oldfashioned, kept her from breaking into it.

Excerpt: It was too hot so they put off driving till later and went to the Willard to get something to eat. He insisted on going to the Willard because he said he had his pockets full of money and would just spend it anyhow and Janey was very much awed because she’d never been in a big hotel before and felt she wasn’t dressed for it and said she was afraid she’d disgrace him and he laughed and said it couldn’t be done. They sat in the big long gilt dining room and Jerry said it looked like a millionaire morgue and the waiter was very polite and Janey couldn’t find what she wanted to eat on the big bill-of-fare and took a salad. Jerry made her take a gin fizz because he said it was cooling; it made her feel lightheaded and tall and gawky. She followed his talk breathless the way she used to tag along after Joe and Alec down to the carbarns when she was little.

Excerpt: After supper they drove round some more and Jerry got quiet and she felt constrained and couldn’t think of what to say. They went way out Rhode Island Avenue and circled round back by the Old Soldier’s Home. There was no air anywhere and the staring identical streetlights went by on either side, lighting segments of monotonous unrustling trees. Even out on the hills there was not a breath stirring. Out in the dark roads beyond the streetlamps it was better. Janey lost all sense of direction and lay back breathing in an occasional patch of freshness from a cornfield or a copse of woods. In a spot where a faint marshy dampness almost cool drifted across the road Jerry suddenly stopped the car and leaned over and kissed her. Her heart began to beat very fast. She wanted to tell him not to, but she couldn’t. “I didn’t mean to, but I can’t help it, he whispered. “It’s living in Washington undermines the will... Or maybe I’m in love with you, Janey. I don’t know... Let’s sit in the back seat where it’s cooler.” Weakness started in the pit of her stomach and welled up through her. As she stepped out he caught her in his arms. She let her head droop on his shoulder, her lips against his neck. His arms were burning hot round her shoulders, she could feel his ribs through his shirt pressing against her. Her head started going round in a reek of tobacco and liquor and male sweat. His legs began pressing up to hers. She yanked herself away and got into the back seat. She was trembling. He was right after her. “No, no,” she said. He sat down beside her with his arm around her waist. “Lez have a cigarette,” he said in a shaky voice.

Excerpt: With the insurance money Mrs. Williams did over the house and fixed up the two top floors to rent out as apartments. That was the chance Janey had been waiting for for so long to get a place of her own and she and Alice got a room in a house on Massachusetts Avenue near the Carnegie Library, with cooking privileges. So one Saturday afternoon she phoned from the drugstore for a taxicab and set out with her suitcase and trunk and a pile of framed pictures from her room on the seat beside her. The pictures were two color prints of Indians by Remington, a Gibson girl, a photograph of the battleship Connecticut in the harbor of Villefranche that Joe had sent her and an enlarged photograph of her father in uniform standing at the wheel of an imaginary ship against a stormy sky furnished by a photographer in Norfolk, Va. Then there were two unframed colorprints by Maxfield Parrish that she’d bought recently and a framed snapshot of Joe in baseball clothes. The little picture of Alec she’d wrapped among her things in her suitcase. The cab smelt musty and rumbled along the streets. It was a crisp autumn day, the gutters were full of dry leaves. Janey felt scared and excited as if she were starting out alone on a journey.

Excerpt: She put on her hat and coat, freshened up her face a little in the mirror over the mantel and walked through the stinging January evening to the corner of F and 14th where she stood waiting for the car. She wished she had a muff; the lashing wind bit into her hands in her thin gloves and into her legs just above the shoetops. She wished she was a wealthy married woman living in Chevy Chase and waiting for her limousine to come by and take her home to her husband and children and a roaring open fire. She remembered Jerry Burnham and wondered if she could have married him if she'd handled it right. Or Johnny Edwards; he'd gone to New York when she'd refused him, and was making big money in a broker's office. Or Morris Byer. But he was a Jew. This year she hadn't had any beaux. She was on the shelf; that was about the size of it.