Night Shift - Softcover

Wolff, Maritta

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743254872 ISBN 13: 9780743254878

Publisher: Scribner, 2006

Synopsis

Originally published in 1942 to rave reviews and astonishing commercial success, Night Shift dramatizes the working class life of the Midwest during World War II with the excitement of melodrama, the vividness of documentary, and the page-turning quality of the best commercial fiction.

Sally Otis works herself to the bone as a waitress, supporting her three children and a jobless younger sister. With her bills mounting and no rest in sight, Sally's resolve is beginning to crumble when her swaggering older sister, Petey Braun, appears on the scene. Petey, with her furs and jewels and exotic trips, is an American career woman—one who makes a career of men. But when Petey gets a gig at the glamorous, rowdy local nightclub, it will forever alter the world of the struggling Otis family.

Night Shift “manages to be touching and horrible, sentimental and brutal all at the same time. It is both sordidly real and theatrically melodramatic. It’s good” (New York Times).

About this title

About the Author:

Maritta Wolff was born in 1918 in Michigan. Whistle Stop, her first novel, won the Avery Hopwood Award in 1940. A runaway bestseller, the book was also printed as a special Armed Forces edition for American troops during World War II. Whistle Stop was made into a feature film in 1946, starring Ava Gardner. In the next two decades, Ms. Wolff authored more than five novels, but she hid her final, unpublished manuscript in her refrigerator until her death in 2002. Rediscovered, that novel, Sudden Rain, is available from Scribner.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1

The personnel manager dropped the telephone back in the cradle, the radiator behind her made a little whistling sound and right after that there came a buzz from the inner mechanism of the electric clock on the corner of the desk. Wham! Whistle! Buzz! As if there was some idiotic relationship between the three noises, leading through a brief climax to a finality, Virginia Braun thought. And she almost laughed out loud.

The personnel manager shuffled the pink application blank and the little white card from the employment agency. "I'm sorry, Miss Braun," she said, "but the only opening we have here right now is for an experienced office girl. You'd have to have a professional knowledge of shorthand as well as typing. I'm sorry."

"I see," Virginia said. "Thank you."

She got up from the chair, pulling her coat around her. She had dropped one of her gloves. She noticed it then, a limp, brown cotton glove, lying alone and forlorn on the floor, the fingers curling upward pathetically, a hole in the forefinger and threads hanging where it had been mended before. Virginia picked up the glove quickly, and turned away.

The woman behind the desk smiled her professionally warm and friendly smile. "I'll keep your application on file, Miss Braun. There might be an opening for you later, maybe after the holidays. If there should be, I'll get in touch with you."

"Thank you," Virginia said again. She went on past the door into the outer office. There was a long line of girls, each with a pink-colored application blank, still waiting to be interviewed. She walked the length of the line to the elevator.

In the lobby, Virginia hesitated beside the revolving doors and turned the collar of her flimsy, tan-colored polo coat higher around her throat. Out on the street, the air was sharp and cold, the wind blowing a few fine pellets of snow with it. A patient-faced Salvation Army woman in a black bonnet stood beside a kettle and tripod, clanging her bell drearily. Virginia was swallowed up in the crowd that jammed the sidewalks, people hurrying along in both directions, shoving and bumping, their arms laden with packages.

Just then the Christmas decoration lights came on, hundreds of vari-colored bulbs amid the green festoons strung across Main Street. Above, a mist of smoke hung between the middling-tall buildings, the fine soot settling everywhere, begriming the green festoons and the patches of snow at the curb. The sky overhead was the same gray color of the smoke; and the sidewalks and fronts of buildings were colorless drab in the dull afternoon light. Restaurants and drug stores, pawn shops and all-night movie theatres punctuated the rows of garishly lighted store windows which were packed with holiday merchandise and trimmed with a glitter of tinsel and cellophane. From somewhere over the noise of the traffic came the sound of a factory whistle blowing, and then another one, the beginning of a cacophony that meant that the afternoon shifts were coming off in factories all over town. The whistles cut through the thin organ music of recorded Christmas carols broadcast through loud speakers onto the streets.

On the corner, a skinny Santa Claus with a dirty, scraggly beard appealed without enthusiasm to the passersby to contribute to some charity that guaranteed to give every child in the city a Merry Christmas.

The traffic policeman blew his whistle, gesturing with his arm, and the crowd surged across the street. There was a drug store on the corner and on the curb in front of it there was a sign that said "Bus Stop" and a schedule mounted on a metal pedestal. Virginia stopped to read the time table, her whole slight body shivering in the cold wind, one hand lifted to hold her hat. She craned her neck to see the illuminated dial of a clock in a jeweler's window across the street and then she pushed her way across the sidewalk. Inside the drug store there was a lunch counter along one wall, and Virginia climbed on the nearest stool.

"I'd like a cup of coffee, please," she said to the boy in the white coat. While she waited she opened the purse on her knees and drew out a letter, the writing blurred, the postmark smudged, the whole envelope creased and dirty from carrying. She took the one sheet of paper out of the envelope and spread it out carefully on the counter top beside her coffee. A short letter, dated "November Second" at the top and signed "love, Bill" at the bottom. In between it said that he was working hard, that he missed her, that guys with lots lower draft numbers than his still hadn't been called yet, that he wished that he could see her. She read it over many times, oblivious to the crowd around her. The corners of her mouth turned down tragically, and at last she put the letter away in her purse. She twisted around on the stool to catch a glimpse of the clock, and then she finished her coffee and picked up her check.

The cashier stamped her check and returned it to her. Virginia hesitated a moment with the little white square of paper in her hand. The lottery box was right in front of her, a pencil secured to the top of it by a chain. Virginia wrote her name and address carefully on the back of the check and then dropped it in the slot in the top of the box. There was a sheet of white cardboard on the wall above the box with a ten-dollar bill, the prize of the week, pinned to it, and beside it was printed the name of this week's lucky winner of the drawing, a Polish name, Mrs. Stanley Walezewski.

Outside the door a little knot of people had formed, waiting for the buses, shoppers with their bundles, pert, chattering office girls, and a few grimy factory workers with their dinner pails. Virginia stood close up against the plate-glass window out of the way of the crowd and the wind. A little drift of snow formed suddenly, eddied around her ankles and then was gone before the wind like a wraith. There was a hole in her silk stocking just above the top of her shoe, and the wide ladder of a runner coming up her leg. She leaned down and touched it with her finger, a helpless, hopeless gesture, with shocked concern on her face, as if it were an overwhelming catastrophe.

Just then a bus pulled up to the curb and Virginia hurried into the line of people that formed waiting to board it.

"Move to the back of the bus, please," the driver kept saying patiently over the ringing of nickels down the slot. "All right, hurry up! Step up, please!"

And over his voice and the roar of the traffic, came the sudden wail of an ambulance siren.

It happened on the chromium line just ten minutes before the day shift went off. It happened on the chromium line, where the thick, wet heat rises up from the vats and meets the dry, blue-green light pouring down -- the last ten minutes of the daylight shift, at the last vat of all in the line of great vats where racks of shining automobile bumpers were doused rhythmically up and down by cables. The last vat on the line before the bumpers were dried and polished and trucked away to meet scores of other auto parts on assembly lines in Detroit and Flint.

It wasn't the vitriol vat nor the chromic-acid vat; just plain water, boiling water, nine feet of it, bubbling and boiling in a vat. The guard rail there was weak. Everybody knew it was weak -- the men who worked there, the foreman, the superintendent on the chromium line. Everybody knew it was weak, but they hadn't gotten around to putting in a new one yet.

Stan Walezewski knew about it too. He never leaned against it, because he knew it wasn't safe. Stan was big, six feet tall (they hire tall men on the chromium line because it takes a tall man to reach the switches). And Stan was heavy, over two hundred pounds, two hundred pounds of big bone and flesh and smooth muscle to his strong young body. He had worked on the chromium line for three months, and he knew about the guard rail, all the boys did, but he was careful.

It was ten minutes before the day shift went off, and Stan was feeling fine. He was going home to Anna and the baby in a few minutes. He'd stop at the corner and drink a bottle of beer while he waited for the bus, and then he would go home. Anna was a fine wife, a big raw-boned Polish girl, almost as tall as Stan himself. And the baby was a fine kid. The next one would be a boy. Anna was four months gone with it. The next kid would be a boy, and he would grow up big and strong and healthy like his father. Oh, he was getting to be a regular family man now, Stan exulted. And tomorrow was pay day. And tomorrow night was the wedding. Anna's kid sister was getting married to a Polish fellow from Dearborn. He was going to get drunk tomorrow afternoon, Stan gloated. He was going to get roaring drunk and dance his feet sore at the wedding and eat his belly full, and keep right on drinking and never sober up till Monday morning.

It was almost quitting time, and Stan felt fine. Another rack of bumpers came clattering along the track. Stan waved his arm and pulled his face out of shape at Joe Braun who worked beside him. Joe Braun was tall, like Stan, but skinny with a pale, sour face. Just to look at Joe always made Stan aware of what a big fine strong man he was. A real man in a fight, a real man when it came to drinking, and a real man in bed. Anna four months along with a boy. He and Anna would have lots of kids. Why not? He made good money in the factory; they could have a lot of kids.

"Hey, you, Joe! Wake up! That whistle gonna blow in a minute!" Stan yelled loud over the clatter. Joe Braun scowled at him. Stan laughed loud and long, his voice mixed in and lost with the noise here. He felt so good he'd like to yell and holler.

His eyes followed the rack of bumpers automatically, the rack slid into place on the track and automatically he moved to throw the switch. Poor old Joe, Stan was thinking, sickly sourpuss bastard! Bet he wishes he was like Stan Walezewski, bet he wishes he was fine, big man with wife and kids, bet he . . .

With the timing just right, Stan stretched up tall, reaching for the s...

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0743254872
• ISBN 13: 9780743254878
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 560