1930's starlet, Anna Rose, expects to marry hotel mogul, Norman Gates, after her residence at the Winter Garden Theatre in a malignant entrapment that leaves her deeply wishing and searching for a sense of freedom. Little did she know, she would fin...
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Harry is quite lucky, he thinks. He considers the circumstances that led him to need to leave school to provide for his family. It's only his mother and sister now; his father had perished in the war, leaving their family with virtually nothing but debt. Furthermore, in the bleakness of this great depression, he considers himself quite lucky in that when he arrived in New York prepared to work the lowest of jobs he had instead managed to be employed in one of Norman Gates' lavish hotels– one of few that remained in the larger part of the city, in fact.
Of course, 'elevator operator' was not in Harry's mind when he was told verbatim from Margaret, his supervisor, that a position at the hotel was recently available; the previous employee took his own life the day before he started. Harry figured from the rush of it all that the position was probably decent, but even if the title didn't immediately amuse him, he reaped the benefits that were included. The pay wasn't too bad, enough to send most to his family while he kept just enough to keep himself fed; Mr. Gates was evidently a generous man and provided his employees with their own room at the hotel, and one hot meal every workday. So really, Harry couldn't complain at all about being an 'elevator operator'. That didn't mean he didn't have difficult days.In the remnants of an ill-fated world, Harry found personal solace in books. His earliest memory is of his mother reading to him. He must have been around four when his mother came into his bedroom one night with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's, Reveries of The Solitary Walker, and proposed she read it to him. He recalls the scent of his mother's perfume, a sedative mix of vanilla and floral notes that bloomed under his nose as she held him close to her heart. It was a stark contrast to how his father tended to smell like the factory when he came into his room to tell him stories. Harry used to think he had never received the news of his father's death and he had been so young, so it'd been easy for him to grieve his father, but it'd come to him that night in the form of his mother reading to him, and he supposes it's the gentlest way for a child to learn about death without really addressing it.
Harry leaves the locker room after his shift ends, dressed in his civic attire now as he heads to his room on the second floor. It's one in the morning, but first, he wants to head up to the roof like he usually does every night for a smoke. He gets off on the seventeenth floor and takes the rest of the stairs leading up to the roof. It's windy when he pushes through the door. The gravel crunches under his footsteps as he walks forward, taking in the night sky and the city below him while reaching into his pocket for a cigarette and his lighter.
When he lights the cig, he takes a long drag and exhales deeply, closing his eyes as he treats the cycle as a form of meditation after a long day. He looks around again, making his way to his usual spot (an old billboard advertising the old Nightfall swing club that shut down several years before) where he'd sit and contemplate on his future, his family, and the struggles in between.
What he does not expect to find is a weeping woman standing at the edge of the building holding onto an iron support beam of the billboard above them.
