I caught her before she hit the floor. She was suddenly warm. I could feel the cold of her skin give way to the rush of heat that seemed to flow through her body like fire. Her head was against my shoulder and she was crying—this time without tears. I held her tightly and impersonally, all the strength seemed to have left her legs.
“Mister,” she sobbed, “mister, you couldn’t know what we’ve gone through—how many times Mike has gone hungry to give the food to the kid, how many things he’s done without, cigarettes.”
She was cracked. Here I had a dame in my arms and she was crying about what her husband sacrificed. I suppose she didn’t think she had done anything for the kid either. I was suddenly ashamed.
“Take it easy!” I said, interrupting her babbling. “Take it easy! Everything will be all right.”
She looked up at me. Her eyes were wide pools of gratitude. I gave it back to her, look for look. “You’re O.K.,” she half whispered.
“I know, I know.” I laughed shortly. Sucker Kane, number one patsy!
We walked silently through to the kitchen. At the door she stopped me.
“Thanks again, mister,” she said.
“Forget it, lady! Courtesy is our motto.”
I walked down the stairs and out into the street. About half-way down the block I saw the little girl. A man ran up to her and picked her up and tossed her in the air.
“Daddy, Daddy!”
He did a little dance with her, “Laurey,” he sang out, “Daddy’s got a job!”
I walked past them. “Congratulations, Mike!” I said. “You got more than that.” And kept on going.
He looked after me for a second and scratched his head. I guess he was wondering if he knew me. Then he turned and ran for his house with his baby in his arms.
I was getting madder and madder as I walked back toward the store. That teasing bitch Terry would pay for this! The next time I had her out, she wouldn’t get away with it.
And she didn’t.
47
The next morning the lady I had left the groceries with came down to the store. She came over to me. The kid was tagging along with her. She looked different than she had looked the day before. It was the way she held her head or maybe the way she moved—more sure of herself. The defeated look had vanished from her eyes.
“My husband got a job,” she said without any preliminaries. “I was wondering if you could let me have a few things till payday, tomorrow.”
“I know,” I said. “I saw him on the street. Wait a minute, I’ll ask the boss.” I went over to Harry and explained the situation to him: that her husband had just started work and they would like a few things to carry them over until the next day when he’d get paid. I was ashamed of what I had done yesterday. I didn’t know just how bad off I was until this morning. And now I was anxious to make it up to them. He told me it was O.K. if I thought they were all right.
I went back to her and gave her what she wanted. While I was wrapping the package I tried to apologize for my action yesterday. I spoke in a low tone of voice so no one else could hear me but her. “I’m glad your husband got something,” I said.
She didn’t answer.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” I continued. “I don’t know why I acted that way, but I heard so many stories about different things. I don’t know who to believe anymore. I don’t know who to trust.”
“Why can’t you trust everybody until you find out differently about them?” she said simply, her face reddening.
I felt worse than before, but there was no answer to what she said. I couldn’t explain to her some people would cheat you and some wouldn’t—that the bad ones made it tough for the good. I wrapped up the package and gave it to her. She took it and left.
Later in the afternoon Terry came in. She smiled at me. “Gimme a bottle of katship.”
“Christ!” I said to her, “don’t you ever eat anything else?” I knew she wasn’t sore at me. I could tell from the way she acted. I should have knocked her off a long time ago, I thought, and then I wouldn’t have been in the swindle I got myself into. I took the ketchup from the shelf behind me and put it in on the counter. “Anything else?” I asked.
She shook her head.
I put the bottle in a bag. “Ten cents, please.”
She gave me the dime. “Coming to the meeting tomorrow?” she asked.
“I’ll be there,” I said. “Wait for me.”
She left.
Harry came over. “How come you’re going to those meetings?” He asked. “They’re a bunch of reliefers. Most of them don’t want to work anyway.”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “They seem like pretty decent folks. The breaks are against them, that’s all. Besides I have some fun up there.”
He looked at me. “Don’t tell me you’re going communist!”
I laughed at that. “I don’t even know what communism is. I wouldn’t know one if I saw one. The people upstairs look the same to me as other people. They seem to want the same things other people do. They want jobs and food and a good time. I want the same things and I’m not a communist.”
“They believe in free love,” he said. “They don’t believe in getting married if you want it.”
“I don’t know about that,” I replied. “Most of them up there are married.”
“Well,” he said, “if they were decent, they wouldn’t let their kids run around the way they do—like that Terry, for instance. I bet they bang her off plenty up there.
That got me sore. I started to answer him hotly but controlled myself. Instead I grinned slowly. “She’s the kind that everybody would bang—if they could.”
A customer came in then and Harry turned away to wait on her and I got busy unpacking and we forgot all about what we were saying.
The months went by. Sam quit his job and went to live with some relatives of his in Hartford. I became a full-fledged grocery clerk and was raised to fifteen dollars a week. I became a pretty good soda clerk too on the Sundays I worked for Otto. I saved a few bucks and bought some new clothes, gained a little weight, felt a little better, more friendly toward people. I knew everybody in the neighborhood. Between the store and the club I kept pretty busy. Not that I was active in the club, but being there seemed to bring me closer to people in general.
One evening about a week after Thanksgiving Gerro Browning called me as I left the store. I waited for him to catch up to me and then we walked downtown.
“Where do you live, Frank?” he asked.
“At the Mills,” I said. I was wondering why he was interested.
“Where you going now?”
“I’m going to eat and then home,” I told him.
“Mind if I eat with you?” he asked.
“No, not at all,” I answered, surprised that he should ask to eat with me. “I’d like it, as a matter of fact—have someone to talk to for a change.”
He looked at me curiously. “Haven’t you any folks?”
I shook my head.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-two,” I told him. I looked at him questioningly. “Look, I don’t mind your asking me these questions, but maybe you can tell me why the sudden interest?”
He laughed shortly. “I don’t know exactly why myself. You interest me, I guess.”
“Why should I? I’m no different than any of the others.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No, I don’t,” I said. We turned into a cafeteria.
We went down the counter and picked up our trays and food. Then we sat down at a table and began to eat.
For a few minutes we ate in silence. Then, between mouthfuls of food, he said: “Your hair, for instance.”
Instinctively I raised my hand to my temple. “What about my hair? It’s combed, isn’t it?”
He began to laugh. “No, that’s not it. It’s different. You asked me, didn’t you?”
“It’s no different than any other hair.”
�
��It is,” he said, smiling. “It’s got gray in it—not much, but enough to see. And you’re kind of young to have gray hair.”
“Maybe I worry a lot.”
He shook his head. “No, you’re not the kind. But you’ve been through a lot.”
“How can you tell?”
He swallowed a mouthful of food before he answered. “By little things mostly. The way you act. You seem to sit back and watch people with a glint of amusement, or superiority, or something in your eyes. The way you talk—positively, tersely, always surely, never indefinitely. A certain way you move around, on the edge of your feet, so to speak, ready to jump one way or the other—like an animal, always wary, always on guard.” He took another mouthful of food. “Like when you sat down here in the restaurant—your back against the wall. The instinctive way you look at everybody that comes in or walks past while we’re talking and eating. Who are you looking for, and what are you on guard against?”
I smiled. “I didn’t realize I did that,” I said. “I’m not on guard against anything. It’s just a habit, I guess.”
“There are reasons for habits,” he said. We were through with our meat. I got up and went for the coffee and brought it back to the table.
He was sitting back in his chair and smoking, absently twirling a small pin attached to his watch chain around his finger.
I put the coffee down on the table. “What’s that?” I asked him, indicating the watch chain.
He took the watch from his pocket and gave it to me. I looked at it. “That’s a Phi Beta Kappa key.”
I turned it over in my hand. It had some strange lettering on it. “It’s the funniest-shaped key I ever saw,” I said. “What does it open?”
He laughed. “It’s supposed to open the world of opportunity. But it doesn’t. Sometimes I think it’s a fake.” He saw I didn’t understand him. “You get it in college. It’s a very snooty club that admits you only if you’ve maintained the highest standing.”
“You went to college?”
He nodded.
I handed the watch and chain back to him. I thought of Marty and Jerry: they should be pretty nearly through college by now. “I have some friends that are going to college.”
He looked interested. “Where?” he asked.
I smiled at him wryly. “I don’t know,” I confessed. “I haven’t seen them for a long time.”
“Then how do you know they’re going to college?”
“I know them,” I said.
“It’s funny how people lose track of each other,” he said reflectively.
That seemed to break the ice between us, and everything came easy afterward. We sat and talked for over an hour. I told him about myself. I hadn’t ever told anyone before, and he seemed to be really interested. We parted pretty good friends.
48
The winter of 1932–3 was a bad one. People were out of work, on relief. It was becoming more evident, even to me who was safe in a small way, that steps would have to be taken to insure the livelihood of the people around me. Every day the papers screamed “New Crisis.” People were hungry. People were cold. Bonus for the veterans. Jobs for the people. Stop kidding yourself, neighbor, “prosperity” isn’t just around the corner.
But in some strange way it didn’t seem to affect me. I was safe. I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t cold. I had a job.
When I went upstairs to the club the complaints of the people attending never seemed quite real. The speeches I heard never seemed to have an effect. The demands that were made were never listened to. And gradually the people seemed to despair, to lose their hope of ever getting a job again. It reflected itself in many ways. Men who would religiously get out to look for work every morning stopped going. They adopted a what’s-the-use attitude. Theirs was a standard complaint. “Don’t you know there’s a depression on? Buddy can you spare a dime?”
Several stores on the avenue went out of business. Nobody seemed to care. The stores stood vacant on the street with big to-let signs in their windows. The byword was cheap: “Cut rate,” “half price,” “fire sale,” “anniversary sale.” Any excuse for a sale. But there weren’t any sales.
The people were bewildered, confused. They didn’t know who to blame. Small stickers were pasted on the subways, store windows, doors: “Buy American.” The Morning American and the Evening Journal were plugging a nationwide campaign: “Bring back prosperity by buying American.” At Columbus Circle men were speaking against the government, against the president, against the Jews, the Negroes, the Catholics, against anything. They lashed out savagely at everybody—at unions, at strikes, at strikebreakers, scabs, bosses, Jew bosses, Jew bankers. Aimlessly, savagely, stupidly, they struck at the people around them.
Buy Gentile. Buy American. People walked the streets amidst news of riots in Harlem—food riots in Hell’s Kitchen. Tempers were being frayed, the latent savagery in people was being stirred. The whole mess was being stirred, as if by some master hand that stopped every few minutes, to add a little bit of seasoning, hatred, suspicion, calumny, insinuation.
Put the nigger in his place. White men need the jobs. You don’t want your sister raped by a nigger, do you?
Look around you. Who owns all the businesses? The Jews. Who have the banks? The Jews. Who have the best jobs? The Jews. Who has the most doctors and lawyers? The Jews. Who are the communists? The Jews. Who are the strikers? The Jews. Is this our country or theirs?
The niggers are like cancer. Let them into one house in your neighborhood and they came swarming in like flies. They ruin real estate values. They’ll ruin your neighborhood. They’ll ruin you. You’ll be afraid to walk the streets at night if you let the niggers in. You’ll worry about your little girl coming home from school. The niggers are like cancer. Once you get it, you’re through. They’ll kill you if you let them.
It was a bad winter in more ways than one. I remember the night in February—the night of Lincoln’s birthday—the night I heard Gerro cry.
I stood way in back of the room. The club was half empty and the members were standing around talking quietly. There were no more bands or dancing. The money was needed for more important things. People had stopped coming to the meetings. They had lost hope or had listened to others’ whispering lies, and had been seduced away by coarse, loud-mouthed corner orators.
I had been talking to Terry. As usual, she was complaining. “I’m late again, goddamit! Are you sure you were careful?”
I laughed at her. “Sure, I’m careful. Stop knocking yourself out. In case you get caught, I can always trip you upon the stairs and you can lose it that way.”
She was mad. “I don’t know why in hell I bother with you! You don’t give a damn about me! All you want is your nooky.”
“Is there anything else I’m supposed to want?” I asked her brightly.
“O.K., wise guy!” she snarled through curled lips, her eyes flaming. “Someday you’ll find out I won’t be around to give it to you. Then try and get it!”
“There’s other dames,” I said noncommittally.
She exploded. “Goddamit! Joke about it! I’ll get married.”
“Who wants to marry you?”
“There’s a guy,” she said, suddenly sure of herself. “Got a good job too! Driver on the Fifth Avenue bus. He’s a real gentleman. He wouldn’t push over a girl when she didn’t want to.”
“It only proves the old saying,” I said, “‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ Why don’t you marry him?”
“I don’t know why I don’t,” she snapped back. Suddenly she changed her tone of voice. It became soft and friendly. “Did you ever think of getting married, Frankie?”
I raised my hands in mock horror. “Do you think I’m nuts? Why make one dame unhappy when you can make all of them?” I laughed. “Is this a proposal? This is so sudden.”
She was mad again. “Go ahead and laugh. If I show up this month, I will marry him and you can whistle for it.” She walked off.
I looke
d after her thoughtfully. You never could tell when she was serious. But hell, I didn’t want to get married to anyone!
Gerro had climbed up on the table to speak. He held up his hands for silence. “Friends,” he said, but that was as far as he got.
Just as he spoke, a rock smashed against the window and into the room. More rocks followed. For a minute we stood still, not being able to realize what was happening. Gerro stood there on the table, his mouth open.
I was nearest the window. I moved toward it and looked out. There were twenty or thirty men outside in the street; they were looking up toward us. I didn’t recognize any of them. I felt a hand grab mine. It was Terry.
“What do they want?” she asked. She sounded frightened.
I didn’t have to answer that. Someone in the crowd downstairs did. “We want that pimpin’ nigger. He cain’t go aroun’ screwin’ white women in this neighborhood. We’ll teach him how to act around white people.”
I looked back at Gerro. He was standing in the center of the room. Somehow he seemed to stand alone there. With white frightened faces, the others shrank against the wall. A woman drew in her breath with half a scream. “Why don’t someone call the police?”
“I’d better go down and talk to them,” Gerro said quietly. He started for the door.
“Don’t let him go, Frankie,” Terry whispered. “They’ll kill him!”
I reacted to her statement automatically. “Gerro, wait a minute. If you go out there, it may not do any good. Let’s get the women out first.”
He stopped near the door and came back toward the window.
“Stay where you are!” I told him.
He stopped in his tracks and stood there looking at me.
I turned back to the window. “If we let you have him,” I shouted down into the street, “will you let the others out?”
I could see a few men talk. “O.K.!” someone shouted.
“All right then,” I hollered. “The women will come out first, then the men. When they’re all gone, you can come up and get him.”
“No!” someone shouted. “You come out last with him.”
Harold Robbins Organized Crime Double Page 27