Big Money

by John Dos Passos

  As she got older and along in gradeschool at Rockaway Park it got to be less often like that. More and more Fred was drunk when he got off the train or else he didn’t come at all. Then it was Agnes who would tell her stories about the old days and what fun it had been, and Agnes would sometimes stop in the middle of a story to cry, about how Agnes and Margie’s mother had been such friends and both of them had been salesladies at Siegel Cooper’s at the artificialflower counter and used to go to Manhattan Beach, so much more refined than Coney, Sundays, not to the Oriental Hotel of course, that was too expensive, but to a little beach near there, and how Fred was lifeguard there. “You should have seen him in those days, with his strong tanned limbs he was the handsomest man . . .” “But he’s handsome now, isn’t he, Agnes?” Margie would put in anxiously. “Of course, dearie, but you ought to have seen him in those days.” And Agnes would go on about how lucky he was at the races and how many people he’d saved from drowning and how all the people who owned the concessions chipped in to give him a bonus every year and how much money he always had in his pocket and a wonderful laugh and was such a cheery fellow. “That was the ruination of him,” Agnes would say. “He never could say no.” And Agnes would tell about the wedding and the orangeblossoms and the cake and how Margie’s mother Margery died when she was born. “She gave her life for yours, never forget that”; it made Margie feel dreadful, like she wasn’t her own self, when Agnes said that. And then one day when Agnes came out of work there he’d been standing on the sidewalk wearing a derby hat and all dressed in black and asking her to marry him because she’d been Margery Ryan’s best friend, and so they were married, but Fred never got over it and never could say no and that was why Fred took to drinking and lost his job at Holland’s and nobody would hire him on any of the beaches on account of his fighting and drinking and so they’d moved to Broad Channel but they didn’t make enough with bait and rowboats and an occasional shoredinner so Fred had gotten a job in Jamaica in a saloon keeping bar because he had such a fine laugh and was so goodlooking and everybody liked him so. But that was the ruination of him worse than ever. “But there’s not a finer man in the world than Fred Dowling when he’s himself. . . . Never forget that, Margie.” And they’d both begin to cry and Agnes would ask Margie if she loved her as much as if she’d been her own mother and Margie would cry and say, “Yes, Agnes darling.” “You must always love me,” Agnes would say, “because God doesn’t seem to want me to have any little babies of my own.”

  Margie had to go over on the train every day to go to school at Rockaway Park. She got along well in the gradeschool and liked the teachers and the books and the singing but the children teased because her clothes were all homemade and funnylooking and because she was a mick and a Catholic and lived in a house built on stilts. After she’d been Goldilocks in the school play one Christmas, that was all changed and she began to have a better time at school than at home.

  At home there was always so much housework to do, Agnes was always washing and ironing and scrubbing because Fred hardly ever brought in any money any more. He’d lurch into the house drunk and dirty and smelling of stale beer and whiskey and curse and grumble about the food and why didn’t Agnes ever have a nice piece of steak any more for him like she used to when he got home from the city and Agnes would break down, blubbering, “What am I going to use for money?” Then he would call her dirty names, and Margie would run into her bedroom and slam the door and sometimes even pull the bureau across it and get into bed and lie there shaking. Sometimes when Agnes was putting breakfast on the table, always in a fluster for fear Margie would miss the train to school, Agnes would have a black eye and her face would be swollen and puffy where he’d hit her and she’d have a meek sorryforherself look Margie hated. And Agnes would be muttering all the time she watched the cocoa and condensed milk heating on the stove, “God knows I’ve done my best and worked my fingers to the bone for him. . . . Holy saints of God, things can’t go on like this.”

  All Margie’s dreams were about running away.

  In summer they would sometimes have had fun if it hadn’t been for always dreading that Fred would take a bit too much. Fred would get the rowboats out of the boathouse the first sunny day of spring and work like a demon calking and painting them a fresh green and whistle as he worked, or he would be up before day digging clams or catching shiners for bait with a castingnet, and there was money around and big pans of chowder Long Island style and New England style simmering on the back of the stove, and Agnes was happy and singing and always in a bustle fixing shoredinners and sandwiches for fishermen, and Margie would go out sometimes with fishingparties, and Fred taught her to swim in the clear channel up under the railroad bridge and took her with him barefoot over the muddy flats clamming and after softshell crabs, and sportsmen with fancy vests who came down to rent a boat would often give her a quarter. When Fred was in a sober spell it was lovely in summer, the warm smell of the marshgrass, the freshness of the tide coming in through the inlet, the itch of saltwater and sunburn, but then as soon as he’d gotten a little money together Fred would get to drinking and Agnes’s eyes would be red all the time and the business would go to pot. Margie hated the way Agnes’s face got ugly and red when she cried, she’d tell herself that she’d never cry no matter what happened when she grew up.

  Once in a while during the good times Fred would say he was going to give the family a treat and they’d get all dressed up and leave the place with old man Hines, Joe Hines’s father, who had a wooden leg and big bushy white whiskers, and go over on the train to the beach and walk along the boardwalk to the amusementpark at Holland’s.

  It was too crowded and Margie would be scared of getting something on her pretty dress and there was such a glare and men and women with sunburned arms and legs and untidy hair lying out in the staring sun with sand over them, and Fred and Agnes would romp around in their bathingsuits like the others. Margie was scared of the big spuming surf crashing over her head, even when Fred held her in his arms she was scared and then it was terrible he’d swim so far out.

  Afterwards they’d get back itchy into their clothes and walk along the boardwalk shrilling with peanutwagons and reeking with the smell of popcorn and saltwater taffy and hotdogs and mustard and beer all mixed up with the surf and the clanking roar of the roller-coaster and the steamcalliope from the merrygoround and so many horrid people pushing and shoving, stepping on your toes. She was too little to see over them. It was better when Fred hoisted her on his shoulder though she was too old to ride on her father’s shoulder in spite of being so small for her age and kept pulling at her pretty paleblue frock to keep it from getting above her knees.

  What she liked at the beach was playing the game where you rolled a little ball over the clean narrow varnished boards into holes with numbers and there was a Jap there in a clean starched white coat and shelves and shelves of the cutest little things for prizes: teapots, little china men that nodded their heads, vases for flowers, rows and rows of the prettiest Japanese dolls with real eyelashes some of them, and jars and jugs and pitchers. One time Margie won a little teapot shaped like an elephant that she kept for years. Fred and Agnes didn’t seem to think much of the little Jap who gave the prizes but Margie thought he was lovely, his face was so smooth and he had such a funny little voice and his lips and eyelids were so clearly marked just like the dolls’ and he had long black eyelashes too.

  Margie used to think she’d like to have him to take to bed with her like a doll. She said that and Agnes and Fred laughed and laughed at her so that she felt awful ashamed.

  But what she liked best at Holland’s Beach was the vaudeville theater. They’d go in there and the crowds and laughs and racket would die away as the big padded doors closed behind them. There’d be a movingpicture going on when they went in. She didn’t like that much, but what she liked best in all the world were the illustrated songs that came next, the pictures of lovely ladies and gentlemen in colors like tinted fl
owers and such lovely dresses and big hats and the words with pansies and forgetmenots around them and the lady or gentleman singing them to the dark theater. There were always boats on ripply streams and ladies in lovely dresses being helped out of them, but not like at Broad Channel where it was so glary and there was nothing but mudflats and the slimysmelly piles and the boatlanding lying on the ooze when the tide went out, but lovely blue ripply rivers with lovely green banks and weepingwillowtrees hanging over them. After that it was vaudeville. There were acrobats and trained seals and men in straw hats who told funny jokes and ladies that danced. The Merry Widow Girls it was once, in their big black hats tipped up so wonderfully on one side and their sheathdresses and trains in blue and green and purple and yellow and orange and red, and a handsome young man in a cutaway coat waltzing with each in turn.

  The trouble with going to Holland’s Beach was that Fred would meet friends there and keep going in through swinging doors and coming back with his eyes bright and a smell of whiskey and pickled onions on his breath, and halfway through the good time, Margie would see that worried meek look coming over Agnes’s face, and then she’d know that there would be no more fun that day. The last time they all went over together to the beach they lost Fred although they looked everywhere for him, and had to go home without him. Agnes sobbed so loud that everybody stared at her on the train and Ed Otis the conductor who was a friend of Fred’s came over and tried to tell her not to take on so, but that only made Agnes sob the worse. Margie was so ashamed she decided to run away or kill herself as soon as she got home so that she wouldn’t have to face the people on the train ever again.

  That time Fred didn’t turn up the next day the way he usually did. Joe Hines came in to say that a guy had told him he’d seen Fred on a bat over in Brooklyn and that he didn’t think he’d come home for a while. Agnes made Margie go to bed and she could hear her voice and Joe Hines’s in the kitchen talking low for hours. Margie woke up with a start to find Agnes in her nightgown getting into bed with her. Her cheeks were fiery hot and she kept saying, “Imagine his nerve and him a miserable trackwalker. . . . Margie. . . . We can’t stand this life any more, can we, little girl?”

  “I bet he’d come here fussing, the dreadful old thing,” said Margie.

  “Something like that. . . . Oh, it’s too awful, I can’t stand it any more. God knows I’ve worked my fingers to the bone.”

  Margie suddenly came out with, “Well, when the cat’s away the mice will play,” and was surprised at how long Agnes laughed though she was crying too.

  In September just when Agnes was fixing up Margie’s dresses for the opening of school, the rentman came round for the quarter’s rent. All they’d heard from Fred was a letter with a fivedollar bill in it. He said he’d gotten into a fight and gotten arrested and spent two weeks in jail but that he had a job now and would be home as soon as he’d straightened things out a little. But Margie knew they owed the five dollars and twelve dollars more for groceries. When Agnes came back into the kitchen from talking to the rentman with her face streaky and horrid with crying, she told Margie that they were going into the city to live. “I always told Fred Dowling the day would come when I couldn’t stand it any more. Now he can make his own home after this.”

  It was a dreadful day when they got their two bags and the awful old dampeaten trunk up to the station with the help of Joe Hines, who was always doing odd jobs for Agnes when Fred was away, and got on the train that took them into Brooklyn. They went to Agnes’s father’s and mother’s, who lived in the back of a small paperhanger’s store on Fulton Street under the el. Old Mr. Fisher was a paperhanger and plasterer and the whole house smelt of paste and turpentine and plaster. He was a small little grey man and Mrs. Fisher was just like him except that he had drooping grey mustaches and she didn’t. They fixed up a cot for Margie in the parlor but she could see that they thought she was a nuisance. She didn’t like them either and hated it in Brooklyn.

  It was a relief when Agnes said one evening when she came home before supper looking quite stylish, Margie thought, in her city clothes, that she’d taken a position as cook with a family on Brooklyn Heights and that she was going to send Margie to the Sisters’ this winter.

  Margie was a little scared all the time she was at the convent, from the minute she went in the door of the greystone vestibule with a whitemarble figure standing up in the middle of it. Margie hadn’t ever had much religion, and the Sisters were scary in their dripping black with their faces and hands looking so pale always edged with white starched stuff, and the big dark church full of candles and the catechismclass and confession, and the way the little bell rang at mass for everybody to close their eyes when the Saviour came down among angels and doves in a glare of amber light onto the altar. It was funny, after the way Agnes had let her run round the house without any clothes on, that when she took her bath once a week the Sister made her wear a sheet right in the tub and even soap herself under it.

  The winter was a long slow climb to Christmas, and after all the girls had talked about what they’d do at Christmas so much Margie’s Christmas was awful, a late gloomy dinner with Agnes and the old people and only one or two presents. Agnes looked pale, she was deadtired from getting the Christmas dinner for the people she worked for. She did bring a net stocking full of candy and a pretty goldenhaired dolly with eyes that opened and closed, but Margie felt like crying. Not even a tree. Already sitting at the table she was busy making up things to tell the other girls anyway.

  Agnes was just kissing her goodnight and getting ready putting on her little worn furpiece to go back to Brooklyn Heights when Fred came in very much under the influence and wanted to take them all out on a party. Of course they wouldn’t go and he went away mad and Agnes went away crying, and Margie lay awake half the night on the cot made up for her in the old people’s parlor thinking how awful it was to be poor and have a father like that.

  It was dreary, too, hanging round the old people’s house while the vacation lasted. There was no place to play and they scolded her for the least little thing. It was bully to get back to the convent where there was a gym and she could play basketball and giggle with the other girls at recess. The winter term began to speed up towards Easter. Just before, she took her first communion. Agnes made the white dress for her and all the Sisters rolled up their eyes and said how pretty and pure she looked with her golden curls and blue eyes like an angel, and Minette Hardy, an older girl with a snubnose, got a crush on her and used to pass her chocolatepeppermints in the playground wrapped in bits of paper with little messages scrawled on them: To Goldilocks with love from her darling Minette, and things like that.

  She hated it when commencement came, and there was nothing about summer plans she could tell the other girls. She grew fast that summer and got gawky and her breasts began to show. The stuffy gritty hot weather dragged on endlessly at the Fishers’. It was awful there cooped up with the old people. Old Mrs. Fisher never let her forget that she wasn’t really Agnes’s little girl and that she thought it was silly of her daughter to support the child of a noaccount like Fred. They tried to get her to do enough housework to pay for her keep and every day there were scoldings and tears and tantrums.

  Margie was certainly happy when Agnes came in one day and said that she had a new job and that she and Margie would go over to New York to live. She jumped up and down yelling, “Goody goody. . . . Oh, Agnes, we’re going to get rich.” “A fat chance,” said Agnes, “but anyway it’ll be better than being a servant.”

  They gave their trunks and bags to an expressman and went over to New York on the el and then uptown on the subway. The streets of the uptown West Side looked amazingly big and wide and sunny to Margie. They were going to live with the Francinis in a little apartment on the corner on the same block with the bakery they ran on Amsterdam Avenue where Agnes was going to work. They had a small room for the two of them but it had a canarybird in a cage and a lot of plants in the window and the Franc
inis were both of them fat and jolly and they had cakes with icing on them at every meal. Mrs. Francini was Grandma Fisher’s sister.

  They didn’t let Margie play with the other children on the block; the Francinis said it wasn’t a safe block for little girls. She only got out once a week and that was Sunday evening, everybody always had to go over to the Drive and walk up to Grant’s Tomb and back. It made her legs ache to walk so slowly along the crowded streets the way the Francinis did. All summer she wished for a pair of rollerskates, but the way the Francinis talked and the way the nuns talked about dangers made her scared to go out on the streets alone. What she was so scared of she didn’t quite know. She liked it, though, helping Agnes and the Francinis in the bakery.

  That fall she went back to the convent. One afternoon soon after she’d gone back from the Christmas holidays Agnes came over to see her; the minute Margie went in the door of the visitors’ parlor she saw that Agnes’s eyes were red and asked what was the matter. Things had changed dreadfully at the bakery. Poor Mr. Francini had fallen dead in the middle of his baking from a stroke and Mrs. Francini was going out to the country to live with Uncle Joe Fisher. “And then there’s something else,” Agnes said and smiled and blushed. “But I can’t tell you about it now. You mustn’t think that poor Agnes is bad and wicked but I couldn’t stand it being so lonely.” Margie jumped up and down. “Oh, goody, Fred’s come back.” “No, darling, it’s not that,” Agnes said and kissed her and went away.

  That Easter Margie had to stay at the convent all through the vacation. Agnes wrote she didn’t have any place to take her just then. There were other girls there and it was rather fun. Then one day Agnes came over to get her to go out, bringing in a box right from the store a new darkblue dress and a little straw hat with pink flowers on it. It was lovely the way the tissuepaper rustled when she unpacked them. Margie ran up to the dormitory and put on the dress with her heart pounding, it was the prettiest and grownupest dress she’d ever had. She was only twelve but from what little she could see of herself in the tiny mirrors they were allowed it made her look quite grownup. She ran down the empty greystone stairs, tripped and fell into the arms of Sister Elizabeth. “Why such a hurry?” “My mother’s come to take me out on a party with my father and this is my new dress.” “How nice,” said Sister Elizabeth, “but you mustn’t . . .” Margie was already off down the passage to the parlor and was jumping up and down in front of Agnes hugging and kissing her. “It’s the prettiest dress I ever had.” Going over to New York on the elevated Margie couldn’t talk about anything else but the dress.