It was through the pigeons that Connie first met Yo Yonson. Yo Yonson wasn’t really his name. Later she learned it was Erling Something-or-other, and he was a Norwegian sailor off a ship. But the moment she saw him one spring afternoon shambling through the square like a great blond bear, she said to herself: Look at that big Swede. She remembered the old vaudeville number, My name is Yo Yonson, I come from Wisconsin. And the name stuck in her mind.
She would, of course, have noticed Yo Yonson even if it hadn’t been for the pigeons. He was so big, for one thing. And so shabby. His pants had been patched at least a dozen times with neat, sailor-like stitches, and his jacket looked almost as if it had once been a tuxedo jacket. There was a hole under one elbow. He was unshaven, too, and there was so much unshaven cheek that it would have seemed like a great forest to a fly.
But all those things were just facts that Connie would have noticed about anyone. What really won her was his smile. It wasn’t a very clever smile, maybe, but, as he paused to look down at the pigeons clucking and pecking at the scraps around her, it came—sudden, white, infinitely tender.
He stopped right in front of her, watching the pigeons as if they were diamonds or maybe little children. One of his great hands went out towards them and then dropped.
“Here.” She smiled impulsively. “Like to try?”
She fumbled in her brown paper bag and held out to him a crust of black Italian bread. He took it like a kid receiving a present. He stooped down and held the crust out cautiously towards the pigeons. One of them cocked its head, made a swift peck, and grabbed the bread away. Yo Yonson pulled his hand back with startled swiftness.
Then he caught Connie’s eye and they both broke into delighted laughter.
After that, Connie saw Yo Yonson every day in the square. He would come at exactly four o’clock and now he had a brown paper bag of his own. He was invariably dressed in the same rags, but they were always clean and always neat, except for the hole under the right elbow of his jacket. The ritual was always the same, too. He would pause at the bench next to hers and give her his shy, tentative smile, as if the pigeons were her possessions and he was asking her permission to visit with them. She would smile back. He would sit down then, rip open his bag of scraps, and leave it spread across his great knees like a tray. When the pigeons alighted around him, with a dry rustle of feathers, he would sit still as a statue so as not to frighten them. Soon they would be all over him, pecking in his lap, perching on his huge shoulders. Sometimes one of them would even rest a moment, wabbling slightly, on the top of his blond head.
His innocent delight in the birds enchanted Connie. Why, he loves them even more than I do, she thought. Sometimes she would try to speak to him, just to be sociable, but he didn’t say much and what he did say was hard to understand, though always polite.
It didn’t take the Mazzoli Restaurant long to find out about Yo Yonson. On the second day, Shirley saw him sitting on the bench next to Connie and that evening the restaurant was loud with a brand-new series of pigeon jokes.
“The pigeon-woman’s found a pigeon-man.”
“Say, Connie, why don’t you ditch Mr. Mazzoli, marry your pigeon-man, and set up in a menagerie?”
Even Sergeant Connors and Fred Kitner, in for a plate of spaghetti before going on duty, joined in the gag.
Connie just laughed and kidded back with them. But she was glad about Yo Yonson. Not because he was a man—nothing like that. Connie liked her men dark and quick and cheerful—like Mr. Mazzoli. But it made her glow to think of all that affection Yo Yonson felt for the birds. Maybe he was simple—not so bright in the head. But the world needed kindness. There couldn’t be too much kindness, Connie thought, not ever in a million years. There could never be enough.
She wondered where Yo Yonson lived. She hoped there was someone who was kind to him and saw that he got enough to eat.
Connie had every second Saturday evening off. One Saturday, about a month after she had met Yo Yonson, she left the restaurant just before five. She figured maybe she would go uptown and take in a show. As she strolled through the square, the afternoon sunlight, slanting down across the benches and the seedy city trees, made it all as pretty as a picture. Yo Yonson was there. He had just finished feeding the pigeons which were up again, darting and spinning in the sky. When he saw her, he rose, hurriedly brushing crumbs from his pants. The smile came as usual, but it seemed shyer, more excited, and his huge head was bobbing to and fro as if he was making an effort to think out the right words to say something.
Connie paused and smiled back at him encouragingly.
At last he managed, in his deep, guttural voice: “Pliz? My house. You come? Pliz?”
He turned and pointed across the square towards one of the shabby apartment brownstones.
“My house? A little time—pliz?”
His eagerness was as touching as his first cautious holding out of the crust to the pigeons. The smile had gone, giving way to an agonized fear that she might not understand. No one, not even a little child, could be afraid of him—for all of his bulk.
“Why, of course I’ll come.” Connie almost added Yo Yonson, and felt a tickle of amusement in her throat at her own foolishness.
The house where Yo Yonson lived was the most squalid in the block. The paint was peeling off the window frames. A slatternly woman was sitting on the dirty steps, and above, at one of the upper windows, another woman with bright auburn hair was gazing at the street, stolidly chewing gum. When she saw Yo Yonson and Connie, she grinned and yelled down at Yo Yonson: “Hey, moron, gonna give her some of that junk you tried to give me?” She laughed a loud, brassy laugh. The sour woman on the steps peered at them in prickly silence.
Connie was smarting with indignation against the slut of a woman at the window. But Yo Yonson did not seem to have heard, or at least didn’t seem to have understood. Wreathed in smiles, he stood at the head of a steep iron ladder which led down into an areaway. He gave a little bow indicating that she should precede him.
Where he lived was a cellar—an honest-to-goodness cellar. The only light seeped in from a small window just about at street level. It was damp, too. But he had it clean and shipshape as a boat deck. There wasn’t any real furniture. Wooden orange crates had been put out for chairs, and an old mattress on the floor was the bed. Stacked precisely against the walls were cartons and cartons of junk. Some of the boxes had chipped cups and plates in them; some had pieces of iron; others were full of old nails, all nearly hammered straight again. There were piles of wood and rags and old newspapers.
So that’s how he earns his living, she thought. Going around collecting junk from ash cans at night and then selling it to the dealers. It’s a shame, she thought, and this is the United States where everyone’s supposed to have rights and earn enough for a decent meal.
Yo Yonson was still smiling happily. He gestured to one of the crates and she sat down. Then he went way back into the darkest part of the room and seemed to be searching through the cartons. Soon she heard him give a little grunt of satisfaction. He came back to her. His big arms were stretched out in front of him and, delicately draped over them, was a long black dress with black artificial lace around the collar and cuffs.
He held it out to her. His smile was unsure again. When she did not take it, he gripped it around the neck part and held it out to her, pointing at the label inside. In the dim light, Connie could just make out the name of a department store.
“Good!” he said. “From big, big store. In the junk can.” He nodded vigorously, pushing the dress at her, almost smothering her with it. “Good. From big store. For you.”
Connie took it, and, rising, held it up in front of her. It was much too small for her; there was a rusty brown stain on one of the sleeves which showed why it had been thrown out; and personally she preferred a more colorful dress. But she knew he was paying her back for the pigeons, and suddenly she wanted to cry. She smiled up at him brilliantly, patting the material, ma
king little exclamations. “Why, it’s lovely! It’s beautiful! You shouldn’t … Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.”
His answering smile spread right across his face. “You like?”
Then he looked embarrassed, and the blood flooded into his unshaven cheeks. Stiffly, almost with the grandeur of a duke, he bowed towards the door. He was telling her that she didn’t have to stay any longer just to be polite or to show she was grateful.
Clutching the dress, Connie hurried out and climbed the area steps. The slut was still at the upper window. Connie jerked her thumb contemptuously at her.
But she didn’t really feel angry, not even against that cruel, stupid woman. She felt the way she felt when the pigeons were soaring and swooping against the blue spring sky. She didn’t go to the show. She took the dress home and tried it on. It was much too small for her large, solid body, but that didn’t make any difference. All evening it warmed her little furnished room, as if it were an expensive electric heater.
Because the whole episode had seemed so beautiful to her, she told them all about it at the restaurant the next day. It never occurred to her to keep it to herself. Nor did it occur to her that the reactions of her friends would be so violent.
Rosa said: “You went there—right there in his place? Connie, how could you? Gives me the creeps just to think of it!”
Shirley said: “He could have murdered you right there and then. That’s what he could have done!”
But Mr. Mazzoli was the most concerned of all. He harangued her ferociously in the hot, richly smelling kitchen, all the time stirring a Parmesan sauce.
“Connie, you crazy? That’s a crazy man. That’s a loco. Guy like that ain’t got no brains—is like-a the animals in the zoo. He grab you. One big fist—he grab you. Connie, you crazy! Better I take-a you quick to City Hall and stoppa all this foolishness.”
He tried to make Connie promise she would have nothing to do with Yo Yonson ever again. But she wasn’t married to Mr. Mazzoli yet and she wouldn’t listen. Not that she was mad with him or with the girls. She knew they weren’t being unkind to Yo Yonson. They were just saying what they thought was right for her. They didn’t know the Big Swede. They hadn’t seen his sweet, clumsy smile when he held the crust out to the pigeons.
It was two days later when it happened.
Around eleven o’clock, the last diners had gone and all the tables had been cleared off. Connie said good night to Mr. Mazzoli, who still had hours of work ahead of him in his kitchen, and left Rosa and Shirley at the door because they always went off in the other direction to get a downtown bus. From the very first moment that she stepped out into the dimly lit square, she could tell something was wrong. It was kind of in the air. Then she heard the murmuring voices and made out the small crowd which was gathered around a house on the north side of the square. She hurried towards the disturbance and, as she did so, she realized that the center of the chattering, excited throng was the house where Yo Yonson lived.
“Murder!”
She heard the word instantly, passed from one shadowy face to another. A woman standing next to her turned to her eagerly.
“You heard? A woman’s been murdered. Second floor front. Not better than she ought, they say. Strangled, she was. Strangled with her neck snapped clean in two. And you know something? Her hair was pulled out. Great chunks of it—pulled out, lying there on the floor.”
Second floor front. That would be the one with the dyed auburn hair. The dyed hair! Connie felt a twinge of horror and sympathy. Murdered! The poor soul! People were running up and down the steps into the house. Conspicuous among them was the sour-looking woman who had been sitting there the day Yo Yonson had given her the dress. Soon Sergeant Connors and Fred Kitner arrived. All the people on the steps crushed around them, but they pushed their way inside. A little later, more important policemen and detectives swung up in a car. They went inside too.
Gossip was tossed from person to person in the constantly increasing crowd. Just as Connie was turning to leave, the woman next to her grabbed her arm.
“Hear that? There’s an idiot that lives here. Some kind of a big Swede. She was always kidding him, they say. And that’s the way they go—they have spells on them when they kill. It’s the Big Swede that did it, the moron …”
Connie felt her heart turn over. All around her now she could hear voices whispering: the moron… the Big Swede …
The avidity, the cruelty in the atmosphere was choking her. They couldn’t say that! Not about Yo Yonson—Yo Yonson who loved the pigeons, who couldn’t hurt a fly.
Sergeant Connors was coming out of the house. The sour woman jumped at him crying: “The moron! It’s the moron! The Big Swede. Get the moron!”
Sergeant Connors, his normally cheerful red face heavy and flustered, managed to break through to the street. But the onlookers had taken up the refrain.
“The Big Swede … The moron …”
Then to the left of the crowd there was a murmuring. It came closer, growing in strength, until it was a gasp of excitement. Everyone lurched to the left. As Connie was jostled along with the others, she felt sick and frightened, but mostly she felt furiously angry. How could people be like this? How could they judge and condemn before they were sure, absolutely sure?
An eccentric current in the throng shoved her to the front. She saw then what it was that had caused the commotion.
Yo Yonson had come around the corner into the square. He was pushing a little cart made out of a big crate on old bicycle wheels. The crate was filled with junk and he was standing behind it, huge, shabby, gazing back bewildered at the hostile group in front of him.
Connie wanted to run to him, to protect him. But something about him checked not only her but the rest of the crowd. It was a kind of dignity in the way he held his unshaven head, the way his great fingers curved firmly around the handles of his cart.
The crowd stood still. Yo Yonson stood still. There was a complete silence, but it lasted only a second. Then someone yelled: “Get the moron!”
A rock was thrown. It landed with a clatter in Yo Yonson’s cart.
It was then that Sergeant Connors and Fred Kitner broke through. Before a riot could start, they had whisked Yo Yonson away in a police car.
Connie did not have to stop and think what to do. It was as clear to her as an order from a customer in the restaurant. Those wicked people! They would hound Yo Yonson into the electric chair. Just because he was different—that was all they needed. They’d never bothered to get to know him, to find out how kind he was, how innocent, how much he wanted to be friendly. Oh, no, he was different—so, hound him, destroy him.
They would lie, too. Connie knew that. The stringy woman with her face shining in excitement, for example—she would lie, and not even know she was doing it. She’d say anything, say she saw Yo Yonson actually coming out of the room. They’d all say anything, because by now they believed it, or thought they believed it. They’d kidded themselves because that was the way they wanted it to have happened.
And poor Yo Yonson with his slow wits, his few stumbling words, could never stand up against them.
She would have to stop them. She would have to go to the police station. If she talked to Sergeant Connors and the other precinct boys, maybe they’d understand, because they liked her and trusted her judgment.
Maybe …
Connie Webber sat stubbornly for over an hour in the drab receiving room of the precinct house. There was a man she didn’t know—must be a new cop—at the night desk and she wasn’t going to risk talking with him. She was waiting to see Sergeant Connors, she said, and she just sat there.
All sorts of things were going on. Every few minutes some detective or other would come in or go out. It was all about the murder. Once a little man with a moustache and a black bag hurried in—the medical examiner. He stopped at the desk.
“Well, she was strangled between four and five this afternoon. No doubt about that. They didn’t need me. A co
uple of them heard a scream around quarter of five. Didn’t do anything, of course. In that sort of house, no one bats an eye at a scream.” He grinned waggishly at the cop Connie didn’t know. “If you were one of her boy friends, Joe, I hope you have an alibi.”
One of her boy friends! That meant that what the woman in the crowd had said was right. The dead woman had been no better than she—a real slut. If she’d been that sort of woman, with the crazy twisted kinds that always hang around a person like that, anything might have happened to her any time. Surely, they would see that Yo Yonson wouldn’t be …
It was then that the thought came to Connie, and the moment it came she knew she would go through with it. The scream had been heard around quarter of five. That was the time Yo Yonson had been sitting with the pigeons right next to her in the square. Of course, as it happened, that afternoon she had remembered a nylon slip she’d forgotten to wash out, and just about four-thirty she had left the pigeons and run home to do it before the dinners began.
But she’d been there with Yo Yonson until almost a quarter to five! No one need know about that little extra time.
Now that she was less angry, she could see more clearly. Sergeant Connors was kind—but would he and the other big, important cops really believe her when she tried to explain about Yo Yonson? Hadn’t Mr. Mazzoli and the girls failed to understand? Hadn’t Mr. Mazzoli called Yo Yonson a loco, no better than the animals in the zoo? Why wouldn’t Sergeant Connors and the rest of them react the same way? Wouldn’t it be better if she said she’d been there with Yo Yonson in the square all the time until five, and not to mention the nylon slip? It was a kind of lie, of course, but that way none of them, not fifty of them with cruel tongues, would be able to hurt Yo Yonson.
Sergeant Connors came in with some big-shot detective. He grinned wearily at Connie.
“Hi, Connie, what you doing here?”
All the talk and everything lasted about three hours, but she won. Over and over again, to all ranks of policemen, she repeated her tale that Yo Yonson had been with her in the square. Over and over again too, she tried to explain to them how kind he was, how harmless, how helpless for all his strength, and how the people in the house, because they were stupid, so set in their ways, would surely make up things against him. At first, some of the important detectives were not going to take her seriously, but Sergeant Connors insisted that she was a reliable witness. And it came out that there was nothing to pin on Yo Yonson—no fingerprints, no one whose word could be relied on had seen him around at the time. He had only been taken into custody to protect him from the angry crowd. What with the woman being the type she had been, and with all kinds of crackpots hanging around, it was finally all right. The Inspector explained that, since Yo Yonson had an alibi, they couldn’t hold him—there was a law about that.
The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow Page 16