Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “I’m thinking of putting something like this in my next project, Shanghai Scampers, and there might be a part for you.”

  “Uh, huh.” She looked around to see who was handy if this customer proved to be the sort of pest it only took a girl a minute and a half in New York to tumble to.

  “It’s entirely legitimate,” presenting her with his card. “Ask anybody in the business. Or just take a stroll up Broadway, you’ll notice two or three of my little efforts playing to sold-out houses. Important question right now is, do you have a contract here?”

  “I signed something. But it was in Chinese.”

  “Ah, when is it not. Indeed, the Chinese tongue is innocent simplicity next to a standard run-of-the-show contract in English. Not to worry my dear, we’ll sort it out.”

  “Yes and here’s my associate Mr. Hop Fung, and I must dash, so nice talking to you.” She almost held out her hand as she imagined an actress might but was startled to hear this uptown smoothie slide into what sounded like real Chinese. Hop Fung, who hardly ever changed expression from his all-purpose scowl, broke into a smile so dazzling she wondered for a minute if it was him.

  Shortly after, production money began to appear mysteriously in hefty amounts, usually delivered in the form of gold. The cast list was expanded and more fancy stage effects added on. All of a sudden, there were highbinders popping in and out of doorways and manholes faster than you could say chop suey, jabbering a mile a minute in that impenetrable lingo of theirs. Sinister young tong soldiers wearing chain-mail under their Western suits appeared to run dodging and blasting away with their .44s, the smoke soon bringing a picturesque imprecision to the scene. Horses, having been instructed to, reared and whinnied. A small band of police raced along Pell Street to the scene, while others, understood to be in the pay of the other tong, came charging up Mott waving their day clubs, both parties colliding at the corner, where, clubs in motion, they fell to arguing as to who had jurisdiction over the outrage, which of course was proceeding regardless. Glans penis–shaped helmets, dislodged, rolled in the gutters.

  At this point a curious thing happened. As if all the expensive make-believe had somehow slopped over into “real life,” the actual tong war in the neighborhood now heated up in earnest, gunfire was heard at night, Mock Duck himself appeared in the street down in his well-known spinning squat, firing two revolvers at a time in all directions as pushcart vegetables were destroyed and pedestrians went diving for cover, warnings were issued about what parts of Chinatown would be best avoided unless uptown tourists wished to suffer inconvenience, and Dally’s white-slave engagement looked more and more precarious. Co-workers she had taken for the meanest and ugliest of highbinders turned out to be sensitive artistes in fear of their safety. Hop Fung was seen popping twenty-five-cent opium pills by the fistful. Doyers Street was occupied by little more than an eerie miasma of silence.

  “Maybe I should be looking for another job, Katie, what do you think?”

  “How about your old pal R. Wilshire Vibe?”

  “Can’t tell if he’s ‘the real thing.’”

  “Oh, R.W.’s real as any of them,” Katie assured her, “but it’s a fast, not to mention godless, crowd, and I know personally more than one girl who’s come to a sorrowful pass, including our own treasured Modestine.”

  “Her vacation—”

  “Oh, child. There are farms upstate for such purposes, and sometimes these wealthy vermin find it cheaper than hiring a plug-ugly to introduce her to the river. Moddie got off lucky.”

  “Well thanks for getting me into this, Katie.”

  “I’m not talking about the Chinese, who are gentlemen first and last, their arrangements stay always within their race. But it was Moddie’s choice to leave that genteel environment for the cruel jungles of the moneyed white.”

  “Well, guess I’ll put on my pith helmet anyway and head across town.”

  “If you hear about two jobs . . .”

  Dally found R. Wilshire at his offices on West Twenty-eighth Street. From open windows all up and down the street came the clangor of what sounded like a whole orchestra of saloon pianos. “Horrible, ain’t it?” R. Wilshire greeted her cheerfully. “Night and day, and not one of those blessed instruments in tune. They call this Tin Pan Alley.”

  “Figured you more for the marble-halls type.”

  “Got to stay close to the sources of my inspiration.”

  “He means steal whatever he can,” beamed a portly, white-haired gent in a plaid suit of acid magenta and saffron, who was carrying what appeared to be a sack of soup bones.

  “He’s out scouting unsigned dog acts,” R.W. explained. “Con McVeety, say hello to Miss Rideout.”

  “I’m also looking for a card girl,” Con said.

  “A what?”

  “I’m in vaudeville, see.” Behind Con’s back, R.W. was making frantic thumbs-down signals. “Don’t mind him, it’s simple envy. I need somebody presentable who doesn’t drink and can hold up the printed signs that introduce the different acts. Right side up, if possible.”

  “McVeety,” R.W. muttered. “Will you tell her, or shall I?”

  Turned out that Con’s fatality, a subject of wonder throughout the business, was for finding absolutely the worst acts in the city, acts that earned not only ejection but permanent banishment from even the least promising of Bowery Amateur Nights—at which Con in fact had long been in the practice of lurking backstage, waiting for the fateful Hook deployment, often able to sign artistes before that instrument ever made contact with their persons, booking them forthwith into such dubious venues as public toilets, patches of sidewalk in front of blind pigs, and, briefly, opium dens along Mott Street, till somebody pointed out to him that opium smokers provide their own entertainment.

  “I take it the Chinatown situation grows more dangerous as we speak,” said R.W. “But you’d have to be pretty desperate to work for this lowlife.”

  “These light-operatical tycoons have lost touch,” Con pretended to confide. “For the Bowery is still the true heart of American show business.”

  “I wish I had something for you,” R.W. shrugged. “Soon as the revenue picture improves, perhaps—”

  “He means soon as he can find a bookie who’s left the cash box unattended,” Con chuckled. “I’ll pay seven-fifty a week, cash in advance.”

  “What a rookie cop gets for a bribe,” Dally said. “I thought we were talking about Art here.”

  The two other sets of eyebrows in the room went up and down, and there might have been a moment of silent discussion. In any case Con came back with “Ten?” and the deal was done.

  AT THIS STAGE of his career, Con was just managing to come up every week with the rent on a failed dime museum he had purchased for a song, whose gaudy sign in front redesignated it MCVEETY’S THEATER. The former owners having been in some haste to absquatulate, random items of inventory had been left behind, the usual two-headed dogs in jars and pickled brains of notable figures in history, many from long before pickling as we know it was invented, the Baby from Mars, the scalp of General Custer, certified to be authentic, despite having passed from the Little Big Horn through an odyssey of secondary markets which included Mexico and the Lower East Side, a caged Australian Wild Cockroach the size of a sewer rat which nobody was willing to go near, and so forth. Con assembled these in a tasteful display he termed the Olio of Oddities and put them out in the foyer of his Theater. “Get em in the mood before the show starts, see.”

  Some kind of incentive, Dally soon realized with dismay, was sure needed. Her job as card girl being made difficult by audiences impatient, not to mention unfamiliar, with print, after a while Con allowed her to make brief speeches describing, as hopefully as she could, what they were in for. The nightly talent included Professor Bogoslaw Borowicz, who put on what he called “Floor Shows,” which, due to his faulty grasp of the American idiom, turned out to be literal displays of floors—more usually fragments of them, detached and stole
n from various locations around the city—Steeplechase Park, Grand Central station, McGurk’s on the Bowery (“ . . . you will notice interesting textures of tobacco juice and sawdust . . .”), strange tilings from demolition jobs that raised advanced mathematical issues the Prof was then moved to go on about at stupefying length—as well as “trainers” of stuffed animals whose repertoire of “tricks” inclined to the rudimentary, narcoleptics who had mastered the difficult but narrowly appreciated knack of going to sleep while standing up, three minutes or less of which had audiences, even heavily opiated themselves, fighting to get out the exits, and crazy inventors with their inventions, levitating shoes, greenback duplicators, perpetual-motion machines which even the most distracted of audiences understood could never be demonstrated in any time frame short of eternity, and, strangely often, hats—notably The Phenomenal Dr. Ictibus and His Safe-Deflector Hat. This ingenious piece of headgear was invented to address the classic urban contingency of a heavy steel safe falling from a broken purchase at a high window onto the head of some unlucky pedestrian. “Bearing in mind that any concentrated mass is actually a local distortion of space itself, there happens to be exactly one surface, defined by a metric tensor or let us say equation, registered with the U.S. Patent Office, which, incorporated into a suitable hat design, will take the impact load of any known safe falling from any current altitude, transmitting to the wearer only the most trivial of resultant vectors, a brief tap on the head if that, while camming the safe itself harmlessly away toward the nearest curbside. Here’s my assistant Odo, who will be happy to rig, hoist, and drop any safe you ladies and gents may care to designate, smack on top of my head, isn’t that right Odo?”

  “Unnhhrrhhh!” replied Odo, with an eagerness some might have taken as inappropriate, though offstage Dally found him to be a polite and well-spoken young man, who was trying to save up enough money to open his own dime museum, maybe a little farther uptown, and they fell into the habit of going for coffee after the last performance of the night.

  From time to time, amid the unshaven faces and dicer-topped heads, she caught sight of R. Wilshire Vibe, always in the company of a different aspiring young actress, or, as R.W. preferred, figurante. “Just looking in,” he greeted Dally, “haven’t forgotten you, have you caught African Antics yet? Basically a coon revue, couple of boys who’re going to be the next Williams and Walker. Here, take a couple of comps. Shanghai Scampers, say it’s all but set, the score’s written, job now is to get the pigeons all lined up on the window ledge, so to speak.”

  Meanwhile Con had decided to put on a Bowery version of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, to be called Dagoes with Knives, which Dally tried out for, landing, to her bewilderment, the part of Calpurnia, whom Con had decided to call Mrs. Caesar, Dally’s competition for the part having been a blind-pig regular named One-Tooth Elsie and Liu Bing, a tong warrior’s girlfriend looking for a different line of work, whose acquaintance with English, both Elizabethan and present-day, proved bothersomely remote. After he’d turned her down, however, Con had a visit from her beau and a few of his colleagues, all packing .44s and hatchets, which left Con with a sudden new perspective on the casting. “It was only a couple of lines,” he apologized to Dally. “You’re a much better choice, really, but this way I get to stay alive. I figure we can pretend she’s talking Latin.”

  “Aw. I sort of liked that stuff about drizzling blood on the Capitol.”

  “Welcome to the business,” Katie shrugged when Dally came back scowling. “Courage, Camille, it’s only the first act.”

  “Meantime,” loosening her stays, “this Vibe specimen is having a party Saturday night, and he says I can bring a friend along. You’re probably not interested, rich folks’s depravity and so forth—”

  “Interested? Does Lillian Russell wear a hat? Completely different story, girl—let’s see, Verbena owes me a favor, I know we can borrow her red ball gown—”

  “Katie, for goodness’ sake.”

  “No, not for you, you’d do better with your hair down, in something more, what they call ‘ingenue’—”

  They went uptown to look for ball dresses. Katie knew a seamstress who worked in a sub-basement of the I. J. & K. Smokefoot department store and had a line on returned or just-out-of-fashion numbers which could be picked up for a song. Smokefoot’s was located along the Ladies’ Mile, far enough north to avoid imputations of the unfashionable, yet not so far from others of its kind as to present inconvenience to any female client determined to shop the day through. All but clear of surface ornament, towering in gray modernity twelve stories high and engrossing an entire city block, it might’ve struck the visitor from out of town lucky enough to find an unjostled vantage point as more a monument for simple goggling at, than a real-life marketplace actually to be entered and engaged. Yet the size of the place was not due to whims of grandiosity but rather dictated by a need for enough floor-area to keep rigorously set a veil separating two distinct worlds—the artfully illusory spaces intended for the store’s customers and the less-merciful topography in between the walls and below the bargain basement, populated by the silent and sizable regiment of cash-girls, furnace-stokers, parcel-wrappers, shipping clerks, needlewomen, feather-workers, liveried messengers, sweepers and dusters and runners of errands of all sorts who passed invisibly everywhere, like industrious spirits, separated often only by inches, by careful breaths, from the theatrical bustle of the bright, sussurant Floors.

  As if two human figures in an architectural rendering had briefly come to life and begun exchanging pleasantries, oblivious to the lofty vision towering above them, the young women swept toward the Sixth Avenue entrance, to either side of which stood two doormen splendidly uniformed, living pillars before whose serene inertia one was either intimidated into moving along or not. Let the hair-oiled “bouncer” ply his trade in the Bowery, the electrical gates of Fifth Avenue mansions swing to or fro at the remote touch of a button—here at I. J. & K. Smokefoot’s, without a word or indeed a physical movement, because of how and where the Pillars stood, a visitor might know in not too lengthy an instant how and where she stood as well.

  “Jachin and Boaz,” grinned Katie, indicating them with a head-toss. “Guardians of the Temple, First Kings someplace.”

  “But will these two let us in, do you think? and suppose they don’t?”

  Katie patted her shoulder. “Easier here than the employees’ entrance, my girl. Give them the level gaze and the sketch of a smile, and as you pass, keep looking at them sideways, as if you were flirting.”

  “Me? I’m just a kid.”

  Inside was everything that outside was not—luminous, ornamental, beautifully swept, fragrant with perfumes and cut flowers, a-thrill with a concentrated chic, as if the crowds in the Avenues adjoining had been culled for particularly modish women and they’d all just this instant been herded in here. Dally stood breathing it in, till Katie took her arm. “Look at this bunch of old frumps, I declare.”

  “Huh? You think so?”

  “Well, let’s have a look around, as long as we’re here.”

  They ascended by Otis escalator, a newly-introduced conveyance which Dally found miraculous, even after she’d figured out roughly how it had to work. Katie, who’d ridden them before, was no longer impressed. “Gawking is O.K., but not too much, please, it’s New York. It all looks a lot more wonderful than it is.”

  “Sure is a long way from Chillicothe, though.”

  “All right, all right.”

  It being her first time in a department store, Dally put herself through the usual small humiliations, taking mannequins once or twice for real women, finding herself unable to locate price tags on anything, gazing in alarm at an approaching pair of young women, arm in arm, who looked exactly like her and Katie, both regarding Dally with such queer familiarity, closer and closer till Katie all but had to grab and shake her, muttering “Only hayseeds walk into mirrors, kid.” By the time they got all the way upstairs, Dally had dr
ifted into a kind of daze.

  It was nothing, really, almost nothing, could have been another clothes dummy at this distance, sighted across the deep central courtyard that ran vertiginously up through all twelve floors, with only a filigreed ironwork railing between shoppers and a plunge to the main floor, past the tranquilly ascending diagonals of moving staircase and a scale replica of Yosemite Falls, down to where a tiny harpist in shadows thrown by palm trees seemed from up here part of the realm of the Hereafter. There on the other side of that hypnotic Deep and the arpeggiations ascending out of it stood a figure in lady-shopper’s streetwear in a violet and gray check, the egret plume on her hat articulating sensitive as a hand, not looking at Dally in particular but somehow demanding her attention. Before the clarity of the apparition, Dally knew she had to get an immediate grip on herself, because if she didn’t, the next thing she knew, she’d be running over there screaming, to embrace some woman who would of course turn out to be a stranger, and all the embarrassment, maybe even legal action, that was sure to go with that, and the word she’d be screaming would be “Mamma!”

  The rest of the shopping tour floated by in nebulous incoherence. Dally seemed to remember tea with cucumber sandwiches, a horribly saccharine harp performance of “Her Mother Never Told Her,” two smart young matrons scandalizing the tea-room by lighting up cigarettes—but none of it hung together, the details were like cards tossed on the table of the day that upon inspection could not be arranged into a playable hand.

  On the way down to the basement, Dally made sure on every floor to look for her, but the woman, tall, fair, perhaps not real to begin with, had vanished. In addition, the harpist on the street floor turned out to be not an ethereal young woman in a long gown but a cigar-chewing bruiser, just released from a lengthy stay at the Tombs, named Chuck, who leered amiably at Katie and Dally as they passed.

  In the basement Katie made inquiries, and her friend Verbena emerged from the scene behind the scene to lead them back and downward into an underlit chill where conversation did not exist either because it was forbidden or because there was too much work to be done, grimy pipes hanging from corroded brackets ran along the ceilings, the smell of cleaning and dyeing solvents and steam from pressers’ irons pervaded all the space, workers slipped by silent as wraiths, shadowy doorways led to crowded rooms full of women at sewing machines who did not look up from their work except with apprehension when they felt the supervisor draw close.