In the Slammer With Carol Smith

by Hortense Calisher

  Both of them have been here for longer than what Mungo, who as a former sailor claimed to be learned on all the varieties of time round the atlas, used to call a ‘fortnight,’ saying life went better by those than by the week. At the moment the Cat Club is down to us five. The kid won’t give his name; we call him Ace. The names come easy. Getting in here is like what coming out of zero tundra into the warm igloo must be. We plug into a house.

  But how is it they don’t stay on and on?—Alphonse said to me soon after I arrived. ‘Beats me.’ At the onset he’d been prepared to have trouble moving folks on in a kindly way. ‘So that more could benefit.’ Each time he worries himself somebody might be getting to be a fixture, then can’t believe it when one day they don’t turn up. He says he can forget them after five days. But down in his heart he wants all of them to stay. That’s why he hangs onto me. But one day I’m going to disappoint him too. This place is not the outside.

  ‘Trash this place. This place? I couldn’t do it, understand?’ he says, appealing to the three of us.

  We do. He had to do what he saw could be done here. He couldn’t resist.

  The kid is fiddling with Margaret’s toaster. A kind of nineteen fifties job with an arrow design on its chrome. ‘Know what you’d be, Alphonse? If you wasn’t a wino? A parole officer.’

  Out of the mouths of babes. Alphonse—he’s an improver. You could almost marry him to Mickens, if he wasn’t one of those timid almost neuters. Not just merely off the sex sauce, like me. Or maybe he wasn’t so neuter once?

  ‘That pair won’t be coming this late,’ I tell him. ‘It’s ten pm.’ Just when any like us start to come in. But not those daytimers. The Club is on another time, really. On the outside, you still have to deal with those others, the workadays. Even while you’re walking their pavement, or hanging around stuck straight up in their sun.

  ‘Never fear, that pair will be coming. I got a letter last week. Asking why no housing complaints?’

  He goes off to the toilet. He used to do that to retch, but not any more. Nobody ever remarks, either way. When you luck into the use of an in-house toilet and no questions asked—you know your luck.

  ‘Hey—this toaster tests okay,’ Ace yells. His face falls then—or what’s left of it. ‘So old though. I dunno we should.’

  I feel so cozy here. There’s nothing like meeting your kind. And like—having something to risk. This Ace would understand what I did with the desk.

  ‘When they come,’ Margaret asks ‘—can’t we hide?’

  On this big square of poured concrete with no closets, no curtains, only our three stashes for furnishings and the one tiny stall, where could we hide that big butt of hers, those breasts that just looking at makes mine feel sore?

  Alphonse comes back. He shows us a patch he’s put on his arm. You wear one, and it’s supposed to keep you from smoking. ‘Somebody told me it works for wine.’

  The go-go girl gives up on him. ‘I gotta lead on a job.’ She twirls out, taking her gold-leather backpack with her; we don’t ask where.

  I stay the night. We make toast.

  ONCE THE SUN is up, Margaret and I climb to the third floor. Her weight makes it risky; half the risers are bunged in. The violations stare at us as we pass. Ripped off banisters, plaster hanging from the lath at every landing, water-stained ceiling far above. A smell of rot. In places here and there you can see the brick. The ladder to the roof is on its chain, but the landing up there is caved in. On each floor doors on either side of the staircase are open; if you want you can peer in and see how people have lived. At the third floor front Margaret says ‘Italians lived here. Fifty years in one place maybe, like my folks. The kitchen—see that old-style white tile? A tub over there, once. Mondays the work-shirts. Saturday before, the kids. Same soap.’

  An easy chair is still in the front room by the window, its bottom stuffing half on the floor. When it holds her, she crows. I sit on a plank over the radiator. Gone to rust, it hadn’t been worth stealing. ‘Ours was a cold-water flat,’ she says. ‘Two front windows, like here.’ I say, ‘Don’t lean. The sills are crumbling.’ The air blows in free. Only the street level is boarded up.

  ‘We always leaned,’ Margaret said. ‘The mothers, that is. We kids got socked for it. For our mothers, talking window to window, it was like a club.’

  Sun climbs high. We have no watch. She has one in her slip hem. ‘But it’s squashed. I stepped on it.’ The slip, which has pockets in the hem for valuables, was a gift from the staff when she left Valatie.

  She spells that for me, like for a spelling contest. ‘Vee ay—vah, ell-ay—lah; tee. But it’s pronounced Valaysha.’ She wouldn’t have had to explain; on the street you get to know them all. Rockland’s not bad, they say. Manhattan State is the worst.

  She is only on a one-month try-out pass to her family. The pass is in the hem pocket, along with her medication. ‘I don’t report in, I go back to first base.’ But she is on her way back there. Her folks hassled her.

  ‘Ace skipped, before it got light,’ she says. ‘You were sacked out. He took my little oven. I’d have guv it; I can’t keep it upstate. But maybe to take it set him up.’

  Not my hang-up, lifting stuff, but I know what she means. I’ve watched people hoard a piece of crap to their hearts one night, toss it away the morning after. And not always crap. Or if it’s money, gone before you can say Jack Robinson—leaving them nothing to live on for the week.

  Still—I like knowing. I am not a Christian, never been baptized. My one aunt was, the night one; though she never was at church, she taught in a rough school. Which she claimed was enough religious instruction. How can we really be Christian, she said—unless we know thieves? I feel akin to that. Unless I wise to what others on the outside, sleeping in my alleys, walking my paths, are capable of, how can I be one of them?

  Down below, the street is September for sure. That foggy pall is no longer summer, no matter how hot. Look at the city from up above this time of year and it’s like draped. Season’s last call. First call from winter, my element.

  ‘Mid-morning, my gut says.’ Margaret brings out a cardboard cake box from one of her homemade folds; she was a seamstress by trade before she went in. One-and-a-half deli sandwiches and a jelly doughnut are stuffed in. We eat, me taking the half. Camaraderie is where you find it. And sandwiches.

  When the car draws up in the street down below, its top shines like a beetle crawling toward its burrow. The persons who get out—you can tell they have breakfasted. The man carries his belly like it is satisfied. The woman saunters in her fox fur. Rushing the season. Maybe it was in storage in the warehouse. The wig doesn’t match. Red fox is more orange. But who’s this third person, short and stumpy, also in fur?

  ‘Must be the old girl herself,’ Margaret says. ‘Florida to the city, sure. You wear your mink no matter what.’

  We wait. There’s no reason for us to hold our breath, but we do.

  ‘Get yourself up like a customer, don’t you,’ Margaret says to me then. ‘That brown skirt. That tan blouse. Thrift shop, I know the score. But it’s the picking that counts. Got all your marbles too. But you don’t talk much. They give you shock?’

  I shake my head. But it knows it should speak. ‘My think-track. It sticks.’ Or it piles up. ‘Long time ago, things blew. I mean really blew. A bomb.’ How it helps to say. And who better to, where it can slip into those loose hem folds. After that, I was a long time on the run. I didn’t do it, they said later; I only thought I did. But you turn yourself in; they tend to believe.’

  ‘You been in the slammer?’

  ‘Not for long. They said I wasn’t responsible. But in the end they want you to be. That’s when I got started on the hospital.’

  ‘Which one?’

  A private one, she wouldn’t know of it. She didn’t.

  ‘Boston. My two aunts had left me a trust.’

  ‘A truss is for hernia. Old-country stuff.’ She looks at me sideways, like maybe I am s
crewy.

  ‘Here, it’s money.’ Game stakes, left over from obedient Sunday afternoons in the bay window.

  ‘Ah-hah. So you couldn’t get the disability, huh. Not till you use up the truss, huh?’

  I look at her. The all over fat, so queerly placed. The sneakers, on slab feet. A sweet two hundred pound subnormal, in teenage clothes. But on certain things, all the Club’s clientele will know the score.

  ‘Not back then, no.’ Not until the halfway house. Such a dedicated one, the SW up there advised. But how naive a one though, for the swingers some of us had become.—You’ve such a good environmentalist record; you even marched—they said.—But over-night stands are not allowed here.

  ‘This is my third pass,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m not mental; I got a wrong gene. But my folks, they won’t take me for good. There’s a guy at Valatie, he would. A guard. I made a communion dress for his son’s kid. When he retires, he’ll sign me out, he might even marry me. If they say okay.’

  ‘I know an ashram would take you.’ Women kitchen-slaves. Long days of fostered male calm, lean brown rice. Not to eat at all makes the head sing. Top slaves get to wash the Swami’s feet, and maybe sing with him. ‘But I wouldn’t recommend.’

  Talking at cross-purposes is the safest. Even on the ward, we all know how to dream the past. And to forget the future. To be on the run is the best of all.

  ‘Finished, hon’? You don’t want your crusts, I’ll take.’ Margaret’s voice is dulcet, like the kids in my grade school classes, who were always willing to nibble the leavings of the thick sandwiches our hired-girl had forgot to trim—since bits of crab or ham or turkey adhered to them. Mothers urge a child to eat the crusts. Maiden aunts teach it not to. When I catch myself at that I am still shamed.

  ‘What you suppose they’re doing down there?’ Margaret whispers. ‘I got to pee. I’ll go use the one here.’

  ‘None of them work, up here. The plumbing is cut off.’ And the basins gone.

  ‘Okay. I’ll hold off.’ Her compliance is so humble. Her smile so sweet.

  I feel like an attendant. They’re not nurses. There’s not enough distance between the patient and them. The world is full of them. ‘Go if you have to, Margaret.’

  She too likes the sound of her name.

  ‘Nah. But Jeez, it’s hot up here.’

  Framed in the window, she sits rubbing those breasts. I kneel at the other window, chin on the sill. Doze off and I could be in the hospital common-room, among such silent figures as hers. Or weaving ones: right foot, left foot, blotted here and there in the medicinal dusk. Time for my pill now, but I am dozing. What’s going on down on the floors below doesn’t count—not in hospital. The ward you’re on is your diagnosis. A cure goes floor-by-floor, down, down—until you’re out. Or the years can pass, up, up, into forever. At the end of the long corridor leading to the locked wards, two attendants—they travel in pairs there,—are closing the door on a yell.

  I wake.

  Margaret’s screaming—‘I can’t stand them. Get it away.’ Braced in the window, she has drawn her feet up on the arm of the easy chair.

  The cat is in the rafters. Crouched. Above eye level, they double in size. Tawny, it stalks toward her, transfixed by her screams.

  ‘Don’t lean, Margaret; don’t lean—’ I am screaming too.

  But she already has. The cat springs to the empty sill.

  WHEN I GET near the pad it’s a dawn fresh with leaves, like the city can still come up with when it wants to. Cooling toward summer’s end, and so early even the garbage looks innocent. Orange peels and other natural throwaways, instead of filth. In this part of town no police-car has come yet for a body, tacking a notice on the boarded-up front door—not up here yet, not today.

  When I sneaked down the stairs, how long after I don’t know, it was still dark. As I sat in the empty house, white day seeped in from the storefront. It became light enough to see Margaret’s stash in a corner. One blanket-heap looks like another to most people; they wouldn’t know it was hers. A black blouse she traveled in hung on the wash line. Alphonse’s extra tee-shirt was gone from there, but down at the end was his flannel shirt, hung waiting for winter; he must’ve forgotten it when he was cleared out—or not had time. Would he be back for the shirt? Should I take it, on the chance I would see him again? Would I ever? I couldn’t decide. Be too neat, and you might suffer the consequences.

  When the light is normal, I leave. Behind me, the Club looks like one of those storerooms where some dumb occupational therapy has failed. But I know better. Here I am in a locked house, but I know a way out.

  When I go out through the shed there’s another decision to make. Who can be sure that a club with no membership will really die? So I did what we always did. I threw the bolts, one after the other, leaving them in the trial-and-error positions that most anyone could solve.

  I hike all the way up from the Village to the barrio. Not that I am to blame for what happened to her. But when one of us dies like that, everybody ought to take a little punishment.

  I’m out of practice though. Walking is our way of staying in the fog. Now my head is too clear for that. And I haven’t even taken my pill.

  One block to go, I meet up with Angel. He looks good these days; he’s in a ball team that plays in Central Park. Madre de Dios, he says; I guess I don’t look so good to him. ‘Watch it—’ he says before he runs off. ‘You got company.’

  What’s Mickens doing, tracking me down before she’s due? On the new bi-monthly schedule she’d put me on. Hinting that with her heavy case-load I can’t expect her to give me the one-to-one attention. And I know I’ll have to deal with her about the desk. Why’s she breathing down my neck? Then it hits me. She must have lined up a job. Wait ’til she sees her prospect. Smears from that stairway, a nail-hole in the sock. Dust-patches on elbows and knees. Cobwebs in the hair. Or droppings from the rafters.

  Then it strikes me. I’m in luck. Rest of the block, I drag my feet, rehearsing. Oh I’m ready, Miz M. Secretarial skills maybe a mite out-of-date. But I can get along in Spanish, for some firm needs that. Or maybe some nice office needs a go-for, for sandwiches. These days I button my blouses right, and both are washable—maybe a receptionist?

  This early, the Avenue is still a family place. Off-Track betting office not open yet, no men ganging around in front of our bar. Somebody’s on our stoop though, slumped. Worn out by us already? She didn’t seem the type.

  But hey. But—hey. This is not the SW. Or not any more.

  Don’t turn around, please. Stay where you left me. Don’t.

  She already has. It’s Daisy Gold.

  I knew just what to do. Why wouldn’t I of all people?

  ‘Daisy. Daisy,’ I say low. ‘Daisy.’ Just that. Her name.

  I know what else she’ll want though. A haven. Even if for starters she refuses it. A duck-blind, where the creature behind it is the duck. Even so, you have to test whether it’ll come where it wants to. I can’t help that what I say is what attendants say too. ‘Come along.’

  Even if you want to, sometimes you run. But she comes quietly.

  Four flights, poorly lit. You don’t see much, but it’s a long time to smell a person. I never did any dope. But the body don’t distinguish. Any way you choose not to clean it, it’ll respond. Months on the road get ingrained; Gold’s not there yet. Her flesh is only sad sour from being ignored, first by other people maybe, then by her. Girls in a dorm get that way—the shy, depressed ones. But the gym sweat can cover it, and the monthly rut.

  On the outside, a person long there can smell like a bear has moved in next to you. Even in the Club, one such person can fill a whole corner with vegetable evil. But that kind of stink is still part of the going world.

  Gold is on stoppage. Dusty hair fades into her dim sweater, with a little human leakage at the armpits. Some rose petals, if you dry them they only go bad, like the past they come from. On the ward, that’s all taken care of either way. I don’t se
e her there yet.

  On the road, certain body-hints are like measurements. A guy can knock a guy, saying he pees soda-water, meaning not as yellow as a jock. The blood odor can link women temporarily. And it is well known, even counted a blessing, that street routine can make the sex machinery slack off. You hunker down into what you are.

  Gold’s not there yet.

  At the top, last floor, is my door. She stands in front of it, legs apart, like she’s about to fall. ‘A wreath. A white one. That’s for a dead child.’

  ‘Carmen Lopez picked a load of wreaths off the garbage truck.’ Shouting at the sanitation men didn’t they know enough to sort out the goodies for people to keep? Corning up the stoop afterward with two, three, like bracelets on her arm, one around her neck and on her head a wreath crown. ‘We all got them, the whole house. Carmen says a wreath is a protection. And they’re not all-white. They have red velvet wound in.’

  I take out my new key.

  Gold says ‘You have a double lock now.’ She begged me to, when I first got here, but I held back.

  ‘Yeah, Lopez again. He’s gunning for high class super. I’m his Master’s thesis. He’ll get in the union yet.’ Then the Lopez’s will leave. But before that, I could be gone.

  The lock sticks, but I push in. She falls into the desk chair just in time.… I know that allgone shuddering, not connected to any muscle you can name. A tremble that a medic may identify, if he thinks you’re worth explaining to, as ‘indiscriminate.’ The long words that intern used peeled out of my brain like on a string. ‘Fear can pool in the limbs like blood, Miss—.’ He’d stolen a glance at the name-choices on the chart. ‘Call me Carol,’ I’d said.…

  He was right about the fear. It lies ready, like blood. But I am maybe wrong about Gold. She can still cry.

  ‘They took the kids away from me,’ she says. Her hands come down from her face and settle in her lap, tremoring. She squeezes them to a stop. ‘The worst is, I wanted them to.’