by Paula Fox
Annie didn’t want to listen to his sex gossip. She was in a mood of melancholy movie exaltation—if the workers of the world, as Walter had told her, had more in common with each other than with their own countrymen, so did the aristocrats. How noble the doomed French officer in the film had been, washing his white gloves, death in attendance. Noble! Where had she picked up that word? From her father, probably—noble gestures, noble causes, noble because they were doomed.
Samuel fiddled restlessly with his keys. She suspected he would leave for the street as soon as she went upstairs, cruising, he called it.
“Samuel, I want to leave New York.”
“You’re paid up to next month,” he said impatiently. “That bastard father of yours took care of that, at least. I was thinking of how you could stay on—you know, clean my apartment once a week, something like that. I simply couldn’t let you stay here for nothing. You understand…”
“I want to borrow fifty dollars from you, Samuel,” she said, bracing herself for his outburst. He said nothing. “There’s a woman at the League who’s driving to California. She’ll take me with her.”
Samuel heaved a great sigh, the keys hanging from his fingers.
“I earned my way,” he said. “From ship to ship, from Sfax to Piraeus, from Naples to Barcelona. Oh—you should have seen me then—like a ripe little fig!”
“I’m sorry,” Annie said humbly. “I’m really sorry. I just thought I’d ask. I’ll try to make it modeling.”
“Why don’t you wire that old devil? He’s out there drinking up his new wife’s money, if I know him. You could take him to court for nonsupport. Did you know that?”
“I don’t even know his address.”
“Well, I do!”
She was mortified and he saw that at once. “Listen, I told him if I was going to be your mama, he had to give me someplace I could reach him. He’s in Taos—”
“I know that much—”
“—and don’t think he’s living in any teepee either, not that one!”
“I can’t ask him for money,” she said desperately. “I can’t.” Her father had said, “Annie, you’re without greed…” To ask him for money, to ask him for anything, was to destroy the only connection she felt she had with him. She couldn’t now even ask Samuel to give her the Taos address. Maintain silence, smile when questioned, ask nothing. That was the law. She wished to break it; she wished she were without will, in a lunatic asylum where everything that restraint served to keep back would tumble out of her like broken china.
Samuel was staring down at his small feet in their cordovan shoes.
“Oh, come here,” he said harshly. She followed him into his apartment. It smelled musty, unused. Samuel went to the bedroom and returned carrying a cigar box. When he opened it, she saw that it was full of money in change and bills. There were also two very large diamond rings. “They’re fakes,” Samuel said. He handed her five new ten-dollar bills.
“Get a man, some big strong man. Stay away from Jews. Have babies. For God’s sake, don’t be a bum. You don’t know it yet, but time passes.” Then, with palpable effort, he added, “And forget about the money. I’ll take it out of that son of a bitch’s hide someday. Merry Christmas, dear. Now, go to bed.”
“Your socks…”
“Oh, keep them…”
On the last day of the League classes before Christmas, May Landower told Annie that December twenty-seventh was a propitious day to leave, and on Christmas Day at noon, Walter Vogel came to her door wearing a seaman’s cap and a pea jacket over his blue jeans and work shirt. He had brought her his play to read, what he had written of it, thirty-seven pages. He seemed distraught, restless, but she suspected he was playing at something.
“Read it now,” he ordered, turning a chair around so his back was to her. “I haven’t eaten breakfast,” she said. “Eat something, then…”
She drank yesterday’s quart of milk and ate a piece of bread.
The play consisted, so far, of three scenes. In the first, an actor arrives home to tell his wife the Federal Theater is no more. She is expecting a child. They have no money. Her parents are—“What’s a kulak?” asked Annie.
“A rich peasant, and exploiter,” he replied in a tone of contempt, whether for the kulak or her own ignorance, Annie didn’t know.
The couple embrace, cursing the bosses and imperialists. While the actor’s wife sleeps on the cot, the actor cleans an old Winchester gun. In the second scene, the next morning, the wife wakes and screams when she sees the gun. There is no food in the icebox. A neighbor storms in to say that the husband has impregnated her daughter. The wife faints. In the third scene, the actor speaks directly to the audience. He had known months earlier that funds were to be withdrawn from the Federal Theater. He’d gotten drunk, knowing that miseries under capitalism had no end. On his way upstairs to tell his wife she would have to have an abortion, he had seduced the neighbor’s daughter. But because, precisely because of his brief stop-off at the neighbor’s apartment, his baby’s life had been saved!
“Who is he going to shoot?” Annie asked.
“Nobody. It just shows his powerlessness.”
“Oh.”
“It’s a little crude…”
“No, no…”
“Agit-prop…”
“What?”
“It’s to teach, a kind of teaching play, for workers’ study groups.”
“Oh.”
She wanted to fall down on the floor with embarrassment. Yet she was touched. Her father had said there was no purpose to life, a stirring of worms, mindless energy. Yet Walter was trying to do something with his awful play. She changed her mind about telling him how she had felt about the film, Grande Illusion. He was trying to do something for her, wasn’t he? Bring some order to her life? She remembered how kind people had been to her at the meeting he had taken her to. She remembered him saying there was nothing wrong with her except that she was a victim of middle-class values. That, at least, was better than being somebody’s victim.
“It’s very good,” she said at last. It wasn’t the worst lie she’d ever told. He nodded grimly.
She told him that a muralist at the League had invited her to drop by that afternoon for some drinks and food. The muralist, who was from Louisiana, had often shared his lunch with her. She’d modeled for him. She was sure Walter would like him. Walter agreed to go, still looking rather grim. She handed him his manuscript. He rolled it up and stuck it in his pocket.
On the way downstairs, she said, “You know, I really am going to California.”
“I know,” he said. “You can’t help yourself.”
“The day after tomorrow,” she said, ignoring his comment. He suddenly gripped her in a ferocious and painful embrace. One of her feet dangled over the next step. She was afraid one of the tenants would come out into the hall, or, worse, Samuel. Walter muttered something and kissed her neck. “Don’t!” she pleaded. He pressed more strongly against her as though forcing a jammed door. He would never kiss her lips—he said that was movie horsing around. She’d asked him if people didn’t kiss in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He’d told her not to be so goddamned arrogant.
“Walter!” she cried. He let go of her abruptly and raced down the steps ahead of her. There was a light snowfall. The few cars parked along the curb looked like deserted hovels. Annie and Walter walked quickly, silently, toward Columbus Circle near which Leonard Poole lived in a small flat with his wife and two children.
The door was open. A stifling odor of old radiator pipes did not quite overpower the delicious smells of corn bread and fried chicken which Annie tracked down to a card-table buffet set up near a Christmas tree already withered in the tenement heat. Nearby was another little table on which reposed a large mixing bowl, a ladle hanging from its rim.
Walter seemed almost instantly drunk, one of his arms around a young painter Annie knew slightly, the other circling the plump shoulders of Leonard Poole’s fat s
leek Georgia wife, an abstracted smile on her baby’s Tartar face. Annie ate steadily. She had been in many rooms filled with people. Outside of the food—which no one seemed about to take away from her—only the two small Poole children caught her interest. The girl was around ten, plump, her face benign, dressed in a long white cotton nightgown, a gold cross hanging from a chain around her neck. The boy was about five. And as Annie, holding a chicken wing in one hand, a piece of corn bread in the other, observed them, the boy put his small hands on his sister’s thighs and rested his head on her lap. His fingernails looked like little red candies—he must have gotten into his mother’s nail polish. The girl looked down dreamily at his nestling head, then up at the adults circling around them, talking and shouting. She smiled faintly as her glance came to rest on the scrawny tree with its dusty chains of popcorn.
Annie choked back a kind of wail of protest. Where had it come from? She hadn’t had anything to drink—she liked alcohol but was afraid of it because it made her talk too much. She pushed her way down to a little hall and opened a door to a small bathroom. She was coughing violently; she covered her face with her greasy fingers. A magazine reproduction of the Mona Lisa had been pasted over the mirror above the sink.
“Are you all right, honey?” asked a liquid voice outside the door. With a mighty effort, Annie cleared her throat…“Fine,” she said, “just caught a piece of chicken in a tooth.”
The door opened, and Mrs. Poole, her barbaric loop earrings swinging, looked at her tenderly. “You sure?”
Lord, she was pretty! Imagine looking like that!
“Ah, now,” said Mrs. Poole. “Christmas makes us all miserable.” She took a firm grip on Annie’s hand and led her back to the party room. Walter was standing in the middle of the room, shouting that the oppressed colonial peoples of the world would one day join with the downtrodden Negroes of the American South and rise up, and—“Blah! Blah! Blah!” screamed Leonard Poole and fell, laughing, against Walter’s back. No one paid them any attention.
“I have to put the children to bed,” said Mrs. Poole softly. “You come along with me.”
Annie followed her and the children to a tiny hot room. Two unmade narrow cots stood against opposite walls. The children murmured sleepily, holding their mother’s arms, the little girl sliding Mrs. Poole’s bracelets up and down her fine skin. A new doll sat on one pillow. The boy asked for his truck and his mother said no, it might hurt him if he rolled over on it in his sleep. Kisses. The slow drawing up of the blankets.
Mrs. Poole led Annie to a larger bedroom and sat her down on a bench in front of an elaborate dressing table. “It’s the only thing I brought with me from New Orleans,” Mrs. Poole explained. “Leonard had a fit, said I was no painter’s wife. I told him I was his wife…I had to have a little token of past glory.” A slender volume, The Prophet, lay next to an empty perfume bottle. From its sepia-colored jacket, a frail face gazed out with an expression of mild lunacy. Annie picked it up. “One of his students gave it to Len. We haven’t read it, but my little girl says the man on the cover is God…Now, look here. Your hair’s all wrong like that, braided up so tight.”
She took Annie’s hair down, throwing the rubber bands into a basket. “They’ll ruin your hair, break the ends,” she said. She brushed and combed the long mane. Annie watched her drowsily in the mirror as she made a thick chignon and pinned it in place. She felt an extraordinary peacefulness. Mrs. Poole suddenly laughed. “My little girl just hates to have her hair brushed. Now, here. I’m giving you this lipstick. It makes me look like a gypsy. I’ve only used it once or twice. How old are you anyhow? Seventeen, I bet. Leonard says you’re a wonderful model, so quiet.”
“I like to model,” Annie said. “It makes everything stop.”
“What stops?”
“Oh, I don’t know…the noise of things.”
“That man you came with is very good-looking,” said Mrs. Poole. “He’s too old for you, isn’t he? And what’s he carrying on about like that? Just drinking, I guess. When men start drinking, I sit and wait till it’s over. I told Leonard he made that punch too strong.”
“I think Walter was a little drunk before we came.”
“Oh, well, then…”
At the threshold of the living room, Mrs. Poole paused and sighed softly. “We’re going back to New Orleans in the spring. I’ll be glad. This is not my real life, mooching around these nasty rooms, keeping the children occupied.”
Party voices slammed into Annie’s consciousness, shattering the peace she had felt in the bedroom. A tall, thin girl, well made up, elegantly dressed, was gesturing excitedly at Walter.
“I can’t stand people who talk about Shakespeare and Russian movies the way you do!” she cried. “When I hear people talking that way, I feel crazy! I can’t abide your self-importance. That look on your face…all greasy with self-importance! God! It makes me want to belch! What do you mean, you laughed at The Cherry Orchard and shocked the people sitting around you? Why, you were just trying to show how original you are! We’re all a bunch of obscene monkeys parading around as if we were real! I laugh so hard I can hardly get to sleep at night…”
“I can believe that,” murmured Mrs. Poole. Walter grinned provocatively. The girl suddenly burst into laughter. “You, a radical!” she exclaimed, rocking slightly on her long thin legs. “I never knew one yet who wasn’t in it for personal reasons…”
“Well, you damned well know everything,” Walter replied. How remarkable it would be, Annie thought longingly, to be able to talk to Walter like that—to tease him!
Later, as they walked toward the Columbus Circle subway station, Walter talked about the girl. “Terrific!” he said. “Did you see the way she was dressed? She knows exactly what she looks like and just what to do with her looks.”
“I haven’t got money to look like that.”
“It isn’t just money. It’s style.”
“You’re always saying it’s money.”
Now, he said, as they went down the subway stairs, he was going to take her to meet some of his friends who lived in the Village. Elmira, the wife of the couple they were to visit, had formerly been married to his best friend, Kenneth, a great mad Irishman. “He brought me into the party.” Once, he told her, Kenneth had taken him to a wake; they’d broken the corpse’s legs and arms so he could sit up and join in the drinking. Elmira was married now to a dim fellow, but he didn’t blame her. No one could have stayed married to Kenneth. He was larger than marriage. Walter sang to himself on the train. He was very drunk.
The Lighters lived in a loft. Annie and Walter found the door ajar. There were smells of glue and straw. Jersey Lighter was sitting on a stool, looking thoughtfully at a wire figurine he was holding.
“Merry, Merry Christmas!” shouted Walter.
Jersey looked up. “Hello, Walter. There’s some wine over there on the shelf. Elmira will be back soon.”
“Here’s Annie, my little Annie!” cried Walter, pushing her forward toward the man.
Jersey removed his eyeglasses. He had a small quiet face; his smile, only a slight widening of his narrow mouth. “Hello, Annie,” he said. “See this object? It’s going to be draped in silk in the display window of a swanky department store. Walter, we’ve hit. Elmira’s gotten orders from most of the big stores. I’m going to have to hire people.”
“Capitalist!”
“I hope so,” said Jersey mildly.
“Where’s Elmira?” Walter’s voice had become subdued; he was watching Jersey’s thin fingers manipulate the figurine. It was cold in the loft—there was an atmosphere of sobriety.
“There’s a party down the block to raise money for the Spanish refugees,” Jersey replied. “Elmira is the chief exhibit. I painted a roulette board on her belly. People put quarters on the numbers. If the baby kicks their quarter off, they win a copy of The Underground Stream.”
He looked up at Walter. “What did you mean? Calling me a capitalist with that Vogel sneer? L
isten, Vogel, we’re naming the baby Franklin Delano, boy or girl.”
“When’s it due?”
“Next month. We’re going to have to do something about the climate in this place. It’s too cold for a baby. Or maybe we’ll call it Popular Front—Poppy for short.”
“You sound bitter, Comrade,” said Walter.
“I’m tired,” Jersey replied. “There’s going to be a terrible war. I don’t understand it…I don’t understand the party. I just want to be let alone.”
Annie wandered around the big room. On long wooden tables rested gluepots and paints, scraps of cloth, armatures, tools, excelsior. She felt that Walter’s changed mood—the men were talking quietly in the corner—had released her to herself. She stood half dreaming over a drawing table. It was like the best of times, when her father had been really working. Work had a smell of its own; sharp, clean, vigorous.
Elmira soon returned and heated up a pot of spaghetti for them. She was a small, energetic woman, ducklike in her pregnancy. She spoke with a barely restrained lisp in a shrill animated voice. But with all her animation, in the midst of her chatter with Walter, she kept an eye on Annie with a certain calculation. Annie thought, she’s acting. Jersey beckoned to her. Annie walked over to him, leaving Elmira and Walter at the table. She was queasy after so much food.
“I don’t usually eat so much,” she confided to him shyly.
“It’s too bad we can’t store up food like camels, for the lean days,” he said. “You want some bicarb?”
“It’s not that bad.”
“Jersey!” cried Elmira. “Do you remember those marvelous theater sets Kenneth did when we were all in Washington, you know, sort of Breughel-like? Walter, listen! Now he’s living in the woods and won’t see anybody! Just painting trees.”