The Black Angel
Page 6
Flophouses, they were, I guess. They called themselves hotels; their signs offered rooms at twenty-five or thirty-five cents a night, and there were scads of them along there. The entrance was always one flight up, never on the street level. And in the background you would see a long bare room with these hopeless figures sitting around, reading papers, or just rocking back and forth, rocking themselves slowly into their graves. Figures that had once been human beings.
It wasn’t a matter of outward appearance, of the clothes they wore. This was a thing that came from inside. A living man could have been in worse rags than they wore, and he would still be a living man. One of them could have been put into the swankiest apparel to be found and he would have still remained—what he was. A lamp with the wick burned out. A bulb with the filaments worn out. Something still intact but that no longer gives off light.
There were so many of them along there. End to end they were placed. Because, after all, that is the one thing that must continue, even in this twilight world—sleep. At first, when I’d come back again each time the following night, I was never quite sure of where I’d left off the night before; they all looked so alike. I found myself overlapping a little. So I brought along a little piece of chalk and I marked a little check, a pothook, on the doorway of the last one as I was quitting for the night. And then when I came again the following night I knew where to begin. At the next one after that.
Over and over and over. Up the dimly lighted stairs to the little niche or cubicle with a slab before it that served as a payment desk. And then the wordless gasp that always followed when they looked up and saw who it was that had been making that toilsome ascent. And then the inevitable blanket dismissal before I was even able to open my mouth. “Sorry, miss, we don’t accommodate ladies.”
“I know, but I’m looking for someone. Marty, his name is Marty. He’s tall and thin, light brown hair. Blair’s his other name, Marty Blair.”
Yet I found, for one thing, that it was easier along here to ask for him just by his given name. This was a place where the second name dropped away again. Whether it was that they were ashamed and kept it to themselves, or that there was no longer any need for it now that they had all reached this common level, they seemed to be known to one another more by their first names and, more than that even, by nicknames that the Bowery had fastened on them.
He’d look through the haphazard, pencil-scrawled book of admissions they kept, and sometimes he’d call to someone sitting near by for information: “Is Porky’s real name Martin, any of you know?”
They’d scratch their heads and finally someone would say: “No—Marvin, I think I once heard him say. He ain’t who the lady wants anyway; he’s a short, fat little guy. Don’t you ’member him? He was in here only a couple nights ago, had the bed right across from mine.”
Over and over, over and over. While the el rumbled by and you had to wait until it had finished passing before you could make yourself heard.
“We don’t take women.”
“I know, but I’m looking for someone. Marty, his name is Marty. Tall and thin and light brown hair.”
Down the stairs again, around into the next doorway, up the stairs.
“No dames. We only got dormitories here, so you may as well go on down again.”
“Marty, his name is Marty; light brown hair.”
Down the stairs, around, and up.
“Marty, light brown hair——”
One of the newspaper readers over by the window looked up, cackled: “I bet I know who she means, Haggerty. Heartbreak. That guy that’s always talking to a dame that isn’t there.”
I stopped, came back a step or two.
The man behind the slab looked around, asked the “reading room” in general: “Anybody here know his right name?”
“Blake or Blair, something short like that; I think I once heard him tell it to somebody.”
“Blair.” I nodded. “It’s Blair.”
He shuffled forward, offering his services. But indirectly, via the clerk, afraid to address me personally. “I can show you where you’ll mostly find him. Down at Dan’s place; it’s on’y a little way from here.”
The clerk had had a better look at me by now. “You better not go there, miss. I’ll send one of these fellows for you, have him bring him back here.”
“No, it’s all right; I’d rather go myself.”
I’d never been in a Bowery drinking place before. I’d heard the phrase “the lower depths”; I don’t remember where. I think I’d read it once. This was it now. The lowest depths of all, this side the grave. There was nothing beyond this, nothing further. Nothing came after it—only death, the river. These were not human beings any more. These were shadows.
And there was one thing more pathetic than themselves, more eloquent of what had become of them. It was the hush that fell when I went in. That bated breathlessness. I went into many places after that, but never again did that same thing happen in just that way. Men in a barroom will often fall silent when a woman comes in. This was not that. This was not admiration or even covetousness. I don’t know what to call it myself. It was the memory of someone in each man’s past, someone like me, long ago, far away, come back to mind again for a moment as his blurred eyes focused on me. For just a moment, before the memory darkened again and went out—forever. It was life’s last afterglow glancing off the faces of the dead as I brushed by them.
I went up to the bartender. “Is there someone in here named Heartbreak? I’m looking for someone called Heartbreak.”
His jaw hung slack. He forgot to go ahead with what he’d been polishing. He just looked at me and looked, as though he’d never get through. I didn’t get it at first. He just worked there; he just catered to the dead; he wasn’t one of them. He shouldn’t feel that way.
“Heartbreak?” he said half incredulously.
“Yes, Heartbreak.”
He murmured something to himself that sounded like “So there really was, after all——”
Then I got it a little. What was it they’d said back at that flophouse? That he was always talking of or to a woman who wasn’t there. They hadn’t believed there was such a woman until now. Now, seeing me, they thought I was she. They thought I was his dream come down to the Bowery to seek him, to take him back to life with me.
They were wrong; I wasn’t she. But I had an idea of who she might be.
He’d found his voice at last. He pointed. “That’s him, back there. See him, all the way back against the rear wall?”
I saw a head, inert on one of the plank tables. One arm half folded around it. The other dangling lifeless, straight down toward the floor. I saw two empty thimble glasses, one before him, one before the empty chair beside him.
I turned to the barman uncertainly. “Do you think I can——? How do you wake them up when they’re like that?”
“Want me to go back and shake him a little for you?”
“No, I—I’ll see what I can do myself. Just keep the rest of them away from that table.” I fumbled in my bag, handed him a coin.
“What would you like, miss?”
“Nothing. That’s just for coming in here and sitting with him for a while.”
I made my way back toward where he was, that hush following me like the wake of a boat. Those who were in my way sidled aside to let me go by, then closed in again behind me. Every head in the place, probably, was turned to look after me. I didn’t know about that; I didn’t care. I reached him, and I stood there for a moment looking down at him, feeling a good deal of uncertainty within me. I didn’t even know for sure that he was the one; I only had another nondescript’s guess for it.
I sat down gingerly on the chair beside his, turned sideways toward him. He didn’t move. You wouldn’t have known he was alive at all. Even his breathing didn’t show.
I touched him on the shoulder finally, waited.
That was no good.
I tapped him on it, pressed down heavier.
> That was no good.
I tried to shake him.
That was no good either. His hand that was on the table fell around the other way, open side out; that was all.
The bartender came back to my assistance at this point, unasked, bringing a mug of cold water. He must have been watching.
“Stand up a minute, so you don’t get any of it on you,” he counseled. He pulled back his shabby collar a little, baring the nape of the neck. Then he expertly let the water trickle in a thin but continuous thread down on it. The effect must have been needlelike to be able to penetrate those layers of unconsciousness.
He stirred a little finally, grunted, rolled his head unwillingly out of the way of the annoyance. He blew his breath out flatly along the top of the table with a sort of hollow, snorting sound.
The bartender drew his head up and back by the hair, held it that way, leaned around in front of it. “Open your eyes, Heartbreak. Someone here wants to talk to you. The lady here wants to talk to you.”
They remained furrows, plowed deep into his face.
The barman passed the head by the hair grip to one of the men standing gaping around us. “Here, hold him like that a minute till I get back.” He returned behind the bar for something.
The man held the head aloft, but it was I he kept looking at the whole time with a sort of owlish gravity, not the patient.
“I get that way meself quite often,” he offered tentatively. I don’t think it was the content of the remark itself that mattered to him as much as the mere fact of having addressed me at all; he wanted to save that, like they did string and bottle caps and this and that. Things that other people don’t value, but that helps fill up the emptiness of having nothing for them.
The bartender came back with something cloudy in a tumbler. Spirits of ammonia, maybe; I don’t know.
“Here’s a drink for you, Heartbreak. One on the house.”
The eyes flickered, tried to open. They never quite made it, but at least they did flicker valiantly in the attempt. My mind said to me: “This man would be better off dead. Why do we think death is so cruel? It’s life that is cruel. Death is man’s greatest gift from Nature. Animals don’t have this happen to them.”
The bartender got it down him, apparently. I couldn’t see—his back was between us, but the tumbler came back empty.
He held his head a moment longer, then he let go of it. The head fluctuated, weaved in a halolike orbit, but it stayed up.
The bartender withdrew, driving the gallery of onlookers that had hedged us in back before him. “Go back to your own places now, you men. Don’t nobody come near this table, understand? This lady wants to sit here.” And to me in parting, “I’ll keep my eye out. Just call me if anybody crowds you or tries to put the touch on you.”
“Thank you,” I said.
I sank unobtrusively into the chair beside that erect, unseeing head, and the place and all the faces faded from view, the noise and the smoky haze, and we were alone together—me and the crossed-out line from somebody’s book. Not just a cheap woman’s book, the book of the recording angel himself. The Book of Destiny.
I waited for him to look around at me and see me there beside him. I wanted the reaction to come from within him, unforced. He was staring straight ahead into the nothingness that faced him. That always faced him day and night. What was he seeing there, I wondered; murder?
She had done this to him; it must be she, of course. The thing was, had she done it living or dead? Which had come first, the descent or the crime? The descent, almost certainly. She was only dead months. He’d already left the St. Albans, started on the downward way a year or two ago. He’d even been dispossessed from the other place, the Senator, the last rung of the ladder over the pit, well before it had happened. Then, perhaps, had he gone back, sought her out, and wreaked retribution on her for what she’d done to him? It appeared plausible.
He moved slightly, and I saw him looking downward at the floor around his feet. Looking around for something on that filthy place where people stepped and spat all day long. In a moment more I had guessed what he was looking for and I opened my handbag and took out the cigarettes I had provided myself with and held the package ready, with one protruding, as my first silent overture.
His eyes stopped roaming suddenly, and they had found the small arched shape of my shoe, planted there unexpectedly on that floor beside him, and the tan silk ankle rising from it.
I watched, breathless, afraid to move. He stared steadily, and then pain clouded his eyes, and he turned his head aside toward the wall, but still bent downward as it was. The dream was too old; it had fooled him too many times for him to believe in it now.
Then he turned back again to see if it would be gone, that hallucination on the floor. It wasn’t. I could see a cord at the side of his neck swell out as he kept himself from looking up to where the face should be but, he knew, wouldn’t be. He was afraid to look up. He shaded his forehead with one trembling hand for a minute. I heard him murmur: “You’ll go away if I do.”
I edged out my forearm, with the cigarettes in my hand, a little farther along the rim of the table toward him, and that caught at his eyes and he saw that. He closed his eyes to give it time to vanish. He opened them again, and it was still there.
“Ah, Mia, don’t,” he pleaded. “Don’t kid me like this!” And he ground his hands into the sockets of his eyes to rub the apparition out of them.
Thus he gave me her name, and I knew that the quest for “Marty,” at least, was at an end. The quest if nothing else.
I spoke to him softly, reassuringly, as to a child, as to someone very sick who must not be frightened, whose confidence must be gained. “Yes, I’m here,” I said. “I’m real. I’m really here.”
The voice, I guess, disabused him. He made a confused turn of the head, and we were looking at one another at long last. The bum and the widow.
He pawed out toward me tentatively and still half fearfully, without quite reaching me.
“You’re Marty, aren’t you? Marty Blair.”
I saw, by the little start of remembrance he gave, that he hadn’t been hearing the name for a long time past; it had just come to him it was his own. Or rather had once been his own.
“Here, have one of these,” I said soothingly. I even had to put the cigarette to his mouth, strike the match for it. He seemed too dazed, incapable of moving, of doing anything but just looking incredulously at me.
Then finally he said, “But you’re in her seat.” His eyes went to the empty jigger glass that had been before it on the table the whole time. “And what’d you do, finish off her drink? I always buy one for her every time I come in here. Even when I can’t buy one for myself I always see that she gets one at least. Then sometimes she don’t feel like it, and she lets me have it afterward.”
I didn’t know what to say. “She won’t be here tonight, Marty. She couldn’t come. That’s why she sent me instead. I’m a friend of Mia’s, Marty. I’m a very good friend of Mia’s.”
I waited to see what the name would do to him. It did plenty. The pain was livid, like an incision made across his whole face.
I gave him a little time. I would have sent for another drink for him, but I was afraid it would send him off into the dark again. Finally I said, gently as I could, “You think quite a lot of her, don’t you, Marty?”
He smiled at me in a pitiful, helpless sort of way. Gee, that smile was an awful thing to behold. It was—I don’t know how to say it; did you ever see a dumb animal run over and crushed out in the middle of the street, so that its hind part is paralyzed? It no longer feels any pain, but it drags itself up on the curb to expire, and it offers a convulsive, fanged grin just before it does.
I said to myself, “He could have done it. It could have been he very easily.” It was in that smile just then, that terrible smile he gave. Pain, festered love that no longer knows what it’s doing, no longer can distinguish between the rights and wrongs of murder.
Even in the first shock of discovery my mind found time to note the tense he’d given it. “Was,” he’d said.
I didn’t have to be so careful with him as I would have with a normal person; his faculties were still tinctured with smoke. “Yes, I know that,” I said demurely. I looked down at the table to try to keep his suspicions allayed. “Weren’t you ever—was there a divorce, or something like that?”
“No,” he said, “I just got left behind—after she started having friends and all——”
“When was the last time you saw her?” I kept looking down. I traced an imaginary line along the soiled table with the tip of my finger. Then I traced another one over the other way.
“I see her every night. The smoke clears away and there she is. She sits next to me, and I buy her a drink. She comes with me into every one of these places——”
“Yes, but when was the last time you really saw her?” I urged with gentle persuasiveness. I smiled a little, trying to show him that I didn’t refuse to accept her on his plane; it was just that I wanted to know a little more about her on the other plane.
I waited, but he didn’t answer.
“You used to go up and see her sometimes, too, didn’t you, as well as having her come down here to see you?” And to make it stick I added: “She told me you did.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I used to. I used to lots. It hurt too much, though. So mostly I didn’t go in; she didn’t know about it. I just watched her windows from across the street in the shadows, in the rain and in the snow——”
I kept drawing that imaginary line over and over. His eyes were on my finger now, hypnotized.
“And then when they went away I’d go away—kind of happy—because she was by herself again.”
“They?” I breathed, scarcely stirring my lips.
“Whoever it was. I couldn’t see him; I was never near enough. But you could tell by the way the lights would go out, and then a little while later somebody would come out of the doorway.”