‘I wish you’d never set eyes on him.’
Thatcher cleared his throat and turned his face away from her to look out the window at the two endless bands of automobiles that passed along the road in front of the station. Dust rose from them and angular glitter of glass enamel and nickel. Tires made a swish on the oily macadam. Ellen dropped onto the davenport and let her eyes wander among the faded red roses of the carpet.
The bell rang. ‘I’ll go daddy… How do you do Mrs Culveteer?’
A redfaced broad woman in a black and white chiffon dress came into the room puffing. ‘Oh you must forgive my butting in, I’m just dropping by for a second… How are you Mr Thatcher?… You know my dear your poor father has really been very poorly.’
‘Nonsense; all I had was a little backache.’
‘Lumbago my dear.’
‘Why daddy you ought to have let me know.’
‘The sermon today was most inspiring, Mr Thatcher… Mr Lourton was at his very best.’
‘I guess I ought to rout out and go to church now and then, but you see I like to lay round the house Sundays.’
‘Of course Mr Thatcher it’s the only day you have. My husband was just like that… But I think it’s different with Mr Lourton than with most clergymen. He has such an uptodate commonsense view of things. It’s really more like attending an intensely interesting lecture than going to church… You understand what I mean.’
‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do Mrs Culveteer, next Sunday if it’s not too hot I’ll go… I guess I’m getting too set in my ways.’
‘Oh a little change does us all good… Mrs Oglethorpe you have no idea how closely we follow your career, in the Sunday papers and all… I think it’s simply wonderful… As I was telling Mr Thatcher only yesterday it must take a lot of strength of character and deep Christian living to withstand the temptations of stage life nowadays. It’s inspiring to think of a young girl and wife coming so sweet and unspoiled through all that.’
Ellen kept looking at the floor so as not to catch her father’s eye. He was tapping with two fingers on the arm of his morrischair. Mrs Culveteer beamed from the middle of the davenport. She got to her feet. ‘Well I just must run along. We have a green girl in the kitchen and I’m sure dinner’s all ruined… Wont you drop in this afternoon… ? quite informally. I made some cookies and we’ll have some gingerale out just in case somebody turns up.’
‘I’m sure we’d be delighted Mrs Culveteer,’ said Thatcher getting stiffly to his feet. Mrs Culveteer in her bunchy dress waddled out the door.
‘Well Ellie suppose we go eat… She’s a very nice kindhearted woman. She’s always bringing me pots of jam and marmalade. She lives upstairs with her sister’s family. She’s the widow of a traveling man.’
‘That was quite a line about the temptations of stage life,’ said Ellen with a little laugh in her throat. ‘Come along or the place’ll be crowded. Avoid the rush is my motto.’
Said Thatcher in a peevish crackling voice, ‘Let’s not dawdle around.’
Ellen spread out her sunshade as they stepped out of the door flanked on either side by bells and letterboxes. A blast of gray heat beat in their faces. They passed the stationery store, the red A. and P., the corner drugstore from which a stale coolness of sodawater and icecream freezers drifted out under the green awning, crossed the street, where their feet sank into the sticky melting asphalt, and stopped at the Sagamore Cafeteria. It was twelve exactly by the clock in the window that had round its face in old English lettering, TIME TO EAT. Under it was a large rusty fern and a card announcing Chicken Dinner $1.25. Ellen lingered in the doorway looking up the quivering street. ‘Look daddy we’ll probably have a thunderstorm.’ A cumulus soared in unbelievable snowy contours in the slate sky. ‘Isnt that a fine cloud? Wouldnt it be fine if we had a riproaring thunderstorm?’
Ed Thatcher looked up, shook his head and went in through the swinging screen door. Ellen followed him. Inside it smelled of varnish and waitresses. They sat down at a table near the door under a droning electric fan.
‘How do you do Mr Thatcher? How you been all the week sir? How do you do miss?’ The bonyfaced peroxidehaired waitress hung over them amicably. What’ll it be today sir, roast Long Island duckling or roast Philadelphia milkfed capon?’
4 Fire Engine
Such afternoons the buses are crowded into line like elephants in a circusparade. Morningside Heights to Washington Square, Penn Station to Grant’s Tomb. Parlorsnakes and flappers joggle hugging downtown uptown, hug joggling gray square after gray square, until they see the new moon giggling over Weehawken and feel the gusty wind of a dead Sunday blowing dust in their faces, dust of a typsy twilight.
They are walking up the Mall in Central Park.
‘Looks like he had a boil on his neck,’ says Ellen in front of the statue of Burns.
‘Ah,’ whispers Harry Goldweiser with a fat-throated sigh, ‘but he was a great poet.’
She is walking in her wide hat in her pale loose dress that the wind now and then presses against her legs and arms, silkily, swishily walking in the middle of great rosy and purple and pis-tachiogreen bubbles of twilight that swell out of the grass and trees and ponds, bulge against the tall houses sharp gray as dead teeth round the southern end of the park, melt into the indigo zenith. When he talks, forming sentences roundly with his thick lips, continually measuring her face with his brown eyes, she feels his words press against her body, nudge in the hollows where her dress clings; she can hardly breathe for fear of listening to him.
‘The Zinnia Girl’s going to be an absolute knockout, Elaine, I’m telling you and that part’s just written for you. I’d enjoy working with you again, honest… You’re so different, that’s what it is about you. All these girls round New York here are just the same, they’re monotonous. Of course you could sing swell if you wanted to… I’ve been crazy as a loon since I met you, and that’s a good six months now. I sit down to eat and the food dont have any taste… You cant understand how lonely a man gets when year after year he’s had to crush his feelings down into himself. When I was a young fellow I was different, but what are you to do? I had to make money and make my way in the world. And so I’ve gone on year after year. For the first time I’m glad I did it, that I shoved ahead and made big money, because now I can offer it all to you. Understand what I mean?… All those ideels and beautiful things pushed down into myself when I was making my way in a man’s world were like planting seed and you’re their flower.’
Now and then as they walk the back of his hand brushes against hers; she clenches her fist sullenly drawing it away from the hot determined pudginess of his hand.
The Mall is full of couples, families waiting for the music to begin. It smells of children and dress-shields and talcum powder. A balloonman passes them trailing red and yellow and pink balloons like a great inverted bunch of grapes behind him. ‘Oh buy me a balloon.’ The words are out of her mouth before she can stop them.
‘Hay you gimme one of each color… And how about one of those gold ones? No keep the change.’
Ellen put the strings of the balloons into the dirtsticky hands of three little monkeyfaced girls in red tams. Each balloon caught a crescent of violet glare from the arclight.
‘Aw you like children, Elaine, dont you? I like a woman to like children.’
Ellen sits numb at a table on the terrace of the Casino. A hot gust of foodsmell and the rhythm of a band playing He’s a Ragpicker swirls chokingly about her; now and then she butters a scrap of roll and puts it in her mouth. She feels very helpless, caught like a fly in his sticky trickling sentences.
‘There’s nobody else in New York could have got me to walk that far, I’ll tell you that… I walked too much in the old days, do you understand, used to sell papers when I was a kid and run errands for Schwartz’s Toystore… on my feet all day except when I was in nightschool. I thought I was going to be a lawyer, all us East Side fellers thought we were goin to be lawyers. Then I wo
rked as an usher one summer at the Irving Place and got the theater bug… Not such a bad hunch it turned out to be, but it’s too uncertain. Now I dont care any more, only want to cover my losses. That’s the trouble with me. I’m thirtyfive an I dont care any more. Ten years ago I was still only a kind of clerk in old man Erlanger’s office, and now there’s lots of em whose shoes I used to shine in the old days’d be real glad of the opportunity to sweep my floors on West Forty-eighth… Tonight I can take you anywhere in New York, I dont care how expensive or how chic it is… an in the old days us kids used to think it was paradise if we had five plunks to take a couple of girls down to the Island… I bet all that was different with you Elaine… But what I want to do is get that old feelin back, understand?… Where shall we go?’
‘Why dont we go down to Coney Island then? I’ve never been?
‘It’s a pretty rough crowd… still we can just ride round. Let’s do it. I’ll go phone for the car.’
Ellen sits alone looking down into her coffeecup. She puts a lump of sugar on her spoon, dips it in the coffee and pops it into her mouth where she crunches it slowly, rubbing the grains of sugar against the roof of her mouth with her tongue. The orchestra is playing a tango.
The sun streaming into the office under the drawn shades cut a bright slanting layer like watered silk through the cigarsmoke.
‘Mighty easy,’ George Baldwin was saying dragging out the words. ‘Gus we got to go mighty easy on this.’ Gus McNiel bull-necked redfaced with a heavy watchchain in his vest sat in the armchair nodding silently, pulling on his cigar. ‘As things are now no court would sustain such an injunction… an injunction that seems to me a pure piece of party politics on Judge Connor’s part, but there are certain elements…’
‘You said it… Look here George I’m goin to leave this whole blame thing to you. You pulled me through the East New York dockin space mess and I guess you can pull me through this.’
‘But Gus your position in this whole affair has been entirely within the bounds of legality. If it werent I certainly should not be able to take the case, not even for an old friend like you.’
‘You know me George… I never went back on a guy yet and I dont expect to have anybody go back on me.’ Gus got heavily to his feet and began to limp about the office leaning on a goldknobbed cane. ‘Connor’s a son of a bitch… an honest, you wouldn’t believe it but he was a decent guy before he went up to Albany.’
‘My position will be that your attitude in this whole matter has been willfully misconstrued. Connor has been using his position on the bench to further a political end.’
‘God I wish we could get him. Jez I thought he was one of the boys; he was until he went up an got mixed up with all those lousy upstate Republicans. Albany’s been the ruination of many a good man.’
Baldwin got up from the flat mahogany table where he sat between tall sheaves of foolscap and put his hand on Gus’s shoulder. ‘Dont you lose any sleep over it…’
‘I’d feel all right if it wasn’t for those Interborough bonds.’
‘What bonds? Who’s seen any bonds?… Let’s get this young fellow in here… Joe… And one more thing Gus, for heaven’s sakes keep your mouth shut… If any reporters or anybody comes round to see you tell ’em about your trip to Bermuda… We can get publicity enough when we need it. Just at present we want to keep the papers out of it or you’ll have all the reformers on your heels.’
‘Well aint they friends of yours? You can fix it up with em.’
‘Gus I’m a lawyer and not a politician… I dont meddle in those things at all. They dont interest me.’
Baldwin brought the flat of his hand down on a pushbell. An ivoryskinned young woman with heavy sullen eyes and jetty hair came into the room.
‘How do you do Mr McNiel.’
‘My but you’re looking well Miss Levitsky.’
‘Emily tell em to send that young fellow that’s waiting for Mr McNiel in.’
Joe O’Keefe came in dragging his feet a little, with his straw hat in his hand. ‘Howde do sir.’
‘Look here Joe, what does McCarthy say?’
‘Contractors and Builders Association’s goin to declare a lockout from Monday on.’
‘And how’s the union?’
‘We got a full treasury. We’re goin to fight.’
Baldwin sat down on the edge of the desk. ‘I wish I knew what Mayor Mitchel’s attitude was on all this.’
‘That reform gang’s just treadin water like they always do,’ said Gus savagely biting the end off a cigar. ‘When’s this decision going to be made public?’
‘Saturday.’
‘Well keep in touch with us.’
‘All right gentlemen. And please dont call me on the phone. It dont look exactly right. You see it aint my office.’
‘Might be wiretappin goin on too. Those fellers wont stop at nothin. Well see ye later Joey.’
Joe nodded and walked out. Baldwin turned frowning to Gus.
‘Gus I dont know what I’m goin to do with you if you dont keep out of all this labor stuff. A born politician like you ought to have better sense. You just cant get away with it.’
‘But we got the whole damn town lined up.’
‘I know a whole lot of the town that isnt lined up. But thank Heavens that’s not my business. This bond stuff is all right, but if you get into a mess with this strike business I couldn’t handle your case. The firm wouldnt stand for it,’ he whispered fiercely. Then he said aloud in his usual voice, ‘Well how’s the wife, Gus?’
Outside in the shiny marble hall, Joe O’Keefe was whistling Sweet Rosy O’Grady waiting for the elevator. Imagine a guy havin a knockout like that for a secretary. He stopped whistling and let the breath out silently through pursed lips. In the elevator he greeted a walleyed man in a check suit. ‘Hullo Buck.’
‘Been on your vacation yet?’
Joe stood with his feet apart and his hands in his pockets. He shook his head. ‘I get off Saturday.’
‘I guess I’ll take in a couple o days at Atlantic City myself.’
‘How do you do it?’
‘Oh the kid’s clever.’
Coming out of the building O’Keefe had to make his way through people crowding into the portal. A slate sky sagging between the tall buildings was spatting the pavements with fiftycent pieces. Men were running to cover with their straw hats under their coats. Two girls had made hoods of newspaper over their summer bonnets. He snatched blue of their eyes, a glint of lips and teeth as he passed. He walked fast to the corner and caught an uptown car on the run. The rain advanced down the street in a solid sheet glimmering, swishing, beating newspapers flat, prancing in silver nipples along the asphalt, striping windows, putting shine on the paint of streetcars and taxicabs. Above Fourteenth there was no rain, the air was sultry.
‘A funny thing weather,’ said an old man next to him. O’Keefe grunted. ‘When I was a boy onct I saw it rain on one side of the street an a house was struck by lightnin an on our side not a drop fell though the old man wanted it bad for some tomatoplants he’d just set out.’
Crossing Twentythird O’Keefe caught sight of the tower of Madison Square Garden. He jumped off the car; the momentum carried him in little running steps to the curb. Turning his coatcollar down again he started across the square. On the end of a bench under a tree drowsed Joe Harland. O’Keefe plunked down in the seat beside him.
‘Hello Joe. Have a cigar.’
‘Hello Joe. I’m glad to see you my boy. Thanks. It’s many a day since I’ve smoked one of these things… What are you up to? Aint this kind of out of your beat?’
‘I felt kinder blue so I thought I’d buy me a ticket to the fight Saturday.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Hell I dunno… Things dont seem to go right. Here I’ve got myself all in deep in this political game and there dont seem to be no future in it. God I wish I was educated like you.’
‘A lot of good it’s done me.’
‘You cant tell Joe, funny things get into a man.’
‘There’s women and that sort of stuff.’
‘No I dont mean that… You get kinder disgusted.’
‘But hell I dont see how a guy with enough jack can git disgusted.’
‘Then maybe it was booze, I dont know.’
They sat silent a minute. The afternoon was flushing with sunset. The cigarsmoke was blue and crinkly about their heads.
‘Look at the swell dame… Look at the way she walks. Aint she a peacherino? That’s the way I like ’em, all slick an frilly with their lips made up… Takes jack to go round with dames like that.’
‘They’re no different from anybody else, Joe.’
‘The hell you say.’
‘Say Joe you havent got an extra dollar on you?’
‘Maybe I have.’
‘My stomach’s a little out of order… I’d like to take a little something to steady it, and I’m flat till I get paid Saturday… er … you understand… you’re sure you dont mind? Give me your address and I’ll send it to you first thing Monday morning.’
‘Hell dont worry about it, I’ll see yez around somewheres.’
‘Thank you Joe. And for God’s sake dont buy any more Blue Peter Mines on a margin without asking me about it. I may be a back number but I can still tell a goldbrick with my eyes closed.’
‘Well I got my money back.’
‘It took the devil’s own luck to do it.’
‘Jez it strikes me funny me loanin a dollar to the guy who owned half the Street.’
‘Oh I never had as much as they said I did.’
‘This is a funny place…’
‘Where?’
‘Oh I dunno, I guess everywhere… Well so long Joe, I guess I’ll go along an buy that ticket… Jez it’s goin to be a swell fight.’
Joe Harland watched the young man’s short jerky stride as he went off down the path with his straw hat on the side of his head. Then he got to his feet and walked east along Twentythird Street. The pavements and housewalls still gave off heat although the sun had set. He stopped outside a corner saloon and examined carefully a group of stuffed ermines, gray with dust, that occupied the center of the window. Through the swinging doors a sound of quiet voices and a malty coolness seeped into the street. He suddenly flushed and bit his upper lip and after a furtive glance up and down the street went in through the swinging doors and shambled up to the brassy bottleglittering bar.
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