by Irwin Shaw
“I thought Jews ate herring,” Josephine said. Her voice scraped in the lobby, as though the Circus Hotel itself had suddenly broken into speech in its own voice, lysol and ammonia and rotting ancient wood finally put into sound.
“Jews eat herring,” Wysocki said. “And the English eat herring.”
Enders sighed again and walked up to the desk. In the chair near the stairway, he noticed, a girl was sitting, a pretty girl in a handsome green coat trimmed with lynx. He watched her obliquely as he talked to Wysocki, noticed that her legs were good and the expression cool, dignified, somehow hauntingly familiar.
“Hello, Wysocki,” Enders said.
“Mr. Enders,” Wysocki looked up pleasantly from the newspaper. “So you decided to come in out of the rain to your cozy little nest.”
“Yes,” said Enders, watching the girl.
“Did you know,” Josephine asked, “that the English eat herring?”
“Yes,” Enders said, digging into his mind for the face the girl reminded him of.
“That’s what Wysocki said.” Josephine shrugged. “I was living in happy ignorance.”
Enders leaned over so that he could whisper into Wysocki’s ear. “Who is she?” Enders asked.
Wysocki peered at the girl in the green coat, his eyes sly and guilty, as a thief might peer at a window at Tiffany’s through which he intended to heave a brick later in the evening. “Zelinka,” Wysocki whispered. “Her name’s Bertha Zelinka. She checked in this afternoon. You could do worse, couldn’t you?” He chuckled soundlessly, his bone-shaven face creasing without mirth, green and gleaming under the thirty-watt bulb.
“I’ve seen her some place,” Enders whispered, looking at the girl over his shoulder. She sat remote, cold, her legs crossed beautifully under the green coat, looking under heavy lids at the scarred and battered clock over Wysocki’s head. “I know that face,” Enders said. “But from where?”
“She looks like Greta Garbo,” Wysocki said. “That’s where you know her from.”
Enders stared at the girl in the green coat. She did look like Greta Garbo, the long pale face, the long eyes, the wide, firm mouth, the whole thing a mirror of passion and pain and deep Northern melancholy and bony, stubborn beauty. Suddenly Enders realized that he was a stranger in a strange city, a thousand miles from home, that it was raining out, that he had no girl, and that no one in this huge and wrangling seven-million town had ever said anything more tender to him than, “Pass the mustard.” And here, before him, solid as his hand, in a green coat with a lynx collar, sat a tall, melancholy girl who looked enough like Greta Garbo, pain and passion and beauty and understanding all mixed on the bony, pale face, to be her twin sister. His voice charged at his throat, leaping to say the first tender word in this rat-eaten, roach-claimed hotel lobby.
“Enders!” His name was spoken gaily, warmly. He turned from looking at Bertha Zelinka, wrenching his soul. “Mr. Enders, I was waiting for your appearance.” It was Bishop, the owner of the hotel, a little fat, gray-faced man with wet mustaches. He was rubbing his hands jovially now. “You were just the person I wanted to see tonight,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Enders.
“Wait!” Bishop’s voice trilled. “Don’t move an inch from the spot! I have a treat in store for you.”
He darted back of the desk through the door into his office. Enders turned and looked at Bertha Zelinka, sitting there as calmly, as remotely, as Garbo herself.
“Observe!” Bishop darted out again from his office. “Look!” He held his hand high above his head. From it dangled a dead, wet chicken. “See what I’ve saved for you. I am willing to give you this chicken for sixty cents, Mr. Enders.”
Enders looked politely at the chicken, hanging sadly in death from Bishop’s proud hand.
“Thanks, Mr. Bishop,” Enders said. “But I have no place to cook a chicken.”
“Take it to your home.” Bishop whirled the chicken lovingly, giving it a spruce and electric appearance of life, the wings spreading, the feathers ruffling. “Your mother would be delighted with this bird.”
“My mother’s in Davenport, Iowa,” Enders said.
“You must have some relatives in the city.” Bishop pushed it lovingly under his nose, spreading the limp wings for inspection. “They’ll receive you with open arms with this chicken. This is a guaranteed Plymouth Rock chicken. Birds like this are exhibited in poultry shows from coast to coast. Sixty cents, Mr. Enders,” Bishop said winningly. “Can you go wrong for sixty cents?”
Enders shook his head. “I have no relatives in the city,” he said. “Thanks a lot, but I can’t use it.”
Bishop looked at him coldly. He shrugged. “I could’ve sold this chicken five times already,” he said, “but I was saving it for you because you looked so pale. You gained my sympathy.” He shrugged again, and holding the Plymouth Rock by the neck, he went into his office.
“Well,” said Enders loudly, looking squarely at Bertha Zelinka, “I guess I’ll turn in for the night.”
“Want some company, Baby?” Josephine asked, in her voice the first note of hope she had allowed to sound there all evening.
“No, thank you,” Enders said, embarrassedly, glad that Miss Zelinka wasn’t looking at him at the moment.
“You certainly are a great ladies’ man,” Josephine said, her voice rasping through the lobby. “Don’t you know you’ll go crazy, you go so long without a woman? You been here two weeks, you haven’t had a woman all that time. They face that problem in Sing Sing, the convicts climb on the walls.”
Enders looked uneasily at Miss Zelinka. He didn’t want a girl who looked like Greta Garbo to hear him mixed up in that kind of a conversation. “Good night,” he said, and walked past Miss Zelinka, down the hallway to his own room, which was on the ground floor, at the bottom of an airwell, three dollars a week. He looked back regretfully. Miss Zelinka’s legs were visible, jutting out, like a promise of poetry and flowers, past the grime and gloom of the hallway. Sadly he opened the door and went into his room, took off his hat and coat and fell on the bed. He could hear Josephine talking, as though the walls, the vermin, the old and wailing plumbing, the very rats hurrying on their gloomy errands between the floors, had at last found a voice.
“The papers are full of boys like him” Josephine was saying. “Turning the gas on and stuffing their heads into the oven. What a night! What a stinking whore of a night! They’ll find plenty of bodies in the river tomorrow morning.”
“Josephine,” Wysocki’s voice floated down the hallway. “You ought to learn to talk with more cheerfulness. You’re ruining your business, Josephine. The wholesale butchers from Tenth Avenue, the slaughterhouse workers, your whole regular clientele, they’re all avoiding you. Should I tell you why?”
“Tell me why,” Josephine said.
“Because you’re gloomy!” Wysocki said. “Because you depress them with your talk. People like a woman to be cheerful. You can’t expect to succeed in your line if you walk around like the last day of the world is beginning in two and three-quarter hours, Bulova watch time.”
“The butchers from Tenth Avenue!” Josephine snarled. “Who wants them? I give them to you as a gift.”
Enders lay on the bed, regretting that a proud and beautiful woman like Bertha Zelinka had to sit in one of the three chairs of the lobby of the Circus Hotel on a rainy night and listen to a conversation like that. He put on the light and picked up the book he was reading.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought …
“What a night!” Josephine’s voice scraped down the hallway. “The river will be stuffed with bodies in the morning.”
Enders put down T. S. Eliot. It was hard to read T. S. Eliot in the Circus Hotel without a deep feeling of irony. Enders got up and looked around the doorpost, down the hall. The proud, poetic legs were still there, le
an, muscular, beautifully shaped, aristocratic, stemming down into slim ankles and narrow feet. Enders leaned dreamily against the doorpost, regarding Miss Zelinka’s legs. Music played from a well-known orchestra in a night club lit by orange lamps, where no dish cost less than a dollar seventy-five, even tomato juice, and he danced with Bertha Zelinka, both of them dressed beautifully, shiningly, and he made those deep, long eyes, charged with Northern melancholy, crinkle with laughter, and later grow sober and reflective as he talked swiftly of culture, of art, of poetry. “‘Nor fought in the warm rain,’ in the phrase of T. S. Eliot, a favorite of mine, ‘nor knee deep in the salt marsh …’”
He walked quickly down the hallway, looking neither to right nor left until he stopped at the desk. “Have there been any telephone calls for me today?” he asked Wysocki, carefully avoiding looking at Miss Zelinka.
“No,” said Wysocki. “Not a thing.”
Enders turned and stared full at Miss Zelinka, trying, with the deep intensity of his glance, to get her to look at him, smile at him …
“Heads like yours, my friend,” Josephine said, “they find in ovens.”
Miss Zelinka sat passionless, expressionless, heedless, looking at a point twenty-five feet over Wysocki’s shoulder, patiently, but coolly, in the attitude of a woman who is expecting a Lincoln to drive up at any moment and a uniformed chauffeur to spring from it and lead her fastidiously to the heavy, upholstered door, rich with heavy hardware.
Enders walked slowly back to his room. He tried to read some more. “April is the cruellest month …” He thumbed through the book. “Here, said she, is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor …” Enders put the book down. He couldn’t read tonight. He went to the door and looked out. The legs, silk and skin and firm muscle, were still there. Enders took a deep breath and walked back toward the desk.
“Look,” said Josephine, “the shuttle’s back.”
“I forgot to ask.” He looked straight at Wysocki. “Is there any mail for me?”
“No mail,” said Wysocki.
“I’ll tell you frankly, friend,” Josephine said. “You should’ve stayed in Davenport, Iowa. That’s my honest opinion. New York City will break you like a peanut shell.”
“Nobody asked for your opinion,” Wysocki said, noticing Enders peering uneasily at Miss Zelinka to see what impression Josephine’s advice had made on her. “He’s a nice boy, he’s educated, he’s going to go a long way. Leave him alone.”
“I’m only giving him my honest opinion,” Josephine said. “I’ve been in New York a dozen years. I see them begin and I see them wind up in the river.”
“Will you, for Christ’s sake, stop talking about the river?” Wysocki slammed his hand on the desk.
Gratefully, Enders noticed that Miss Zelinka was listening to the conversation, that her head tilted just a little, a shade went across her disdainful, beautiful eyes.
“I come from Fall River,” Josephine said. “I should’ve stayed there. At least when you’re dead in Fall River they bury you. Here they leave you walk around until your friends notice it. Why did I ever leave Fall River? I was attracted by the glamor of the Great White Way.” She waved her red and white umbrella ironically, in salute to the city.
Enders noticed that a hint, a twitch of a smile, played at the corner of Miss Zelinka’s mouth. He was glad that she’d heard Wysocki say he was educated, he was going to go a long way.
“If you’d like,” he heard his voice boom out suddenly in the direction of Miss Zelinka, “if you’d like, if you’re waiting for someone, you can wait in my room. It’s not so noisy there.”
“No, thank you,” Miss Zelinka said, speaking curiously, her lips together, not showing her teeth. Her voice, behind the closed, beautiful lips, was deep and hoarse and moving, and Enders felt it grip at his throat like a cool, firm hand. He turned to Wysocki, determined now that he was not going back to his room.
“I was curious,” he said. “Where did Bishop get that chicken he wants to sell me?”
Wysocki looked behind him carefully. “Don’t buy those chickens, Enders,” he said in a low voice. “I advise you as a good friend. Bishop picks them up on Tenth Avenue, alongside the railroad tracks.”
“What’re they doing there?” Enders asked.
“The trains bring them in from the farms, from the country,” Wysocki said. “The ones that died on the trip for one reason or another, the trainmen throw them off the cars and they’re piled up alongside the tracks and Bishop picks out the ones that look as though they died most peaceful and he tries to sell them.” Wysocki slid back to the office door, listened guiltily for a moment for Bishop, like a spy in the movies. “I advise you not to buy them. They’re not the most nourishing articles of food in the world.”
Enders smiled. “Bishop ought to be in Wall Street,” he said. “With talent like that.”
Miss Zelinka laughed. Feeling twice as tall as he had felt a moment before, Enders noticed that Miss Zelinka was laughing, quietly, and without opening her mouth, but true laughter. He laughed with her and their eyes met in friendly, understanding amusement.
“May I buy you a cup of coffee?” hurled out of his throat, at Miss Zelinka’s head, like a hand grenade.
The light of thought, consideration, appeared in the large gray eyes, while Enders waited. Then Miss Zelinka smiled. “All right,” she said. She stood up, five feet six inches tall, graceful as a duchess.
“I’ll be right back,” Enders said, quickly. “Just have to get my coat.”
He fled lightly down the hall toward his room.
“That’s what keeps me poor,” Josephine said. “Girls like that. What a night, what a dirty whore of a night!”
“I’m a dancer,” Bertha Zelinka was saying two hours later, her coat off, in Enders’ room, as she drank the whisky straight in one of the two water tumblers the room boasted. “Specialty dancing.” She put the whisky down, suddenly sank beautifully to the floor in a split. “I’m as supple as a cat.”
“I see,” Enders said, his eyes furious with admiration for Miss Zelinka, full-breasted, flat-bellied, steel-thighed, supple as a cat, spread magnificently on the dirty carpet. It was more pleasant to look at her body, now that he had seen her eating, mouth opened to reveal the poor, poverty-stricken, ruined teeth jagged and sorrowful in her mouth. “That looks very hard to do.”
“My name’s been in lights,” Miss Zelinka said, from the floor. “Please pass the whisky. From one end of the country to another. I’ve stopped show after show. I’ve got an uncanny sense of timing.” She stood up, after taking another draught of her whisky, closing her eyes with a kind of harsh rapture as the Four Roses went down past the miserable teeth, down inside the powerful, long white throat. “I’m an actress, too, you know, Mr. Enders.”
“I’m an actor,” Enders said shyly, feeling the whisky beat in his blood, keeping his eyes fiercely and wonderingly on Miss Zelinka. “That’s why I’m in New York. I’m an actor.”
“You ought to be a good actor,” Miss Zelinka said. “You got the face for it. It’s refined.” She poured herself another drink, watching the amber liquor pour into her glass with a brooding, intense expression in her face. “I had my name in lights from coast to coast. Don’t you believe it?”
“I believe it,” Enders said sincerely, noting that half the bottle was already gone.
“That’s why I’m here now,” she said. She walked beautifully around the small, flaky-walled room, her hands running sorrowfully over the warped bureau, the painted bedstead. “That’s why I’m here now.” Her voice was faraway and echoing, hoarse with whisky and regret. “I’m very much in demand, you know. I’ve stopped shows for ten minutes at a time. They wouldn’t let me get off the stage. Musicals that cost one hundred and fifty thousand to ring the curtain up. That’s why I’m here now,” she said mysteriously, and drained her glass. She threw herself on the bed next to Enders, stared moodily through almost closed eyes, at the stained and beaten ceiling. “The Shubert
s’re putting on a musical. They want me for it. Rehearsals are on Fifty-second Street, so I thought I’d move close by for the time being.” She sat up, silently reached for the bottle, poured with the fixed expression, brooding and infatuate, which she reserved for the distillers’ product. Enders, too full for words, sitting on the same bed with a woman who looked like Greta Garbo, who had stopped musical shows with specialty dancing from coast to coast, who got drunk with the assured yet ferocious grace of a young society matron, watched her every move, with hope, admiration, growing passion.
“You might ask,” Miss Zelinka said, “what is a person like myself doing in a rat-hole like this.” She waited, but Enders merely gulped silently at his whisky. She chuckled and patted his hand. “You’re a nice boy. Iowa, you said? You come from Iowa?”
“Iowa.”
“Corn,” Miss Zelinka said. “That’s what they grow in Iowa.” She nodded, having placed Iowa and Enders firmly in her mind. “I passed through Iowa on my way to Hollywood.” Half the whisky in her glass disappeared.
“Have you acted in pictures?” Enders asked, impressed, sitting on the same bed with a woman who had been in Hollywood.
Miss Zelinka laughed moodily. “Hollywood!” She finished her drink. “Don’t look for my footprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese.” She reached fluently for the bottle.
“It seems to me,” Enders said seriously, breathing deeply because Miss Zelinka was leaning across him for the moment. “It seems to me you’d do very well. You’re beautiful and you’ve got a wonderful voice.”
Miss Zelinka laughed again. “Look at me,” she said.
Enders looked at her.
“Do I remind you of anybody?” Miss Zelinka asked.
Enders nodded.
Miss Zelinka drank moodily. “I look like Greta Garbo,” she said. “Nobody could deny that. I’m not being vain when I tell you when I photograph you couldn’t tell me apart from the Swede.” She sipped her whisky, ran it lovingly around in her mouth, swallowed slowly. “A woman who looks like Greta Garbo in Hollywood is like the fifth leg on a race horse. Do you understand what I mean?”