A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Story to Be Whispered

I was twenty-one, and the time was ’29, and the town was San Francisco.

The San Francisco of our dreams, all those of us who lived back inland, on the farms and in the valleys and on the upslopes leading toward the mountains. The San Francisco where the money was, the San Francisco where success was, the San Francisco where beautiful women were. Many of whom you’d love when you went there (or so you dreamed). One of whom you’d finally marry there and settle down with there.

I didn’t have much; you don’t have much at twenty-one. Then again, you have everything. I had a hotel-room that had cost me the standard two-dollars-and-a-half just off the upper end of Market Street, mine till three the next day. I had a valise in that hotel-room — originally my father’s, from his own young footloose days, but he had turned it over to me for my first trip away from home. In the hotel-safe for safekeeping ("The management is not responsible,” etc.) I had, I think, forty or fifty dollars.

But I had a job, a good one too, starting Monday morning at nine.

And this was Saturday night.

I’d come in two days ahead, just to make sure no one would get the job away from me by default. Trains could be delayed, anything could happen.

I’d had a meal, and I stood now in front of an Owl Drugstore some distance down Market from where I’d started out, looking at each girl going by. Each one who had no man with her. I was not truthfully what the period referred to as a “drugstore cowboy,” but there wasn’t any other way than this for me to meet a girl. The town was new to me. Back home I had a small notebook with various names in it, but here I didn’t know a soul.

Looking back now, it seems strange to think of the way the women dressed at that time. I don’t think at any time, before or since, was the dress of women more of a universal uniform, with less variation in it. They were all straight up-and-down-hanging things, completely shapeless, with no waists to them. They were like shifts or long undershirts down to the knees. The only variation that could possibly enter into them was that of color, and to a lesser degree, texture or fabric. And I don’t think, either, that at any time before or since has the natural configuration of women, their body-contours, been more toned down, more effaced. The ideal of the period was quite frankly the tomboyish figure or form, and to achieve this the bosom was ruthlessly flattened to invisibility, the waist was obliterated, and the curve of the hips was planed down. Their figures were like pipe-stem-cleaners. Even in the wearing of the hair the sex-differences were kept at a minimum, for not only was it worn cropped short by almost all women of every age, but many of the younger ones even had it shingled and razored on the back of the neck the way men did.

Of all the feminine attributes, only the smallness of the hands, the feet, and the facial features had not been tampered with in one way or another. Simply because they could not be, I suppose.

I stood there watching them all go by, and I wouldn’t have been twenty-one, and on my own in a brand-new town, if I hadn’t hoped for a signal from one of them that my company, my presence at her side, would be accepted. Once or twice I even made a false start, thinking I had seen such an indication, but because no additional encouragement was forthcoming, I lost my nerve and fell back again. I was not an expert Casanova or Don Juan or whatever the word for it is. Back in the small town I’d come from, each boy knew almost all the girls of a like age, and a procedure such as this was uncalled-for.

So the crowd passed back and forth, the halcyon street-crowd of a halcyon period, both alike carefree, untroubled by any cosmic fears of destruction, untroubled even by economic doubts or worries. Fun, a good time, was the only criterion.

The Golden Twenties, almost over, just about to end, but nobody knew that yet. They seemed intended to stay on forever. Oh, everyone knew the date on the calendar would change in just a few short months more, but no one thought the spirit of the times ever would.

Finally, just when I was about ready to give up and move on elsewhere, or else resign myself to spending the evening alone, my perseverance paid off. I looked into the eyes of someone going by, and she not only returned the look, she held it steadily, for as long as we were opposite one another.

There could be no mistaking it this time. She stood there poised at the brink of the sidewalk longer than was necessary in order to obtain a favorable chance to cross over safely. Several breaks in the cross-street traffic offered themselves, and she didn’t take advantage of them.

Finally she glanced very charily over her own shoulder, not all the way around but just enough to show me her profile, and smiled very slightly in interrogation. The smile plainly was meant to say, Aren’t you going to come over and speak to me? That’s what I’m waiting here for.

Someone more experienced than I at this sort of thing might have detected a touch of furtiveness about her bearing that detracted from it by that much, but I was too new at it to go in for nuances. Besides, in what other way could she have gone about it? She couldn’t be too obvious about it without the risk of attracting humiliating attention on the public sidewalk.

I stepped forward away from the glass drugstore-showcase — I had been leaning out from it interrogatively — and went after her, reached her, and stopped there alongside her.

We both smiled at each other, openly now, she as well as I.

“How are you?” I said, informally if not very originally.

“I’m all right,” she said. “How’re you?” Friendlily, if also not very originally.

After this opening gambit, the conversation picked up pace, even though it remained staccato for some time to come yet, due, I suppose, to our not knowing each other well as yet.

“Going any place?” I asked.

“Just out walking,” she said.

“All right if I come along with you?” I asked.

“If you want to,” she said demurely.

“I do want to,” I said. “I like your looks.”

“Thanks,” she smiled appreciatively. “I like yours too,” she said.

That ended the preliminary stage. We now knew each other, technically speaking. We were now indissolubly together for the space of the evening, and, as in the larger area covered by a marriage-ceremony, no one dared separate us or try to come between us. At least not without answering to me. She was now my girl, at least for the time being, and I was her date. Youth doesn’t go in for long-winded introductory build-ups.

“Want to go to a show?” I asked, as we finally breached the crossing that had held her back for so long.

“I don’t think so,” she said without enthusiasm. “I saw one last night.”

“Do you want to have something to eat?” was my next proposal of entertainment.

“I had something just a little while before you came along,” she said to that.

I had nearly run out of suggestions by now. “Well, do you want to have a drink, then?”

This, for the first time, was met willingly. “Sure, if you want to yourself,” was the way she put it.

“The only trouble is,” I had to admit, “I’m new here. I don’t know where any of the speaks are.”

“I don’t know where the speaks are myself,” she said, making a distinction. “But I do know a place we could go.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Know what a gin-flat is?” she asked me in turn.

I thought I’d heard the expression before, but I wasn’t sure of the exact meaning.

“A friend of mine uses the place she lives, her own flat, to sell drinks in,” she explained. “She won’t admit strangers, that way she stays out of trouble, but if you know her you can get in.”

I wondered if it would cost very much. I didn’t say it aloud, but she seemed to read my mind.

“You don’t have to worry,” she said tactfully. “If you run out, I can always get credit there. We’ve known each other a long time.”

That sufficed, and we started out without further ado.

I no longer recall which streets we took to get there. All of San Fran was still so new to me that their names wouldn’t have meant anything anyway. I do remember that the flat- or apartment-building was situated at the intersection of two streets that came together at an angle instead of squarely. In other words the house was wedge-shaped. One of the two streets ran down the slope of a hill at a breakneck incline; the other was on the level.

We went in, rode up I think three floors in an automatic elevator, got out, and she pushed a doorbell. You could hear music and a welter of voices coming from the other side even before it opened. But toned down below the point of creating a disturbance.

It opened and a harridan of about fifty-five stood looking at us. There wasn’t a single personable quality about her to my twenty-one-year-old eyes. Her hair was as coarse as rope, and bleached to the same dirty color. She looked tough, she walked tough, and she talked tough. Even when she stood still, as she was doing now, she was tough standing still. She stood with one hip-joint thrown out of whack, and a hand planted on top of it.

“You,” she said to the girl who’d brought me. She flipped her head curtly. “Mon in,” she said. Then she said to her, “Wherej get the young one?”

The girl ignored that. She whispered to me, “Slip her a couple bucks. It costs a buck a head admission. Then after that you pay for the drinks as you get them.”

“You know the way,” the proprietress or whatever you’d call her said, and she turned aside into an open doorway and left the two of us on our own. She evidently didn’t mix with the paying customers. I caught a glimpse of a tall white refrigerator and a tabletop studded with empty carbonated-water bottles in there where she’d gone.

She’d taken the living-room of her Hat — or rather had had a carpenter do it for her — and knocked up a row of wooden partitions along one wall. Each little enclosure they formed held benches and a clamped-down table. They were all taken except one, down at the very end, and we slipped into that one. Next to us there was a party of four, two sailors and their girls, very noisy but good-natured about it. Then there was a girl wearing an orange dress with black polka-dots, farther down the line somewhere. I can still remember her; you could see that dress a mile away.

And that was about all there was to the place. A haggard waiter with one of these ineradicable subcutaneous blue beards and blue eye-pouches to match. A record-machine to play music, a cigarette machine so you could smoke, and the floor left bare so you could dance. Two baby-spots trained down on it from opposite corners, one swathed in red tissue-paper the other in blue, so you could have atmosphere.

I thought it was the cat’s pajamas, as they said at the time. I thought it was the bee’s knees. I thought this was living it up. At twenty-one you’re easily pleased.

So the evening began. The evening I never forgot all the rest of my life.

They played the songs that were hits that season — Moanin’ Low and Mean to Me and Tiptoe Through the Tulips, which Nick Lucas had introduced in one of the big musical movies that were just beginning to come out. Once we got up and danced, but I had never been a good dancer, and to my surprise I found out that she wasn’t either. I had always thought it was second nature to most girls. She was sort of rigid, hard to push around. After that we just sat there and let the gin do its work.

The gin was murderous; juniper flavoring added to raw alcohol. You couldn’t tell which was worse, the flavoring or the base. But you couldn’t get it any better than that all over America at the time. If you wanted a good drink, you had to cross the border to Mexicali or Montreal.

Even so, the frump who ran the dump must have coined money: there was no overhead to speak of. Just the rank rotgut, a couple of cases of mixer a night, and the tubercular waiter, who looked like he was related to her (probably an illegitimate son) and therefore not on salary. Maybe a monthly fix to the janitor to keep quiet about it.

As I got drunker, every time I glimpsed the girl in the polka-dotted dress I got the weirdest optical illusion I’d ever had in my life. All the polka-dots seemed to swarm upward off the dress and hang there suspended over her, like a cloud of lazy bees hovering in mid-air. She’d move offside, in a plain orange-color dress. Then the dots would all go after her and land back all over it again. She was always just one step too quick for them to go along with her, they always had to catch up afterward.

After a while the sailors and their girls were no longer there, without my noticing at just which point they had left. Just a forlorn and forgotten White Rock bottle stayed on there to mark their place. Then the girl in the polka-dots was gone with her swain too, and that I didn’t mind. Then we were all alone in the place, and it was time for us to go too.

On our way to the door, the roughneck manageress accosted us.

“You didn’t give me my usual discount,” the girl with me told her.

“Listen, baby,” she wheezed, “I’m not in business for my health.”

“Well, I could have steered him somewhere else,” my girl pointed out.

“You wouldn’t have dared,” the other one jeered. “Is he hep?”

“Come on, forget about it,” I said, sensing that a row was brewing between the two of them, and not wanting to get caught in the middle. I went on out the front door of the Hat awhile, waiting for her to come after me.

The moment my back was turned, the thing erupted. There was a scuffling sound, a scream of rage, and then the noise of something falling heavily to the floor.

Then my girl came running out. She didn’t stop, but gave my sleeve a tug as she flashed past me. “Come on, don’t stand there! As long as she wouldn’t give me my cut, I took it away from her anyway.” She didn’t waste time waiting for the elevator, but went skittering down the stairs, so I went chasing down after her.

“She’s liable to call the cops, isn’t she?” I said jaggedly as we clobbered down and around and down some more.

“She wouldn’t take the chance,” she answered. “She’s running an illegal operation up there and she knows it. They’d close her down in a minute if she attracted their attention.”

Before we’d made the street a door opened above and a gin-corroded voice rasped down after us — or after her, I should say — “You’re going to get yourself killed one of these nights. And I hope tonight’s the night you do!”

We chased out into the street, caught our breaths a minute, and finally hooked arms again.

“Let’s go over to my place,” she said. “It’s not too far from here; we can walk it.”

I’d been hoping for this. This was what I’d been aiming at all evening long, ever since I’d first met her. And now it was here, it had been arrived at. All the intervening hours had proved not to be wasted after all. If she hadn’t made her suggestion first, I had fully intended at about this point or not too long after to ask her to come back to my own room at the hotel with me. But this way was better by far; I wasn’t at all sure the desk-man wouldn’t have stopped us on our way in.

As far as walking there was concerned, I liked that part of it too. I wasn’t sure I had enough money left to cover a taxi.

We walked along arm in arm, every now and then lurching a little, first to one side, then to the other. I couldn’t tell if I was responsible, or she was, or if it was the two of us together. Oddly enough, the gin seemed to have taken more of a hold out here in the chilly open than it had back in the warm stuffy room. Probably it was the cumulative build-up that was at work.

Presently we’d stepped into what looked like some sort of a furnished rooming-house. There were too many doors up and down the hall for them to be multiple-room apartments. She stood with lowered head chinking a key briefly, and then the door had closed after us and we were in a pitch-dark room.

“Put on the light,” I said in an undertone.

“No, we don’t need any,” she said in an equally confidential voice.

“I can’t see where I’m going,” I said. “I’ll knock myself out.”

“Give me your hand,” she said. “I’ll steer you. The fuse is blown; I have to get it fixed.”

I had an impression it had been done deliberately. Still, it might have been true. It had looked like that kind of a crummy building from the outside.

Something cut me off across the knees and I overbalanced and fell forward onto an unmade bed that smelled faintly of stale face-powder...

... There was a flash of shock, some kind of psychic

shock deep down inside me, that was like lightning tearing a black sky to pieces. I reared backward in a recoil as strong as a kick in the jaw. Then I fell sprawling off the bed onto my head. There must have been a rug or mat there; it didn’t hurt, or if it did I didn’t feel it, I was too anaesthetized with shock.

I crawled on all fours over to the wall, and leaned against it, still on all fours, like a cowed animal. My stomach kept kneading convulsively, trying to empty itself, and it should have been able to, enough of the gin must have still been in it, but the muscles were jammed, they wouldn’t work.

There wasn’t a sound around me, the room was deathly still.

If it had only stayed like that, nothing would have happened. I would have finally picked myself up, groped my way to the door, and escaped out into the clean fresh air.

But first there was this soft slurring sound across the floor, as someone moved furtively toward the door. Then three amber lines, forming the outline of the door, suddenly appeared against the darkness, as it stealthily broke contact with its frame.

I sprang — still from the same crouched position I was in, without waiting to stand first — and the three amber cracks snuffed out, there was the slap of wood back against wood, and I held the fugitive trapped between my body and the door.

I started to work my arms pulverizingly, in and out, in and out, in and out, swinging with the blows, from side to side, from side to side, from side to side. These weren’t punches, these were death-blows.

For a moment, at the very start, a smothered voice pleaded: “Don’t kill me, don’t! I’ll give you money!” Then after that, there wasn’t any more voice left to plead with.

You don’t offer money to the outraged mating instinct.

Very soon there was no more pleading voice. Very soon there was no more spasmic movement. Very soon there was no more anything. The name for that is death.

The supreme insult had been paid back. The body had had its revenge.

My arms had grown heavy as lead, and still I swung them. I was afraid they wouldn’t be massive enough, wouldn’t have enough strength left in them, to inflict final total death, so I picked up some metal object I found at random in the dark. I think it was a wastebasket, but it was too flimsy, it dented inward at the first blow. Then I found something else, a chunky cube, scooped out in the middle. A thick glass ashtray, I suppose. That was better.

After a while I stood still. After a while the red went out of the world, like sparks settling back into a spent fire.

I couldn’t get the door open. The dead obstacle was lying there blocking its inward sweep. I scuffed the impediment over to the side a little with the backs of my heels, until I could get the door open enough to pass through. Then I stepped over it, and passed through the narrow door-opening I’d made. I went a little way on my way, and then I looked down at my hand, and I was still holding that heavy cubed thing. It was an ashtray all right, but one side of it had a growth of matted hairs clinging to it. They looked terrible, like some kind of unclean fungus growing out of the thick glass.

I knew it belonged inside, so I went all the way back, threw it back inside the room through the door-opening, and then I went on my way for good.

I don’t know why I didn’t just drop it where I was; some sense of restoring things to their proper place, I guess; leaving them as you found them.

I couldn’t tell the cabman the name of my hotel, but I found the key in my pocket and handed it to him, and he read it off the little tag attached to it and took me there.

The night-clerk had wise knowing eyes; they could spot a dead-beat or a girl-hustler trying to get past him from a mile away. But this is one time they were fooled. When he saw me straggle by, holding my coat-lapels closed tight under my chin, and shivering all over, all he said was: “Oughtn’t to go out without a topcoat if you’re not used to it here. Gets very raw late at nights.”

Upstairs in the room, all I took off was my shoes. Then I got under the covers just the way I was. I left the light on. I didn’t ever want to be in the dark again for the rest of my life.

After a while I even pulled the covers up over the top of my head, just left a little hole in them I could breath through.

And I shook, and I shook, and I shook.

They came and got me late the following day. I hadn’t even tried to leave the room in the meantime. I didn’t want to run away. Running away is all right from a misdeed or even a crime, but not from a nightmare. The nightmare goes right with you as you run. I think I was almost glad when they knocked and I told them to come in. It was like being back among ordinary men again, it was like being back to normalcy again. The shadows went away.

At the trial the prosecutor’s attitude toward me was almost fatherly. I know that’s a strange word to use of such a person at such a place and such a time, but no other would be accurate. I was young, he said in his summing-up. It hadn’t been premeditated. And nobody in that room (meaning I suppose all the men his own age) would want a son of theirs to suddenly come face to face with such a harrowing, such a beastly, predicament as I had.

And though he didn’t come right out and say it in so many words, his inference was plain. I had taken a life, and therefore I had to be punished for it, I couldn’t be allowed to get off scot-free. But it wasn’t as though I had killed another man. Or even (God forbid) as if I had killed a woman. Or yet (banish the thought) killed a little child. All I had killed was a queer.

They let me out the other day. I’m forty now.