Children of the Ritz

Chapter Three

You know the Corona, or the Bijou, as the case may be. It’s the neighborhood motion picture house. A comparatively new one-story building faced with buff bricks and white tiles and set down between dingy age-old tenements where there used to be a vacant lot filled with garbage five or six years ago. The Corona has an electric sign overhead at right angles to the sidewalk and the lights twinkle like ginger ale as the current is broken every fifteen or thirty seconds. But it really doesn’t need the inducement of this sign, because every one, old and young, living within a radius of, say, seven or eight blocks goes there at least once a week in any case. It gets to be a habit with them after a while.

To cut down expenses the sign goes out for the night at about ten o’clock, shortly after the last show begins. There is a lovely Moorish kiosk, gilt all over, on the pavement outside, and within, like the proverbial bird in a gilded cage, sits the young lady who sells the tickets. Her hair is equally gold with the rest of it and she chews gum from morn till eve, or thereabouts. There is a neat little framed sign hanging from the bars of her prison: “How many?” and underneath in cautious letters, “Count your change before leaving.”

The foyer, where there is a man to take your tickets from you as you go in, and tear them in half under your very eyes, is suffused with a tinted light the color of peaches and cream and is lined with “stills” of the pictures going on inside. These are about the size of picture postcards. In addition, large lifesized photographs of Ramon Novarro, perhaps, and Pola Negri are on display.

At eleven-ten or fifteen the people started coming out as a rule. The golden Lorelei of the box office had gone by that time, so had the doorman, and the electricians, up on ladders, were changing the bracketed letters of the sign to fit the next day’s program. Often they dropped bulbs, which fell to the sidewalk like cartridges. First came the few brave souls who had gotten up without waiting for “The End” to flash on the screen, or who had been seated near the back, which gave them an unfair advantage. Then all at once the foyer was black with people as the main body of the audience came milling out, exchanging greetings and tolerant criticism.

“Good evening, Mrs. Mahoney, sure an’ I was sittin’ two rows behind ye. Did ye see me?”

“Were you now? Why didn’t you cahl me over, for the mercy’s sake?”

“Sure an’ I thought I’d better not be disturbin’ her.”

And then, at the tail end of the procession, came those who were in love, or those who had rheumatism. Among them Margie Haines on the arm of her escort. These two were positively the last to leave the theater.

Margie, as she came stalking down the lobby, was pleasantly attractive to the eye, or what is technically known as pretty without being beautiful. Moreover, she presented a fairly accurate portrait of what the well-dressed young thing who had to work for her living would wear in the months to come. It was all there: a hat wider than her shoulders now that they were no longer being worn as small as bouillon cups. Its flexible brim sufficiently hid her lack of tresses from the inquisitive eye, you could not tell whether she was blonde, brunette, or Titian-haired. And yet the burnt almond make-up she had on hinted that she was dark; no light person would have dared to use it. The collar of her dress reached to her throat, and around it she had a black scarf tied in a loose blousy bow like the conventional necktie of a Bohemian eccentric. The hem of her skirt and her kneecaps were perfect strangers, in the present instance at least. All this looked most fetching as it came out of the dark into the gentle flush of the foyer.

But Margie herself was more important than her clothes, and this was Margie herself: she had wide blue eyes, without any make-up around them, but her brows, it must be admitted, had been carefully trained so that they resembled fragments of arc, or what the French call an accent circonflexe. Her mouth was adorable as long as it stayed shut, but when she smiled, and she often smiled, it became a little too wide, a little too knowing, more like a good-natured boy’s mouth than a pretty girl’s.

“It was all right, wasn’t it? Only it wasn’t as good as the one we saw last week,” she was saying.

“Na, it wasn’t,” Gaffney agreed. If she had said it was then he would have said, “Sure, it sartanly was.”

He found it much less trouble to agree with her no matter what she said. Gaffney was a lost soul of about thirty, lost, that is, since he had first met Margie, who showed his profession by the striking habits he wore whenever he was seen anywhere in public with her. He had a cream-colored cap on his head, his suiting was of a livid paleness that suggested vanilla or marshmallow, and his polka-dotted bowknot had most obviously not been tied by hand; in other words, it was machine-made. As though this were not enough, his two upper front teeth were a handsome gold that outshone even the glittering ticket office. And Margie? Well, Margie thought he was everything one’s “fellah” should be, except that she did wish he would stop trying to start a fight every time he caught any one so much as looking at her. Still, if he hadn’t she would have felt neglected, so there you are.

“How about having something?” he suggested.

“All right,” said Margie affably.

They sauntered into the Cosmos Ice Cream Parlor which had two huge jars of blood-red preserved cherries displayed in its window, and sat down at a small marble-lidded table. A mechanical piano was playing Mandalay.

“Nice in here, isn’t it?” Margie said.

“Yeah, awfully,” said Gaffney, looking around at the white waxed roses and green linen leaves that sprawled coquettishly over the lattices between each table. A bored waiter sketchily wiped the top of theirs with a dishcloth and set two thick ugly glasses of water before them.

“What’ll it be?” he grunted asthmatically.

“Give me a DeLuxe Banana Delight,” said Margie, reading the list conscientiously. “I don’t know what it is,” she added, “but sounds as though there might be an awful lot of it.”

“I’ll have a Marshmeller Temptation,” Gaffney remarked. “I knew a horse once,” he said, “called Temptations of Saint Anthony.”

“How was he?” said Margie.

“Punk,” he remarked disgustedly.

“Did you do what I told you with Dewey’s money?” she wanted to know.

“Yeah. Sat’day’s race. I let a sure thing called Lucky Day have it.”

“Big odds?” she asked.

“Twenty to one.”

Margie let her spoon fall with a clatter and a dash of whipped cream flecked her chin. She evidently disapproved of what he had done.

“What’s the bright idea,” she exclaimed crossly, “taking a chance like that? You ought to be shot! Why couldn’t you spread it a little; you know plenty of systems?”

“Systems aren’t in it compared to this baby.”

“If he’s so good why are they letting out such heavy odds?” she demanded, not unreasonably.

Gaffney took refuge in a typically masculine evasion. “Listen, leave this to me,” he said. “You wouldn’t understand, see?”

“Maybe I wouldn’t,” she grumbled, “but Dewey’ll kill you. It’s his bonus.”

“Dewey’s bonus is safe,” he assured her. “What’s more, he stands in the way of making fifty thousand dollars, and not Confederate money either.”

“Well, when I see that fifty thousand I’ll believe it,” she remarked sarcastically, “and maybe not even then. If you ask me, we’ve played a dirty trick on Dewey, both of us.”

“Yeah? Well, you come out there Sat’day and see whether it’s a dirty trick or not.”

Margie stood up, looking like a mushroom growth in her wide hat. “Believe me, I will,” she assured him, “and I’ll return home alone, unaccompanied, if you get what I mean, unless that horse behaves the way it should. So if you want to be my friend any longer, you better see that he gets to the winning post first.”

They left the Cosmos Ice Cream Parlor still arguing about it.

“Now don’t you let it worry you,” Gaffney was saying; “you leave it to me. When I have a hunch I play it, and I have a hunch right now.”

“What you think is a hunch,” said Margie skeptically, “may be your woolen underwear for all you know.”

They walked the rest of the way in a moody silence. The kiss she let him have in the shadow of her doorway was most perfunctory and anything but cordial, judging by other kisses of the past.

“I’ll be there Saturday,” she said, and hurried up the three flights of imitation marble stairs. She decided that the best thing to do was not to let her mother know what Gaffney had done with the money. If anything went wrong she would have to be told soon enough. Mrs. Haines, Margie knew, was not favorably inclined toward horse racing. She had wanted Dewey’s money put in the bank, or have an insurance policy taken out with it.

The light was on in her mother’s room when Margie entered the flat. It shone through the glass transom, feebly illuminating the dim corridor. This was one of those “railroad” flats.

“Who is it?” called Mrs. Haines indolently, hearing the hall door close.

“Me, Ma.”

Margie took off her wide hat and went to her room with it under her arm.

“Back so soon? How was the picture?” Her mother’s resonant voice could carry through any number of doors and walls.

“Reginald Denny,” said Margie cryptically.

“Is it the one where he’s a floorwalker on roller skates?” Mrs. Haines knew her movies, to say the least.

Margie stretched and yawned elaborately. “No,” she said with a vigorous shake of the head. “Is there anything in the ice box, Ma? I’m kinda hungry. All we had was ice cream.”

“The padlock goes on that ice box after seven-thirty. Get to bed,” ordered Mrs. Haines, turning out her light to put a stop to the conversation.

Margie closed her door with a sigh of resignation and proceeded to shimmy herself enthusiastically out of her dress. She allowed it to lie in a ring about her feet, like an extinct volcano crater, while she was busied dispensing with the faded silver satin shoulder straps that held her one remaining garment in place. She reached out toward the little black peg at the side of the light bulb and a second later was engulfed in darkness, rushing out of the recesses of the room and blotting everything out like a miniature death.

When Margie reached the track the following Saturday afternoon she found Gaffney surrounded by an excited crowd giving out slips of paper right and left. His cap was reversed with the peak of it pointing down over the back of his neck, and he hardly had time to greet her in the flurry that surrounded him.

“Sit over there on the end stand where I can find you. Be right with you.”

No hello or anything. Margie, who had taken all morning to get ready for the race, down to the pink banana oil daubed on her nails, was hurt at the way he seemed to take her for granted. She sat down next to a much beaded gray-haired woman, whom she took to be a society woman but who was as a matter of fact wardrobe mistress of a theatrical company that had just disbanded. Gaffney only joined her when the horses were already out of the paddocks, and throwing across the sunny track elongated shadows that looked like giraffes on stilts.

“That’s him there in the middle. The yellow and black jockey.”

“He looks nice,” said Margie very unprofessionally, and was immediately rebuked for it.

“Looks don’t cut any ice. This ain’t a beauty contest.”

They started off painlessly enough, as is the case with most races, spilling over the track like dark water. Dozens of pairs of field glasses were lifted to dozens of pairs of eyes, and a great shifting of feet arose, like the sighing of a restless sea. Margie forgot the spiced gumdrops she had with her.

The field was a large one. They entered the second lap all in a jumble and flashed past like so many rockets with brightly colored pegs on top. Hundreds of heads turned as one and necks were craned after them. People stood up here and there screwing the dark-rimmed glasses into their eyes.

They had manipulated the curve now and were rolling along the off arm of the track like marbles. Black and yellow seemed to be hanging on by the skin of his teeth, only third from the end. They rounded the bend once more, clipped momentarily like the joints between rails on a railroad track by an octagonal white dial of some sort that stood higher up the track. As they came abreast of her, Margie’s chin was protruding, her hands were clasped between her legs at ankle level.

“He’s hanging back,” she whispered. “Seems to be lagging. Oh, what’s the matter with him? Can’t he pick up?”

“Give the mutt a break,” growled Gaffney impatiently; “the race isn’t over yet.”

They disappeared down the long track and made the next to the last turn. By the time they were opposite the stands again, going in the other direction this time on the further arm, black and yellow had slipped several notches ahead. He was coming up shiningly. And then he dropped back again and two of them nosed him out.

It seemed to her she couldn’t stand it another minute. She shut her eyes and pressed the flats of her hands to them and leaned far back in her seat. The crowd around her, the oyster-white horseshoe of the track, the pennants on the little white structure that looked like a traffic signal station, the blue afternoon sky with an eyebrow of cloud floating across it, all vanished from sight simultaneously as though a huge sponge had wiped the slate clean.

But the fierce drone of excitement, the isolated cries, the heel tapping, the feverishness that expressed itself in the jerky shifting and reshifting of whole rows of people in their seats, seemed to strengthen itself by becoming unseen, seemed redoubled in intensity, pressing in on her brain with greater insistency, now that there was only one sense instead of two conducting it.

Gaffney must have glanced around and noticed the way she was sitting there. She heard him exclaim: “Well, I’ll be shot. What’s the matter? Feel dizzy?”

She could tell he was addressing himself to her by a nearness about it felt rather than actually heard, likewise the let-down in tone, an absence of raucousness that made it seem almost smooth by comparison.

“Let me know when they’re at the turn,” she said in a muffled voice. “It’s killing me.”

He snorted between pity and amusement and promptly forgot all about her in the cataclysmic thrill the far-away clump of horses sent coursing through his veins.

They came on like black bullets, and were reflected on the polished lenses of hundreds of pairs of glasses turned on them from the stands.

“Wake up,” he said. “They’re at the turn now.”

She opened her eyes wider than they had ever opened before. They seemed to swallow the whole world as it came rushing back into focus. Oyster-white track bed, little white caboose on stilts that looked like a traffic tower, far-away green grass, not daring to come any nearer, afternoon sky with the eyebrow of cloud gone now, the whole scene came back instantly, like a wet decalcomania poster slapped against the blankness that had been there a second ago.

They were rounding the turn spread out in single file, no two abreast of each other. That was because some of them had the outside of the track. But as they tore down the home stretch they congealed into a knot again, except that one or two were hopelessly outdistanced and one stubbornly stuck to the lead. And the jockey’s shirt, which was Margie’s only way of telling the horse, was a smudge of yellow and black past the irises of her eyes.

She was on her feet, but so was every one else.

“That must be him. He’s over! I saw the flag drop!” Lozenges of blue fire danced before her eyes for a moment. She clasped a hand to her heart. “Boy, you don’t know what I feel in here.”

“I knew what I was talking about all along,” maintained Gaffney with professional sang-froid. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

She followed him blindly across the crowded track to where the horse and its rider were already solidly wedged in and held motionless by their pack of admirers and hangers-on. “She won fifty thousand whackers,” she heard Gaffney say to somebody. “This little lady here.” And neither of them quite realized what he was saying.

They were all looking at her with the typical emotionlessness of a New York crowd, no indication of friendliness, every face a blank.

“Don’t spend it all in one place,” said the jockey, mopping the back of his neck with a bandanna and smiling down at her.

She laughed stridently, out of sheer nervousness, as though he had said the funniest thing in the world.

A number of tripods had sprung up all around them. “Back everybody,” some one called. “Movies.” With the jockey in the saddle, a wreath around his neck, Margie and Gaffney stood on either side of the horse’s head.

“Caress him,” directed one of the camera men, grinding away busily.

“Who, the horse?” Margie asked in surprise.

She stroked his nose gingerly, then rested her cheek against it for a moment or two, not without a strained look in her eyes.

“O. K.” said the camera men, picking up their tripods and loping away with them over their shoulders, as though each was anxious to be the first one off the track.

As she walked out through the gate at Gaffney’s side, an individual with a damp cigar in his mouth held in place by a gleaming, biting, gold tooth attached himself to her. A horseshoe of brilliants crackled at the knot of his striped tie.

“Could I interest you in some real estate?”

“It’s not my money, it’s my brother’s,” she explained, giving him a look of esteem for singling her out, which she regarded as a compliment.

“Well, could I interest your brother, then?” he immediately went on.

“No, you couldn’t,” snapped Gaffney. “Waft yourself away, brother, waft yourself away.”

The shark turned around and walked off most matter-of-factly. Margie couldn’t help staring after him a little longingly, already liking the sense of importance all this gave her. She slipped her arm submissively through her escort’s nevertheless.

“Let’s take a taxi back to N’ Yark,” he suggested.

“That’s right too,” she agreed readily.

As they got in she spread her hands on either side of her and smoothed down the leather cushions. “Mm, this is swell,” she sighed. “Pull down those seats in front and let’s put our feet on them.”

“N’ Yark,” ordered Gaffney regally.

“Any particular place?” queried the driver sarcastically.

“Sure,” was the cutting answer, “wait’ll we get there.”

Margie unclasped a powder case the size of a half dollar. “One thing about horses, they smell awfully strong,” she remarked, powdering her throat vigorously.

Up in the Amsterdam Avenue flat, meanwhile, Mrs. Haines sat placidly sewing buttons on her roomer’s shirts, breaking the thread with her teeth whenever necessary. From time to time she glanced at the moon-faced alarm clock that stood on the kitchen shelf, a clock that continued to survive after months of hard usage in spite of having originally cost only one dollar and a quarter. The clock said it was twenty to seven, and Mrs. Haines would have taken this clock’s word against any number of other clocks. She felt it was their own fault if they couldn’t keep up with it.

A key began to dig frantically at the latch of the outer door.

“Hm,” said Mrs. Haines under her breath, biting a thread between her lips, “twenty to seven, is it?”

Margie appeared at the threshold. There was drama in the way she poised herself on her toes before flinging her arms about her mother’s neck. The heap of colored shirts fell about their feet like autumn leaves.

“Stop the shenanigans,” said Mrs. Haines in a muffled voice. “This is a fine time to be coming home from a movie.”

“Ma!” squeaked Margie, embracing her for dear life, “Oh, Ma!” That was as far as she could get for the present. She clasped her mother’s hands in her own, raised her to her feet, and danced ring-around-a-rosie with her, upsetting the chair and trampling the roomer’s shirts underfoot.

Mrs. Haines, bewildered and outraged, at last seized an aluminum cooking utensil and stood ready to defend herself with a broad arm raised menacingly.

“Will you now?” she cried indignantly. “The life of me!”

Margie retreated into a corner, unabashed and still delirious with excitement. Mrs. Haines stooped down and began to collect the scattered sewing articles, giving each one a vigorous shaking out.

“Dewey’s money,” said Margie, leaning far over the table toward her on both palms, “was on a horse called Lucky Day. It ran to-day.”

“Why?” said the naïve Mrs. Haines.

“It ran in a race,” explained Margie patiently, “with the other horses.” She would be calm, very calm. She wanted her mother to see the point of her own accord, without having to be coached. It would be delicious that way.

“Don’t be tellin’ me about it,” remonstrated Mrs. Haines angrily, relapsing for a moment into the brogue of an earlier day. “The creatures running a race wid themselves! They shouldn’t be let loose that way.”

“Don’t you see?” persisted Margie, who was now sitting on the edge of the table. “Dewey’s money was on this horse.”

Suddenly Mrs. Haines had seen the point thoroughly and completely. “Oh,” she said ponderously, and her mouth was as round as a cherry. “Oh-ho.” She caught Margie’s slim white hand abruptly and buried it under her own fat pink one. “All of it?” she asked. She could be shrewd when she chose. “Answer me! All of it?”

“All,” gloried Margie, “all, all, every cent of it! And the odds were twenty to one. And we’ve made fifty thousand dollars!”

“Glory be to goodness! If this is another of your jokes—” she threatened vaguely.

“Jokes!” echoed Margie. “It is a joke, all right; it’s the biggest joke in life. Only this time the laugh is with us. People lost their money right and left to-day, and here we are, sitting on top of the world. And all because Gaffney had a hunch, bless his little heart. Oh, gee, Ma, I forgot! He’s been waiting downstairs in a taxi all this time. Hurry up, we’re going out and celebrate. You’re coming with us. Where’s my blue georgette with the ding-dongs around the bottom?”

Mrs. Haines in a daze allowed herself to be dressed like a two-year-old child, Margie, in her haste, splitting a pair of her own chiffon stockings while endeavoring to get her mother’s feet into them. But at such a time ordinary calamities went unnoticed.

“I’ll get you a pair for yourself to-morrow,” Margie promised.

Mrs. Haines, in a tangerine shirtwaist that had been the pride of her life since 1913, and strangely powdered, allowed herself to be pulled out of the flat and down the stairs with dangerous velocity by Margie, in an eight dollar evening frock. But at the street door force of habit reasserted itself too strongly. She broke away and tried to go back up the stairs on all fours.

“Whoo!” she said, “I promised to have the roomer’s shirts for him by to-morrow morning. What’s come over me, gallivantin’ around—”

Margie pushed her bodily out to the waiting taxicab, where Gaffney lurked, ambushed with flowers. “You tell the roomer,” Margie directed, “to start looking around for a new place on Monday. And throw away your needle and your thread. Those days are over.”