Ironweed

II

They rode the Albany-Troy-via-Watervliet bus downtown from the cemetery. Francis told Rudy: “Spend a dime, ya bum,” and they stepped up into the flat-faced, red-andcream window box on wheels, streamline in design but without the spark of electric life, without the rockinghorse comfort, or the flair, or the verve, of the vanishing trolley. Francis remembered trolleys as intimately as he remembered the shape of his father’s face, for he had seen them at loving closeness through all his early years. Trolleys dominated his life the way trains had dominated his father’s. He had worked on them at the North Albany carbarns for years, could take them apart in the dark. He’d even killed a man over them in 1901 during the trolley strike. Terrific machines, but now they’re goin’.

“Where we headed?” Rudy asked.

“What do you care where we’re headed? You got an appointment? You got tickets for the opera?”

“No, I just like to know where I’m goin’.”

“You ain’t knowed where you was goin’ for twenty years.”

“You got somethin’ there,” Rudy said.

“We’re goin’ to the mission, see what’s happenin’, see if anybody knows where Helen is.”

“What’s Helen’s name?”

“Helen.”

“I mean her other name.”

“Whatayou want to know for?”

“I like to know people’s names.”

“She ain’t got only one name.”

“Okay, you don’t want to tell me, it’s all right.”

“You goddamn right it’s all right.”

“We gonna eat at the mission? I’m hungry.”

“We could eat, why not? We’re sober, so he’ll let us in, the bastard. I ate there the other night, had a bowl of soup because I was starvin’. But god it was sour. Them driedout bums that live there, they sit down and eat like fuckin’ pigs, and everything that’s left they throw in the pot and give it to you. Slop.”

“He puts out a good meal, though.”

“He does in a pig’s ass.”

“Wonderful.”

“Pig’s ass. And he won’t feed you till you listen to him preach. I watch the old bums sittin’ there and I wonder about them. What are you all doin’, sittin’ through his bullshit? But they’s all tired and old, they’s all drunks. They don’t believe in nothin’. They’s just hungry.”

“I believe in somethin’,” Rudy said. “I’m a Catholic.”

“Well so am I. What the hell has that got to do with it?”

The bus rolled south on Broadway following the old trolley tracks, down through Menands and into North Albany, past Simmons Machine, the Albany Felt Mill, the Bond Bakery, the Eastern Tablet Company, the Albany Paper Works. And then the bus stopped at North Third Street to pick up a passenger and Francis looked out the window at the old neighborhood he could not avoid seeing. He saw where North Street began and then sloped down toward the canal bed, the lumber district, the flats, the river. Brady’s saloon was still on the corner. Was Brady alive? Pretty good pitcher. Played ball for Boston in 1912, same year Francis was with Washington. And when the King quit the game he opened the saloon. Two bigleaguers from Albany and they both wind up on the same street. Nick’s delicatessen, new to Francis, was next to Brady’s, and in front of it children in false faces-a clown, a spook, a monster-were playing hopscotch. One child hopped in and out of chalked squares, and Francis remembered it was Halloween, when spooks made house calls and the dead walked abroad.

“I used to live down at the foot of that street,” Francis told Rudy, and then wondered why he’d bothered. He had no desire to tell Rudy anything intimate about his life. Yet working next to the simpleton all day, throwing dirt on dead people in erratic rhythm with him, had generated a bond that Francis found strange. Rudy, a friend for about two weeks, now seemed to Francis a fellow traveler on a journey to a nameless destination in another country. He was simple, hopeless and lost, as lost as Francis himself, though somewhat younger, dying of cancer, afloat in ignorance, weighted with stupidity, inane, sheeplike, and given to fits of weeping over his lostness; and yet there was something in him that buoyed Francis’s spirit. They were both questing for the behavior that was proper to their station and their unutterable dreams. They both knew intimately the etiquette, the taboos, the protocol of bums. By their talk to each other they understood that they shared a belief in the brotherhood of the desolate; yet in the scars of their eyes they confirmed that no such fraternity had ever existed, that the only brotherhood they belonged to was the one that asked that enduring question: How do I get through the next twenty minutes? They feared drys, cops, jailers, bosses, moralists, crazies, truth-tellers, and one another. They loved storytellers, liars, whores, fighters, singers, collie dogs that wagged their tails, and generous bandits. Rudy, thought Francis: he’s just a bum, but who ain’t?

“You live there a long time?” Rudy asked.

“Eighteen years,” Francis said. “The old lock was just down from my house.”

“What kind of lock?”

“On the Erie Canal, you goddamn dimwit. I could throw a stone from my stoop twenty feet over the other side of the canal.”

“I never saw the canal, but I seen the river.”

“The river was a little ways further over. Still is. The lumber district’s gone and all that’s left is the flats where they filled the canal in. Jungle town been built up on ‘em right down there. I stayed there one night last week with an old bo, a pal of mine. Tracks run right past it, same tracks I went west on out to Dayton to play ball. I hit.387 that year.”

“What year was that?”

“‘Oh-one.”

“I was five years old,” Rudy said.

“How old are you now, about eight?”

They passed the old carbarns at Erie Street, all full of buses. Buildings a different color, and more of ‘em, but it looks a lot like it looked in ‘16. The trolley full of scabs and soldiers left this barn that day in ‘01 and rocketed arrogantly down Broadway, the street supine and yielding all the way to downtown. But then at Columbia and Broadway the street changed its pose: it became volatile with the rage of strikers and their women, who trapped the car at that corner between two blazing bedsheets which Francis helped to light on the overhead electric wire. Soldiers on horses guarded the trolley; troops with rifles rode on it. But every scabby-souled one of them was trapped between pillars of fire when Francis pulled back, wound up his educated right arm, and let fly that smooth round stone the weight of a baseball, and brained the scab working as the trolley conductor. The troops saw more stones coming and fired back at the mob, hitting two men who fell in fatal slumps; but not Francis, who ran down to the railroad tracks and then north along them till his lungs blew out. He pitched forward into a ditch and waited about nine years to see if they were on his tail, and they weren’t, but his brother Chick and his buddies Patsy McCall and Martin Daugherty were; and when the three of them reached his ditch they all ran north, up past the lumberyards in the district, and found refuge with Iron Joe Farrell, Francis’s father-in-law, who bossed the filtration plant that made Hudson River water drinkable for Albany folk. And after a while, when he knew for sure he couldn’t stay around Albany because the scab was surely dead, Francis hopped a train going north, for he couldn’t get a westbound without going back down into that wild city. But it was all right. He went north and then he walked awhile and found his way to some westbound tracks, and went west on them, all the way west to Dayton, O-hi-o.

That scab was the first man Francis Phelan ever killed. His name was Harold Allen and he was a single man from Worcester, Massachusetts, a member of the IOOF, of Scotch-Irish stock, twenty-nine years old, two years of college, veteran of the Spanish-American War who had seen no combat, an itinerant house painter who found work in Albany as a strikebreaker and who was now sitting across the aisle of the bus from Francis, dressed in a long black coat and a motorman’s cap.

Why did you kill me? was the question Harold Allen’s eyes put to Francis.

“Didn’t mean to kill you,” Francis said.

Was that why you threw that stone the size of a potato and broke open my skull? My brains flowed out and I died.

“You deserved what you got. Scabs get what they ask for. I was right in what I did.”

Then you feel no remorse at all.

“You bastards takin’ our jobs, what kind of man is that, keeps a man from feedin’ his family?”

Odd logic coming from a man who abandoned his own family not only that summer but every spring and summer thereafter, when baseball season started. And didn’t you finally abandon them permanently in 1916? The way I understand it, you haven’t even been home for a visit in twenty-two years.

“There are reasons. That stone. The soldiers would’ve shot me. And I had to play ball-it’s what I did. Then I dropped my baby son and he died and I couldn’t face that.”

A coward, he’ll run.

“Francis is no coward. He had his reasons and they were goddamn good ones.”

You have no serious arguments to justify what you did.

“I got arguments,” Francis yelled, “I got arguments.”

“Whatayou got arguments about?” Rudy asked.

“Down there,” Francis said, pointing toward the tracks beyond the carbarns, “I was in this boxcar and didn’t know where I was goin’ except north, but it seemed I was safe. It wasn’t movin’ very fast or else I couldn’t of got into it. I’m lookin’ out, and up there ahead I see this young fella runnin’ like hell, runnin’ like I’d just run, and I see two guys chasm’ him, and one of them two doin’ the chasm’ looks like a cop and he’s shootin’. Stoppin’ and shootin’. But this fella keeps runnin’, and we’re gettin’ to him when I see another one right behind him. They’re both headin’ for the train, and I peek around the door, careful so’s I don’t got me shot, and I see the first one grab hold of a ladder on one of the cars, and he’s up, he’s up, and they’re still shootin,’ and then damn if we don’t cross that road just about the time the second fella gets to the car I’m ridin’ in, and he yells up to me: Help me, help me, and they’re shootin’ like sonsabitches at him and sure as hell I help him, they’re gonna shoot at me too.”

“What’d you do?” Rudy asked.

“I slid on my belly over to the edge of the car, givin’ them shooters a thin target, and I give that fella a hand, and he’s grabbin’ at it, almost grabbin’ it, and I’m almost gettin’ a full purchase on him, and then whango bango, they shoot him right in the back and that’s all she wrote. Katie bar the door. Too wet to plow. He’s all done, that fella, and I roll around back in the car and don’t find out till we get to Whitehall, when the other fella drops into my boxcar, that they both was prisoners and they was on their way to the county jail in Albany. But then there was this big trolley strike with shootin’ and stuff because some guy threw a stone and killed a scab. And that got this mob of people in the street all mixed up and crazy and they was runnin’ every which way and the deputies guardin’ these two boys got a little careless and so off went the boys. They run and hid awhile and then lit out and run some more, about three miles or so, same as me, and them deputies picked up on ‘em and kept right after them all the way. They never did get that first fella. He went to Dayton with me, ‘preciated what I tried to do for his buddy and even stole two chickens when we laid over in some switchyards somewheres and got us a fine meal. We cooked it up right in the boxcar. He was a murderer, that fella. Strangled some lady in Selkirk and couldn’t say why he done it. The one that got shot in the back, he was a horse thief.”

“I guess you been mixed up in a lot of violence,” Rudy said.

“If it draws blood or breaks heads,” said Francis, “I know how it tastes.”

The horse thief was named Aldo Campione, an immigrant from the town of Teramo in the Abruzzi. He’d come to America to seek his fortune and found work building the Barge Canal. But as a country soul he was distracted by an equine opportunity in the town of Coeymans, was promptly caught, jailed, transported to Albany for trial, and shot in the back escaping. His lesson to Francis was this: that life is full of caprice and missed connections, that thievery is wrong, especially if you get caught, that even Italians cannot outrun bullets, that a proffered hand in a moment of need is a beautiful thing. All this Francis knew well enough, and so the truest lesson of Aldo Campione resided not in intellected fact but in spectacle; for Francis can still remember Aldo’s face as it came toward him. It looked like his own, which is perhaps why Francis put himself in jeopardy: to save his own face with his own hand. On came Aldo toward the open boxcar door. Out went the hand of Francis Phelan. It touched the curved fingers of Aldo’s right hand. Francis’s fingers curved and pulled. And there was tension. Tension! On came Aldo yielding to that tension, on and on and lift! Leap! Pull, Francis, pull! And then up, yes up! The grip was solid. The man was in the air, flying toward safety on the great right hand of Francis Phelan. And then whango bango and he let go. Whango bango and he’s down, and he’s rolling, and he’s dead. Katie bar the door.

When the bus stopped at the corner of Broadway and Columbia Street, the corner where that infamous trolley was caught between flaming bedsheets, Aldo Campione boarded. He was clad in a white flannel suit, white shirt, and white necktie, and his hair was slicked down with brilliantine. Francis knew instantly that this was not the white of innocence but of humility. The man had been of low birth, low estate, and committed a low crime that had earned him the lowliest of deaths in the dust. Over there on the other side they must’ve give him a new suit. And here he came down the aisle and stopped at the seats where Rudy and Francis sat. He reached out his hand in a gesture to Francis that was ambiguous. It might have been a simple Abruzzian greeting. Or was it a threat, or a warning? It might have been an offer of belated gratitude, or even a show of compassion for a man like Francis who had lived long (for him), suffered much, and was inching toward death. It might have been a gesture of grace, urging, or even welcoming Francis into the next. And at this thought, Francis, who had raised his hand to meet Aldo’s, withdrew it.

“I ain’t shakin’ hands with no dead horse thief,” he said.

“I ain’t no horse thief,” Rudy said.

“Well you look like one,” Francis said.

By then the bus was at Madison Avenue and Broadway, and Rudy and Francis stepped out into the frosty darkness of six o’clock on, the final night of October 1938, the unruly night when grace is always in short supply, and the old and the new dead walk abroad in this land.

o o o

In the dust and sand of a grassless vacant lot beside the Mission of Holy Redemption, a human form lay prostrate under a lighted mission window. The sprawl of the figure arrested Francis’s movement when he and Rudy saw it. Bodies in alleys, bodies in gutters, bodies anywhere, were part of his eternal landscape: a physical litany of the dead. This one belonged to a woman who seemed to be doing the dead man’s float in the dust: face down, arms forward, legs spread.

“Hey,” Rudy said as they stopped. “That’s Sandra.”

“Sandra who?” said Francis.

“Sandra There-ain’t-no-more. She’s only got one name, like Helen. She’s an Eskimo.”

“You dizzy bastard. Everybody’s an Eskimo or a Cherokee.”

“No, that’s the straight poop. She used to work up in Alaska when they were buildin’ roads.”

“She dead?”

Rudy bent down, picked up Sandra’s hand and held it. Sandra pulled it away from him.

“No,” Rudy said, “she ain’t dead.”

“Then you better get up outa there, Sandra,” Francis said, “or the dogs’ll eat your ass off.”

Sandra didn’t move. Her hair streamed out of her inertness, long, yellow-white wisps floating in the dust, her faded and filthy cotton housedress twisted above the back of her knees, revealing stockings so full of holes and runs that they had lost their integrity as stockings. Over her dress she wore two sweaters, both stained and tattered. She lacked a left shoe. Rudy bent over and tapped her on the shoulder.

“Hey Sandra, it’s me, Rudy. You know me?”

“Hnnn,” said Sandra.

“You all right? You sick or anything, or just drunk?”

“Dnnn,” said Sandra.

“She’s just drunk,” Rudy said, standing up. “She can’t hold it no more. She falls over.”

“She’ll freeze there and the dogs’ll come along and eat her ass off,” Francis said.

“What dogs?” Rudy asked.

“The dogs, the dogs. Ain’t you seen them?”

“I don’t see too many dogs. I like cats. I see a lotta cats.”

“If she’s drunk she can’t go inside the mission,” Francis said.

“That’s right,” said Rudy. “She comes in drunk, he kicks her right out. He hates drunk women more’n he hates us.”

“Why the hell’s he preachin’ if he don’t preach to people that need it?”

“Drunks don’t need it,” Rudy said. “How’d you like to preach to a room full of bums like her?”

“She a bum or just on a heavy drunk?”

“She’s a bum.”

“She looks like a bum.”

“She’s been a bum all her life.”

“No,” said Francis. “Nobody’s a bum all their life. She hada been somethin’ once.”

“She was a whore before she was a bum.”

“And what about before she was a whore?”

“I don’t know,” Rudy said. “She just talks about whorin’ in Alaska. Before that I guess she was just a little kid.”

“Then that’s somethin’. A little kid’s somethin’ that ain’t a bum or a whore.”

Francis saw Sandra’s missing shoe in the shadows and retrieved it. He set it beside her left foot, then squatted and spoke into her left ear.

“You gonna freeze here tonight, you know that? Gonna be frost, freezin’ weather. Could even snow. You hear? You oughta get yourself inside someplace outa the cold. Look, I slept the last two nights in the weeds and it was awful cold, but tonight’s colder already than it was either of them nights. My hands is half froze and I only been walkin’ two blocks. Sandra? You hear what I’m sayin’? If I got you a cup of hot soup would you drink it? Could you? You don’t look like you could but maybe you could. Get a little hot soup in, you don’t freeze so fast. Or maybe you wanna freeze tonight, maybe that’s why you’re layin’ in the goddamn dust. You don’t even have any weeds to keep the wind outa your ears. I like them deep weeds when I sleep outside. You want some soup?”

Sandra turned her head and with one eye looked up at Francis.

“Who you?”

“I’m just a bum,” Francis said. “But I’m sober and I can get you some soup.”

“Get me a drink?”

“No, I ain’t got money for that.”

“Then soup.”

“You wanna stand up?”

“No. I’ll wait here.”

“You’re gettin’ all dusty.”

“That’s good.”

“Whatever you say,” Francis said, standing up. “But watch out for them dogs.”

She whimpered as Rudy and Francis left the lot. The night sky was black as a bat and the wind was bringing ice to the world. Francis admitted the futility of preaching to Sandra. Who could preach to Francis in the weeds? But that don’t make it right that she can’t go inside to get warm. Just because you’re drunk don’t mean you ain’t cold.

“Just because you’re drunk don’t mean you ain’t cold,” he said to Rudy.

“Right,” said Rudy. “Who said that?”

“I said that, you ape.”

“I ain’t no ape.”

“Well you look like one.”

From the mission came sounds made by an amateur organist of fervent aggression, and of several voices raised in praise of good old Jesus. where’d we all be without him? The voices belonged to the Reverend Chester, and to half a dozen men in shirt sleeves who sat in the front rows of the chapel area’s folding chairs. Reverend Chester, a gargantuan man with a clubfoot, wild white hair, and a face flushed permanently years ago by a whiskey condition all his own, stood behind the lectern looking out at maybe forty men and one woman.

Helen.

Francis saw her as he entered, saw her gray beret pulled off to the left, recognized her old black coat. She held no hymnal as the others did, but sat with arms folded in defiant resistance to the possibility of redemption by any Methodist like Chester; for Helen was a Catholic. And any redemption that came her way had better be through her church, the true church, the only church.

“Jesus,” the preacher and his shirt-sleeved loyalists sang, “the name that charms our fears, That bids our sorrows cease, ‘Tis music in the sinners’ ears, ‘Tis life and health and peace…”

The remaining seven eighths of Reverend Chester’s congregation, men hiding inside their overcoats, hats in their laps if they had hats, their faces grimed and whiskered and woebegone, remained mute, or gave the lyrics a perfunctory mumble, or nodded already in sleep. The song continued: “… He breaks the power of canceled sin, He sets the prisoner free; His blood can make the foulest clean, His blood availed for me.”

Well not me, Francis said to his unavailed-for self, and he smelled his own uncanceled stink again, aware that it had intensified since morning. The sweat of a workday, the sourness of dried earth on his hands and clothes, the putrid perfume of the cemetery air with its pretension to windblown purity, all this lay in foul encrustation atop the private pestilence of his being. When he threw himself onto Gerald’s grave, the uprush of a polluted life all but asphyxiated him.

“Hear him, ye deaf; his praise, ye dumb, Your loosened tongues employ; Ye blind, behold your Savior come; and leap, ye lame, for joy.”

The lame and the halt put their hymnals down joylessly, and Reverend Chester leaned over his lectern to look at tonight’s collection. Among them, as always, were good men and straight, men honestly without work, victims of a society ravaged by avarice, sloth, stupidity, and a God made wrathful by Babylonian excesses. Such men were merely the transients in the mission, and to them a preacher could only wish luck, send prayer, and provide a meal for the long road ahead. The true targets of the preacher were the others: the dipsos, the deadbeats, the wetbrains, and the loonies, who needed more than luck. What they needed was a structured way, a mentor and guide through the hells and purgatories of their days. Bringing the word, the light, was a great struggle today, for the decline of belief was rampant and the anti-Christ was on the rise. It was prophesied in Matthew and in Revelation that there would be less and less reverence for the Bible, greater lawlessness, depravity, and selfindulgence. The world, the light, the song, they would all die soon, for without doubt we were witnessing the advent of end times.

“Lost,” said the preacher, and he waited for the word to resound in the sanctums of their damaged brains. “Oh lost, lost forever. Men and women lost, hopeless. Who will save you from your sloth? Who will give you a ride on the turnpike to salvation? Jesus will! Jesus delivers!”

The preacher screamed the word delivers and woke up half the congregation. Rudy, on the nod, flared into wakefulness with a wild swing of the left arm that knocked the hymnal out of Francis’s grip. The book fell to the floor with a splat that brought Reverend Chester eye-to-eye with Francis. Francis nodded and the preacher gave him a firm and flinty smile in return.

The preacher then took the beatitudes for his theme. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.

“Oh yes, you men of skid row, brethren on the poor streets of the one eternal city we all dwell in, do not grieve that your spirit is low. Do not fear the world because you are of a meek and gentle nature. Do not feel that your mournful tears are in vain, for these things are the keys to the kingdom of God.”

The men went swiftly back to sleep and Francis resolved he would wash the stink of the dead off his face and hands and hit Chester up for a new pair of socks. Chester was happiest when he was passing out socks to dried-out drunks. Feed the hungry, clothe the sober.

“Are you ready for peace of mind and heart?” the preacher asked. “Is there a man here tonight who wants a different life? God says: Come unto me. Will you take him at his word? Will you stand up now? Come to the front, kneel, and we will talk. Do this now and be saved. Now. Now. Now!”

No one moved.

“Then amen, brothers,” said the preacher testily, and he left the lectern.

“Hot goddamn,” Francis said to Rudy. “Now we get at that soup.”

Then began the rush of men to table, the pouring of coffee, ladling of soup, cutting of bread by the mission’s zealous volunteers. Francis sought out Pee Wee, a good old soul who managed the mission for Chester, and he asked him for a cup of soup for Sandra.

“She oughta be let in,” Francis said. “She’s gonna freeze out there.”

“She was in before,” Pee Wee said. “He wouldn’t let her stay. She was really shot, and you know him on that. He won’t mind on the soup, but just for the hell of it, don’t say where it’s going.”

“Secret soup,” Francis said.

He took the soup out the back door, pulling Rudy along with him, and crossed the vacant lot to where Sandra lay as before. Rudy rolled her onto her back and sat her up, and Francis put the soup under her nose.

“Soup,” he said.

“Gazoop,” Sandra said.

“Have it.” Francis put the cup to her lips and tipped the soup at her mouth. It dribbled down her chin. She swallowed none.

“She don’t want it,” Rudy said.

“She wants it,” Francis said. “She’s just pissed it ain’t wine.”

He tried again and Sandra swallowed a little.

“When I was sleepin’ inside just now,” Rudy said, “I remembered Sandra wanted to be a nurse. Or used to be a nurse. That right, Sandra?”

“No,” Sandra said.

“No, what? Wanted to be a nurse or was a nurse?”

“Doctor,” Sandra said.

“She wanted to be a doctor,” Francis said, tipping in more soup.

“No,” Sandra said, pushing the soup away. Francis put the cup down and slipped her ratty shoe onto her left foot. He lifted her, a feather, carried her to the wall of the mission, and propped her into a sitting position, her back against the building, somewhat out of the wind. With his bare hand he wiped the masking dust from her face. He raised the soup and gave her another swallow.

“Doctor wanted me to be a nursie,” she said.

“But you didn’t want it,” Francis said.

“Did. But he died.”

“Ah,” said Francis. “Love?”

“Love,” said Sandra.

Inside the mission, Francis handed the cup back to Pee Wee, who emptied it into the sink.

“She all right?” Pee Wee asked.

“Terrific,” Francis said.

“The ambulance won’t even pick her up anymore,” Pee Wee said. “Not unless she’s bleedin’ to death.”

Francis nodded and went to the bathroom, where he washed Sandra’s dust and his own stink off his hands. Then he washed his face and his neck and his ears; and when he was finished he washed them all again. He sloshed water around in his mouth and brushed his teeth with his left index finger. He wet his hair and combed it with nine fingers and dried himself with a damp towel that was tied to the wall. Some men were already leaving by the time he picked up his soup and bread and sat down beside Helen.

“Where you been hidin’?” he asked her.

“A fat lot you care where anybody is or isn’t. I could be dead in the street three times over and you wouldn’t know a thing about it.”

“How the hell could I when you walk off like a crazy woman, yellin’ and stompin’.”

“Who wouldn’t be crazy around you, spending every penny we get. You go out of your mind, Francis.”

“I got some money.”

“How much?”

“Six bucks.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“I worked all the damn day in the cemetery, fillin’ up graves. Worked hard.”

“Francis, you did?”

“I mean all day.”

“That’s wonderful. And you’re sober. And you’re eating.”

“Ain’t drinkin’ no wine either. I ain’t even smokin’.”

“Oh that’s so lovely. I’m very proud of my good boy.”

Francis scarfed up the soup, and Helen smiled and sipped the last of her coffee. More than half the men were gone from table now, Rudy still eating with a partial mind across from Francis. Pee Wee and his plangently compassionate volunteers picked up dishes and carried them to the kitchen. The preacher finished his coffee and strode over to Francis.

“Glad to see you staying straight,” the preacher said.

“Okay,” said Francis.

“And how are you, little lady?” he asked Helen.

“I’m perfectly delightful,” Helen said.

“I believe I’ve got a job for you if you want it, Francis,” the preacher said.

“I worked today up at the cemetery.”

“Splendid.”

“Shovelin’ dirt ain’t my idea of that much of a job.”

“Maybe this one is better. Old Rosskam the ragman came here today looking for a helper. I’ve sent him men from time to time and I thought of you. If you’re serious about quitting the hooch you might put a decent penny together.”

“Ragman,” Francis said. “Doin’ what, exactly?”

“Going house to house on the wagon. Rosskam himself buys the rags and bottles, old metal, junk, papers, no garbage. Carts it himself too, but he’s getting on and needs another strong back.”

“Where’s he at?”

“ Green Street, below the bridge.”

“I’ll go see him and I ‘preciate it. Tell you what else I’d ‘preciate’s a pair of socks, if you can spare ‘em. Ones I got are all rotted out.”

“What size?”

“Tens. But I’ll take nines, or twelves.”

“I’ll get you some tens. And keep up the good work, Franny. Nice to see you’re doing well too, little lady.”

“I’m doing very well,” Helen said. “Very exceptionally well.” When he walked away she said: “He says it’s nice I’m doing well. I’m doing just fine, and I don’t need him to tell me I’m doing well.”

“Don’t fight him,” Francis said. “He’s givin’ me some socks.”

“We gonna get them jugs?” Rudy asked Francis. “Go somewheres and get a flop?”

“Jugs?” said Helen.

“That’s what I said this mornin’,” Francis said. “No, no jugs.”

“With six dollars we could get a room and get our suitcase back,” Helen said.

“I can’t spend all six,” Francis said. “I gotta give some to the lawyer. I figure I’ll give him a deuce. After all, he got me the job and I owe him fifty.”

“Where do you plan to sleep?” Helen asked.

“Where’d you sleep last night?”

“I found a place.”

“Finny’s car?”

“No, not Finny’s car. I won’t stay there anymore, you know that. I will absolutely not stay in that car another night.”

“Then where’d you go?”

“Where did you sleep?”

“I slept in the weeds,” Francis said.

“Well I found a bed.”

“Where, goddamn it, where?”

“Up at Jack’s.”

“I thought you didn’t like Jack anymore, or Clara either.”

“They’re not my favorite people, but they gave me a bed when I needed one.”

“Somethin’ to be said for that,” Francis said.

Pee Wee came over with a second cup of coffee and sat across from Helen. Pee Wee was bald and fat and chewed cigars all day long without lighting them. He had cut hair in his younger days, but when his wife cleaned out their bank account, poisoned Pee Wee’s dog, and ran away with the barber whom Pee Wee, by dint of hard work and superior tonsorial talent, had put of of business, Pee Wee started drinking and wound up on the bum. Yet he carried his comb and scissors everywhere to prove his talent was not just a bum’s fantasy, and gave haircuts to other bums for fifteen cents, sometimes a nickel. He still gave haircuts, free now, at the mission.

When Francis came back to Albany in 1935, he met Pee Wee for the first time and they stayed drunk together for a month. When Francis turned up in Albany only weeks back to register for the Democrats at five dollars a shot, he met Pee Wee again. Francis registered to vote twenty-one times before the state troopers caught up with him and made him an Albany political celebrity. The pols had paid him fifty by then and still owed him fifty-five more that he’d probably never see. Pee Wee was off the juice when Francis met him the second time, and was full of energy, running the mission for Chester. Pee Wee was peaceful now, no longer the singing gin-drinker he used to be. Francis still felt good things about him, but now thought of him as an emotional cripple, dry, yeah, but at what cost?

“You see who’s playin’ over at The Gilded Cage?” Pee Wee asked Francis.

“I don’t read the papers.”

“Oscar Reo.”

“You mean our Oscar?”

“The same.”

“What’s he doin’?”

“Singin’ bartender. How’s that for a comedown?”

“Oscar Reo who used to be on the radio?” Helen asked.

“That’s the fella,” said Pee Wee. “He blew the big time on booze, but he dried out and tends bar now. At least he’s livin’, even if it ain’t what it was.”

“Pee Wee and me pitched a drunk with him in New York. Two, three days, wasn’t it, Pee?”

“Mighta been a week,” Pee Wee said. “None of us was up to keepin’ track. But he sang a million tunes and played piano everyplace they had one. Most musical drunk I ever see.”

“I used to sing his songs,” Helen said. “‘Hindustan Lover’ and ‘Georgie Is My Apple Pie’ and another one, a grand ballad, ‘Under the Peach Trees with You.’ He wrote wonderful, happy songs and I sang them all when I was singing.”

“I didn’t know you sang,” Pee Wee said.

“Well I most certainly sang, and played piano very well too. I was getting a classical education in music until my father died. I was at Vassar.”

“Albert Einstein went to Vassar,” Rudy said.

“You goofy bastard,” said Francis.

“Went there to make a speech. I read it in the papers.”

“He could have,” Helen said. “Everybody speaks at Vassar. It just happens to be one of the three best schools in the world.”

“We oughta go over and see old Oscar,” Francis said.

“Not me,” said Pee Wee.

“No,” said Helen.

“What no?” Francis said. “You afraid we’d all get drunked up if we stopped in to say hello?”

“I’m not afraid of that.”

“Then let’s go see him. He’s all right, Oscar.”

“Think he’ll remember you?” Pee Wee said.

“Maybe. I remember him.”

“So do I.”

“Then let’s go.”

“I wouldn’t drink anything,” Pee Wee said. “I ain’t been in a bar in two years.”

“They got ginger ale. You allowed to drink ginger ale?”

“I hope it’s not expensive,” Helen said.

“Just what you drink,” Pee Wee said. “About usual.”

“Is it snooty?”

“It’s a joint, old-timey, but it pulls in the slummers. That’s half the trade.”

Reverend Chester stepped lively across the room and thrust at Francis a pair of gray woolen socks, his mouth a crescent of pleasure and his great chest heaving with beneficence.

“Try these for size,” he said.

“I thank ya for ‘em,” said Francis.

“They’re good and warm.”

“Just what I need. Nothin’ left of mine.”

“It’s fine that you’re off the drink. You’ve got a strong look about you today.”

“Just a false face for Halloween.”

“Don’t run yourself down. Have faith.”

The door to the mission opened and a slim young man in bifocals and a blue topcoat two sizes small for him, his carroty hair a field of cowlicks, stood in its frame. He held the doorknob with one hand and stood directly under the inside ceiling light, casting no shadow.

“Shut the door,” Pee Wee yelled, and the young man stepped in and shut it. He stood looking at all in the mission, his face a cracked plate, his eyes panicked and rabbity.

“That’s it for him,” Pee Wee said.

The preacher strode to the door and stood inches from the young man, studying him, sniffing him.

“You’re drunk,” the preacher said.

“I only had a couple.”

“Oh no. You’re in the beyond.”

“Honest,” said the young man. “Two bottles of beer.”

“Where did you get the money for beer?”

“A fella paid me what he owed me.”

“You panhandled it.”

“No.”

“You’re a bum.”

“I just had a drink, Reverend.”

“Get your things together. I told you I wouldn’t put up with this a third time. Arthur, get his bags.”

Pee Wee stood up from the table and climbed the stairs to the rooms where the resident handful lived while they sorted out their lives. The preacher had invited Francis to stay if he could get the hooch out of his system. He would then have a clean bed, clean clothes, three squares, and a warm room with Jesus in it for as long as it took him to answer the question: What next? Pee Wee held the house record: eight months in the joint, and managing it after three, such was his zeal for abstention. No booze, no smoking upstairs (for drunks are fire hazards), carry your share of the work load, and then rise you must, rise you will, into the brilliant embrace of the just God. The kitchen volunteers stopped their work and came forward with solemnized pity to watch the eviction of one of their promising young men. Pee Wee came down with a suitcase and set it by the door.

“Give us a cigarette, Pee,” the young man said.

“Don’t have any.”

“Well roll one.”

“I said I don’t have any tobacco.”

“Oh.”

“You’ll have to leave now, Little Red,” the preacher said.

Helen stood up and came over to Little Red and put a cigarette in his hand. He took it and said nothing. Helen struck a match and lit it for him, then sat back down.

“I don’t have anyplace to go,” Little Red said, blowing smoke past the preacher.

“You should have thought of that before you started drinking. You are a contumacious young man.”

“I got noplace to put that bag. And I got a pencil and paper upstairs.”

“Leave it here. Come and get your pencil and paper when you get that poison out of your system and you can talk sense about yourself.”

“My pants are in there.”

“They’ll be all right. Nobody here will touch your pants.”

“Can I have a cup of coffee?”

“If you found money for beer, you can find money for coffee.”

“Where can I go?”

“I couldn’t begin to imagine. Come back sober and you may have some food. Now get a move on.”

Little Red grabbed the doorknob, opened the door, and took a step. Then he stepped back in and pointed at his suitcase.

“I got cigarettes there,” he said.

“Then get your cigarettes.”

Little Red undid the belt that held the suitcase together and rummaged for a pack of Camels. He rebuckled the belt and stood up.

“If I come back tomorrow…”

“We’ll see about tomorrow,” said the preacher, who grabbed the doorknob himself and pulled it to as he ushered Little Red out into the night.

“Don’t lose my pants,” Little Red called through the glass of the closing door.

o o o

Francis, wearing his new socks, was first out of the mission, first to cast an anxious glance around the corner of the building at Sandra, who sat propped where he had left her, her eyes sewn as tightly closed by the darkness as the eyes of a diurnal bird. Francis touched her firmly with a finger and she moved, but without opening her eyes. He looked up at the full moon, a silver cinder illuminating this night for bleeding women and frothing madmen, and which warmed him with the enormous shadow it thrust forward in his own path. When Sandra moved he leaned over and put the back of his hand against her cheek and felt the ice of her flesh.

“You got an old blanket or some old rags, any old bum’s coat to throw over her?” he asked Pee Wee, who stood in the shadows considering the encounter.

“I could get something,” Pee Wee said, and he loosened his keys and opened the door of the darkened mission: all lights off save the kitchen, which would remain bright until eleven, lockout time. Pee Wee opened the door and entered as Rudy, Helen, and Francis huddled around Sandra, watching her breathe. Francis had watched two dozen people suspire into death, all of them bums except for his father, and Gerald.

“Maybe if we cut her throat the ambulance’d take her,” Francis said.

“She doesn’t want an ambulance,” Helen said. “She wants to sleep it all away. I’ll bet she doesn’t even feel cold.”

“She’s a cake of ice.”

Sandra moved, turning her head toward the voices but without opening her eyes. “You got no wine?” she asked.

“No wine, honey,” Helen said.

Pee Wee came out with a stone-gray rag that might once have been a blanket and wrapped its rough doubleness around Sandra. He tucked it into the neck of her sweater, and with one end formed a cowl behind her head, giving her the look of a monastic beggar in sackcloth.

“I don’t want to look at her no more,” Francis said, and he walked east on Madison, the deepening chill aggravating his limp. Helen and Pee Wee fell in behind him, and Rudy after that.

“You ever know her, Pee Wee?” Francis asked. “I mean when she was in shape?”

“Sure. Everybody knew her. You took your turn. Then she got to givin’ love parties, is what she called ‘em. but she’d turn mean, first love you up and then bite you bad. Half-ruined enough guys so only strangers’d go with her. Then she stopped that and hung out with one bum name of Freddy and they specialized in one another about a year till he went somewheres and she didn’t.”

“Nobody suffers like a lover left behind,” Helen said.

“Well that’s a crock,” Francis said. “Lots suffer ain’t ever been in love even once.”

“They don’t suffer like those who have,” said Helen.

“Yeah. Where’s this joint, Pee Wee, Green Street?”

“Right. Couple of blocks. Where the old Gayety Theater used to be.”

“I used to go there. Watch them ladies’ ankles and cancanny crotches.”

“Be nice, Francis,” Helen said.

“I’m nice. I’m the nicest thing you’ll see all week.”

Goblins came at them on Green Street, hooded spooks, a Charlie Chaplin in whiteface, with derby, cane, and tash, and a girl wearing an enormous old bonnet with a fullsized bird on top of it.

“They gonna get us!” Francis said. “Look out!” He threw his arms in the air and shook himself in a fearful dance. The children laughed and spooked boo at him.

“Gee it’s a nice night,” Helen said. “Cold but nice and clear, isn’t it, Fran?”

“It’s nice,” Francis said. “It’s all nice.”

o o o

The Gilded Cage door opened into the old Gayety lobby, now the back end of a saloon that mimicked and mocked the Bowery pubs of forty years gone. Francis stood looking toward a pair of monumental, half-wrapped breasts that heaved beneath a hennaed wig and scarlet lips. The owner of these spectacular possessions was delivering outward from an elevated platform a song of anguish in the city: You would not insult me, sir, if Jack were only here, in a voice so devoid of musical quality that it mocked its own mockery.

“She’s terrible,” Helen said. “Awful.”

“She ain’t that good,” Francis said.

They stepped across a floor strewn with sawdust, lit by ancient chandeliers and sconces, all electric now, toward a long walnut bar with a shining brass bar rail and three gleaming spittoons. Behind the half-busy bar a man with high collar, string tie, and arm garters drew schooners of beer from a tap, and at tables of no significant location sat men and women Francis recognized: whores, bums, barflies. Among them, at other tables, sat men in business suits, and women with fox scarves and flyaway hats, whose presence was such that their tables this night were landmarks of social significance merely because they were sitting at them. Thus, The Gilded Cage was a museum of unnatural sociality, and the smile of the barman welcomed Francis, Helen, and Rudy, bums all, and Pee Wee, their clean-shirted friend, to the tableau.

“Table, folks?”

“Not while there’s a bar rail,” Francis said.

“Step up, brother. What’s your quaff?”

“Ginger ale,” said Pee Wee.

“I believe I’ll have the same,” said Helen.

“That beer looks tantalizin’,” Francis said.

“You said you wouldn’t drink,” Helen said.

“I said wine.”

The barman slid a schooner with a high collar across the bar to Francis and looked to Rudy, who ordered the same. The piano player struck up a medley of “She May Have Seen Better Days” and “My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon” and urged those in the audience who knew the lyrics to join in song.

“You look like a friend of mine,” Francis told the barman, drilling him with a smile and a stare. The barman, with a full head of silver waves and an eloquent white mustache, stared back long enough to ignite a memory. He looked from Francis to Pee Wee, who was also smiling:

“I think I know you two turks,” the barman said.

“You thinkin’ right,” Francis said, “except the last time I seen you, you wasn’t sportin’ that pussy-tickler.”

The barman stroked his silvery lip. “You guys got me drunk in New York.”

“You got us drunk in every bar on Third Avenue,” Pee Wee said.

The barman stuck out his hand to Francis.

“Francis Phelan,” said Francis, “and this here is Rudy the Kraut. He’s all right but he’s nuts.”

“My kind of fella,” Oscar said.

“Pee Wee Packer,” Pee Wee said with his hand out.

“I remember,” said Oscar.

“And this is Helen,” said Francis. “She hangs out with me, but damned if I know why.”

“Oscar Reo’s what I still go by. folks, and I really do remember you boys. But I don’t drink anymore.”

“Hey, me neither,” said Pee Wee.

“I ain’t turned it off yet,” Francis said. “I’m waitin’ till I retire.”

“He retired forty years ago,” Pee Wee said.

“That ain’t true. I worked all day today. Gettin’ rich. How you like my new duds?”

“You’re a sport,” Oscar said. “Can’t tell you from those swells over there.”

“Swells and bums, there ain’t no difference,” Francis said.

“Except swells like to look like swells,” Oscar said, “and bums like to look like bums. Am I right?”

“You’re a smart fella,” Francis said.

“You still singin’, Oscar?” Pee Wee asked.

“For my supper.”

“Well goddamn it,” Francis said, “give us a tune.”

“Since you’re so polite about it,” Oscar said. And he turned to the piano man and said: “‘Sixteen’ “; and instantly there came from the piano the strains of “Sweet Sixteen.”

“Oh that’s a wonderful song,” Helen said. “I remember you singing that on the radio.”

“How durable of you, my dear.”

Oscar sang into the bar microphone and, with great resonance and no discernible loss of control from his years with the drink, he turned time back to the age of the village green. The voice was as commonplace to an American ear as Jolson’s, or Morton Downey’s; and even Francis, who rarely listened to the radio, or ever had a radio to listen to in either the early or the modern age, remembered its pitch and its tremolo from the New York binge, when this voice by itself was a chorale of continuous joy for all in earshot, or so it seemed to Francis at a distance of years. And further, the attention that the bums, the swells, the waiters, were giving the man, proved that this drunk was not dead, not dying, but living an epilogue to a notable life. And yet, and yet… here he was, disguised behind a mustache, another cripple, his ancient, weary eyes revealing to Francis the scars of a blood brother, a man for whom life had been a promise unkept in spite of great success, a promise now and forever unkeepable. The man was singing a song that had grown old not from time but from wear. The song is frayed. The song is worn out.

The insight raised in Francis a compulsion to confess his every transgression of natural, moral, or civil law; to relentlessly examine and expose every flaw of his own character, however minor. What was it, Oscar, that did you in? Would you like to tell us all about it? Do you know? It wasn’t Gerald who did me. It wasn’t drink and it wasn’t baseball and it wasn’t really Mama. What was it that went bust, Oscar, and how come nobody ever found out how to fix it for us?

When Oscar segued perfectly into a second song, his talent seemed awesome to Francis, and the irrelevance of talent to Oscar’s broken life even more of a mystery. How does somebody get this good and why doesn’t it mean anything? Francis considered his own talent on the ball field of a hazy, sunlit yesterday: how he could follow the line of the ball from every crack of the bat, zap after it like a chicken hawk after a chick, how he would stroke and pocket its speed no matter whether it was lined at him or sizzled erratically toward him through the grass. He would stroke it with the predatory curve of his glove and begin with his right hand even then, whether he was running or falling, to reach into that leather pocket, spear the chick with his educated talons, and whip it across to first or second base, or wherever it needed to go and you’re out, man, you’re out. No ball player anywhere moved his body any better than Franny Phelan, a damn fieldin’ machine, fastest ever was.

Francis remembered the color and shape of his glove, its odor of oil and sweat and leather, and he wondered if Annie had kept it. Apart from his memory and a couple of clippings, it would be all that remained of a spent career that had blossomed and then peaked in the big leagues far too long after the best years were gone, but which brought with the peaking the promise that some belated and overdue glory was possible, that somewhere there was a hosannah to be cried in the name of Francis Phelan, one of the best sonsabitches ever to kick a toe into third base.

Oscar’s voice quavered with beastly loss on a climactic line of the song: Blinding tears falling as he thinks of his lost pearl, broken heart calling, oh yes, calling, dear old girl. Francis turned to Helen and saw her crying splendid, cathartic tears: Helen, with the image of inexpungeable sorrow in her cortex, with a lifelong devotion to forlorn love, was weeping richly for all the pearls lost since love’s old sweet song first was sung.

“Oh that was so beautiful, so beautiful,” Helen said to Oscar when he rejoined them at the beer spigot. “That’s absolutely one of my all-time favorites. I used to sing it myself.”

“A singer?” said Oscar. “Where was that?”

“Oh everywhere. Concerts, the radio. I used to sing on the air every night, but that was an age ago.”

“You should do us a tune.”

“Oh never,” said Helen.

“Customers sing here all the time,” Oscar said.

“No, no,” said Helen, “the way I look.”

“You look as good as anybody here,” Francis said.

“I could never,” said Helen. But she was readying herself to do what she could never, pushing her hair behind her ear, straightening her collar, smoothing her much more than ample front.

“What’ll it be?” Oscar said. “Joe knows ‘em all.”

“Let me think awhile.”

Francis saw that Aldo Campione was sitting at a table at the far end of the room and had someone with him. That son of a bitch is following me, is what Francis thought. He fixed his glance on the table and saw Aldo move his hand in an ambiguous gesture. What are you telling me, dead man, and who’s that with you? Aldo wore a white flower in the lapel of his white flannel suitcoat, a new addition since the bus. Goddamn dead people travelin’ in packs, buyin’ flowers. Francis studied the other man without recognition and felt the urge to walk over and take a closer look. But what if nobody’s sittin’ there? What if nobody sees these bozos but me? The flower girl came along with a full tray of white gardenias.

“Buy a flower, sir?” she asked Francis.

“Why not? How much?”

“Just a quarter.”

“Give us one.”

He fished a quarter out of his pants and pinned the gardenia on Helen’s lapel with a pin the girl handed him. “It’s been a while since I bought you flowers,” he said. “You gonna sing up there for us, you gotta put on the dog a little.”

Helen leaned over and kissed Francis on the mouth, which always made him blush when she did it in public. She was always a first-rate heller between the sheets, when there was sheets, when there was somethin’ to do between them.

“Francis always bought me flowers,” she said. “He’d get money and first thing he’d do was buy me a dozen roses, or a white orchid even. He didn’t care what he did with the money as long as I got my flowers first. You did that for me, didn’t you, Fran?”

“Sure did,” said Francis, but he could not remember buying an orchid, didn’t know what orchids looked like.

“We were lovebirds,” Helen said to Oscar, who was smiling at the spectacle of bum love at his bar. “We had a beautiful apartment up on Hamilton Street. We had all the dishes anybody’d ever need. We had a sofa and a big bed and sheets and pillowcases. There wasn’t anything we didn’t have, isn’t that right, Fran?”

“That’s right,” Francis said, trying to remember the place.

“We had flowerpots full of geraniums that we kept alive all winter long. Francis loved geraniums. And we had an icebox crammed full of food. We ate so well, both of us had to go on a diet. That was such a wonderful time.”

“When was that?” Pee Wee asked. “I didn’t know you ever stayed anyplace that long.”

“What long?”

“I don’t know. Months musta been if you had an apartment.”

“I was here awhile, six weeks maybe, once.”

“Oh we had it much longer than that,” Helen said.

“Helen knows,” Francis said. “She remembers. I can’t call one day different from another.”

“It was the drink,” Helen said. “Francis wouldn’t stop drinking and then we couldn’t pay the rent and we had to give up our pillowcases and our dishes. It was Haviland china, the very best you could buy. When you buy, buy the best, my father taught me. We had solid mahogany chairs and my beautiful upright piano my brother had been keeping. He didn’t want to give it up, it was so nice, but it was mine. Paderewski played on it once when he was in Albany in nineteen-oh-nine. I sang all my songs on it.”

“She played pretty fancy piano,” Francis said. “That’s no joke. Why don’t you sing us a song, Helen?”

“Oh I guess I will.”

“What’s your pleasure?” Oscar asked.

“I don’t know. ‘In the Good Old Summertime,’ maybe.”

“Right time to sing it,” Francis said, “now that we’re freezin’ our ass out there.”

“On second thought,” said Helen, “I want to sing one for Francis for buying me that flower. Does your friend know ‘He’s Me Pal,’ or ‘My Man’?”

“You hear that, Joe?”

“I hear,” said Joe the piano man, and he played a few bars of the chorus of “He’s Me Pal” as Helen smiled and stood and walked to the stage with an aplomb and grace befitting her reentry into the world of music, the world she should never have left, oh why ever did you leave it, Helen? She climbed the three steps to the platform, drawn upward by familiar chords that now seemed to her to have always evoked joy, chords not from this one song but from an era of songs, thirty, forty years of songs that celebrated the splendors of love, and loyalty, and friendship, and family, and country, and the natural world. Frivolous Sal was a wild sort of devil, but wasn’t she dead on the level too? Mary was a great pal, heaven-sent on Christmas morning, and love lingers on for her. The new-mown hay, the silvery moon, the home fires burning, these were sanctuaries of Helen’s spirit, songs whose like she had sung from her earliest days, songs that endured for her as long as the classics she had committed to memory so indelibly in her youth, for they spoke to her, not abstractly of the aesthetic peaks of the art she had once hoped to master, but directly, simply, about the everyday currency of the heart and soul. The pale moon will shine on the twining of our hearts. My heart is stolen, lover dear, so please don’t let us part. Oh love, sweet love, oh burning love-the songs told her-you are mine, I am yours, forever and a day. You spoiled the girl I used to be, my hope has gone away. Send me away with a smile, but remember: you’re turning off the sunshine of my life.

Love.

A flood tide of pity rose in Helen’s breast. Francis, oh sad man, was her last great love, but he wasn’t her only one. Helen has had a lifetime of sadnesses with her lovers. Her first true love kept her in his fierce embrace for years, but then he loosened that embrace and let her slide down and down until the hope within her died. Hopeless Helen, that’s who she was when she met Francis. And as she stepped up to the microphone on the stage of The Gilded Cage, hearing the piano behind her, Helen was a living explosion of unbearable memory and indomitable joy.

And she wasn’t a bit nervous either, thank you, for she was a professional who had never let the public intimidate her when she sang in a church, or at musicales, or at weddings, or at Woolworth’s when she sold song sheets, or even on the radio with that audience all over the city every night. Oscar Reo, you’re not the only one who sang for Americans over the airwaves. Helen had her day and she isn’t a bit nervous.

But she is… all right, yes, she is… a girl enveloped by private confusion, for she feels the rising ofjoy and sorrow simultaneously and she cannot say whether one or the other will take her over during the next few moments.

“What’s Helen’s last name?” Oscar asked.

“Archer,” Francis said. “Helen Archer.”

“Hey,” said Rudy, “how come you told me she didn’t have a last name?”

“Because it don’t matter what anybody tells you,” Francis said. “Now shut up and listen.”

“A real old-time trouper now,” said Oscar into the bar mike, “will give us a song or two for your pleasure, lovely Miss Helen Archer.”

And then Helen, still wearing that black rag of a coat rather than expose the even more tattered blouse and skirt that she wore beneath it, standing on her spindle legs with her tumorous belly butting the metal stand of the microphone and giving her the look of a woman five months pregnant, casting boldly before the audience this image of womanly disaster and fully aware of the dimensions of this image, Helen then tugged stylishly at her beret, adjusting it forward over one eye. She gripped the microphone with a sureness that postponed her disaster, at least until the end of this tune, and sang then “He’s Me Pal,” a ditty really, short and snappy, sang it with exuberance and wit, with a tilt of the head, a roll of the eyes, a twist of the wrist that suggested the proud virtues. Sure, he’s dead tough, she sang, but his love ain’t no bluff. Wouldn’t he share his last dollar with her? Hey, no millionaire will ever grab Helen. She’d rather have her pal with his fifteen a week. Oh Francis, if you only made just fifteen a week.

If you only.

The applause was full and long and gave Helen strength to begin “My Man,” Fanny Brice’s wonderful torch, and Helen Morgan’s too. Two Helens. Oh Helen, you were on the radio, but where did it take you? What fate was it that kept you from the great heights that were yours by right of talent and education? You were born to be a star, so many said it. But it was others who went on to the heights and you were left behind to grow bitter. How you learned to envy those who rose when you did not, those who never deserved it, had no talent, no training. There was Carla, from high school, who could not even carry a tune but who made a movie with Eddie Cantor, and there was Edna, ever so briefly from Woolworth’s, who sang in a Broadway show by Cole Porter because she learned how to wiggle her fanny. But ah, sweetness was Helen’s, for Carla went off a cliff in an automobile, and Edna sliced her wrists and bled her life away in her lover’s bathtub, and Helen laughed last. Helen is singing on a stage this very minute and just listen to the voice she’s left with after all her troubles. Look at those well-dressed people out there hanging on her every note.

Helen closed her eyes and felt tears forcing their way out and could not say whether she was blissfully happy or fatally sad. At some point it all came together and didn’t make much difference anyway, for sad or happy, happy or sad, life didn’t change for Helen. Oh, her man, how much she loves you. You can’t imagine. Poor girl, all despair now. If she went away she’d come back on her knees. Some day. She’s yours. Forevermore.

Oh thunder! Thunderous applause! And the elegant people are standing for Helen, when last did that happen? More, more, more, they yell, and she is crying so desperately now for happiness, or is it for loss, that it makes Francis and Pee Wee cry too. And even though people are calling for more, more, more, Helen steps delicately back down the three platform steps and walks proudly over to Francis with her head in the air and her face impossibly wet, and she kisses him on the cheek so all will know that this is the man she was talking about, in case you didn’t notice when we came in together. This is the man.

By god that was great, Francis says. You’re better’n anybody.

Helen, says Oscar, that was first-rate. You want a singing job here, you come round tomorrow and I’ll see the boss puts you on the payroll. That’s a grand voice you’ve got there, lady. A grand voice.

Oh thank you all, says Helen, thank you all so very kindly. It is so pleasant to be appreciated for your Godgiven talent and for your excellent training and for your natural presence. Oh I do thank you, and I shall come again to sing for you, you may be sure.

Helen closed her eyes and felt tears beginning to force their way out and could not say whether she was blissfully happy or devastatingly sad. Some odd-looking people were applauding politely, but others were staring at her with sullen faces. If they’re sullen, then obviously they didn’t think much of your renditions, Helen. Helen steps delicately back down the three steps, comes over to Francis, and keeps her head erect as he leans over and pecks her cheek.

“Mighty nice, old gal,” he says.

“Not bad at all,” Oscar says. “You’ll have to do it again sometime.”

Helen closed her eyes and felt tears forcing their way out and knew life didn’t change. If she went away she’d come back on her knees. It is so pleasant to be appreciated.

Helen, you are like a blackbird, when the sun comes out for a little while. Helen, you are like a blackbird made sassy by the sun. But what will happen to you when the sun goes down again?

I do thank you.

And I shall come again to sing for you.

Oh sassy blackbird! Oh!