Manhattan transfer

1 Rejoicing City That Dwelt Carelessly

There are flags on all the flagpoles up Fifth Avenue. In the shrill wind of history the great flags flap and tug at their lashings on the creaking goldknobbed poles up Fifth Avenue. The stars jiggle sedately against the slate sky, the red and white stripes writhe against the clouds.

In the gale of brassbands and trampling horses and rumbling clatter of cannon, shadows like the shadows of claws grasp at the taut flags, the flags are hungry tongues licking twisting curling.

Oh it’s a long way to Tipperary… Over there! Over there!

The harbor is packed with zebrastriped skunkstriped piebald steamboats, the Narrows are choked with bullion, they’re piling gold sovereigns up to the ceilings in the Subtreasury. Dollars whine on the radio, all the cables tap out dollars.

There’s a long long trail awinding… Over there! Over there!

In the subway their eyes pop as they spell out APOCALYPSE, typhus, cholera, shrapnel, insurrection, death in fire, death in water, death in hunger, death in mud.

Oh it’s a long way to Madymosell from Armenteers, over there! The Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming. Down Fifth Avenue the bands blare for the Liberty Loan drive, for the Red Cross drive. Hospital ships sneak up the harbor and unload furtively at night in old docks in Jersey. Up Fifth Avenue the flags of the seventeen nations are flaring curling in the shrill hungry wind.

O the oak and the ash and the weeping willow tree And green grows the grass in God’s country.

The great flags flap and tug at their lashings on the creaking goldknobbed poles up Fifth Avenue.

Captain James Merivale D.S.C. lay with his eyes closed while the barber’s padded fingers gently stroked his chin. The lather tickled his nostrils; he could smell bay rum, hear the drone of an electric vibrator, the snipping of scissors.

‘A little face massage sir, get rid of a few of those blackheads sir,’ burred the barber in his ear. The barber was bald and had a round blue chin.

‘All right,’ drawled Merivale, ‘go as far as you like. This is the first decent shave I’ve had since war was declared.’

‘Just in from overseas, Captain?’

‘Yare… been making the world safe for democracy.’

The barber smothered his words under a hot towel. ‘A little lilac water Captain?’

‘No dont put any of your damn lotions on me, just a little witchhazel or something antiseptic.’

The blond manicure girl had faintly beaded lashes; she looked up at him bewitchingly, her rosebud lips parted. ‘I guess you’ve just landed Captain… My you’ve got a good tan.’ He gave up his hand to her on the little white table. ‘It’s a long time Captain since anybody took care of these hands.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘Look how the cuticle’s grown.’

‘We were too busy for anything like that. I’m a free man since eight o’clock that’s all.’

‘Oh it must have been terr… ible.’

‘Oh it was a great little war while it lasted.’

‘I’ll say it was… And now you’re all through Captain?’

‘Of course I keep my commission in the reserve corps.’

She gave his hand a last playful tap and he got to his feet.

He put tips into the soft palm of the barber and the hard palm of the colored boy who handed him his hat, and walked slowly up the white marble steps. On the landing was a mirror. Captain James Merivale stopped to look at Captain James Merivale. He was a tall straightfeatured young man with a slight heaviness under the chin. He wore a neatfitting whipcord uniform picked out by the insignia of the Rainbow Division, well furnished with ribbons and servicestripes. The light of the mirror was reflected silvery on either calf of his puttees. He cleared his throat as he looked himself up and down. A young man in civilian clothes came up behind him.

‘Hello James, all cleaned up?’

‘You betcher… Say isnt it a damn fool rule not letting us wear Sam Browne belts? Spoils the whole uniform…’

‘They can take all their Sam Browne’s belts and hang them on the Commanding General’s fanny for all I care… I’m a civilian.’

‘You’re still an officer in the reserve corps, dont forget that.’

‘They can take their reserve corps and shove it ten thousand miles up the creek. Let’s go have a drink.’

‘I’ve got to go up and see the folks.’ They had come out on Fortysecond Street. ‘Well so long James, I’m going to get so drunk… Just imagine being free.’ ‘So long Jerry, dont do anything I wouldnt do.’

Merivale walked west along Fortysecond. There were still flags out, drooping from windows, waggling lazily from poles in the September breeze. He looked in the shops as he walked along; flowers, women’s stockings, candy, shirts and neckties, dresses, colored draperies through glinting plateglass, beyond a stream of faces, men’s razorscraped faces, girls’ faces with rouged lips and powdered noses. It made him feel flushed and excited. He fidgeted when he got in the subway. ‘Look at the stripes that one has… He’s a D.S.C.,’ he heard a girl say to another. He got out at Seventysecond and walked with his chest stuck out down the too familiar brownstone street towards the river.

‘How do you do, Captain Merivale,’ said the elevator man.

‘Well, are you out James?’ cried his mother running into his arms.

He nodded and kissed her. She looked pale and wilted in her black dress. Maisie, also in black, came rustling tall and rosy-cheeked behind her. ‘It’s wonderful to find you both looking so well.’

‘Of course we are… as well as could be expected. My dear we’ve had a terrible time… You’re the head of the family now, James.’

‘Poor daddy… to go off like that.’

‘That was something you missed… Thousands of people died of it in New York alone.’

He hugged Maisie with one arm and his mother with the other. Nobody spoke.

‘Well,’ said Merivale walking into the living room, ‘it was a great war while it lasted.’ His mother and sister followed on his heels. He sat down in the leather chair and stretched out his polished legs. ‘You dont know how wonderful it is to get home.’

Mrs Merivale drew up her chair close to his. ‘Now dear you just tell us all about it.’

In the dark of the stoop in front of the tenement door, he reaches for her and drags her to him. ‘Dont Bouy, dont; dont be rough.’ His arms tighten like knotted cords round her back; her knees are trembling. His mouth is groping for her mouth along one cheekbone, down the side of her nose. She cant breathe with his lips probing her lips. ‘Oh I cant stand it.’ He holds her away from him. She is staggering panting against the wall held up by his big hands.

‘Nutten to worry about,’ he whispers gently.

‘I’ve got to go, it’s late… I have to get up at six.’

‘Well what time do you think I get up?’

‘It’s mommer who might catch me…’

‘Tell her to go to hell.’

‘I will some day… worse’n that… if she dont quit pickin on me.’ She takes hold of his stubbly cheeks and kisses him quickly on the mouth and has broken away from him and run up the four flights of grimy stairs.

The door is still on the latch. She strips off her dancing pumps and walks carefully through the kitchenette on aching feet. From the next room comes the wheezy doublebarreled snoring of her uncle and aunt. Somebody loves me, I wonder who… The tune is all through her body, in the throb of her feet, in the tingling place on her back where he held her tight dancing with her. Anna you’ve got to forget it or you wont sleep. Anna you got to forget. Dishes on the tables set for breakfast jingle tingle hideously when she bumps against it.

‘That you Anna?’ comes a sleepy querulous voice from her mother’s bed.

‘Went to get a drink o water mommer.’ The old woman lets the breath out in a groan through her teeth, the bedsprings creak as she turns over. Asleep all the time.

Somebody loves me, I wonder who. She slips off her party dress and gets into her nightgown. Then she tiptoes to the closet to hang up the dress and at last slides between the covers little by little so the slats wont creak. I wonder who. Shuffle shuffle, bright lights, pink blobbing faces, grabbing arms, tense thighs, bouncing feet. I wonder who. Shuffle, droning saxophone tease, shuffle in time to the drum, trombone, clarinet. Feet, thighs, cheek to cheek, Somebody loves me… Shuffle shuffle. I wonder who.

The baby with tiny shut purplishpink face and fists lay asleep on the berth. Ellen was leaning over a black leather suitcase. Jimmy Herf in his shirtsleeves was looking out the porthole.

‘Well there’s the statue of Liberty… Ellie we ought to be out on deck.’

‘It’ll be ages before we dock… Go ahead up. I’ll come up with Martin in a minute.’

‘Oh come ahead; we’ll put the baby’s stuff in the bag while we’re warping into the slip.’

They came out on deck into a dazzling September afternoon. The water was greenindigo. A steady wind kept sweeping coils of brown smoke and blobs of whitecotton steam off the high enormous blueindigo arch of sky. Against a sootsmudged horizon, tangled with barges, steamers, chimneys of powerplants, covered wharves, bridges, lower New York was a pink and white tapering pyramid cut slenderly out of cardboard.

‘Ellie we ought to have Martin out so he can see.’

‘And start yelling like a tugboat… He’s better off where he is.’

They ducked under some ropes, slipped past the rattling steamwinch and out to the bow.

‘God Ellie it’s the greatest sight in the world… I never thought I’d ever come back, did you?’

‘I had every intention of coming back.’

‘Not like this.’

‘No I dont suppose I did.’

‘S’il vous plait madame…’

A sailor was motioning them back. Ellen turned her face into the wind to get the coppery whisps of hair out of her eyes. ‘C’est beau, n’est-ce pas?’ She smiled into the wind into the sailor’s red face.

‘J’aime mieux le Havre… S’il vous plait madame.’

‘Well I’ll go down and pack Martin up.’

The hard chug, chug of the tugboat coming alongside beat Jimmy’s answer out of her ears. She slipped away from him and went down to the cabin again.

They were wedged in the jam of people at the end of the gangplank.

‘Look we could wait for a porter,’ said Ellen.

‘No dear I’ve got them.’ Jimmy was sweating and staggering with a suitcase in each hand and packages under his arms. In Ellen’s arms the baby was cooing stretching tiny spread hands towards the faces all round.

‘D’you know it?’ said Jimmy as they crossed the gangplank, ‘I kinder wish we were just going on board… I hate getting home.’

‘I dont hate it… There’s H… I’ll follow right along… I wanted to look for Frances and Bob. Hello…’ ‘Well I’ll be…’ ‘Helena you’ve gained, you’re looking wonderfully. Where’s Jimps?’ Jimmy was rubbing his hands together, stiff and chafed from handles of the heavy suitcases.

‘Hello Herf. Hello Frances. Isn’t this swell?’

‘Gosh I’m glad to see you…’

‘Jimps the thing for me to do is go right on to the Brevoort with the baby…’

‘Isn’t he sweet.’

‘… Have you got five dollars?’

‘I’ve only got a dollar in change. That hundred is in express checks.’

‘I’ve got plenty of money. Helena and I’ll go to the hotel and you boys can come along with the baggage.’

‘Inspector is it all right if I go through with the baby? My husband will look after the trunks.’

‘Why surely madam, go right ahead.’

‘Isnt he nice? Oh Frances this is lots of fun.’

‘Go ahead Bob I can finish this up alone quicker… You convoy the ladies to the Brevoort.’

‘Well we hate to leave you.’

‘Oh go ahead… I’ll be right along.’

‘Mr James Herf and wife and infant… is that it?’

‘Yes that’s right.’

‘I’ll be right with you, Mr Herf… Is all the baggage there?’

‘Yes everything’s there.’

‘Isnt he good?’ clucked Frances as she and Hildebrand followed Ellen into the cab.

‘Who?’

‘The baby of course…’

‘Oh you ought to see him sometimes… He seems to like traveling.’

A plainclothesman opened the door of the cab and looked in as they went out the gate. ‘Want to smell our breaths?’ asked Hildebrand. The man had a face like a block of wood. He closed the door. ‘Helena doesn’t know prohibition yet, does she?’

‘He gave me a scare… Look.’

‘Good gracious!’ From under the blanket that was wrapped round the baby she produced a brownpaper package… ‘Two quarts of our special cognac… gout famille ’Erf… and I’ve got another quart in a hotwaterbottle under my waistband… That’s why I look as if I was going to have another baby.’

The Hildebrands began hooting with laughter.

‘Jimp’s got a hotwaterbottle round his middle too and chartreuse in a flask on his hip… We’ll probably have to go and bail him out of jail.’

They were still laughing so that tears were streaming down their faces when they drew up at the hotel. In the elevator the baby began to wail.

As soon as she had closed the door of the big sunny room she fished the hotwaterbottle from under her dress. ‘Look Bob phone down for some cracked ice and seltzer… We’ll all have a cognac a l’eau de selz…’

‘Hadn’t we better wait for Jimps?’

‘Oh he’ll be right here… We haven’t anything dutiable… Much too broke to have anything… Frances what do you do about milk in New York?’

‘How should I know, Helena?’ Frances Hildebrand flushed and walked to the window.

‘Oh well we’ll give him his food again… He’s done fairly well on it on the trip.’ Ellen had laid the baby on the bed. He lay kicking, looking about with dark round goldstone eyes.

‘Isnt he fat?’

‘He’s so healthy I’m sure he must be halfwitted… Oh Heavens and I’ve got to call up my father… Isnt family life just too desperately complicated?’

Ellen was setting up her little alcohol stove on the washstand. The bellboy came with glasses and a bowl of clinking ice and White Rock on a tray.

‘You fix us a drink out of the hotwaterbottle. We’ve got to use that up or it’ll eat the rubber… And we’ll drink to the Café d’Harcourt.’

‘Of course what you kids dont realize,’ said Hildebrand, ‘is that the difficulty under prohibition is keeping sober.’

Ellen laughed; she stood over the little lamp that gave out a quiet domestic smell of hot nickel and burned alcohol.

George Baldwin was walking up Madison Avenue with his light overcoat on his arm. His fagged spirits were reviving in the sparkling autumn twilight of the streets. From block to block through the taxiwhirring gasoline gloaming two lawyers in black frock coats and stiff wing collars argued in his head. If you go home it will be cozy in the library. The apartment will be gloomy and quiet and you can sit in your slippers under the bust of Scipio Africanus in the leather chair and read and have dinner sent in to you… Nevada would be jolly and coarse and tell you funny stories… She would have all the City Hall gossip… good to know… But you’re not going to see Nevada any more… too dangerous; she gets you all wrought up… And Cecily sitting faded and elegant and slender biting her lips and hating me, hating life… Good God how am I going to get my existence straightened out? He stopped in front of a flowerstore. A moist warm honied expensive smell came from the door, densely out into the keen steelblue street. If I could at least make my financial position impregnable… In the window was a minature Japanese garden with brokenback bridges and ponds where the goldfish looked big as whales. Proportion, that’s it. To lay out your life like a prudent gardener, plowing and sowing. No I wont go to see Nevada tonight. I might send her some flowers though. Yellow roses, those coppery roses… it’s Elaine who ought to wear those. Imagine her married again and with a baby. He went into the store. ‘What’s that rose?’

‘It’s Gold of Ophir sir.’

‘All right I want two dozen sent down to the Brevoort immediately… Miss Elaine… No Mr and Mrs James Herf… I’ll write a card.’

He sat down at the desk with a pen in his hand. Incense of roses, incense out of the dark fire of her hair… No nonsense for Heaven’s sake…

DEAR ELAINE

I hope you will allow an old friend to call on you and your husband one of these days. And please remember that I am always sincerely anxious – you know me too well to take this for an empty offer of politeness – to serve you and him in any way that could possibly contribute to your happiness. Forgive me if I subscribe myself your lifelong slave and admirer

GEORGE BALDWIN

The letter covered three of the florists’ white cards. He read it over with pursed lips, carefully crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s. Then he paid the florist from the roll of bills he took from his back pocket and went out into the street again. It was already night, going on to seven o’clock. Still hesitating he stood at the corner watching the taxis pass, yellow, red, green, tangerine-colored.

The snubnosed transport sludges slowly through the Narrows in the rain. Sergeant-Major O’Keefe and Private 1st Class Dutch Robertson stand in the lee of the deckhouse looking at the liners at anchor in quarantine and the low wharfcluttered shores.

‘Look some of em still got their warpaint – Shippin Board boats… Not worth the powder to blow em up.’

‘The hell they aint,’ said Joey O’Keefe vaguely.

‘Gosh little old New York’s goin to look good to me…’

‘Me too Sarge, rain or shine I dont care.’

They are passing close to a mass of steamers anchored in a block, some of them listing to one side or the other, lanky ships with short funnels, stumpy ships with tall funnels red with rust, some of them striped and splashed and dotted with puttycolor and blue and green of camouflage paint. A man in a motorboat waved his arms. The men in khaki slickers huddled on the gray dripping deck of the transport begin to sing

Through the brightbeaded mist behind the low buildings of Governors Island they can make out the tall pylons, the curving cables, the airy lace of Brooklyn Bridge. Robertson pulls a package out of his pocket and pitches it overboard.

‘What was that?’

‘Just my propho kit… Wont need it no more.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Oh I’m goin to live clean an get a good job and maybe get married.’

‘I guess that’s not such a bad idear. I’m tired o playin round myself. Jez somebody must a cleaned up good on them Shippin Board boats.’ ‘That’s where the dollar a year men get theirs I guess.’

‘I’ll tell the world they do.’

Up forward they are singing

‘Jez we’re goin up the East River Sarge. Where the devil do they think they’re goin to land us?’

‘God, I’d be willin to swim ashore myself. An just think of all the guys been here all this time cleanin up on us… Ten dollars a day workin in a shipyard mind you…’

‘Hell Sarge we got the experience.’

‘Experience…’

‘I bet the skipper’s been drinkin beaucoup highballs an thinks Brooklyn’s Hoboken.’

‘Well there’s Wall Street, bo.’

They are passing under Brooklyn Bridge. There is a humming whine of electric trains over their heads, an occasional violet flash from the wet rails. Behind them beyond barges tugboats carferries the tall buildings, streaked white with whisps of steam and mist, tower gray into sagged clouds.

Nobody said anything while they ate the soup. Mrs Merivale sat in black at the head of the oval table looking out through the half-drawn portieres and the drawingroom window beyond at a column of white smoke that uncoiled in the sunlight above the trainyards, remembering her husband and how they had come years ago to look at the apartment in the unfinished house that smelled of plaster and paint. At last when she had finished her soup she roused herself and said: ‘Well Jimmy, are you going back to newspaper work?’

‘I guess so.’

‘James has had three jobs offered him already. I think it’s remarkable.’

‘I guess I’ll go in with the Major though,’ said James Merivale to Ellen who sat next to him. ‘Major Goodyear you know, Cousin Helena… One of the Buffalo Goodyears. He’s head of the foreign exchange department of the Banker’s Trust… He says he can work me up quickly. We were friends overseas.’

‘That’ll be wonderful,’ said Maisie in a cooing voice, ‘wont it Jimmy?’ She sat opposite slender and rosy in her black dress.

‘He’s putting me up for Piping Rock,’ went on Merivale.

‘What’s that?’

‘Why Jimmy you must know… I’m sure Cousin Helena has been out there to tea many a time.’

‘You know Jimps,’ said Ellen with her eyes in her plate. ‘That’s where Stan Emery’s father used to go every Sunday.’

‘Oh did you know that unfortunate young man? That was a horrible thing,’ said Mrs Merivale. ‘So many horrible things have been happening these years… I’d almost forgotten about it.’

‘Yes I knew him,’ said Ellen.

The leg of lamb came in accompanied by fried eggplant, late corn, and sweet potatoes. ‘Do you know I think it is just terrible,’ said Mrs Merivale when she had done carving, ‘the way you fellows wont tell us any of your experiences over there… Lots of them must have been remarkably interesting. Jimmy I should think you’d write a book about your experiences.’

‘I have tried a few articles.’

‘When are they coming out?’

‘Nobody seems to want to print them… You see I differ radically in certain matters of opinion…’

‘Mrs Merivale it’s years since I’ve eaten such delicious sweet potatoes… These taste like yams.’

‘They are good… It’s just the way I have them cooked.’

‘Well it was a great war while it lasted,’ said Merivale.

‘Where were you Armistice night, Jimmy?’

‘I was in Jerusalem with the Red Cross. Isn’t that absurd?’

‘I was in Paris.’

‘So was I,’ said Ellen.

‘And so you were over there too Helena? I’m going to call you Helena eventually, so I might as well begin now… Isn’t that interesting? Did you and Jimmy meet over there?’

‘Oh no we were old friends… But we were thrown together a lot… We were in the same department of the Red Cross – the Publicity Department.’

‘A real war romance,’ chanted Mrs Merivale. ‘Isn’t that interesting?’

‘Now fellers it’s this way,’ shouted Joe O’Keefe, the sweat breaking out on his red face. ‘Are we going to put over this bonus proposition or aint we?… We fought for em didnt we, we cleaned up the squareheads, didnt we? And now when we come home we get the dirty end of the stick. No jobs… Our girls have gone and married other fellers… Treat us like a bunch o dirty bums and loafers when we ask for our just and legal and lawful compensation… the bonus. Are we goin to stand for it?… No. Are we goin to stand for a bunch of politicians treatin us like we was goin round to the back door to ask for a handout?… I ask you fellers…’

Feet stamped on the floor. ‘No.’ ‘To hell wid em,’ shouted voices… ‘Now I say to hell wid de politicians… We’ll carry our campaign to the country… to the great big generous bighearted American people we fought and bled and laid down our lives for.’

The long armory room roared with applause. The wounded men in the front row banged the floor with their crutches. ‘Joey’s a good guy,’ said a man without arms to a man with one eye and an artificial leg who sat beside him. ‘He is that Buddy.’ While they were filing out offering each other cigarettes, a man stood in the door calling out, ‘Committee meeting, Committee on Bonus.’

The four of them sat round a table in the room the Colonel had lent them. ‘Well fellers let’s have a cigar.’ Joe hopped over to the Colonel’s desk and brought out four Romeo and Juliets. ‘He’ll never miss em.’

‘Some little grafter I’ll say,’ said Sid Garnett stretching out his long legs.

‘Havent got a case of Scotch in there, have you Joey?’ said Bill Dougan.

‘Naw I’m not drinkin myself jus for the moment.’

‘I know where you kin get guaranteed Haig and Haig,’ put in Segal cockily – ‘before the war stuff for six dollars a quart.’

‘An where are we goin to get the six dollars for crissake?’

‘Now look here fellers,’ said Joe, sitting on the edge of the table, ‘let’s get down to brass tacks… What we’ve got to do is raise a fund from the gang and anywhere else we can… Are we agreed about that?’

‘Sure we are, you tell em,’ said Dougan.

‘I know lot of old fellers even, thinks the boys are gettin a raw deal… We’ll call it the Brooklyn Bonus Agitation Committee associated with the Sheamus O’Rielly Post of the A. L.… No use doin anythin unless you do it up right… Now are yous guys wid me or aint yer?’

‘Sure we are Joey… You tell em an we’ll mark time.’

‘Well Dougan’s got to be president cause he’s the best lookin.’

Dougan went crimson and began to stammer.

‘Oh you seabeach Apollo,’ jeered Garnett.

‘And I think I can do best as treasurer because I’ve had more experience.’

‘Cause you’re the crookedest you mean,’ said Segal under his breath.

Joe stuck out his jaw. ‘Look here Segal are you wid us or aint yer? You’d better come right out wid it now if you’re not.’

‘Sure, cut de comedy,’ said Dougan. ‘Joey’s de guy to put dis ting trough an you know it… Cut de comedy… If you dont like it you kin git out.’

Segal rubbed his thin hooked nose. ‘I was juss jokin gents, I didn’t mean no harm.’

‘Look here,’ went on Joe angrily, ‘what do you think I’m givin up my time for?… Why I turned down fifty dollars a week only yesterday, aint that so, Sid? You seen me talkin to de guy.’

‘Sure I did Joey.’

‘Oh pipe down fellers,’ said Segal. ‘I was just stringin Joey along.’

‘Well I think Segal you ought to be secretary, cause you know about office work…’

‘Office work?’

‘Sure,’ said Joe puffing his chest out. ‘We’re goin to have desk space in the office of a guy I know… It’s all fixed. He’s goin to let us have it free till we get a start. An we’re goin to have office stationery. Cant get nowhere in this world without presentin things right.’

‘An where do I come in?’ asked Sid Garnett.

‘You’re the committee, you big stiff.’

After the meeting Joe O’Keefe walked whistling down Atlantic Avenue. It was a crisp night; he was walking on springs. There was a light in Dr Gordon’s office. He rang. A whitefaced man in a white jacket opened the door.

‘Hello Doc.’

‘Is that you O’Keefe? Come on in my boy.’ Something in the doctor’s voice clutched like a cold hand at his spine.

‘Well did your test come out all right doc?’

‘All right… positive all right.’

‘Christ.’

‘Dont worry too much about it, my boy, we’ll fix you up in a few months.’

‘Months.’

‘Why at a conservative estimate fiftyfive percent of the people you meet on the street have a syphilitic taint.’

‘It’s not as if I’d been a damn fool. I was careful over there.’

‘Inevitable in wartime…’

‘Now I wish I’d let loose… Oh the chances I passed up.’

The doctor laughed. ‘You probably wont even have any symptoms… It’s just a question of injections. I’ll have you sound as a dollar in no time… Do you want to take a shot now? I’ve got it all ready.’

O’Keefe’s hands went cold. ‘Well I guess so,’ he forced a laugh. ‘I guess I’ll be a goddam thermometer by the time you’re through with me.’ The doctor laughed creakily. ‘Full up of arsenic and mercury eh… That’s it.’

The wind was blowing up colder. His teeth were chattering. Through the rasping castiron night he walked home. Fool to pass out that way when he stuck me. He could still feel the sickening lunge of the needle. He gritted his teeth. After this I got to have some luck… I got to have some luck.

Two stout men and a lean man sit at a table by a window. The light of a zinc sky catches brightedged glints off glasses, silverware, oystershells, eyes. George Baldwin has his back to the window. Gus McNiel sits on his right, and Densch on his left. When the waiter leans over to take away the empty oystershells he can see through the window, beyond the graystone parapet, the tops of a few buildings jutting like the last trees at the edge of a cliff and the tinfoil reaches of the harbor littered with ships. ‘I’m lecturin you this time, George… Lord knows you used to lecture me enough in the old days. Honest it’s rank foolishness,’ Gus McNiel is saying. ‘… It’s rank foolishness to pass up the chance of a political career at your time of life… There’s no man in New York better fitted to hold office…’

‘Looks to me as if it were your duty, Baldwin,’ says Densch in a deep voice, taking his tortoiseshell glasses out of a case and applying them hurriedly to his nose.

The waiter has brought a large planked steak surrounded by bulwarks of mushrooms and chopped carrots and peas and frilled browned mashed potatoes. Densch straightens his glasses and stares attentively at the planked steak.

‘A very handsome dish Ben, a very handsome dish I must say… It’s just this Baldwin… as I look at it… the country is going through a dangerous period of reconstruction… the confusion attendant on the winding up of a great conflict… the bankruptcy of a continent… bolshevism and subversive doctrines rife… America…’ he says, cutting with the sharp polished steel knife into the thick steak, rare and well peppered. He chews a mouthful slowly. ‘America,’ he begins again, ‘is in the position of taking over the receivership of the world. The great principles of democracy, of that commercial freedom upon which our whole civilization depends are more than ever at stake. Now as at no other time we need men of established ability and unblemished integrity in public office, particularly in the offices requiring expert judicial and legal knowledge.’

‘That’s what I was tryin to tell ye the other day George.’

‘But that’s all very well Gus, but how do you know I’d be elected… After all it would mean giving up my law practice for a number of years, it would mean…’

‘You just leave that to me… George you’re elected already.’

‘An extraordinarily good steak,’ says Densch, ‘I must say… No but newspaper talk aside… I happen to know from a secret and reliable source that there is a subversive plot among undesirable elements in this country… Good God think of the Wall Street bomb outrage… I must say that the attitude of the press has been gratifying in one respect… in fact we’re approaching a national unity undreamed of before the war.’

‘No but George,’ breaks in Gus, ‘put it this way… The publicity value of a political career’d kinder bolster up your law practice.’

‘It would and it wouldn’t Gus.’

Densch is unrolling the tinfoil off a cigar. ‘At any rate it’s a grand sight.’ He takes off his glasses and cranes his thick neck to look out into the bright expanse of harbor that stretches full of masts, smoke, blobs of steam, dark oblongs of barges, to the hazeblurred hills of Staten Island.

Bright flakes of cloud were scaling off a sky of crushing indigo over the Battery where groups of dingy darkdressed people stood round the Ellis Island landing station and the small boat dock waiting silently for something. Frayed smoke of tugs and steamers hung low and trailed along the opaque glassgreen water. A threemasted schooner was being towed down the North River. A newhoisted jib flopped awkwardly in the wind. Down the harbor loomed taller, taller a steamer head on, four red stacks packed into one, creamy superstructure gleaming. ‘Mauretania just acomin in twentyfour hours lyte,’ yelled the man with the telescope and fieldglasses… ‘Tyke a look at the Mauretania, farstest ocean greyhound, twentyfour hours lyte.’ The Mauretania stalked like a skyscraper through the harbor shipping. A rift of sunlight sharpened the shadow under the broad bridge, along the white stripes of upper decks, glinted in the rows of portholes. The smokestacks stood apart, the hull lengthened. The black relentless hull of the Mauretania pushing puffing tugs ahead of it cut like a long knife into the North River.

A ferry was leaving the immigrant station, a murmur rustled through the crowd that packed the edges of the wharf. ‘Deportees… It’s the communists the Department of Justice is having deported… deportees… Reds… It’s the Reds they are deporting.’ The ferry was out of the slip. In the stern a group of men stood still tiny like tin soldiers. ‘They are sending the Reds back to Russia.’ A handkerchief waved on the ferry, a red handkerchief. People tiptoed gently to the edge of the walk, tiptoeing, quiet like in a sickroom.

Behind the backs of the men and women crowding to the edge of the water, gorillafaced chipontheshoulder policemen walked back and forth nervously swinging their billies.

‘They are sending the Reds back to Russia… Deportees… Agitators… Undesirables.’… Gulls wheeled crying. A catsup-bottle bobbed gravely in the little ground-glass waves. A sound of singing came from the ferryboat getting small, slipping away across the water.

‘Take a look at the deportees… Take a look at the undesirable aliens,’ shouted the man with the telescopes and fieldglasses. A girl’s voice burst out suddenly, ‘Arise prisoners of starvation,’ ‘Sh… They could pull you for that.’

The singing trailed away across the water. At the end of a marbled wake the ferryboat was shrinking into haze. International… shall be the human race. The singing died. From up the river came the longdrawn rattling throb of a steamer leaving dock. Gulls wheeled above the dark dingydressed crowd that stood silently looking down the bay.

2 Nickelodeon

A nickel before midnight buys tomorrow… holdup headlines, a cup of coffee in the automat, a ride to Woodlawn, Fort Lee, Flatbush… A nickel in the slot buys chewing gum. Somebody Loves Me, Baby Divine, You’re in Kentucky Juss Shu’ As You’re Born… bruised notes of foxtrots go limping out of doors, blues, waltzes (We’d Danced the Whole Night Through) trail gyrating tinsel memories… On Sixth Avenue on Fourteenth there are still flyspecked stereopticons where for a nickel you can peep at yellowed yesterdays. Beside the peppering shooting gallery you stoop into the flicker A HOT TIME, THE BACHELOR’S SURPRISE, THE STOLEN GARTER… wastebasket of tornup daydreams… A nickel before midnight buys our yesterdays.

Ruth Prynne came out of the doctor’s office pulling the fur tight round her throat. She felt faint. Taxi. As she stepped in she remembered the smell of cosmetics and toast and the littered hallway at Mrs Sunderlands. Oh I cant go home just yet. ‘Driver go to the Old English Tea Room on Fortieth Street please.’ She opened her long green leather purse and looked in. My God, only a dollar a quarter a nickel and two pennies. She kept her eyes on the figures flickering on the taximeter. She wanted to break down and cry… The way money goes. The gritty cold wind rasped at her throat when she got out. ‘Eighty cents miss… I haven’t any change miss.’ ‘All right keep the change.’ Heavens only thirtytwo cents… Inside it was warm and smelled cozily of tea and cookies.

‘Why Ruth, if it isn’t Ruth… Dearest come to my arms after all these years.’ It was Billy Waldron. He was fatter and whiter than he used to be. He gave her a stagy hug and kissed her on the forehead. ‘How are you? Do tell me… How distinguée you look in that hat.’

‘I’ve just been having my throat X-rayed,’ she said with a giggle. ‘I feel like the wrath of God.’

‘What are you doing Ruth? I havent heard of you for ages.’

‘Put me down as a back number, hadn’t you?’ She caught his words up fiercely.

‘After that beautiful performance you gave in The Orchard Queen…’

‘To tell the truth Billy I’ve had a terrible run of bad luck.’

‘Oh I know everything is dead.’

‘I have an appointment to see Belasco next week… Something may come of that.’

‘Why I should say it might Ruth… Are you expecting someone?’

‘No… Oh Billy you’re still the same old tease… Dont tease me this afternoon. I dont feel up to it.’

‘You poor dear sit down and have a cup of tea with me.’

‘I tell you Ruth it’s a terrible year. Many a good trouper will pawn the last link of his watch chain this year… I suppose you’re going the rounds.’

‘Dont talk about it… If I could only get my throat all right… A thing like that wears you down.’

‘Remember the old days at the Somerville Stock?’

‘Billy could I ever forget them?… Wasnt it a scream?’

‘The last time I saw you Ruth was in The Butterfly on the Wheel in Seattle. I was out front…’

‘Why didn’t you come back and see me?’

‘I was still angry at you I suppose… It was my lowest moment. In the valley of shadow… melancholia… neurasthenia. I was stranded penniless… That night I was a little under the influence, you understand. I didn’t want you to see the beast in me.’

Ruth poured herself a fresh cup of tea. She suddenly felt feverishly gay. ‘Oh but Billy havent you forgotten all that?… I was a foolish little girl then… I was afraid that love or marriage or anything like that would interfere with my art, you understand… I was so crazy to succeed.’

‘Would you do the same thing again?’

‘I wonder…’

‘How does it go?… The moving finger writes and having writ moves on…’

‘Something about Nor all your tears wash out a word of it… But Billy,’ she threw back her head and laughed, ‘I thought you were getting ready to propose to me all over again… Ou my throat.’

‘Ruth I wish you werent taking that X-ray treatment… I’ve heard it’s very dangerous. Dont let me alarm you about it my dear… but I have heard of cases of cancer contracted that way.’

‘That’s nonsense Billy… That’s only when X-rays are improperly used, and it takes years of exposure… No I think this Dr Warner’s a remarkable man.’

Later, sitting in the uptown express in the subway, she still could feel his soft hand patting her gloved hand. ‘Goodby little girl, God bless you,’ he’d said huskily. He’s gotten to be a ham actor if there ever was one, something was jeering inside her all the while. ‘Thank heavens you will never know.’… Then with a sweep of his broadbrimmed hat and a toss of his silky white hair, as if he were playing in Monsieur Beaucaire, he had turned and walked off among the crowd up Broadway. I may be down on my luck, but I’m not all ham inside the way he is… Cancer he said. She looked up and down the car at the joggling faces opposite her. Of all those people one of them must have it. FOUR OUT OF EVERY FIVE GET… Silly, that’s not cancer. EX-LAX, NUJOL, O’SULLIVAN’S… She put her hand to her throat. Her throat was terribly swollen, her throat throbbed feverishly. Maybe it was worse. It is something alive that grows in flesh, eats all your life, leaves you horrible, rotten… The people opposite stared straight ahead of them, young men and young women, middleaged people, green faces in the dingy light, under the sourcolored advertisements. FOUR OUT OF EVERY FIVE… A trainload of jiggling corpses, nodding and swaying as the express roared shrilly towards Ninetysixth Street. At Ninetysixth she had to change for the local.

Dutch Robertson sat on a bench on Brooklyn Bridge with the collar of his army overcoat turned up, running his eye down Business Opportunities. It was a muggy fogchoked afternoon; the bridge was dripping and aloof like an arbor in a dense garden of steamboatwhistles. Two sailors passed. ‘Ze best joint I’ve been in since B.A.’

Partner movie theater, busy neighborhood… stand investigation… $3,000… Jez I haven’t got three thousand mills… Cigar stand, busy building, compelled sacrifice… Attractive and completely outfitted radio and music shop… busy… Modern mediumsized printingplant consisting of cylinders, Kelleys, Miller feeders, job presses, linotype machines and a complete bindery… Kosher restaurant and delicatessen… Bowling alley… busy… Live spot large dancehall and other concessions. WE BUY FALSE TEETH, old gold, platinum, old jewelry. The hell they do. HELP WANTED MALE. That’s more your speed you rummy. Addressers, first class penmen… Lets me out… Artist, Attendant, Auto, Bicycle and Motorcycle repair shop… He took out the back of an envelope and marked down the address. Bootblacks… Not yet. Boy; no I guess I aint a boy any more, Candy-store, Canvassers, Carwashers, Dishwasher. EARN WHILE YOU LEARN. Mechanical dentistry is your shortest way to success… No dull seasons…

‘Hello Dutch… I thought I’d never get here.’ A grayfaced girl in a red hat and gray rabbit coat sat down beside him.

‘Jez I’m sick o readin want ads.’ He stretched out his arms and yawned letting the paper slip down his legs.

‘Aint you chilly, sittin out here on the bridge?’

‘Maybe I am… Let’s go and eat.’ He jumped to his feet and put his red face with its thin broken nose close to hers and looked in her black eyes with his pale gray eyes. He tapped her arm sharply. ‘Hello Francie… How’s my lil girl?’

They walked back towards Manhattan, the way she had come. Under them the river glinted through the mist. A big steamer drifted by slowly, lights already lit; over the edge of the walk they looked down the black smokestacks.

‘Was it a boat as big as that you went overseas on Dutch?’

‘Bigger ’n that.’

‘Gee I’d like to go.’

‘I’ll take you over some time and show you all them places over there… I went to a lot of places that time I went A.W.O.L.’

In the L station they hesitated. ‘Francie got any jack on you?’

‘Sure I got a dollar… I ought to keep that for tomorrer though.’

‘All I got’s my last quarter. Let’s go eat two fiftyfive cent dinners at that chink place… That’ll be a dollar ten.’

‘I got to have a nickel to get down to the office in the mornin.’

‘Oh Hell! Goddam it I wish we could have some money.’

‘Got anything lined up yet?’

‘Wouldn’t I have told ye if I had?’

‘Come ahead I’ve got a half a dollar saved up in my room. I can take carfare outa that.’ She changed the dollar and put two nickels into the turnstile. They sat down in a Third Avenue train.

‘Say Francie will they let us dance in a khaki shirt?’

‘Why not Dutch it looks all right.’

‘I feel kinder fussed about it.’

The jazzband in the restaurant was playing Hindustan. It smelled of chop suey and Chinese sauce. They slipped into a booth. Slickhaired young men and little bobhaired girls were dancing hugged close. As they sat down they smiled into each other’s eyes.

‘Jez I’m hungry.’

‘Are you Dutch?’

He pushed forward his knees until they locked with hers. ‘Gee you’re a good kid,’ he said when he had finished his soup. ‘Honest I’ll get a job this week. And then we’ll get a nice room an get married an everything.’

When they got up to dance they were trembling so they could barely keep time to the music.

‘Mister… no dance without ploper dless…’ said a dapper Chinaman putting his hand on Dutch’s arm.

‘Waz he want?’ he growled dancing on.

‘I guess it’s the shirt, Dutch.’

‘The hell it is.’

‘I’m tired. I’d rather talk than dance anyway…’ They went back to their booth and their sliced pineapple for dessert.

Afterwards they walked east along Fourteenth. ‘Dutch cant we go to your room?’

‘I ain’t got no room. The old stiff wont let me stay and she’s got all my stuff. Honest if I dont get a job this week I’m goin to a recruiting sergeant an re-enlist.’

‘Oh dont do that; we wouldn’t ever get married then Dutch… Gee though why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t want to worry you Francie… Six months out of work… Jez it’s enough to drive a guy cookoo.’

‘But Dutch where can we go?’

‘We might go out that wharf… I know a wharf.’

‘It’s so cold.’

‘I couldn’t get cold when you were with me kid.’

‘Dont talk like that… I dont like it.’

They walked leaning together in the darkness up the muddy rutted riverside streets, between huge swelling gastanks, broken-down fences, long manywindowed warehouses. At a corner under a streetlamp a boy catcalled as they passed.

‘I’ll poke your face in you little bastard,’ Dutch let fly out of the corner of his mouth.

‘Dont answer him,’ Francie whispered, ‘or we’ll have the whole gang down on us.’

They slipped through a little door in a tall fence above which crazy lumberpiles towered. They could smell the river and cedarwood and sawdust. They could hear the river lapping at the piles under their feet. Dutch drew her to him and pressed his mouth down on hers.

‘Hay dere dont you know you cant come out here at night disaway?’ a voice yapped at them. The watchman flashed a lantern in their eyes.

‘All right keep your shirt on, we were just taking a little walk.’

‘Some walk.’

They were dragging themselves down the street again with the black riverwind in their teeth.

‘Look out.’ A policeman passed whistling softly to himself. They drew apart. ‘Oh Francie they’ll be takin us to the nuthouse if we keep this up. Let’s go to your room.’

‘Landlady’ll throw me out, that’s all.’

‘I wont make any noise… You got your key aint ye? I’ll sneak out before light. Goddam it they make you feel like a skunk.’

‘All right Dutch let’s go home… I dont care no more what happens.’

They walked up mudtracked stairs to the top floor of the tenement.

‘Take off your shoes,’ she hissed in his ear as she slipped the key in the lock.

‘I got holes in my stockings.’

‘That dont matter, silly. I’ll see if it’s all right. My room’s way back past the kitchen so if they’re all in bed they cant hear us.’

When she left him he could hear his heart beating. In a second she came back. He tiptoed after her down a creaky hall. A sound of snoring came through a door. There was a smell of cabbage and sleep in the hall. Once in her room she locked the door and put a chair against it under the knob. A triangle of ashen light came in from the street. ‘Now for crissake keep still Dutch.’ One shoe still in each hand he reached for her and hugged her.

He lay beside her whispering on and on with his lips against her ear. ‘And Francie I’ll make good, honest I will; I got to be a sergeant overseas till they busted me for goin A.W.O.L. That shows I got it in me. Onct I get a chance I’ll make a whole lot of jack and you an me’ll go back an see Château Teery an Paree an all that stuff; honest you’d like it Francie… Jez the towns are old and funny and quiet and cozylike an they have the swellest ginmills where you sit outside at little tables in the sun an watch the people pass an the food’s swell too once you get to like it an they have hotels all over where we could have gone like tonight an they dont care if your married or nutten. An they have big beds all cozy made of wood and they bring ye up breakfast in bed. Jez Francie you’d like it.’

They were walking to dinner through the snow. Big snowfeathers spun and spiraled about them mottling the glare of the streets with blue and pink and yellow, blotting perspectives.

‘Ellie I hate to have you take that job… You ought to keep on with your acting.’

‘But Jimps, we’ve got to live.’

‘I know… I know. You’d certainly didnt have your wits about you Ellie when you married me.’

‘Oh let’s not talk about it any more.’

‘Do let’s have a good time tonight… It’s the first snow.’

‘Is this the place?’ They stood before an unlighted basement door covered by a closemeshed grating. ‘Let’s try.’

‘Did the bell ring?’

‘I think so.’

The inner door opened and a girl in a pink apron peered out at them. ‘Bon soir mademoiselle.’

‘Ah… bon soir monsieur ’dame.’ She ushered them into a foodsmelling gaslit hall hung with overcoats and hats and mufflers. Through a curtained door the restaurant blew in their faces a hot breath of bread and cocktails and frying butter and perfumes and lipsticks and clatter and jingling talk.

‘I can smell absinthe,’ said Ellen. ‘Let’s get terribly tight.’

‘Good Lord, there’s Congo… Dont you remember Congo Jake at the Seaside Inn?’

He stood bulky at the end of the corridor beckoning to them. His face was very tanned and he had a glossy black mustache. ‘Hello Meester ’Erf… Ow are you?’

‘Fine as silk. Congo I want you to meet my wife.’

‘If you dont mind the keetchen we will ’ave a drink.’

‘Of course we dont… It’s the best place in the house. Why you’re limping… What did you do to your leg?’

‘Foutu… I left it en Italie… I couldnt breeng it along once they’d cut it off.’

‘How was that?’

‘Damn fool thing on Mont Tomba… My bruderinlaw e gave me a very beautiful artificial leemb… Sit ’ere. Look madame now can you tell which is which?’

‘No I cant,’ said Ellie laughing. They were at a little marble table in the corner of the crowded kitchen. A girl was dishing out at a deal table in the center. Two cooks worked over the stove. The air was rich with sizzling fatty foodsmells. Congo hobbled back to them with three glasses on a small tray. He stood over them while they drank.

‘Salut,’ he said, raising his glass. ‘Absinthe cocktail, like they make it in New Orleans.’

‘It’s a knockout.’ Congo took a card out of his vest pocket:

‘Maybe some day you need some little ting… I deal in nutting but prewar imported. I am the best bootleggair in New York.’

‘If I ever get any money I certainly will spend it on you Congo… How do you find business?’

‘Veree good… I tell you about it. Tonight I’m too busee… Now I find you a table in the restaurant.’

‘Do you run this place too?’

‘No this my bruderinlaw’s place.’

‘I didnt know you had a sister.’

‘Neither did I.’

When Congo limped away from their table silence came down between them like an asbestos curtain in a theater.

‘He’s a funny duck,’ said Jimmy forcing a laugh.

‘He certainly is.’

‘Look Ellie let’s have another cocktail.’

‘Allright.’

‘I must get hold of him and get some stories about bootleggers out of him.’

When he stretched his legs out under the table he touched her feet. She drew them away. Jimmy could feel his jaws chewing, they clanked so loud under his cheeks he thought Ellie must hear them. She sat opposite him in a gray tailoredsuit, her neck curving up heartbreakingly from the ivory V left by the crisp frilled collar of her blouse, her head tilted under her tight gray hat, her lips made up; cutting up little pieces of meat and not eating them, not saying a word.

‘Gosh… let’s have another cocktail.’ He felt paralyzed like in a nightmare; she was a porcelaine figure under a bellglass. A current of fresh snowrinsed air from somewhere eddied all of a sudden through the blurred packed jangling glare of the restaurant, cut the reek of food and drink and tobacco. For an instant he caught the smell of her hair. The cocktails burned in him. God I dont want to pass out.

Sitting in the restaurant of the Gare de Lyon, side by side on the black leather bench. His cheek brushes hers when he reaches to put herring, butter, sardines, anchovies, sausage on her plate. They eat in a hurry, gobbling, giggling, gulp wine, start at every screech of an engine…

The train pulls out of Avignon, they two awake, looking in each other’s eyes in the compartment full of sleep-sodden snoring people. He lurches clambering over tangled legs, to smoke a cigarette at the end of the dim oscillating corridor. Diddledeump, going south, Diddledeump, going south, sing the wheels over the rails down the valley of the Rhône. Leaning in the window, smoking a broken cigarette, trying to smoke a crumbling cigarette, holding a finger over the torn place. Glubglub glubglub from the bushes, from the silverdripping poplars along the track.

‘Ellie, Ellie there are nightingales singing along the track.’

‘Oh I was asleep darling.’ She gropes to him stumbling across the legs of sleepers. Side by side in the window in the lurching jiggling corridor.

Deedledeump, going south. Gasp of nightingales along the track among the silverdripping poplars. The insane cloudy night of moonlight smells of gardens garlic rivers freshdunged field roses. Gasp of nightingales.

Opposite him the Elliedoll was speaking. ‘He says the lobstersalad’s all out… Isnt that discouraging?’

Suddenly he had his tongue. ‘Gosh if that were the only thing.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why did we come back to this rotten town anyway?’

‘You’ve been burbling about how wonderful it was ever since we came back.’

‘I know. I guess it’s sour grapes… I’m going to have another cocktail… Ellie for heaven’s sake what’s the matter with us?’

‘We’re going to be sick if we keep this up I tell you.’

‘Well let’s be sick… Let’s be good and sick.’

When they sit up in the great bed they can see across the harbor, can see the yards of a windjammer and a white sloop and a red and green toy tug and plainfaced houses opposite beyond a peacock stripe of water; when they lie down they can see gulls in the sky. At dusk dressing rockily, shakily stumbling through the mildewed corridors of the hotel out into streets noisy as a brass band, full of tambourine rattle, brassy shine, crystal glitter, honk and whir of motors… Alone together in the dusk drinking sherry under a broadleaved plane, alone together in the juggled particolored crowds like people invisible. And the spring night comes up over the sea terrible out of Africa and settles about them.

They had finished their coffee. Jimmy had drunk his very slowly as if some agony waited for him when he finished it.

‘Well I was afraid we’d find the Barneys here,’ said Ellen.

‘Do they know about this place?’

‘You brought them here yourself Jimps… And that dreadful woman insisted on talking babies with me all the evening. I hate talking babies.’

‘Gosh I wish we could go to a show.’

‘It would be too late anyway.’

‘And just spending money I havent got… Lets have a cognac to top off with. I don’t care if it ruins us.’

‘It probably will in more ways than one.’

‘Well Ellie, here’s to the breadwinner who’s taken up the white man’s burden.’

‘Why Jimmy I think it’ll be rather fun to have an editorial job for a while.’

‘I’d find it fun to have any kind of job… Well I can always stay home and mind the baby.’

‘Dont be so bitter Jimmy, it’s just temporary.’

‘Life’s just temporary for that matter.’

The taxi drew up. Jimmy paid him with his last dollar. Ellie had her key in the outside door. The street was a confusion of driving absintheblurred snow. The door of their apartment closed behind them. Chairs, tables, books, windowcurtains crowded about them bitter with the dust of yesterday, the day before, the day before that. Smells of diapers and coffeepots and typewriter oil and Dutch Cleanser oppressed them. Ellen put out the empty milkbottle and went to bed. Jimmy kept walking nervously about the front room. His drunkenness ebbed away leaving him icily sober. In the empty chamber of his brain a doublefaced word clinked like a coin: Success Failure, Success Failure.

she hums under her breath as she dances. It’s a long hall with a band at one end, lit greenishly by two clusters of electric lights hanging among paper festoons in the center. At the end where the door is, a varnished rail holds back the line of men. This one Anna’s dancing with is a tall square built Swede, his big feet trail clumsily after her tiny lightly tripping feet. The music stops. Now it’s a little blackhaired slender Jew. He tries to snuggle close.

‘Quit that.’ She holds him away from her.

‘Aw have a heart.’

She doesn’t answer, dances with cold precision; she’s sickeningly tired.

An Italian breathes garlic in her face, a marine sergeant, a Greek, a blond young kid with pink cheeks, she gives him a smile; a drunken elderly man who tries to kiss her… Charley my boy O Charley my boy… slickhaired, freckled rumplehaired, pimple-faced, snubnosed, straightnosed, quick dancers, heavy dancers… Goin souf… Wid de taste o de sugarcane right in my mouf… against her back big hands, hot hands, sweaty hands, cold hands, while her dancechecks mount up, get to be a wad in her fist. This one’s a good waltzer, genteel-like in a black suit.

‘Gee I’m tired,’ she whispers.

‘Dancing never tires me.’

‘Oh it’s dancin with everybody like this.’

‘Dont you want to come an dance with me all alone somewhere?’

‘Boyfrien’s waitin for me after.’

‘What time’s it?’ she asked a broadchested wise guy. ‘Time you an me was akwainted, sister…’ She shakes her head. Suddenly the music bursts into Auld Lang Syne. She breaks away from him and runs to the desk in a crowd of girls elbowing to turn in their dancechecks. ‘Say Anna,’ says a broadhipped blond girl… ‘did ye see that sap was dancin wid me?… He says to me the sap he says See you later an I says to him the sap I says see yez in hell foist… an then he says, Goily he says…’

3 Revolving Doors

Glowworm trains shuttle in the gloaming through the foggy looms of spiderweb bridges, elevators soar and drop in their shafts, harbor lights wink.

Like sap at the first frost at five o’clock men and women begin to drain gradually out of the tall buildings downtown, grayfaced throngs flood subways and tubes, vanish underground.

All night the great buildings stand quiet and empty, their million windows dark. Drooling light the ferries chew tracks across the lacquered harbor. At midnight the fourfunneled express steamers slide into the dark out of their glary berths. Bankers blearyeyed from secret conferences hear the hooting of the tugs as they are let out of side doors by lightningbug watchmen; they settle grunting into the back seats of limousines, and are whisked uptown into the Forties, clinking streets of ginwhite whiskey-yellow ciderfizzling lights.

She sat at the dressingtable coiling her hair. He stood over her with the lavender suspenders hanging from his dress trousers prodding the diamond studs into his shirt with stumpy fingers.

‘Jake I wish we were out of it,’ she whined through the hairpins in her mouth.

‘Out of what Rosie?’

‘The Prudence Promotion Company… Honest I’m worried.’

‘Why everything’s goin swell. We’ve got to bluff out Nichols that’s all.’

‘Suppose he prosecutes?’

‘Oh he wont. He’d lose a lot of money by it. He’d much better come in with us… I can pay him in cash in a week anyways. If we can keep him thinkin we got money we’ll have him eatin out of our hands. Didn’t he say he’d be at the El Fey tonight?’

Rosie had just put a rhinestone comb into the coil of her black hair. She nodded and got to her feet. She was a plump broadhipped woman with big black eyes and higharched eyebrows. She wore a corset trimmed with yellow lace and a pink silk chemise.

‘Put on everythin you’ve got Rosie. I want yez all dressed up like a Christmas tree. We’re goin to the El Fey an stare Nichols down tonight. Then tomorrer I’ll go round and put the proposition up to him… Lets have a little snifter anyways…’ He went to the phone. ‘Send up some cracked ice and a couple of bottles of White Rock to four o four. Silverman’s the name. Make it snappy.’

‘Jake let’s make a getaway,’ Rosie cried suddenly. She stood in the closet door with a dress over her arm. ‘I cant stand all this worry… It’s killin me. Let’s you an me beat it to Paris or Havana or somewheres and start out fresh.’

‘Then we would be up the creek. You can be extradited for grand larceny. Jez you wouldnt have me goin round with dark glasses and false whiskers all my life.’

Rosie laughed. ‘No I guess you wouldnt look so good in a fake zit… Oh I wish we were really married at least.’

‘Dont make no difference between us Rosie. Then they’d be after me for bigamy too. That’d be pretty.’

Rosie shuddered at the bellboy’s knock. Jake Silverman put the tray with its clinking bowl of ice on the bureau and fetched a square whiskeybottle out of the wardrobe.

‘Dont pour out any for me. I havent got the heart for it.’

‘Kid you’ve got to pull yourself together. Put on the glad rags an we’ll go to a show. Hell I been in lots o tighter holes than this.’ With his highball in his hand he went to the phone. ‘I want the newsstand… Hello cutie… Sure I’m an old friend of yours… Sure you know me… Look could you get me two seats for the Follies… That’s the idear… No I cant sit back of the eighth row… That’s a good little girl… An you’ll call me in ten minutes will you dearie?’

‘Say Jake is there really any borax in that lake?’

‘Sure there is. Aint we got the affidavit of four experts?’

‘Sure. I was just kinder wonderin… Say Jake if this ever gets wound up will you promise me not to go in for any more wildcat schemes?’

‘Sure; I wont need to… My you’re a redhot mommer in that dress.’

‘Do you like it?’

‘You look like Brazil… I dunno… kinder tropical.’

‘That’s the secret of my dangerous charm.’

The phone rang jingling sharp. They jumped to their feet. She pressed the side of her hand against her lips.

‘Two in the fourth row. That’s fine… We’ll be right down an get em… Jez Rosie you cant go on being jumpy like; you’re gettin me all shot too. Pull yerself together why cant you?’

‘Let’s go out an eat Jake. I havent had anything but buttermilk all day. I guess I’ll stop tryin to reduce. This worryin’ll make me thin enough.’

‘You got to quit it Rosie… It’s gettin my nerve.’

They stopped at the flowerstall in the lobby. ‘I want a gardenia’ he said. He puffed his chest out and smiled his curlylipped smile as the girl fixed it in the buttonhole of his dinnercoat. ‘What’ll you have dear?’ he turned grandiloquently to Rosie. She puckered her mouth. ‘I dont just know what’ll go with my dress.’

‘While you’re deciding I’ll go get the theater tickets.’ With his overcoat open and turned back to show the white puffedout shirtfront and his cuffs shot out over his thick hands he strutted over to the newsstand. Out of the corner of her eye while the ends of the red roses were being wrapped in silver paper Rosie could see him leaning across the magazines talking babytalk to the blond girl. He came back brighteyed with a roll of bills in his hand. She pinned the roses on her fur coat, put her arm in his and together they went through the revolving doors into the cold glistening electric night. ‘Taxi,’ he yapped.

The diningroom smelled of toast and coffee and the New York Times. The Merivales were breakfasting to electric light. Sleet beat against the windows. ‘Well Paramount’s fallen off five points more,’ said James from behind the paper.

‘Oh James I think its horrid to be such a tease,’ whined Maisie who was drinking her coffee in little henlike sips.

‘And anyway,’ said Mrs Merivale, ‘Jack’s not with Paramount any more. He’s doing publicity for the Famous Players.’

‘He’s coming east in two weeks. He says he hopes to be here for the first of the year.’

‘Did you get another wire Maisie?’

Maisie nodded. ‘Do you know James, Jack never will write a letter. He always telegraphs,’ said Mrs Merivale through the paper at her son. ‘He certainly keeps the house choked up with flowers,’ growled James from behind the paper.

‘All by telegraph,’ said Mrs Merivale triumphantly.

James put down his paper. ‘Well I hope he’s as good a fellow as he seems to be.’

‘Oh James you’re horrid about Jack… I think it’s mean.’ She got to her feet and went through the curtains into the parlor.

‘Well if he’s going to be my brother-in-law, I think I ought to have a say in picking him,’ he grumbled.

Mrs Merivale went after her. ‘Come back and finish your breakfast Maisie, he’s just a terrible tease.’

‘I wont have him talk that way about Jack.’

‘But Maisie I think Jack’s a dear boy.’ She put her arm round her daughter and led her back to the table. ‘He’s so simple and I know he has good impulses… I’m sure he’s going to make you very happy.’ Maisie sat down again pouting under the pink bow of her boudoir cap. ‘Mother may I have another cup of coffee?’

‘Deary you know you oughtnt to drink two cups. Dr Fernald said that was what was making you so nervous.’

‘Just a little bit mother very weak. I want to finish this muffin and I simply cant eat it without something to wash it down, and you know you dont want me to lose any more weight.’ James pushed back his chair and went out with the Times under his arm. ‘It’s half past eight James,’ said Mrs Merivale. ‘He’s likely to take an hour when he gets in there with that paper.’

‘Well,’ said Maisie peevishly. ‘I think I’ll go back to bed. I think it’s silly the way we all get up to breakfast. There’s something so vulgar about it mother. Nobody does it any more. At the Perkinses’ it comes up to you in bed on a tray.’

‘But James has to be at the bank at nine.’

‘That’s no reason why we should drag ourselves out of bed. That’s how people get their faces all full of wrinkles.’

‘But we wouldn’t see James until dinnertime, and I like to get up early. The morning’s the loveliest part of the day.’ Maisie yawned desperately.

James appeared in the doorway to the hall running a brush round his hat.

‘What did you do with the paper James?’

‘Oh I left it in there.’

‘I’ll get it, never mind… My dear you’ve got your stickpin in crooked. I’ll fix it… There.’ Mrs Merivale put her hands on his shoulders and looked in her son’s face. He wore a dark gray suit with a faint green stripe in it, an olive green knitted necktie with a small gold nugget stickpin, olive green woolen socks with black clockmarks and dark red Oxford shoes, their laces neatly tied with doubleknots that never came undone. ‘James arent you carrying your cane?’ He had an olive green woolen muffler round his neck and was slipping into his dark brown winter overcoat. ‘I notice the younger men down there dont carry them, mother… People might think it was a little… I dont know…’

‘But Mr Perkins carries a cane with a gold parrothead.’

‘Yes but he’s one of the vicepresidents, he can do what he likes… But I’ve got to run.’ James Merivale hastily kissed his mother and sister. He put on his gloves going down in the elevator. Ducking his head into the sleety wind he walked quickly east along Seventysecond. At the subway entrance he bought a Tribune and hustled down the steps to the jammed soursmelling platform.

Chicago! Chicago! came in bursts out of the shut phonograph. Tony Hunter, slim in a black closecut suit, was dancing with a girl who kept putting her mass of curly ashblond hair on his shoulder. They were alone in the hotel sitting room.

‘Sweetness you’re a lovely dancer,’ she cooed snuggling closer.

‘Think so Nevada?’

‘Um-hum… Sweetness have you noticed something about me?’

‘What’s that Nevada?’

‘Havent you noticed something about my eyes?’

‘They’re the loveliest little eyes in the world.’

‘Yes but there’s something about them.’

‘You mean that one of them’s green and the other one brown.’

‘Oh it noticed the tweet lil ting.’ She tilted her mouth up at him. He kissed it. The record came to an end. They both ran over to stop it. ‘That wasnt much of a kiss, Tony,’ said Nevada Jones tossing her curls out of her eyes. They put on Shuffle Along.

‘Say Tony,’ she said when they had started dancing again. ‘What did the psychoanalyst say when you went to see him yesterday?’

‘Oh nothing much, we just talked,’ said Tony with a sigh. ‘He said it was all imaginary. He suggested I get to know some girls better. He’s all right. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about though. He cant do anything.’

‘I bet you I could.’

They stopped dancing and looked at each other with the blood burning their faces.

‘Knowing you Nevada,’ he said in a doleful tone ‘has meant more to me… You’re so decent to me. Everybody’s always been so nasty.’

‘Aint he solemn though?’ She walked over thoughtfully and stopped the phonograph.

‘Some joke on George I’ll say.’

‘I feel horribly about it. He’s been so decent… And after all I could never have afforded to go to Dr Baumgardt at all.’

‘It’s his own fault. He’s a damn fool… If he thinks he can buy me with a little hotel accommodation and theater tickets he’s got another think coming. But honestly Tony you must keep on with that doctor. He did wonders with Glen Gaston… He thought he was that way until he was thirtyfive years old and the latest thing I hear he’s married an had a pair of twins… Now give me a real kiss sweetest. Thataboy. Let’s dance some more. Gee you’re a beautiful dancer. Kids like you always are. I dont know why it is…’

The phone cut into the room suddenly with a glittering sawtooth ring. ‘Hello… Yes this is Miss Jones… Why of course George I’m waiting for you…’ She put up the receiver. ‘Great snakes, Tony beat it. I’ll call you later. Dont go down in the elevator you’ll meet him coming up.’ Tony Hunter melted out the door. Nevada put Baby… Babee Deevine on the phonograph and strode nervously about the room, straightening chairs, patting her tight short curls into place.

‘Oh George I thought you werent comin… How do you do Mr McNiel? I dunno why I’m all jumpy today. I thought you were never comin. Let’s get some lunch up. I’m that hungry.’

George Baldwin put his derby hat and stick on a table in the corner. ‘What’ll you have Gus?’ he said. ‘Sure I always take a lamb chop an a baked potato.’

‘I’m just taking crackers and milk, my stomach’s a little out of order… Nevada see if you cant frisk up a highball for Mr McNiel.’

‘Well I could do with a highball George.’

‘George order me half a broiled chicken lobster and some alligator pear salad,’ screeched Nevada from the bathroom where she was cracking ice.

‘She’s the greatest girl for lobster,’ said Baldwin laughing as he went to the phone.

She came back from the bathroom with two highballs on a tray; she had put a scarlet and parrotgreen batik scarf round her neck. ‘Just you an me’s drinkin Mr McNiel… George is on the water wagon. Doctor’s orders.’

‘Nevada what do you say we go to a musical show this afternoon? There’s a lot of business I want to get off my mind.’

‘I just love matinees. Do you mind if we take Tony Hunter. He called up he was lonesome and wanted to come round this afternoon. He’s not workin this week.’

‘All right… Nevada will you excuse us if we talk business for just a second over here by the window. We’ll forget it by the time lunch comes.’

‘All righty I’ll change my dress.’

‘Sit down here Gus.’

They sat silent a moment looking out of the window at the red girder cage of the building under construction next door. ‘Well Gus,’ said Baldwin suddenly harshly, ‘I’m in the race.’

‘Good for you George, we need men like you.’

‘I’m going to run on a Reform ticket.’

‘The hell you are?’

‘I wanted to tell you Gus rather than have you hear it by a roundabout way.’

‘Who’s goin to elect you?’

‘Oh I’ve got my backing… I’ll have a good press.’

‘Press hell… We’ve got the voters… But Goddam it if it hadn’t been for me your name never would have come up for district attorney at all.’

‘I know you’ve always been a good friend of mine and I hope you’ll continue to be.’

‘I never went back on a guy yet, but Jez, George, it’s give and take in this world.’

‘Well,’ broke in Nevada advancing towards them with little dancesteps, wearing a flamingo pink silk dress, ‘havent you boys argued enough yet?’

‘We’re through,’ growled Gus. ‘…Say Miss Nevada, how did you get that name?’

‘I was born in Reno… My mother’d gone there to get a divorce… Gosh she was sore… Certainly put my foot in it that time.’

Anna Cohen stands behind the counter under the sign THE BEST SANDWICH IN NEW YORK. Her feet ache in her pointed shoes with runover heels.

‘Well I guess they’ll begin soon or else we’re in for a slack day,’ says the sodashaker beside her. He’s a rawfaced man with a sharp adamsapple. ‘It allus comes all of a rush like.’

‘Yeh, looks like they all got the same idear at the same time.’ They stand looking out through the glass partition at the endless files of people jostling in and out of the subway. All at once she slips away from the counter and back into the stuffy kitchenette where a stout elderly woman is tidying up the stove. There is a mirror hanging on a nail in the corner. Anna fetches a powderbox from the pocket of her coat on the rack and starts powdering her nose. She stands a second with the tiny puff poised looking at her broad face with the bangs across the forehead and the straight black bobbed hair. A homely lookin kike, she says to herself bitterly. She is slipping back to her place at the counter when she runs into the manager, a little fat Italian with a greasy bald head. ‘Cant you do nutten but primp an look in de glass all day?… Veree good you’re fired.’

She stared at his face sleek like an olive. ‘Kin I stay out my day?’ she stammers. He nods. ‘Getta move on; this aint no beauty parlor.’ She hustles back to her place at the counter. The stools are all full. Girls, officeboys, grayfaced bookkeepers. ‘Chicken sandwich and a cup o caufee.’ ‘Cream cheese and olive sandwich and a glass of buttermilk.’

‘Chocolate sundae.’

‘Egg sandwich, coffee and doughnuts.’ ‘Cup of boullion.’ ‘Chicken broth.’ ‘Chocolate icecream soda.’ People eat hurriedly without looking at each other, with their eyes on their plates, in their cups. Behind the people sitting on stools those waiting nudge nearer. Some eat standing up. Some turn their backs on the counter and eat looking out through the glass partition and the sign HCNUL ENIL NEERG at the jostling crowds filing in and out the subway through the drabgreen gloom.

‘Well Joey tell me all about it,’ said Gus McNiel puffing a great cloud of smoke out of his cigar and leaning back in his swivel chair. ‘What are you guys up to over there in Flatbush?’

O’Keefe cleared his throat and shuffled his feet. ‘Well sir we got an agitation committee.’

‘I should say you had… That aint no reason for raidin the Garment Workers’ ball is it?’

‘I didn’t have nothin to do with that… The bunch got sore at all these pacifists and reds.’

‘That stuff was all right a year ago, but public sentiment’s changin. I tell you Joe the people of this country are pretty well fed up with war heroes.’

‘We got a livewire organization over there.’

‘I know you have Joe. I know you have. Trust you for that… I’d put the soft pedal on the bonus stuff though… The State of New York’s done its duty by the ex-service man.’

‘That’s true enough.’

‘A national bonus means taxes to the average business man and nothing else… Nobody wants no more taxes.’

‘Still I think the boys have got it comin to em.’

‘We’ve all of us got a whole lot comin to us we dont never get… For crissake dont quote me on this… Joey fetch yourself a cigar from that box over there. Frien o mine sent em up from Havana by a naval officer.’

‘Thankye sir.’

‘Go ahead take four or five.’

‘Jez thank you.’

‘Say Joey how’ll you boys line up on the mayoralty election?’

‘That depends on the general attitude towards the needs of the ex-service man.’

‘Look here Joey you’re a smart feller…’

‘Oh they’ll line up all right. I kin talk em around.’

‘How many guys have you got over there?’

‘The Sheamus O’Rielly Post’s got three hundred members an new ones signin up every day… We’re gettin em from all over. We’re goin to have a Christmas dance an some fights in the Armory if we can get hold of any pugs.’

Gus McNiel threw back his head on his bullneck and laughed. ‘Thataboy!’

‘But honest the bonus is the only way we kin keep the boys together.’

‘Suppose I come over and talk to em some night.’

‘That’d be all right, but they’re dead sot against anybody who aint got a war record.’

McNiel flushed. ‘Come back feeling kinder smart, dont ye, you guys from overseas?’ He laughed. ‘That wont last more’n a year or two… I seen em come back from the Spanish American War, remember that Joe.’

An officeboy came in an laid a card on the desk. ‘A lady to see you Mr McNiel.’

‘All right show her in… It’s that old bitch from the school board… All right Joe, drop in again next week… I’ll keep you in mind, you and your army.’

Dougan was waiting in the outer office. He sidled up mysteriously. ‘Well Joe, how’s things?’

‘Pretty good,’ said Joe puffing out his chest. ‘Gus tells me Tammany’ll be right behind us in our drive for the bonus… planning a nation wide campaign. He gave me some cigars a friend o his brought up by airplane from Havana… Have one?’ With their cigars tilting up out of the corners of their mouths they walked briskly cockily across City Hall square. Opposite the old City Hall there was a scaffolding. Joe pointed at it with his cigar. ‘That there’s the new statue of Civic Virtue the mayor’s havin set up.’

The steam of cooking wrenched at his knotted stomach as he passed Child’s. Dawn was sifting fine gray dust over the black ironcast city. Dutch Robertson despondently crossed Union Square, remembering Francie’s warm bed, the spicy smell of her hair. He pushed his hands deep in his empty pockets. Not a red, and Francie couldn’t give him anything. He walked east past the hotel on Fifteenth. A colored man was sweeping off the steps. Dutch looked at him enviously; he’s got a job. Milkwagons jingled by. On Stuyvesant Square a milkman brushed past him with a bottle in each hand. Dutch stuck out his jaw and talked tough. ‘Give us a swig o milk will yez?’ The milkman was a frail pinkfaced youngster. His blue eyes wilted. ‘Sure go round behind the wagon, there’s an open bottle under the seat. Dont let nobody see you drink it.’ He drank it in deep gulps, sweet and soothing to his parched throat. Jez I didn’t need to talk rough like that. He waited until the boy came back. ‘Thankye buddy, that was mighty white.’

He walked into the chilly park and sat down on a bench. There was hoarfrost on the asphalt. He picked up a torn piece of pink evening newspaper. $500,000 HOLDUP. Bank Messenger Robbed in Wall Street Rush Hour.

In the busiest part of the noon hour two men held up Adolphus St John, a bank messenger for the Guarantee Trust Company, and snatched from his hands a satchel containing a half a million dollars in bills…

Dutch felt his heart pounding as he read the column. He was cold all over. He got to his feet and began thrashing his arms about.

Congo stumped through the turnstile at the end of the L line. Jimmy Herf followed him looking from one side to the other. Outside it was dark, a blizzard wind whistled about their ears. A single Ford sedan was waiting outside the station.

‘How you like, Meester ’Erf?’

‘Fine Congo. Is that water?’

‘That Sheepshead Bay.’

They walked along the road, dodging an occasional bluesteel glint of a puddle. The arclights had a look of shrunken grapes swaying in the wind. To the right and left were flickering patches of houses in the distance. They stopped at a long building propped on piles over the water. POOL; Jimmy barely made out the letters on an unlighted window. The door opened as they reached it. ‘Hello Mike,’ said Congo. ‘This is Meester ’Erf, a frien’ o mine.’ The door closed behind them. Inside it was black as an oven. A calloused hand grabbed Jimmy’s hand in the dark.

‘Glad to meet you,’ said a voice.

‘Say how did you find my hand?’

‘Oh I kin see in the dark.’ The voice laughed throatily.

By that time Congo had opened the inner door. Light streamed through picking out billiard tables, a long bar at the end, racks of cues. ‘This is Mike Cardinale,’ said Congo. Jimmy found himself standing beside a tall sallow shylooking man with bunchy black hair growing low on his forehead. In the inner room were shelves full of chinaware and a round table covered by a piece of mustardcolored oilcloth. ‘Eh la patronne,’ shouted Congo. A fat Frenchwoman with red applecheeks came out through the further door; behind her came a chiff of sizzling butter and garlic. ‘This is frien o mine… Now maybe we eat,’ shouted Congo. ‘She my wife,’ said Cardinale proudly. ‘Very deaf… Have to talk loud.’ He turned and closed the door to the large hall carefully and bolted it. ‘No see lights from road,’ he said. ‘In summer,’ said Mrs Cardinale, ‘sometime we give a hundred meals a day, or a hundred an fifty maybe.’

‘Havent you got a little peekmeup?’ said Congo. He let himself down with a grunt into a chair.

Cardinale set a fat fiasco of wine on the table and some glasses. They tasted it smacking their lips. ‘Bettern Dago Red, eh Meester ’Erf?’

‘It sure is. Tastes like real Chianti.’

Mrs Cardinale set six plates with a stained fork, knife, and spoon in each and then put a steaming tureen of soup in the middle of the table.

‘Pronto pasta,’ she shrieked in a guineahen voice. ‘Thisa Anetta,’ said Cardinale as a pinkcheeked blackhaired girl with long lashes curving back from bright black eyes ran into the room followed by a heavily tanned young man in khaki overalls with curly sun-bleached hair. They all sat down at once and began to eat the peppery thick vegetable chowder, leaning far over their plates.

When Congo had finished his soup he looked up. ‘Mike did you see lights?’ Cardinale nodded. ‘Sure ting… be here any time.’ While they were eating a dish of fried eggs and garlic, frizzled veal cutlets with fried potatoes and broccoli, Herf began to hear in the distance the pop pop pop of a motorboat. Congo got up from the table with a motion to them to be quiet and looked out the window, cautiously lifting a corner of the shade. ‘That him,’ he said as he stumped back to the table. ‘We eat good here, eh Meester Erf?’

The young man got to his feet wiping his mouth on his forearm. ‘Got a nickel Congo,’ he said doing a double shuffle with his sneakered feet. ‘Here go Johnny.’ The girl followed him out into the dark outer room. In a moment a mechanical piano started tinkling out a waltz. Through the door Jimmy could see them dancing in and out of the oblong of light. The chugging of the motorboat drew nearer. Congo went out, then Cardinale and his wife, until Jimmy was left alone sipping a glass of wine among the debris of the dinner. He felt excited and puzzled and a little drunk. Already he began to construct the story in his mind. From the road came the grind of gears of a truck, then of another. The motorboat engine choked, backfired and stopped. There was the creak of a boat against the piles, a swash of waves and silence. The mechanical piano had stopped. Jimmy sat sipping his wine. He could smell the rankness of salt marshes seeping into the house. Under him there was a little lapping sound of the water against the piles. Another motorboat was beginning to sputter in the far distance.

‘Got a nickel?’ asked Congo breaking into the room suddenly. ‘Make music… Very funny night tonight. Maybe you and Annette keep piano goin. I didnt see McGee about landin… Maybe somebody come. Must be veree quick.’ Jimmy got to his feet and started fishing in his pockets. By the piano he found Annette. ‘Wont you dance?’ She nodded. The piano played Innocent Eyes. They danced distractedly. Outside were voices and footsteps. ‘Please,’ she said all at once and they stopped dancing. The second motorboat had come very near; the motor coughed and rattled still. ‘Please stay here,’ she said and slipped away from him.

Jimmy Herf walked up and down uneasily puffing on a cigarette. He was making up the story in his mind… In a lonely abandoned dancehall on Sheepshead Bay… lovely blooming Italian girl… shrill whistle in the dark… I ought to get out and see what’s going on. He groped for the front door. It was locked. He walked over to the piano and put another nickel in. Then he lit a fresh cigarette and started walking up and down again. Always the way… a parasite on the drama of life, reporter looks at everything through a peephole. Never mixes in. The piano was playing Yes We Have No Bananas. ‘Oh hell!’ he kept muttering and ground his teeth and walked up and down.

Outside the tramp of steps broke into a scuffle, voices snarled. There was a splintering of wood and the crash of breaking bottles. Jimmy looked out through the window of the diningroom. He could see the shadows of men struggling and slugging on the boatlanding. He rushed into the kitchen, where he bumped into Congo sweaty and staggering into the house leaning on a heavy cane.

‘Goddam… dey break my leg,’ he shouted.

‘Good God.’ Jimmy helped him groaning into the diningroom.

‘Cost me feefty dollars to have it mended last time I busted it.’

‘You mean your cork leg?’

‘Sure what you tink?’

‘Is it prohibition agents?’

‘Prohibition agents nutten, goddam hijackers… Go put a neeckel in the piano.’ Beautiful Girl of My Dreams, the piano responded gayly.

When Jimmy got back to him, Congo was sitting in a chair nursing his stump with his two hands. On the table lay the cork and aluminum limb splintered and dented. ‘Regardez moi ça… c’est foutu… completement foutu.’ As he spoke Cardinale came in. He had a deep gash over his eyes from which a trickle of blood ran down his cheek on his coat and shirt. His wife followed him rolling back her eyes; she had a basin and a sponge with which she kept making ineffectual dabs at his forehead. He pushed her away. ‘I crowned one of em good wid a piece o pipe. I think he fell in de water. God I hope he drownded.’ Johnny came in holding his head high. Annette had her arm round his waist. He had a black eye and one of the sleeves of his shirt hung in shreds. ‘Gee it was like in the movies,’ said Annette, giggling hysterically. ‘Wasnt he grand, mommer, wasn’t he grand?’

‘Jez it’s lucky they didn’t start shootin; one of em had a gun.’

‘Scared to I guess.’

‘Trucks are off.’

‘Just one case got busted up… God there was five of them.’

‘Gee didnt he mix it up with em?’ screamed Annette.

‘Oh shut up,’ growled Cardinale. He had dropped into a chair and his wife was sponging off his face. ‘Did you get a good look at the boat?’ asked Congo.

‘Too goddam dark,’ said Johnny. ‘Fellers talked like they came from Joisey… First ting I knowed one of em comes up to me and sez I’m a revenue officer an I pokes him one before he has time to pull a gun an overboard he goes. Jez they were yeller. That guy George on the boat near brained one of em wid an oar. Then they got back in their old teakettle an beat it.’

‘But how they know how we make landin?’ stuttered Congo his face purple.

‘Some guy blabbed maybe,’ said Cardinale. ‘If I find out who it is, by God I’ll…’ he made a popping noise with his lips.

‘You see Meester ’Erf,’ said Congo in his suave voice again, ‘it was all champagne for the holidays… Very valuable cargo eh?’ Annette, her cheeks very red sat still looking at Johnny with parted lips and toobright eyes. Herf found himself blushing as he looked at her.

He got to his feet. ‘Well I must be getting back to the big city. Thank’s for the feed and the melodrama, Congo.’

‘You find station all right?’

‘Sure.’

‘Goodnight Meester ’Erf, maybe you buy case of champagne for Christmas, genuine Mumms.’

‘Too darn broke Congo.’

‘Then maybe you sell to your friends an I give you commission.’

‘All right I’ll see what I can do.’

‘I’ll phone you tomorrow to tell price.’

‘That’s a fine idea. Good night.’

Joggling home in the empty train through empty Brooklyn suburbs Jimmy tried to think of the bootlegging story he’d write for the Sunday Magazine Section. The girl’s pink cheeks and toobright eyes kept intervening, blurring the orderly arrangement of his thoughts. He sank gradually into dreamier and dreamier reverie. Before the kid was born Ellie sometimes had toobright eyes like that. The time on the hill when she had suddenly wilted in his arms and been sick and he had left her among the munching, calmly staring cows on the grassy slope and gone to a shepherd’s hut and brought back milk in a wooden ladle, and slowly as the mountains hunched up with evening the color had come back into her cheeks and she had looked at him that way and said with a dry little laugh: It’s the little Herf inside me. God why cant I stop mooning over things that are past? And when the baby was coming and Ellie was in the American Hospital at Neuilly, himself wandering distractedly through the fair, going into the Flea Circus, riding on merrygorounds and the steam swing, buying toys, candy, taking chances on dolls in a crazy blur, stumbling back to the hospital with a big plaster pig under his arm. Funny these fits of refuge in the past. Suppose she had died; I thought she would. The past would have been complete all round, framed, worn round your neck like a cameo, set up in type, molded on plates for the Magazine Section, like the first of James Herf’s articles on The Bootlegging Ring. Burning slugs of thought kept dropping into place spelled out by a clanking linotype.

At midnight he was walking across Fourteenth. He didnt want to go home to bed although the rasping cold wind tore at his neck and chin with sharp ice claws. He walked west across Seventh and Eighth Avenues, found the name Roy Sheffield beside a bell in a dimly lit hall. As soon as he pressed the bell the catch on the door began to click. He ran up the stairs. Roy had his big curly head with its glassgray gollywog eyes stuck out the door.

‘Hello Jimmy; come on in; we’re all lit up like churches.’

‘I’ve just seen a fight between bootleggers and hijackers.’

‘Where?’

‘Down at Sheepshead Bay.’

‘Here’s Jimmy Herf, he’s just been fighting prohibition agents,’ shouted Roy to his wife. Alice had dark chestnut dollhair and an uptilted peaches and cream dollface. She ran up to Jimmy and kissed him on the chin. ‘Oh Jimmy do tell us all about it… We’re so horribly bored.’

‘Hello,’ cried Jimmy; he had just made out Frances and Bob Hildebrand on the couch at the dim end of the room. They lifted their glasses to him. Jimmy was pushed into an armchair, had a glass of gin and ginger ale put in his hand. ‘Now what’s all this about a fight? You’d better tell us because were certainly not going to buy the Sunday Tribune to find out,’ Bob Hildebrand said in a deep rumbling voice.

Jimmy took a long drink. ‘I went out with a man I know who’s shiek of all the French and Italian bootleggers. He’s a fine man. He’s got a cork leg. He set me up to a swell feed and real Italian wine out in a deserted poolroom on the shores of Sheepshead Bay…’

‘By the way,’ asked Roy, ‘where’s Helena.’

‘Dont interrupt Roy,’ said Alice. ‘This is good… and besides you should never ask a man where his wife is.’

‘Then there was a lot of flashing of signal lights and stuff and a motorboat loaded down with Mumm’s extra dry champagne for Park Avenue Christmases came in and the hijackers arrived on a speedboat… It probably was a hydroplane it came so fast…’

‘My this is exciting,’ cooed Alice. ‘…Roy why dont you take up bootlegging?’

‘Worst fight I ever saw outside of the movies, six or seven on a side all slugging each other on a little narrow landing the size of this room, people crowning each other with oars and joints of lead pipe.’

‘Was anybody hurt?’

‘Everybody was… I think two of the hijackers were drowned. At any rate they beat a retreat leaving us lapping up the spilled champagne.’

‘But it must have been terrible,’ cried the Hildebrands. ‘What did you do Jimmy?’ asked Alice breathless.

‘Oh I hopped around keeping out of harm’s way. I didnt know who was on which side and it was dark and wet and confusing everywhere… I finally did drag my bootlegger friend out of the fray when he got his leg broken… his wooden leg.’

Everybody let out a shout. Roy filled Jimmy’s glass up with gin again.

‘Oh Jimmy,’ cooed Alice, ‘you lead the most thrilling life.’

James Merivale was going over a freshly decoded cable, tapping the words with a pencil as he read them. Tasmanian Manganese Products instructs us to open credit… The phone on his desk began to buzz.

‘James this is your mother. Come right up; something terrible has happened.’

‘But I dont know if I can get away…’

She had already cut off. Merivale felt himself turning pale. ‘Let me speak to Mr Aspinwall please… Mr Aspinwall this is Merivale… My mother’s been taken suddenly ill. I’m afraid it may be a stroke. I’d like to run up there for an hour. I’ll be back in time to get a cable off on that Tasmanian matter.’

‘All right… I’m very sorry Merivale.’

He grabbed his hat and coat, forgetting his muffler, and streaked out of the bank and along the street to the subway.

He burst into the apartment breathless, snapping his fingers from nervousness. Mrs Merivale grayfaced met him in the hall.

‘My dear I thought you’d been taken ill.’

‘It’s not that… it’s about Maisie.’

‘She hasnt met with an accid…?’

‘Come in here,’ interrupted Mrs Merivale. In the parlor sat a little roundfaced woman in a round mink hat and a long mink coat. ‘My dear this girl says she’s Mrs Jack Cunningham and she’s got a marriage certificate to prove it.’

‘Good Heavens, is that true?’

The girl nodded in a melancholy way.

‘And the invitations are out. Since his last wire Maisie’s been ordering her trousseau.’

The girl unfolded a large certificate ornamented with pansies and cupids and handed it to James.

‘It might be forged.’

‘It’s not forged,’ said the girl sweetly.

‘John C. Cunningham, 21… Jessie Lincoln, 18,’ he read aloud… ‘I’ll smash his face for that, the blackguard. That’s certainly his signature, I’ve seen it at the bank… The blackguard.’

‘Now James, don’t be hasty.’

‘I thought it would be better this way than after the ceremony,’ put in the girl in her little sugar voice. ‘I wouldnt have Jack commit bigamy for anything in the world.’

‘Where’s Maisie?’

‘The poor darling is prostrated in her room.’

Merivale’s face was crimson. The sweat itched under his collar. ‘Now dearest’ Mrs Merivale kept saying, ‘you must promise me not to do anything rash.’

‘Yes Maisie’s reputation must be protected at all costs.’

‘My dear I think the best thing to do is to get him up here and confront him with this… with this… lady… Would you agree to that Mrs Cunningham?’

‘Oh dear… Yes I suppose so.’

‘Wait a minute.’ shouted Merivale and strode down the hall to the telephone. ‘Rector 12305… Hello. I want to speak to Mr Jack Cunningham please… Hello. Is this Mr Cunningham’s office? Mr James Merivale speaking… Out of town… And when will he be back?… Hum.’ He strode back along the hall. ‘The damn scoundrel’s out of town.’

‘All the years I’ve known him,’ said the little lady in the round hat, ‘that has always been where he was.’

Outside the broad office windows the night is gray and foggy. Here and there a few lights make up dim horizontals and perpendiculars of asterisks. Phineas Blackhead sits at his desk tipping far back in the small leather armchair. In his hand protecting his fingers by a large silk handkerchief, he holds a glass of hot water and bicarbonate of soda. Densch bald and round as a billiardball sits in the deep armchair playing with his tortoiseshell spectacles. Everything is quiet except for an occasional rattling and snapping of the steampipes.

‘Densch you must forgive me… You know I rarely permit myself an observation concerning other people’s business,’ Blackhead is saying slowly between sips; then suddenly he sits up in his chair. ‘It’s a damn fool proposition, Densch, by God it is… by the Living Jingo it’s ridiculous.’

‘I dont like dirtying my hands any more than you do… Baldwin’s a good fellow. I think we’re safe in backing him a little.’

‘What the hell’s an import and export firm got to do in politics? If any of those guys wants a handout let him come up here and get it. Our business is the price of beans… and its goddam low. If any of you puling lawyers could restore the balance of the exchanges I’d be willing to do anything in the world… They’re crooks every last goddam one of em… by the Living Jingo they’re crooks.’ His face flushes purple, he sits upright in his chair banging with his fist on the corner of the desk. ‘Now you’re getting me all excited… Bad for my stomach, bad for my heart.’ Phineas Blackhead belches portentously and takes a great pulp out of the glass of bicarbonate of soda. Then he leans back in his chair again letting his heavy lids half cover his eyes.

‘Well old man,’ says Mr Densch in a tired voice, ‘it may have been a bad thing to do, but I’ve promised to support the reform candidate. That’s a purely private matter in no way involving the firm.’

‘Like hell it dont… How about McNiel and his gang?… They’ve always treated us all right and all we’ve ever done for em’s a couple of cases of Scotch and a few cigars now and then… Now we have these reformers throw the whole city government into a turmoil… By the Living Jingo…’

Densch gets to his feet. ‘My dear Blackhead I consider it my duty as a citizen to help in cleaning up the filthy conditions of bribery, corruption and intrigue that exist in the city government… I consider it my duty as a citizen…’ He starts walking to the door, his round belly stuck proudly out in front of him.

‘Well allow me to say Densch that I think its a damn fool proposition,’ Blackhead shouts after him. When his partner has gone he lies back a second with his eyes closed. His face takes on the mottled color of ashes, his big fleshy frame is shrinking like a deflating balloon. At length he gets to his feet with a groan. Then he takes his hat and coat and walks out of the office with a slow heavy step. The hall is empty and dimly lit. He has to wait a long while for the elevator. The thought of holdup men sneaking through the empty building suddenly makes him catch his breath. He is afraid to look behind him, like a child in the dark. At last the elevator shoots up.

‘Wilmer,’ he says to the night watchman who runs it, ‘there ought to be more light in these halls at night… During this crime wave I should think you ought to keep the building brightly lit.’

‘Yassir maybe you’re right sir… but there cant nobody get in unless I sees em first.’

‘You might be overpowered by a gang Wilmer.’

‘I’d like to see em try it.’

‘I guess you are right… mere question of nerve.’

Cynthia is sitting in the Packard reading a book. ‘Well dear did you think I was never coming.’

‘I almost finished my book, dad.’

‘All right Butler… up town as fast as you can. We’re late for dinner.’

As the limousine whirs up Lafayette Street, Blackhead turns to his daughter. ‘If you ever hear a man talking about his duty as a citizen, by the Living Jingo dont trust him… He’s up to some kind of monkey business nine times out of ten. You dont know what a relief it is to me that you and Joe are comfortably settled in life.’

‘What’s the matter dad? Did you have a hard day at the office?’ ‘There are no markets, there isnt a market in the goddam world that isnt shot to blazes… I tell you Cynthia it’s nip and tuck. There’s no telling what might happen… Look, before I forget it could you be at the bank uptown at twelve tomorrow?… I’m sending Hudgins up with certain securities, personal you understand, I want to put in your safe deposit box.’

‘But it’s jammed full already dad.’

‘That box at the Astor Trust is in your name isnt it?’

‘Jointly in mine and Joe’s.’

‘Well you take a new box at the Fifth Avenue Bank in your own name… I’ll have the stuff get there at noon sharp… And remember what I tell you Cynthia, if you ever hear a business associate talking about civic virtue, look lively.’

They are crossing Fourteenth. Father and daughter look out through the glass at the windbitten faces of people waiting to cross the street.

Jimmy Herf yawned and scraped back his chair. The nickel glints of the typewriter hurt his eyes. The tips of his fingers were sore. He pushed open the sliding doors a little and peeped into the cold bedroom. He could barely make out Ellie asleep in the bed in the alcove. At the far end of the room was the baby’s crib. There was a faint milkish sour smell of babyclothes. He pushed the doors to again and began to undress. If we only had more space, he was muttering; we live cramped in our squirrelcage… He pulled the dusty cashmere off the couch and yanked his pyjamas out from under the pillow. Space space cleanness quiet; the words were gesticulating in his mind as if he were addressing a vast auditorium.

He turned out the light, opened a crack of the window and dropped wooden with sleep into bed. Immediately he was writing a letter on a linotype. Now I lay me down to sleep… mother of the great white twilight. The arm of the linotype was a woman’s hand in a long white glove. Through the clanking from behind amber foots Ellie’s voice Dont, dont, dont, you’re hurting me so… Mr Herf, says a man in overalls, you’re hurting the machine and we wont be able to get out the bullgod edition thank dog. The linotype was a gulping mouth with nickelbright rows of teeth, gulped, crunched. He woke up sitting up in bed. He was cold, his teeth were chattering. He pulled the covers about him and settled to sleep again. The next time he woke up it was daylight. He was warm and happy. Snowflakes were dancing, hesitating, spinning, outside the tall window.

‘Hello Jimps,’ said Ellie coming towards him with a tray.

‘Why have I died and gone to heaven or something?’

‘No it’s Sunday morning… I thought you needed a little luxury… I made some corn muffins.’

‘Oh you’re marvelous Ellie… Wait a minute I must jump up and wash my teeth.’ He came back with his face washed, wearing his bathrobe. Her mouth winced under his kiss. ‘And it’s only eleven o’clock. I’ve gained an hour on my day off… Wont you have some coffee too?’

‘In a minute… Look here Jimps I’ve got something I want to talk about. Look dont you think we ought to get another place now that you’re working nights again all the time?’

‘You mean move?’

‘No. I was thinking if you could get another room to sleep in somewhere round, then nobody’d ever disturb you in the morning.’

‘But Ellie we’d never see each other… We hardly ever see each other as it is.’

‘It’s terrible… but what can we do when our officehours are so different?’

Martin’s crying came in a gust from the other room. Jimmy sat on the edge of the bed with the empty coffeecup on his knees looking at his bare feet. ‘Just as you like,’ he said dully. An impulse to grab her hands to crush her to him until he hurt her went up through him like a rocket and died. She picked up the coffeethings and swished away. His lips knew her lips, his arms knew the twining of her arms, he knew the deep woods of her hair, he loved her. He sat for a long time looking at his feet, lanky reddish feet with swollen blue veins, shoebound toes twisted by stairs and pavements. On each little toe there was a corn. He found his eyes filling with pitying tears. The baby had stopped crying. Jimmy went into the bathroom and started the water running in the tub.

‘It was that other feller you had Anna. He got you to thinkin you didnt give a damn… He made you a fatalist.’

‘What’s at?’

‘Somebody who thinks there’s no use strugglin, somebody who dont believe in human progress.’

‘Do you think Bouy was like that?’

‘He was a scab anyway… None o these Southerners are class-conscious… Didn’t he make you stop payin your union dues?’

‘I was sick o workin a sewin machine.’

‘But you could be a handworker, do fancy work and make good money. You’re not one o that kind, you’re one of us… I’ll get you back in good standin an you kin get a good job again… God I’d never have let you work in a dancehall the way he did. Anna it hurt me terrible to see a Jewish girl goin round with a feller like that.’

‘Well he’s gone an I aint got no job.’

‘Fellers like that are the greatest enemies of the workers… They dont think of nobody but themselves.’

They are walking slowly up Second Avenue through a foggy evening. He is a rustyhaired thinfaced young Jew with sunken cheeks and livid pale skin. He has the bandy legs of a garment worker. Anna’s shoes are too small for her. She has deep rings under her eyes. The fog is full of strolling groups talking Yiddish, overaccented East Side English, Russian. Warm rifts of light from delicatessen stores and softdrink stands mark off the glistening pavement.

‘If I didn’t feel so tired all the time,’ mutters Anna.

‘Let’s stop here an have a drink… You take a glass o buttermilk Anna, make ye feel good.’

‘I aint got the taste for it Elmer. I’ll take a chocolate soda.’

‘That’ll juss make ye feel sick, but go ahead if you wanter.’ She sat on the slender nickelbound stool. He stood beside her. She let herself lean back a little against him. ‘The trouble with the workers is’… He was talking in a low impersonal voice. ‘The trouble with the workers is we dont know nothin, we dont know how to eat, we dont know how to live, we dont know how to protect our rights… Jez Anna I want to make you think of things like that. Cant you see we’re in the middle of a battle just like in the war?’ With the long sticky spoon Anna was fishing bits of icecream out of the thick foamy liquid in her glass.

George Baldwin looked at himself in the mirror as he washed his hands in the little washroom behind his office. His hair that still grew densely down to a point on his forehead was almost white. There was a deep line at each corner of his mouth and across his chin. Under his bright gimleteyes the skin was sagging and granulated. When he had wiped his hands slowly and meticulously he took a little box of strychnine pills from the upper pocket of his vest, swallowed one, and feeling the anticipated stimulus tingle through him went back into his office. A longnecked officeboy was fidgeting beside his desk with a card in his hand.

‘A lady wants to speak to you sir.’

‘Has she an appointment? Ask Miss Ranke… Wait a minute. Show the lady right through into this office.’ The card read Nellie Linihan McNiel. She was expensively dressed with a lot of lace in the opening of her big fur coat. Round her neck she had a lorgnette on an amethyst chain.

‘Gus asked me to come to see you,’ she said as he motioned her into a chair beside the desk.

‘What can I do for you?’ His heart for some reason was pounding hard.

She looked at him a moment through her lorgnette. ‘George you stand it better than Gus does.’

‘What?’

‘Oh all this… I’m trying to get Gus to go away with me for a rest abroad… Marianbad or something like that… but he says he’s in too deep to pull up his stakes.’

‘I guess that’s true of all of us,’ said Baldwin with a cold smile.

They were silent a minute, then Nellie McNiel got to her feet. ‘Look here George, Gus is awfully cut up about this… You know he likes to stand by his friends and have his friends stand by him.’

‘Nobody can say that I havent stood by him… It’s simply this, I’m not a politician, and as, probably foolishly, I’ve allowed myself to be nominated for office, I have to run on a nonpartisan basis.’

‘George that’s only half the story and you know it.’

‘Tell him that I’ve always been and always shall be a good friend of his… He knows that perfectly well. In this particular campaign I have pledged myself to oppose certain elements with which Gus has let himself get involved.’

‘You’re a fine talker George Baldwin and you always were.’

Baldwin flushed. They stood stiff side by side at the office door. His hand lay still on the doorknob as if paralyzed. From the outer offices came the sound of typewriters and voices. From outside came the long continuous tapping of riveters at work on a new building.

‘I hope your family’s all well,’ he said at length with an effort.

‘Oh yes they are all well thanks… Goodby.’ She had gone.

Baldwin stood for a moment looking out of the window at the gray blackwindowed building opposite. Silly to let things agitate him so. Need of relaxation. He got his hat and coat from their hook behind the washroom door and went out. ‘Jonas,’ he said to a man with a round bald head shaped like a cantaloupe who sat poring over papers in the highceilinged library that was the central hall of the lawoffice, ‘bring everything up that’s on my desk… I’ll go over it uptown tonight.’

‘All right sir.’

When he got out on Broadway he felt like a small boy playing hooky. It was a sparkling winter afternoon with hurrying rifts of sun and cloud. He jumped into a taxi. Going uptown he lay back in the seat dozing. At Fortysecond Street he woke up. Everything was a confusion of bright intersecting planes of color, faces, legs, shop windows, trolleycars, automobiles. He sat up with his gloved hands on his knees, fizzling with excitement. Outside of Nevada’s apartmenthouse he paid the taxi. The driver was a negro and showed an ivory mouthful of teeth when he got a fiftycent tip. Neither elevator was there so Baldwin ran lightly up the stairs, half wondering at himself. He knocked on Nevada’s door. No answer. He knocked again. She opened it cautiously. He could see her curly towhead. He brushed into the room before she could stop him. All she had on was a kimono over a pink chemise.

‘My God,’ she said, ‘I thought you were the waiter.’

He grabbed her and kissed her. ‘I dont know why but I feel like a threeyear old.’

‘You look like you was crazy with the heat… I dont like you to come over without telephoning, you know that.’

‘You dont mind just this once I forgot.’

Baldwin caught sight of something on the settee; he found himself staring at a pair of darkblue trousers neatly folded.

‘I was feeling awfully fagged down at the office Nevada. I thought I’d come up to talk to you to cheer myself up a bit.’

‘I was just practicing some dancing with the phonograph.’

‘Yes very interesting…’ He began to walk springily up and down. ‘Now look here Nevada… We’ve got to have a talk. I dont care who it is you’ve got in your bedroom.’ She looked suddenly in his face and sat down on the settee beside the trousers. ‘In fact I’ve known for some time that you and Tony Hunter were carrying on.’ She compressed her lips and crossed her legs. ‘In fact all this stuff and nonsense about his having to go to a psychoanalyst at twentyfive dollars an hour amused me enormously… But just this minute I’ve decided I had enough. Quite enough.’

‘George you’re crazy,’ she stammered and then suddenly she began to giggle.

‘I tell you what I’ll do,’ went on Baldwin in a clear legal voice, ‘I’ll send you a check for five hundred, because you’re a nice girl and I like you. The apartment’s paid till the first of the month. Does that suit you? And please never communicate with me in any way.’

She was rolling on the settee giggling helplessly beside the neatly folded pair of darkblue trousers. Baldwin waved his hat and gloves at her and left closing the door very gently behind him. Good riddance, he said to himself as he closed the door carefully behind him.

Down in the street again he began to walk briskly uptown. He felt excited and talkative. He wondered who he could go to see. Telling over the names of his friends made him depressed. He began to feel lonely, deserted. He wanted to be talking to a woman, making her sorry for the barrenness of his life. He went into a cigarstore and began looking through the phonebook. There was a faint flutter in him when he found the H’s. At last he found the name Herf, Helena Oglethorpe.

Nevada Jones sat a long while on the settee giggling hysterically. At length Tony Hunter came in in his shirt and drawers with his bow necktie perfectly tied.

‘Has he gone?’

‘Gone? sure he’s gone, gone for good,’ she shrieked. ‘He saw your damn pants.’

He let himself drop on a chair. ‘O God if I’m not the unluckiest fellow in the world.’

‘Why?’ she sat spluttering with laughter with the tears running down her face.

‘Nothing goes right. That means it’s all off about the matinees.’

‘It’s back to three a day for little Nevada… I dont give a damn… I never did like bein a kept woman.’

‘But you’re not thinking of my career… Women are so selfish. If you hadn’t led me on…’

‘Shut up you little fool. Dont you think I dont know all about you?’ She got to her feet with the kimono pulled tight about her.

‘God all I needed was a chance to show what I could do, and now I’ll never get it,’ Tony was groaning.

‘Sure you will if you do what I tell you. I set out to make a man of you kiddo and I’m goin to do it… We’ll get up an act. Old Hirshbein’ll give us a chance, he used to be kinder smitten… Come on now, I’ll punch you in the jaw if you dont. Let’s start thinkin up… We’ll come in with a dance number see… then you’ll pretend to want to pick me up… I’ll be waitin for a streetcar… see… and you’ll say Hello Girlie an I’ll call Officer.’

‘Is that all right for length sir,’ asked the fitter busily making marks on the trousers with a piece of chalk.

James Merivale looked down at the fitter’s little greenish wizened bald head and at the brown trousers flowing amply about his feet. ‘A little shorter… I think it looks a little old to have trousers too long.’

‘Why hello Merivale I didn’t know you bought your clothes at Brooks’ too. Gee I’m glad to see you.’

Merivale’s blood stood still. He found himself looking straight in the blue alcoholic eyes of Jack Cunningham. He bit his lip and tried to stare at him coldly without speaking.

‘God Almighty, do you know what we’ve done?’ cried out Cunningham. ‘We’ve bought the same suit of clothes… I tell you it’s identically the same.’

Merivale was looking in bewilderment from Cunningham’s brown trousers to his own, the same color, the same tiny stripe of red and faint mottling of green.

‘Good God man two future brothersinlaw cant wear the same suit. People’ll think it’s a uniform… It’s ridiculous.’

‘Well what are we going to do about it?’ Merivale found himself saying in a grumbling tone.

‘We have to toss up and see who gets it that’s all… Will you lend me a quarter please?’ Cunningham turned to his salesman. ‘All right… One toss, you yell.’

‘Heads,’ said Merivale mechanically.

‘The brown suit is yours… Now I’ve got to choose another… God I’m glad we met when we did. Look,’ he shouted out through the curtains of the booth, ‘why dont you have dinner with me tonight at the Salmagundi Club?… I’m going to be dining with the only man in the world who’s crazier about hydroplanes than I am… It’s old man Perkins, you know him, he’s one of the vice-presidents of your bank… And look when you see Maisie tell her I’m coming up to see her tomorrow. An extraordinary series of events has kept me from communicating with her… a most unfortunate series of events that took all my time up to this moment… We’ll talk about it later.’

Merivale cleared his throat. ‘Very well,’ he said dryly.

‘All right sir,’ said the fitter giving Merivale a last tap on the buttocks. He went back into the booth to dress.

‘All right old thing,’ shouted Cunningham, ‘I’ve got to go pick out another suit… I’ll expect you at seven. I’ll have a Jack Rose waiting for you.’

Merivale’s hands were trembling as he fastened his belt. Perkins, Jack Cunningham, the damn blackguard, hydroplanes, Jack Cunningham Salmagundi Perkins. He went to a phone booth in a corner of the store and called up his mother. ‘Hello Mother, I’m afraid I wont be up to dinner… I’m dining with Randolph Perkins at the Salmagundi Club… Yes it is very pleasant… Oh well he and I have always been fairly good friends… Oh yes it’s essential to stand in with the men higher up. And I’ve seen Jack Cunningham. I put it up to him straight from the shoulder man to man and he was very much embarrassed. He promised a full explanation within twentyfour hours… No I kept my temper very well. I felt I owed it to Maisie. I tell you I think the man’s a blackguard but until there’s proof… Well good night dear, in case I’m late. Oh no please dont wait up. Tell Maisie not to worry I’ll be able to give her the fullest details. Good night mother.’

They sat at a small table in the back of a dimly lighted tearoom. The shade on the lamp cut off the upper parts of their faces. Ellen had on a dress of bright peacock blue and a small blue hat with a piece of green in it. Ruth Prynne’s face had a sagging tired look under the street makeup.

‘Elaine, you’ve just got to come,’ she was saying in a whiny voice. ‘Cassie’ll be there and Oglethorpe and all the old gang… After all now that you’re making such a success of editorial work it’s no reason for completely abandoning your old friends is it? You dont know how much we talk and wonder about you.’

‘No but Ruth it’s just that I’m getting to hate large parties. I guess I must be getting old. All right I’ll come for a little while.’

Ruth put down the sandwich she was nibbling at and reached for Ellen’s hand and patted it. ‘That’s the little trouper… Of course I knew you were coming all along.’

‘But Ruth you never told me what happened to that traveling repertory company last summer…’

‘O my God,’ burst out Ruth. ‘That was terrible. Of course it was a scream, a perfect scream. Well the first thing that happened was that Isabel Clyde’s husband Ralph Nolton who was managing the company was a dipsomaniac… and then the lovely Isabel wouldn’t let anybody on the stage who didn’t act like a dummy for fear the rubes wouldnt know who the star was… Oh I cant tell about it any more… It isnt funny to me any more, it’s just horrible… Oh Elaine I’m so discouraged. My dear I’m getting old.’ She suddenly burst out crying.

‘Oh Ruth please dont,’ said Ellen in a little rasping voice. She laughed. ‘After all we’re none of us getting any younger are we?’

‘Dear you dont understand… You never will understand.’

They sat a long while without saying anything, scraps of low-voiced conversation came to them from other corners of the dim tearoom. The palehaired waitress brought them two orders of fruit salad.

‘My it must be getting late,’ said Ruth eventually.

‘It’s only half past eight… We dont want to get to this party too soon.’

‘By the way… how’s Jimmy Herf. I havent seen him for ages.’

‘Jimps is fine… He’s terribly sick of newspaper work. I do wish he could get something he really enjoyed doing.’

‘He’ll always be a restless sort of person. Oh Elaine I was so happy when I heard about your being married… I acted like a damn fool. I cried and cried… And now with Martin and everything you must be terribly happy.’

‘Oh we get along all right… Martin’s picking up, New York seems to agree with him. He was so quiet and fat for a long while we were terribly afraid we’d produced an imbecile. Do you know Ruth I don’t think I’d ever have another baby… I was so horribly afraid he’d turn out deformed or something… It makes me sick to think of it.’

‘Oh but it must be wonderful though.’

They rang a bell under a small brass placque that read: Hester Voorhees INTERPRETATION OF THE DANCE. They went up three flights of creaky freshvarnished stairs. At the door open into a room full of people they met Cassandra Wilkins in a Greek tunic with a wreath of satin rosebuds round her head and a gilt wooden panpipe in her hand.

‘Oh you darlings,’ she cried and threw her arms round them both at once. ‘Hester said you wouldnt come but I just knew you would… Come wight in and take off your things, we’re beginning with a few classic wythms.’ They followed her through a long candlelit incensesmelling room full of men and women in dangly costumes.

‘But my dear you didn’t tell us it was going to be a costume party.’

‘Oh yes cant you see evewything’s Gweek, absolutely Gweek… Here’s Hester… Here they are darling… Hester you know Wuth… and this is Elaine Oglethorpe.’

‘I call myself Mrs Herf now, Cassie.’

‘Oh I beg your pardon, it’s so hard to keep twack… They’re just in time… Hester’s going to dance an owiental dance called Wythms from the Awabian Nights… Oh it’s too beautiful.’

When Ellen came out of the bedroom where she had left her wraps a tall figure in Egyptian headdress with crooked rusty eyebrows accosted her. ‘Allow me to salute Helena Herf, distinguished editress of Manners, the journal that brings the Ritz to the humblest fireside… isnt that true?’

‘Jojo you’re a horrible tease… I’m awfully glad to see you.’

‘Let’s go and sit in a corner and talk, oh only woman I have ever loved…’

‘Yes do let’s… I dont like it here much.’

‘And my dear, have you heard about Tony Hunter’s being straightened out by a psychoanalyst and now he’s all sublimated and has gone on the vaudeville stage with a woman named California Jones.’

‘You’d better watch out Jojo.’

They sat down on a couch in a recess between the dormer windows. Out of the corner of her eye she could see a girl dancing in green silk veils. The phonograph was playing the Cesar Frank symphony.

‘We mustnt miss Cassie’s daunce. The poor girl would be dreadfully offended.’

‘Jojo tell me about yourself, how have you been?’

He shook his head and made a broad gesture with his draped arm. ‘Ah let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings.’

‘Oh Jojo I’m sick of this sort of thing… It’s all so silly and dowdy… I wish I hadnt let them make me take my hat off.’

‘That was so that I should look upon the forbidden forests of your hair.’

‘Oh Jojo do be sensible.’

‘How’s your husband, Elaine or rathah Helenah?’

‘Oh he’s all right.’

‘You dont sound terribly enthusiastic.’

‘Martin’s fine though. He’s got black hair and brown eyes and his cheeks are getting to be pink. Really he’s awfully cute.’

‘My deah, spare me this exhibition of maternal bliss… You’ll be telling me next you walked in a baby parade.’

She laughed. ‘Jojo it’s lots of fun to see you again.’

‘I havent finished my catechism yet deah… I saw you in the oval diningroom the other day with a very distinguished looking man with sharp features and gray hair.’

‘That must have been George Baldwin. Why you knew him in the old days.’

‘Of course of course. How he has changed. A much more interesting looking man than he used to be I must say… A very strange place for the wife of a bolshevik pacifist and I. W. W. agitator to be seen taking lunch, I must say.

‘Jimps isnt exactly that. I kind of wish he were…’ She wrinkled up her nose. ‘I’m a little fed up too with all that sort of thing.’

‘I suspected it my dear.’ Cassie was flitting selfconsciously by.

‘Oh do come and help me… Jojo’s teasing me terribly.’

‘Well I’ll twy to sit down just for a second, I’m going to dance next… Mr Oglethorpe’s going to wead his twanslation of the songs of Bilitis for me to dance to.’

Ellen looked from one to the other; Oglethorpe crooked his eyebrows and nodded.

Then Ellen sat alone for a long while looking at the dancing and the chittering crowded room through a dim haze of boredom.

The record on the phonograph was Turkish. Hester Voorhees, a skinny woman with a mop of hennaed hair cut short at the level of her ears, came out holding a pot of drawling incense out in front of her preceded by two young men who unrolled a carpet as she came. She wore silk bloomers and a clinking metal girdle and brassières. Everybody was clapping and saying, ‘How wonderful, how marvelous,’ when from another room came three tearing shrieks of a woman. Everybody jumped to his feet. A stout man in a derby hat appeared in the doorway. ‘All right little goils, right through into the back room. Men stay here.’

‘Who are you anyway?’

‘Never mind who I am, you do as I say.’ The man’s face was red as a beet under the derby hat.

‘It’s a detective.’ ‘It’s outrageous. Let him show his badge.’

‘It’s a holdup.’

‘It’s a raid.’

The room had filled suddenly with detectives. They stood in front of the windows. A man in a checked cap with a face knobbed like a squash stood in front of the fireplace. They were pushing the women roughly into the back room. The men were herded in a little group near the door; detectives were taking their names. Ellen still sat on the couch. ‘… complaint phoned to headquarters,’ she heard somebody say. Then she noticed that there was a phone on the little table beside the couch where she sat. She picked it up and whispered softly for a number.

‘Hello is this the district attorney’s office?… I want to speak to Mr Baldwin please… George… It’s lucky I knew where you were. Is the district attorney there? That’s fine… no you tell him about it. There has been a horrible mistake. I’m at Hester Voorhees’; you know she has a dancing studio. She was presenting some dances to some friends and through some mistake the police are raiding the place…’

The man in the derby was standing over her. ‘All right phoning wont do no good… Go ’long in the other room.’

‘I’ve got the district attorney’s office on the wire. You speak to him… Hello is this Mr Winthrop?… Yes O… How do you do? Will you please speak to this man?’ She handed the telephone to the detective and walked out into the center of the room. My I wish I hadnt taken my hat off, she was thinking.

From the other room came a sound of sobbing and Hester Voorhees’ stagy voice shrieking, ‘It’s a horrible mistake… I wont be insulted like this.’

The detective put down the telephone. He came over to Ellen. ‘I want to apologize miss… We acted on insufficient information. I’ll withdraw my men immediately.’

‘You’d better apologize to Mrs Voorhees… It’s her studio.’

‘Well ladies and gents,’ the detective began in a loud cheerful voice, ‘we’ve made a little mistake and we’re very sorry… Accidents will happen…’

Ellen slipped into the side room to get her hat and coat. She stood some time before the mirror powdering her nose. When she went out into the studio again everybody was talking at once. Men and women stood round with sheets and bathrobes draped over their scanty dancingclothes. The detectives had melted away as suddenly as they came. Oglethorpe was talking in loud impassioned tones in the middle of a group of young men.

‘The scoundrels to attack women,’ he was shouting, red in the face, waving his headdress in one hand. ‘Fortunately I was able to control myself or I might have committed an act that I should have regretted to my dying day… It was only with the greatest self-control…’

Ellen managed to slip out, ran down the stairs and out into drizzly streets. She hailed a taxi and went home. When she had got her things off she called up George Baldwin at his house. ‘Hello George, I’m terribly sorry I had to trouble you and Mr Winthrop. Well if you hadnt happened to say at lunch you’d be there all the evening they probably would be just piling us out of the black maria at the Jefferson Market Court… Of course it was funny. I’ll tell you about it sometime, but I’m so sick of all that stuff… Oh just everything like that æsthetic dancing and literature and radicalism and psychoanalysis… Just an overdose I guess… Yes I guess that’s it George… I guess I’m growing up.’

The night was one great chunk of black grinding cold. The smell of the presses still in his nose, the chirrup of typewriters still in his ears, Jimmy Herf stood in City Hall Square with his hands in his pockets watching ragged men with caps and earsflaps pulled down over faces and necks the color of raw steak shovel snow. Old and young their faces were the same color, their clothes were the same color. A razor wind cut his ears and made his forehead ache between the eyes.

‘Hello Herf, think you’ll take the job?’ said a milkfaced young man who came up to him breezily and pointed to the pile of snow. ‘Why not, Dan. I dont know why it wouldnt be better than spending all your life rooting into other people’s affairs until you’re nothing but a goddam traveling dictograph.’

‘It’d be a fine job in summer all right… Taking the West Side?’

‘I’m going to walk up… I’ve got the heebyjeebies tonight.’

‘Jez man you’ll freeze to death.’

‘I dont care if I do… You get so you dont have any private life, you’re just an automatic writing machine.’

‘Well I wish I could get rid of a little of my private life… Well goodnight. I hope you find some private life Jimmy.’

Laughing, Jimmy Herf turned his back on the snowshovelers and started walking up Broadway, leaning into the wind with his chin buried in his coatcollar. At Houston Street he looked at his watch. Five o’clock. Gosh he was late today. Wouldnt be a place in the world where he could get a drink. He whimpered to himself at the thought of the icy blocks he still had to walk before he could get to his room. Now and then he stopped to pat some life into his numb ears. At last he got back to his room, lit the gasstove and hung over it tingling. His room was a small square bleak room on the south side of Washington Square. Its only furnishings were a bed, a chair, a table piled with books, and the gasstove. When he had begun to be a little less cold he reached under the bed for a basketcovered bottle of rum. He put some water to heat in a tin cup on the gasstove and began drinking hot rum and water. Inside him all sorts of unnamed agonies were breaking loose. He felt like the man in the fairy story with an iron band round his heart. The iron band was breaking.

He had finished the rum. Occasionally the room would start going round him solemnly and methodically. Suddenly he said aloud: ‘I’ve got to talk to her… I’ve got to talk to her.’ He shoved his hat down on his head and pulled on his coat. Outside the cold was balmy. Six milkwagons in a row passed jingling.

On West Twelfth two black cats were chasing each other. Everywhere was full of their crazy yowling. He felt that something would snap in his head, that he himself would scuttle off suddenly down the frozen street eerily caterwauling.

He stood shivering in the dark passage, ringing the bell marked Herf again and again. Then he knocked as loud as he could. Ellen came to the door in a green wrapper. ‘What’s the matter Jimps? Havent you got a key?’ Her face was soft with sleep; there was a happy cozy suave smell of sleep about her. He talked through clenched teeth breathlessly.

‘Ellie I’ve got to talk to you.’

‘Are you lit, Jimps?’

‘Well I know what I’m saying.’

‘I’m terribly sleepy.’

He followed her into her bedroom. She kicked off her slippers and got back into bed, sat up looking at him with sleepweighted eyes.

‘Dont talk too loud on account of Martin.’

‘Ellie I dont know why it’s always so difficult for me to speak out about anything… I always have to get drunk to speak out… Look here do you like me any more?’

‘You know I’m awfully fond of you and always shall be.’

‘I mean love, you know what I mean, whatever it is…’ he broke in harshly.

‘I guess I dont love anybody for long unless they’re dead… I’m a terrible sort of person. It’s no use talking about it.’

‘I knew it. You knew I knew it. O God things are pretty rotten for me Ellie.’

She sat with her knees hunched up and her hands clasped round them looking at him with wide eyes. ‘Are you really so crazy about me Jimps?’

‘Look here lets get a divorce and be done with it.’

‘Dont be in such a hurry, Jimps… And there’s Martin. What about him?’

‘I can scrape up enough money for him occasionally, poor little kid.’

‘I make more than you do, Jimps… You shouldnt do that yet.’

‘I know. I know. Dont I know it?’

They sat looking at each other without speaking. Their eyes burned from looking at each other. Suddenly Jimmy wanted terribly to be asleep, not to remember anything, to let his head sink into blackness, as into his mother’s lap when he was a kid.

‘Well I’m going home.’ He gave a little dry laugh. ‘We didn’t think it’d all go pop like this, did we?’

‘Goodnight Jimps,’ she whined in the middle of a yawn. ‘But things dont end… If only I weren’ so terribly sleepy… Will you put out the light?’

He groped his way in the dark to the door. Outside the arctic morning was growing gray with dawn. He hurried back to his room. He wanted to get into bed and be asleep before it was light.

A long low room with long tables down the middle piled with silk and crêpe fabrics, brown, salmonpink, emeraldgreen. A smell of snipped thread and dress materials. All down the tables bowed heads auburn, blond, black, brown of girls sewing. Errandboys pushing rolling stands of hung dresses up and down the aisles. A bell rings and the room breaks out with noise and talk shrill as a birdhouse.

Anna gets up and stretches out her arms. ‘My I’ve got a head,’ she says to the girl next her.

‘Up last night?’

She nods.

‘Ought to quit it dearie, it’ll spoil your looks. A girl cant burn the candle at both ends like a feller can.’ The other girl is thin and blond and has a crooked nose. She puts her arm round Anna’s waist. ‘My I wish I could put on a little of your weight.’

‘I wish you could,’ says Anna. ‘Dont matter what I eat it turns to fat.’

‘Still you aint too fat… You’re juss plump so’s they like to squeeze ye. You try wearing boyishform like I told an you’ll look fine.’

‘My boyfriend says he likes a girl to have shape.’

On the stairs they push their way through a group of girls listening to a little girl with red hair who talks fast, opening her mouth wide and rolling her eyes. ’…She lived just on the next block at 2230 Cameron Avenue an she’d been to the Hippodrome with some girlfriends and when they got home it was late an they let her go home alone, up Cameron Avenue, see? An the next morning when her folks began looking for her they found her behind a Spearmint sign in a back lot.’

‘Was she dead?’

‘Sure she was… A negro had done somethin terrible to her and then he’d strangled her… I felt terrible. I used to go to school with her. An there aint a girl on Cameron Avenue been out after dark they’re so scared.’

‘Sure I saw all about it in the paper last night. Imagine livin right on the next block.’

‘Did you see me touch that hump back?’ cried Rosie as he settled down beside her in the taxi. ‘In the lobby of the theater?’ He pulled at the trousers that were tight over his knees. ‘That’s goin to give us luck Jake. I never seen a hump back to fail… if you touch him on the hump… Ou it makes me sick how fast these taxis go.’ They were thrown forward by the taxi’s sudden stop. ‘My God we almost ran over a boy.’ Jake Silverman patted her knee. ‘Poor ikle kid, was it all worked up?’ As they drove up to the hotel she shivered and buried her face in her coatcollar. When they went to the desk to get the key, the clerk said to Silverman, ‘There’s a gentleman waiting to see you sir.’ A thickset man came up to him taking a cigar out of his mouth. ‘Will you step this way a minute please Mr Silverman.’ Rosie thought she was going to faint. She stood perfectly still, frozen, with her cheeks deep in the fur collar of her coat.

They sat in two deep armchairs and whispered with their heads together. Step by step, she got nearer, listening. ‘Warrant… Department of Justice… using the mails to defraud…’ She couldnt hear what Jake said in between. He kept nodding his head as if agreeing. Then suddenly he spoke out smoothly, smiling.

‘Well I’ve heard your side Mr Rogers… Here’s mine. If you arrest me now I shall be ruined and a great many people who have put their money in this enterprise will be ruined… In a week I can liquidate the whole concern with a profit… Mr Rogers I am a man who has been deeply wronged through foolishness in misplacing confidence in others.’

‘I cant help that… My duty is to execute the warrant… I’m afraid I’ll have to search your room… You see we have several little items…’ The man flicked the ash off his cigar and began to read in a monotonous voice. ‘Jacob Silverman, alias Edward Faversham, Simeon J. Arbuthnot, Jack Hinkley, J. J. Gold… Oh we’ve got a pretty little list… We’ve done some very pretty work on your case, if I do say it what shouldnt.’

They got to their feet. The man with the cigar jerked his head at a lean man in a cap who sat reading a paper on the opposite side of the lobby.

Silverman walked over to the desk. ‘I’m called away on business,’ he said to the clerk. ‘Will you please have my bill prepared? Mrs Silverman will keep the room for a few days.’

Rosie couldnt speak. She followed the three men into the elevator. ‘Sorry to have to do this maam,’ said the lean detective pulling at the visor of his cap. Silverman opened the room door for them and closed it carefully behind him. ‘Thank you for your consideration, gentlemen… My wife thanks you.’ Rosie sat in a straight chair in the corner of the room. She was biting her tongue hard, harder to try to keep her lips from twitching.

‘We realize Mr Silverman that this is not quite the ordinary criminal case.’

‘Wont you have a drink gentlemen?’

They shook their heads. The thickset man was lighting a fresh cigar.

‘Allright Mike,’ he said to the lean man. ‘Go through the drawers and closet.’

‘Is that regular?’

‘If this was regular we’d have the handcuffs on you and be running the lady here as an accessory.’

Rosie sat with her icy hands clasped between her knees swaying her body from side to side. Her eyes were closed. While the detectives were rummaging in the closet, Silverman took the opportunity to put his hand on her shoulder. She opened her eyes. ‘The minute the goddam dicks take me out phone Schatz and tell him everything. Get hold of him if you have to wake up everybody in New York.’ He spoke low and fast, his lips barely moving.

Almost immediately he was gone, followed by the two detectives with a satchel full of letters. His kiss was still wet on her lips. She looked dazedly round the empty deathly quiet room. She noticed some writing on the lavender blotter on the desk. It was his handwriting, very scrawly: Hock everything and beat it; you are a good kid. Tears began running down her cheeks. She sat a long while with her head dropped on the desk kissing the penciled words on the blotter.

4 Skyscraper

The young man without legs has stopped still in the middle of the south sidewalk of Fourteenth Street. He wears a blue knitted sweater and a blue stocking cap. His eyes staring up widen until they fill the paperwhite face. Drifts across the sky a dirigible, bright tinfoil cigar misted with height, gently prodding the rainwashed sky and the soft clouds. The young man without legs stops still propped on his arms in the middle of the south sidewalk of Fourteenth Street. Among striding legs, lean legs, waddling legs, legs in skirts and pants and knickerbockers, he stops perfectly still, propped on his arms, looking up at the dirigible.

Jobless, Jimmy Herf came out of the Pulitzer Building. He stood beside a pile of pink newspapers on the curb, taking deep breaths, looking up the glistening shaft of the Woolworth. It was a sunny day, the sky was a robin’s egg blue. He turned north and began to walk uptown. As he got away from it the Woolworth pulled out like a telescope. He walked north through the city of shiny windows, through the city of scrambled alphabets, through the city of gilt letter signs.

Spring rich in gluten… Chockful of golden richness, delight in every bite, THE DADDY OF THEM ALL, spring rich in gluten. Nobody can buy better bread than PRINCE ALBERT. Wrought steel, monel, copper, nickel, wrought iron. All the world loves natural beauty. LOVE’S BARGAIN that suit at Gumpel’s best value in town. Keep that schoolgirl complexion… JOE KISS, starting, lightning, ignition and generators.

Everything made him bubble with repressed giggles. It was eleven o’clock. He hadnt been to bed. Life was upside down, he was a fly walking on the ceiling of a topsyturvy city. He’d thrown up his job, he had nothing to do today, tomorrow, next day, day after. Whatever goes up comes down, but not for weeks, months. Spring rich in gluten.

He went into a lunchroom, ordered bacon and eggs, toast and coffee, sat eating them happily, tasting thoroughly every mouthful. His thoughts ran wild like a pasture full of yearling colts crazy with sundown. At the next table a voice was expounding monotonously:

‘Jilted… and I tell you we had to do some cleaning. They were all members of your church you know. We knew the whole story. He was advised to put her away. He said, “No I’m going to see it through”.’

Herf got to his feet. He must be walking again. He went out with a taste of bacon in his teeth.

Express service meets the demands of spring. O God to meet the demands of spring. No tins, no sir, but there’s rich quality in every mellow pipeful… SOCONY. One taste tells more than a million words. The yellow pencil with the red band. Than a million words, than a million words. ‘All right hand over that million… Keep him covered Ben.’ The Yonkers gang left him for dead on a bench in the park. They stuck him up, but all they got was a million words… ‘But Jimps I’m so tired of booktalk and the proletariat, cant you understand?’

Chockful of golden richness, spring.

Dick Snow’s mother owned a shoebox factory. She failed and he came out of school and took to standing on streetcorners. The guy in the softdrink stand put him wise. He’d made two payments on pearl earings for a blackhaired Jewish girl with a shape like a mandolin. They waited for the bankmessenger in the L station. He pitched over the turnstile and hung there. They went off with the satchel in a Ford sedan. Dick Snow stayed behind emptying his gun into the dead man. In the deathhouse he met the demands of spring by writing a poem to his mother that they published in the Evening Graphic.

With every deep breath Herf breathed in rumble and grind and painted phrases until he began to swell, felt himself stumbling big and vague, staggering like a pillar of smoke above the April streets, looking into the windows of machineshops, buttonfactories, tenementhouses, felt of the grime of bedlinen and the smooth whir of lathes, wrote cusswords on typewriters between the stenographer’s fingers, mixed up the pricetags in departmentstores. Inside he fizzled like sodawater into sweet April syrups, strawberry, sarsaparilla, chocolate, cherry, vanilla dripping foam through the mild gasolineblue air. He dropped sickeningly fortyfour stories, crashed. And suppose I bought a gun and killed Ellie, would I meet the demands of April sitting in the deathhouse writing a poem about my mother to be published in the Evening Graphic?

He shrank until he was of the smallness of dust, picking his way over crags and boulders in the roaring gutter, climbing straws, skirting motoroil lakes.

He sat in Washington Square, pink with noon, looking up Fifth Avenue through the arch. The fever had seeped out of him. He felt cool and tired. Another spring, God how many springs ago, walking from the cemetery up the blue macadam road where fieldsparrows sang and the sign said: Yonkers. In Yonkers I buried my boyhood, in Marseilles with the wind in my face I dumped my calf years into the harbor. Where in New York shall I bury my twenties? Maybe they were deported and went out to sea on the Ellis Island ferry singing the International. The growl of the International over the water, fading sighing into the mist.

James Herf young newspaper man of 190 West 12th Street recently lost his twenties. Appearing before Judge Merivale they were remanded to Ellis Island for deportation as undesirable aliens. The younger four Sasha Michael Nicholas and Vladimir had been held for some time on a charge of criminal anarchy. The fifth and sixth were held on a technical charge of vagrancy. The later ones Bill Tony and Joe were held under various indictments including wifebeating, arson, assault, and prostitution. All were convicted on counts of misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance.

Oyez oyez oyez prisoner at the bar… I find the evidence dubious said the judge pouring himself out a snifter. The clerk of the court who was stirring an oldfashioned cocktail became overgrown with vineleaves and the courtroom reeked with the smell of flowering grapes and the Shining Bootlegger took the bulls by the horns and led them lowing gently down the courthouse steps. ‘Court is adjourned by hicky,’ shouted the judge when he found gin in his waterbottle. The reporters discovered the mayor dressed in a leopard skin posing as Civic Virtue with his foot on the back of Princess Fifi the oriental dancer. Your correspondent was leaning out of the window of the Banker’s Club in the company of his uncle, Jefferson T. Merivale, wellknown clubman of this city and two lamb chops well peppered. Meanwhile the waiters were hastily organizing an orchestra, using the potbellies of the Gausenheimers for snaredrums. The head waiter gave a truly delightful rendition of My Old Kentucky Home, utilizing for the first time the resonant bald heads of the seven directors of the Well Watered Gasoline Company of Delaware as a xylophone. And all the while the Shining Bootlegger in purple running drawers and a blueribbon silk hat was leading the bulls up Broadway to the number of two million, threehundred and fortytwo thousand, five hundred and one. As they reached the Spuyten Duyvil, they were incontinently drowned, rank after rank, in an attempt to swim to Yonkers.

And as I sit here, thought Jimmy Herf, print itches like a rash inside me. I sit here pockmarked with print. He got to his feet. A little yellow dog was curled up asleep under the bench. The little yellow dog looked very happy. ‘What I need’s a good sleep,’ Jimmy said aloud.

‘What are you goin to do with it, Dutch, are you goin to hock it?’

‘Francie I wouldnt take a million dollars for that little gun.’

‘For Gawd’s sake dont start talkin about money, now… Next thing some cop’ll see it on your hip and arrest you for the Sullivan law.’

‘The cop who’s goin to arrest me’s not born yet… Just you forget that stuff.’

Francie began to whimper. ‘But Dutch what are we goin to do, what are we goin to do?’

Dutch suddenly rammed the pistol into his pocket and jumped to his feet. He walked jerkily back and forth on the asphalt path. It was a foggy evening, raw; automobiles moving along the slushy road made an endless interweaving flicker of cobwebby light among the skeleton shrubberies.

‘Jez you make me nervous with your whimperin an cryin… Cant you shut up?’ He sat down beside her sullenly again. ‘I thought I heard somebody movin in the bushes… This goddam park’s full of plainclothes men… There’s nowhere you can go in the whole crummy city without people watchin you.’

‘I wouldnt mind it if I didnt feel so rotten. I cant eat anythin without throwin up an I’m so scared all the time the other girls’ll notice something.’

‘But I’ve told you I had a way o fixin everythin, aint I? I promise you I’ll fix everythin fine in a couple of days… We’ll go away an git married. We’ll go down South… I bet there’s lots of jobs in other places… I’m gettin cold, let’s get the hell outa here.’

‘Oh Dutch,’ said Francie in a tired voice as they walked down the muddyglistening asphalt path, ‘do you think we’re ever goin to have a good time again like we used to?’

‘We’re S.O.L. now but that dont mean we’re always goin to be. I lived through those gas attacks in the Oregon forest didnt I? I been dopin out a lot of things these last few days.’

‘Dutch if you go and get arrested there’ll be nothin left for me to do but jump in the river.’

‘Didnt I tell you I wasnt goin to get arrested?’

Mrs Cohen, a bent old woman with a face brown and blotched like a russet apple, stands beside the kitchen table with her gnarled hands folded over her belly. She sways from the hips as she scolds in an endless querulous stream of Yiddish at Anna sitting blearyeyed with sleep over a cup of coffee: ‘If you had been blasted in the cradle it would have been better, if you had been born dead… Oy what for have I raised four children that they should all of them be no good, agitators and streetwalkers and bums…? Benny in jail twice, and Sol God knows where making trouble, and Sarah accursed given up to sin kicking up her legs at Minski’s, and now you, may you wither in your chair, picketing for the garment workers, walking along the street shameless with a sign on your back.’

Anna dipped a piece of bread in the coffee and put it in her mouth. ‘Aw mommer you dont understand,’ she said with her mouth full.

‘Understand, understand harlotry and sinfulness…? Oy why dont you attend to your work and keep your mouth shut, and draw your pay quietly? You used to make good money and could have got married decent before you took to running wild in dance halls with a goy. Oy Oy that I’ve raised daughters in my old age no decent man’d want to take to his house and marry…’

Anna got to her feet shrieking ‘It’s no business of yours… I’ve always paid my part of the rent regular. You think a girl’s worth nothin but for a slave and to grind her fingers off workin all her life… I think different, do you hear? Dont you dare scold at me…’

‘Oy you will talk back to your old mother. If Solomon was alive he’d take a stick to you. Better to have been born dead than talk back to your mother like a goy. Get out of the house and quick before I blast you.’

‘All right I will.’ Anna ran through the narrow trunkobstructed hallway to the bedroom and threw herself on her bed. Her cheeks were burning. She lay quiet trying to think. From the kitchen came the old woman’s fierce monotonous sobbing.

Anna raised herself to a sitting posture on the bed. She caught sight in the mirror opposite of a strained teardabbled face and rumpled stringy hair. ‘My Gawd I’m a sight,’ she sighed. As she got to her feet her heel caught on the braid of her dress. The dress tore sharply. Anna sat on the edge of the bed and cried and cried. Then she sewed the rent in the dress up carefully with tiny meticulous stitches. Sewing made her feel calmer. She put on her hat, powdered her nose copiously, put a little rouge on her lips, got into her coat and went out. April was coaxing unexpected colors out of the East Side streets. Sweet voluptuous freshness came from a pushcart full of pineapples. At the corner she found Rose Segal and Lillian Diamond drinking coca-cola at the softdrink stand.

‘Anna have a coke with us,’ they chimed.

‘I will if you’ll blow me… I’m broke.’

‘Vy, didnt you get your strike pay?’

‘I gave it all to the old woman… Dont do no good though. She goes on scoldin all day long. She’s too old.’

‘Did you hear how gunmen broke in and busted up Ike Goldstein’s shop? Busted up everythin wid hammers an left him unconscious on top of a lot of dressgoods.’

‘Oh that’s terrible.’

‘Soive him right I say.’

‘But they oughtnt to destroy property like that. We make our livin by it as much as he does.’

‘A pretty fine livin… I’m near dead wid it,’ said Anna banging her empty glass down on the counter.

‘Easy easy,’ said the man in the stand. ‘Look out for the crockery.’

‘But the worst thing was,’ went on Rose Segal, ‘that while they was fightin up in Goldstein’s a rivet flew out the winder an fell nine stories an killed a fireman passin on a truck so’s he dropped dead in the street.’

‘What for did they do that?’

‘Some guy must have slung it at some other guy and it pitched out of the winder.’

‘And killed a fireman.’

Anna saw Elmer coming towards them down the avenue, his thin face stuck forward, his hands hidden in the pockets of his frayed overcoat. She left the two girls and walked towards him. ‘Was you goin down to the house? Dont lets go, cause the old woman’s scoldin somethin terrible… I wish I could get her into the Daughters of Israel. I cant stand her no more.’

‘Then let’s walk over and sit in the square,’ said Elmer. ‘Dont you feel the spring?’

She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. ‘Dont I? Oh Elmer I wish this strike was over… It gets me crazy doin nothin all day.’

‘But Anna the strike is the worker’s great opportunity, the worker’s university. It gives you a chance to study and read and go to the Public Library.’

‘But you always think it’ll be over in a day or two, an what’s the use anyway?’

‘The more educated a feller is the more use he is to his class.’

They sat down on a bench with their backs to the playground. The sky overhead was glittering with motherofpearl flakes of sunset. Dirty children yelled and racketed about the asphalt paths.

‘Oh,’ said Anna looking up at the sky, ‘I’d like to have a Paris evening dress an you have a dress suit and go out to dinner at a swell restaurant an go to the theater an everything.’

‘If we lived in a decent society we might be able to… There’d be gayety for the workers then, after the revolution.’

‘But Elmer what’s the use if we’re old and scoldin like the old woman?’

‘Our children will have those things.’

Anna sat bolt upright on the seat. ‘I aint never goin to have any children,’ she said between her teeth, ‘never, never, never.’

Alice touched his arm as they turned to look in the window of an Italian pastryshop. On each cake ornamented with bright analin flowers and flutings stood a sugar lamb for Easter and the resurrection banner. ‘Jimmy,’ she said turning up to him her little oval face with her lips too red like the roses on the cakes, ‘you’ve got to do something about Roy… He’s got to get to work. I’ll go crazy if I have him sitting round the house any more reading the papers wearing that dreadful adenoid expression… You know what I mean… He respects you.’

‘But he’s trying to get a job.’

‘He doesnt really try, you know it.’

‘He thinks he does. I guess he’s got a funny idea about himself… But I’m a fine person to talk about jobs…’

‘Oh I know, I think it’s wonderful. Everybody says you’ve given up newspaper work and are going to write.’

Jimmy found himself looking down into her widening brown eyes, that had a glimmer at the bottom like the glimmer of water in a well. He turned his head away; there was a catch in his throat; he coughed. They walked on along the lilting brightcolored street.

At the door of the restaurant they found Roy and Martin Schiff waiting for them. They went through an outer room into a long hall crowded with tables packed between two greenish bluish paintings of the Bay of Naples. The air was heavy with a smell of parmesan cheese and cigarettesmoke and tomato sauce. Alice made a little face as she settled herself in a chair.

‘Ou I want a cocktail right away quick.’

‘I must be kinder simpleminded,’ said Herf, ‘but these boats coquetting in front of Vesuvius always make me feel like getting a move on somewhere… I think I’ll be getting along out of here in a couple of weeks.’

‘But Jimmy where are you going?’ asked Roy. ‘Isnt this something new?’

‘Hasnt Helena got something to say about that?’ put in Alice.

Herf turned red. ‘Why should she?’ he said sharply.

‘I just found there was nothing in it for me,’ he found himself saying a little later.

‘Oh we none of us know what we want,’ burst out Martin. ‘That’s why we’re such a peewee generation.’

‘I’m beginning to learn a few of the things I dont want,’ said Herf quietly. ‘At least I’m beginning to have the nerve to admit to myself how much I dislike all the things I dont want.’

‘But it’s wonderful,’ cried Alice, ‘throwing away a career for an ideal.’

‘Excuse me,’ said Herf pushing back his chair. In the toilet he looked himself in the eye in the wavy lookingglass.

‘Dont talk,’ he whispered. ‘What you talk about you never do…’ His face had a drunken look. He filled the hollow of his two hands with water and washed it. At the table they cheered when he sat down.

‘Yea for the wanderer,’ said Roy.

Alice was eating cheese on long slices of pear. ‘I think it’s thrilling,’ she said.

‘Roy is bored,’ shouted Martin Schiff after a silence. His face with its big eyes and bone glasses swam through the smoke of the restaurant like a fish in a murky aquarium.

‘I was just thinking of all the places I had to go to look for a job tomorrow.’

‘You want a job?’ Martin went on melodramatically. ‘You want to sell your soul to the highest bidder?’

‘Jez if that’s all you had to sell…’ moaned Roy.

‘It’s my morning sleep that worries me… Still it is lousy putting over your personality and all that stuff. It’s not your ability to do the work it’s your personality.’

‘Prostitutes are the only honest…’

‘But good Lord a prostitute sells her personality.’

‘She only rents it.’

‘But Roy is bored… You are all bored… I’m boring you all.’

‘We’re having the time of our lives,’ insisted Alice. ‘Now Martin we wouldn’t be sitting here if we were bored, would we?… I wish Jimmy would tell us where he expected to go on his mysterious travels.’

‘No, you are saying to yourselves what a bore he is, what use is he to society? He has no money, he has no pretty wife, no good conversation, no tips on the stockmarket. He’s a useless fardel on society… The artist is a fardel.’

‘That’s not so Martin… You’re talking through your hat.’

Martin waved an arm across the table. Two wineglasses upset. A scaredlooking waiter laid a napkin over the red streams. Without noticing, Martin went on, ‘It’s all pretense… When you talk you talk with the little lying tips of your tongues. You dont dare lay bare your real souls… But now you must listen to me for the last time… For the last time I say… Come here waiter you too, lean over and look into the black pit of the soul of man. And Herf is bored. You are all bored, bored flies buzzing on the windowpane. You think the windowpane is the room. You dont know what there is deep black inside… I am very drunk. Waiter another bottle.’

‘Say hold your horses Martin… I dont know if we can pay the bill as it is… We dont need any more.’

‘Waiter another bottle of wine and four grappas.’

‘Well it looks as if we were in for a rough night,’ groaned Roy.

‘If there is need my body can pay… Alice take off your mask… You are a beautiful little child behind your mask… Come with me to the edge of the pit… O I am too drunk to tell you what I feel.’ He brushed off his tortoiseshell glasses and crumpled them in his hand, the lenses shot glittering across the floor. The gaping waiter ducked among the tables after them.

For a moment Martin sat blinking. The rest of them looked at each other. Then he shot to his feet. ‘I see your little smirking supercil-superciliosity. No wonder we can no longer have decent dinners, decent conversations… I must prove my atavistic sincerity, prove…’ He started pulling at his necktie.

‘Say Martin old man, pipe down,’ Roy was reiterating.

‘Nobody shall stop me… I must run into the sincerity of black… I must run to the end of the black wharf on the East River and throw myself off.’

Herf ran after him through the restaurant to the street. At the door he threw off his coat, at the corner his vest.

‘Gosh he runs like a deer,’ panted Roy staggering against Herf’s shoulder. Herf picked up the coat and vest, folded them under his arm and went back to the restaurant. They were pale when they sat down on either side of Alice.

‘Will he really do it? Will he really do it?’ she kept asking.

‘No of course not,’ said Roy. ‘He’ll go home; he was making fools of us because we played up to him.’

‘Suppose he really did it?’

‘I’d hate to see him… I like him very much. We named our kid after him,’ said Jimmy gloomily. ‘But if he really feels so terribly unhappy what right have we to stop him?’

‘Oh Jimmy,’ sighed Alice, ‘do order some coffee.’

Outside a fire engine moaned throbbed roared down the street. Their hands were cold. They sipped the coffee without speaking.

Francie came out of the side door of the Five and Ten into the six o’clock goinghome end of the day crowd. Dutch Robertson was waiting for her. He was smiling; there was color in his face.

‘Why Dutch what’s…’ The words stuck in her throat.

‘Dont you like it…?’ They walked on down Fourteenth, a blur of faces streamed by on either side of them. ‘Everything’s jake Francie,’ he was saying quietly. He wore a light gray spring overcoat and a light felt hat to match. New red pointed Oxfords glowed on his feet. ‘How do you like the outfit? I said to myself it wasnt no use tryin to do anythin without a tony outside.’

‘But Dutch how did you get it?’

‘Stuck up a guy in a cigar store. Jez it was a cinch.’

‘Ssh dont talk so loud; somebody might hear ye.’

‘They wouldnt know what I was talkin about.’

Mr Densch sat in the corner of Mrs Densch’s Louis XIV boudoir. He sat all hunched up on a little gilt pinkbacked chair with his potbelly resting on his knees. In his green sagging face the pudgy nose and the folds that led from the flanges of the nostrils to the corners of the wide mouth made two triangles. He had a pile of telegrams in his hand, on top a decoded message on a blue slip that read: Deficit Hamburg branch approximately $500,000; signed Heintz. Everywhere he looked about the little room crowded with fluffy glittery objects he saw the purple letters of approximately jiggling in the air. Then he noticed that the maid, a pale mulatto in a ruffled cap, had come into the room and was staring at him. His eye lit on a large flat cardboard box she held in her hand.

‘What’s that?’

‘Somethin for the misses sir.’

‘Bring it here… Hickson’s… and what does she want to be buying more dresses for will you tell me that… Hickson’s… Open it up. If it looks expensive I’ll send it back.’

The maid gingerly pulled off a layer of tissuepaper, uncovering a peach and peagreen evening dress.

Mr Densch got to his feet spluttering, ‘She must think the war’s still on… Tell em we will not receive it. Tell em there’s no such party livin here.’

The maid picked up the box with a toss of the head and went out with her nose in the air. Mr Densch sat down in the little chair and began looking over the telegrams again.

‘Ann-ee, Ann-ee,’ came a shrill voice from the inner room; this was followed by a head in a lace cap shaped like a libertycap and a big body in a shapeless ruffled negligée. ‘Why J. D. what are you doing here at this time of the morning? I’m waiting for my hair-dresser.’

‘It’s very important… I just had a cable from Heintz. Serena my dear, Blackhead and Densch is in a very bad way on both sides of the water.’

‘Yes ma’am,’ came the maid’s voice from behind him.

He gave his shoulders a shrug and walked to the window. He felt tired and sick and heavy with flesh. An errand boy on a bicycle passed along the street; he was laughing and his cheeks were pink. Densch saw himself, felt himself for a second hot and slender running bareheaded down Pine Street years ago catching the girls’ ankles in the corner of his eye. He turned back into the room. The maid had gone.

‘Serena,’ he began, ‘cant you understand the seriousness…? It’s this slump. And on top of it all the bean market has gone to hell. It’s ruin I tell you…’

‘Well my dear I dont see what you expect me to do about it.’

‘Economize… economize. Look where the price of rubber’s gone to… That dress from Hickson’s…’

‘Well you wouldnt have me going to the Blackhead’s party looking like a country schoolteacher, would you?’

Mr Densch groaned and shook his head. ‘O you wont understand; probably there wont be any party… Look Serena there’s no nonsense about this… I want you to have a trunk packed so that we can sail any day… I need a rest. I’m thinking of going to Marienbad for the cure… It’ll do you good too.’

Her eye suddenly caught his. All the little wrinkles on her face deepened; the skin under her eyes was like the skin of a shrunken toy balloon. He went over to her and put his hand on her shoulder and was puckering his lips to kiss her when suddenly she flared up.

‘I wont have you meddling between me and my dressmakers… I wont have it… I wont have it…’

‘Oh have it your own way.’ He left the room with his head hunched between his thick sloping shoulders.

‘Ann-ee!’

‘Yes ma’am.’ The maid came back into the room.

Mrs Densch had sunk down in the middle of a little spindlelegged sofa. Her face was green. ‘Annie please get me that bottle of sweet spirits of ammonia and a little water… And Annie you can call up Hickson’s and tell them that that dress was sent back through a mistake of… of the butler’s and please to send it right back as I’ve got to wear it tonight.’

Pursuit of happiness, unalienable pursuit… right to life liberty and… A black moonless night; Jimmy Herf is walking alone up South Street. Behind the wharfhouses ships raise shadowy skeletons against the night. ‘By Jesus I admit that I’m stumped,’ he says aloud. All these April nights combing the streets alone a skyscraper has obsessed him, a grooved building jutting up with uncountable bright windows falling onto him out of a scudding sky. Typewriters rain continual nickelplated confetti in his ears. Faces of Follies girls, glorified by Ziegfeld, smile and beckon to him from the windows. Ellie in a gold dress, Ellie made of thin gold foil absolutely lifelike beckoning from every window. And he walks round blocks and blocks looking for the door of the humming tinselwindowed skyscraper, round blocks and blocks and still no door. Every time he closes his eyes the dream has hold of him, every time he stops arguing audibly with himself in pompous reasonable phrases the dream has hold of him. Young man to save your sanity you’ve got to do one of two things… Please mister where’s the door to this building? Round the block? Just round the block… one of two unalienable alternatives: go away in a dirty soft shirt or stay in a clean Arrow collar. But what’s the use of spending your whole life fleeing the City of Destruction? What about your unalienable right, Thirteen Provinces? His mind unreeling phrases, he walks on doggedly. There’s nowhere in particular he wants to go. If only I still had faith in words.

‘How do you do Mr Goldstein?’ the reporter breezily chanted as he squeezed the thick flipper held out to him over the counter of the cigar store. ‘My name’s Brewster… I’m writing up the crime wave for the News.’

Mr Goldstein was a larvashaped man with a hooked nose a little crooked in a gray face, behind which pink attentive ears stood out unexpectedly. He looked at the reporter out of suspicious screwedup eyes.

‘If you’d be so good I’d like to have your story of last night’s little… misadventure…’

‘Vont get no story from me young man. Vat vill you do but print it so that other boys and goils vill get the same idear.’

‘It’s too bad you feel that way Mr Goldstein… Will you give me a Robert Burns please…? Publicity it seems to me is as necessary as ventilation… It lets in fresh air.’ The reporter bit off the end of the cigar, lit it, and stood looking thoughtfully at Mr Goldstein through a swirling ring of blue smoke. ‘You see Mr Goldstein it’s this way,’ he began impressively. ‘We are handling this matter from the human interest angle… pity and tears… you understand. A photographer was on his way out here to get your photograph… I bet you it would increase your volume of business for the next couple of weeks… I suppose I’ll have to phone him not to come now.’

‘Well this guy,’ began Mr Goldstein abruptly, ‘he’s a welldressed lookin feller, new spring overcoat an all that and he comes in to buy a package o Camels… “A nice night,” he says openin the package an takin out a cigarette to smoke it. Then I notices the goil with him had a veil on.’

‘Then she didnt have bobbed hair?’

‘All I seen was a kind o mournin veil. The foist thing I knew she was behind the counter an had a gun stuck in my ribs an began talkin… you know kinder kiddin like… and afore I knew what to think the guy’d cleaned out the cashregister an says to me, “Got any cash in your jeans Buddy?” I’ll tell ye I was sweatin some…’

‘And that’s all?’

‘Sure by the time I’d got hold of a cop they vere off to hell an gone.’

‘How much did they get?’

‘Oh about fifty berries an six dollars off me.’

‘Was the girl pretty?’

‘I dunno, maybe she was. I’d like to smashed her face in. They ought to make it the electric chair for those babies… Aint no security nowhere. Vy should anybody voirk if all you’ve got to do is get a gun an stick up your neighbors?’

‘You say they were welldressed… like welltodo people?’

‘Yare.’

‘I’m working on the theory that he’s a college boy and that she’s a society girl and that they do it for sport.’

‘The feller vas a hardlookin bastard.’

‘Well there are hardlooking college men… You wait for the story called “The Gilded Bandits” in next Sunday’s paper Mr Goldstein… You take the News dont you?’

Mr Goldstein shook his head.

‘I’ll send you a copy anyway.’

‘I want to see those babies convicted, do you understand? If there’s anythin I can do I sure vill do it… Aint no security no more… I dont care about no Sunday supplement publicity.’

‘Well the photographer’ll be right along. I’m sure you’ll consent to pose Mr Goldstein… Well thank you very much… Good day Mr Goldstein.’

Mr Goldstein suddenly produced a shiny new revolver from under the counter and pointed it at the reporter.

‘Hay go easy with that.’

Mr Goldstein laughed a sardonic laugh. ‘I’m ready for em next time they come,’ he shouted after the reporter who was already making for the Subway.

‘Our business, my dear Mrs Herf,’ declaimed Mr Harpsicourt, looking sweetly in her eyes and smiling his gray Cheshire cat smile, ‘is to roll ashore on the wave of fashion the second before it breaks, like riding a surfboard.’

Ellen was delicately digging with her spoon into half an alligator pear; she kept her eyes on her plate, her lips a little parted; she felt cool and slender in the tightfitting darkblue dress, shyly alert in the middle of the tangle of sideways glances and the singsong modish talk of the restaurant.

‘It’s a knack that I can prophesy in you more than in any girl, and more charmingly than any girl I’ve ever known.’

‘Prophesy?’ asked Ellen, looking up at him laughing.

‘You shouldnt pick up an old man’s word… I’m expressing myself badly… That’s always a dangerous sign. No, you understand so perfectly, though you disdain it a little… admit that… What we need on such a periodical, that I’m sure you could explain it to me far better.’

‘Of course what you want to do is make every reader feel Johnny on the spot in the center of things.’

‘As if she were having lunch right here at the Algonquin.’

‘Not today but tomorrow,’ added Ellen.

Mr Harpsicourt laughed his creaky little laugh and tried to look deep among the laughing gold specs in her gray eyes. Blushing she looked down into the gutted half of an alligator pear in her plate. Like the sense of a mirror behind her she felt the smart probing glances of men and women at the tables round about.

The pancakes were comfortably furry against his ginbitten tongue. Jimmy Herf sat in Child’s in the middle of a noisy drunken company. Eyes, lips, evening dresses, the smell of bacon and coffee blurred and throbbed about him. He ate the pancakes painstakingly, called for more coffee. He felt better. He had been afraid he was going to feel sick. He began reading the paper. The print swam and spread like Japanese flowers. Then it was sharp again, orderly, running in a smooth black and white paste over his orderly black and white brain:

Misguided youth again took its toll of tragedy amid the tinsel gayeties of Coney Island fresh painted for the season when plainclothes men arrested ‘Dutch’ Robinson and a girl companion alleged to be the Flapper Bandit. The pair are accused of committing more than a score of holdups in Brooklyn and Queens. The police had been watching the couple for some days. They had rented a small kitchenette apartment at 7356 Seacroft Avenue. Suspicion was first aroused when the girl, about to become a mother, was taken in an ambulance to the Canarsie Presbyterian Hospital. Hospital attendants were surprised by Robinson’s seemingly endless supply of money. The girl had a private room, expensive flowers and fruit were sent in to her daily, and a well-known physician was called into consultation at the man’s request. When it came to the point of registering the name of the baby girl the young man admitted to the physician that they were not married. One of the hospital attendants, noticing that the woman answered to the description published in the Evening Times of the flapper bandit and her pal, telephoned the police. Plainclothes men sleuthed the couple for some days after they had returned to the apartment on Seacroft Avenue and this afternoon made the arrests.

The arrest of the flapper bandit…

A hot biscuit landed on Herf’s paper. He looked up with a start; a darkeyed Jewish girl at the next table was making a face at him. He nodded and took off an imaginary hat. ‘I thank thee lovely nymph,’ he said thickly and began eating the biscuit.

‘Quit dat djer hear?’ the young man who sat beside her, who looked like a prizefighter’s trainer, bellowed in her ear.

The people at Herf’s table all had their mouths open laughing. He picked up his check, vaguely said good night and walked out. The clock over the cashier’s desk said three o’clock. Outside a rowdy scattering of people still milled about Columbus Circle. A smell of rainy pavements mingled with the exhausts of cars and occasionally there was a whiff of wet earth and sprouting grass from the Park. He stood a long time on the corner not knowing which way to go. These nights he hated to go home. He felt vaguely sorry that the Flapper Bandit and her pal had been arrested. He wished they could have escaped. He had looked forward to reading their exploits every day in the papers. Poor devils, he thought. And with a newborn baby too.

Meanwhile a rumpus had started behind him in Child’s. He went back and looked through the window across the griddle where sizzled three abandoned buttercakes. The waiters were struggling to eject a tall man in a dress suit. The thickjawed friend of the Jewish girl who had thrown the biscuit was being held back by his friends. Then the bouncer elbowed his way through the crowd. He was a small broadshouldered man with deepset tired monkey eyes. Calmly and without enthusiasm he took hold of the tall man. In a flash he had him shooting through the door. Out on the pavement the tall man looked about him dazedly and tried to straighten his collar. At that moment a policewagon drove up jingling. Two policemen jumped out and quickly arrested three Italians who stood chatting quietly on the corner. Herf and the tall man in the dress suit looked at each other, almost spoke and walked off greatly sobered in opposite directions.

5 The Burthen of Nineveh

Seeping in red twilight out of the Gulf Stream fog, throbbing brassthroat that howls through the stiff-fingered streets, prying open glazed eyes of skyscrapers, splashing red lead on the girdered thighs of the five bridges, teasing caterwauling tugboats into heat under the toppling smoketrees of the harbor.

Spring puckering our mouths, spring giving us gooseflesh grows gigantic out of the droning of sirens, crashes with enormous scaring din through the halted traffic, between attentive frozen tiptoe blocks.

Mr Densch with the collar of his woolly ulster up round his ears and a big English cap pulled down far over his eyes, walked nervously back and forth on the damp boat deck of the Volendam. He looked out through a drizzly rain at the gray wharfhouses and the waterfront buildings etched against a sky of inconceivable bitterness. A ruined man, a ruined man, he kept whispering to himself. At last the ship’s whistle boomed out for the third time. Mr Densch, his fingers in his ears, stood screened by a lifeboat watching the rift of dirty water between the ship’s side and the wharf widen, widen. The deck trembled under his feet as the screws bit into the current. Gray like a photograph the buildings of Manhattan began sliding by. Below decks the band was playing O Titin-e Titin-e. Red ferryboats, carferries, tugs, sandscows, lumberschooners, tramp steamers drifted between him and the steaming towering city that gathered itself into a pyramid and began to sink mistily into the browngreen water of the bay.

Mr Densch went below to his stateroom. Mrs Densch in a cloche hat hung with a yellow veil was crying quietly with her head on a basket of fruit. ‘Dont Serena,’ he said huskily. ‘Dont… We like Marienbad… We need a rest. Our position isnt so hopeless. I’ll go and send Blackhead a radio… After all it’s his stubbornness and rashness that brought the firm to… to this. That man thinks he’s a king on earth… This’ll… this’ll get under his skin. If curses can kill I’ll be a dead man tomorrow.’ To his surprise he found the gray drawn lines of his face cracking into a smile. Mrs Densch lifted her head and opened her mouth to speak to him, but the tears got the better of her. He looked at himself in the glass, squared his shoulders and adjusted his cap. ‘Well Serena,’ he said with a trace of jauntiness in his voice, ‘this is the end of my business career… I’ll go send that radio.’

Mother’s face swoops down and kisses him; his hands clutch her dress, and she has gone leaving him in the dark, leaving a frail lingering fragrance in the dark that makes him cry. Little Martin lies tossing within the iron bars of his crib. Outside dark, and beyond walls and outside again the horrible great dark of grownup people, rumbling, jiggling, creeping in chunks through the windows, putting fingers through the crack in the door. From outside above the roar of wheels comes a strangling wail clutching his throat. Pyramids of dark piled above him fall crumpling on top of him. He yells, gagging between yells. Nounou walks towards the crib along a saving gangplank of light ‘Dont you be scared… that aint nothin.’ Her black face grins at him, her black hand straightens the covers. ‘Just a fire engine passin… You wouldn’t be sceered of a fire engine.’

Ellen leaned back in the taxi and closed her eyes for a second. Not even the bath and the halfhour’s nap had washed out the fagging memory of the office, the smell of it, the chirruping of typewriters, the endlessly repeated phrases, faces, typewritten sheets. She felt very tired; she must have rings under her eyes. The taxi had stopped. There was a red light in the traffic tower ahead. Fifth Avenue was jammed to the curbs with taxis, limousines, motorbusses. She was late; she had left her watch at home. The minutes hung about her neck leaden as hours. She sat up on the edge of the seat, her fists so tightly clenched that she could feel through her gloves her sharp nails digging into the palms of her hands. At last the taxi jerked forward, there was a gust of exhausts and whir of motors, the clot of traffic began moving up Murray Hill. At a corner she caught sight of a clock. Quarter of eight. The traffic stopped again, the brakes of the taxi shrieked, she was thrown forward on the seat. She leaned back with her eyes closed, the blood throbbing in her temples. All her nerves were sharp steel jangled wires cutting into her. ‘What does it matter?’ she kept asking herself. ‘He’ll wait. I’m in no hurry to see him. Let’s see, how many blocks?… Less than twenty, eighteen.’ It must have been to keep from going crazy people invented numbers. The multiplication table better than Coué as a cure for jangled nerves. Probably that’s what old Peter Stuyvesant thought, or whoever laid the city out in numbers. She was smiling to herself. The taxi had started moving again.

George Baldwin was walking back and forth in the lobby of the hotel, taking short puffs of a cigarette. Now and then he glanced at the clock. His whole body was screwed up taut like a high violin-string. He was hungry and full up with things he wanted to say; he hated waiting for people. When she walked in, cool and silky and smiling, he wanted to go up to her and hit her in the face.

‘George do you realize that it’s only because numbers are so cold and emotionless that we’re not all crazy?’ she said giving him a little pat on the arm.

‘Fortyfive minutes waiting is enough to drive anybody crazy, that’s all I know.’

‘I must explain it. It’s a system. I thought it all up coming up in the taxi… You go in and order anything you like. I’m going to the ladies’ room a minute… And please have me a Martini. I’m dead tonight, just dead.’

‘You poor little thing, of course I will… And dont be long please.’

His knees were weak under him, he felt like melting ice as he went into the gilt ponderously ornamented diningroom. Good lord Baldwin you’re acting like a hobbledehoy of seventeen… after all these years too. Never get anywhere that way… ‘Well Joseph what are you going to give us to eat tonight? I’m hungry… But first you can get Fred to make the best Martini cocktail he ever made in his life.’

‘Très bien monsieur,’ said the longnosed Roumanian waiter and handed him the menu with a flourish.

Ellen stayed a long time looking in the mirror, dabbing a little superfluous powder off her face, trying to make up her mind. She kept winding up a hypothetical dollself and setting it in various positions. Tiny gestures ensued, acted out on various model stages. Suddenly she turned away from the mirror with a shrug of her toowhite shoulders and hurried to the diningroom.

‘Oh George I’m starved, simply starved.’

‘So am I’ he said in a crackling voice. ‘And Elaine I’ve got news for you,’ he went on hurriedly as if he were afraid she’d interrupt him.

‘Cecily has consented to a divorce. We’re going to rush it through quietly in Paris this summer. Now what I want to know is, will you… ?’

She leaned over and patted his hand that grasped the edge of the table. ‘George lets eat our dinner first… We’ve got to be sensible. God knows we’ve messed things up enough in the past both of us… Let’s drink to the crime wave.’ The smooth infinitesimal foam of the cocktail was soothing in her tongue and throat, glowed gradually warmly through her. She looked at him laughing with sparkling eyes. He drank his at a gulp.

‘By gad Elaine,’ he said flaming up helplessly, ‘you’re the most wonderful thing in the world.’

Through dinner she felt a gradual icy coldness stealing through her like novocaine. She had made up her mind. It seemed as if she had set the photograph of herself in her own place, forever frozen into a single gesture. An invisible silk band of bitterness was tightening round her throat, strangling. Beyond the plates, the ivory pink lamp, the broken pieces of bread, his face above the blank shirtfront jerked and nodded; the flush grew on his cheeks; his nose caught the light now on one side, now on the other, his taut lips moved eloquently over his yellow teeth. Ellen felt herself sitting with her ankles crossed, rigid as a porcelain figure under her clothes, everything about her seemed to be growing hard and enameled, the air bluestreaked with cigarettesmoke, was turning to glass. His wooden face of a marionette waggled senselessly in front of her. She shuddered and hunched up her shoulders.

‘What’s the matter, Elaine?’ he burst out. She lied:

‘Nothing George… Somebody walked over my grave I guess.’

‘Couldnt I get you a wrap or something?’

She shook her head.

‘Well what about it?’ he said as they got up from the table.

‘What?’ she asked smiling. ‘After Paris?’

‘I guess I can stand it if you can George,’ she said quietly.

He was waiting for her, standing at the open door of a taxi. She saw him poised spry against the darkness in a tan felt hat and a light tan overcoat, smiling like some celebrity in the rotogravure section of a Sunday paper. Mechanically she squeezed the hand that helped her into the cab.

‘Elaine,’ he said shakily, ‘life’s going to mean something to me now… God if you knew how empty life had been for so many years. I’ve been like a tin mechanical toy, all hollow inside.’

‘Let’s not talk about mechanical toys,’ she said in a strangled voice.

‘No let’s talk about our happiness,’ he shouted.

Inexorably his lips closed on to hers. Beyond the shaking glass window of the taxi, like someone drowning, she saw out of a corner of an eye whirling faces, streetlights, zooming nickleglinting wheels.

The old man in the checked cap sits on the brownstone stoop with his face in his hands. With the glare of Broadway in their backs there is a continual flickering of people past him towards the theaters down the street. The old man is sobbing through his fingers in a sour reek of gin. Once in a while he raises his head and shouts hoarsely, ‘I cant, dont you see I cant?’ The voice is inhuman like the splitting of a plank. Footsteps quicken. Middleaged people look the other way. Two girls giggle shrilly as they look at him. Streeturchins nudging each other peer in and out through the dark crowd. ‘Bum Hootch.’ ‘He’ll get his when the cop on the block comes by.’ ‘Prohibition liquor.’ The old man lifts his wet face out of his hands, staring out of sightless bloodyrimmed eyes. People back off, step on the feet of the people behind them. Like splintering wood the voice comes out of him. ‘Don’t you see I cant…? I cant… I cant.’

When Alice Sheffield dropped into the stream of women going through the doors of Lord & Taylor’s and felt the close smell of stuffs in her nostrils something went click in her head. First she went to the glovecounter. The girl was very young and had long curved black lashes and a pretty smile; they talked of permanent waves while Alice tried on gray kids, white kids with a little fringe like a gauntlet. Before she tried it on, the girl deftly powdered the inside of each glove out of a longnecked wooden shaker. Alice ordered six pairs.

‘Yes. Mrs Roy Sheffield… Yes I have a charge account, here’s my card… I’ll be having quite a lot of things sent.’ And to herself she said all the while: Ridiculous how I’ve been going round in rags all winter… When the bill comes Roy’ll have to find some way of paying it that’s all. Time he stopped mooning round anyway. I’ve paid enough bills for him in my time, God knows.’ Then she started looking at fleshcolored silk stockings. She left the store her head still in a whirl of long vistas of counters in a violet electric haze, of braided embroidery and tassles and nasturtiumtinted silks; she had ordered two summer dresses and an evening wrap.

At Maillard’s she met a tall blond Englishman with a coneshaped head and pointed wisps of towcolored mustaches under his long nose.

‘Oh Buck I’m having the grandest time. I’ve been going berserk in Lord & Taylor’s. Do you know that it must be a year and a half since I’ve bought any clothes?’

‘Poor old thing,’ he said as he motioned her to a table. ‘Tell me about it.’

She let herself flop into a chair suddenly whimpering, ‘Oh Buck I’m so tired of it all… I dont know how much longer I can stand it.’

‘Well you cant blame me… You know what I want you to do…’

‘Well suppose I did?’

‘It’d be topping, we’d hit it off like anything… But you must have a bit of beef tea or something. You need picking up.’ She giggled. ‘You old dear that’s just what I do need.’

‘Well how about making tracks for Calgary? I know a fellow there who’ll give me a job I think.’

‘Oh let’s go right away. I dont care about clothes or anything… Roy can send those things back to Lord & Taylor’s… Got any money Buck?’

A flush started on his cheekbones and spread over his temples to his flat irregular ears. ‘I confess, Al darling, that I havent a penny. I can pay for lunch.’

‘Oh hell I’ll cash a check; the account’s in both our names.’

‘They’ll cash it for me at the Biltmore, they know me there. When we get to Canada everything will be quite all right I can assure you. In His Majesty’s Dominion, the name of Buckminster has rather more weight than in the U.S.’

‘Oh I know darling, it’s nothing but money in New York.’

When they were walking up Fifth Avenue she hooked her arm in his suddenly. ‘O Buck I have the most horrible thing to tell you. It made me deathly ill… You know what I told you about the awful smell we had in the apartment we thought was rats? This morning I met the woman who lives on the ground floor… O it makes me sick to think of it. Her face was green as that bus… It seems they’ve been having the plumbing examined by an inspector… They arrested the woman upstairs. O it’s too disgusting. I cant tell you about it… I’ll never go back there. I’d die if I did… There wasnt a drop of water in the house all day yesterday.’

‘What was the matter?’

‘It’s too horrible.’

‘Tell it to popper.’

‘Buck they wont know you when you get back home to Orpen Manor.’

‘But what was it?’

‘There was a woman upstairs who did illegal operations, abortions… That was what stopped up the plumbing.’

‘Good God.’

‘Somehow that’s the last straw… And Roy sitting limp over his damn paper in the middle of that stench with that horrible adenoid expression on his face.’

‘Poor little girl.’

‘But Buck I couldn’t cash a check for more than two hundred… It’ll be an overdraft as it is. Will that get us to Calgary?’

‘Not very comfortably… There’s a man I know in Montreal who’ll give me a job writing society notes… Beastly thing to do, but I can use an assumed name. Then we can trot along from there when we get a little more spondulix as you call it… How about cashing that check now?’

She stood waiting for him beside the information desk while he went to get the tickets. She felt alone and tiny in the middle of the great white vault of the station. All her life with Roy was going by her like a movie reeled off backwards, faster and faster. Buck came back looking happy and masterful, his hands full of greenbacks and railway tickets. ‘No train till seven ten Al,’ he said. ‘Suppose you go to the Palace and leave me a seat at the boxoffice… I’ll run up and fetch my kit. Wont take a sec… Here’s a fiver.’ And he had gone, and she was walking alone across Fortythird Street on a hot May afternoon. For some reason she began to cry. People stared at her; she couldnt help it. She walked on doggedly with the tears streaming down her face.

‘Earthquake insurance, that’s what they calls it! A whole lot of good it’ll do ’em when the anger of the Lord smokes out the city like you would a hornet’s nest and he picks it up and shakes it like a cat shakes a rat… Earthquake insurance!’

Joe and Skinny wished that the man with whiskers like a bottle-cleaner who stood over their campfire mumbling and shouting would go away. They didn’t know whether he was talking to them or to himself. They pretended he wasnt there and went on nervously preparing to grill a piece of ham on a gridiron made of an old umbrellaframe. Below them beyond a sulphurgreen lace of budding trees was the Hudson going silver with evening and the white palisade of apartmenthouses of upper Manhattan.

‘Dont say nutten,’ whispered Joe, making a swift cranking motion in the region of his ear. ‘He’s nuts.’

Skinny had gooseflesh down the back, he felt his lips getting cold, he wanted to run.

‘That ham?’ Suddenly the man addressed them in a purring benevolent voice.

‘Yessir,’ said Joe shakily after a pause.

‘Dont you know that the Lord God forbad his chillun to eat the flesh of swine?’ His voice went to its singsong mumbling and shouting. ‘Gabriel, Brother Gabriel… is it all right for these kids to eat ham?… Sure. The angel Gabriel, he’s a good frien o mine see, he said it’s all right this once if you dont do it no more… Look out brother you’ll burn it.’ Skinny had got to his feet. ‘Sit down brother. I wont hurt you. I understand kids. We like kids me an the Lord God… Scared of me cause I’m a tramp aint you? Well lemme tell you somethin, dont you never be afraid of a tramp. Tramps wont hurt ye, they’re good people. The Lord God was a tramp when he lived on earth. My buddy the angel Gabriel says he’s been a tramp many a time… Look I got some fried chicken an old colored woman gave me… O Lordy me!’ groaning he sat down on a rock beside the two boys.

‘We was goin to play injuns, but now I guess we’ll play tramps,’ said Joe warming up a little. The tramp brought a newspaper package out of the formless pocket of his weathergreened coat and began unwrapping it carefully. A good smell began to come from the sizzling ham. Skinny sat down again, still keeping as far away as he could without missing anything. The tramp divided up his chicken and they began to eat together.

‘Gabriel old scout will you just look at that?’ The tramp started his singsong shouting that made the boys feel scared again. It was beginning to get dark. The tramp was shouting with his mouth full pointing with a drumstick towards the flickering checkerboard of lights going on up Riverside Drive. ‘Juss set here a minute an look at her Gabriel… Look at the old bitch if you’ll pardon the expression. Earthquake insurance, gosh they need it dont they? Do you know how long God took to destroy the tower of Babel, folks? Seven minutes. Do you know how long the Lord God took to destroy Babylon and Nineveh? Seven minutes. There’s more wickedness in one block in New York City than there was in a square mile in Nineveh, and how long do you think the Lord God of Sabboath will take to destroy New York City an Brooklyn an the Bronx? Seven seconds. Seven seconds… Say kiddo what’s your name?’ He dropped into his low purring voice and made a pass at Joe with his drumstick.

‘Joseph Cameron Parker… We live in Union.’

‘An what’s yours?’

‘Antonio Camerone… de guys call me Skinny. Dis guy’s my cousin. His folks dey changed deir name to Parker, see?’

‘Changing your name wont do no good… they got all the aliases down in the judgment book… And verily I say unto you the Lord’s day is at hand… It was only yesterday that Gabriel says to me “Well Jonah, shall we let her rip?” an I says to him, “Gabriel ole scout think of the women and children an the little babies that dont know no better. If you shake it down with an earthquake an fire an brimstone from heaven they’ll all be killed same as the rich people an sinners,” and he says to me, “All right Jonah old horse, have it your own way… We wont foreclose on em for a week or two.”… But it’s terrible to think of, folks, the fire an brimstone an the earthquake an the tidal wave an the tall buildins crashing together.’

Joe suddenly slapped Skinny on the back. ‘You’re it,’ he said and ran off. Skinny followed him stumbling along the narrow path among the bushes. He caught up to him on the asphalt. ‘Jez, that guy’s nuts,’ he called.

‘Shut up cant ye?’ snapped Joe. He was peering back through the bushes. They could still see the thin smoke of their little fire against the sky. The tramp was out of sight. They could just hear his voice calling, ‘Gabriel, Gabriel.’ They ran on breathless towards the regularly spaced safe arclights and the street.

Jimmy Herf stepped out from in front of the truck; the mudguard just grazed the skirt of his raincoat. He stood a moment behind an L stanchion while the icicle thawed out of his spine. The door of a limousine suddenly opened in front of him and he heard a familiar voice that he couldnt place.

‘Jump in Meester ’Erf… Can I take you somewhere?’ As he stepped in mechanically he noticed that he was stepping into a Rolls-Royce.

The stout redfaced man in a derby hat was Congo. ‘Sit down Meester ’Erf… Very pleas’ to see you. Where were you going?’

‘I wasnt going anywhere in particular.’ ‘Come up to the house, I want to show you someting. Ow are you today?’

‘Oh fine; no I mean I’m in a rotten mess, but it’s all the same.’

‘Tomorrow maybe I go to jail… six mont’… but maybe not.’ Congo laughed in his throat and straightened carefully his artificial leg.

‘So they’ve nailed you at last, Congo?’

‘Conspiracy… But no more Congo Jake, Meester ’Erf. Call me Armand. I’m married now; Armand Duval, Park Avenue.’

‘How about the Marquis des Coulommiers?’

‘That’s just for the trade.’

‘So things look pretty good do they?’

Congo nodded. ‘If I go to Atlanta which I ’ope not, in six mont’ I come out of jail a millionaire… Meester ’Erf if you need money, juss say the word… I lend you tousand dollars. In five years even you pay it back. I know you.’

‘Thanks, it’s not exactly money I need, that’s the hell of it.’

‘How’s your wife?… She’s so beautiful.’

‘We’re getting a divorce… She served the papers on me this morning… That’s all I was waiting in this goddam town for.’

Congo bit his lips. Then he tapped Jimmy gently on the knee with his forefinger. ‘In a minute we’ll get to the ’ouse… I give you one very good drink.’… Yes wait,’ Congo shouted to the chauffeur as he walked with a stately limp, leaning on a goldknobbed cane, into the streaky marble hallway of the apartmenthouse. As they went up in the elevator he said, ‘Maybe you stay to dinner.’ ‘I’m afraid I cant tonight, Con… Armand.’

‘I have one very good cook… When I first come to New York maybe twenty years ago, there was a feller on the boat… This is the door, see A. D., Armand Duval. Him and me ran away togedder an always he say to me, “Armand you never make a success, too lazy, run after the leetle girls too much.… Now he’s my cook… first class chef, cordon bleu, eh? Life is one funny ting, Meester ’Erf.’

‘Gee this is fine,’ said Jimmy Herf leaning back in a highbacked Spanish chair in the blackwalnut library with a glass of old Bourbon in his hand. ‘Congo… I mean Armand, if I’d been God and had to decide who in this city should make a million dollars and who shouldnt I swear you’re the man I should have picked.’

‘Maybe by and by the misses come in. Very pretty I show you.’ He made curly motions with his fingers round his head. ‘Very much blond hair.’ Suddenly he frowned. ‘But Meester ’Erf, if dere is anyting any time I can do for you, money or like dat, you let me know eh? It’s ten years now you and me very good frien… One more drink?’

On his third glass of Bourbon Herf began to talk. Congo sat listening with his heavy lips a little open, occasionally nodding his head. ‘The difference between you and me is that you’re going up in the social scale, Armand, and I’m going down… When you were a messboy on a steamboat I was a horrid little chalkyfaced kid living at the Ritz. My mother and father did all this Vermont marble blackwalnut grand Babylonian stuff… there’s nothing more for me to do about it… Women are like rats, you know, they leave a sinking ship. She’s going to marry this man Baldwin who’s just been appointed District Attorney. They’re said to be grooming him for mayor on a fusion reform ticket… The delusion of power, that’s what’s biting him. Women fall for it like hell. If I thought it’d be any good to me I swear I’ve got the energy to sit up and make a million dollars. But I get no organic sensation out of that stuff any more. I’ve got to have something new, different… Your sons’ll be like that Congo… If I’d had a decent education and started soon enough I might have been a great scientist. If I’d been a little more highly sexed I might have been an artist or gone in for religion… But here I am by Jesus Christ almost thirty years old and very anxious to live… If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I’d have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I havent even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.’

‘Looks like,’ said Congo filling the little glasses again with a slow smile, ‘Meester ’Erf you tink too much.’

‘Of course I do Congo, of course I do, but what the hell am I going to do about it?’

‘Well when you need a little money remember Armand Duval… Want a chaser?’

Herf shook his head. ‘I’ve got to chase myself… So long Armand.’

In the colonnaded marble hall he ran into Nevada Jones. She was wearing orchids. ‘Hullo Nevada, what are you doing in this palace of sin?’

‘I live here, what do you think?… I married a friend of yours the other day, Armand Duval. Want to come up and see him?’

‘Just been… He’s a good scout.’

‘He sure is.’

‘What did you do with little Tony Hunter?’

She came close to him and spoke in a low voice. ‘Just forget about me and him will you?… Gawd the boy’s breath’d knock you down… Tony’s one of God’s mistakes, I’m through with him… Found him chewing the edges of the rug rolling on the floor of the dressing room one day because he was afraid he was going to be unfaithful to me with an acrobat… I told him he’d better go and be it and we busted up right there… But honest I’m out for connubial bliss this time, right on the level, so for God’s sake dont let anybody spring anything about Tony or about Baldwin either on Armand… though he knows he wasnt hitching up to any plaster virgin… Why dont you come up and eat with us?’

‘I cant. Good luck Nevada.’ The whisky warm in his stomach, tingling in his fingers, Jimmy Herf stepped out into seven o’clock Park Avenue, whirring with taxicabs, streaked with smells of gasoline and restaurants and twilight.

It was the first evening James Merivale had gone to the Metropolitan Club since he had been put up for it; he had been afraid, that like carrying a cane, it was a little old for him. He sat in a deep leather chair by a window smoking a thirtyfive cent cigar with the Wall Street Journal on his knee and a copy of the Cosmopolitan leaning against his right thigh and, with his eyes on the night flawed with lights like a crystal, he abandoned himself to reverie: Economic Depression… Ten million dollars… After the war slump. Some smash I’ll tell the world. BLACKHEAD & DENSCH FAIL FOR $10,000,000… Densch left the country some days ago… Blackhead incommunicado in his home at Great Neck. One of the oldest and most respected import and export firms in New York, $10,000,000. O it’s always fair weather When good fellows get together. That’s the thing about banking. Even in a deficit there’s money to be handled, collateral. These commercial propositions always entail a margin of risk. We get ’em coming or else we get ’em going, eh Merivale? That’s what old Perkins said when Cunningham mixed him that Jack Rose… With a stein on the tahul And a good song ri-i-inging clear. Good connection that feller. Maisie knew what she was doing after all… A man in a position like that’s always likely to be blackmailed. A fool not to prosecute… Girl’s crazy he said, married to another man of the same name… Ought to be in a sanitarium, a case like that. God I’d have dusted his hide for him. Circumstances exonerated him completely, even mother admitted that. O Sinbad was in bad in Tokio and Rome… that’s what Jerry used to sing. Poor old Jerry never had the feeling of being in good right in on the ground floor of the Metropolitan Club… Comes of poor stock. Take Jimmy now… hasnt even that excuse, an out and out failure, a misfit from way back… Guess old man Herf was pretty wild, a yachtsman. Used to hear mother say Aunt Lily had to put up with a whole lot. Still he might have made something of himself with all his advantages… dreamer, wanderlust… Greenwich Village stuff. And dad did every bit as much for him as he did for me… And this divorce now. Adultery… with a prostitute like as not. Probably had syphilis or something. Ten Million Dollar Failure.

Failure. Success.

Ten Million Dollar Success… Ten Years of Successful Banking… At the dinner of the American Bankers Association last night James Merivale, president of the Bank & Trust Company, spoke in answer to the toast ‘Ten Years of Progressive Banking’… Reminds me gentlemen of the old darky who was very fond of chicken… But if you will allow me a few serious words on this festive occasion (flashlight photograph) there is a warning note I should like to sound… feel it my duty as an American citizen, as president of a great institution of nationwide, international in the better sense, nay, universal contacts and loyalties (flashlight photograph)… At last making himself heard above the thunderous applause James Merivale, his stately steelgray head shaking with emotion, continued his speech… Gentlemen you do me too much honor… Let me only add that in all trials and tribulations, becalmed amid the dark waters of scorn or spurning the swift rapids of popular estimation, amid the still small hours of the night, and in the roar of millions at noonday, my staff, my bread of life, my inspiration has been my triune loyalty to my wife, my mother, and my flag.

The long ash from his cigar had broken and fallen on his knees. James Merivale got to his feet and gravely brushed the light ash off his trousers. Then he settled down again and with an intent frown began to read the article on Foreign Exchange in the Wall Street Journal.

They sit up on two stools in the lunchwaggon.

‘Say kid how the hell did you come to sign up on that old scow?’

‘Wasnt anything else going out east.’

‘Well you sure have dished your gravy this time kid, cap’n ’s a dopehead, first officer’s the damnedest crook out o Sing Sing, crew’s a lot o bohunks, the ole tub aint worth the salvage of her… What was your last job?’

‘Night clerk in a hotel.’

‘Listen to that cookey… Jesus Kerist Amighty look at a guy who’ll give up a good job clerkin in a swell hotel in Noo York City to sign on as messboy on Davy Jones’ own steam yacht… A fine seacook you’re goin to make.’ The younger man is flushing. ‘How about that Hamburgher?’ he shouts at the counterman.

After they have eaten, while they are finishing their coffee, he turns to his friend and asks in a low voice, ‘Say Rooney was you ever overseas… in the war?’

‘I made Saint Nazaire a couple o times. Why?’

‘I dunno… It kinder gave me the itch… I was two years in it. Things aint been the same. I used to think all I wanted was to get a good job an marry an settle down, an now I dont give a damn… I can keep a job for six months or so an then I get the almighty itch, see? So I thought I ought to see the orient a bit…’

‘Never you mind,’ says Rooney shaking his head. ‘You’re goin to see it, dont you worry about that.’

‘What’s the damage?’ the young man asks the counterman.

‘They must a caught you young.’

‘I was sixteen when I enlisted.’ He picks up his change and follows Rooney’s broad shambling back into the street. At the end of the street, beyond trucks and the roofs of warehouses, he can see masts and the smoke of steamers and white steam rising into the sunlight.

‘Pull down the shade,’ comes the man’s voice from the bed.

‘I cant, it’s busted… Oh hell, here’s the whole business down.’ Anna almost bursts out crying when the roll hits her in the face, ‘You fix it,’ she says going towards the bed.

‘What do I care, they cant see in,’ says the man catching hold of her laughing.

‘It’s just those lights,’ she moans, wearily letting herself go limp in his arms.

It is a small room the shape of a shoebox with an iron bed in the corner of the wall opposite the window. A roar of streets rises to it rattling up a V shaped recess in the building. On the ceiling she can see the changing glow of electric signs along Broadway, white, red, green, then a jumble like a bubble bursting, and again white, red, green.

‘Oh Dick I wish you’d fix that shade, those lights give me the willies.’

‘The lights are all right Anna, it’s like bein in a theater… It’s the Gay White Way, like they used to say.’

‘That stuff’s all right for you out of town fellers, but it gives me the willies.’

‘So you’re workin for Madame Soubrine now are you Anna?’

‘You mean I’m scabbin… I know it. The old woman trew me out an it was get a job or croak…’

‘A nice girl like you Anna could always find a boyfriend.’

‘God you buyers are a dirty lot… You think that because I’ll go with you, I’d go wid anybody… Well I wouldnt, do you get that?’

‘I didnt mean that Anna… Gee you’re awful quick tonight.’

‘I guess it’s my nerves… This strike an the old woman trowin me out an scabbin up at Soubrine’s… it’d get anybody’s goat. They can all go to hell for all I care. Why wont they leave you alone? I never did nothin to hurt anybody in my life. All I want is for em to leave me alone an let me get my pay an have a good time now and then… God Dick it’s terrible… I dont dare go out on the street for fear of meetin some of the girls of my old local.’

‘Hell Anna, things aint so bad, honest I’d take you West with me if it wasnt for my wife.’

Anna’s voice goes on in an even whimper, ‘An now ’cause I take a shine to you and want to give you a good time you call me a goddam whore.’

‘I didnt say no such thing. I didnt even think it. All I thought was that you was a dead game sport and not a kewpie above the ears like most of ’em… Look if it’ll make ye feel better I’ll try an fix that shade.’

Lying on her side she watches his heavy body move against the milky light of the window. At last his teeth chattering he comes back to her. ‘I cant fix the goddam thing… Kerist it’s cold.’

‘Never mind Dick, come on to bed… It must be late. I got to be up there at eight.’

He pulls his watch from under the pillow. ‘It’s half after two… Hello kitten.’

On the ceiling she can see reflected the changing glare of the electric signs, white, red, green, then a jumble like a bubble bursting, then again white, green, red.

‘An he didn’t even invite me to the wedding… Honestly Florence I could have forgiven him if he’d invited me to the wedding,’ she said to the colored maid when she brought in the coffee. It was a Sunday morning. She was sitting up in bed with the papers spread over her lap. She was looking at a photograph in a rotogravure section labeled Mr and Mrs Jack Cunningham Hop Off for the First Lap of Their Honeymoon on his Sensational Seaplane Albatross VII. ‘He looks handsome dont he?’

‘He su’ is miss… But wasn’t there anything you could do to stop ’em, miss?’

‘Not a thing… You see he said he’d have me committed to an asylum if I tried… He knows perfectly well a Yucatan divorce isn’t legal.’

Florence sighed.

‘Menfolks su’ do dirt to us poor girls.’

‘Oh this wont last long. You can see by her face she’s a nasty selfish spoiled little girl… And I’m his real wife before God and man. Lord knows I tried to warn her. Whom God has joined let no man put asunder… that’s in the Bible isnt it?… Florence this coffee is simply terrible this morning. I cant drink it. You go right out and make me some fresh.’

Frowning and hunching her shoulders Florence went out the door with the tray.

Mrs Cunningham heaved a deep sigh and settled herself among the pillows. Outside churchbells were ringing. ‘Oh Jack you darling I love you just the same,’ she said to the picture. Then she kissed it. ‘Listen, deary the churchbells sounded like that the day we ran away from the High School Prom and got married in Milwaukee… It was a lovely Sunday morning.’ Then she stared in the face of the second Mrs Cunningham. ‘Oh you,’ she said and poked her finger through it.

When she got to her feet she found that the courtroom was very slowly sickeningly going round and round; the white fishfaced judge with noseglasses, faces, cops, uniformed attendants, gray windows, yellow desks, all going round and round in the sickening close smell, her lawyer with his white hawk nose, wiping his bald head, frowning, going round and round until she thought she would throw up. She couldn’t hear a word that was said, she kept blinking to get the blur out of her ears. She could feel Dutch behind her hunched up with his head in his hands. She didnt dare look back. Then after hours everything was sharp and clear, very far away. The judge was shouting at her, from the small end of a funnel his colorless lips moving in and out like the mouth of a fish.

‘… And now as a man and a citizen of this great city I want to say a few words to the defendants. Briefly this sort of thing has got to stop. The unalienable rights of human life and property the great men who founded this republic laid down in the constitootion have got to be reinstated. It is the dooty of every man in office and out of office to combat this wave of lawlessness by every means in his power. Therefore in spite of what those sentimental newspaper writers who corrupt the public mind and put into the head of weaklings and misfits of your sort the idea that you can buck the law of God and man, and private property, that you can wrench by force from peaceful citizens what they have earned by hard work and brains… and get away with it; in spite of what these journalistic hacks and quacks would call extentuating circumstances I am going to impose on you two highwaymen the maximum severity of the law. It is high time an example was made…’

The judge took a drink of water. Francie could see the little beads of sweat standing out from the pores of his nose.

‘It is high time an example was made,’ the judge shouted. ‘Not that I dont feel as a tender and loving father the misfortunes, the lack of education and ideels, the lack of a loving home and tender care of a mother that has led this young woman into a life of immorality and misery, led away by the temptations of cruel and voracious men and the excitement and wickedness of what has been too well named, the jazz age. Yet at the moment when these thoughts are about to temper with mercy the stern anger of the law, the importunate recollection rises of other young girls, perhaps hundreds of them at this moment in this great city about to fall into the clutches of a brutal and unscrupulous tempter like this man Robertson… for him and his ilk there is no punishment sufficiently severe… and I remember that mercy misplaced is often cruelty in the long run. All we can do is shed a tear for erring womanhood and breathe a prayer for the innocent babe that this unfortunate girl has brought into the world as the fruit of her shame…’

Francie felt a cold tingling that began at her fingertips and ran up her arms into the blurred whirling nausea of her body. ‘Twenty years,’ she could hear the whisper round the court, they all seemed licking their lips whispering softly ‘Twenty years.’ ‘I guess I’m going to faint,’ she said to herself as if to a friend. Everything went crashing black.

Propped with five pillows in the middle of his wide colonial mahogany bed with pineapples on the posts Phineas P. Blackhead his face purple as his silk dressing gown sat up and cursed. The big mahogany-finished bedroom hung with Javanese print cloth instead of wallpaper was empty except for a Hindu servant in a white jacket and turban who stood at the foot of the bed, with his hands at his sides, now and then bowing his head at a louder gust of cursing and saying ‘Yes, Sahib, yes, Sahib.’

‘By the living almighty Jingo you goddam yellow Babu bring me that whiskey, or I’ll get up and break every bone in your body, do you hear, Jesus God cant I be obeyed in my own house? When I say whiskey I mean rye not orange juice. Damnation. Here take it!’ He picked up a cutglass pitcher off the nighttable and slung it at the Hindu. Then he sank back on the pillows, saliva bubbling on his lips, choking for breath.

Silently the Hindu mopped up the thick Beluchistan rug and slunk out of the room with a pile of broken glass in his hand. Blackhead was breathing more easily, his eyes sank into their deep sockets and were lost in the folds of sagged green lids.

He seemed asleep when Gladys came in wearing a raincoat with a wet umbrella in her hand. She tiptoed to the window and stood looking out at the gray rainy street and the old tomblike brownstone houses opposite. For a splinter of a second she was a little girl come in her nightgown to have Sunday morning breakfast with daddy in his big bed.

He woke up with a start, looked about him with bloodshot eyes, the heavy muscles of his jowl tightening under the ghastly purplish . skin.

‘Well Gladys where’s that rye whiskey I ordered?’

‘Oh daddy you know what Dr Thom said.’

‘He said it’d kill me if I took another drink… Well I’m not dead yet am I? He’s a damned ass.’

‘Oh but you must take care of yourself and not get all excited.’ She kissed him and put a cool slim hand on his forehead.

‘Havent I got reason to get excited? If I had my hands on that dirty lilylivered bastard’s neck… We’d have pulled through if he hadnt lost his nerve. Serve me right for taking such a yellow sop into partnership… Twentyfive, thirty years of work all gone to hell in ten minutes… For twentyfive years my word’s been as good as a banknote. Best thing for me to do’s to follow the firm to Tophet, to hell with me. And by the living Jingo you, my own flesh, tell me not to drink… God almighty. Hay Bod… Bob… Where’s that goddam officeboy gone? Hay come here one of you sons of bitches, what do you think I pay you for?’

A nurse put her head in the door.

‘Get out of here,’ shouted Blackhead, ‘none of your starched virgins around me.’ He threw the pillow from under his head. The nurse disappeared. The pillow hit one of the posts and bounced back on the bed. Gladys began to cry.

‘Oh daddy I cant stand it… and everybody always respected you so… Do try to control yourself, daddy dear.’

‘And why should I for Christ’s sake… ? Show’s over, why dont you laugh? Curtain’s down. It’s all a joke, a smutty joke.’

He began to laugh deliriously, then he was choking, fighting for breath with clenched fists again. At length he said in a broken voice, ‘Don’t you see that it’s only the whiskey that was keeping me going? Go away and leave me Gladys and send that damned Hindu to me. I’ve always liked you better than anything in the world… You know that. Quick tell him to bring me what I ordered.’

Gladys went out crying. Outside her husband was pacing up and down the hall. ‘It’s those damned reporters… I dont know what to tell ’em. They say the creditors want to prosecute.’

‘Mrs Gaston,’ interrupted the nurse, ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to get male nurses… Really I cant do anything with him…’ On the lower floor a telephone was ringing ringing.

When the Hindu brought the bottle of whiskey Blackhead filled a highball glass and took a deep gulp of it.

‘Ah that makes you feel better, by the living Jingo it does. Achmet you’re a good fellow… Well I guess we’ll have to face the music and sell out… Thank God Gladys is settled. I’ll sell out every goddam thing I’ve got. I wish that precious son-in-law wasnt such a simp. Always my luck to be surrounded by a lot of capons… By gad I’d just as soon go to jail if it’ll do em any good; why not? it’s all in a lifetime. And afterwards when I come out I’ll get a job as a bargeman or watchman on a wharf. I’d like that. Why not take it easy after tearing things up all my life, eh Achmet?’

‘Yes Sahib,’ said the Hindu with a bow.

Blackhead mimicked him, ‘Yes Sahib… You always say yes, Achmet, isn’t that funny?’ He began to laugh with a choked rattling laugh. ‘I guess that’s the easiest way.’ He laughed and laughed, then suddenly he couldnt laugh any more. A perking spasm went through all his limbs. He twisted his mouth in an effort to speak. For a second his eyes looked about the room, the eyes of a little child that has been hurt before it begins to cry, until he fell back limp, his open mouth biting at his shoulder. Achmet looked at him coolly for a long time then he went up to him and spat in his face. Immediately he took a handkerchief out of the pocket of his linen jacket and wiped the spittle off the taut ivory skin. Then he closed the mouth and propped the body among the pillows and walked softly out of the room. In the hall Gladys sat in a big chair reading a magazine. ‘Sahib much better, he sleep a little bit maybe.’

‘Oh Achmet I’m so glad,’ she said and looked back to her magazine.

Ellen got off the bus at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fiftythird Street. Rosy twilight was gushing out of the brilliant west, glittered in brass and nickel, on buttons, in people’s eyes. All the windows on the east side of the avenue were aflame. As she stood with set teeth on the curb waiting to cross, a frail tendril of fragrance brushed her face. A skinny lad with towhair stringy under a foreignlooking cap was offering her arbutus in a basket. She bought a bunch and pressed her nose in it. May woods melted like sugar against her palate.

The whistle blew, gears ground as cars started to pour out of the side streets, the crossing thronged with people. Ellen felt the lad brush against her as he crossed at her side. She shrank away. Through the smell of the arbutus she caught for a second the unwashed smell of his body, the smell of immigrants, of Ellis Island, of crowded tenements. Under all the nickelplated, goldplated streets enameled with May, uneasily she could feel the huddling smell, spreading in dark slow crouching masses like corruption oozing from broken sewers, like a mob. She walked briskly down the cross-street. She went in a door beside a small immaculately polished brass plate.

She forgot everything in the catlike smile of Madame Soubrine herself, a stout blackhaired perhaps Russian woman who came out to her from behind a curtain with outstretched arms, while other customers waiting on sofas in a sort of Empress Josephine parlor, looked on enviously.

‘My dear Mrs Herf, where have you been? We’ve had your dress for a week,’ she exclaimed in too perfect English. ‘Ah my dear, you wait… it’s magnificent… And how is Mr Harrpsi-court?’

‘I’ve been very busy… You see I’m giving up my job.’

Madame Soubrine nodded and blinked knowingly and led the way through the tapestry curtains into the back of the shop.

‘Ah ça se voit… Il ne faut pas trravailler, on peut voir déjà des toutes petites rrides. Mais ils dispareaitront. Forgive me, dear.’ The thick arm round her waist squeezed her. Ellen edged off a little… ‘Vous la femme la plus belle de New Yorrk… Angelica Mrs Herf’s evening dress,’ she shouted in a shrill grating voice like a guineahen’s.

A hollowcheeked washedout blond girl came in with the dress on a hanger. Ellen slipped off her gray tailored walkingsuit. Madame Soubrine circled round her, purring. ‘Angelica look at those shoulders, the color of the hair… Ah c’est le rêve,’ edging a little too near like a cat that wants its back rubbed. The dress was pale green with a slash of scarlet and dark blue.

‘This is the last time I have a dress like this, I’m sick of always wearing blue and green…’ Madame Soubrine, her mouth full of pins, was at her feet, fussing with the hem.

‘Perfect Greek simplicity, wellgirdled like Diana… Spiritual with Spring… the ultimate restraint of an Annette Kellermann, holding up the lamp of liberty, the wise virgin,’ she was muttering through her lips.

She’s right, Ellen was thinking, I am getting a hard look. She was looking at herself in the tall pierglass. Then my figure’ll go, the menopause haunting beauty parlors, packed in boncilla, having your face raised.

‘Regardez-moi ça, cherrie;’ said the dressmaker getting to her feet and taking the pins out of her mouth ‘C’est le chef-d’œuvre de la maison Soubrine.’

Ellen suddenly felt hot, tangled in some prickly web, a horrible stuffiness of dyed silks and crêpes and muslins was making her head ache; she was anxious to be out on the street again.

‘I smell smoke, there’s something the matter,’ the blond girl suddenly cried out. ‘Sh-sh-sh,’ hissed Madame Soubrine. They both disappeared through a mirrorcovered door.

Under a skylight in the back room of Soubrine’s Anna Cohen sits sewing the trimming on a dress with swift tiny stitches. On the table in front of her a great pile of tulle rises full of light like beaten white of egg. Charley my boy, Oh Charley my boy, she hums, stitching the future with swift tiny stitches. If Elmer wants to marry me we might as well; poor Elmer, he’s a nice boy but so dreamy. Funny he’d fall for a girl like me. He’ll grow out of it, or maybe in the Revolution, he’ll be a great man… Have to cut out parties when I’m Elmer’s wife. But maybe we can save up money and open a little store on Avenue A in a good location, make better money there than uptown. La Parisienne, Modes.

I bet I could do as good as that old bitch. If you was your own boss there wouldn’t be this fightin about strikers and scabs… Equal Opportunity for All. Elmer says that’s all applesauce. No hope for the workers but in the Revolution. Oh I’m juss wild about Harree, And Harry’s juss wild about me… Elmer in a telephone central in a dinnercoat, with eartabs, tall as Valentino, strong as Doug. The Revolution is declared. The Red Guard is marching up Fifth Avenue. Anna in golden curls with a little kitten under her arm leans with him out of the tallest window. White tumbler pigeons flutter against the city below them. Fifth Avenue bleeding red flags, glittering with marching bands, hoarse voices singing Die Rote Fahne in Yiddish; far away, from the Woolworth a banner shakes into the wind. ‘Look Elmer darling’ ELMER DUSKIN FOR MAYOR. And they’re dancing the Charleston in all the officebuildings… Thump. Thump. That Charleston dance… Thump. Thump… Perhaps I do love him. Elmer take me. Elmer, loving as Valentino, crushing me to him with Dougstrong arms, hot as flame, Elmer.

Through the dream she is stitching white fingers beckon. The white tulle shines too bright. Red hands clutch suddenly out of the tulle, she cant fight off the red tulle all round her biting into her, coiled about her head. The skylight’s blackened with swirling smoke. The room’s full of smoke and screaming. Anna is on her feet whirling round fighting with her hands the burning tulle all round her.

Ellen stands looking at herself in the pierglass in the fitting room. The smell of singed fabrics gets stronger. After walking to and fro nervously a little while she goes through the glass door, down a passage hung with dresses, ducks under a cloud of smoke, and sees through streaming eyes the big workroom, screaming girls huddling behind Madame Soubrine, who is pointing a chemical extinguisher at charred piles of goods about a table. They are picking something moaning out of the charred goods. Out of the corner of her eye she sees an arm in shreds, a seared black red face, a horrible naked head.

‘Oh Mrs Herf, please tell them in front it’s nothing, absolutely nothing… I’ll be there at once,’ Madame Soubrine shrieks breathlessly at her. Ellen runs with closed eyes through the smoke-filled corridor into the clean air of the fitting room, then, when her eyes have stopped running, she goes through the curtains to the agitated women in the waiting room.

‘Madame Soubrine asked me to tell everybody it was nothing, absolutely nothing. Just a little blaze in a pile of rubbish… She put it out herself with an extinguisher.’

‘Nothing, absolutely nothing,’ the women say one to another settling back onto the Empress Josephine sofas.

Ellen goes out to the street. The fireengines are arriving. Policemen are beating back the crowds. She wants to go away but she cant, she’s waiting for something. At last she hears it tinkling down the street. As the fireengines go clanging away, the ambulance drives up. Attendants carry in the folded stretcher. Ellen can hardly breathe. She stands beside the ambulance behind a broad blue policeman. She tries to puzzle out why she is so moved; it is as if some part of her were going to be wrapped in bandages, carried away on a stretcher. Too soon it comes out, between the routine faces, the dark uniforms of the attendants.

‘Was she terribly burned?’ somehow she manages to ask under the policeman’s arm.

‘She wont die… but it’s tough on a girl.’ Ellen elbows her way through the crowd and hurries towards Fifth Avenue. It’s almost dark. Lights swim brightly in night clear blue like the deep sea.

Why should I be so excited? she keeps asking herself. Just somebody’s bad luck, the sort of thing that happens every day. The moaning turmoil and the clanging of the fireengines wont seem to fade away inside her. She stands irresolutely on a corner while cars, faces, flicker clatteringly past her. A young man in a new straw hat is looking at her out of the corners of his eyes, trying to pick her up. She stares him blankly in the face. He has on a red, green, and blue striped necktie. She walks past him fast, crosses to the other side of the avenue, and turns uptown. Seven thirty. She’s got to meet some one somewhere, she cant think where. There’s a horrible tired blankness inside her. O dear what shall I do? she whimpers to herself. At the next corner she hails a taxi. ‘Go to the Algonquin please.’

She remembers it all now, at eight o’clock she’s going to have dinner with Judge Shammeyer and his wife. Ought to have gone home to dress. George’ll be mad when he sees me come breezing in like this. Likes to show me off all dressed up like a Christmas tree, like an Effenbee walking talking doll, damn him.

She sits back in the corner of the taxi with her eyes closed. Relax, she must let herself relax more. Ridiculous to go round always keyed up so that everything is like chalk shrieking on a blackboard. Suppose I’d been horribly burned, like that girl, disfigured for life. Probably she can get a lot of money out of old Soubrine, the beginning of a career. Suppose I’d gone with that young man with the ugly necktie who tried to pick me up… Kidding over a banana split in a soda fountain, riding uptown and then down again on the bus, with his knee pressing my knee and his arm round my waist, a little heavy petting in a doorway… There are lives to be lived if only you didn’t care. Care for what, for what; the opinion of mankind, money, success, hotel lobbies, health, umbrellas, Uneeda biscuits… ? It’s like a busted mechanical toy the way my mind goes brrr all the time. I hope they havent ordered dinner. I’ll make them go somewhere else if they havent. She opens her vanity case and begins to powder her nose.

When the taxi stops and the tall doorman opens the door, she steps out with dancing pointed girlish steps, pays, and turns, her cheeks a little flushed, her eyes sparkling with the glinting seablue night of deep streets, into the revolving doors.

As she goes through the shining soundless revolving doors, that spin before her gloved hand touches the glass, there shoots through her a sudden pang of something forgotten. Gloves, purse, vanity case, handkerchief, I have them all. Didn’t have an umbrella. What did I forget in the taxicab? But already she is advancing smiling towards two gray men in black with white shirtfronts getting to their feet, smiling, holding out their hands.

Bob Hildebrand in dressing gown and pyjamas walked up and down in front of the long windows smoking a pipe. Through the sliding doors into the front came a sound of glasses tinkling and shuffling feet and laughing and Running Wild grating hazily out of a blunt needle on the phonograph.

‘Why dont you park here for the night?’ Hildebrand was saying in his deep serious voice. ‘Those people’ll fade out gradually… We can put you up on the couch.’

‘No thanks,’ said Jimmy. ‘They’ll start talking psychoanalysis in a minute and they’ll be here till dawn.’

‘But you’d much better take a morning train.’

‘I’m not going to take any kind of a train.’

‘Say Herf did you read about the man in Philadelphia who was killed because he wore his straw hat on the fourteenth of May?’

‘By God if I was starting a new religion he’d be made a saint.’

‘Didnt you read about it? It was funny as a crutch… This man had the temerity to defend his straw hat. Somebody had busted it and he started to fight, and in the middle of it one of these street-corner heroes came up behind him and brained him with a piece of lead pipe. They picked him up with a cracked skull and he died in the hospital.’

‘Bob what was his name?’

‘I didnt notice.’

‘Talk about the Unknown Soldier… That’s a real hero for you; the golden legend of the man who would wear a straw hat out of season.’

A head was stuck between the double doors. A flushfaced man with his hair over his eyes looked in. ‘Cant I bring you fellers a shot of gin… Whose funeral is being celebrated anyway?’

‘I’m going to bed, no gin for me,’ said Hildebrand grouchily.

‘It’s the funeral of Saint Aloysius of Philadelphia, virgin and martyr, the man who would wear a straw hat out of season,’ said Herf. ‘I might sniff a little gin. I’ve got to run in a minute… So long Bob.’

‘So long you mysterious traveler… Let us have your address, do you hear?’

The long front room was full of ginbottles, gingerale bottles, ashtrays crowded with halfsmoked cigarettes, couples dancing, people sprawled on sofas. Endlessly the phonograph played Lady… lady be good. A glass of gin was pushed into Herf’s hand. A girl came up to him.

‘We’ve been talking about you… Did you know you were a man of mystery?’

‘Jimmy,’ came a shrill drunken voice, ‘you’re suspected of being the bobhaired bandit.’

‘Why dont you take up a career of crime, Jimmy?’ said the girl putting her arm round his waist. ‘I’ll come to your trial, honest I will.’

‘How do you know I’m not?’

‘You see,’ said Frances Hildebrand, who was bringing a bowl of cracked ice in from the kitchenette, ‘there is something mysterious going on.’

Herf took the hand of the girl beside him and made her dance with him. She kept stumbling over his feet. He danced her round until he was opposite to the halldoor; he opened the door and foxtrotted her out into the hall. Mechanically she put up her mouth to be kissed. He kissed her quickly and reached for his hat. ‘Good night,’ he said. The girl started to cry.

Out in the street he took a deep breath. He felt happy, much more happy than Greenwich Village kisses. He was reaching for his watch when he remembered he had pawned it.

The golden legend of the man who would wear a straw hat out of season. Jimmy Herf is walking west along Twentythird Street, laughing to himself. Give me liberty, said Patrick Henry, putting on his straw hat on the first of May, or give me death. And he got it. There are no trollycars, occasionally a milkwagon clatters by, the heartbroken brick houses of Chelsea are dark… A taxi passes trailing a confused noise of singing. At the corner of Ninth Avenue he notices two eyes like holes in a trianglewhite of paper, a woman in a raincoat beckons to him from a doorway. Further on two English sailors are arguing in drunken cockney. The air becomes milky with fog as he nears the river. He can hear the great soft distant lowing of steamboats.

He sits a long time waiting for a ferry in the seedy ruddylighted waiting room. He sits smoking happily. He cant seem to remember anything, there is no future but the foggy river and the ferry looming big with its lights in a row like a darky’s smile. He stands with his hat off at the rail and feels the riverwind in his hair. Perhaps he’s gone crazy, perhaps this is amnesia, some disease with a long Greek name, perhaps they’ll find him picking dewberries in the Hoboken Tube. He laughs aloud so that the old man who came to open the gates gave him a sudden sidelong look. Cookoo, bats in the belfry, that’s what he’s saying to himself. Maybe he’s right. By gum if I were a painter, maybe they’ll let me paint in the nuthouse, I’d do Saint Aloysius of Philadelphia with a straw hat on his head instead of a halo and in his hand the lead pipe, instrument of his martyrdom, and a little me praying at his feet. The only passenger on the ferry, he roams round as if he owned it. My temporary yacht. By Jove these are the doldrums of the night all right, he mutters. He keeps trying to explain his gayety to himself. It’s not that I’m drunk. I may be crazy, but I dont think so…

Before the ferry leaves a horse and wagon comes aboard, a brokendown springwagon loaded with flowers, driven by a little brown man with high cheekbones. Jimmy Herf walks round it; behind the drooping horse with haunches like a hatrack the little warped wagon is unexpectedly merry, stacked with pots of scarlet and pink geraniums, carnations, alyssum, forced roses, blue lobelia. A rich smell of maytime earth comes from it, of wet flowerpots and greenhouses. The driver sits hunched with his hat over his eyes. Jimmy has an impulse to ask him where he is going with all those flowers, but he stifles it and walks to the front of the ferry.

Out of the empty dark fog of the river, the ferryslip yawns all of a sudden, a black mouth with a throat of light. Herf hurries through cavernous gloom and out to a fogblurred street. Then he is walking up an incline. There are tracks below him and the slow clatter of a freight, the hiss of an engine. At the top of a hill he stops to look back. He can see nothing but fog spaced with a file of blurred arclights. Then he walks on, taking pleasure in breathing, in the beat of his blood, in the tread of his feet on the pavement, between rows of otherworldly frame houses. Gradually the fog thins, a morning pearliness is seeping in from somewhere.

Sunrise finds him walking along a cement road between dumping grounds full of smoking rubbishpiles. The sun shines redly through the mist on rusty donkeyengines, skeleton trucks, wishbones of Fords, shapeless masses of corroding metal. Jimmy walks fast to get out of the smell. He is hungry; his shoes are beginning to raise blisters on his big toes. At a cross-road where the warning light still winks and winks, is a gasoline station, opposite it the Lightning Bug lunchwagon. Carefully he spends his last quarter on breakfast. That leaves him three cents for good luck, or bad for that matter. A huge furniture truck, shiny and yellow, has drawn up outside.

‘Say will you give me a lift?’ he asks the redhaired man at the wheel.

‘How fur ye goin?’

‘I dunno… Pretty far.’