Part 10

A long winter that, more like a cloudy November dusk. Annie knotted into her bed and looking out through the door of her room, which she always kept open, upon the two of them moving so tirelessly upstairs and down, at slops, scrubbing until the wet stench rose, and when a fruit steamer or a freighter came in, running with the gray blankets and the pillows.

Chita feared Annie and the vituperative words. She seemed to shrink and the disks of her eyes to become larger. Annie's hands were too crippled to strike her, but all the same she would quiver back, her arm dodging up before her eyes, and the great bony bulbs of her knees clicking together.

But in the shadow of Bertha it was safe. There she could play around with Jocko, herself so curiously like Jocko, cheating on the job outrageously. They would start, she and Bertha, at the opposite ends of a floor, scrubbing toward the center, only Chita never arrived. She liked to sit in a huddle and rock herself, arms locked about her ankles and chitter--chitter questions at the great crawling hulk of Bertha as she came scrubbing toward her on all fours, her arm plunging from the socket and sweeping its great circle of dirty suds.

Darting, steely little questions that she threw like knives in mumblety-peg, landing them straight up.

"Bertha, b'Jesus-- Whozee? Huh?"

"Jesus? He was a man, Chita."

"A man nawthin'! He's God."

"He bane a perfect man."

"Bloke, you! God wusn't a man. God, he had curls and a white dress."

"Yah--He--was drenched in Light--that was his white dress."

"Bloke, you! Light ain't no white dress. Silk is. That's you!" said Chita and slid out with her palm a splash of greasy water from her scrub pail upon Bertha--"that's you--drenched in slop."

Bertha boxed her then, roundly against the ear, so that the little imp, strung on her wires of legs, jumped and dangled.

"You bane a--a bad rowdy--brat--."

"Bertha--drenched in--slop--."

She looked down to fleck off some webby stuff that had clung to her gray woolen skirt.

"Slop cannot drench--like Light!"

"What light?"

"His!"

"Aw you--square head--there ain't no light."

"Aw you--curly head, there ain't unless you see it."

Sometimes Bertha kissed her, right down into the riot of short curls that rose off her head like the suds of a shampoo.

But Chita was nervous and vicious from being afraid. Once she bit Bertha on the lips until they bled.

"Bloke, you fooled me--diden you? Bloke you! I thought you wuz gonna hit."

Chita had black and blue marks on her arms and down her lean little legs. Usually when she came to work in the morning she could display new ones. Not without pride.

"Me mudder give me this one. Me old man. Me brud! Look at 'em and make a snoot, Bertha."

The sight of these blue and green bruises, burning there so sullenly along the tan little limbs of Chita, could cause Bertha's lips to fold back in a quivering ejaculation of sickness. That was a "snoot."

"I don't know any snoots, Chita."

"There, bloke you--you're doing one now--a snoot like there was somebody sticking a knife and fork in you and then cutting you up in little bittsa pieces----"

Chita was fond of the torturous phrase. She liked to devise them. Her father's favorite threat to her was, "I'll brekka your leg."

"Bertha, what if somebody 'ud cut off Annie Wennerberg's head and cook it with cabbage."

"Chita, you think only bad thoughts."

"Me brud stuck a pin in my wrist once, all the way in."

"Poor Chita."

"If I was a jackknife I'd cut all bad people's eyes out----"

"Poor Chita--it bane terrible bad for you with your people----"

"I'd slit a Chinaman if I had a butcher knife."

"Chita!"

"Looka, he gimme this--me old man--he pinched--look--make a snoot now--look--ouch--don't touch."

It was a savage-looking black and blue mark on her shoulder, and one day it began to fester and Chita, a little stoic for pain, started whimpering and reaching up her lower lip to suck in the tears.

Squatting in their puddles, as they scrubbed toward one another down one of the pitch-black upper halls, Bertha, who had grown bold in words with this child, began to piece out a story to soothe her.

"Don't cry, Chita."

"Hurts. Hurts."

"Poor little Chita your tears are falling right in the scrub-bucket----"

"I hurt so, Bertha----"

"Sh-h, don't cry, Chita. Once upon a time, there was a good little girl like you----"

"Me?"

"Yah. She cried too, little Chita, because her wounds they hurt."

"Pinches, like mine."

"Yah, pinches."

"An' bloody sores--I got bloody sores, too----"

"And bloody sores----"

"And she lived by the ocean----"

"The Cunard piers?"

"No--no--out somewhere--old countree--a gray ocean--with rocks----"

"Old countree. Naples is old countree----"

"It was lonely by the ocean. Sometimes she cried much."

"No mudder--no brud?"

"Nobody. Only wind that tore her and rain that wet her and snow that froze her."

"No bread? No spagett'?"

"Sometimes a fisherman out of a boat on the sea brought her fish----"

"A beau----"

"N-no--yoost--a man."

"Did he like 'er?"

"She--could--clean--fish----"

"Ugh!"

"But that was yoost ugly to her hands and she did not mind."

"Phew!"

"She used to cry--sometimes because it was so beautiful--the rocks and the sea--or so lonely--the sky and the rocks and the sea--so big--like she felt inside of-herself--big----"

"Big as--New York?"

"Yah--she used to cry--right out of her heart--into the waves--yoost like you cry into the bucket--and whadda you think?"

"What?"

"Her tears got folded up in the water of the waves and one day a little girl way off in New York----"

"Me?"

"Yah--took a drink of water and whadda you think was in the drink of water?"

"A bug!"

"The tears--the beautiful tears that the lonely girl in old countree had cried because the sea was so lonely and the sky and the rocks and the sea--so big and--and heart-breaking and----"

"She drank 'em--the same tears----"

"Yah--and whadda you think?"

"What?"

"When she drank 'em--the little girl off in New York----"

"Me?"

"Yah--they began to boil inside of her----"

"How----"

"Just boil--and swell--like waves--and she was all full--of the sky and rocks and the sea and the heart-break and whadda you think?"

"What? She busted!"

"She began to sing, Chit--the tears inside they were hurting--and she began to sing--all the beauty of the sea and the sky and the rocks and the--loneliness and the heart beauty--wasn't that grand, Chita--and from all over the people came to hear her--the most beautiful singing in the world all filled with the tears that were shed by the sea----"

"Was that me----"

"Yah--I guess so and----"

"And the girl in the old countree?"

"Oh she--I dunno--she----"

"Didn't her beau----"

"Yah--her beau--the fisherman, I guess, came one day in the fishing boat----"

"And was she glad?"

"Yah--all her tears--the beautiful tears--were gone and she went with him then----"

"To clean--the fish?"

"To--clean--the fish."

"I'd rather be me--with all the people in the world coming to hear me--than cleaning fish----"

"I dunno--Chita--I dunno----."

The upper hall was full of the black twilight and Chita in her puddle had scarcely scrubbed her way forward at all. It was Bertha who had come scouring down the hallway toward her. They met on all fours there at one end of the gloom. Chita with her little bright eyes shining in amber tunnels like Jocko's. The hulk of Bertha.

"Kiss me, Bertha."

"Oh Chita. Chita."

***

Something hateful happened. On Dearborn Street near Front was a pretty brick house, conspicuous for its undilapidated shutters and polished doorplate. Bertha passed it upon those rare occasions when she walked out. It was next to a meat stall, where she went to buy lamb-neck for stew. Annie's favorite dish. A small meticulous house with something of the narrow-shouldered air of a lady missionary. The little white ruching of front steps. The pious precisions. The exactitude of window shades like eyelids discreetly lowered for prayer. That polished doorplate! It has a habit of moving along sedately before Bertha's eyes to the meat stall and back again.

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Society for the prevention of cruelty to children.

Chita's tan, taut little body with the blue spots running up her leg. There was even one on her tiny, lovely breast. A lurid, frightening purple. And Chita's eyelids were peculiarly red at the rims and her feet inflamed looking, probably merely because she loved so to dance, but her toes were all curled under, in a prehensile fashion.

Bertha liked to rub them warm, until the blood circulated, and to anoint the bruises with the many different liniments she was lavish at buying. And the reefer! To unbutton it from its warm fastenings when Chita arrived in the morning and to button it up snugly in double-breasted fashion when Chita went home at night! Sometimes as it hung on its peg all day Bertha would button it there, and then unfasten it again. Chita's little reefer. Chita.

So resolutely, she kept her head away from that small polished sign. But even so, it was screwed to her eyes. "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children." She scrubbed floors through it, she stirred stew of veal through it. She saw Chita through it. She shook open a gray blanket to make up a sailor's cot, and there it stared up at her. Society-for-the-Pre-vention-of-Cruelty-to-Children.

Then the something hateful happened.

There were three freighters in and the men were sleeping two on a cot, and floor pallets were to be made up, and all morning Bertha had been hoisting mattresses up the narrow stairway, even Annie, who could walk a little now, hobbling as far as the foot of the steps with an armful of pillows. Chita was like Jocko and Jocko like Chita. They scampered over banisters. Slid downstairs and rode up on Bertha's shoulder. Only with Annie about, one had to be very spry, and by noon Chita had made sixteen cots and filled all the wash pitchers. Usually Bertha filled these for her, but Annie's eyes seemed to have the power of turning the corner of the upper halls, so Chita lugged and tugged alone and her breath came very short, and the red rims around her eyes seemed almost wet with blood.

The men began to swagger in on sea legs. Rum. The smell of it ticklingly through the hallways. Annie back in the keg room now, whacking her knees with the best of them.

"Chita--you bane tired, poor baby. You can rest now. I will do it for you."

"They hurt," said Chita and rubbing her arms began to cry. She never cried to Annie.

Bertha rubbed them, the little bony fragile things, and blew on them with her strong, hot breath. The room was in appalling disorder, the sprawling cots, the mounds of mattresses, the dirty waters of yesterday gathering scum in bowls. Thirty cots to be made and already the seamen, lurching as if the world were a deck beneath them, were sprawling in, loony with land.

One came in on her tussling with her man's task of getting mattresses laid, a Scandinavian whom she knew by the name of Tor. He was one of the troublesome ones, and he swung his arms around her waist, and she shoved him from her with a force that sent him backward, down on one of the half unfurled mattresses, and almost immediately he was asleep and she dragged him to a corner, and there he lay for twenty-two hours, like a dog, snoring.

And then suddenly, while she was dragging these mattresses into place, Bertha missed Chita. Chita who danced so nimbly in her shadow all day and ran up her shoulder like Jocko.

"Chita," she cried, and j'erked the pillows this way and that as if she might have been a kitten, hiding. "Chita!"

There should have been nothing frightening about Chita bounding off that way. But suddenly the silence seemed to have a little pulse to it. It beat in Bertha's throat. And so she ran about the long ward-like room, peering under pillows and mattresses for all the world as if she were looking for the kitten.

"Chita!"

In the hallways was the hot pulsing silence too, except down in the keg room there was laughter; crazy, skating laughter.

"Chita!"

There was a closet at the end of the hall, almost as large as a room and with a skylight. It was filled with such miscellaneous old refuse as a broken chair, leaky pails, the Australian sailor's lambswool jacket, bottles, brooms, and a rusty gas stove.

Somehow, the door to this closet seemed to blow out at Bertha like a woman's skirt. She opened it. There were Chita and a young Italian sailor off a fruit ship. He had a face like a carved almond. Narrow. Slit. White. And his fingers were quick and caressing over Chita's little body, as if she had been a harp, and there she lay back in his arms, her eyes, usually as quick as Jocko's, suddenly like fresh and flowing waters that had been dammed. Stagnant and a little heavy with mud. Chita lying back there, drugged-looking and with her agile young limbs tranced. Chita--Chita lying back there with her stagnant-looking eyes and her dancing limbs that were suddenly full of a dreadful kind of languor.

The sailor oozed away. Literally. Because under Bertha's very eyes, he was gone, leaving Chita on the chair like a doll that had been cast there, along with other broken things.

"Chita----"

She began to whimper and dodge back.

"Diden do nawthin'----"

"Come here--to Bertha----"

"You can't hit me--you're not me mudder."

"Bertha won't hit you, Baby. Chita--come--to me----"

But Chita was still afraid, and it was almost like luring Jocko, to unlock her tight fingers from the chair arm, and draw her out of her tight crouch in the corner.

"I diden do nawthin'--lemme alone."

"Chita--little Chita."

It was dead in the old closet. Stale smelling. For an hour Bertha held Chita there, in her big, man-sized arms. Close. Pressing her little boniness against her breast, while the beat of her heart pounded through.

Below the men were swaggering in now, outlandish with their packs and bags of luggage, and downstairs Annie's voice, shouting for Bertha and shouting for Chita, kept screaming out oaths between greetings.

"Bertha--was I almost being bad----"

"Yes, Chita. Terribly. Terribly bad."

"I won't no more, Bertha. My Bertha. You're cryin'----"

"For you, Chita."

"No, Bertha, I'm gonna be good--Bertha--what's that on your insides? A heart--it's ticking--like a clock."

"For you, Chita."

"Tick--Bertha--for me----"

She fell asleep, and finally Annie's oaths died down in the hullabaloo of arrivals, and the great empty barracks of a room with the unmade cots and the half-furled mattresses stood waiting, and the skylight over the closet turned taupe, and down in the keg room the shoutings rose and somebody must have overturned a tray of glasses because a crash splintered the silence and, under cover of it, Bertha shook Chita gently awake and buttoned her into her reefer. It was dusk and she walked home with her down to the mouth of a filthy street on the lower West Side.

"Good night, Bertha--my--Bertha----"

"Good night--Chita--mine----"

She watched her scamper down the street, nimble once more as Jocko, and up into the black mouth of a tenement.

The way back was through a district of torchlit pushcarts and the flicker of pale wastrel faces. There was a waving light before the meat stall. The meticulous little house with the narrow shoulders of a lady missionary stood out of the glare. Neatly. The shutters were closed, but there was a fan of lit transom above the door.

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Ringing the bell above that small sign, a tear meandered down to the corner of Bertha's lips.

***

It was noon of the next day when they came to take Chita. She was washing the iron grating of a ground-floor window, the grotesque bulbs of her knees rubbing and shivering as she reached.

Bertha lifted back her wisp of furiously sooty little panties to show the purple smears. A cranberry of a little man rubbed his chin and said "M-m-m-m" and a young woman in an alpine hat opened her notebook.

"Chita--these bane good people here--to help you."

Suddenly the little monkey-like focus of Chita's gaze seemed to slide right down the bridge of her nose and up to Bertha!

"Cops!" she cried and sprang back.

"No, Chita--good people----"

"Cops! You dirty snitch. You got the cops on me--the plain closes bulls--you dirty bloke--I diden do nawthin--he was a dago sailor and he gimme a dime--that's all--you dirty square head--snitch--the lord hates a snitch--me brud'--he'll knock the stuffin's out of you--snitch you--dirty square head snitch--I'll sick me brud' on you----"

They carried Chita struggling between them into the little enclosed wagonette at the curb. A light tan omnibus with curtains at the window of the rear door.

"Chita," cried Bertha, and stood there with the tears raining down her cheeks, "Chita--mine----"

"Bloke--you--dirty--snitch--bloke!"

Against the little window of the rear door of the omnibus, her simian little furious face with the Jocko eyes and the twitchings of rage grimaced back at her.

"Bloke--dirty snitch--square-head--hate yuh--lunk----"

Chita who had loved so to listen to the tick of Bertha's heart. Chita. After a while the face became a blur.

Chita----

The window gratings were only half washed. The pail was still there.

"Chita," cried Bertha and plunged in her brush. "Oh God--my Chita--gone----"

Rub-a-dub-dub. Scrub-a-dub-dub.

***

Annie paid Bertha twenty dollars a month, when she paid it. Usually during these bedridden weeks of Annie's, there was a household deficit which Bertha dug down into the pocket of her gray flannel petticoat to meet.

The wad with the rubber band about it, which had a friendly way of hitting against Bertha's leg when she walked, was very light now.

At the Wallensteins' it had fattened out into quite a roll of soft dirty bills. Her wants were so meager. The Sailors' Supply Store filled them mostly, and a sliver of a shop on the Bowery where the kind of flannel waists she wore, flopped on hangers outside the door.

But invariably in the end, one way or another, Annie wormed away these little savings, so that her intervals of unemployment had a frightening way of draining her petticoat pocket. Frightening, because somehow that wad, hitting against her when she walked, meant a pad between her and she knew what! The women one passed at night with dragging hems and twitching faces. The crones picking out of refuse boxes and asleep in doorways. The girls in dreadful finery soliciting along the wharves.

That hit-hit against her leg. It could seem as if someone were walking in step with her.

Then one day the wad petered out into a mere handful of change, left from a dollar bill with which she had purchased a bottle of sarsaparilla for Jocko, who loved to drink it out of the bottle and rub his little belly.

A shudder went down her back. Ninety-five cents in silver. The hit gone from against her leg. The women one passed at night with the dragging hems....

***

There was new management at Raussman's. An unctuous Bohemian with a pimply face sorted out the human stock. All the young girls sat in the front row with their big red hands like beef-steaks on their laps. The older women were placed against the wall. They seemed to sit hugging themselves underneath their jackets and sighed a great deal. Some of cold, because the gin fires had gone out. Some of fatigue, and some of an unutterable hopelessness that pulled down their eyelids like window shades. There was considerable traffic among the young girls in the front row. The alert Bohemian was kept busy between the telephone, the passing out of slips, and the arrival of clients.

The assorted display in the front row was in a constant state of change, as if someone kept plucking bonbons from a box and almost immediately the little fluted container would be replaced with another.

The row against the wall did not change much. The faces were grimmer and the slow frieze of them would sit sometimes uninterrupted throughout the day.

Bertha found herself in this back row of the waiting faces, most of them flecked with fear. Not Bertha's. Hers was so big and so pale. Like a light. It burned roundly and patiently through the greasy twilit days at Raussman's. But after several of the futile ones of waiting, there were just twenty-five cents left in the petticoat pocket.

Then she began to buy newspapers and pore over them. It was November and the parks were old and gray-looking and newspapers ballooned up in the wind unless you sat on one end and nailed the other to the bench with your palm.

HELP WANTED, FEMALE

Columns of it, yet the dread of going the rounds. The women aggrieved with the servant problem, who asked abashing intimate questions, and weighed out the weekly consignment of second-grade butter and eggs for the help. The women aggrieved with the servant problem, who provided kennels for sleeping and railed at high wages for the fourteen-hour day. The dread of starting those rounds. Help Wanted, Female.

The park benches were strewn with discarded newspapers, turned almost invariably to the classified advertisement page. Sometimes a little oblong had been torn out with a hair pin or penknife. One day in City Hall Park, poring over one of these left overs, this one burned up at Bertha from its little enclosure:

Wanted: Practical nurse to assist governess in care of five-year-old boy. Must be well trained and efficient. References. Apply W. Bixby, 3450 Madison Avenue.

It was a rowdy of a day. Whistling, prankish winds that flew up under capes and rushed newspapers along the curving walks of the park. A pecksniffy little gale that filled the air with dust and paper. Pedestrians hustled before it and the benches were pretty well swept, except for one or two hunches of men asleep under their hats and the hoppings of sparrows aiming for empty peanut hulls. And Bertha. She sat forward, her torso a little oblique as if someone had placed a broken urn there on a slant, and the look that she had lifted up from that newspaper insertion, pinioned to her face.

The city ran past her. Dived into subway hoods. Clamored over cobbles. Honked, whizzed, banged. Park Row had just spewed out a red-hot edition and the newsboys' howls ran high.

It was strange to be there in the midst of life when the heart was as dreary as a moor. Wasteland down which she could see herself stalking, brooding and terrible with the tears that were dry and sobs that were silent. She began to walk. It was very far. The city blocks streamed behind, one after another. They were so full of life. But the moor gathering around her heart, it encompassed her.

The house on Madison Avenue was as handsome and portly as a park statue of a gentleman in a frock coat. It had an air and a gracious, portentous dignity, as if any moment the double oak doors might swing back and someone important and lovely sweep down the fine curve of stone steps. Candlelight would gleam on old silver in such a house and the kettles in such a house would be of polished copper that swelled what they reflected. Fine, drum shaped kettles, that would draw the juices out of fowl.

The curtains were frilled net and did an elaborate crisscross in the center of the long windows, and then drew back to reveal the shoulder of a chair or the dim loveliness of marble statuary. A child in such a house could, if he wanted, peer out of that little open place between the curtains. He would probably leave five fingerprints against the pane. Spudgy little fingerprints that would polish off with a dry cloth. But there were no fingerprints against the panes. They were very shiny. Peer as she would with the corners of her eyes as she passed the house, up the block, down the block, there were no fingerprints against the panes.