Part 11

It was easy to pass and repass. That is, if one kept shoulders bent into the wind as if with destination. There was a constant trickle of pedestrians along the fine wide avenue. One swung back and forth with the little tides. No stopping to stare, of course. Just that tail of the eye, ready!

It was a block of portly houses. Of great wide windows and curving stoops and motor cars at the curb. There were several ways of not passing up and down too often. Walking on the opposite side. Appearing to stand at a corner for the traffic to pass. Strolling around the block and loitering a little along the way.

Not even the smudge of a sprawled little palm against the window pane. How precious had there been!

Once a young woman entered the trade entrance. She had a click to her broad heels and there was a gleam of starched white under her long blue cape. The door was opened to her only the fraction of an inch and closed again, gently. She went away on heels not so clicking. Bertha, passing, could have touched her.

Almost immediately after, a big heavy-busted woman, with hair on her chin and also in white uniform that crackled under her cloak, rang the bell. Bertha knew her! A Mrs. Mahaffy! She had once tended the senile grandfather in a private house on Lexington Avenue where Bertha had cooked for a month. "Hateful Mahaffy" the waitress had called her. She was always fussing around the kitchen with trays, mostly her own, and had let the old man fall in his bath one morning, for which she was dismissed. Her arms were pock-marked too. The waitress had stumbled across a little nest of hypodermic needles under her mattress after she left.

Hateful Mahaffy!

Passive Bertha with her slow, white face. A sudden, a new, an aggressive rage laid hold of her. A frenzy that made her want to tear and strip and choke. She started after the largely undulating figure of Mrs. Mahaffy, but the one inch of door had already been opened and closed to her, so that they met on the sidewalk.

"Save yourself the trouble," said Mrs. Mahaffy, "the place is already filled."

She had a horrid kind of voice for a woman. It seemed to want to boom because she had hair on her chin. Then she recognized Bertha.

"Wasn't we in a place together once? Lexington Avenue."

"Yah----"

"Well, you're in wrong here. Practical nurse is wanted. Big automobile moguls from Detroit. Just moved here. New-rich. Give me the new-rich every time. They got proper respect for their servants, and not too much for themselves. Well, stung here, but they're engaging a new staff in that big brown house over on the corner. Want to come with me?"

"No," said Bertha. "No."

"Well, you always was good company for yourself," said Mrs. Mahaffy and stalked off on a diagonal across the street.

Hateful Mahaffy, who, they said of her, pinched children, and had let the old man slip and break his hip. To think that hateful Mahaffy, with the boom of voice, might have gained custody over the child within that house.

Or someone like her might already have been hired! Or someone worse! Fear flashed through her. Flash after flash of it. Then again the swelling anger. Mrs. Mahaffy. She pinched children. She started across the street, striking into her solemn golem trot, her lower lip pursed out.

Mrs. Mahaffy had disappeared. She hurried a block after her, her stiff Inverness cape blowing out from her, and her face thrust out ahead.

Mrs. Mahaffy. What had she to do with it? Do with it? Why, there was a child over there in that house--five years old--who made it unbearable that any child should be pinched.

She hurried. Mrs. Mahaffy had disappeared. After a while she began to cry. Slow ashamed tears. The house looked soft through the blur of them. Almost as if you could poke in a dimple through the wall with your finger, as you could in the cheek of a child.

A man in shirt sleeves and a black apron came out of the service entrance and began to polish the brass doorbell. He was shaved to the skull, and his neck was fat, and he danced up and down from the knees as he rubbed. A gay feather duster stuck up from his rear hip pocket. He whistled. She could not tear her eyes from him. His jouncing legs and the little jelly-dance of the fat along his neck! Perhaps as recently as an hour ago--ten minutes ago--five--he had passed the five-year-old child in a hallway. That gay little duster might have flecked a chair that he had sat upon.

The excitement of that! It ran like a fever through her. She stood and looked at him. Just stood there in front of the house and watched him rubbing the bell. After a while he turned, because the irises of her eyes must by this time have been like hot disks on his back. He had a face of loose fat and the jowls fell in pleats like a spaniel's. A soft face that you could mash up softly with your hand like pie dough. Ugh.

She began to walk and he followed her by swinging his head around to glance over the other shoulder.

Perhaps so recently as an hour ago--ten minutes--five--he had passed the five-year-old in a hallway----

He winked.

Slowly and with the horrid sensation that she could softly mash up his face into pie dough, Bertha winked back.

"Fine day for a walk," he said, and sucked back his words and made a noise like a kiss.

"Yah," she said and lifted her lips back off her square white teeth to make a smile.

He was chewing something and he spat, quid and all, on to the stoop of the house adjoining.

"Big 'un, ain't you?"

"Me? I dunno----"

"Ticklish? Slk-k-k-k-k," he said, and made a sound between his tongue and his cheek. Nasty. Frightening.

"Naw."

His face was shaved, but the day's stubble of beard was out, and when he rubbed it you could hear the bristles scrape.

"Good time?"

"What?"

He bunched up his mouth again with the little hissing, kissing sound. Someone lowered a window with a slam. He flecked open his polishing rag and began to rub at the bell again.

"Wait for me a few minutes down at the drug store on Thirty-ninth. I'm off at five. Big 'un, heh?"

She moved off. That face of old dough--ugh!

It was horrible waiting. It grew dusk and she shivered and her tongue thickened and her distaste kept welling. But her feet stood rooted, sullen, there. Waiting. The ruby urn in the drug store window lit up and threw a stain on the sidewalk. He came, looking stuffed into his coat, and his derby hat sat high on his head like a rocking chair. He was short. She had not noted how short. Why, she could have almost leaned an elbow on his head and rested her cheek comfortably upon her palm.

Silly Willy.

Idiotically enough, that transpired to be his name. Willy. She was never to utter it without the aftermath of a little chime in her brain. Silly.

His soft mouth slid around so in his face. It was a little sunken because his molar teeth were gone. Slk-k-k-k-k! He was always making that noise between his tongue and his cheek and making a boring gesture with his forefinger, Slk-k-k-k-k. He met her that way.

"Slk-k-k-k-k, you're a husky one."

"You bane a _little_ one," she said with elephantine coquetry.

"I'm little," he said, "but oh my," and beat himself upon the chest.

"You bane short and I bane long, heh?"

"That's me! Little but oh my--is what they used to label me in Winnipeg."

"Oh, that bane a big fine place."

"Winnipeg! She's a dream. There's a little city with a gizzard. I was born there. My boss comes from Detroit. You know him? Ever been in a Bixby Six? That's him. Every third time you bat your eye a Bixby car runs past you."

"You bane house-man?"

"Yeh, but I don't live in. I got a room. Good time?"

"It bane a big fine house. It's a fine big family?"

"Big family! There's him and her--fine as silk--and a kid--the little devil is five----"

"You--know--him----?"

"Little devil--let me so much as be washin' the window of his nursery and he gets me down on all-fours for a ride on me back."

"Your--back----"

"To-day, if anybody be askin' you--I can feel his little heels in my shins yet----."

"You!"

"Slk-k-k-k-k! I live over there--near First Avenue. I got a room."

"He rode you--to-day----"

"He's a card--kicked my shins----"

"Will he ride you to-morrow----?"

"Mebbe."

"You like me?"

He threw up a killing glance from under his rocking-chair derby and poked her under the cape with his forefinger. "Slk-k-k-k-k."

They turned down a crosstown street that ran toward First Avenue.

***

Willy's room was over a garage where a great mercantile establishment kept its regiment of trucks. It was large, with one end filled with traces; the body of an old horse-drawn delivery wagon and some old leather harnesses that smelled.

The front part of the room had a bed and a chair and a table and a small stove the shape of a snow man. Bertha hung some muslin portières up one day. That cut the room in two and shut off the wagon top, with a red star and R.H. Stacy and Company painted across it. This seemed to move the chair, the table, the bed, and the stove into a cozier propinquity. Otherwise, it was rather an awful room. It stood there cold and mean and bare all day, scarcely more than a kennel, waiting for the occupants who called it home, to creep back into it at night.

Willy usually came first. It was a straight cut cross town, from the house on Madison Avenue. Bertha's hours were more irregular. Her work took her far and wide.

Once, during Christmas holidays, an agency on East Twenty-third Street which kept her constantly supplied with day-work sent her, along with a staff, to clean a schoolhouse on East One Hundred and Ninety-second Street. It was ten o'clock before she climbed to the room.

Willy was asleep on the bed with his shoes on and his derby hat over his face. There was no fire and no supper. Willy could cook. He had always lived off like this in a room with a bed and a stove. But with the advent of Bertha an atavism cropped out in him. The stove might be laid, but unless she struck the match, there was no fire. It was easier to be cold and hungry and lie on the bed with his derby over his face, waiting.

"You're a lunk," Bertha cried one night and hit him across the soles of his shoes with a poker, as he lay stretched and waiting on top of the bed.

"Then get out," he said, and turned over and dozed off until the fire began to crackle in the round little belly of the stove and the strong smell of tripe stew to wind through the room.

He was vicious, but in the small ways that a terrier can be vicious. Yappy. Snappy. But the crack of a whip could curl his legs under him and make him slink. He had the mind of a child. Colored picture cards amused. He could not drink, and what he chewed was tobacco substitute, and his pockets were filled with bits of bright glass and twine and pencil stubs and old screws. Even his vices were not man size. He was sly and he was a thief, but he stole only pennies and doll's eyes and no one in the Bixby household could call a pen-knife or scratch-pad his own. He was constantly filching the smaller coins from Bertha's pocketbook. Coppers. She could feel his hand steal under the leather cushion that was her pillow and would lie there in the darkness with her eyes wide open, looking at the dim white smear his teeth made across the darkness when he laid them bare in his effort at stealth.

Silly Willy. He was not even a man. That made it less horrible, even while it made it more horrible. She slept on the other side of the muslin curtain, on the long leather seat of the old delivery wagon. It made quite a couch. Only her feet dangled off, and she could crowd them in if she drew up her knees. It was almost private, except that he liked to peer through to see the gleam of her hair. Unbound it fell in a slow cascade of heavy, solemn, taffy-looking yellow.

"Get out! Sca-at!"

He didn't always, and had to be pushed out like a hateful boy. She despised him and was never free of the feeling that his face was boneless and made of dough, and that by the pressure of her palm against it something terrifying and feature-less would be left there before her.

And yet when Bertha came home from work with her pulpous brown butcher's package, and her arms stinging from lye water and the sockets aching, sometimes she could not run up the stairs fast enough, skinning her shins and stumbling in her haste.

Willy would be there. Silly Willy. And he could show her the very spot along his back where the boy had straddled, riding him horseback and kicking into his shins. Once he had come home with the skin on his arm torn. The boy had flecked him too hard with a whip. Bertha washed it and kissed it. Kissed that wound on the hairless arm of Silly Willy.

It was easy to make him talk. A sack of little cone-shaped chocolate drops would accomplish it, or a new screw driver, or a roll of adhesive plaster. Any little tinkery thing. And because he was sly, he would only answer Slk-k-k-k-k to her questions until she produced the bribe. It never bothered him to know the why of her trembling interest in the boy. He just was silly and would talk for a cone-shaped chocolate drop.

Sometimes at the Bixby house, instead of his emptying ashes or washing windows or polishing brass, they would detain him in the nursery on a rainy day to play those straddling floor games that the starchy nurse could not manage. Silly Willy could amble on all fours for hours. He would buckle on a leather harness that had bells, shake himself and roar, and the boy, straddling his back, would kick with his heels and shout.

Silly Willy was good at these games. He played them sincerely and with the mind of a child.

Sometimes the boy stole down to the furnace rooms, where Willy kept fires banked, and looked with solemn pools of eyes into the red maw of the boiler. He had rather a frail, choir-boy face with long cheeks and very straight yellow bangs which came down to his brows. He could stare into the fire until the black irises almost crowded out the blue in his eyes and his cheeks began to redden. He liked fire. It fascinated him. Infuriated him. He would contemplate it, then catch up a broom and ride hobby-horse astride it like one possessed. Usually Willy followed, more feebly, on a second broomstick.

His nurse or his mother usually precipitated this and Willy on his springy knees would wabble back to the fire, to feed it, to sit in its red stain, and to chuckle.

Sometimes in good outdoor weather or with the family away, there would be no sign of the boy for days, for weeks. That was dull for Willie. He liked to play. But Willie was sly.

For a bag of the chocolate drops or a screw or a ball of twine, he would invent the day's encounter with the boy. Nothing very ingenious. Willy's imagination was a feeble affair. Just a sort of refurbishings of oft told tales.

Bertha did not mind. No sooner had they sat down with their dish of dinner steaming up between them, than her hand made its insidious curve down toward her pocket.

And then without any particular preamble Willy would begin: "He's a devil for fire. He is. Gets his owl eyes full of it from staring and then goes crazy with it. He's a fire horse. So am I. We're a team of fire horses."

"Willy--that's a dangerous play!"

"Dangerous! You got to straddle your horse tight. That's all. Hold 'im in--is what I tells him--hold 'im in and you're all right."

"Is he strong enough to hold 'im in?"

"Naw. That's where I come in. Slk-k-k-k! I rein him up!"

"Willy--tell me again--what does he look like--the little boy?"

"Didn't I tell you--again and again and again----"

"Yoost once--more, Willy."

"Is it chocolates? Gimme."

"What does he look like?"

"He's a boy--he is, with eyes and hair----"

"Yellow, Willy? His hair bane yellow--like mine?"

"It's yellow all right."

"He's a big boy, Willy?"

"I showed you on the wall--he bane that high."

"That was last week--he bane bigger now?"

"Aw--not quick--like that--gimme what you've got. Chocolate?"

She handed him the sack of cones, for his dessert.

One evening over the strong smell of their kidney stew he screwed up his eyes at her!

"I give him one--to-day."

"What?"

His eyes looked sly and almost at once that frightened her.

"What--Willy----?"

They disappeared as if dough had crowded up around two raisins.

"Willy--one what?"

"One of my chocolates!"

She rose up sudden and threatening as an apparition, her two arms towering as if they would crash down upon him, and he cowed in his chair with his mouth fallen open.

"You gave him from those----"

"Yeh----"

"He ate----"

"Naw--we put it in the fire. It melted up. Get away. You!"

She came down from the great towering gesture of her wrath, which he interpreted not at all, and her fingers unclenched and the blood went back into her face. She shook him then, by the scroff of his coat until his head bobbed loosely.

"Don't you ever--don't you ever again--give him those ten cent cones."

"Stingy-gut, Slk-k-k-k-k--I only gave one----"

"Never. You hear, Willy. It bane bad for the boy. You--you'll get fired. Make him sick. I'll bring you chocolates for him. Not your kind. Chocolates for him----"

"Yeh, we're fire horses."

Chocolates for him! She could not sleep that night. Her feet kept plunging off the end of the seat and sometimes she sat up in the leather-smelling darkness because she breathed too fast and felt crowded.

She bought a dollar box the next day. A red paper affair with a dog and a boy on the cover. Stale bonbons that had lain in the incandescent glare of a Third Avenue window for weeks.

The boy never received them. Bertha did not know, but he had been in Asheville, North Carolina, for three weeks with his foster parents. Willy ate the chocolates beside the glow of his furnace, popping them whole into his mouth.

***

Willy had slacked. Shamefully. He no longer paid the rent for the room, eight dollars a month. Bertha did. The first time she did it because he wanted a tool chest for seven dollars and eighty-five cents in a First Avenue show window. After that he never paid anything. Bertha didn't demur. It was too precious, coming home in the evening to Willy who that very day might have been galloping like a fire horse for the boy.

Tools. They grew in a pile. His complete earnings, forty dollars a month, went into them. He liked to sit and polish them. Test the ductility of saws, run his plane around the floor for the curl of the shavings. There were boxes of nails in assorted sizes. Screws. Gimlets of every graduated variety. He could bore with them for an entire evening into a bit of plank or the flank of the old delivery wagon top. Bore and bore with a little mousy sound. He liked that best. Slk-k-k-k-k! He never made anything. Only bored and sawed and piddled.

Sometimes Bertha sewed. Made the muslin portières. Patched his denim house-jacket.

Usually she was so tired evenings that to the sound of the mousy borings she fell asleep behind her portières. Day-work was draining. It was like undergoing the dreadful preliminaries of a new job each morning.

"You can put your shoes there under the sink and there's a chair down in the basement where you can hang your hat and coat. You don't go stocking-footed, do you? Gracious, that agency is getting the limit for day-help. Here's a pail and a mop. You can scrub this whole courtyard in a morning, if you're spry. My former girl did it before she got consumption. If that drain there backs water on you, ram your arm down."

Day after day of it. Day-jobs where the residuum of dirty work was apt to lie waiting and accumulated. Wet, sloppy, puddled days. Cold, gaunt houses about to be occupied. Public buildings with rooms full of the stench of neglect. Once, at a fishmonger's, scales clung to her arms. Shining fish scales that hung to the flesh like burrs and would not wash off. She scrubbed at the faucet, and suddenly panic of them, the wet, slimy things, seized her and she screamed. The fishmonger, enormous and stained and with a mallet for pounding down codfish steaks in his hand, came and plucked off a few of them for her and laughed, and then, because her arm was white and firm, kissed her with wet, fish-smelling lips. She struck him with his own mallet by jerking back his arm until he hit himself in the head, and in his rage he struck back and she went home discharged and with a blue welt coming out above her cheek bone.

Cold dirty days. Then hot days, equally dirty.

That way the months swung around and, through the poor silly eyes of Willy, she beheld the boy grow older.

And as the eyes of Willy became sillier, and the face around them more and more horridly doughy, Bertha, who hated him, was glad. As he receded more and more into childishness, he played with the mind and the heart of an innocent. Sometimes, on spring evenings, after his supper, he joined the street boys at baseball or swapped some of his shiny screws for chinies. Bertha, sitting up behind the window curtain, would watch him. Carefully. He was kind to children.

He had come to hate her in a sly and secret kind of way. He was cunning enough to know she paid the rent and bought the meat for stews and that, by grace of her, the stack of his shining tools grew high, but there festered in him, day by day, the desire to torture her.

The same impulse, doubtless, that led him to delight in tearing off the wings of flies. Or perhaps dimly she was to him the badge of his impotence, and so he smouldered against her and hated. He had never been a man, and yet the pangs of impotence made him more horrible than he might have been with desire.

He liked to grimace at her with every torturous twist of feature he could connive. To awaken her by hanging over her couch with his face all drooly and loose of feature like an idiot's, and his hands drooping loosely from the wrists so that they swept her face.

The horror of this made her wild. She would tremble for an entire day from the start of waking up to this loose, drooling face of Willy's. He was devilish at these little abuses. One day he brought the window sharply on her hands as she leaned over the sill, so that it made her finger nails blue. He never failed to scratch down deeply into her palms if he had occasion to take anything from her, and one evening he wanted to hand her the red hot poker and when she saw the ruse and held the hand behind her, he brought it down on her shoulder so that it singed her waist and the flesh.

But he was kind to children.

There was only about one way to deal with him. To slap him. Usually, with his ears boxed, he could be trusted to trot over to his tools and begin to plane or bore. Sometimes the cartwright's child next door would come to play. Together they would set up the racket of carpentry. Particularly with the plane, improvising mustachios and fierce whiskers out of the shavings. Sometimes he carried a handful of the shavings to the boy.