Part 13

One Wednesday morning someone in the third-floor-back must have been very ill. There was a sweetish, etheric odor in the house, and Mrs. McMurtry hurried back and forth with ice packs and blankets. A narrow black doctor with a narrow black bag oozed up through the halls. A group of the kimono-clad women gathered at the end of the hall, bleating like frightened quail. One of them had left her door open. The room was papered in light red, the drawn shades were green, and four of the jets on a very ornate center chandelier were burning. An imitation tapestry of nude Leda and her swan hung over the mantel. A man was seated on the side of the wide bed, bending to lace his shoes. Mrs. McMurtry, passing with a bowl of cracked ice, leaned in to close that door hurriedly. Then she shooed away the girls. They scattered like doves off of crumbs. One of them, trailing the edge of her light sateen kimono in the pool of Bertha's scrub water so that it slapped against her bare legs, glanced down with a kick and an oath.

It was Helga.

***

Helga was so thin! And pretty. A delicate, convalescent kind of prettiness, as if she had been ill a long while, and her hands had whitened and her skin softened and her eye sockets were like enormous pans with a jewel in them. This soft-handed Helga whose wrists used to crack open from chapping and bleed until she cried!

"Helga!"

"Fortheluvvaga! So help me--it's the lump! Bertha!"

Pretty, pretty Helga, with her brown hair frizzed and her face full of pink light from the sateen kimono. Bertha on her knees, with her hands dripping the sloppy water, could only sit back on her heels and stare her fill.

"Helga, you remember me?"

"You're the square head from Farley's. You're the quitter walked off one breakfast time and left us cold. If it ain't old Berth!"

She began to cry, for all the world like a convalescent too weak to know quite why.

"It's old Berth--still scrubbing."

"You're so pretty, Helga--that way."

"And you're so white, Berth. Still like a white old tomb, you, sittin' on the world, listening to it."

"You don't work no more, Helga? You're so fine. Helga--Helga--you ain't----"

"Yes--I am! Oh I work all right, I work! Come in my room."

"Mrs. McMurtry won't like that!"

"The hell Mrs. McMurtry won't. I don't owe her nothing. She does all the owing there is around here. I don't owe her nothing. Not even an apology."

Helga's room was papered in light green and there was an atrocity of a great green satin bow, sprawled like a spider, pinned on the lace curtains. The shades were drawn against the relenting spring sunshine and the gas jets sang. A brass bed and a base burner and a carpet with an enormous floral wreath crowded up the room. Between the windows was a full-length repetition of the tapestry of the nude Leda and her Swan.

It was somehow a horrible room, the kind Willy was fond of looking at through the lenses in the Fourteenth Street nickelodeons. You half expected girls in corsets and ruffled panties to be sitting about smoking cigarettes.

"Helga! Helga!"

"Why not? Whose got the right to stop me, I'd like to know? I've slung my last pot for the privilege of keeping the slanting roof of somebody's garret over my head."

"This place----?"

"Yah--yah--what do you think? A convent? Don't look so holy or you'll sprout a halo. Sit down. Oh, I know all your Sunday school gab. You're afraid to touch me. Your scrub water has made you clean and I'm unclean. I know--the line of talk. You're clean with slops and me I--I'm dirty with stinkin' perfume--you don't need to touch me----"

"Why Helga--Helga--come here--kiss--me----"

Suddenly Helga began to cry again, the tears of physical weakness.

"I know what I'm doing. Pretty damn well. Where did I get off? Nobody's ever yet answered me why I had to get up at six, every tooth in my head rattling of cold and my back aching from a lumpy cot, so that four hours later a thin-lipped icicle that never done nothing for this world except get herself born into it right, could step out of her soft bed into a warm bath and then to her hot breakfast that three of us had been three hours bustling around in the cold dark getting ready for her. Not much!"

"How long, Helga, since you quit the Farleys?"

"I couldn't stand the young one! Rollo's wife. There's the one finished me. I stuck it out two years after she came. There was a hell-cat for you. The kind of a house-devil that wakes up with her eyes glued shut and can't straighten herself out into a presentable creature until along about noon when the society stuff starts to begin. I know 'em--the smooth-faced kind with the smooth-parted hair and the pecan-shaped faces. There was a woman could subscribe to a charity ball with one hand and pinch an orphan with another. She led me a merry hell for two years I won't soon forget. And Rollo--that poor piece of white meat! He can thank God he made himself famous writing a book before she copped him. He'll never write another. He's married to one that takes all and gives nothing. She couldn't inspire a man to write an entry in the butcher book."

"Why did you quit, Helga?"

"One month she had the old woman dock me for a little old terra cotta statue I knocked off of Rollo's desk, dusting it. She said Rollo had written his greatest poem in front of that little terra cotta on his desk and that no money could repay it, but she was for learning me a lesson. I learned her one. There was ten coming to dinner that night and me on second-floor duty. Well, that dinner party had to slide out of its fur coats and powder its noses alone that night. I quit!"

"And this?"

"I got to thinking, that's all. All back doors and slop cans for some--front doors and canopies for others--no reason--just happening that way. God couldn't mean it like that. And what if He did? He was God. I'm me! Little! Weak. I get so tired, Bertha. Nobody gets so tired as I do. My floatin' kidney. I love to sleep so. It's a sickness. I can't pull out of it. I ain't strong, Bertha. I couldn't--I--I ain't strong and white and all on the inside of me like you! Lye water hurts my hands! Slops stink. It eats my heart to have to peek through the swinging doors at the good things of life being gobbled by others that ain't earned 'em as much as we have. That's why I'm here. I thought maybe--God--I thought maybe----"

"Maybe--what?"

"Maybe some of the easiness--was coming to me. There--there was a fellow--you remember--while you was at Farley's--Joe Dike, the little plumber that always used to kid you about sitting and listening to the oleander tree grow. Joe liked me. I never made no bones, Bertha. I wanted kids. A two-by-four of my own somewheres and kids. That's all I ever asked out of it. Joe, he strung me along a while after you left and then--he quit. It used to go against his grain not even to be allowed to sit in the kitchen. He had self-respect Joe did. He didn't like courting in alleyways and elevated trains. I--didn't have nowheres except to sneak him--up. That's where I lost my chance, Bertha. Joe liked me while I was straight and used to talk marrying, but when he seen me up there in that dirty hole--living like a rat--he--I--aw--after him--I didn't--care--that's all. I don't care now!"

"I care, Helga."

"You! Lots anybody cares for me. But I fooled 'em. I fooled 'em--I--got a place--now--I--got a place now--to invite 'em in!"

Suddenly Helga, whose prettiness was drawn back from her face as if someone were pulling her by the hair, fell forward in a pink sateen huddle against Bertha.

"And now the worst of it is, I hate them, Bertha. Some day I'll kill one. Their mouths. Their ugly wet mouths. McMurtry sends me the slobbiest ones. She hates me, because she knows I hate her. They begin coming as early as six--mouths all loose and wet that slide around in their faces like something alive crawling over them! I'll kill one some day! Help me, Bertha. Where can I turn to? Where, oh God, where?"

Then Mrs. McMurtry came in. A neat little, black little engine without a puff.

"What's this?"

"I spilt a bottle of medicine and she wiped it up for me."

"Go back to your work, Bertha."

Out in the hallways the twilight was like smoke. It wound and it thickened and it flowed around the little nubs of light. The waiting webby water in Bertha's pail lapped on to her wrists as she plunged them into the pail again. Clung there.

At six o'clock Mrs. McMurtry paid her off. The two one dollar bills again and the ten cent piece.

"Next Wednesday, Bertha."

"Next Wednesday, Mrs. McMurtry."

Going downstairs she crowded up against the wall to let someone pass. He had a wet mouth. Like a live thing crawling across his face.

***

Sometimes in summer, Willie went away with the family to a square house by the sea. Bertha knew it well from the picture post card view of it that he kept tacked up over the table. The edge of the vast smooth lawn was walled into a fortress, against which the sea plunged in a fury of spray. A row of imported poplar trees, straight as young boys, bisected this sleek lawn into an Italian garden on one side and a cleared area of playground for the boy on the other. There was a swing with an awning; a small wooden chute-the-chutes, carefully railed, and by scanning with the eye almost touching the card, tiny croquet hoops and pegs could be discerned against the turf, which undulated along, supple as a caterpillar, until the sea brought it up, sheerly.

There was something terrifying about that rebuffed surf, as It showed up on the post card, bending back with spray. Terrifying thought of the boy bounding down that springy sod with the wind in his face and the thwarted sea full of its licking tongues.

Often at night Bertha awoke trembling with that fear. It helped somehow to have Willie there with him--and yet--just silly Willie--and the leaping, grinding, gnashing sea running up to the feet of the boy.

So the summers could be long, even cruel, except that it was pleasant to have the muslin portières drawn back and never to feel the skulking putterings of Willie, or to waken to the grimace which he loved to hang over her pillow. The room could be very hot. It seemed to pant at night, as if the long scorching trail of the day had left it exhausted. Warm breath stole out of its walls. The leather wagon seat was hot to the touch.

One August evening she dragged the old thing to the window and lay on it there, where she could lift her face to the sill every little while in the hope of a fugitive passing breeze. It was horrible. Babies cried and died in that welter. The bare, tossing little limbs were sprawled on the stoops and fire escapes. She could rest her chin upon the sill and look out on the litter of them and on the mothers whose arms were filled with the hot, sick droop of prostrated children. The tired senile infants in the thick of their battle with the tenements. The secret exultancy of Bertha. An exultancy that could burn in her like wine.

Puling, mewling sons of the mothers whose arms were rich with them. Bertha's were empty. So empty that sometimes, for the relief of tangible pain, she would wrap them around her body until the hands clasped in back, for the ache of the pulling sockets. Those mothers out there who thought that their arms were rich with the mewling and puny sons. Bertha's were empty, but her son was in a white square house by the sea, where the nights blew in life-giving with salt, and a green lawn flowed all about him, growing and shimmering so that his swift boy's feet might beat it down. Tormented exultancy of Bertha!

Sometimes Helga came. She was only half a Helga now, so slim, and the indoor pallor made her very lovely. Until she spoke she was delicate as an old perfume and then her voice came out of this frailty with all of its old husky quality. The same berating Helga who could box an iceman's ears or shrill down Mrs. Farley over the strewn mass of her slovenly bed.

Her slippers. They were so pretty. Slim with tall heels and buckles of bronze beads across the instep. Twinkling feet. And a pleated silk dress with a skirt that opened out in a fan. And there was money in her purse. You could see the green of the bills through the gilt mesh. More than once her impulse had been to leave some of these bills with Bertha.

"I suppose if I was to give you a ten spot, you would sprout a sanitary halo and tear up the dirty stuff."

"I got enough. Day work is good."

"Yeh,--you got enough. Smoked fish and a horse blanket. Oh, I know. Even you are too good for prostitute money."

"Even--me----"

They seldom lit the gas. It cost, and besides in the heat it was unbearable. Sometimes, with the silk dress spread around her in a great flower, Helga sat on the floor with her cheek against the sill, her dry feverish face thrust up for a breath of air. Bertha, barefoot, upright on the soap box that served as the room's second chair, and a bit back from the window, the dark silence thick and luxurious to her as sealskin.

"Fortheluvvaga, why don't you say something? You give me the jimjams. I'd sooner have you say what's on your mind than sit there like you was sitting up on top of the world brooding over it. Whadda you keep looking at me like that for? You ought to set yourself in a gilt frame with some candles burning up to yourself. It's my funeral--not yours----"

"And mine--Helga--to see it go bad--with--you----"

"I'm nothing to you----"

"Nothing--and everything."

"Huh?"

"Nothing."

"Bertha--who are you----?"

"Yoost--me."

"Well, whoever you are, I won't be saved, if that's what's on your mind. I know the slick ways of the savers. Words. Words. Words from the teeth out never saved anybody. I know them. I hate a professional thin-lipped saver like I hate the ripple in a snake--I know what I'm doing, I do. Saved for what? Saved for going back to scrubbing somebody's pots and pans in somebody's kitchen? That's a helluva life, ain't it, to want to be saved for? You or any of the professional savers got a swell chance to save me from that."

"That--don't matter----"

"Yeh--yeh--I know! I know! Dishwater don't need to soak through to the soul. I know the line of talk. Well, it soaks through me! Makes me sick with the meaning of living. If there's got to be pot slingers for ladies who breakfast in pink silk boudoirs, then all of us on the kitchen side of the door ought to have been made with machinery inside instead of hearts and souls."

"Somebody has got to----"

"Well, that don't make it no easier to be one of the pot-slinging somebodies. If you've got a heart and a soul, then you're going to ask questions about what made you one of the somebodies on the kitchen side of the door, instead of on the pink silk side, and if you ask questions it's a helluva lot of satisfaction you get. Somebody's got to sling the pots. That's about all the answer anybody has been able to give me yet. Oh, it's all right about being too deep down inside yourself to mind the scum on your hands. Maybe you can pull a dead rat out of its hole like you was picking a lily, I've seen you do it, but I'm one of the human ones. I'm glad I done what I done. I'd do it all over again."

"Helga----"

"I've nothing to be saved for. I've worked in the kitchens of the good ones and the bad ones and it don't make it any easier. Going around the alley way for someone whose heart is made no different than your heart and whose soul wasn't made in a special heaven. Yeh--I'd do it all over again--and I hate 'em, I tell you--hate them--I hate them--their wet slippery mouths----"

She fell down into the huddle then of the accordion-pleated silk skirt, racked with the sobs she had not the strength for, and she had to be cooed and soothed out of what seemed almost delirium. Cooed and soothed as if she had been a child. Bertha's.

***

It was raining in a soft, fast whisper. The first September gusts fanned sprays of it through the open window. A tin spout dribbled. It was an evening for placing a growing plant on the window sill. The gusts came stronger and full of rain. Finally the window had to be lowered and then the fine fizz went after the pane. An evening with a sense of hurry to it. Pedestrians hurrying with slant umbrellas. The waiter from Tom's Eating Place across the way, hurrying into the Crescent Billiard Parlors with a covered tray. And how the soft rain did hurry. It had a melody. Bertha dried her cup and plate to it. Sleet--te--tee! Sleettee--tee! Sleeeeeee!

The twilight was a little mouse, and the rain full of tiny scuttling feet. The old cup and the plate with a V chopped out, shone in a pale, jagged grin when she set them on the shelf. It was hard to light the gas because the matches were damp, There!

Someone was coming up the stairs. In clumps. It was Willie, home from the three months of country. There was the rocking-chair derby, with a little rill of water dripping from the gutter of the brim, and a large newspaper bundle of his belongings throwing him a little lopsided.

"Slk-k-k-k," he said, and stood in the doorway.

She flew at him and took his wet hat and shook it and dragged the soap box for him up to the stove, so that he sat down in an immediate exudation of steam.

"Willie--the boy---you bane home again!"

He was sullen and held her off with his elbow.

"Don't shove. Don't shove."

"I won't--the boy?"

"Don't shove----"

She poured him a cup of the still warm coffee and he drank it gulping and sighing and staring, with the rims of his eyes stretched and contemplating the red doorway to the stove. There was something irate and dozy about him, like a man who has been jerked out of a nap.

"Willie--you--the boy?"

He began to swing what was left of the coffee around in the cup. He made a game of it. Swinging and swirling and then he threw it down his throat at a gulp.

"Ah"--he said--"Hell."

A dart of fear shot through her.

"Willie--the boy--quick--the boy--my boy?"

She had him by the scruff of his neck, so that he came up loosely like a sack of potatoes.

"Scat you! Crazy!"

"Willie----"

"Aw let up. I'm out of a job," he said, and sat looking groggily into the door of the stove.

"Then the boy--all right----?"

"Whadda you mean--all right?--All wrong!"

"Willie----"

"All wrong for me. They're takin' him to Europe to-morrow. For two years--maybe five. Leaves me flat of a job. All of us. There's a dirty trick to play on the staff. Not even opening the town house this year."

"Europe--the boy----"

"Yeh--all of a sudden the staff of us, except the old woman that learns him his books, gets notice. Could knock us down. Taking him to Europe to study the piano. Beat that! The boy's a great one for piddling on the piano. Nobuddy notices it much and then all of a sudden--Europe. And where does that leave us? Out of a job. And where do we get off because they're taking him to learn the bloomin' old piano? That's what a fella gets. Stays after hours to play with the boy and in the end it's the boy that costs him his job."

"The--boy--plays--the--piano?"

"Naw, he plays the scissors grinder, in case you didn't hear me the first time I said it. Piano. You get me? Piano."

Suddenly Willie leaped up, the grimace he loved to hang over her couch on his face. The vicious, drooly, half-wit mask.

"I know! You! You done it! You gave him that damned concertina! That was the beginning. He never played before then. That got him started. He couldn't leave off that damned thing. They kept making him play it for company. Had him down standing on the dinner table one night at a party, showing him off on that old accordion. Then they got him a new one, but he wouldn't leave off with the old. The one that you sent him. That's what got him started to fumbling out tunes all day on the piano. That dirty concertina. Yours! You lost me my job, sending it to him, and now you owe me my living for starting it all with your old concertina!"

"Willie!"

"You! God damn you." He lunged and struck her on the right cheek bone with a loud cracking sound and then, as the other cheek swung around from the impact, struck her again on the left, shambled downstairs and went out.

A little scarlet tear of blood began to trickle down toward the corner of her mouth. The taste of it was sickish, and the flesh began to flame up around her eyes. Waving purple flags.

She stood with her lips fallen apart in what might have been a smile. "You started it all with that damn concertina." Ecstasy of that! It made it easy not to faint through the waving purple and to walk over through the muslin curtains and there, from behind the overturned wagon-top marked in a red star and "R.H. Stacy and Company," to drag out the old carpetbag and pack it with unfumbling hands.

***

The rain had ceased. A warmish night was left that was soft as an oyster and felt clammy to the cheek. The street lights went down in corkscrews into the sidewalks, and when you glanced up the heavens were all moving with the hurry of low clouds. And yet the murkiness parted like a curtain. Bertha's feet were so swift and her face thrust ahead like a blade cutting. A lovely, draped kind of a night, through which she could pass to the swish of her own tingling blood. Street cars clanged angrily and almost touched her as she darted. The carpetbag hit softly.

The balls of her feet were part of this business of being glad. She felt big and silly, jiggling along on them. It was hard to keep the lip down firmly over the teeth. It kept quivering to smile. Sometimes the street ran in darts of color because of the bonfires underneath her eyes. Bonfires of exultant flame.

The petty shops and the soiled look of poverty began to peter out. The tenement badges of fire escape and clothes line, of prowling cats and strewn gutters, left off suddenly after Lexington Avenue, and by the hair line of a bisecting street, the respectable brownstone march began. Blocks of solemn, riveted, stare after stare. The monotony of the desert, captive in city streets.

In the well-to-do aridity of one of these crosstown blocks, as she worked her way zigzag toward boarding a car for Front Street, a pair of women walking ahead turned in at one of the ornate stoops. A street lamp burned before it and its reflection ran up along the wet steps in yellow shafts. In this light the quick, avian face of one of the women spun around upon Bertha and she grasped her companion by the coat sleeve.

"I tell you, there is a good girl leaving a situation. I know the look of them. Neat as a pin. There is no harm asking."

The second face was hung on delicately. Like a pear.

"Tilda, how can you? It's not only an insulting thing to do, but in a city like New York it isn't safe. Come, dear."

"I've picked up some of the best servants I ever had that way. That is how I found Aggie one Saturday morning, right off the cornet of Madison and Fifty-first Street. She reminds me something of Aggie, too. New York or no New York, I know a good servant when I see one. Say, you--girl----"

"Tilda!"

"Say, you! Come here, please."

"Me?"

"Yes. I merely wish to ask, you don't mind, I'm sure, if you are leaving a situation, or if you happen to know of a good cook or housemaid, who does want a place?"

"Tilda!"

"Paula, if you don't like it I wish you would go into the house. I know what I am doing. My daughter thinks it shocking because I stop you in this fashion. You don't mind, do you?"

"No."

"Then do you wish a place?"

"Yah----."

"There, didn't I tell you! Thank goodness, I am sufficiently strong-minded to follow my own intuition and ask for what I want in this world when I see it. Are you a cook?"