Part 21

One girl asleep in a chair with neatly closed but fumy lips had to be picked up as if she were a little bag of sachet, crammed into her wrap and handed bodily to one of the young men with the irreverent eyes. He left a dollar bill on the counter that separated the cloakroom from the corridor. That was the beginning. Until dawn the coins and a few more dollar bills showered there. There was a china saucer for catching them in one of the dressing table drawers. Bertha did not know that.

At four o'clock the jazz sort of reared itself up on its hind legs, neighed enormously, and stopped like a great fantastic, fabled horse, frozen there on his dancing haunches with horror at his bray.

The strange silence began to pour. It pressed on the eardrums. It sang. A ringing silence as full of shuddering little atoms as a brass gong after a beating. You tiptoed through it, picking up oddments of a glove, a ribbon, a comb. The exhausted air was full of fog. There were three thickness of brocade across the window and the sash was hard to budge.

Finally, with all the strength of her, Bertha jerked it open. A wet cool dawn blew in. You scooped your hands into it and laved it over your face. Cool dawn that had traveled over wide and brooding silences. You fell on your knees beside the open window and drank it in as it pinkened.

It was time to go, but there was still one coat left on the rack. A lovely one of pink silver and silver fox. The money made quite a wad in Bertha's petticoat pocket. It was pleasant while you waited, to walk about the room to the friendly hit-hit. It made the rising day seem kindly. The little ducts in her mouth were running. The hit-hit meant tripe stew for breakfast.

Bertha standing there in the ruins of that cluttered bejazzed night, her silhouette against the new day....

A vacuum cleaner started to whine on a lower floor. The coat of pink silver began to tarnish against the day. Voices. The girl with the heart-shaped face and one of the young men with the patent leather hair and the irreverent eyes. There had been so many of them. Hundreds of them passing and repassing that door. You wanted to laugh at the identical procession of them. A shirt front for a shirt front. An eye for an eye. A silhouette for a silhouette. Hundreds of the lean-faced young men. They had passed and they had passed until there was only the one left. He was leaning up against the door frame in an easy and insolent hypotenuse with his hands plunged into his pockets and crawling about in there, and his easy face none too steady, with the mouth off on its rhomboid every so often.

"_Chérie_, I adore you."

"Jerry, you darling villain."

"Get your wraps. I'll run down and get mine. Here's a dollar for the Woolworth Tower."

"Grant's Tomb, darling."

"Hurry along, there's a girl."

"But Jerry--I----"

"Darling, haven't my two hours of eloquence upon the subject convinced you that no one will ever know?"

"But the family--Jerry, and Father is so--so----"

"Will you leave all that to me, _Chérie_? Do you trust me enough? You'll be home tucked in your little bed by the time your maid comes in to draw your curtains. I want you, _Chérie_, with me--to-night--my rooms--for an hour only----"

"Jerry."

"I'll be back with my coat ... wait, sit here, darling...."

"Oh, Jerry----"

"No, no--no nonsense--say to me, 'Yes, Jerry darling.' Say it pretty, so I can kiss it off your lips."

"Yes--Jerry darling----"

The wrap of pink silver. She slid into it like a star into a cloud. It was hard to tear your eyes off the pale, frightened beauty of her. Somehow you wanted to keep her. Close. Close to your bigness. To make her listen if she would, to the calmness, to the great calm tick of your heart. Your eyes, you could not take them off. You stood there drawing on her wrap for her. But your eyes. You could not tear them off. Bertha, standing there big and pale and tranquil against the daylight.

"You! Let go, please. What are you looking at?"

"I--why, miss----"

"You think I'm drunk. I'm not."

"No."

"I won't be looked at like that. You hear me? I won't."

She began to cry. Tipsy little tears that ran down to the point of her heart-shaped face.

"You! I won't be looked at like that. I hate it. I won't have it. I want to go home."

"Go----"

"Tell him--the young man--tell him when he comes that I've gone. Tell him I left the message. I've gone home. I--you--I hate you for staring like that. I won't have it. I want to go home...."

She gathered the shimmer of wrap all about her and ran down the right-hand curve of the staircase. You could follow the shimmer of her through the mirror. The shimmer--the whine of the vacuum cleaner.

The empty cloakroom, it was the color of cloyed grease. Presently he came.

"Where----"

"She's gone----"

"Gone where----"

"Gone----"

"Hell," he said and started toward the right staircase.

"No. No. Wait. She'll be back in yoost a minute. Wait here, she said."

"Oh." He sat down a little unsteadily.

She closed the window so that the heat crowded up again. Tiptoe. Her movements about the room had a slow sedative rhythm. Tiptoe. There was a corsage of double Parma violets kicked under a table and dying into the heat. She picked it up and placed it on the table at his elbow. Slow tease of perfume. His eyelids began to wave like an old green frog's. Finally, he slumped over sidewise. Asleep.

Bertha, tiptoeing out, with her lips lifted back off her shining square teeth.

It was sun-up when she came out into the street. Even the city can be sweet with morning. She strode through the tender light, the bold, reassuring hit-hit against her leg. There was a certain Quick Lunch Room on Lexington Avenue. Tripe stew. The juices along the sides of her tongue were running.

***

The half-days were humiliating. They were the crumbs from the agencies. Almost invariably they fell to the frieze of the charwomen. One day for the first time one of these part-time allotments fell to Bertha. Fell like a clod of fear. She took it and went out with her shoulders round, and the slip of paper clutched in her dread smitten fingers.

It was as if you had passed a milestone. An old stump of a milestone all worn down and shaped like the last tooth of one of the scrubwomen.

The morning's work was in an automobile showroom on Fifty-ninth Street near Columbus Circle. Polishing brass railings and the mirrors nailed to the floor underneath the motor cars to reflect their lowermost perfections. A soft morning of mousy little rubbings along smooth surfaces. At two o'clock the workaday was finished. A sun-drenched spring day swam over the Park and along the streets that were running with new thaw. Women wore bright hats and overshoes. What snow remained had great gaps in it that widened, and everywhere little rivulets were hurrying toward the gutters. It was pleasant just to stroll.

At Carnegie Hall on Fifty-seventh Street the motor cars were dense and the bright hats were bobbing. Traffic ran toward the great building in spokes. Up from the subways. Down from the elevated trains. Along the side streets. Out from the motors. Concert crowds. Bertha knew. Madam Gerbhardt had once given her the tickets to the Ukrainian Chorus.

The crowd hit into you from all sides. You began to elbow. The broad steps were crammed and everyone's face was uplifted. Two policemen swung benign clubs. This was a kid-glove crowd with a scent and a rustle to it. Once the swirl tightened so that no one could move, but everybody swayed. The well-bred little squeals of the women. The firm, well-clad arms of the men forging ahead for them. Slamming of motor doors. Slow pouring upward of the crowd on the steps. The eager, fluty voices of the women....

The swirl held Bertha like a vise. The women, ever so slightly, and kindly enough, veered a little from the contact with her worn old reefer. It was horrible in the spring light. Like a scab. You had to hold yourself away from it by breathing in. Bertha could do that until it almost seemed a mere box, with herself quite slimly and fastidiously down its center.

Something curious happened. A child caught down in the jam had his face crushed up softly against the reefer. His mother slid in a quick hand between his cheek and the contact.

"Daddy," she said, "see if you cannot lift Junior over on your side. Don't touch, Junior. Ugh, darling, not nice. Come over on this side with Daddy--don't touch lady's coat."

She was as snug as a plover and as plump. Sweet fleshed. Something eupeptic about her. Something about her....

"Go over to Daddy and Brother Ben." she said and veered. The veering women.

The father lifted the child. His smile was very white in a brown face. Liver spotted eyes....

"Come, Junior Boy," he said, "away from there. Here, Mother, you come too. Away."

It was the Musliners. The firm pat tight little group of them. You watched them edge up the steps with the crowd.

***

It was the spring made you hate that reefer. So with simulated unconsciousness you looked over the heads of the veering women as you tried to force your way through. And over the heads of the veering women you saw a picture. A lithograph pasted on to a panel beside the entrance. It stood out like the spot cast by a sun glass. It riveted the eye. Willy-nilly the crowds jammed around. Bertha with her big hands and wrists hanging bare in a huddle in front and her gaze sucked up against the lithograph in the panel.

The spot that stood out as if cast by a sun glass was a head. It leaned out over one shoulder and then everything was black, like a silence, until farther down over the keyboard of a piano were two hands. You wanted to cry. Such ineffably tender hands. Why--why the white hands at your heart! There they were. And that head leaning over one shoulder out of that background of silence. That luminous, tawny-looking head with the long tender cheeks and the eyes that looked tranced with the music of the chimes goldily. Who? The name ran in script across the corner. Charvet.

Ah, Charvet. That evening at dinner. Madam Gerbhardt. Moon-haunted. To be moon-haunted was to live with an opal mist about the heart....

It was so hard to move. The eyes held so. They held, with that feeling of suction....

"Move on."

There was still something of the sixteen dollars in that petticoat pocket. Friendly little wad. It burned. It made your body glow suddenly like a hot coin. An excoriating kind of heat that made your lips feel cracked and your eyes glossy.

The crowd bent up the steps. There was a long line before the box office. It moved up inch by inch, and Bertha, suddenly a part of it, moved too. The wad was tied into a handkerchief and it had to be bitten open with the teeth.

"Ticket please."

"Admission only."

"What?"

"Standing room only. One dollar."

"Yah...."

You slid in through a baize door. The auditorium was dim and enormous and the waiting silence all arched up like a cat's back. The stage was so far--off somewhere beyond the intervening sea of all the soft breathings. You could see a little, if you tiptoed to peer between the heads. The piano. A curve of black. The white hands. The ineffably tender hands. Heart flutters that had flown out there. Someone rammed in ahead, pressing you there against the wall.

***

The shelving slipping beach. The white keys ran down it with the purr of surf. You could feel the floor of sand moving out subtly from under your feet. The floor that led under the sea.

***

Bertha standing pinioned there to the wall with her hands caught up and crowded to her breast by the crush of the standees and her throat flexed outward and beating. It was like bleeding. As if the melodies of her heart were arteries and that running of the keys out there the precious bleeding of them. It was like that. Oh, it was....

The tears came out in a dew along your eyes.

It stepped down the keys in heartbeats. You could scarcely keep back. You knew that cry. It had lain in your heart for so long. There it was on the outside of yourself, strewn along the keys. You were free of the hurt of it--where it had lodged like a knife in the plushy case of your heart.

The bleeding out of all the little inner turmoils. The dammed-up ecstasies. The music of the chimes goldily. The glad releases. The rilling beauty. The white hands at your heart. Just by tilting yourself up tiptoe you could see them flown out there above the keys. The white flutterings. To be pinioned there against the wall all of that afternoon with your hands caught up against your breast and the arteries of your heart uncocked and flowing....

The applause beat itself out and then began all over again. It died down and then, on the momentum of a few little scattered claps, rose again. The crowd loosened and moved down the aisle, blackening and jamming around the platform. The cramming against the wall eased up. You could hurry, too, if you wanted.

But is was enough, just to remain there against the wall with the eyes closed and the throat flexing. She could no more have moved--down there--those white hands--the white hands at her heart--down there--fluttering. She could no more have moved....

It was enough to be standing back there against the wall weak and glad.

It did not matter that her eyes somehow could not open to see the face of Felix Charvet down there beyond the opal mist, the face with the chimes tranced so goldily in the eyes and the long, choir-boy cheeks that were lit with their first faint down.

It did not matter, now that she felt so glad and weak and bled free of those lovely torments that were without dimension ... it did not matter that she was never to know that Felix Charvet was Felix--son of Rollo.

***

It was frightening to see the houses board up and the exodus of the families set in. Summer. Truck loads of perilously piled trunks. Nonplussed cats mewling at sealed doors. Handbills collecting on stoops in little snow drifts.

The agencies began to crowd.

The room in Desbrosses Street was as black and as narrow as a flue and all day it drew in the heat and all night long breathed it out. There was a window, but it opened upon a brick wall that you could touch without leaning. The darkness seemed to embalm the heat. Dreadful furry thickness like the fuzz on the tongue of a fever patient.

Sometimes at night, Bertha dragged herself to the sill and crouched on the floor with her cheek to it. The wall breathed like a flank. If you looked straight up there was a bit of sky about the size of a quill. On certain nights a star wandered into it. It made Bertha laugh to see it. Like a wise eye to a keyhole. Until she fell asleep Bertha gazed, eye to eye.

But this very slit of a room was the reason why it was frightening to see the houses board up. Its rental was a dollar a week and with the exodus to the country even part time work with the families, scarcer and scarcer.

Once she did jump a week and the agent who collected each Saturday into a dirty canvas bag with a drawstring showed a tooth at her. A sort of fang and the more terrifying because she had thought his gums were empty.

One day an innkeeper engaging a staff for his back street little hostelry in Asbury Park debated between Bertha and a great green Swedish girl who spoke no English, but whose lips hung down like ripe plums.

For the life of him he could not decide. Bertha sitting back in the frieze kept saying something that was her little prayer.

"Please make him," she kept saying--"please make him."

The bald spot on his head was all crimson and beaten from the sun. It must have taken a good warm sun through clean salted air to do that. Asbury Park. Please make him. Please make him.

"You're too old," he said finally and turned to lay his hand on the Swedish girl's hip.

_You're too old. You're too old. You're too old_. The phrase was so sly. It ran after you like a shadow. It would never let you be.

But that same day there came along a week of half-days at Coronation Point Inn. Airing rooms preparatory to the opening of the season. Prying closed windows from their winter stripping. Swabbing floors and unswathing the wrapped bedsteads which were hung slightly from the floor, against winter dampness.

Oh, but it was pleasant. Coronation Point stood on a terrace and overlooked a curve of bay. You took a subway to the end of the line and then a surface car and then you walked fifteen minutes through sun-shot leafage that speckled the road and made it dance. Chipmunks made precious noises scuttling over leaves. Orioles the color of the batting of an eye flashed through. Tit-a-weet of cock robin. And smells. The damp lush ones of sun making moist places steam and the green ones of stems when they are snapped in two and bleed. The green smells came from a little tramp stream of new water without even a bed for itself which ran through the grasses. It had a trill. It made the morning a hurrying loveliness. Quick, delicate, tumbling thing--sometimes on the homeward walk, Bertha took off her shoes and stockings, stooped for a handful of skirt and waded in against its tiny tide. The toes bit down and the mud squnched up....

Where the woods left off, the highway and hot little wooden houses took up. Then it was hot! Trudging along toward the surface car, motors tore along that macadam road, so that it was best to walk on the little rim of cinders at the edge. That was the worst of the half-day at Coronation Point. The half pay and the walk back to the surface car through the blazing noon.

Sometimes in front of the occasional frame houses there were wooden planks. They eased the feet of the burn from the macadam and before a shanty that had been rigged up as a gasoline station, an old overturned chassis, rotting there through sun and storm, was at least a resting place.

A hot, bald-faced little shanty-town squatting there on the bare clay stretch beyond the surface cars. You could see the tracks shining in the distance like forceps and on clear days the minarets of the city. Children and hens wallowed themselves out dust-baths in the patches of yard before these houses. The women were slattern. But sometimes there were neat corrugated truck gardens. Ruffles of lettuce. Lattice work of peas. Ridged potato patches like the roof of a mouth. Tough, good-smelling gardens. Just to trudge past them could set the knife blades of hunger to slashing in Bertha.

There was a bake shop farther along. A dilapidated little packing case of a building, with a brood of dirty children wallowing in the back yard and a weedy truck garden that had somehow been eked out of the clay.

MEYERBOGEN'S BAKERY. LUNCH ROOM. CROTON'S ICE CREAM SOLD HERE.

Its breath was so sweet. The fragrance of hot bread. You could smell it as you came along the road. It teased at Bertha's faintness. It made the noonday road turn into a garter snake that rippled. The swimming, buzzing bread-scented haze. One day, because it was unendurable to wait for the three o'clock tripe stew in the city, which must serve as lunch and dinner, she turned in.

A mat of flies clung to the screen door and buzzed off as she opened it. There was a table near the door with a mustard pot on it. The bread and rolls on the counter were covered with pink netting. The proprietor served. He was enormous. A white apron girded his middle. His white cap was awry on his curly head. You saw him through a fog of flour. Great fellow, most of the objects in the shop shook as he walked. The T of chandelier that hung down in the show window of tilted loaves of bread. The coffee mugs on the shelf. A stack of saucers.

"Veenie sandwiches, five zents. Baked beans, five zents. Gorned beef hash vid boached egg, fiveteen."

"Beans."

"Coffee?"

"Yah...."

The noonday buzzed with the flies and the broken little shouts of the children. It was hard not to doze as she waited. Once her head did fall forward.

"It's a hot day," said Meyerbogen the baker, and set down a brown dish of the beans with a pale cube of pork on top.

"Yah."

Suddenly it was hard to eat. Even while her nostrils flared with the need of the strong hot food the heat was full of disks, spinning little juggler's plates and the shouts of the children were so far away--so far----

"Here--quick! You going to vaint? No. Don't. Here--drink----"

"I--where----"

"It's all right. You god a liddle stroke from the zun. Here, sit while I fan you."

The noonday drone swam back again. It was good to feel it, hot and buzzing and full of the shouts of the children.

"I'm all right," she said, and shook herself like a spaniel, and looked up at Meyerbogen with the blue channels of her eyes.

"You're all right, sure, now," he said and went off on his waddle about the business of unstacking buns from a wooden tray which a helper had just brought up from a basement.

But the lunch. For the life of her the beans would not go down or the cup of the light tan coffee. That was terrible. To feel all warm again and free of the chill of cold sweat and back safely once more in the drone of the noon and the lunch spread out on the clean wooden top of the table, untasted. Waste. The half days made one calculate so. Inevitably the slashing blades of hunger that cut through and through the great organism of Bertha would begin to champ again, a little later and the day's food allotment was already spent down to the last penny. Slowly and against a restricted throat she began to swallow the coffee.

Presently Meyerbogen sat down on the chair opposite.

"It's a heat," he said and the fog of the flour rose up off him.

"Yah."

He was like a great milk-fed baby. Pink polished cheeks. Tight, spring-tight curls and fat hands with dimples. And the enormous girth of him! He swayed back from himself for all the world like a tenor drinking in breath for Pagliacci's sob. And, ridiculously enough, he was almost dainty.

His big white throat was soft, and when he laughed he shook from head to toe, and the cloud of flour exuded as if someone were beating him with a baby's cornstarch bag.

"You lost your abbidite?"

"Yah--a little----"

"Take your time----"

"The heat----"

"Yah--yah---the heat--my woman--she died on me in heat like this." He looked off toward the roadway and screwed up his face. There was something about him actually of a baby about to cry.

"Yah----"

"Meningitis," he said--"down two days----"

"Oh--oh----"

"A good woman. Never down with child more than three days--and then in two days--meningitis--gone----"

"Oh--oh----"

"Five of them needing her. From two years old to ten."

"The children?"

"Yah--we had it neat like a pin here once. Now look!--I had a good woman----"

"Oh."

His great baby face was still screwed and resolutely out toward the road.

"Zummer," he said cryptically, "is zummer. It's good but not too much----"

Foolishly you could have cried for him. Big baby.

"Some zinnamon buns? Just hot from the ofen."

"No."

He waddled out on the porch and began carrying a sack of flour around the side entrance. You could hear him wheeze and the white haze was everywhere. Gradually it was pleasant to be eating. The coarse, strong food--the steam of it was appetizing, and after the first forkfuls appetite came back.