Part 7

On the stairs where a brass rod held the dull crimson carpet in place on each step, Jimmy pulled off his rubbers and stuffed them into the pockets of his raincoat. With his head in the air he hurried through the web of prying glances of the bellhops on the bench beside the desk. “Goin fer a walk?” the youngest lighthaired bellhop asked him. Jimmy nodded wisely, slipped past the staring buttons of the doorman and out onto Broadway full of clangor and footsteps and faces putting on shadowmasks when they slid out of the splotches of light from stores and arclamps. He walked fast uptown past the Ansonia. In the doorway lounged a blackbrowed man with a cigar in his mouth, maybe a kidnapper. But nice people live in the Ansonia like where we live. Next a telegraph office, drygoods stores, a dyers and cleaners, a Chinese laundry sending out a scorched mysterious steamy smell. He walks faster, the chinks are terrible kidnappers. Footpads. A man with a can of coaloil brushes past him, a greasy sleeve brushes against his shoulder, smells of sweat and coaloil; suppose he’s a firebug. The thought of firebug gives him gooseflesh. Fire. Fire.

Huyler’s; there’s a comfortable fudgy odor mixed with the smell of nickel and wellwiped marble outside the door, and the smell of cooking chocolate curls warmly from the gratings under the windows. Black and orange crêpepaper favors for Hallowe’en. He is just going in when he thinks of the Mirror place two blocks further up, those little silver steamengines and automobiles they give you with your change. I’ll hurry; on rollerskates it’d take less time, you could escape from bandits, thugs, holdupmen, on rollerskates, shooting over your shoulder with a long automatic, bing ... one of em down! that’s the worst of em, bing ... there’s another; the rollerskates are magic rollerskates, whee ... up the brick walls of the houses, over the roofs, vaulting chimneys, up the Flatiron Building, scooting across the cables of Brooklyn Bridge.

Mirror candies; this time he goes in without hesitating. He stands at the counter a while before anyone comes to wait on him. “Please a pound of sixty cents a pound mixed chocolate creams,” he rattled off. She is a blond lady, a little crosseyed, and looks at him spitefully without answering. “Please I’m in a hurry if you dont mind.”

“All right, everybody in their turn,” she snaps. He stands blinking at her with flaming cheeks. She pushes him a box all wrapped up with a check on it “Pay at the desk.” I’m not going to cry. The lady at the desk is small and grey-haired. She takes his dollar through a little door like the little doors little animals go in and out of in the Small Mammal House. The cash register makes a cheerful tinkle, glad to get the money. A quarter, a dime, a nickel and a little cup, is that forty cents? But only a little cup instead of a steamengine or an automobile. He picks up the money and leaves the little cup and hurries out with the box under his arm. Mother’ll say I’ve been too long. He walks home looking straight ahead of him, smarting from the meanness of the blond lady.

“Ha ... been out abuyin candy,” said the lighthaired bellhop. “I’ll give you some if you come up later,” whispered Jimmy as he passed. The brass rods rang when he kicked them running up the stairs. Outside the chocolate-colored door that had 503 on it in white enameled letters he remembered his rubbers. He set the candy on the floor and pulled them on over his damp shoes. Lucky Muddy wasn’t waiting for him with the door open. Maybe she’d seen him coming from the window.

“Mother.” She wasn’t in the sittingroom. He was terrified. She’d gone out, she’d gone away. “Mother!”

“Come here dear,” came her voice weakly from the bedroom.

He pulled off his hat and raincoat and rushed in. “Mother what’s the matter?”

“Nothing honey.... I’ve a headache that’s all, a terrible headache.... Put some cologne on a handkerchief and put it on my head nicely, and dont please dear get it in my eye the way you did last time.”

She lay on the bed in a skyblue wadded wrapper. Her face was purplish pale. The silky salmoncolored teagown hung limp over a chair; on the floor lay her corsets in a tangle of pink strings. Jimmy put the wet handkerchief carefully on her forehead. The cologne reeked strong, prickling his nostrils as he leaned over her.

“That’s so good,” came her voice feebly. “Dear call up Aunt Emily, Riverside 2466, and ask her if she can come round this evening. I want to talk to her.... Oh my head’s bursting.”

His heart thumping terribly and tears blearing his eyes he went to the telephone. Aunt Emily’s voice came unexpectedly soon.

“Aunt Emily mother’s kinder sick.... She wants you to come around.... She’s coming right away mother dear,” he shouted, “isn’t that fine? She’s coming right around.” He tiptoed back into his mother’s room, picked up the corset and the teagown and hung them in the wardrobe.

“Deary” came her frail voice “take the hairpins out of my hair, they hurt my head.... Oh honeyboy I feel as if my head would burst....” He felt gently through her brown hair that was silkier than the teagown and pulled out the hairpins.

“Ou dont, you are hurting me.”

“Mother I didn’t mean to.”

Aunt Emily, thin in a blue mackintosh thrown over her evening dress, hurried into the room, her thin mouth in a pucker of sympathy. She saw her sister lying twisted with pain on the bed and the skinny whitefaced boy in short pants standing beside her with his hands full of hairpins.

“What is it Lil?” she asked quietly.

“My dear something terrible’s the matter with me,” came Lily Herf’s voice in a gasping hiss.

“James,” said Aunt Emily harshly, “you must run off to bed.... Mother needs perfect quiet.”

“Good night muddy dear,” he said.

Aunt Emily patted him on the back. “Dont worry James I’ll attend to everything.” She went to the telephone and began calling a number in a low precise voice.

The box of candy was on the parlor table; Jimmy felt guilty when he put it under his arm. As he passed the bookcase he snatched out a volume of the American Cyclopædia and tucked it under the other arm. His aunt did not notice when he went out the door. The dungeon gates opened. Outside was an Arab stallion and two trusty retainers waiting to speed him across the border to freedom. Three doors down was his room. It was stuffed with silent chunky darkness. The light switched on obediently lighting up the cabin of the schooner _Mary Stuart_. All right Captain weigh anchor and set your course for the Windward Isles and dont let me be disturbed before dawn; I have important papers to peruse. He tore off his clothes and knelt beside the bed in his pyjamas. Nowilaymedowntosleep Ipraythelordmysoultokeep Ifishoulddiebeforeiwake Ipraythelordmysoultotake.

Then he opened the box of candy and set the pillows together at the end of the bed under the light. His teeth broke through the chocolate into a squashysweet filling. Let’s see ...

A the first of the vowels, the first letter in all written alphabets except the Amharic or Abyssinian, of which it is the thirteenth, and the Runic of which it is the tenth....

Darn it that’s a hairy one....

AA, Aachen (see Aix-la-Chapelle).

Aardvark ...

Gee he’s funny looking ...

(orycteropus capensis), a plantigrade animal of the class mammalia, order edentata, peculiar to Africa.

Abd,

Abd-el-halim, an Egyptian prince, son of Mehmet Ali and a white slave woman....

His cheeks burned as he read:

The Queen of the White Slaves.

Abdomen (lat. of undetermined etymology) ... the lower part of the body included between the level of the diaphragm and that of the pelvis....

Abelard ... The relation of master and pupil was not long preserved. A warmer sentiment than esteem filled their hearts and the unlimited opportunities of intercourse which were afforded them by the canon who confided in Abelard’s age (he was now almost forty), and in his public character, were fatal to the peace of both. The condition of Heloise was on the point of betraying their intimacy.... Fulbert now abandoned himself to a transport of savage vindictiveness ... burst into Abelard’s chamber with a band of ruffians and gratified his revenge by inflicting on him an atrocious mutilation....

Abelites ... denounced sexual intercourse as service of Satan.

Abimelech I, son of Gideon by a Sheshemite concubine, who made himself king after murdering all his seventy brethren except Jotham, and was killed while besieging the tower of Thebez ...

Abortion ...

No; his hands were icy and he felt a little sick from stuffing down so many chocolates.

Abracadabra.

Abydos ...

He got up to drink a glass of water before Abyssinia with engravings of desert mountains and the burning of Magdala by the British.

His eyes smarted. He was stiff and sleepy. He looked at his Ingersoll. Eleven o’clock. Terror gripped him suddenly. If mother was dead...? He pressed his face into the pillow. She stood over him in her white ballgown that had lace crisply on it and a train sweeping behind on satin rustling ruffles and her hand softly fragrant gently stroked his cheek. A rush of sobs choked him. He tossed on the bed with his face shoved hard into the knotty pillow. For a long time he couldn’t stop crying.

He woke up to find the light burning dizzily and the room stuffy and hot. The book was on the floor and the candy squashed under him oozing stickily from its box. The watch had stopped at 1.45. He opened the window, put the chocolates in the bureau drawer and was about to snap off the light when he remembered. Shivering with terror he put on his bathrobe and slippers and tiptoed down the darkened hall. He listened outside the door. People were talking low. He knocked faintly and turned the knob. A hand pulled the door open hard and Jimmy was blinking in the face of a tall cleanshaven man with gold eyeglasses. The folding doors were closed; in front of them stood a starched nurse.

“James dear, go back to bed and dont worry,” said Aunt Emily in a tired whisper. “Mother’s very ill and must be absolutely quiet, but there’s no more danger.”

“Not for the present at least, Mrs. Merivale,” said the doctor breathing on his eyeglasses.

“The little dear,” came the nurse’s voice low and purry and reassuring, “he’s been sitting up worrying all night and he never bothered us once.”

“I’ll go back and tuck you into bed,” said Aunt Emily. “My James always likes that.”

“May I see mother, just a peek so’s I’ll know she’s all right.” Jimmy looked up timidly at the big face with the eyeglasses.

The doctor nodded. “Well I must go.... I shall drop by at four or five to see how things go.... Goodnight Mrs. Merivale. Goodnight Miss Billings. Goodnight son....”

“This way....” The trained nurse put her hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. He wriggled out from under and walked behind her.

There was a light on in the corner of mother’s room shaded by a towel pinned round it. From the bed came the rasp of breathing he did not recognize. Her crumpled face was towards him, the closed eyelids violet, the mouth screwed to one side. For a half a minute he stared at her. “All right I’ll go back to bed now,” he whispered to the nurse. His blood pounded deafeningly. Without looking at his aunt or at the nurse he walked stiffly to the outer door. His aunt said something. He ran down the corridor to his own room, slammed the door and bolted it. He stood stiff and cold in the center of the room with his fists clenched. “I hate them. I hate them,” he shouted aloud. Then gulping a dry sob he turned out the light and slipped into bed between the shiverycold sheets.

* * * * *

“With all the business you have, madame,” Emile was saying in a singsong voice, “I should think you’d need someone to help you with the store.”

“I know that ... I’m killing myself with work; I know that,” sighed Madame Rigaud from her stool at the cashdesk. Emile was silent a long time staring at the cross section of a Westphalia ham that lay on a marble slab beside his elbow. Then he said timidly: “A woman like you, a beautiful woman like you, Madame Rigaud, is never without friends.”

“Ah ça.... I have lived too much in my time.... I have no more confidence.... Men are a set of brutes, and women, Oh I dont get on with women a bit!”

“History and literature ...” began Emile.

The bell on the top of the door jangled. A man and a woman stamped into the shop. She had yellow hair and a hat like a flowerbed.

“Now Billy dont be extravagant,” she was saying.

“But Norah we got have sumpen te eat.... An I’ll be all jake by Saturday.”

“Nutten’ll be jake till you stop playin the ponies.”

“Aw go long wud yer.... Let’s have some liverwurst.... My that cold breast of turkey looks good....”

“Piggywiggy,” cooed the yellowhaired girl.

“Lay off me will ye, I’m doing this.”

“Yes sir ze breast of turkee is veree goud.... We ave ole cheekens too, steel ’ot.... Emile mong ami cherchez moi uns de ces petits poulets dans la cuisin-e.” Madame Rigaud spoke like an oracle without moving from her stool by the cashdesk. The man was fanning himself with a thickbrimmed straw hat that had a checked band.

“Varm tonight,” said Madame Rigaud.

“It sure is.... Norah we ought to have gone down to the Island instead of bummin round this town.”

“Billy you know why we couldn’t go perfectly well.”

“Don’t rub it in. Aint I tellin ye it’ll be all jake by Saturday.”

“History and literature,” continued Emile when the customers had gone off with the chicken, leaving Madame Rigaud a silver half dollar to lock up in the till ... “history and literature teach us that there are friendships, that there sometimes comes love that is worthy of confidence....”

“History and literature!” Madame Rigaud growled with internal laughter. “A lot of good that’ll do us.”

“But dont you ever feel lonely in a big foreign city like this...? Everything is so hard. Women look in your pocket not in your heart.... I cant stand it any more.”

Madame Rigaud’s broad shoulders and her big breasts shook with laughter. Her corsets creaked when she lifted herself still laughing off the stool. “Emile, you’re a good-looking fellow and steady and you’ll get on in the world.... But I’ll never put myself in a man’s power again.... I’ve suffered too much.... Not if you came to me with five thousand dollars.”

“You’re a very cruel woman.”

Madame Rigaud laughed again. “Come along now, you can help me close up.”

* * * * *

Sunday weighed silent and sunny over downtown. Baldwin sat at his desk in his shirtsleeves reading a calfbound lawbook. Now and then he wrote down a note on a scratchpad in a wide regular hand. The phone rang loud in the hot stillness. He finished the paragraph he was reading and strode over to answer it.

“Yes I’m here alone, come on over if you want to.” He put down the receiver. “God damn it,” he muttered through clenched teeth.

Nellie came in without knocking, found him pacing back and forth in front of the window.

“Hello Nellie,” he said without looking up; she stood still staring at him.

“Look here Georgy this cant go on.”

“Why cant it?”

“I’m sick of always pretendin an deceivin.”

“Nobody’s found out anything, have they?”

“Oh of course not.”

She went up to him and straightened his necktie. He kissed her gently on the mouth. She wore a frilled muslin dress of a reddish lilac color and had a blue sunshade in her hand.

“How’s things Georgy?”

“Wonderful. D’you know, you people have brought me luck? I’ve got several good cases on hand now and I’ve made some very valuable connections.”

“Little luck it’s brought me. I haven’t dared go to confession yet. The priest’ll be thinkin I’ve turned heathen.”

“How’s Gus?”

“Oh full of his plans.... Might think he’d earned the money, he’s gettin that cocky about it.”

“Look Nellie how would it be if you left Gus and came and lived with me? You could get a divorce and we could get married.... Everything would be all right then.”

“Like fun it would.... You dont mean it anyhow.”

“But it’s been worth it Nellie, honestly it has.” He put his arms round her and kissed her hard still lips. She pushed him away.

“Anyways I aint comin here again.... Oh I was so happy comin up the stairs thinkin about seein you.... You’re paid an the business is all finished.”

He noticed that the little curls round her forehead were loose. A wisp of hair hung over one eyebrow.

“Nellie we mustn’t part bitterly like this.”

“Why not will ye tell me?”

“Because we’ve both loved one another.”

“I’m not goin to cry.” She patted her nose with a little rolledup handkerchief. “Georgy I’m goin to hate ye.... Goodby.” The door snapped sharply to behind her.

Baldwin sat at his desk and chewed the end of a pencil. A faint pungence of her hair lingered in his nostrils. His throat was stiff and lumpy. He coughed. The pencil fell out of his mouth. He wiped the saliva off with his handkerchief and settled himself in his chair. From bleary the crowded paragraphs of the lawbook became clear. He tore the written sheet off the scratchpad and clipped it to the top of a pile of documents. On the new sheet he began: Decision of the Supreme Court of the State of New York.... Suddenly he sat up straight in his chair, and started biting the end of his pencil again. From outside came the endless sultry whistle of a peanut wagon. “Oh well, that’s that,” he said aloud. He went on writing in a wide regular hand: Case of Patterson vs. The State of New York.... Decision of the Supreme ...

* * * * *

Bud sat by a window in the Seamen’s Union reading slowly and carefully through a newspaper. Next him two men with freshly shaved rawsteak cheeks cramped into white collars and blue serge storesuits were ponderously playing chess. One of them smoked a pipe that made a little clucking noise when he drew on it. Outside rain beat incessantly on a wide glimmering square.

Banzai, live a thousand years, cried the little gray men of the fourth platoon of Japanese sappers as they advanced to repair the bridge over the Yalu River ... Special correspondent of the New York Herald ...

“Checkmate,” said the man with the pipe. “Damn it all let’s go have a drink. This is no night to be sitting here sober.”

“I promised the ole woman ...”

“None o that crap Jess, I know your kinda promises.” A big crimson hand thickly furred with yellow hairs brushed the chessmen into their box. “Tell the ole woman you had to have a nip to keep the weather out.”

“That’s no lie neither.”

Bud watched their shadows hunched into the rain pass the window.

“What you name?”

Bud turned sharp from the window startled by a shrill squeaky voice in his ear. He was looking into the fireblue eyes of a little yellow man who had a face like a toad, large mouth, protruding eyes and thick closecropped black hair.

Bud’s jaw set. “My name’s Smith, what about it?”

The little man held out a square callouspalmed hand, “Plis to meet yez. Me Matty.”

Bud took the hand in spite of himself. It squeezed his until he winced. “Matty what?” he asked. “Me juss Matty ... Laplander Matty ... Come have drink.”

“I’m flat,” said Bud. “Aint got a red cent.”

“On me. Me too much money, take some....” Matty shoved a hand into either pocket of his baggy checked suit and punched Bud in the chest with two fistfuls of greenbacks.

“Aw keep yer money ... I’ll take a drink with yous though.”

By the time they got to the saloon on the corner of Pearl Street Bud’s elbows and knees were soaked and a trickle of cold rain was running down his neck. When they went up to the bar Laplander Matty put down a five dollar bill.

“Me treat everybody; very happy yet tonight.”

Bud was tackling the free lunch. “Hadn’t et in a dawg’s age,” he explained when he went back to the bar to take his drink. The whisky burnt his throat all the way down, dried wet clothes and made him feel the way he used to feel when he was a kid and got off to go to a baseball game Saturday afternoon.

“Put it there Lap,” he shouted slapping the little man’s broad back. “You an me’s friends from now on.”

“Hey landlubber, tomorrow me an you ship togezzer. What say?”

“Sure we will.”

“Now we go up Bowery Street look at broads. Me pay.”

“Aint a Bowery broad would go wid yer, ye little Yap,” shouted a tall drunken man with drooping black mustaches who had lurched in between them as they swayed in the swinging doors.

“Zey vont, vont zey?” said the Lap hauling off. One of his hammershaped fists shot in a sudden uppercut under the man’s jaw. The man rose off his feet and soared obliquely in through the swinging doors that closed on him. A shout went up from inside the saloon.

“I’ll be a sonofabitch, Lappy, I’ll be a sonofabitch,” roared Bud and slapped him on the back again.

Arm in arm they careened up Pearl Street under the drenching rain. Bars yawned bright to them at the corners of rainseething streets. Yellow light off mirrors and brass rails and gilt frames round pictures of pink naked women was looped and slopped into whiskyglasses guzzled fiery with tipped back head, oozed bright through the blood, popped bubbly out of ears and eyes, dripped spluttering off fingertips. The raindark houses heaved on either side, streetlamps swayed like lanterns carried in a parade, until Bud was in a back room full of nudging faces with a woman on his knees. Laplander Matty stood with his arms round two girls’ necks, yanked his shirt open to show a naked man and a naked woman tattooed in red and green on his chest, hugging, stiffly coiled in a seaserpent and when he puffed out his chest and wiggled the skin with his fingers the tatooed man and woman wiggled and all the nudging faces laughed.

* * * * *

Phineas P. Blackhead pushed up the wide office window. He stood looking out over the harbor of slate and mica in the uneven roar of traffic, voices, racket of building that soared from the downtown streets bellying and curling like smoke in the stiff wind shoving down the Hudson out of the northwest.

“Hay Schmidt, bring me my field glasses,” he called over his shoulder. “Look ...” He was focusing the glasses on a thickwaisted white steamer with a sooty yellow stack that was abreast of Governors Island. “Isn’t that the _Anonda_ coming in now?”

Schmidt was a fat man who had shrunk. The skin hung in loose haggard wrinkles on his face. He took one look through the glasses. “Sure it is.” He pushed down the window; the roar receded tapering hollowly like the sound of a sea shell.

“Jiminy they were quick about it.... They’ll be docked in half an hour.... You beat it along over and get hold of Inspector Mulligan. He’s all fixed.... Dont take your eyes off him. Old Matanzas is out on the warpath trying to get an injunction against us. If every spoonful of manganese isnt off by tomorrow night I’ll cut your commission in half.... Do you get that?”

Schmidt’s loose jowls shook when he laughed. “No danger sir.... You ought to know me by this time.”

“Of course I do.... You’re a good feller Schmidt. I was just joking.”