Part 11

“Don’t you know, you come from the South, don’t you?... that gambling and prostitution are illegal in New York? I am an Officer of the New York Police. I am the head of what is known in the papers as the Strong Arm Squad. I raid Houses of gambling and prostitution.”

“All----“

“Those that don’t do their duty.”

“How can an illegal house do its duty?”

“By supporting the Police, of course--the way we must be supported. I have needs----“

Statt’s face was serious and serene. He stretched out a long leg.... “Needs----” and kicked the case of wine. “You don’t savvy much, little stupid woman from Dixie.”

She watched him close.

“Aren’t you afraid, Jim Statt?”

He drew in his leg and crossed it over the other.

“I’m an Officer of Police. I’m a Roman Catholic. What have I got to fear?” ...

Tessie came in, tossing off her hat. Tessie hated hats and gloves.

“--Hasn’t Abe been here? O hello Statt.”

“He’s nursing a hurt,” he answered her. “I’ve raised his price.”

The little girl glowered over the big man.

“You look out,” she muttered. “Don’t hurt Abe Mangel too much.”

“No?... why not?” sneered Jim Statt.

“He’ll turn good----“

Fanny took a magazine and went into the corner of the room beside the curtains. She tried to read. She did not see the page. What did this mean? _He’ll turn good!_ Was that what Jews did when they were hurt too much! Was that when they saw God?...--Harry and I blinded by a blow that _you_ see God by? Fanny sat brooding over the blank page of her book ... brooding of the Bible, brooding over the words of Jesus Christ: hearing the sneers of Statt, the swift shrill scold of Tessie, the warm weary murmur of Clara.

--O it is good I am here!

Learning ... learning....

She saw no thing. She understood no thing. But she was at ease as an infant, also perhaps not knowing, who sucks and who swallows.--Why is Statt also a child?

Abe Mangel was there. He bowed to the group near the door and came beside Fanny. She held out both her hands and smiled at him.

“Sit down!”

Old man with the heavy face of the Jew!--Your eyes are dark wells, your brow is dry and rumpled like an old bit of parchment. Your nose and your lips droop wearily, old man!

“You are tired, Mr. Mangel.”

“O it’s nothing. Tessie’ll cheer me up, a little....”

“Mr. Mangel--may I ask you a question?”

He looked at Fanny with compassion.--You are young too? you too ask questions?... “Why of course, Fanny. Go on.”

“Why do I like you, Mr. Mangel?”

“O--that! You’ll hav’ to answer that yourself. Such woman foolishness, liking _me_! how can a man explain?”

“You are a bad man, aren’t you?”

“Very bad. I ain’t no better than a _crook_. Only richer. My wife dresses better.” His eyes twinkled.

“Well, I can’t help it. I like you.”

He smiled at her with his weary slow-twinkling eyes. She saw his hands ... gnarled yet fat, ugly yet expressive.

“And I like you, Fanny Luve. What’s the difference why you like me? Don’t ask no foolish questions about a good thing. Take it.”

“But are you glad I like you?”

“I should say so! That sort of foolishness ... that’s all that makes life liveable, I say! That sort of foolishness--you know what it is?--it’s Trut’.”

“You think.”

“O no. I am too tired to think. When I was young, I thought. I was clever. I was full of dreams. I thought--I thought ... instead of learning to make money. When it was too late, I had to stop thinking of anything except how to make money, because earlier I hadn’t thought of _that_ at all. It don’t pay to be a thinker. You end up by being a gambler.”

“All thinkers----?”

“I should imagine so,” said Mangel. He brooded. Stiffly he got up. “Look here! What sort of nonsense are you making me say? Fanny Luve, I’m a stupid old feller. I don’t know nothing. Thirty years ago I was a stupid young feller. I’m sure. I guess I never knew how to think.”

She held up her face to him.

“I don’t know how to think, either. I am stupid too.”

Abe Mangel shook his head.

“You’re funny. You make me feel we don’t know how to think ... and we don’t know how to be good.... We men and women.”

He smiled with his old eyes. But his brow was frowning. He walked away to Tessie.

* * * * *

FANNY:---- You are there! The world is dark, there is no light in the world. The world is close, I feel you there about me. You stir, you crouch, you are still. You do not know that I am here, knowing you. You lift your voices, they give no sound: Shrieking they are still.

--Only the dark world Holding you and me.... No word, no hand-touch, no signal of the eye Binds us: only A dark world.

--Yet we are close! Could one be closer in the Sun, Loving in the lap of the Spring? Harry and I, were we so close? Edith and I ... you in the grip of my bowels, you in the suck of my blood and my heavy breasts. Were we so close?

--A dark world holds us Strange from each other, groping with blank eyes, With blank mouths.... Closely.

CLARA:---- You are not well yet, you are not ready to leave me. What is the matter with you? Why are you still here? O I am glad you are here! You are balm, you are pressing sharpness on my ache ... I do not understand.

--You are good friends with Mark, and with Susan and Tessie. Also they already feel how right that you are here with us. And Mangel feels it. Statt feels nothing. Statt does not count. Is it because you are not well, not complete, that you stay? Is it because we must heal you, must complete you, that you stay? Then you will go?--when you have taken from us ... what? You give?... You give--to me how deeply, to us all how deeply! What can we give to you? How can we heal and complete you?

--Is it our hurt that you would take from us? Is it our broken-ness that will complete you?

MANGEL:---- Tessie should be my daughter. Then the Fear of God would keep her flesh away. You have shown me, Luve woman, that Tessie is my daughter.

--I am made of filth. If I could stop hating myself! I am a dirty Jew ... I hate Statt. ... He makes me feel--this.... But who is he? His body is straighter because he has no soul. (There are times when I would love to kiss his body.)

--My soul is beautiful. My soul says to me: You are a dirty Jew!... What is the use? One picks the smut from one’s nose, But one’s nose smells on, the smut comes back, What is the use of having a beautiful soul? No one tells Statt that he is a dirty Dutchman.

--You, little girl, with the apple breasts and the hips hard and sweet like an apple, You are my soul and you are far away. You should be my daughter. Then I should not have to hold you naked.... She is my daughter! O if I could say that, say: Father! Not:--a whore and a dirty Jew that keeps her.

TESSIE:---- Music is a dancing wall Between me and the mad man world. Wall danced away. Stiff man world holds me and pierces me. You, Abe, at least have hands soft-speaking.

--Fanny Luve ... what is the name of your kid?

SUSAN:---- I ask myself no question. O horror, O torrent of horror If I asked a question.

--The mountainside Is steep, is snow. I mount, I mount. I am erect: my shoulders and my feet Freeze sharp.

--O the horror, O the torrent, O the flood Down-pouring ... If I asked a question.

MARK:---- Well, what difference does it make? At least half my life is good. I’m a good Judge, I’m a good husband and father. Who in New York can say as much for himself?

... They looked on Fanny naturally, without color of her ... seeing her within the way of their looking on themselves: so that they came not to ask who she was who was there.

* * * * *

“Well, all right then ... if you ask me: you’re right. Mangel gets my goat. I can’t go him. He’s nothin’ but a damn gambler. Why does he put on airs?”

“I never saw him put on airs,” said Fanny.

They stood. Her face, upturned to James Statt’s gray one, glowed in a strange way.

“He’s so humble----“

“Is that putting on airs, Jim?”

Statt stirred in discomfort.

“You’re right,” she went on. “It’s the worst sort of putting on airs.”

“There, you see? The damn little weasel! I’ll stand none of his nonsense!”

“He don’t give you any, Jim.”

“Well, you know what I mean.”

“I know that you hate him because he’s just himself.”

“Jew!”

“He’s cringing and a coward. But even so, he makes us feel small, don’t he, Jim?”

“Us small? Are you crazy? Us small?”

“Surely. Even when he is ever so mean and humble, he is asserting to our souls ... to all in us that feels and understands ... that he is one of those high up ... who have made us feel and understand.”

“Fanny, you’re crazy. I’ll kill the little beggar!”

“You won’t dispose of him that way, you silly boy. It’s not _he_....”

“God damn him.”

“Jim, you have no mind and you have no heart. You don’t learn at all, Jim. Why instead of swearing at Abe Mangel don’t you see him straight? God hasn’t damned him. God’s damned us perhaps ... by spreading him and the likes of him all over the world: or blessed us. I don’t know, Jim. But _he’s_ not damned.”

“O look here, Fanny. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Even Susan don’t, either, half the time. None of us. But we like you fine just the same. Now, it ain’t because Mangel’s a Jew that I can’t go him. You’re wrong there, Fanny. I know lots of Jews. Lots of my pals is Jews. Mark Pfennig’s one, for instance. All the gamblers ... half the gunmen ... the best of the bulls ... the sharpest of the lawyers....”

“But Mangel’s different----?”

“Yes! His doddering old big-nosed face bowing into the room. His softy grey hands weaving inside each other. His flat feet that don’t make a squeak.”

“Is he square?”

“O he’s square, all right.... So far. He’s shrewd. He can be hard and smart, believe me! It ain’t that, Fanny.”

“A lot you know what it is? It’s because he’s a Jew, I tell you.”

“It ain’t. I got lots of friends----“

“Jim, I don’t think anybody can be a Jew, just because his name happens to be Cohn or Levy.”

“Fanny ... you’re crazy!”

* * * * *

One twilight Fanny had them clear....

More and more they came to Clara’s flat. Evening ‘parties’ were frequent. Afternoons, Tessie and Susan often called for Fanny, and took her for a walk or to a show. It was Spring. The City lay beneath the Sun’s lubricity. The dirt in the hard streets was fecund. The sparrows and the robins daubed the warming world with their swift flashes of life. It was Spring. And Fanny moved, somnambulant, through a strange ease spread for her by hands forever less strange.

--You ... and you ... and you: now I see you clear.

These men and women were no accident. They had words now she understood. They had wills now--here was the wonder of her life--that touched her own. Not Harry’s will had touched hers. Not her child’s, to eat her’s up. Not Christopher Johns’. And Leon’s ... Leon’s will had stood beyond her, over the ken of her horizons.

These wills touched hers!--these wills of women disgraced, of men criminal and broken, outlawed and dissolute.

--I have two hands, and upon each of them five fingers. My sickness, the harsh four years since Jonathan, have wasted my flesh. Yet it is somehow sweet. My hair is not the verdant hedge it was, it is a little stringy, a little limp. But still black. My eyes have fire at times. I am thirty-five ... and I am real, Fanny Luve!

They felt that she felt them clear. Clara above all. The women above all. Her feeling them clear at last was a bridge to them. Their will, long champing on the brink of their division, moved on her own.

Already they had spoken of details of their dream to Mark Pfennig, to Statt, to Mangel.

“We will take a House. And you will take care of us, Fanny!”

“And make us behave.”

“And make the men behave.”

“And bring God with you?” whispered Clara low....

They sat at her feet that evening after the magic dusk of a hard city melting to Spring: they were in Clara’s bedroom.

From her chair, Fanny touched them: her fingers in their hair: her skirt fringing their arms and their faces.

“It’s all arranged, Fanny dear.”

They were below her, seated on the floor ... Clara and Tessie and Susan. Their will surged over her head.

She was flooded with their will. Slowly her hands stroked hair and cheek. Their will stormed her head ... surged torrentful about her.

Her eyes lay quietly upon the faces of her friends. And her hands slow. And their will a tempest.

Slowly, Fanny nodded.

Her left hand closed tight on the hand of Clara. Her right hand upon Tessie’s upbrushed hair contracted until the scalp of Tessie hurt. She nodded slowly....

* * * * *

The street is quiet. The House stands braced in a wall of higher houses dusty and grimed about their stifled worlds. It is of four stories. Its mellow red brick glows with at least half a hundred years. White net curtains angle the square windows. The stoop has an iron rail that peels as Judge Mark mounts, his heaving mass buttressed by a soft white hand upon it.

He upholds his right palm with its rust stains to Fanny.

“I wish you’d have that rail off. Every time I come here I’ve got to wash before I can even sit down.”

Susan laughs. Tessie is humming, and her eyes slide away with her balancing tune. Clara does not care.

“I won’t change it,” says Fanny. “I love that old rail. It’s pretty. Besides, if it wasn’t there some night you’d fall over into the airy-way.”

“Put another in its place.”

“Well, I won’t. And I won’t have the bricks painted either.”

“Yes, but you went and did the windows--“

“She did them herself,” says Clara.

“Don’t you think the blue goes nice with the red? It was fun.”

... An old house in which lived an old couple and a little maid dressed all in black, with an apron like a robin-white-breast. A big house: these two old persons: one young. She brought her lovers to her fourth-floor precincts. Creaking stair ... creaking bannister ... a mutter: the hard sweet adventure that became no lighter and no less sweet. Her masters listened for the clandestine footprints groping, mounting: for the swifter descent as if the man had left a burden above. They loved the love affairs of their pretty little maid. She made them young, she added zest to their evenings of Patience....--“We won’t need you any longer, Zoe. We’re going to bed. Good-night, dear....” their knowing her wickedness spiced their prim demeanor, brought them delight in the prim way of their maid. The old lady died. A month: then again the furtive mounting steps. The old man could not bear it. In his muffled reception of the loveplay overhead he learned how he missed his wife: how in the license of their maid now many years, he and his dried spouse had stolen fruit to themselves. In the gap between the guessed fulness above and the empty bed beside him, his nerves gave out. He withered and he died....

The paint of the windowsills and the Dutch net curtains are Fanny’s. Little else. The house has the plethoric gloom of its mahogany false-Empire chairs, its red brocades, its striped and flowered walls. The beds are new and all alike: bright brass, cheap, furnished with soft mattresses.

In the basement is the dining-room and the kitchen. Upon the first floor a sitting room and two partitioned cardrooms. On the second floor, Susan and Tessie each has her bedroom. Above, Clara has hers, and the back room is reserved for whatever friend be granted it for the night. On the top floor in back is the room of Lucy the maid and a storeroom: in the front, the home of Fanny, a room to sleep in, a room to stay in alone: for it is understood that no one enter. Here then she faced her life.

--My name is Frances. Frances Dirk. Frances Luve. Luve.... Fourteen years ago there was Harry. Nine years ago he went and there was Edith. Six years ... near seven ... a man came back in a black suit with white sharp lips, quoting the words of Jesus. Harry, that. Just a less Christian Harry ... whipping me out with the words of a Jew. And Edith has kept on growing. I see you! I feel you!

--This is my Home. Do you see it, Leon? This is my _home_, I tell you. For this I came North. For this, in the talk we never had, you told me I did right. Leon does not know. Edith will never know. Whores and gamblers and corrupted officers of the Law ... God knows. God is interested. He must be. It must mean something....

She thought of her failures in New York. The House became a reality upon her ... a sort of scarlet flower upon her black tree of failures.--I have a will. I have a soul. I shall not let them die. What she possessed of strength she forced herself to give, now, wholly to the House.--It must mean something!

She studied her men and women. All of them. All of them, despite their falsity of life, held a grain of loveliness. Perhaps because this grain had been so stubborn to live, their life in the world was false? She did not know.--But it shall grow! The House shall mean something!

She made herself comfortable. There was plenty of money. She went to old shops, glowing in walls of dusty woodcuts, classic figures steel-engraved; shops that were a litter of ripe yesterdays crippled out of shape, beyond words, still mellow. Here, piece by piece, leisuredly, she picked together things for her room:--pictures, a Pembroke table, a Hepplewhite desk, a set of slender American Windsor chairs. She picked up three graceful glass goblets, three candlesticks of pewter. She made her room lovely. She watched her language. She kept her language pure. She watched the furrows in her cheeks and the grayness. The great illness and the years before it were gone, but they had taken her bloom and her hair’s wave. She used paint ... judiciously at first. But here, her taste failed, unnourished in the tasteless world about her, and by the world of her own past where they did not paint at all: so that she came to use paint badly.

She was past thirty-five. She was a little stooped, a little brittle, broken. All of her body had gone from curve to angle. Man moved her not at all. She thought of the body of man without memory, without desire. She bought a Bible. She bought a copy, bound in crumbling black Levant, of a certain Pascal’s _Thoughts_ she had found once, browsing. It was Englished from the French. She liked him, whoever he was. He knew life. Yet he seemed young.

As her face grew sallow and the roundness of her cheeks sagged long, as her hair became hard and her knees went stiff, all of this resilience of fire drew to the eyes of Fanny. They were larger, blacker. They were hot wells of thought, sealed fountains of vision that leaped at times upward through the gray earth slumber of men.

And her hands had fingers sensitized like filaments of seed. They seemed, as her eyes saw, to spin with their faint tremor of response a woman’s clasp about the reach of her seeing.

--Harry said Jesus said---- But perhaps I can understand. From Harry’s standpoint it was the ugly word and the ugly thing. That’s it! That’s what Jesus meant. You, Boy ... you broke me and when you had broken me you came back and what you had done to me made me a horror to yourself. Poor Harry, I forgive you. For I understand. Like a child, you could not bear to see your own bad act. You meant to thrust out that ... not the beauty that was borne of it despite you. Who can thrust out beauty? Jesus didn’t preach. Jesus described the state of children like yourself. I guess his people were children like yourself. Some folk have grown up since then. And you, who quote Jesus, haven’t. That’s funny, too. And all’s forgivable. Even you, down there, respectable and holy ... bringing up Edith to be a child like yourself.

--But I love her. What can I do? Lord, I’m beginning to think! so that my love for my child does not burn me, twist me into despair? You down there ... my Darling, ... not knowing your mother, judging her with the child judgments of your father ... God! but I must be strong. Despair is childish too. My love, it is a torrent within me. Love, anger, need ... turn it away from your hurts. Turn it away from yourself ... which it can only break against and wreck. Turn it where it can flow. Edith, shall I succeed in daring to think of you _here_?...

--Why is it poison to me when I judge?... You, Jim Statt, you are a callous monster. You’ve a soul as black as hell. If I judge you I am poisoned.... You, Susan, you’re twisted. You hold a man in your arms to feel him die there ... all that is really he. That’s your love: hate. That’s your passion: death. If I judge you, I am poisoned.... And you, sweet Tessie, you’re hardest of all. With your sensitive soft soul and your unbalanced eyes: with your wanton small hands that turned you from an artist into this. If I despise you, Tessie, I am poisoned.

--Clara, thee I love. My dark white mate! My boy! If I make plans for thee, dearest, if I dream to help thee, I am poisoned.

--What is happening to me? I am no good. I am no better. Is it better not to hate? not to despise, not to plan? Better or worse, I have no choice. If I judge I am poisoned....

--Our world unfolds beyond itself, It is a yearning, it is a leaping toward God.

--I see Him! When the trees break out, When the trees heave up, --I see Him! When men dance like little trees full of Springtime, There you are, God. Here.... I am unafraid. You cannot kill me, for I am part of your Spring.

* * * * *

In the warm smoke shadow of the room the chandelier thrust its gas tongues weakly. Beneath it on the table stood bottles of whiskey and gin and syphon water. Night. The backyards swathed silence: the shut of a window, the call of a cat were in the Night like little breaks in a close textured weave.

A slight man with heavy sparse-haired head on thin shoulders, frail chest, spoke in a singing voice. His English was good, the Irish brogue was thick.

“It’s this way--it’s this way. We sit here night after night and we have a good time. What is it we do really? We destroy ourselves, and that means we hurt less. We drug ourselves down to these parts of life which are happy.”

“Man is not happy?”

“Man,” Daniel Scome went on, “is caught between the fulness of the brute and the fulness of manhood. That’s where we are. We’re half way. And we’re weary and comfortless. Where we are we suffer. We cannot rest. We cannot forget. Because we are half way. We must go on, to a new happiness: or we must go back.”

“That’s what we do,” said Mangel. “We go back....”

A voice came from the shadow: “We got laws and governments ... we got arts and War, so we can go back comfortably. Yes.”

“We’re corrupted. Adam and Eve have damned us,” spoke the thrust, sure of itself, of Statt. “We don’t slump back. We’re naturally brutes.”

“I don’t believe you!” cried Mangel.

“Of course you don’t. You ain’t a Christian.”

“Nor you!” said Daniel Scome. “If we were naturally brutes, God would not bother about us.”

“Nor we about God,” said Fanny.