Chapter 8

No sooner said than done. In rented bathing suits, unfastidious, if you will, but, pshaw! with the ocean for wash day, who minded! Hers a little blue wrinkly one that hit her far too far, below the knees, but her head flowered up in a polka-dotted turban, that well enough she knew bound her up prettily, and her arms were so round with that indescribable softiness of youth! Getaway, whose eyes could focus a bit when he looked at them, set up a leggy dance at sight of her. He shocked her a bit in his cheap cotton trunks--woman's very old shock to the knobby knees and hairy arms of the beach. But they immediately ran, hand in hand, down the sand and fizz! into the grin of a breaker.

Marylin with her face wet and a fringe of hair, like a streak of seaweed, down her cheek! Getaway, shivery and knobbier than ever, pushing great palms of water at her and she back at him, only less skillfully her five fingers spread and inefficient. Once in the water, he caught and held her close, and yet, for the wonder of it, almost reverentially close, as if what he would claim for himself he must keep intact.

"Marry me, Marylin," he said, with all the hubbub of the ocean about them.

She reached for some foam that hissed out before she could touch it.

"That's you," he said. "Now you are there, and now you aren't."

"I wish," she said--"oh, Getaway, there's so much I wish!"

"What do you wish?"

She looked off toward the immensity of sea and sky. "I--Oh, I don't know! Being here makes me wish--Something as beautiful as out there is what I wish."

"Out where?"

"There."

"I don't see--"

"You--wouldn't."

And then, because neither of them could swim, he began chasing her through shallow water, and in the kicked-up spray of their own merriment they emerged finally, dripping and slinky, the hairs of his forearms lashed flat, and a little drip of salt water running off the tip of her chin.

Until long after the sun went down they lay drying on the sand, her hair spread in a lovely amber flare, and, stretched full length on his stomach beside her, he built a little grave of sand for her feet. And the crowd thinned, and even before the sun dipped a faint young moon, almost as if wearing a veil, came up against the blue. They were quiet now with pleasant fatigue, and, propped up on his elbows, he spilled little rills of sand from one fist into the other.

"Gee! you're pretty, Marylin!"

"Are I, Getaway?"

"You know you are. You wasn't born with one eye shut and the other blind."

"Honest, I don't know. Sometimes I look in the mirror and hope so."

"You've had enough fellows tell you so."

"Yes, but--but not the kind of fellows that mean by pretty what _I_ mean by pretty."

"Well, this here guy means what you mean by pretty."

"What do you mean by pretty, Getaway?"

"Pep. Peaches. Cream. Teeth. Yellow hair. Arms. Le--those little holes in your cheeks. Dimples. What do I mean by pretty? I mean you by pretty. Ain't that what you want me to mean by pretty?"

"Yes--and no--"

"Well, what the--"

"It's all right, Getaway. It's fine to be pretty, but--not enough--somehow. I--I can't explain it to you--to anybody. I guess pretty isn't the word. It's beauty I mean."

"All right, then, anything your little heart desires--beauty."

"The ocean beauty out there, I mean. Something that makes you hurt and want to hurt more and more. Beauty, Getaway. It's something you understand or something you don't. It can't be talked. It sounds silly."

"Well, then, whistle it!"

"It has to be _felt_."

"Peel me," he said, laying her arm to his bare bicep. "Some little gladiator, eh? Knock the stuffings out of any guy that tried to take you away from me."

She turned her head on its flare of drying hair away from him. The beach was all but quiet and the haze of the end of day in the air, almost in her eyes, too.

"Oh, Getaway!" she said, on a sigh, and again, "Getaway!"

His reserve with her, at which he himself was the first to marvel, went down a little then and he seized her bare arm, kissing it, almost sinking his teeth. The curve of her chin down into her throat, as she turned her head, had maddened him.

"Quit," she said.

"Never you mind. You'll wear diamonds," he said, in his sole phraseology of promise. "Will you get sore if I ask you something, Fairylin?"

"What?"

"Want one now?"

"Want what?"

"A diamond."

"No," she said. "When I'm out here I quit wanting things like that."

"Fine chance a fellow has to warm up to you!"

"Getaway!"

"What?"

"What did you do last night, after you walked home with me?"

"When?"

"You know when."

"Why, bless your heart, I went home, Fairylin!"

"Please, Getaway--"

"Home, Fairy."

"You were up in Monkey's room last night about eleven. Now think, Getaway!"

"Aw now--"

"You were."

"Aw now--"

"Nobody can fool me on your step. You tiptoed for all you were worth, but I knew it! The-ball-of your-foot--squeak! The-ball-of-your foot--squeak!"

"Sure enough, now you mention it, maybe for a minute around eleven, but only for a minute--"

"Please, Getaway, don't lie. It was for nearly all night. Comings and goings on my ceiling until I couldn't sleep, not because they were so noisy, but because they were so soft. Like ugly whispers. Is Monkey the friend you got the deal on with, Getaway?"

"We just sat up there talking old times--"

"And Muggs, about eleven o'clock, sneaking up through the halls, dressed like the messenger boy again. I saw him when I peeked out of the door to see who it was tiptoeing. Getaway, for God's sake--"

He closed over her wrist then, his face extremely pointed. It was a bony face, so narrow that the eyes and the cheek bones had to be pitched close, and his black hair, usually so shiny, was down in a bang now, because it was damp, and to Marylin there was something sinister in that dip of bang which frightened her.

"What you don't know don't hurt you. You hear that? Didn't I tell you that after a few days this business deal--_business_, get that?--will be over. Then I'm going to hold down any old job your heart desires. But first I'm going to have money in my pockets! That's the only way to make this old world sit up and take notice. Spondulicks! Then I'm going to carry you off and get spliced. See? Real money. Diamonds. If you weren't so touchy, maybe you'd have diamonds sooner than you think. Want one now?"

"Getaway, I know you're up to something. You and Monkey and Muggs are tied up with those Wall Street bond getaways."

"For the luvagod, cut that talk here! First thing I know you'll have me in a brainstorm too."

"Those fake messenger boys that get themselves hired and, instead of delivering the bonds from one office to another--disappear with them. Muggs isn't wearing that messenger's uniform for nothing. You and Monkey are working with him under cover on something. You can't pass a cop any more without tightening up. I can feel it when I have your arm. You've got that old over-your-shoulder look to you, Getaway. My father--had it. My--mother--too. Getaway!"

"By gad! you can't beat a woman!"

"You don't deny it."

"I do!"

"Oh, Getaway, I'm glad then, glad!"

"Over-the-shoulder look. Why, if I'd meet a plain-clothes this minute I'd go up and kiss him--with my teeth in his ear. That's how much I got to be afraid of."

"Oh, Getaway, I'm so glad!"

"Well, then, lay off--"

"Getaway, you jumped then! Like somebody had hit you, and it was only a kid popping a paper bag."

"You get on my nerves. You'd make a cat nervous, with your suspecting! The more a fellow tries to do for a girl like you the less--Look here now, you got to get the hell out of my business."

She did not reply, but lay to the accompaniment of his violent nervousness and pinchings into the sand, with her face still away from him, while the dusk deepened and the ocean quieted.

After a while: "Now, Marylin, don't be sore. I may be a rotten egg some ways, but when it comes to you, I'm there."

"I'm not sore, Getaway," she said, with her voice still away from him. "Only I--Let's not talk for a minute. It's so quiet out here--so full of rest."

He sat, plainly troubled, leaning back on the palms of his hands and dredging his toes into the sand. In the violet light the tender line of her chin to her throat still teased him.

Down farther along the now deserted beach a youth in a bathing suit was playing a harmonica, his knees hunched under his chin, his mouth and hand sliding at cross purposes along the harp. That was the silhouette of him against a clean sky, almost Panlike, as if his feet might be cloven.

What he played, if it had any key at all, was rather in the mood of Chopin's Nocturne in D flat major. A little sigh for the death of a day, a sob for the beauty of that death, and a hope and ecstasy for the new day yet unborn--all of that on a little throbbing mouth organ.

"Getaway," cried Marylin, and sat up, spilling sand, "that's it! That's what I meant a while ago. Hear? It can't be talked. That's it on the mouth organ!"

"It?"

"It! Yes, like I said. Somebody has to feel it inside of him, just like I do, before he can understand. Can't you feel it? Please! Listen."

"Aw, that's an old jew's-harp. I'll buy you one. How's that?"

"All right, I guess," she said, starting off suddenly toward the bathhouse.

He was relieved that she had thrown off the silence.

"Ain't mad any more, are you, Marylin?"

"No, Getaway--not mad."

"Mustn't get fussy that way with me, Marylin. It scares me off. I've had something to show you all day, but you keep scaring me off."

"What is it?" she said, tiptoe.

His mouth drew up to an oblique. "You know."

"No, I don't."

"Maybe I'll tell you and maybe I won't," he cried, scooping up a handful of sand and spraying her. "What'll you give me if I tell?"

"Why--nothing."

"Want to know?"

But at the narrowing something in his eyes she sidestepped him, stooping down at the door of her bathhouse for a last scoop of sand at him.

"No," she cried, her hair blown like spray and the same breeze carrying her laughter, guiltless of mood, out to sea.

On the way home, though, for the merest second, there recurred the puzzling quirk in her thoughtlessness.

In the crush of the electric train, packed tightly into the heart of the most yammering and petulant crowd in the world--home-going pleasure seekers--a youth rose to give her his seat. A big, beach-tanned fellow with a cowlick of hair, when he tipped her his hat, standing up off his right brow like a little apostrophe to him, and blue eyes so very wide apart, and so clear, that they ran back into his head like aisles with little lakes shining at the ends of them.

"Thank you," said Marylin, the infinitesimal second while his hat and cowlick lifted, her own gaze seeming to run down those avenues of his eyes for a look into the pools at the back.

"That was it, too, Getaway! The thing that fellow looked--that I couldn't say. He said it--with his eyes."

"Who?"

"That fellow who gave me this seat."

"I'll break his face if he goo-goos you," said Getaway, who by this time had a headache and whose feet had fitted reluctantly back into patent leather.

But inexplicably, even to herself, that night, in the shadow of the stoop of her witch of a rooming house, she let him kiss her lips. His first of her--her first to any man. It may have been that suddenly she was so extremely tired--tired of the lay of the week ahead, suggested by the smells and the noises and the consciousness of that front box pleat.

The little surrender, even though she drew back immediately, was wine to him and as truly an intoxicant.

"Marylin," he cried, wild for her lips again, "I can't be held off much longer. I'm straight with you, but I'm human, too."

"Don't, Getaway, not here! To-morrow--maybe."

"I'm crazy for you!"

"Go home now, Getaway."

"Yes--but just one more--"

"Promise me you'll go straight home from here--to bed."

"I promise. Marylin, one more. One little more. Your lips--"

"No, no--not now. Go--"

Suddenly, by a quirk in the dark, there was a flash of something down Marylin's bare third finger, so hurriedly and so rashly that it scraped the flesh.

"That's for you! I've been afraid all day. Touchy! Didn't I tell you? Diamonds! Now will you kiss me? Now will you?"

In the shadow of where she stood, looking down, it was as if she gazed into a pool of fire that was reaching in flame clear up about her head, and everywhere in the conflagration Getaway's triumphant "Now will you! Now will you!"

"Getaway," she cried, flecking her hand as if it burned, "where did you get this?"

"It's for you, Fairylin, and more like it coming. It weighs a carat and a half. That stone's worth more than a sealskin jacket. You're going to have one of those, too. Real seal! Now are you sore at me any more? Now you've a swell kick coming, haven't you? Now! Now!"

"Getaway," she cried behind her lit hand, because her palm was to her mouth and above it her eyes showing the terror in their whites, "where did you get this?"

"There!" he said, and kissed her hotly and squarely on the lips.

Somehow, with the ring off her finger and in a little pool of its light as it lay at his feet, where he stood dazed on the sidewalk, Marylin was up the stoop, through the door, up two flights, and through her own door, slamming it, locking it, and into her room, rubbing and half crying over her left third finger where the flash had been.

She was frightened, because for all of an hour she sat on the end of the cot in her little room trembling and with her palms pressed into her eyes so tightly that the darkness spun. There was quick connection in Marylin between what was emotional and what was merely sensory. She knew, from the sickness at the very pit of her, how sick were her heart and her soul--and how afraid.

She undressed in the dark--a pale darkness relieved by a lighted window across the areaway. The blue mercerized dress she slid over a hanger, covering it with one of her cotton nightgowns and putting it into careful place behind the cretonne curtain that served her as clothes closet. Her petticoat, white, with a rill of lace, she folded away. And then, in her bare feet and a pink-cotton nightgown with a blue bird machine-stitched on the yoke, stood cocked to the hurry of indistinct footsteps across her ceiling, and in the narrow slit of hallway outside her door, where the stairs led up still another flight, the-ball-of-a-foot--squeak! The sharp crack of a voice. Running.

"Getaway!" cried Marylin's heart, almost suffocating her with a dreadful spasm of intuition.

It was all so quick. In the flash of her flung-open door, as her head in its amber cloud leaned out, Getaway, bending almost double over the upper banister, his lips in his narrow face back to show a white terribleness of strain that lingered in the memory, hurled out an arm suddenly toward two men mounting the steps of the flight below him.

There was a shot then, and on the lower flight one of the men, with an immediate red mouth opening slowly in his neck, slid downstairs backward, face up.

Suddenly, from a crouching position beside her door, the second figure shot forward now, with ready and perfect aim at the already-beginning-to-be-nerveless figure of Getaway hanging over the banister with the smoking pistol.

By the reaching out of her right hand Marylin could have deflected that perfect aim. In fact, her arm sprang toward just that reflex act, then stayed itself with the jerk of one solid body avoiding collision with another.

So much quicker than it takes in the telling there marched across Marylin's sickened eyes this frieze: Her father trailing dead from the underslinging of a freight car. That moment when a uniform had stepped in from the fire escape across the bolt of Brussels lace; her mother's scream, like a plunge into the heart of a rapier. Uniforms--contemplating. On street corners. Opposite houses. Those four fingers peeping over each of her father's shoulders in the courtroom. Getaway! His foxlike face leaner. Meaner. Black mask. Electric chair. Volts. Ugh--volts! God--you know--best--help--

When the shot came that sent Getaway pitching forward down the third-floor flight she was on her own room floor in a long and merciful faint. Marylin had not reached out.

* * * * *

Time passed. Whole rows of days of buttonholes down pleats that were often groped at through tears. Heavy tears like magnifying glasses. And then, with that gorgeous and unassailable resiliency of youth, lighter tears. Fewer tears. Few tears. No tears.

Under the cretonne curtain, though, the blue mercerized frock hung unworn, and in its dark drawer remained the petticoat with its rill of lace. But one night, with a little catch in her throat (it was the last of her sobs), she took out the sport hat, and for no definite reason began to turn the jockey rosette to the side where the sun had not faded it.

These were quiet evenings in her small room. All the ceiling agitation had long ago ceased since the shame of the raided room above, and Muggs, in his absurd messenger's suit, and Monkey marching down the three flights to the clanking of steel at the wrists.

There were new footsteps now. Steps that she had also learned to know, but pleasantly. They marched out so regularly of mornings, invariably just as she was about to hook her skirtband or pull on her stockings. They came home so patly again at seven, about as she sat herself down to a bit of sewing or washing-out. They went to bed so pleasantly. Thud, on the floor, and then, after the expectant interval of unlacing, thud again. They were companionable, those footsteps, almost like reverential marching on the grave of her heart.

Marylin reversed the rosette, and as the light began to go sat down beside her window, idly, looking up. There was the star point in her patch of sky, eating its way right through the purple like a diamond, and her ache over it was so tangible that it seemed to her she could almost lift the hurt out of her heart, as if it were a little imprisoned bird. And as it grew darker there came two stars, and three, and nine, and finally the sixty hundred.

Then from the zig of the fire escape above, before it twisted down into the zag of hers, there came to Marylin, through the medley of city silences and the tears in her heart, this melody, on a jew's-harp:

If it had any key at all, it was in the mood of Chopin's Nocturne in D flat major. A little sigh for the death of a day, a sob for the beauty of that death, and the throb of an ecstasy for the new day not yet born.

Looking up against the sheer wall of the vertical city, on the ledge of fire escape above hers, and in the yellow patch of light thrown out from the room behind, a youth, with his knees hunched up under his chin, and his mouth and hand moving at cross purposes, was playing the harmonica.

Wide apart were his eyes, and blue, so that while she gazed up, smiling, as he gazed down, smiling, it was almost as if she ran up the fire escape through the long clear lanes of those eyes, for a dip into the little twin lakes at the back of them.

And--why, didn't you know?--there was a lift of cowlick to the right side of his front hair, as he sat there playing in the twilight, that was exactly the shape of an apostrophe!

THE SMUDGE

In the bleak little graveyard of Hattie Bertch's dead hopes, dead loves, and dead ecstasies, more than one headstone had long since begun to sag and the wreaths of bleeding heart to shrivel.

That was good, because the grave that is kept bubbly with tears is a tender, quivering thing, almost like an amputated bit of self that still aches with threads of life.

Even over the mound of her dead ambitions, which grave she had dug with the fingers of her heart, Hattie could walk now with unsensitive feet. It had become dry clay with cracks in it like sardonic smiles.

Smiles. That was the dreadful part, because the laugh where there have been tears is not a nice laugh, and Hattie could sit among the headstones of her dead dreams now and laugh. But not horridly. Just drearily.

There was one grave, Heart's Desire, that was still a little moist. But it, too, of late years, had begun to sink in, like an old mouth with receding gums, as if the very teeth of a smiling dream had rotted. They had.

Hattie, whose heart's desire had once been to play Juliet, played maids now. Buxom negro ones, with pale palms, white eyes, and the beat of kettledrums somewhere close to the cuticle of the balls of her feet.

She was irrevocably down on managers' and agents' lists as "comedy black." Countless the premiers she had opened to the fleck of a duster! Hattie came high, as maids go. One hundred and fifty dollars a week and no road engagements. She dressed alone. Her part in "Love Me Long" had been especially written in for the sake of the peculiar kind of comedy relief she could bring to it. A light roar of recognition swept the audience at her entrance. Once in a while, a handclap. So Hattie, whose heart's desire had once been to play Juliet, played maids now. Buxomly.

And this same Hattie, whose heart's desire had once been to kiss Love, but whose lips were still a little twisted with the taste of clay, could kiss only Love's offspring now. But not bitterly. Thanksgivingly.

Love's offspring was Marcia. Sixteen and the color and odor of an ivory fan that has lain in frangipani. And Hattie could sometimes poke her tongue into her cheek over this bit of whimsy:

It was her well-paid effort in the burnt cork that made possible, for instance, the frill of real lace that lay to the low little neck of Marcia's first party dress, as if blown there in sea spume.

Out of the profits of Hattie's justly famous Brown Cold Cream--Guaranteed Color-fast--Mulatto, Medium, Chocolate, had come Marcia's ermine muff and tippet; the enamel toilet set; the Steinway grand piano; the yearly and by no means light tuition toll at Miss Harperly's Select Day School for Girls.

You get the whimsy of it? For everything fair that was Marcia, Hattie had brownly paid for. Liltingly, and with the rill of the song of thanksgiving in her heart.

That was how Hattie moved through her time. Hugging this melody of Marcia. Through the knife-edged nervous evenings in the theater. Bawlings. Purple lips with loose muscles crawling under the rouge. Fetidness of scent on stale bodies. Round faces that could hook into the look of vultures when the smell of success became as the smell of red meat. All the petty soiled vanities, like the disordered boudoir of a cocotte. The perpetual stink of perfume. Powder on the air and caking the breathing. Open dressing-room doors that should have been closed. The smelling geometry of the make-up box. Curls. Corsets. Cosmetics. Men in undershirts, grease-painting. "Gawdalmighty, Tottie, them's my teddy bears you're puttin' on." Raw nerves. Raw emotions. Ego, the actor's overtone, abroad everywhere and full of strut. "Overture!" The wait in the wings. Dizziness at the pit of the stomach. Audiences with lean jaws etched into darkness. Jaws that can smile or crack your bones and eat you. Faces swimming in the stage ozone and wolfish for cue. The purple lips--

Almost like a frieze stuck on to the border of each day was Hattie's life in the theater. Passementerie.