CHAPTER V

THE WILL TO PLAY

A girl from fourteen to eighteen is about as unstable and kaleidoscopic as any quantity in nature. She is changing, almost from day to day. It may be that poverty in her home has deprived her of her full share of youth’s vigor and supreme physical wellbeing. Even so, she keeps its impatient desire for action and experience. She feels its disdain of restraint and hindrance; its zest for swallowing life in hot, hasty gulps. The desire to play is strong in her. Lack-luster resignation and pessimism are rare among the young even where poverty weighs most heavily. The girl’s buoyant spirit breaks loose at the instant of release from factory walls or from the momentary depression of family want. It bubbles forth in girls’ laughter and girls’ play, and in girls’ capricious, whimsical, egoistic moods.

The West Side girl is an independent young person. She has seen a good deal of the world. She has the early sophistication bred of a crowded, close-pressed life. As yet, she has not been battered to the wall in the stress. She has not the pitiful appreciation of the middle-aged woman for slight and passing kindliness. She is self-assertive, arrogant, “able to take care of herself.” She comes, asking nothing, at ease and alert, but ready to give a trial to anything thrown in her way. If it does not suit, she will not be slow to reject it. So she stands, looking bright and curious eyed, straight into the face of her world. She can be defiant at a hint of challenge. And yet one finds that she is suddenly and sharply sensitive. Ridicule and harshness touch her to the quick. Her new-born self-consciousness is easily wounded. A trifling hurt may become a lifelong grievance.

This is a signal of a restlessness beneath the surface which she does not herself understand. It is propelling her onward in an unconscious search. In all her pleasure-loving, drifting adventures she is hunting steadily for the deeper and stronger forces of life. Into her nature are surging for the first time the insistent needs and desires of her womanhood. But this she does not know. She is the daughter of the people, the child of the masses. Athletics, sports, diversions, the higher education, will not be hers to divert this deep craving. She is not close enough to her church for religion to control it. It will stay with her, sweeping her inevitably out of the simplicity of little girlhood into the thousand temptations of her environment, if not, perhaps, into one of the commonest of neighborhood tragedies.

Just now her search is translated very lightly and gaily into the demand for “a good time” and a keen interest in the other sex. She prosecutes it with the imperious heedlessness of her age. Her haphazard and inconsistent training has given her little of the art of self-control. The city bristles with the chances she longs for--“to have fun and see the fellows.” What is to come of this depends on the unformed character of the individual girl, the oversight of her family,--sometimes effective and sometimes not,--and, most of all, on chance.

The control of a little money is far more essential to these girls in their search for enjoyment than to girls in another class. There are many doors which a very small coin will open to her. After she goes to work she usually has a little spending money of her own. As a rule she is given, besides lunch money and carfare, a quarter or 50 cents a week. This may go for candy, carfare to dances and parks, or entrance fees to dance halls and moving picture shows. Sometimes she spends the money given her for carfare on other and more pleasurable things, and walks to work, “wearing out shoe leather, which ain’t right,” as her mother complains. A carfare saved by walking to work is a carfare earned for a trip to a dance hall “away out in the Bronx.” Usually a single fare is enough for the whole trip. The “fellow” who “sees you home” will pay for the return. Thus the little West Sider makes her 25 cents carry her as far along the primrose path as possible.

She has no keener longing than her longing for pretty and becoming clothes. Usually she helps in selection, though now and then the mother buys her clothing from the girl’s own earnings as autocratically as she buys the rest of the home necessities. Sometimes the girl is allowed to keep a dollar or two out of her pay every week with which she buys her own clothes. Often there comes a period of distress which swallows up her whole wages week after week. She sees her earnings go for rent, for fuel, and for food. Hers is not the time of life to be content with shelter, warmth, and nourishment. She would rather starve for these things than miss her worshipped pleasures. Mamie Craven, working steadily in the laundry, turning in her money every Saturday night, once broke out one night in a bitter wail, “Oh, Miss Wright, you don’t know _how_ I want a chinchilla coat.”

There are bound to be many lacks in her wardrobe. Usually the greatest one is that of protective clothing. She has no overshoes and no umbrella. When it rains she comes drenched to her club, but will not think of foregoing the evening’s pleasure on that account. She goes to work in the same unprotected fashion. Winter clothes are thin and inadequate. Many a girl’s vitality is sapped for months in the year through sheer exposure to cold. These deficiencies are endured uncomplainingly. It is much harder if finery or the coveted Easter suit must be foregone. The poorer girl will buy her suit on the instalment plan--$4.00 down and $2.00 each following week. She pays $15 for a suit of the value of $10. She is often guilty, like girls of every class, of some wild bit of extravagance. But in her case extravagance may become heartlessness. A girl whose income was the only regular support of her family spent $5.00--a week’s wages--on a willow plume. “We starved fer that hat,” her mother said, “just plain starved fer it, so we did.”

Social relations between girls of their age and class are very unlike those of boys. A single friend or a little clique takes the place of the gang. They will follow a leader for a moment but not consistently; they are jealous of leadership and slow to acknowledge it. There is almost no natural loyalty to a group. Probably the girl by the time she reaches fourteen has already some special companion. This may be a playmate from her school days, or, very likely, a “pick up” on the street or at work, who soon has the title of “me lady friend.” The relationship may extend over years. It is very constant and means that the two share most of their pleasures together. There are distinct requirements; one must “call up” and “wait in” and not “go round” too much with anyone else. But the girl is rare who has a strong feeling of obligation toward appointments or promises. Therefore the friendship is sure to be checkered by quarrels and reunions. There are besides a thousand and one reasons for dispute. The quarrel is taken very seriously, but the chances are that the breach will heal before long. However, this is not always so; no prediction formed on girl nature is sure. The relationship assumes at times some of the formality and ceremony of the gang. In one case, a definite proposal to be “friends” was made by a girl who had quarreled with her former lady friend. The second girl declined, not from any dislike, but because she was already “going with somebody else.” When a girl begins to have a “gentleman friend” even the slight ceremony of calling up and waiting in for the girl friend is omitted.

The cliques consist of three or four girls, seldom of more. They are likely to exist among the younger girls who have played together as children. They are seldom formed later on, but incline to resolve themselves into the standard couples.

The girls’ homes are not very advantageous places for entertainment and fun. They are too cramped and often too forlorn. Yet everyone here is used to these conditions, and they are not the only difficulties which stand in the way of visits and hospitality. Visits from gentlemen friends are frowned upon and not desired. The parents, especially of the younger girls, look askance on the boys who come to see them.

“My father was always too strict with us girls,” said an older sister, married and established in her own home. “It was always work and keep quiet at home the minute we came in from the factory. He believed that girls must be kept down. He’d have beaten us good if we’d brought a fellow home. So I used to meet my friend at a corner a few blocks off, just the same as my sister Maggie has been doing. It’s only a wonder I didn’t get into trouble the same as she has done and get put away like her. I’m not the one to turn against her now. When she comes out of the Home, she and her baby can come and live with me.”

The sequel of Maggie’s story only served to prove the unwisdom of the parental policy which had tried to “keep her down.” One day Maggie returned to her sister’s home with her six-months-old baby. A week later her sister announced with the utmost gratification and relief that Maggie was married. “If she’d only told us at the start, there’d never been any need for all this trouble. Hannick is a decent fellow and has steady work. He was looking for Maggie all the time she was in the hospital and he was afraid to ask her folks what had become of her. As soon as she came back here, he sent word to me and asked if he could see her. That was the first time I knew who her fellow was. When he came around I told them they ought to go straight off to the priest, and they did.”

The street corner has become, with its free and easy etiquette, a substitute for the home. It is very popular in spite of nagging from the “cop.” Still, the policeman is not a very censorious chaperon. Even the older girl whose parents have opened their door to her company has often learned to prefer its lack of supervision. As a place of rendezvous it is greatly preferred to a parlor of one’s own where one must be “real lady-like.” “You see,” one of the girls explained, “my friend comes to my home; then if he wants me to go somewhere to a dance, my mother’ll likely hear and won’t let me. My brother knows all the places and he’ll tell my mother there’s likely to be shooting there. He makes it bad for me that way.”

The boys’ preference for the street corner is quite as strong as the girls’. Their habit is to send a small boy as intermediary to the girl’s door to tell her who is waiting in the hall below. An incident at “471” gave the smaller boys a chance to express their sentiment. Their gang, known in the neighborhood as “tough young nuts,” were giving a return party to their girl friends. It was to be a “swell” affair, and had involved much consultation and collecting of money beforehand. The instructions had been, “Buy three times as much ice cream as the girls had at their party. Get a cake as big as the cover of this table (a centerpiece 22 inches round). Get three pounds of good candy. Get all the milk and cocoa you want for them girls, but none of that for us. We want soda and ginger ale and celery tonic.” These concoctions, not as harmless as their names suggest, had been purchased by the boys. Everything was elaborately ready and the party had begun. All the guests had arrived except the special friends of two of the boys. A club leader’s naïve suggestion was that Peter and “Gimp” should call for the girls at their homes. Gimp leaned forward, astonished, as if uncertain of what he had heard. “Homes,” he gasped, in a tone surcharged with dismay. “Gee,” the other boy added, “that sure w’d be some place to go, a’right.”

Still, the home is by no means to be discounted entirely as a place for recreation. There is too much Irish jollity and good-fellowship in our neighborhood to make it altogether a tame and stupid place. The “house party,” as any home gathering is known, is not unusual. Music, dancing, and drinking are the chief features of the entertainment on such occasions. A Thanksgiving party at the McKeevers’, for instance, to which the family invited one of the club leaders, showed that the happy good-fellowship which Goldsmith mourned as forever departed from the “Deserted Village” has crossed the ocean with the Irish immigrants and is still preserved to some extent in their newer stronghold on the Middle West Side.

The homelike spirit of the gathering was noticeable. Mrs. McKeever, gray-haired, fifty-two years of age, presided over the festivities. She sat in the only rocking chair, holding in her arms the small son of a neighbor, aged three, extremely dirty and ragged, and as a companion a fox terrier, the pet of the McCormick family. Then came Mrs. O’Hara, the neighbor from the next tenement, large and fat and slovenly, but perfectly good-natured and kindly. She was nursing a small child who was boarded with her by some organization. The child was sleepy and tired and whenever he dozed off was wakened by the music and dancing. In the corner of the sofa next to Mrs. O’Hara was a small, undeveloped specimen of humanity in a faded flannellette dress and very much broken shoes whose appearance classed her as degenerate. She was also a neighbor and had come in to take part in the Thanksgiving festivities. On the same sofa with her at the other end sat a well made-up Negro minstrel, with feet crossed and a large guitar in his arms, who played and sang as well as many a man in a minstrel show on the stage. Next to him, on a kitchen chair, sat a chap of probably thirty-five years. A crutch stood beside his chair, and upon a closer look one could see that one of his legs had been amputated. He was very dreamily playing an accordion, and had had just enough drink to make him very solemn and uninterested in people and things in general. Mrs. McKeever several times deposited the small child and the fox terrier in the middle of the floor and went over to remonstrate with him for not being willing to take part in the ceremonies. He, however, could not be persuaded and sat perfectly still, only occasionally extracting a glass of beer from under his chair and offering it to the others. Over in the corner next to the man with the accordion was a short, stout boy, probably of seventeen years, in his shirt sleeves, whose chief desire was to dance, but who found it difficult to procure partners.

These were the guests on one side of the room. In front of the large pier glass at the end the chair was occupied by an immense Teddy bear, who occasionally was forced into taking part in the dances and general merrymaking. The next seat was occupied by Delia McKeever. Delia was a remarkably good-looking girl, and on most occasions was neat and tidy, but this evening she was conspicuous because of her untidiness. She had had enough beer to make her unusually mirthful and to make her dance much better than usual. Next to Delia sat Annie, also in most untidy condition. Lizzie, the youngest daughter, was sent for to come in from the street. She was dressed in boy’s clothes and had been out masquerading. Holding the center of the floor was a rather handsome chap who played the mandolin well and had a bellowing baritone voice.

The McKeever family were very solicitous that their guests should have a good time, and went around whispering to the musicians, telling them to play or sing whatever the visitors suggested. Everyone sang “The Suwanee River,” and the players of the mandolin and accordion sang several of the latest popular songs. Delia and Annie did a fancy dance known as the “Novelty.” Delia also danced with the chap in the corner, who was ever busy trying to procure a partner. He was so much shorter than Delia that she could conveniently rest her forehead on his head, which she did during the entire dance, making him act very much as a prop to her wilful, antic steps.

* * * * *

There are two places in which the unoccupied of all ages and types may be seen--the streets and the moving picture shows. Eighth Avenue, the residence street of our aristocracy, is the promenade of the district. No one has better expressed the essential spirit of these promenades than Mr. Wells has done in The New Machiavelli.[81]

“Unkindly critics, blind to the inner meanings of things, call them, I believe, Monkey’s Parades--the shop apprentices, the young work girls, the boy clerks, and so forth, stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their first-earned money upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace collars, walking-sticks, sunshades, or cigarettes, and come valiantly into the vague transfiguring mingling of gas light and evening, to walk up and down, to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends. It is a queer instinctive revolt from the narrow, limited, friendless homes in which so many find themselves, a going out toward something, romance, if you will, beauty, that has suddenly become a need--a need that hitherto has lain dormant and unsuspected. They promenade. Vulgar!--it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the moth abroad in the evening and lights the body of the glow-worm in the night.”

Here also are the flashing, gaudy, poster-lined entrances of Hickman’s and of the Galaxy. These supply the girls with a “craze,” the same that sends those with a more liberal allowance to the matinees. Their pictures spread out adventure and melodrama which are soul-satisfying. The vaudeville is even more popular and not so clean.

Sooner or later almost every girl drifts into some club or settlement. She is a wandering spirit, difficult to hold, still more difficult to tie down to any definite program. She wants activity but soon tires of any one form of it. She cannot concentrate, especially on any finely co-ordinated work requiring time and patience. Dancing and music make the strongest appeal to her. A boisterous club room will quiet suddenly to the sound of “Oh! Mr. Dream Man, let me dream some more.” The dark-eyed girl at the piano drawls in shrill nasal mimicry of the vaudeville “artist,” copying her air and mannerisms.

Cheap and shoddy--but the scene typifies that groping for the ideal which is universal. Look along the line of faces, stilled and attentive. Something is there neither cheap nor small. Here the face of a youngster is caught an instant from its impish drollery. The hardening lines are soft as with a child’s wonder at something beautiful and new. Next to her an older girl is leaning forward. Her features are haggard and drawn, a ghastly white. But she sits with opened lips and a look in her eyes as if she heard beyond the singing something half articulate and far-away. The song has brought a quickening of the imagination, a stirring of childish, unformed aspirations, half gropings for a world finer than the one she knows.

In these girls the longing for the unreal is overlaid by much that is commonplace and sordid. To come upon this sudden, vivid glimpse of it takes away one’s breath. At the same instant some of the faces are prophetic of its final dying out. The girls’ instinctive idealism, a wild thing here, unnurtured, is as elusive and fleeting as it is beautiful. It is foredoomed to fade swiftly in the midst of unfriendly reality.

Only a fleeting glimpse of the ideal, and soon the club room is again a clamorous, gay, turbulent place. There is much energy that must be let off; nothing but dancing will satisfy the demand. This means that the doors must be opened to “the fellows” too. They, meantime, have been besieging the club from the outside. If the older girl is to be held, some concession must be made to her chief desire. Once it is made, many difficulties arise. The interest between the girls and boys here is almost wholly one of sex. They are farther apart than in other circles. As children, there has been very little playing in common. The boys’ interests are more energetic; group athletics have seldom been opened to the girls of the elementary schools. Both boys and girls have a narrow range of knowledge and impersonal interests. Conversation is a mere exchange of personalities, gossip, and bickering, and there is little even of that. The girls line up on one side of the room; the boys group together on the other side. Games are sidetracked as foolish. There is only dancing to bring them together, and so the club dances. This is doubtless the reason why the dance hall holds the first place in the girl’s estimation of a good time. In these places she learns the “tough” dances in their worst forms and with all their suggestive details. If she attends these dubious resorts freely, she is marked socially by it.

Most of the girls under sixteen and the most strictly guarded of the older girls go to dances only occasionally. Then they attend some “racket” given by their special friends, their fathers’ association, or their church. They may go with their families or be taken by a boy friend with their parents’ knowledge and consent. Perhaps a younger sister is allowed to go along, much below the age when the first daughter started, because “she’s company for May.” This occasional ball, with its more or less formal invitation, its sanction by the parents, and its semi-chaperonage, is considered a very different thing from the promiscuous attendance of dance halls.

Many of the older girls, as we have seen, go much as they choose, in a free and easy fashion. They are not restricted, or if they are they “sneak” away. Two girls go together as a rule. They must have a little money--carfare and a quarter for entrance. But that is all that is needed; no chaperon and no escort. Bonds are off; freedom is absolute; the range of possibilities is almost limitless. From Fourteenth Street to 162nd Street, East Side and West, from Coney to Jersey, these eager feet in the path of pleasure find their way. They are not even dependent on the initiative of an escort for their good time. The girls decide on their dance hall, and once on the floor, a “pick-up” is easy to acquire. If they dance together, two men are sure to “break” provided the girls are good looking and dance well. Etiquette demands that they remain through the dance with this random partner. To desert him on the floor is an insult which he may avenge with violence. To sneak between the halves is somewhat risky and is considered mean. It is better, as one of our girls pointed out, to tell him frankly that “you can’t seem to keep step and you’d rather not dance it out.”

The dance hall, with its air of license, its dark corners and balconies, its tough dancing, and its heavy drinking, is becoming familiar to every reader of the newspapers. To the girls who attend them they are not all of one kind by any means. The best places are perhaps too “classy” for the West Side girl, and she has not the proper clothes. The character of the dances at any hall depends, our informants said, entirely upon the club that manages the affair. “If they don’t want nothing but society dancing, why the cop’ll keep the floor clear for them. But if some of these tough fellows are running the racket off they go to the cop and say, ‘We don’t want any dancing stopped here. See?’ and he leaves them alone.”[82] Home-going is not thought of until 1 or 2, often 3 or 4 a. m. The ball is often followed by a trip to a restaurant and home is finally reached at 6 a. m.

A party of this kind is not the single carnival of the year. Once a week, if not twice or thrice, the girl who goes to the dance hall goes through its round of excesses. The most startling fact in this connection is that it is the little girls who are doing the dancing in the public places of amusement in New York. The young girl usually settles down to keeping steady company some time before her early marriage, and goes less to the dance halls. Sixteen-year-old Josie, spending three out of every seven nights of the week at public dances, said, “When I’m eighteen or nineteen I won’t care about it any more. I’ll have a ‘friend’ then and won’t want to go anywheres.”

There is another group of girls who do not go to the dance halls. They have not even the small amount of money that would take them there, nor the one suit of good clothes that would make them presentable among the others. Lacking the tawdry finery and the superficial good manners of the other set, they are shabby and dirty and are known throughout the block as tough. Between them and the upper set, those who hover on the edge of toughness and fight for the poor distinction of just escaping it, there is a chasm of dislike, suspicion, and jealousy. The tough girls have the two universal amusement places--the street and the nickel “dump” (moving picture show). Besides these, they can make meeting places of the alleys, the docks, and vacant rooms in the tenements. These neglected, unlit cracks and crannies serve as traps for childhood of both sexes. Here children are snared in the darkness long before they are old enough to know the meaning of temptation. This is the most sinister phase of the recreation problem.

Marriage is for all these girls the final and greatest adventure of adolescence. They do not look past the adventure at the responsibilities which lie beyond. The question of children is waved aside as scarcely worth a hearing. Here, where the management of a household is so hazardous and stern an affair, it is most lightly assumed. The girl steps carelessly and boldly ahead. Sixteen is a bit early, but eighteen or nineteen is a good age and further delay is considered needless.

Sometimes the girl goes to church with her companion and is married in the presence of her family and friends. But very often she and her boy-husband indulge in a mild elopement. This is not necessarily done to evade the objection of parents. It is partly in obedience to the romantic instinct of youth and partly because the girl and her family cannot afford the parade of a real wedding. After one of these secret marriages, it is not uncommon for the girl to go on living at home and working, while her husband does the same. In a short time the fact of their marriage becomes known; the young pair become the center of neighborhood interest; and then, as a decidedly secondary matter, the question of their “taking up rooms” is considered. Probably the new wife goes on working in order to buy furniture for her home.

“What do you think!” exclaimed Mrs. Attinger to a visitor from the club who dropped in on a Saturday morning. “Our Lizzie’s married. She’s been married two months and they never told me till last week.” Mrs. Attinger seemed not at all displeased with the event, viewing it as a successful joke on herself and Lizzie’s friends. She went on to relate how her daughter had given up her job at the cigarette factory and had gone over to live in New Jersey with her husband, who was a day laborer. It also appeared, from her mother’s story, that the young couple had not started out under the most favorable auspices. Lizzie had visited Mrs. Attinger the day before with the news that her husband expected to be laid off soon and she was looking for work, as she needed money to furnish her house. Mrs. Attinger related these details without seeming to be particularly disturbed by them.

It was, after all, the familiar story of beginning wives and husbands on the West Side. It indicated that Lizzie had quickly found marriage to be an extremely sobering event. Henceforth she would have new problems to face, problems in which the adolescent hunger for good times would cease to be the dominant element. The will to play was to give place to the incessant struggle for existence which makes up the career of the wife of a casual laborer.