the windows. A man in a checked cap with a face knobbed like a squash
stood in front of the fireplace. They were pushing the women roughly
into the back room. The men were herded in a little group near the
door; detectives were taking their names. Ellen still sat on the couch.
“... complaint phoned to headquarters,” she heard somebody say. Then
she noticed that there was a phone on the little table beside the couch
where she sat. She picked it up and whispered softly for a number.
“Hello is this the district attorney’s office?... I want to speak to
Mr. Baldwin please.... George.... It’s lucky I knew where you were.
Is the district attorney there? That’s fine ... no you tell him about
it. There has been a horrible mistake. I’m at Hester Voorhees’; you
know she has a dancing studio. She was presenting some dances to some
friends and through some mistake the police are raiding the place ...”
The man in the derby was standing over her. “All right phoning wont do
no good.... Go ’long in the other room.”
“I’ve got the district attorney’s office on the wire. You speak to
him.... Hello is this Mr. Winthrop?... Yes O ... How do you do?
Will you please speak to this man?” She handed the telephone to the
detective and walked out into the center of the room. My I wish I hadnt
taken my hat off, she was thinking.
From the other room came a sound of sobbing and Hester Voorhees’ stagy
voice shrieking, “It’s a horrible mistake.... I wont be insulted like
this.”
The detective put down the telephone. He came over to Ellen. “I want to
apologize miss.... We acted on insufficient information. I’ll withdraw
my men immediately.”
“You’d better apologize to Mrs. Voorhees.... It’s her studio.”
“Well ladies and gents,” the detective began in a loud cheerful voice,
“we’ve made a little mistake and we’re very sorry.... Accidents will
happen ...”
Ellen slipped into the side room to get her hat and coat. She stood
some time before the mirror powdering her nose. When she went out
into the studio again everybody was talking at once. Men and women
stood round with sheets and bathrobes draped over their scanty
dancingclothes. The detectives had melted away as suddenly as they
came. Oglethorpe was talking in loud impassioned tones in the middle of
a group of young men.
“The scoundrels to attack women,” he was shouting, red in the face,
waving his headdress in one hand. “Fortunately I was able to control
myself or I might have committed an act that I should have regretted to
my dying day.... It was only with the greatest selfcontrol...”
Ellen managed to slip out, ran down the stairs and out into drizzly
streets. She hailed a taxi and went home. When she had got her things
off she called up George Baldwin at his house. “Hello George, I’m
terribly sorry I had to trouble you and Mr. Winthrop. Well if you hadnt
happened to say at lunch you’d be there all the evening they probably
would be just piling us out of the black maria at the Jefferson Market
Court.... Of course it was funny. I’ll tell you about it sometime, but
I’m so sick of all that stuff.... Oh just everything like that æsthetic
dancing and literature and radicalism and psychoanalysis.... Just an
overdose I guess.... Yes I guess that’s it George.... I guess I’m
growing up.”
* * * * *
The night was one great chunk of black grinding cold. The smell of
the presses still in his nose, the chirrup of typewriters still in
his ears, Jimmy Herf stood in City Hall Square with his hands in his
pockets watching ragged men with caps and earsflaps pulled down over
faces and necks the color of raw steak shovel snow. Old and young their
faces were the same color, their clothes were the same color. A razor
wind cut his ears and made his forehead ache between the eyes.
“Hello Herf, think you’ll take the job?” said a milkfaced young man
who came up to him breezily and pointed to the pile of snow. “Why not,
Dan. I dont know why it wouldnt be better than spending all your life
rooting into other people’s affairs until you’re nothing but a goddam
traveling dictograph.”
“It’d be a fine job in summer all right.... Taking the West Side?”
“I’m going to walk up.... I’ve got the heebyjeebies tonight.”
“Jez man you’ll freeze to death.”
“I dont care if I do.... You get so you dont have any private life,
you’re just an automatic writing machine.”
“Well I wish I could get rid of a little of my private life.... Well
goodnight. I hope you find some private life Jimmy.”
Laughing, Jimmy Herf turned his back on the snow-shovelers and started
walking up Broadway, leaning into the wind with his chin buried in his
coatcollar. At Houston Street he looked at his watch. Five o’clock.
Gosh he was late today. Wouldnt be a place in the world where he could
get a drink. He whimpered to himself at the thought of the icy blocks
he still had to walk before he could get to his room. Now and then he
stopped to pat some life into his numb ears. At last he got back to
his room, lit the gasstove and hung over it tingling. His room was a
small square bleak room on the south side of Washington Square. Its
only furnishings were a bed, a chair, a table piled with books, and the
gasstove. When he had begun to be a little less cold he reached under
the bed for a basketcovered bottle of rum. He put some water to heat in
a tin cup on the gasstove and began drinking hot rum and water. Inside
him all sorts of unnamed agonies were breaking loose. He felt like the
man in the fairy story with an iron band round his heart. The iron band
was breaking.
He had finished the rum. Occasionally the room would start going round
him solemnly and methodically. Suddenly he said aloud: “I’ve got to
talk to her ... I’ve got to talk to her.” He shoved his hat down on his
head and pulled on his coat. Outside the cold was balmy. Six milkwagons
in a row passed jingling.
On West Twelfth two black cats were chasing each other. Everywhere was
full of their crazy yowling. He felt that something would snap in his
head, that he himself would scuttle off suddenly down the frozen street
eerily caterwauling.
He stood shivering in the dark passage, ringing the bell marked Herf
again and again. Then he knocked as loud as he could. Ellen came to the
door in a green wrapper. “What’s the matter Jimps? Havent you got a
key?” Her face was soft with sleep; there was a happy cozy suave smell
of sleep about her. He talked through clenched teeth breathlessly.
“Ellie I’ve got to talk to you.”
“Are you lit, Jimps?”
“Well I know what I’m saying.”
“I’m terribly sleepy.”
He followed her into her bedroom. She kicked off her slippers and got
back into bed, sat up looking at him with sleepweighted eyes.
“Dont talk too loud on account of Martin.”
“Ellie I dont know why it’s always so difficult for me to speak out
about anything.... I always have to get drunk to speak out.... Look
here do you like me any more?”
“You know I’m awfully fond of you and always shall be.”
“I mean love, you know what I mean, whatever it is ...” he broke in
harshly.
“I guess I dont love anybody for long unless they’re dead.... I’m a
terrible sort of person. It’s no use talking about it.”
“I knew it. You knew I knew it. O God things are pretty rotten for me
Ellie.”
She sat with her knees hunched up and her hands clasped round them
looking at him with wide eyes. “Are you really so crazy about me Jimps?”
“Look here lets get a divorce and be done with it.”
“Dont be in such a hurry, Jimps.... And there’s Martin. What about him?”
“I can scrape up enough money for him occasionally, poor little kid.”
“I make more than you do, Jimps.... You shouldnt do that yet.”
“I know. I know. Dont I know it?”
They sat looking at each other without speaking. Their eyes burned from
looking at each other. Suddenly Jimmy wanted terribly to be asleep, not
to remember anything, to let his head sink into blackness, as into his
mother’s lap when he was a kid.
“Well I’m going home.” He gave a little dry laugh. “We didn’t think
it’d all go pop like this, did we?”
“Goodnight Jimps,” she whined in the middle of a yawn. “But things dont
end.... If only I weren’ so terribly sleepy.... Will you put out the
light?”
He groped his way in the dark to the door. Outside the arctic morning
was growing gray with dawn. He hurried back to his room. He wanted to
get into bed and be asleep before it was light.
* * * * *
A long low room with long tables down the middle piled with silk and
crêpe fabrics, brown, salmonpink, emeraldgreen. A smell of snipped
thread and dress materials. All down the tables bowed heads auburn,
blond, black, brown of girls sewing. Errandboys pushing rolling stands
of hung dresses up and down the aisles. A bell rings and the room
breaks out with noise and talk shrill as a birdhouse.
Anna gets up and stretches out her arms. “My I’ve got a head,” she says
to the girl next her.
“Up last night?”
She nods.
“Ought to quit it dearie, it’ll spoil your looks. A girl cant burn the
candle at both ends like a feller can.” The other girl is thin and
blond and has a crooked nose. She puts her arm round Anna’s waist. “My
I wish I could put on a little of your weight.”
“I wish you could,” says Anna. “Dont matter what I eat it turns to fat.”
“Still you aint too fat.... You’re juss plump so’s they like to squeeze
ye. You try wearing boyishform like I told an you’ll look fine.”
“My boyfriend says he likes a girl to have shape.”
On the stairs they push their way through a group of girls listening to
a little girl with red hair who talks fast, opening her mouth wide and
rolling her eyes. “... She lived just on the next block at 2230 Cameron
Avenue an she’d been to the Hippodrome with some girlfriends and when
they got home it was late an they let her go home alone, up Cameron
Avenue, see? An the next morning when her folks began looking for her
they found her behind a Spearmint sign in a back lot.”
“Was she dead?”
“Sure she was.... A negro had done somethin terrible to her and then
he’d strangled her.... I felt terrible. I used to go to school with
her. An there aint a girl on Cameron Avenue been out after dark they’re
so scared.”
“Sure I saw all about it in the paper last night. Imagine livin right
on the next block.”
* * * * *
“Did you see me touch that hump back?” cried Rosie as he settled down
beside her in the taxi. “In the lobby of the theater?” He pulled at
the trousers that were tight over his knees. “That’s goin to give us
luck Jake. I never seen a hump back to fail.... if you touch him on the
hump ... Ou it makes me sick how fast these taxis go.” They were thrown
forward by the taxi’s sudden stop. “My God we almost ran over a boy.”
Jake Silverman patted her knee. “Poor ikle kid, was it all worked up?”
As they drove up to the hotel she shivered and buried her face in her
coatcollar. When they went to the desk to get the key, the clerk said
to Silverman, “There’s a gentleman waiting to see you sir.” A thickset
man came up to him taking a cigar out of his mouth. “Will you step this
way a minute please Mr. Silverman.” Rosie thought she was going to
faint. She stood perfectly still, frozen, with her cheeks deep in the
fur collar of her coat.
They sat in two deep armchairs and whispered with their heads together.
Step by step, she got nearer, listening. “Warrant ... Department of
Justice ... using the mails to defraud ...” She couldnt hear what Jake
said in between. He kept nodding his head as if agreeing. Then suddenly
he spoke out smoothly, smiling.
“Well I’ve heard your side Mr. Rogers.... Here’s mine. If you arrest
me now I shall be ruined and a great many people who have put their
money in this enterprise will be ruined.... In a week I can liquidate
the whole concern with a profit.... Mr. Rogers I am a man who has been
deeply wronged through foolishness in misplacing confidence in others.”
“I cant help that.... My duty is to execute the warrant.... I’m afraid
I’ll have to search your room.... You see we have several little
items ...” The man flicked the ash off his cigar and began to read in a
monotonous voice. “Jacob Silverman, alias Edward Faversham, Simeon J.
Arbuthnot, Jack Hinkley, J. J. Gold.... Oh we’ve got a pretty little
list.... We’ve done some very pretty work on your case, if I do say it
what shouldnt.”
They got to their feet. The man with the cigar jerked his head at a
lean man in a cap who sat reading a paper on the opposite side of the
lobby.
Silverman walked over to the desk. “I’m called away on business,”
he said to the clerk. “Will you please have my bill prepared? Mrs.
Silverman will keep the room for a few days.”
Rosie couldnt speak. She followed the three men into the elevator.
“Sorry to have to do this maam,” said the lean detective pulling at the
visor of his cap. Silverman opened the room door for them and closed it
carefully behind him. “Thank you for your consideration, gentlemen....
My wife thanks you.” Rosie sat in a straight chair in the corner of the
room. She was biting her tongue hard, harder to try to keep her lips
from twitching.
“We realize Mr. Silverman that this is not quite the ordinary criminal
case.”
“Wont you have a drink gentlemen?”
They shook their heads. The thickset man was lighting a fresh cigar.
“Allright Mike,” he said to the lean man. “Go through the drawers and
closet.”
“Is that regular?”
“If this was regular we’d have the handcuffs on you and be running the
lady here as an accessory.”
Rosie sat with her icy hands clasped between her knees swaying her body
from side to side. Her eyes were closed. While the detectives were
rummaging in the closet, Silverman took the opportunity to put his hand
on her shoulder. She opened her eyes. “The minute the goddam dicks take
me out phone Schatz and tell him everything. Get hold of him if you
have to wake up everybody in New York.” He spoke low and fast, his lips
barely moving.
Almost immediately he was gone, followed by the two detectives with a
satchel full of letters. His kiss was still wet on her lips. She looked
dazedly round the empty deathly quiet room. She noticed some writing
on the lavender blotter on the desk. It was his handwriting, very
scrawly: Hock everything and beat it; you are a good kid. Tears began
running down her cheeks. She sat a long while with her head dropped on
the desk kissing the penciled words on the blotter.
IV. Skyscraper
_The young man without legs has stopped still in the middle
of the south sidewalk of Fourteenth Street. He wears a blue
knitted sweater and a blue stocking cap. His eyes staring
up widen until they fill the paperwhite face. Drifts across
the sky a dirigible, bright tinfoil cigar misted with
height, gently prodding the rainwashed sky and the soft
clouds. The young man without legs stops still propped on
his arms in the middle of the south sidewalk of Fourteenth
Street. Among striding legs, lean legs, waddling legs, legs
in skirts and pants and knickerbockers, he stops perfectly
still, propped on his arms, looking up at the dirigible._
Jobless, Jimmy Herf came out of the Pulizter Building. He stood beside
a pile of pink newspapers on the curb, taking deep breaths, looking up
the glistening shaft of the Woolworth. It was a sunny day, the sky was
a robin’s egg blue. He turned north and began to walk uptown. As he
got away from it the Woolworth pulled out like a telescope. He walked
north through the city of shiny windows, through the city of scrambled
alphabets, through the city of gilt letter signs.
Spring rich in gluten.... Chockful of golden richness, delight in
every bite, THE DADDY OF THEM ALL, spring rich in gluten. Nobody can
buy better bread than PRINCE ALBERT. Wrought steel, monel, copper,
nickel, wrought iron. _All the world loves natural beauty._ LOVE’S
BARGAIN that suit at Gumpel’s best value in town. Keep that schoolgirl
complexion.... JOE KISS, starting, lightning, ignition and generators.
Everything made him bubble with repressed giggles. It was eleven
o’clock. He hadnt been to bed. Life was upside down, he was a fly
walking on the ceiling of a topsy-turvy city. He’d thrown up his job,
he had nothing to do today, tomorrow, next day, day after. Whatever
goes up comes down, but not for weeks, months. Spring rich in gluten.
He went into a lunchroom, ordered bacon and eggs, toast and coffee, sat
eating them happily, tasting thoroughly every mouthful. His thoughts
ran wild like a pasture full of yearling colts crazy with sundown. At
the next table a voice was expounding monotonously:
“Jilted ... and I tell you we had to do some cleaning. They were all
members of your church you know. We knew the whole story. He was
advised to put her away. He said, ‘No I’m going to see it through’.”
Herf got to his feet. He must be walking again. He went out with a
taste of bacon in his teeth.
_Express service meets the demands of spring._ O God to meet the
demands of spring. No tins, no sir, but there’s rich quality in every
mellow pipeful.... SOCONY. One taste tells more than a million words.
The yellow pencil with the red band. Than a million words, than a
million words. “All right hand over that million.... Keep him covered
Ben.” The Yonkers gang left him for dead on a bench in the park. They
stuck him up, but all they got was a million words.... “But Jimps I’m
so tired of booktalk and the proletariat, cant you understand?”
Chockful of golden richness, spring.
Dick Snow’s mother owned a shoebox factory. She failed and he came
out of school and took to standing on streetcorners. The guy in the
softdrink stand put him wise. He’d made two payments on pearl earings
for a blackhaired Jewish girl with a shape like a mandolin. They waited
for the bankmessenger in the L station. He pitched over the turnstile
and hung there. They went off with the satchel in a Ford sedan.
Dick Snow stayed behind emptying his gun into the dead man. In the
deathhouse he met the demands of spring by writing a poem to his mother
that they published in the _Evening Graphic_.
With every deep breath Herf breathed in rumble and grind and painted
phrases until he began to swell, felt himself stumbling big and vague,
staggering like a pillar of smoke above the April streets, looking into
the windows of machineshops, buttonfactories, tenementhouses, felt of
the grime of bedlinen and the smooth whir of lathes, wrote cusswords on
typewriters between the stenographer’s fingers, mixed up the pricetags
in departmentstores. Inside he fizzled like sodawater into sweet
April syrups, strawberry, sarsaparilla, chocolate, cherry, vanilla
dripping foam through the mild gasolineblue air. He dropped sickeningly
fortyfour stories, crashed. And suppose I bought a gun and killed
Ellie, would I meet the demands of April sitting in the deathhouse
writing a poem about my mother to be published in the _Evening Graphic_?
He shrank until he was of the smallness of dust, picking his way over
crags and bowlders in the roaring gutter, climbing straws, skirting
motoroil lakes.
He sat in Washington Square, pink with noon, looking up Fifth Avenue
through the arch. The fever had seeped out of him. He felt cool and
tired. Another spring, God how many springs ago, walking from the
cemetery up the blue macadam road where fieldsparrows sang and the sign
said: Yonkers. In Yonkers I buried my boyhood, in Marseilles with the
wind in my face I dumped my calf years into the harbor. Where in New
York shall I bury my twenties? Maybe they were deported and went out to
sea on the Ellis Island ferry singing the International. The growl of
the International over the water, fading sighing into the mist.
DEPORTED
James Herf young newspaper man of 190 West 12th Street
recently lost his twenties. Appearing before Judge Merivale
they were remanded to Ellis Island for deportation as
undesirable aliens. The younger four Sasha Michael Nicholas
and Vladimir had been held for some time on a charge of
criminal anarchy. The fifth and sixth were held on a
technical charge of vagrancy. The later ones Bill Tony
and Joe were held under various indictments including
wifebeating, arson, assault, and prostitution. All were
convicted on counts of misfeasance, malfeasance, and
nonfeasance.
Oyez oyez oyez prisoner at the bar.... I find the evidence
dubious said the judge pouring himself out a snifter.
The clerk of the court who was stirring an oldfashioned
cocktail became overgrown with vineleaves and the courtroom
reeked with the smell of flowering grapes and the Shining
Bootlegger took the bulls by the horns and led them lowing
gently down the courthouse steps. “Court is adjourned
by hicky,” shouted the judge when he found gin in his
waterbottle. The reporters discovered the mayor dressed
in a leopard skin posing as Civic Virtue with his foot
on the back of Princess Fifi the oriental dancer. Your
correspondent was leaning out of the window of the Banker’s
Club in the company of his uncle, Jefferson T. Merivale,
wellknown clubman of this city and two lamb chops well
peppered. Meanwhile the waiters were hastily organizing
an orchestra, using the potbellies of the Gausenheimers
for snaredrums. The head waiter gave a truly delightful
rendition of _My Old Kentucky Home_, utilizing for the
first time the resonant bald heads of the seven directors
of the Well Watered Gasoline Company of Delaware as a
xylophone. And all the while the Shining Bootlegger in
purple running drawers and a blue-ribbon silk hat was
leading the bulls up Broadway to the number of two million,
threehundred and fortytwo thousand, five hundred and one.
As they reached the Spuyten Duyvil, they were incontinently
drowned, rank after rank, in an attempt to swim to Yonkers.
And as I sit here, thought Jimmy Herf, print itches like a
rash inside me. I sit here pockmarked with print. He got to
his feet. A little yellow dog was curled up asleep under
the bench. The little yellow dog looked very happy. “What I
need’s a good sleep,” Jimmy said aloud.
* * * * *
“What are you goin to do with it, Dutch, are you goin to hock it?”
“Francie I wouldnt take a million dollars for that little gun.”
“For Gawd’s sake dont start talkin about money, now.... Next thing some
cop’ll see it on your hip and arrest you for the Sullivan law.”
“The cop who’s goin to arrest me’s not born yet.... Just you forget
that stuff.”
Francie began to whimper. “But Dutch what are we goin to do, what are
we goin to do?”
Dutch suddenly rammed the pistol into his pocket and jumped to his
feet. He walked jerkily back and forth on the asphalt path. It was
a foggy evening, raw; automobiles moving along the slushy road made
an endless interweaving flicker of cobwebby light among the skeleton
shrubberies.
“Jez you make me nervous with your whimperin an cryin.... Cant you shut
up?” He sat down beside her sullenly again. “I thought I heard somebody
movin in the bushes.... This goddam park’s full of plainclothes men....
There’s nowhere you can go in the whole crummy city without people
watchin you.”
“I wouldnt mind it if I didnt feel so rotten. I cant eat anythin
without throwin up an I’m so scared all the time the other girls’ll
notice something.”
“But I’ve told you I had a way o fixin everythin, aint I? I promise you
I’ll fix everythin fine in a couple of days.... We’ll go away an git
married. We’ll go down South.... I bet there’s lots of jobs in other
places.... I’m gettin cold, let’s get the hell outa here.”
“Oh Dutch,” said Francie in a tired voice as they walked down the
muddyglistening asphalt path, “do you think we’re ever goin to have a
good time again like we used to?”
“We’re S.O.L. now but that dont mean we’re always goin to be. I lived
through those gas attacks in the Oregon forest didnt I? I been dopin
out a lot of things these last few days.”
“Dutch if you go and get arrested there’ll be nothin left for me to do
but jump in the river.”
“Didnt I tell you I wasnt goin to get arrested?”
Mrs. Cohen, a bent old woman with a face brown and blotched like a
russet apple, stands beside the kitchen table with her gnarled hands
folded over her belly. She sways from the hips as she scolds in an
endless querulous stream of Yiddish at Anna sitting blearyeyed with
sleep over a cup of coffee: “If you had been blasted in the cradle
it would have been better, if you had been born dead.... Oy what for
have I raised four children that they should all of them be no good,
agitators and streetwalkers and bums...? Benny in jail twice, and Sol
God knows where making trouble, and Sarah accursed given up to sin
kicking up her legs at Minski’s, and now you, may you wither in your
chair, picketing for the garment workers, walking along the street
shameless with a sign on your back.”
Anna dipped a piece of bread in the coffee and put it in her mouth. “Aw
mommer you dont understand,” she said with her mouth full.