done in all my life, Wheeler, almost like doing something for the war,
the way these women in the pretty white caps have done, and you know
we--we haven't turned a finger for it except to--to gain--if I was
to--to marry Gerald for those few weeks, Wheeler. I know it's a--rotten
sacrifice, but I guess that's the only kind I'm capable of making."
He sat squat, with his knees spread.
"You crazy?" he said.
"It would mean, Wheeler, his dying happy. He doesn't know it's all up
with him. He'd be made happy for the poor little rest of his life. He
loves me. You see, Wheeler, I was his first--his only sweetheart. I'm on
a pedestal, he says, in his dreams. I never told you--but that boy was
willing to marry me, Wheeler, knowing--some--of the things I am. He's
always carried round a dream of me, you see--no, you wouldn't see, but
I've been--well, I guess sort of a medallion that won't tarnish in his
heart. Wheeler, for the boy's few weeks he has left? Wheeler?"
"Well, I'll be hanged!"
"I'm not turning holy, Wheeler. I am what I am. But that boy lying
out there--I can't bear it! It wouldn't make any difference with
us--afterward. You know where you stand with me and for always, but it
would mean the dying happy of a boy who fought for us. Let me marry
that boy, Wheeler. Let his light go out in happiness. Wheeler? Please,
Wheeler?" He would not meet her eyes. "Wheeler?"
"Go to it, Hester," he said, coughing about in his throat and rising to
walk away. "Bring him here and give him the fat of the land. You can
count on me to keep out of the way. Go to it," he repeated.
And so they were married, Hester holding his hand beside the hospital
cot, the man nurse and doctor standing by, and the chaplain incanting
the immemorial words. A bar of sunshine lay across the bed, and Gerald
pronounced each "I will" in a lifted voice that carried to the four
corners of the little room. She was allowed to stay that night past
hospital hours, and they talked with the dusk flowing over them.
"Hester, Hester," he said, "I should have had the strength to hold out
against your making this terrible sacrifice."
"It's the happiest hour of my life," she said, kissing him.
"I feel well enough to get up now, sweetheart."
"Gerald, don't force. You've weeks ahead before you are ready for that."
"But to-morrow, dear, home! In whose car are you calling for me
to-morrow to take me _home_?"
"In a friend's, dearest."
"Won't I be crowding up our little apartment? Describe it again to me,
dearest--our _home_."
"It's so little, Gerald. Three rooms and the littlest, babiest kitchen.
When you're once up, I'll teach its every corner to you."
Tears seeped through the line where his lids had been, and it was almost
more than she could bear.
"I'll make it up to you, though, Hester. I know I should have been
strong enough to hold out against your marrying me, but I'll make it up.
I've a great scheme; a sort of braille system of accountancy--"
"Please, Gerald--not now!"
"If only, Hester, I felt easier about the finances. Will your savings
stand the strain? Your staying at home from your work this way--and then
me--"
"Gerald dear, I've told you so often--I've saved more than we need."
"My girl!"
"My dear, my dear!" she said.
* * * * *
They moved him with hardly a jar in an army ambulance, and with the
yellow limousine riding alongside to be of possible aid, and she had the
bed stripped of its laces and cool with linen for him, and he sighed out
when they placed him on it and would not let go her hand.
"What a feeling of space for so little a room!"
"It's the open windows, love."
He lay back tiredly.
"What sweet linen!"
"I shopped it for you."
"You, too--you're in linen, Hester?"
"A percale shirt waist. I shopped it for you, too."
"Give me your hand," he said, and pressed a string of close kisses into
its palm.
The simplicity of the outrageous subterfuge amazed even her. She held
hothouse grapes at two dollars a pound to his lips, and he ate them
through a smile.
"Naughty, extravagant girl!" he said.
"I saw them on a fruit stand for thirty cents, and couldn't resist."
"Never mind; I'll make it up to you."
Later, he asked for braille books, turning his sightless face toward her
as he studied, trying to concentrate through the pain in his lung.
"If only you wouldn't insist upon the books awhile yet, dear. The doctor
says it's too soon."
"I feel so strong, Hester, with you near, and, besides, I must start the
pot boiling."
She kissed down into the high nap of his hair, softly.
Evenings, she read to him newspaper accounts of his fellow-soldiers, and
the day of the peace, for which he had paid so terribly, she rolled his
bed, alone, with a great tugging and straining, to the open window,
where the wind from the river could blow in against him and steamboat
whistles shoot up like rockets.
She was so inexpressibly glad for the peace day. Somehow, it seemed
easier and less blackly futile to give him up.
Of Wheeler for three running weeks she had not a glimpse, and then, one
day, he sent up a hamper, not a box, but an actual trunk of roses, and
she, in turn, sent them up the back way to Kitty's flat, not wanting
even their fragrance released.
With Kitty there were little hurried confabs each day outside the
apartment door in the hallway before the elevator shaft. A veil of awe
seemed to wrap the Drew woman.
"I can't get it out of my head, Hester. It's like a fairy story, and, in
another way, it's a scream--Wheeler standing for this."
"Sh-h, Kitty! His ears are so sensitive."
"Quit shushing me every time I open my mouth. Poor kid! Let me have a
look at him. He wouldn't know."
"No! No!"
"God! if it wasn't so sad it would be a scream--Wheeler footing the
bills!"
"Oh--you! Oh--oh--you!"
"All right, all right! Don't take the measles over it. I'm going. Here's
some chicken broth I brought down. Ed sent it up to me from Sherry's."
But Hester poured it into the sink for some nameless reason, and brewed
some fresh from a fowl she tipped the hallboy a dollar to go out and
purchase.
She slept on a cot at the foot of his bed, so sensitive to his waking
that almost before he came up to consciousness she was at his side. All
day she wore the little white shirt waists, a starchy one fresh each
morning, and at night scratchy little unlacy nightgowns with long
sleeves and high yokes. He liked to run his hand along the crispness of
the fabric.
"I love you in cool stuff, Hester. You're so cool yourself, I always
think of you in the little white waist and blue skirt. You remember,
dear--Finleys' annual?"
"I--I'm going to dress like that for you always, Gerald."
"I won't let you be going back to work for long, sweetheart. I've some
plans up my sleeve, I have."
"Yes! Yes!"
But when the end did come, it was with as much of a shock as if she had
not been for days expecting it. The doctor had just left, puncturing his
arm and squirting into his poor tired system a panacea for the pain. But
he would not react to it, fighting down the drowsiness.
"Hester," he said, suddenly, and a little weakly, "lean down,
sweetheart, and kiss me--long--long--"
She did, and it was with the pressure of her lips to his that he died.
* * * * *
It was about a week after the funeral that Wheeler came back. She was on
the _chaise-longue_ that had been dragged out into the parlor, in the
webbiest of white negligées, a little large-eyed, a little subdued, but
sweetening the smile she turned toward him by a trick she had of lifting
the brows.
"Hel-lo, Wheeler!" she said, raising her cheek to be kissed.
He trailed his lips, but did not seek her mouth, sitting down rather
awkwardly and in the spread-kneed fashion he had.
"Well, girl--you all right?"
"You helped," she said.
"It gave me a jolt, too. I made over twenty-five thousand to the Red
Cross on the strength of it."
"Thank you, Wheeler."
"Lord!" he said, rising and rubbing his hands together. "Give us a
couple of fingers to drink, honey; I'm cotton-mouthed."
She reached languidly for a blue-enameled bell, lying back, with her
arms dangling and her smile out. Then, as if realizing that the occasion
must be lifted, turned her face to him.
"Old bummer!" she said, using one of her terms of endearment for him and
two-thirds closing her eyes. Then did he stoop and kiss her roundly on
the lips.
* * * * *
For the remainder of this tale, I could wish for a pen supernally
dipped, or for a metaphysician's plating to my vernacular, or for the
linguistic patois of that land off somewhere to the west of Life. Or
maybe just a neurologist's chart of Hester's nerve history would help.
In any event, after an evening of musical comedy and of gelatinous
dancing, Hester awoke at four o'clock the next morning out of an hour of
sound sleep, leaping to her knees there in bed like a quick flame, her
gesture shooting straight up toward the jointure of wall and ceiling.
"Gerald!" she called, her smoky black hair floating around her and her
arms cutting through the room's blackness. "Gerald!" Suddenly the room
was not black. It was light with the Scandinavian blondness of Gerald,
the head of him nebulous there above the pink-satin canopy of her
dressing table, and, more than that, the drained lakes of his sockets
were deep with eyes. Yes, in all their amazing blueness, but queerly
sharpened to steel points that went through Hester and through her as if
bayonets were pushing into her breasts and her breathing.
"Gerald!" she shrieked, in one more cry that curdled the quiet, and sat
up in bed, trembling and hugging herself, and breathing in until her
lips were drawn shudderingly against her teeth like wind-sucked window
shades.
"Gerald!" And then the picture did a sort of moving-picture fade-out,
and black Lottie came running with her hair grotesquely greased and
flattened to take out the kink, and gave her a drink of water with the
addition of two drops from a bottle, and turned on the night light and
went back to bed.
The next morning Hester carried about what she called "a head," and,
since it was Wheeler's day at Rosencranz, remained in bed until three
o'clock, Kitty curled at the foot of it the greater part of the
forenoon.
"It was the rotten night did me up. Dreams! Ugh! dreams!"
"No wonder," diagnosed Kitty, sweetly. "Indigestion from having your
cake and eating it."
At three she dressed and called for her car, driving down to the Ivy
Funeral Rooms, a Gothic Thanatopsis, set, with one of those laughs up
her sleeves in which the vertical city so loves to indulge, right in
the heart of the town, between an automobile-accessory shop and a
quick-lunch room. Gerald had been buried from there with simple
flag-draped service in the Gothic chapel that was protected from the
view and roar of the Elevated trains by suitably stained windows. There
was a check in Hester's purse made out for an amount that corresponded
to the statement she had received from the Ivy Funeral Rooms. And right
here again, for the sake of your elucidation, I could wish at least for
the neurologist's chart. At the very door to the establishment--with
one foot across the threshold, in fact--she paused, her face tilted
toward the corner where wall and ceiling met, and at whatever she saw
there her eyes dilated widely and her left hand sprang to her bosom as
if against the incision of quick steel. Then, without even entering, she
rushed back to her car again, urging her chauffeur, at the risk of every
speed regulation, homeward.
That was the beginning of purgatorial weeks that were soon to tell on
Hester. They actually brought out a streak of gray through her hair,
which Lottie promptly dyed and worked under into the lower part of her
coiffure. For herself, Hester would have let it remain.
Wheeler was frankly perplexed. God knows it was bad enough to be called
upon to endure streaks of unreasonableness at Rosencranz, but Hester
wasn't there to show that side to him if she had it. To be pretty frank
about it, she was well paid not to. Well paid! He'd done his part. More
than nine out of ten would have done. Been made a jay of, if the truth
was known. She was a Christmas-tree bauble and was expected to throw off
holiday iridescence. There were limits!
"You're off your feed, girl. Go off by yourself and speed up."
"It's the nights, Gerald. Good God--I mean Wheeler! They kill me. I
can't sleep. Can't you get a doctor who will give me stronger drops? He
doesn't know my case. Nerves, he calls it. It's this head. If only I
could get rid of this head!"
"You women and your nerves and your heads! Are you all alike? Get out
and get some exercise. Keep down your gasoline bills and it will send
your spirits up. There's such a thing as having it too good."
She tried to meet him in lighter vein after that, dressing her most
bizarrely, and greeting him one night in a batik gown, a new process of
dyeing that could be flamboyant and narrative in design. This one, a
long, sinuous robe that enveloped her slimness like a flame, beginning
down around the train in a sullen smoke and rushing up to her face in a
burst of crimson.
He thought her so exquisitely rare that he was not above the poor, soggy
device of drinking his dinner wine from the cup of her small crimson
slipper, and she dangled on his knee like the dangerous little flame she
none too subtly purported to be, and he spanked her quickly and softly
across the wrists because she was too nervous to hold the match steadily
enough for his cigar to take light, and then kissed away all the mock
sting.
But the next morning, at the fateful four o'clock, and in spite of four
sleeping-drops, Lottie on the cot at the foot of her bed, and the night
light burning, she awoke on the crest of such a shriek that a stiletto
might have slit the silence, the end of the sheet crammed up and into
her mouth, and, ignoring all of Lottie's calming, sat up on her knees,
her streaming eyes on the jointure of wall and ceiling, where the open,
accusing ones of Gerald looked down at her. It was not that they were
terrible eyes. They were full of the sweet blue, and clear as lakes. It
was only that they knew. Those eyes _knew. They knew!_ She tried the
device there at four o'clock in the morning of tearing up the still
unpaid check to the Ivy Funeral Rooms, and then she curled up in bed
with her hand in the negro maid's and her face half buried in the
pillow.
"Help me, Lottie!" she begged; "help me!"
"Law! Pore child! Gettin' the horrors every night thisaway! I've been
through it before with other ladies, but I never saw a case of the sober
horrors befoh. Looks like they's the worst of all. Go to sleep, child.
I's holdin'."
You see, Lottie had looked in on life where you and I might not. A
bird's-eye view may be very, very comprehensive, but a domestic's-eye
view can sometimes be very, very close.
And then, one night, after Hester had beat her hands down into the
mattress and implored Gerald to close his accusing eyes, she sat up in
bed, waiting for the first streak of dawn to show itself, railing at the
pain in her head.
"God! My head! Rub it, Lottie! My head! My eyes! The back of my neck!"
The next morning she did what you probably have been expecting she would
do. She rose and dressed, sending Lottie to bed for a needed rest.
Dressed herself in the little old blue-serge suit that had been hanging
in the very back of a closet for four years, with a five-and two
ten-dollar bills pinned into its pocket, and pressed the little blue
sailor hat down on the smooth, winglike quality of her hair. She looked
smaller, peculiarly, indescribably younger. She wrote Wheeler a note,
dropping it down the mail-chute in the hall, and then came back, looking
about rather aimlessly for something she might want to pack. There was
nothing; so she went out quite bare and simply, with all her lovely
jewels in the leather case on the upper shelf of the bedroom closet, as
she had explained to Wheeler in the note.
That afternoon she presented herself to Lichtig. He was again as you
would expect--round-bellied, and wore his cigar up obliquely from one
corner of his mouth. He engaged her immediately at an increase of five
dollars a week, and as she was leaving with the promise to report at
eight-thirty the next morning he pinched her cheek, she pulling away
angrily.
"None of that!"
"My mistake," he apologized.
She considered it promiscuous and cheap, and you know her aversion for
cheapness.
Then she obtained, after a few forays in and out of brownstone houses
in West Forty-fifth Street, one of those hall bedrooms so familiar to
human-interest stories--the iron-bed, washstand, and slop-jar kind.
There was a five-dollar advance required. That left her twenty dollars.
She shopped a bit then in an Eighth Avenue department store, and, with
the day well on the wane, took a street car up to the Ivy Funeral Rooms.
This time she entered, but the proprietor did not recognize her until
she explained. As you know, she looked smaller and younger, and there
was no tan car at the curb.
"I want to pay this off by the week," she said, handing him out
the statement and a much-folded ten-dollar bill. He looked at her,
surprised. "Yes," she said, her teeth biting off the word in a click.
"Certainly," he replied, handing her out a receipt for the ten.
"I will pay five dollars a week hereafter."
"That will stretch it out to twenty-eight weeks," he said, still
doubtfully.
"I can't help it; I must."
"Certainly," he said, "that will be all right," but looked puzzled.
That night she slept in the hall bedroom in the Eighth Avenue,
machine-stitched nightgown. She dropped off about midnight, praying not
to awaken at four. But she did--with a slight start, sitting up in bed,
her eyes where the wall and ceiling joined.
Gerald's face was there, and his blue eyes were open, but the steel
points were gone. They were smiling eyes. They seemed to embrace her, to
wash her in their fluid.
All her fear and the pain in her head were gone. She sat up, looking at
him, the tears streaming down over her smile and her lips moving.
Then, sighing out like a child, she lay back on the pillow, turned over,
and went to sleep.
* * * * *
And this is the story of Hester which so insisted to be told. I think
she must have wanted you to know. And wanted Gerald to know that you
know, and, in the end, I rather think she wanted God to know.
THE VERTICAL CITY
In the most vertical city in the world men have run up their dreams
and their ambitions into slim skyscrapers that seem to exclaim at the
audacity of the mere mortar that sustains them.
Minarets appear almost to tamper with the stars; towers to impale
the moon. There is one fifty-six-story rococo castle, built from the
five-and-ten-cent-store earnings of a merchant prince, that shoots
upward with the beautiful rush of a Roman candle.
Any Manhattan sunset, against a sky that looks as if it might give to
the poke of a finger, like a dainty woman's pink flesh, there marches a
silhouetted caravan of tower, dome, and the astonished crests of office
buildings.
All who would see the sky must gaze upward between these rockets of
frenzied architecture, which are as beautiful as the terrific can ever
be beautiful.
In the vertical city there are no horizons of infinitude to rest the
eyes; rather little breakfast napkins of it showing between walls and
up through areaways. Sometimes even a lunchcloth of five, six, or maybe
sixty hundred stars or a bit of daylight-blue with a caul of sunshine
across, hoisted there as if run up a flagpole.
It is well in the vertical city if the eyes and the heart have a lift
to them, because, after all, these bits of cut-up infinitude, as
many-shaped as cookies, even when seen from a tenement window and to the
accompaniment of crick in the neck, are as full of mysterious alchemy
over men's hearts as the desert sky or the sea sky. That is why, up
through the wells of men's walls, one glimpse of sky can twist the soul
with--oh, the bitter, the sweet ache that lies somewhere within the
heart's own heart, curled up there like a little protozoa. That is, if
the heart and the eyes have a lift to them. Marylin's had.
* * * * *
Marylin! How to convey to you the dance of her! The silver scheherazade
of poplar leaves when the breeze is playful? No. She was far nimbler
than a leaf tugging at its stem. A young faun on the brink of a pool,
startled at himself? Yes, a little. Because Marylin's head always had a
listening look to it, as if for a message that never quite came through
to her. From where? Marylin didn't know and didn't know that she didn't
know. Probably that accounted for a little pucker that could sometimes
alight between her eyes. Scarcely a shadow, rather the shadow of a
shadow. A lute, played in a western breeze? Once a note of music,
not from a lute however, but played on a cheap harmonica, had caught
Marylin's heart in a little ecstasy of palpitations, but that doesn't
necessarily signify. Zephyr with Aurora playing? Laughter holding both
his sides?
How Marylin, had she understood it, would have kicked the high hat off
of such Miltonic phrasing. Ah, she was like--herself!
And yet, if there must be found a way to convey her to you more quickly,
let it be one to which Marylin herself would have dipped a bow.
She was like nothing so much as unto a whole two dollars' worth of
little five-cent toy balloons held captive in a sea breeze and tugging
toward some ozonic beyond in which they had never swum, yet strained so
naturally toward.
That was it! A whole two dollars' worth of tugging balloons.
Red--blue--orange--green--silver, jerking in hollow-sided collisions,
and one fat-faced pink one for ten cents, with a smile painted on one
side and a tear on the other.
And what if I were to tell you that this phantom of a delight of a
Marylin, whose hair was a sieve for sun and whose laughter a streamer of
it, had had a father who had been shot to death on the underslinging
of a freight car in one of the most notorious prison getaways ever
recorded, and whose mother--but never mind right here; it doesn't matter
to the opening of this story, because Marylin, with all her tantalizing
capacity for paradox, while every inch a part of it all, was not at all
a part of it.
For five years, she who had known from infancy the furtive Bradstreet of
some of the vertical city's most notorious aliases and gang names, and
who knew, almost by baptism of fire, that there were short cuts to an
easier and weightier wage envelope, had made buttonholes from eight
until five on the blue-denim pleat before it was stitched down the front
of men's blue-denim shirts.
At sweet sixteen she, whose mother had borne her out of wed--well,
anyway, at sweet sixteen, like the maiden in the saying, she had never
been kissed, nor at seventeen, but at eighteen--
It was this way. Steve Turner--"Getaway," as the quick lingo of the
street had him--liked her. Too well. I firmly believe, though, that
if in the lurid heat lightning of so stormy a career as Getaway's the
beauty of peace and the peace of beauty ever found moment, Marylin
nestled in that brief breathing space somewhere deep down within the
noisy cabaret of Getaway's being. His eyes, which had never done
anything of the sort except under stimulus of the horseradish which he
ate in quantities off quick-lunch counters, could smart to tears at the
thought of her. And over the emotions which she stirred in him, and
which he could not translate, he became facetious--idiotically so.
Slim and supine as the bamboo cane he invariably affected, he would wait
for her, sometimes all of the six work-a-evenings of the week, until
she came down out of the grim iron door of the shirt factory where she
worked, his one hip flung out, bamboo cane bent almost double, and, in
his further zeal to attitudinize, one finger screwing up furiously at
a vacant upper lip. That was a favorite comedy mannerism, screwing at
where a mustache might have been.
"Getaway!" she would invariably admonish, with her reproach all in the
inflection and with the bluest blue in her eyes he had ever seen outside
of a bisque doll's.
The peculiar joy, then, of linking her sweetly resisting arm into his;
of folding over each little finger, so! until there were ten tendrils
at the crotch of his elbow and his heart. Of tilting his straw "katy"
forward, with his importance of this possession, so that the back of his
head came out in a bulge and his hip, and then of walking off with her,
so! Ah yes, so!
MARYLIN _(who had the mysterious little jerk in her laugh of a very
young child_): "Getaway, you're the biggest case!"
GETAWAY _(wild to amuse her further_): "Hocus pocus, Salamagundi! I
smell the blood of an ice-cream sundae!"