"Getaway, stop your monkeyshines. The cop has his eye on you!"
GETAWAY _(sobered):_ "C'm on!"
Therein lay some of the wonder of her freshet laughter. Because to
Marylin a police officer was not merely a uniformed mentor of the law,
designed chiefly to hold up traffic for her passing, and with his night
stick strike security into her heart as she hurried home of short,
wintry evenings. A little procession of him and his equally dread
brother, the plain-clothes man, had significantly patrolled the days of
her childhood.
Once her mother, who had come home from a shopping expedition with the
inside pocket of her voluminous cape full of a harvest of the sheerest
of baby things to match Marylin's blond loveliness--batiste--a whole
bolt of Brussels lace--had bitten the thumb of a policeman until it
hung, because he had surprised her horribly by stepping in through the
fire escape as she was unwinding the Brussels lace.
Another time, from her mother's trembling knee, she had seen her father
in a crowded courtroom standing between two uniforms, four fingers
peeping over each of his shoulders!
A uniform had shot her father from the underpinnings of the freight
car. Her mother had died with the phantom of one marching across her
delirium. Even opposite the long, narrow, and exceedingly respectable
rooming house in which she now dwelt a uniform had stood for several
days lately, contemplatively.
There was a menacing flicker of them almost across her eyeballs, so
close they lay to her experience, and yet how she could laugh when
Getaway made a feint toward the one on her beat, straightening up into
exaggerated decorum as the eye of the law, noting his approach, focused.
"Getaway," said Marylin, hop-skipping to keep up with him now, "why has
old Deady got his eye on you nowadays?"
Here Getaway flung his most Yankee-Doodle-Dandy manner, collapsing
inward at his extremely thin waistline, arms akimbo, his step designed
to be a mincing one, and his voice as soprano as it could be.
"You don't know the half of it, dearie. I've been slapping granny's
wrist, just like that. Ts-s-st!"
But somehow the laughter had run out of Marylin's voice. "Getaway," she
said, stopping on the sidewalk, so that when he answered his face must
be almost level with hers--"you're up to something again."
"I'm up to snuff," he said, and gyrated so that the bamboo cane looped a
circle.
She almost cried as she looked at him, so swift was her change of mood,
her lips trembling with the quiver of flesh that has been bruised.
"Oh, Getaway!" she said, "get away." And pushed him aside that she might
walk on. He did not know, nor did she, for that matter, the rustling
that was all of a sudden through her voice, but it was almost one of
those moments when she could make his eyes smart.
But what he said was, "For the luvagod, whose dead?"
"Me, in here," she said, very quickly, and placed her hand to her flimsy
blouse where her heart beat under it.
"Whadda you mean, dead?"
"Just dead, sometimes--as if something inside of me that can't get out
had--had just curled up and croaked."
The walk from the shirt factory where Marylin worked, to the long, lean
house in the long, lean street where she roomed, smelled of unfastidious
bedclothes airing on window sills; of garbage cans that repulsed even
high-legged cats; of petty tradesmen who, mysteriously enough, with
aërial clotheslines flapping their perpetually washings, worked and
sweated and even slept in the same sour garments. Facing her there on
these sidewalks of slops, and the unprivacy of stoops swarming with
enormous young mothers and puny old children, Getaway, with a certain
fox pointiness out in his face, squeezed her arm until she could feel
the bite of his elaborately manicured finger nails.
"Marry me, Marylin," he said, "and you'll wear diamonds."
In spite of herself, his bay-rummed nearness was not unpleasant to her.
"Cut it out--here, Getaway," she said through a blush.
He hooked her very close to him by the elbow, and together they crossed
through the crash of a street bifurcated by elevated tracks.
"You hear, Marylin," he shouted above the din. "Marry me and you'll wear
diamonds."
"Getaway, you're up to something again!"
"Whadda you mean?"
"Diamonds on your twenty a week! It can't be done."
His gaze lit up with the pointiness. "I tell you, Marylin, I can promise
you headlights!"
"How?"
"Never you bother your little head how; O.K., though."
"_How_, Getaway?"
"Oh--clean--if that's what's worrying you. Clean-cut."
"It _is_ worrying me."
"Saw one on a little Jane yesterday out to Belmont race track. A
fist-load for a little trick like her. And sparkle! Say, every time that
little Jane daubed some whitewash on her little nosie she gave that
grand stand the squints. That's what I'm going to do. Sparkle you up!
With a diamond engagement ring. Oh boy! How's that? A diamond engagement
ring!"
"Oh, Getaway!" she said, with her hand on the flutter of her throat and
closing her eyes as if to imprison the vision against her lids. "A pure
white one with lots of fire dancing around it." And little Marylin, who
didn't want to want it, actually kissed the bare dot on her left ring
finger where she could feel the burn of it, and there in the crowded
street, where he knew he was surest of his privacy with her, he stole a
kiss off that selfsame finger, too.
"I'll make their eyes hang out on their cheeks like grapes when they see
you coming along, Marylin."
"I love them because they're so clear--and clean! Mountain water that's
been filtered through pebbles."
"Pebbles is right! I'm going to dike you out in one as big as a pebble.
And poils! Sa-y, they're what cost the spondulicks. A guy showed me a
string of little ones no bigger than pimples. Know what? That little
string could knock the three spots out of a thousand-dollar bond--I mean
bill!"
It was then that something flashed out of Marylin's face. A shade might
have been lowered; a candle blown out.
"Getaway," she said, with a quick little dig of fingers into his
forearm, "you're up to something!"
"Snuff, I said."
"What did you mean by that word, 'bond'?"
"Who built a high fence around the word 'bond'?"
"Bonds! All that stuff in the newspapers about those messengers
disappearing out of Wall Street with--bonds! Getaway, are you mixed up
in that? Getaway!"
"Well, well! I like that! I had you doped out for fair and warmer
to-day. The weather prophet didn't predict no brainstorm."
"That's not answering."
"Well, whadda you know! Miss Sherlock Holmes finds a corkscrew in the
wine cellar and is sore because it's crooked!"
"Getaway--answer."
"Whadda you want me to answer, Fairylin? That I'm the master mind behind
the--"
"It worries me so! You up in Monkey's room so much lately. You think I
don't know it? I do! All the comings and goings up there. Muggs Towers
sneaking up to Monkey's room in that messenger boy's suit he keeps
wearing all the time now. He's no more messenger boy than I am. Getaway,
tell me, you and Muggs up in Monkey's room so often? Footsteps up there!
Yours!"
"Gawalmighty! Now it's my footsteps!"
"I know them! Up in Monkey's room, right over mine. I know how you sneak
up there evenings after you leave me. It don't look nice your going into
the same house where I live, Getaway, even if it isn't to see me. It
don't look right from the outside!"
"Nobody can ever say I wanted to harm a hair of your little head. I even
look the other way when I pass your door. That's the kind of a modest
violet I am."
"It's not that, but the looks. That's the reason, I'll bet, if the
truth's known, why Monkey squirmed himself into that room over mine--to
hide your comings and goings as if they was to see me."
"Nothing of the kind!"
"Everything--up there--worries me so! Monkey's room right over mine.
My ceiling so full of soft footsteps that frighten me. I
know your footsteps, Getaway, just as well as anything. The
ball-of-your-foot--squeak! The-ball-of-your-foot--squeak!"
"Well, that's a good one! The-ball-of-me-foot--squeak!"
"Everybody tiptoeing! Muggs! Somebody's stocking feet! Monkey's. Steps
that aren't honest. All on my ceiling. Monkey never ought to have rented
a room in a respectable house like Mrs. Granady's. Nobody but genteel
young fellows holding down genteel jobs ever had that room before.
Monkey passing himself off as Mr. James Pollard, or whatever it is he
calls himself, just for the cover of a respectable house--or of me, for
all I know. You could have knocked me down with a feather the first time
I met him in the hall. If I did right I'd squeal."
"You would, like hell."
"Of course I wouldn't, but with Mrs. Granady trying to run a respectable
house, only the right kind of young fellows and girls rooming there,
it's not fair. Monkey getting his nose into a house like that and
hatching God knows what! Getaway, what do you keep doing up in that
room--all hours--you and all the pussyfooters?"
"That's the thanks a fellow gets for letting a straight word like
'marry' slip between his teeth; that's the thanks a fellow gets for
honest-to-God intentions of trying to get his girl out of a shirt
factory and dike her out in--"
"But, Getaway, if I was only sure it's all straight!"
"Well, if that's all you think of me--"
"All your big-gun talk about the ring. Of course I--I'd like it. How
could a girl help liking it? But only if it's on the level. Getaway--you
see, I hate to act suspicious all the time, but all your new silk shirts
and now the new checked suit and all. It don't match up with your
twenty-dollar job in the Wall Street haberdashery."
Then Getaway threw out one of his feints of mock surprise. "Didn't I
tell you, Fairylin? Well, whadda you know about that? I didn't tell her,
and me thinking I did."
"What, Getaway, what?"
"Why, I'm not working there any more. Why, Gawalmighty couldn't have
pleased that old screwdriver. He was so tight the dimes in his pocket
used to mildew from laying. He got sore as a pup at me one day just
because I--"
"Getaway, you never told me you lost that job that I got for you out of
the newspaper!"
"I didn't lose it, Marylin. I heard it when it fell. Jobs is like
vaccination, they take or they don't."
"They never take with you, Getaway."
"Don't you believe it. I'm on one now--"
"A job?"
"Aw, not the way you mean. Me and a guy got a business proposition on.
If it goes through, I'll buy you a marriage license engraved on solid
gold."
"What is it, then, the proposition?"
"Can't you trust me, Marylin, for a day or two, until it goes through?
Sometimes just talking about it is enough to put the jinx on a good
thing."
"You mean--"
"I mean I'm going to have money in my pockets."
"What kind of money?"
"Real money."
"_Honest_ money?"
"Honest-to-God money. And I'm going to dike you out. That's my idea.
Pink! That's the color for you. A pink sash and slippers, and one of
them hats that show your yellow hair right through it, and a lace
umbrella and--"
"And streamers on the hat! I've always been just crazy for streamers on
a hat."
"Red-white-and-blue ones!"
"No, just pink. Wide ones to dangle it like a basket."
"And slippers with real diamond buckles."
"What do you mean, Getaway? How can you give me real diamond shoe
buckles--"
"There you go again. Didn't you promise to trust me and my new business
proposition?"
"I do, only you've had so many--"
"You do--_only!_ Yah, you do, only you don't!"
"I--You see--Getaway--I know how desperate you can be--when you're
cornered. I'll never forget how you--you nearly killed a cop--once! Oh,
Getaway, when I think back, that time you got into such trouble with--"
"Leave it to a woman, by Jove! to spoil a fellow's good name, if she has
to rub her fingers in old soot to do it."
"I--I guess it is from seeing so much around me all the time that it's
in me so to suspect."
"Oh, it's in you all right. Gawalmighty knows that!"
"You see, it's because I've seen so much all my life. That's why it's
been so grand these last years since I'm alone and--and away from it.
Nothing to fear. My own little room and my own little job and me not
getting heart failure every time I recognize a plain-clothes man on the
beat or hear a night stick on the sidewalk jerk me out of my sleep.
Getaway, don't do anything bad. You had one narrow escape. You're
finger-printed. Headquarters wouldn't give you the benefit of a doubt if
there was one. Don't--Getaway!"
"Yah, stay straight and you'll stay lonesome."
"Money wouldn't make no difference with me, anyway, if everything else
wasn't all right. Nothing can be pink to me even if it is pink, unless
it's honest. That's why I hold back, Getaway--there's things in you
I--can't trust."
"Yah, fine chance of you holding back if I was to come rolling up to
your door in a six-cylinder--"
"I tell you, no! If I was that way I wouldn't be holding down the same
old job at the factory. I know plenty of boys who turn over easy money.
Too easy--"
"Then marry me, Marylin, and you'll wear diamonds. In a couple of days,
when this goes through, this deal with the fellows--oh, _honest_ deal,
if that's what you're opening your mouth to ask--I can stand up beside
you with money in my pockets. Twenty bucks to the pastor, just like
that! Then you can pick out another job and I'll hold it down for you.
Bet your life I will--Oh--here, Marylin--this way--quick!"
"Getaway, why did you turn down this street so all of a sudden? This
isn't my way home."
"It's only a block out of the way. Come on! Don't stand gassing."
"You-thought-that-fellow-on-the-corner-of-Dock-Street-might-be-a-plain
-clothes-man!"
"What if I did? Want me to go up and kiss him?"
"Why-should-you-care, Getaway?"
"Don't."
"But--"
"Don't believe in hugging the law, though. It's enough when it hugs
you."
"I want to go home, Getaway."
"Come on. I'll buy some supper. Steak and French frieds and some French
pastry with a cherry on top for your little sweet tooth. That's the kind
of a regular guy I am."
"No. I want to go home."
"All right, all right! I'm taking you there, ain't I?"
"Straight."
"Oh, you'll go straight, if you can't go that way anywhere but home."
They trotted the little detour in silence, the corners of her mouth
wilting, he would have declared, had he the words, like a field flower
in the hands of a picnicker. Marylin could droop that way, so suddenly
and so whitely that almost a second could blight her.
"Now you're mad, ain't you?" he said, ashamed to be so quickly
conciliatory and trying to make his voice grate.
"No, Getaway--not mad--only I guess--sad."
She stopped before her rooming house. It was as long and as lean and
as brown as a witch, and, to the more fanciful, something even of the
riding of a broom in the straddle of the doorway, with an empty flagpole
jutting from it. And then there was the cat, too--not a black one with
gold eyes, just one of the city's myriad of mackerel ones, with chewed
ear and a skillful crouch for the leap from ash to garbage can.
"I'm going in now, Getaway."
"Gowann! Get into your blue dress and I'll blow you to supper."
"Not to-night."
"Mad?"
"No. I said only--"
"Sad?"
"No--tired--I guess."
"Please, Marylin."
"No. Some other time."
"When? To-morrow? It's Saturday! Coney?"
"Oh!"
He thought he detected the flash of a dimple. He did. Remember, she was
very young and, being fanciful enough to find the witch in the face of
her rooming house, the waves at Coney Island, peanut cluttered as they
were apt to be, told her things. Silly, unrepeatable things. Nonsense
things. Little secret goosefleshing things. Prettinesses. And then the
shoot the chutes! That ecstatic leap of heart to lips and the feeling
of folly down at the very pit of her. Marylin did like the shoot the
chutes!
"All right, Getaway--to-morrow--Coney!"
He did not conceal his surge of pleasure, grasping her small hand in
both his. "Good girlie!"
"Good night, Getaway," she said, but with the inflection of something
left unsaid.
He felt the unfinished intonation, like a rocket that had never dropped
its stick, and started up the steps after her.
"What is it, Marylin?"
"Nothing," she said and ran in.
The window in her little rear room with the zigzag of fire escape across
it was already full of dusk. She took off her hat, a black straw with a
little pink-cotton rose on it, and, rubbing her brow where it had left a
red rut, sat down beside the window. There were smells there from a city
bouquet of frying foods; from a pool of old water near a drain pipe;
from the rear of a butcher shop. Slops. Noises, too. Babies, traffic,
whistles, oaths, barterings, women, strife, life. On her very
own ceiling the whisper of footsteps--of restless comings and
goings--stealthy comings and goings--and then after an hour,
suddenly and ever so softly, the ball-of-a-foot--squeak!
The-ball-of-a-foot--squeak!
Marylin knew that step.
And yet she sat, quiet. A star had come out. Looking up at the napkin of
sky let in through the walls of the vertical city, Marylin had learned
to greet it almost every clear evening. It did something for her. It
was a little voice. A little kiss. A little upside down pool of light
without a spill. A little of herself up there in that beyond--that
little napkin of beyond that her eyes had the lift to see.
* * * * *
Who are you, whose neck has never ached from nine hours a day, six days
a week, of bending over the blue-denim pleat that goes down the front
of men's shirts, to quiver a supersensitive, supercilious, and superior
nose over what, I grant you, may appear on the surface to be the omelet
of vulgarities fried up for you on the gladdest, maddest strip of
carnival in the world?
But it is simpler to take on the cold glaze of sophistication than to
remain simple. When the eyelids become weary, it is as if little
red dancing shoes were being wrapped away forever, or a very tight
heartstring had suddenly sagged, and when plucked at could no longer
plong.
To Marylin, whose neck very often ached clear down into her shoulder
blade and up into a bandeau around her brow, and to whom city walls
were sometimes like slaps confronting her whichever way she turned, her
enjoyment of Coney Island was as uncomplex as A B C. Untortured by any
awarenesses of relative values, too simple to strive to keep simple,
unself-conscious, and with a hungry heart, she was not a spectator, half
ashamed of being amused. She _was_ Coney Island! Her heart a shoot the
chutes for sheer swoops of joy, her eyes full of confetti points, the
surf creaming no higher than her vitality.
And it was so the evening following, as she came dancing down the
kicked-up sand of the beach, in a little bright-blue frock, mercerized
silk, if you please, with very brief sleeves that ended right up in the
jolliest part of her arm, with a half moon of vaccination winking out
roguishly beneath a finish of ribbon bow, and a white-canvas sport hat
with a jockey rosette to cap the little climax of her, and by no means
least, a metal coin purse, with springy insides designed to hold exactly
fifty cents in nickels.
Once on the sand, which ran away, tickling each step she took, her
spirits, it must be admitted, went just a little crazily off. The
window, you see, where Marylin sewed her buttonholes six days the week,
faced a brick wall that peeled with an old scrofula of white paint.
Coney Island faced a world of sky. So that when she pinched Getaway's
nose in between the lips of her coin purse and he, turning a double
somersault right in his checked suit, landed seated in a sprawl of mock
daze, off she went into peals of laughter only too ready to be released.
He bought her a wooden whirring machine, an instrument of noise that,
because it was not utilitarian, became a toy of delicious sound.
They rode imitation ocean waves at five cents a voyage, their only _mal
de mer_, regret when it was over. He bought her salt-water taffy, and
when the little red cave of her mouth became too ludicrously full of the
pully stuff he tried to kiss its state of candy paralysis, and instantly
she became sober and would have no more of his nonsense.
"Getaway," she cried, snapping fingers of inspiration, "let's go in
bathing!"
"I'll say we will!"
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?"