"No," she said. "When I'm out here I quit wanting things like that."
"Fine chance a fellow has to warm up to you!"
"Getaway!"
"What?"
"What did you do last night, after you walked home with me?"
"When?"
"You know when."
"Why, bless your heart, I went home, Fairylin!"
"Please, Getaway--"
"Home, Fairy."
"You were up in Monkey's room last night about eleven. Now think,
Getaway!"
"Aw now--"
"You were."
"Aw now--"
"Nobody can fool me on your step. You tiptoed for all you were worth,
but I knew it! The-ball-of your-foot--squeak! The-ball-of-your
foot--squeak!"
"Sure enough, now you mention it, maybe for a minute around eleven, but
only for a minute--"
"Please, Getaway, don't lie. It was for nearly all night. Comings and
goings on my ceiling until I couldn't sleep, not because they were so
noisy, but because they were so soft. Like ugly whispers. Is Monkey the
friend you got the deal on with, Getaway?"
"We just sat up there talking old times--"
"And Muggs, about eleven o'clock, sneaking up through the halls, dressed
like the messenger boy again. I saw him when I peeked out of the door to
see who it was tiptoeing. Getaway, for God's sake--"
He closed over her wrist then, his face extremely pointed. It was a bony
face, so narrow that the eyes and the cheek bones had to be pitched
close, and his black hair, usually so shiny, was down in a bang now,
because it was damp, and to Marylin there was something sinister in that
dip of bang which frightened her.
"What you don't know don't hurt you. You hear that? Didn't I tell you
that after a few days this business deal--_business_, get that?--will be
over. Then I'm going to hold down any old job your heart desires. But
first I'm going to have money in my pockets! That's the only way to make
this old world sit up and take notice. Spondulicks! Then I'm going to
carry you off and get spliced. See? Real money. Diamonds. If you weren't
so touchy, maybe you'd have diamonds sooner than you think. Want one
now?"
"Getaway, I know you're up to something. You and Monkey and Muggs are
tied up with those Wall Street bond getaways."
"For the luvagod, cut that talk here! First thing I know you'll have me
in a brainstorm too."
"Those fake messenger boys that get themselves hired and, instead of
delivering the bonds from one office to another--disappear with them.
Muggs isn't wearing that messenger's uniform for nothing. You and Monkey
are working with him under cover on something. You can't pass a cop any
more without tightening up. I can feel it when I have your arm. You've
got that old over-your-shoulder look to you, Getaway. My father--had it.
My--mother--too. Getaway!"
"By gad! you can't beat a woman!"
"You don't deny it."
"I do!"
"Oh, Getaway, I'm glad then, glad!"
"Over-the-shoulder look. Why, if I'd meet a plain-clothes this minute
I'd go up and kiss him--with my teeth in his ear. That's how much I got
to be afraid of."
"Oh, Getaway, I'm so glad!"
"Well, then, lay off--"
"Getaway, you jumped then! Like somebody had hit you, and it was only a
kid popping a paper bag."
"You get on my nerves. You'd make a cat nervous, with your suspecting!
The more a fellow tries to do for a girl like you the less--Look here
now, you got to get the hell out of my business."
She did not reply, but lay to the accompaniment of his violent
nervousness and pinchings into the sand, with her face still away from
him, while the dusk deepened and the ocean quieted.
After a while: "Now, Marylin, don't be sore. I may be a rotten egg some
ways, but when it comes to you, I'm there."
"I'm not sore, Getaway," she said, with her voice still away from him.
"Only I--Let's not talk for a minute. It's so quiet out here--so full of
rest."
He sat, plainly troubled, leaning back on the palms of his hands and
dredging his toes into the sand. In the violet light the tender line of
her chin to her throat still teased him.
Down farther along the now deserted beach a youth in a bathing suit was
playing a harmonica, his knees hunched under his chin, his mouth and
hand sliding at cross purposes along the harp. That was the silhouette
of him against a clean sky, almost Panlike, as if his feet might be
cloven.
What he played, if it had any key at all, was rather in the mood of
Chopin's Nocturne in D flat major. A little sigh for the death of a day,
a sob for the beauty of that death, and a hope and ecstasy for the new
day yet unborn--all of that on a little throbbing mouth organ.
"Getaway," cried Marylin, and sat up, spilling sand, "that's it! That's
what I meant a while ago. Hear? It can't be talked. That's it on the
mouth organ!"
"It?"
"It! Yes, like I said. Somebody has to feel it inside of him, just like
I do, before he can understand. Can't you feel it? Please! Listen."
"Aw, that's an old jew's-harp. I'll buy you one. How's that?"
"All right, I guess," she said, starting off suddenly toward the
bathhouse.
He was relieved that she had thrown off the silence.
"Ain't mad any more, are you, Marylin?"
"No, Getaway--not mad."
"Mustn't get fussy that way with me, Marylin. It scares me off. I've had
something to show you all day, but you keep scaring me off."
"What is it?" she said, tiptoe.
His mouth drew up to an oblique. "You know."
"No, I don't."
"Maybe I'll tell you and maybe I won't," he cried, scooping up a handful
of sand and spraying her. "What'll you give me if I tell?"
"Why--nothing."
"Want to know?"
But at the narrowing something in his eyes she sidestepped him, stooping
down at the door of her bathhouse for a last scoop of sand at him.
"No," she cried, her hair blown like spray and the same breeze carrying
her laughter, guiltless of mood, out to sea.
On the way home, though, for the merest second, there recurred the
puzzling quirk in her thoughtlessness.
In the crush of the electric train, packed tightly into the heart of
the most yammering and petulant crowd in the world--home-going pleasure
seekers--a youth rose to give her his seat. A big, beach-tanned fellow
with a cowlick of hair, when he tipped her his hat, standing up off his
right brow like a little apostrophe to him, and blue eyes so very wide
apart, and so clear, that they ran back into his head like aisles with
little lakes shining at the ends of them.
"Thank you," said Marylin, the infinitesimal second while his hat and
cowlick lifted, her own gaze seeming to run down those avenues of his
eyes for a look into the pools at the back.
"That was it, too, Getaway! The thing that fellow looked--that I
couldn't say. He said it--with his eyes."
"Who?"
"That fellow who gave me this seat."
"I'll break his face if he goo-goos you," said Getaway, who by this time
had a headache and whose feet had fitted reluctantly back into patent
leather.
But inexplicably, even to herself, that night, in the shadow of the
stoop of her witch of a rooming house, she let him kiss her lips. His
first of her--her first to any man. It may have been that suddenly she
was so extremely tired--tired of the lay of the week ahead, suggested by
the smells and the noises and the consciousness of that front box pleat.
The little surrender, even though she drew back immediately, was wine to
him and as truly an intoxicant.
"Marylin," he cried, wild for her lips again, "I can't be held off much
longer. I'm straight with you, but I'm human, too."
"Don't, Getaway, not here! To-morrow--maybe."
"I'm crazy for you!"
"Go home now, Getaway."
"Yes--but just one more--"
"Promise me you'll go straight home from here--to bed."
"I promise. Marylin, one more. One little more. Your lips--"
"No, no--not now. Go--"
Suddenly, by a quirk in the dark, there was a flash of something down
Marylin's bare third finger, so hurriedly and so rashly that it scraped
the flesh.
"That's for you! I've been afraid all day. Touchy! Didn't I tell you?
Diamonds! Now will you kiss me? Now will you?"
In the shadow of where she stood, looking down, it was as if she gazed
into a pool of fire that was reaching in flame clear up about her head,
and everywhere in the conflagration Getaway's triumphant "Now will you!
Now will you!"
"Getaway," she cried, flecking her hand as if it burned, "where did you
get this?"
"It's for you, Fairylin, and more like it coming. It weighs a carat and
a half. That stone's worth more than a sealskin jacket. You're going to
have one of those, too. Real seal! Now are you sore at me any more? Now
you've a swell kick coming, haven't you? Now! Now!"
"Getaway," she cried behind her lit hand, because her palm was to her
mouth and above it her eyes showing the terror in their whites, "where
did you get this?"
"There!" he said, and kissed her hotly and squarely on the lips.
Somehow, with the ring off her finger and in a little pool of its light
as it lay at his feet, where he stood dazed on the sidewalk, Marylin
was up the stoop, through the door, up two flights, and through her
own door, slamming it, locking it, and into her room, rubbing and half
crying over her left third finger where the flash had been.
She was frightened, because for all of an hour she sat on the end of the
cot in her little room trembling and with her palms pressed into her
eyes so tightly that the darkness spun. There was quick connection in
Marylin between what was emotional and what was merely sensory. She
knew, from the sickness at the very pit of her, how sick were her heart
and her soul--and how afraid.
She undressed in the dark--a pale darkness relieved by a lighted window
across the areaway. The blue mercerized dress she slid over a hanger,
covering it with one of her cotton nightgowns and putting it into
careful place behind the cretonne curtain that served her as clothes
closet. Her petticoat, white, with a rill of lace, she folded away. And
then, in her bare feet and a pink-cotton nightgown with a blue bird
machine-stitched on the yoke, stood cocked to the hurry of indistinct
footsteps across her ceiling, and in the narrow slit of hallway
outside her door, where the stairs led up still another flight,
the-ball-of-a-foot--squeak! The sharp crack of a voice. Running.
"Getaway!" cried Marylin's heart, almost suffocating her with a dreadful
spasm of intuition.
It was all so quick. In the flash of her flung-open door, as her head
in its amber cloud leaned out, Getaway, bending almost double over
the upper banister, his lips in his narrow face back to show a white
terribleness of strain that lingered in the memory, hurled out an arm
suddenly toward two men mounting the steps of the flight below him.
There was a shot then, and on the lower flight one of the men, with
an immediate red mouth opening slowly in his neck, slid downstairs
backward, face up.
Suddenly, from a crouching position beside her door, the second
figure shot forward now, with ready and perfect aim at the
already-beginning-to-be-nerveless figure of Getaway hanging over the
banister with the smoking pistol.
By the reaching out of her right hand Marylin could have deflected that
perfect aim. In fact, her arm sprang toward just that reflex act, then
stayed itself with the jerk of one solid body avoiding collision with
another.
So much quicker than it takes in the telling there marched across
Marylin's sickened eyes this frieze: Her father trailing dead from the
underslinging of a freight car. That moment when a uniform had stepped
in from the fire escape across the bolt of Brussels lace; her
mother's scream, like a plunge into the heart of a rapier.
Uniforms--contemplating. On street corners. Opposite houses. Those four
fingers peeping over each of her father's shoulders in the courtroom.
Getaway! His foxlike face leaner. Meaner. Black mask. Electric chair.
Volts. Ugh--volts! God--you know--best--help--
When the shot came that sent Getaway pitching forward down the
third-floor flight she was on her own room floor in a long and merciful
faint. Marylin had not reached out.
* * * * *
Time passed. Whole rows of days of buttonholes down pleats that were
often groped at through tears. Heavy tears like magnifying glasses. And
then, with that gorgeous and unassailable resiliency of youth, lighter
tears. Fewer tears. Few tears. No tears.
Under the cretonne curtain, though, the blue mercerized frock hung
unworn, and in its dark drawer remained the petticoat with its rill of
lace. But one night, with a little catch in her throat (it was the last
of her sobs), she took out the sport hat, and for no definite reason
began to turn the jockey rosette to the side where the sun had not faded
it.
These were quiet evenings in her small room. All the ceiling agitation
had long ago ceased since the shame of the raided room above, and Muggs,
in his absurd messenger's suit, and Monkey marching down the three
flights to the clanking of steel at the wrists.
There were new footsteps now. Steps that she had also learned to know,
but pleasantly. They marched out so regularly of mornings, invariably
just as she was about to hook her skirtband or pull on her stockings.
They came home so patly again at seven, about as she sat herself down to
a bit of sewing or washing-out. They went to bed so pleasantly. Thud,
on the floor, and then, after the expectant interval of unlacing, thud
again. They were companionable, those footsteps, almost like reverential
marching on the grave of her heart.
Marylin reversed the rosette, and as the light began to go sat down
beside her window, idly, looking up. There was the star point in her
patch of sky, eating its way right through the purple like a diamond,
and her ache over it was so tangible that it seemed to her she could
almost lift the hurt out of her heart, as if it were a little imprisoned
bird. And as it grew darker there came two stars, and three, and nine,
and finally the sixty hundred.
Then from the zig of the fire escape above, before it twisted down into
the zag of hers, there came to Marylin, through the medley of city
silences and the tears in her heart, this melody, on a jew's-harp:
If it had any key at all, it was in the mood of Chopin's Nocturne in D
flat major. A little sigh for the death of a day, a sob for the beauty
of that death, and the throb of an ecstasy for the new day not yet born.
Looking up against the sheer wall of the vertical city, on the ledge of
fire escape above hers, and in the yellow patch of light thrown out from
the room behind, a youth, with his knees hunched up under his chin, and
his mouth and hand moving at cross purposes, was playing the harmonica.
Wide apart were his eyes, and blue, so that while she gazed up, smiling,
as he gazed down, smiling, it was almost as if she ran up the fire
escape through the long clear lanes of those eyes, for a dip into the
little twin lakes at the back of them.
And--why, didn't you know?--there was a lift of cowlick to the right
side of his front hair, as he sat there playing in the twilight, that
was exactly the shape of an apostrophe!
THE SMUDGE
In the bleak little graveyard of Hattie Bertch's dead hopes, dead loves,
and dead ecstasies, more than one headstone had long since begun to sag
and the wreaths of bleeding heart to shrivel.
That was good, because the grave that is kept bubbly with tears is a
tender, quivering thing, almost like an amputated bit of self that still
aches with threads of life.
Even over the mound of her dead ambitions, which grave she had dug with
the fingers of her heart, Hattie could walk now with unsensitive feet.
It had become dry clay with cracks in it like sardonic smiles.
Smiles. That was the dreadful part, because the laugh where there
have been tears is not a nice laugh, and Hattie could sit among the
headstones of her dead dreams now and laugh. But not horridly. Just
drearily.
There was one grave, Heart's Desire, that was still a little moist. But
it, too, of late years, had begun to sink in, like an old mouth with
receding gums, as if the very teeth of a smiling dream had rotted. They
had.
Hattie, whose heart's desire had once been to play Juliet, played maids
now. Buxom negro ones, with pale palms, white eyes, and the beat of
kettledrums somewhere close to the cuticle of the balls of her feet.
She was irrevocably down on managers' and agents' lists as "comedy
black." Countless the premiers she had opened to the fleck of a duster!
Hattie came high, as maids go. One hundred and fifty dollars a week and
no road engagements. She dressed alone. Her part in "Love Me Long" had
been especially written in for the sake of the peculiar kind of comedy
relief she could bring to it. A light roar of recognition swept the
audience at her entrance. Once in a while, a handclap. So Hattie, whose
heart's desire had once been to play Juliet, played maids now. Buxomly.
And this same Hattie, whose heart's desire had once been to kiss Love,
but whose lips were still a little twisted with the taste of clay, could
kiss only Love's offspring now. But not bitterly. Thanksgivingly.
Love's offspring was Marcia. Sixteen and the color and odor of an ivory
fan that has lain in frangipani. And Hattie could sometimes poke her
tongue into her cheek over this bit of whimsy:
It was her well-paid effort in the burnt cork that made possible, for
instance, the frill of real lace that lay to the low little neck of
Marcia's first party dress, as if blown there in sea spume.
Out of the profits of Hattie's justly famous Brown Cold
Cream--Guaranteed Color-fast--Mulatto, Medium, Chocolate, had come
Marcia's ermine muff and tippet; the enamel toilet set; the Steinway
grand piano; the yearly and by no means light tuition toll at Miss
Harperly's Select Day School for Girls.
You get the whimsy of it? For everything fair that was Marcia, Hattie
had brownly paid for. Liltingly, and with the rill of the song of
thanksgiving in her heart.
That was how Hattie moved through her time. Hugging this melody of
Marcia. Through the knife-edged nervous evenings in the theater.
Bawlings. Purple lips with loose muscles crawling under the rouge.
Fetidness of scent on stale bodies. Round faces that could hook into the
look of vultures when the smell of success became as the smell of red
meat. All the petty soiled vanities, like the disordered boudoir of a
cocotte. The perpetual stink of perfume. Powder on the air and caking
the breathing. Open dressing-room doors that should have been closed.
The smelling geometry of the make-up box. Curls. Corsets. Cosmetics. Men
in undershirts, grease-painting. "Gawdalmighty, Tottie, them's my teddy
bears you're puttin' on." Raw nerves. Raw emotions. Ego, the actor's
overtone, abroad everywhere and full of strut. "Overture!" The wait in
the wings. Dizziness at the pit of the stomach. Audiences with lean jaws
etched into darkness. Jaws that can smile or crack your bones and eat
you. Faces swimming in the stage ozone and wolfish for cue. The purple
lips--
Almost like a frieze stuck on to the border of each day was Hattie's
life in the theater. Passementerie.
That was how Hattie treated it. Especially during those placid years of
the phenomenal New York run of "Love Me Long." The outer edge of her
reality. The heart of her reality? Why, the heart of it was the long
morning hours in her own fragrant kitchen over doughnuts boiled in oil
and snowed under in powdered sugar! Cookies that bit with a snap. Filet
of sole boned with fingers deft at it and served with a merest fluff of
tartar sauce. Marcia ate like that. Preciously. Pecksniffily. An egg at
breakfast a gag to the sensibilities! So Hattie ate hers in the kitchen,
standing, and tucked the shell out of sight, wrapped in a lettuce leaf.
Beefsteak, for instance, sickened Marcia, because there was blood in the
ooze of its juices. But Hattie had a sly way of camouflage. Filet
mignon (so strengthening, you see) crushed under a little millinery of
mushrooms and served under glass. Then when Marcia's neat little row of
neat little teeth bit in and the munch began behind clean and careful
lips, Hattie's heart, a regular old bandit for cunning, beat hoppity,
skippity, jump!
Those were her realities. Home. The new sandwich cutters. Heart shape.
Diamond shape. Spade. The strip of hall carpet newly discovered to scour
like new with brush and soap and warm water. Epstein's meat market
throws in free suet. The lamp with the opal-silk shade for Marcia's
piano. White oilcloth is cleaner than shelf paper. Dotted Swiss
curtains, the ones in Marcia's room looped back with pink bows. Old
sashes, pressed out and fringed at the edges.
And if you think that Hattie's six rooms and bath and sunny, full-sized
kitchen, on Morningside Heights, were trumped-up ones of the press agent
for the Sunday Supplement, look in.
Any afternoon. Tuesday, say, and Marcia just home from school. On
Tuesday afternoon of every other week Hattie made her cream, in a large
copper pot that hung under the sink. Six dozen half-pint jars waiting
to be filled with Brown Cold Cream. One hundred and forty-four jars
a month. Guaranteed Color-fast. Mulatto, Medium, Chocolate. Labeled.
Sealed. Sold. And demand exceeding the supply. An ingratiating, expert
cream, known the black-faced world over. It slid into the skin, not
sootily, but illuminating it to winking, African copper. For instance,
Hattie's make-up cream for Linda in "Love Me Long" was labeled
"Chocolate." But it worked in even a truer brown, as if it had come out
of the pigment instead of gone into the pores.
Four hours of stirring it took, adding with exact minutiae the
mysteriously proper proportions of spermacetti, oil of sweet almonds,
white wax--But never mind. Hattie's dark secret was her own.
Fourteen years of her black art as Broadway's maid _de luxe_ had been
her laboratory. It was almost her boast now--remember the sunken
headstones--that she had handled spotlessly every fair young star of the
theaters' last ten years.
It was as mysterious as pigment, her cream, and as true, and netted
her, with occasional extra batches, an average of two hundred dollars a
month. She enjoyed making it. Singing as she stirred or rather stirring
as she sang, the plenitude of her figure enveloped in a blue-and-white
bungalow apron with rickrack trimming.
Often Marcia, home from day school, watched. Propped up in the window
frame with her pet cat, a Persian, with eyes like swimming pools with
painted green bottoms, seated in a perfect circle in her quiet lap,
for all the world in the attitude of a sardel except for the toothpick
through.
Sometimes it almost seemed as if Marcia did the purring. She could sit
like that, motionless, her very stare seeming to sleep. To Hattie that
stare was beautiful, and in a way it was. As if two blue little suns
were having their high noon.
Sometimes Marcia offered to help, because toward the end, Hattie's back
could ache at this process, terribly, the pain knotting itself into her
face when the rotary movement of her stirring arm began to yank at her
nerves.
"Momie, I'll stir for a while."
Marcia's voice was day-schooled. As clipped, as boxed, and as precise
as a hedge. Neat, too, as neat as the way her clear lips met, and her
teeth, which had a little mannerism of coming down after each word,
biting them off like threads. They were appealing teeth that had never
grown big or square. Very young corn. To Hattie there was something
about them that reminded her of a tiny set of Marcia's doll dishes that
she had saved. Little innocences.
"I don't mind stirring, dear. I'm not tired."
"But your face is all twisted."
Hattie's twisted face could induce in Marcia the same gagged pallor that
the egg in the morning or the red in the beefsteak juices brought there.
"Go in and play the piano awhile, Marcy, I'll be finished soon."
"Sh-h-h! No. Pussy-kitty's asleep."
As the cream grew heavier and its swirl in the pot slower, Hattie could
keep the twist out of her face only by biting her tongue. She did, and a
little arch of sweat came out in a mustache.