evening he invited his friend the story-writer to dinner, and they
talked. And, as it seemed, by accident, their talk touched upon the
subject of neighbours.
“Is Greenwich Village any different in that way from uptown? Do you know
your school-teacher neighbour in the little white house next door, for
instance?” Surely, he thought, it could not be rash to ask that.
Certainly his friend would not suspect him of a personal interest in an
old-maid school-teacher. So he was thinking when he heard, “She died
there to-day.”
Afterward he could hardly believe what had happened except that a wild
conviction came into his mind, whirling him out of his chair, out of the
restaurant. He wandered somewhere, with one thought in his mind:
_He must see that dead face._
Then he found himself in a house, in that house, among a fluttered group
of school-teachers, who talked to him about the woman who had died. They
took him for one of her family. He did not talk to them. He went up a
stairway and into a room with faded flowers and tall candles ranged
about a high bed like an altar. A dead woman lay there, with a sheet
drawn over her face. He lifted the cloth and looked at her face and went
away silently.
_VI. The Confession._ It was queer, he knew, this impulse to confess
that haunted him day and night. When she had been alive he had never
wished to speak the words that might set him free to seek again the
strange solace of her lips and arms. But now that she was for ever out
of reach, he felt this mad compulsion to make known their shadowy love.
To speak now would be to risk losing all the happiness he had built up
for himself in the real world, out of an inexplicable loyalty to the
memory of his dead playmate. But he could not think of such things now.
He could think only of the dreamer who had decked a room for a beautiful
adventure that did not come, and who sat in a garden waiting, wondering
whether death would come before the adventure; and of a gate that swung
open one moonlit night to make her dream come true, and of two
adventurers happy for an uncalendared hour in the phantom world of
fancy. The time would come, his reason urged, when this memory would be
a thing remote and forgotten, when it would no longer hold for him even
the ache of regret, when its pathos even would be faded, as its bright
joys were already fading in his thoughts. He would be sorry to have
spoken. He would know that he had been a fool to speak. But now, though
he lost everything that would one day be dear to him again, he did not
care.
He fought against that mad impulse while he could. Then, lest he blurt
the thing out suddenly, he began to plan the manner of his confession.
He remembered a fantastic idea uttered that night by the story-writer
and he thought, “It will be easier to tell it to her first as a story.”
And one evening he told her the story.
He began haltingly enough, constrained as he was to present to her
imagination these two nameless figures of a man and a woman who had
wished rashly for a happiness not to be had within the solid confines of
reality; but as he talked, he forgot all else, and his confession became
a passionate vindication of the rights of that phantom self for which
the workaday world has so little use, and which can achieve only a
pitiful and momentary freedom in what the world calls folly. Then, for
he had come to the end of his tale, in that picture of a room with its
faded flowers and spent candles and a face whose eyes were no longer
bright with wild dreams, abruptly he ceased speaking. And it seemed to
him that even without as yet naming himself, he had confessed his crime
of secret rebellion against the wisdom of the world.
He looked up and saw that there were tears in his wife’s eyes.
“It’s true,” she said. “Women do feel like that.”
He was bewildered.
“All women,” she went on. “But I didn’t think men knew. How _did_ you
know?”
He was about to tell her how he knew, when she spoke again, softly.
“I’m glad she found so beautiful a lover.”
Then he was ashamed, of what, he hardly knew, unless it was of what he
seemed to his wife. He realized that he was to her merely what he had
laboured for twelve years to seem to all the world. Not the foolish
adventurer of his tale; no, she could never believe that. He imagined
how it would sound to her if he pretended to be that man in the story.
It would be the strangest argument in the annals of marriage. He could
prove nothing; his secret was fatally secure. She would say, “You have
dreamed it, dear.”
And seeing himself with her eyes, he was shaken by a doubt. Perhaps it
_had_ been just a dream.
_VII. Catharsis._ But presently a thought of bitter comfort came; he
would tell his friend the story-writer, who would do what was after all
the only sensible thing to do with a dream in this world, sell it to
other dreamers.
And after a time that was what happened.
THE DISTANT STREET
BY FRANCIS EDWARDS FARAGOH
From _The New Pearson’s_
(Pearson’s Magazine, 157 E. Ohio St., Chicago, Ill.)
On the sidewalk pools of yellow light. Stretches of evening-tinted
pavement between them, around them. Gray pavement, with touches of
black. To Emmanuel, as he stood in the uncertainly lighted doorway of
the college building, the street called out. The yellow pools leaped out
of their own flatness; they sang and touched his hands.
Still, he dared not leave the doorway. Every evening it was the same.
The street was not for him. The yellow bits of sidewalk, stealing their
gold from the lights of the soft-curtained doors, low windows along the
street, were not his. He was an outsider. For three years, ever since he
had started going to the college, he had known that. And now, again, he
felt that he would always remain an outsider.
Sometimes, during the day, Emmanuel would look out of the window of one
of the classrooms and try to understand the street. But while daylight
was on the pavements, the street was very much like other streets. It
was only in the evening that it became alluring, that it became
forbidding, throwing light-kisses that were not for him.
No, it would not be wise to go into the street, thought Emmanuel. But he
knew that, although impotent rage was causing his legs to tremble, he
loved all the hasty-gabled houses and arched doorways, the lawns with
their now dusky smiles. This street had a song about it. His own
street--that other one, downtown, under the humpbacked shadow of the
Williamsburg bridge--had no song. It had only butcher shops and fruit
stands and grimy children and smells. Garbage cans and stoops that were
unswept and slouching houses which pushed their bellies out into the
evening and grinned.
Emmanuel waited in the doorway. Someone would come out. Someone always
did. Then, together, it would be easier to face the street, talking in
fast, loud sentences to shut out the song. He peered into the building.
Yes, someone was approaching. Luck! He knew the man, one of his
classmates. He knew, also, that he would not be considered welcome by
the other. But that didn’t matter. Anything rather than walk alone....
“Are you going to the Subway?” He tried to conceal his anxiety,
desperately forcing the question to be casual.
“Why ... yes!” Not cordial, just as Emmanuel had expected. They thought
him queer.... Well.... The main thing was that he’d not have to walk to
the subway alone. Blocks and blocks.
“Anything happen in the psychiatry class? I cut it, you know.” Had to
make conversation! Oh, anything.... The street....
“No. Nothing much. Old man Hedley gassed some more about
maniac-depressives. Usual stuff.”
Hedley ... that was the professor ... maniac-depressives ... oh, yes,
maniac-depressives.... (Was that somebody laughing up in that window,
behind those flowers? A girl) ... maniac....
“He ... he didn’t.... (A girl! Her body can’t be seen, but she must have
white shoulders, smiling through the transparent crimson shawl!) ... let
me see ... oh, yes ... he didn’t say when those paranoia reports are
due?”
“No.”
“He didn’t! That’s funny!” Emmanuel began to laugh softly. He could
feel, without actually seeing it, that the other threw him a questioning
troubled glance from the corner of his eye. That made him laugh more.
The fool! He didn’t know that the laughter belonged to the girl behind
the flowers, to the girl who must have silken eyes and a soft throat.
“Well, I guess I’ll cut to-morrow again.”
“Yes?” Without interest.
“Yes!” A warmth came over Emmanuel. He felt himself getting angry, at
what he didn’t know. “Yes! I’ll cut it as many times as I damn feel like
it. See?” He realized that this required an explanation. “I’m no good
at the stuff. I don’t want to be good at it. I’ll never be a doctor. I
hate the thought of ever being a doctor.”
“Then why did you come to the school?” In spite of himself the man was
compelled to ask. He was amazed at the fury in Emmanuel’s words. “Why
did you take up medicine?”
“Why? What the hell do you ask me that for? Don’t you know?” Emmanuel
wasn’t listening to himself. The questions had come out of his mouth
almost automatically. This was not his only conversation of the kind.
Just now he was paying attention to the piano that was being played in a
house up the street. “No, I guess you can’t know,” his mouth continued.
“You’re not a Jew.”
“What has that to do with it?”
A wailing chord ... was there some regret in that music? Who played it?
Another girl? One with seeking eyes?
“Everything! When you’re a Jew your family works for you ... your
father, your mother, sisters even ... and you study. And all the time
they look at you so hungry, so impatient, demanding that you hurry,
hurry, through college, through all your years. That you make money.
That’s what they want. And then they’ve got their damned pride, too. You
must become a professional man. A lawyer, a doctor.... God, their rotten
selfishness! Always driving you, hungry, exacting....”
The other was frightened. Emmanuel knew that and he grinned with
pleasure. He was flattered. Frightened--of him. That was good! He heard
the uncertain tone:
“Well, what would you like to do instead?”
Ah.... It had come! Emmanuel stopped. Under his feet a yellow patch of
light, on his hair, uncovered now as he snatched off his hat, the notes
of the piano rested for a moment before rushing along the street.
Emmanuel could see the chords in the air, he told himself. They glowed.
There were flames in them. He threw out his arms, indicating the street:
“This! This is what I’d like to do!”
His companion also had to stop. Out of bewildered gray eyes he looked at
Emmanuel. He didn’t understand, of course.
“This?”
“This! You hear that music ...?” He stepped closer to the man, grabbed
his lapels. “You hear it? I could do that!”
“Do it?” Absolutely terrified! Emmanuel grinned with satisfaction. He
released him. “Why, do you play an instrument?”
“No ... no....” What a fool! But why should he understand?
“Oh, you compose....”
Idiot!
“I don’t have to compose! I don’t have to play!” Snarling: “I said I
could _do_ it. You don’t have to know a note to do it.... It’s just got
to be in you....” His hands dropped. A silly smile came into his face.
What’s the use? “I guess I can’t explain. I don’t know myself exactly
what I mean. Take the sky, for instance. It’s like a banner. That’s it,
a torn banner. Well, I could do that, too! Not paint it, or write about
it, though. Something else....”
The other had left him. Emmanuel looked after the hurrying man and he
knew that an empty papier-mâché figure was going there, a papier-mâché
figure made of flesh, curiously, and that terror was dogging the steps
of that figure. Let him run! Let him think that he, Emmanuel Wolkowitz,
is a lunatic! Let him run. Now, now he was not afraid of the street. He
turned and shouted into it:
“I won’t be a doctor!”
He shook his fist into the face of the houses:
“I won’t be a doctor!”
Blood rushed to his face. He coughed. Perspiration stood on his
forehead. He felt tired, spent. How would he ever get home? The
Subway.... He turned into the station. But the music, although that had
been blocks beyond, kept on following him. He muttered.
“That’s Rachmaninoff.... No, it isn’t.... I don’t know what it is.... I
don’t know one piece from another.... Why don’t I?”
II
“You late again, Manny!”
That was his mother. He didn’t answer her. He looked at the room, at
the table with its red tablecloth, now set for the evening meal, at the
crayon enlargements of his grandfather and grandmother on the wall. At
the ice box in the corner of the dining room. At the long-handled pot in
which the soup had been cooked and brought to the table. His father ...
long beard ... almost asleep.... Reba--was she dirty or was that just
the way she put the rouge on her face? So much rouge! That was his
sister.
“Where were you?”
He brushed past his mother. He went into the bedroom. Over his shoulder
he told her:
“In school.”
“So late? You get out at five, no?”
“Well....”
He didn’t care to wash up. To hell with hygiene. That was for doctors.
He wouldn’t be a doctor.
“Ain’t coming to eat?” His mother again, in the doorway.
“I don’t want to eat. I’m tired.” But he went. He sat down at the table.
“I’m tired....”
“Ha! You make me giggle.” Reba. “What should I say then? You tired? My
Gawd, you don’t have to stand at the machine all day long, punching them
buttons till you think your arm was gonna break off.”
“Now you let ’im alone.” The mother had come to his defence. Always she
came to his defence. “Studying ain’t so easy.”
“It ain’t? Wisht to Gawd you would ’ave let me study. How I was begging
you to let me go to business school. All the girls I know is stenogs,
only I got to work in a factory, because....”
She didn’t say it. But she looked at Emmanuel. The accusation was there.
He jumped up. He pushed away his plate and jumped up.
“What do you want of me? Did I stop you from school? Am I making you go
to work?” Still, he couldn’t shake off her eyes. They were telling the
truth. His mouth twitched, he lowered his voice: “I guess you’re right.
If it wasn’t for me you’d.... I’m sorry, Reba!”
She softened, too. She rose and put a hand on his sleeve. She smiled;
underneath the thick paint on her face there was something kindly.
“Oh, what’s the matter with you, Manny? I was only kiddin’. Can’t you
take a joke?”
Yes, they were all working for him! His father, getting rheumatism in
that basement shop of his, haggling, cheating customers out of an extra
potato, cheating for the sake of an added cent.... That mother of his,
over there. She worked, too. Embroidered with her always diseased eyes.
Reba....
“No, I guess you’re right, Reba. I ... I’m just sucking the blood out of
you, all of you....”
“Don’t be a fool. My work is all right. You’ll be a doctor soon.”
Ah, he’ll be a doctor soon! That’s why they were willing to work. He was
a bank of flesh, into which they put their greasy pennies.... To be
returned with interest! What if he told them that he didn’t intend to
become a doctor? What if he told them to go to hell? How? How to say it
to them? After all this?
He ate his fish. There was no talk in the room. His father drank the
soup with gurgling noises. It was _borscht_ soup. It trickled down over
his beard, red soup, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. His
mother sighed every time she had to rise to bring something to the
table. His family!
Suddenly Emmanuel rose. The room was choking him. The walls were coming
nearer. The clatter of the dishes was low thunder now.
“I’m through.”
He knew where he was going. Upstairs, to the third floor, to Etta. Etta!
Etta! She was real. She had black hair, and when you touched it you
could shut your eyes and think you were touching nice warm water. It
seemed to lick your fingers with a warm tongue, her hair. Her eyes, too,
like the feel of a child-wind in summer....
“Manny!”
She had come to meet him at the door. Their hands touched. He was the
first to draw his away. Again he felt warm all over, as he had in the
street. When she brushed past him in the dim-lit hall to lead the way to
the living room and her body was close to his, Emmanuel was conscious of
a feeling of shame, his throat became dry. For no reason at all, as far
as he could tell.
Their living room was like any other East Side living room. No--better.
Here there was a cheap golden-oak piano, too, and an incongruous gilded
music stand with stencilled flowers and angels and birds. Otherwise the
usual crayon pictures of bearded ancestors of _scheiteled_ ancestors,
the seven-branched candlestick on the mantel, the rocking chair, a vase
with artificial roses....
“Listen, Manny, you never heard me sing, did you? I’m gonna sing a new
piece I just got. Wanna hear it?”
She seated herself at the piano. She spread the sheets of music. The
song was a ballad, a jumble of molasses-coated words, smirking though
they meant to whimper. And her hands struck the wrong notes, they
slipped off, she had to shake her head and begin all over again. Her
voice uncertain, trembling. Still.... Emmanuel, listening to the girl,
knew that this was the street returned. His mouth opened in amazement.
His arm shook. Then:
“Etta!” he cried, cutting into the cracked notes of the piano. “You can
sing!”
She didn’t seem to pay any attention to that. Again she started, false,
tremulous. Emmanuel grasped her arm.
“Ouch, you’re hurting me!”
But he would not let her go on.
“Listen, Etta! You can sing. Don’t you understand me? You’ve got it in
you. You ... well, you can sing, Etta! Not yet. You know what I mean.
Not yet. But it’s in you. You can sing.”
“Yeah?” She was pleased. She brought her face closer to his as he stood
there, bending over her.
“You’re going to study....”
“How can I? I got to go to work. I ain’t got time. You feel awful tired
after taking dictation all day.”
He waved that aside. Again his hand was cutting into her arm.
“You’ll have to study. You don’t know how good it is. If only I could
have studied!”
“Well, you’re studying, ain’t you? You’re gonna be a doctor.”
“That’s not what I mean....” How to explain it? “Listen, Etta, I wanted
to study things like history. Not the stuff they gave me at high school.
Real history. There is colour in it. The books never speak of that,
though. They give you only dates and names. But when you shut your eyes
you can see helmets and campfires. Flames and singing people in forests,
monks in black hoods, golden coins. That’s funny how those golden coins
come to you when you shut your eyes. That.... That’s history.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I never cared much for it in school.”
“Because you never shut your eyes to see. Then, take drawing. The way I
imagine it.... Well, I wasn’t good at it, of course. My lines took crazy
turns. They moved about the paper and I couldn’t stop them. The teacher
was angry. But what could I do? He put there a vase and a strawberry box
and I could see only patches of colour and sometimes fountains and
sometimes dancing flowers. You know.... The lines went their own way.
Sometimes one side was larger than the other, sometimes you could see
through it.... And my teacher was angry.”
“I don’t understand you. What you mean flowers was dancing?” She reached
out for his hand and patted it. “You say such funny things, Manny. What
you shouting for so?”
He felt her face very close to his. Her hair touched his eyes. He
brushed that aside. He spoke in whispers now.
“Listen, Etta, I’ll teach you how to sing. I’ll teach you. I can do it.
I can’t sing myself, but I can teach you. It’s here in me! Shall I?”
She didn’t seem to care about that. She was flushed, her eyes had grown
wide, warm. Her red bit of a tongue moistened her quivering lips:
“Yeah!” Hers was also a whisper. Then her arms were about his neck.
Feeling the touch of her bare elbows, Emmanuel stopped talking. The arms
were hot. Through her thin blouse he could see the girl’s shoulders.
Suddenly he bent his face to hers, almost bit into her lips. He was
happy. No, not the melody of the street ... that was gone just now....
This was something else. His legs trembled.
“Etta, I love you!”
She lay back in his arms. She knew. She kissed him with even more
passion than before. He was going to be a doctor....
“We’re sweethearts, ain’t we, Manny?”
“Yes, yes!” Ah, it was good to kiss her.
“We’re gonna go steady, yeah?” He would be a doctor. They would go
“steady.” Then there would be a “catered supper” in the pink reception
room of an East Side hall after the wedding, with many candles in the
hands of the guests, a band for dancing, a paper-flower decorated throne
for the bridal pair. “Steady, yes, Manny?”
There was only another year of college....
III
Another year of college.
That was the hardest year. Emmanuel told himself every day that it would
have to be the last--another seven hours in the classrooms would kill
him. No, not kill him, make him do something, murder, suicide, what did
he know? What if he kicked over an apparatus in the laboratory, what if
he spat into the dean’s august, bearded face? They’d throw him out
then.... Histology, materia medica, physiological chemistry, the rotten,
dead stuff ... all the rotten, dead stuff.... And then there would have
to be an added year, in a hospital. He, Emmanuel Wolkowitz, an interne.
He, Emmanuel Wolkowitz, taking thermometers out of the mouths of
patients, making clinical charts, listening to the smutty confidences of
leering nurses....
He tried to go through that year, somehow. The street was still there,
but since that evening many months ago when he had turned to defy it, he
was no longer afraid of it. He was doing something which, he knew, the
street must approve of.
He was doing something! He was writing. Writing was easy. Except when
the words would not come. Or the wrong ones came. The dictionary was
stupid. Dots and dashes and exclamation marks were stupid. They ruined
the melody. Who said writing was easy, anyhow? What about the song? It
would go on in your head, in your ears, it would paint pictures:
dreamfields of the dawn, grottoes where purple and blue flowers sang.
When you tried to put all that to paper there were only words and the
song was gone. Words were harsh--you couldn’t write down the melody....
But he wrote.
He said to Etta:
“I’ll be a writer!”
“Gowan! Not a doctor?” She didn’t believe what he said, of course. She
thought it a good joke. “That ain’t a good trade.”
A trade!
“Oh, yes, it’s very good when it’s a trade,” he replied. “Mine will be
art.” He wanted to take back the words immediately. Art! He! When the
melody could not be captured. Uncertainly: “Well, of course, it’s not
very profitable.”
“Then you can’t be a writer,” decided Etta, “because you’ll have to earn
money. Sure!”
“Oh, money!” Emmanuel looked at his shiny trousers. “Money!”
“Now, Manny, get all that foolishness out of your head. You’re gonna be
through school in no time now and then we’ll get married. My father will
furnish an office for you and....”
Yes, he knew that. Her father would furnish an office for him. All East
Side fathers did. He had seen it happen again and again. To some of his
classmates, too. An office--then he’d have to practise. Marry Etta,
practise, make money for her, for his family, for Reba’s dowry, who
would in turn be sold to somebody else, a lawyer or dentist perhaps. Was
there no way out of it?
There must be! He would be a writer. An author. After all, there must be
money in it. So many magazines. And then, perhaps, he would write a
book. Would Etta, would his family care how the money came, as long as
he gave them enough? He saw his name on a dull-red volume. In golden
letters: Emmanuel Wolkowitz.
But why did they want money so much?
“Why do you want money so much, Etta?”
“Well, my Gawd, who don’t? This ain’t living, the way we go on now.
Maybe once a week you take me to the movies. Oh, I ain’t complaining,
Manny. Only it’s pretty hard. All the other girls at the office have
good times. They go to Coney Island, Broadway, they go to cabarets,
dances. I’m as good-looking as they are. I got nice clothes. You’re all
right, Manny, but gee, it’s long, waiting like this.”
“Oh....”
“You ain’t sore at me, are you, because I told you? It’ll be all right,
Manny! You’ll make good. I’ll speak to my father. He’ll come across.”
“Oh....”
He didn’t go near her for the next three or four days.
* * * * *
There were two letters on the dining-room table. One had come in a
large, oblong manila envelope, the other in a cheap pink one.