About a week later an advertisement in a morning paper caught Lilly's
eye.
WANTED:--Refined young woman of good appearance and soprano voice, to
sing in music store. Must be able to accompany self. Apply between
twelve and six. Broadway Melody Shop, 1432 Broadway.
A recurring and dragging sense of lassitude was over her these mornings,
so that it was all she could do to drag herself through two hours of
practice in the parlor, scrupulously given over by Mrs. Neugass, who
moved constantly and audibly about the kitchen.
Her lessons, one every Tuesday morning, with Leopold Ballman, were
tiresome unmusical periods of diaphragm exercises and an entire tearing
down and reconstruction process of the previous methods taught her. It
was tedious, standing before the long gold-and-black pier glass in the
front parlor, watching the tendinous rise and fall of her lower thorax
when her forbidden arias were on top of the piano and a cabinet of
Millie du Gass's sheet music bulged there at her disposal.
The old disturbing ache would climb up to the back of her neck, and her
half-baked power of concentration falter at the arid monotony of,
breathe-in; breathe-out.
There were about five months between Lilly and the hour of her supreme
travail. They might have been five years, while she paused suspended,
as it were, in this state of abeyance that hung between the hot August
day of her leave-taking of home and that chimeric hour ahead which
depended like a stalactite, stabbing space.
Her most tangible concern was a money one. The breaking of another
one-hundred-dollar bill was imminent and it frightened her. She reduced
her vocal lessons, at three dollars the hour, to one every other week,
finally discontinuing entirely, and took to haunting the agencies daily,
leaving her address where no initial charges were required and scanning
incessantly the want advertisements under Amusements.
She applied one Monday morning at the Broadway Melody Shop, a mere aisle
wedged between a theater and a _rôtisserie_, a megaphone inserted
through a hole cut in the plate-glass frontage that was violently
plastered over with furiously colored copies of what purported to be the
latest song hits: "If I Could Be Molasses to Your Griddle Cakes."
"Snuggle Up, Snookums." "Honey, Does You Love Me?" "Cakin' the Walk."
"It's Twilight on the Tiber." "Tu-Lips for Mine!"
A sort of managerial salesman in a number-thirteen-and-a-half collar and
a part that ran through his varnished-looking hair bisecting the back of
his head like a poodle's, and a soft, pimply jowl that had never borne
beard, stuck up a random sheet of music on the piano, so placed that its
tones carried straight through the megaphone to the sidewalk.
She played and sang it off easily, her tones jaunty and staccato and her
desire to please quivering through them. He stood beside her, the angle
of his body so that the sharp bone of his hip pressed against her.
"Rag up," he said once, insinuating the movement with a slight wriggle
that ran through his apparently rigid body. She quickened her speed,
leaning forward to read more surely:
"Uh-uh! my ba-a-aaby,
You drive me cra-azy,
Uh-uh! quit shovin',
I'm only lov--in'."
The words running along to a stuttering syncopation that filled her with
self-disgust as she sang them. But she finished with quite a flourish,
swinging around on the stool to face him.
"You need ragging up, kiddo. You've the speed of a funeral march."
"A little practice is what I need," she said, half hoping to obtain.
"I'll try you at fifteen a week. Eleven to six Tuesday, Thursday, and
Friday. The other evenings we close at eleven; fifty cents extra for
supper money. You on?"
"Yes."
"Slick, ain't you? Who peeled you to-day, Miss Bermuda Onion? Aw,
touchy! No harm meant. You're too big to suit me; I like 'em squab size.
Rag up a bit between now and to-morrow, Miss Onion."
For five weeks in the little slit of store that was foul with tired and
devitalized air, and concealed behind a screen that shut off the
megaphone device, Lilly sang through an eight and sometimes a
twelve-hour day, her voice drifting out to the sidewalk with a remote
calling quality.
To her relief she quickly learned that Mr. Alphonse
Rook--"Phonzie"--spent the greater part of his time at the office of the
Manhattan Music Publishing Company, under which auspices the Broadway
Melody Shop operated.
He was replaced by a salesgirl of such superlative dress and manner that
her long jet earrings were like exclamations at the audacity of her
personality. An habitual counter line-up of Broadway mental brevities in
the form of young men with bamboo sticks and eyes with perpetual ogles
in them, would while away the syncopated hours with her, occasionally
Lilly emerging from behind her screen to "come up for air," as Miss
Gertrude Kirk put it.
She was "Gert" to the boys, and from the propinquity of that sliver of
store and the natural loquacity of Miss Kirk, which would have
overflowed a much more generous area, Lilly was to learn much of life as
it is lived on that bias which is cut against the warp and woof of
society. Miss Kirk had twice been up in night court. Her mother
alternated under three aliases and was best known on the night boat that
plied between New York and Albany. Occasionally this mother visited upon
her daughter, her laughter hitting through the store like cymbals. She
had the sagging flesh of an old fowl and cheeks that had not been
cleansed of rouge long enough for the pores to breathe in and keep the
flesh alive. To Lilly she was as terrible as a plucked hen on a
butcher's block, with her head dyed to a vicious cock's-comb red and the
wattles of loose skin beneath her chin.
In fact, she was familiarly known around the shop as "old bird," and on
one occasion had invited Lilly for a Sunday excursion "up to Albany."
"Lay off, ma," said her daughter. "Fer Gossake, can't you take a
tumble?"
Miss Kirk's tongue was as nimble as her fingers. She used them both
lightly. Would tear the flounce off her too lacy petticoat to bind up a
messenger boy's cut finger, and no scarf-pin that came within three feet
of her was immune from her quick touch. The only hour that ever struck
for her was sex o'clock. The unmentionable lay mentioned in her
discourse so frequently that to Lilly the Broadway Melody Shop became a
slimy-sided vat, horrible with small-necked young men with flexible
canes and Gertrude Kirk's slit-eyed stare of calculation.
"I don't know what you're trying to put over, Lilly-of-the-valley;
you're one too many for me. But I'd stake my life on one thing."
"What?"
"You got a caul over your face."
"A what?"
"Caul. Sort of veil some get born with. I know a girl carried hers
around in a little wooden box for luck. Well, you got that white-veil
kind of look that would blacklist you for the Vestal Virgin Sextet. I
can pick 'em every time. You look to me like--say, I got a little mud
puddle of my own to play in without wetting my feet in yours."
"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," said Lilly, crashing
out the opening bars of "Oh, Willie, I love you when you're silly."
"No?" said Miss Kirk, the slit-eyed stare of terrible sophistication
narrowing down to two blade edges.
That night Lilly eyed herself in all the plate-glass windows as she
walked to the car. She was straight as a lance, but before she went to
bed she readjusted the gathers of her skirt band, pushing them forward.
One evening, because she saw it in the window of one of the Amsterdam
Avenue petty shops, she bought, furtively, a baby dress with a little
nursery legend embroidered on the yoke. She stole home with the package
up under her coat, like a thief. Once in her room, she laid it out on
the bed. It was as tiny as the French apron of the French maid who opens
the play, and as sheer. She wanted suddenly to finger it, and did,
laying her cheek to it with a rushing sense of sweetness, and then
suddenly, on wild lashing tears of her resentment and terror, her hands
tightening into and wringing it. Dragging the suitcase out from beneath
her bed, she crammed in the little garment, and finally, strapping down
the lid again, laid her head against it, silently screaming her despair.
Strangely enough, that very night, long after the street noises had
thinned and she had heard Isaac Neugass, creeping up from the drug
store, drag the bolt across the apartment door, Lilly sat suddenly up in
bed out of a hot tossing period of light doze. She was often crying
unconsciously into her sleep these nights, so that her eyes were
tear-bitten and dilated into the darkness. The night bell that connected
from the drug store was gouging the silence with a long-sustained
grilling. Soft-soled feet were already padding down the hallway past her
door, a bolt withdrawn, then voices.
The grunty tones of Mr. Neugass and a woman's fast soprano that rose and
rent the silence like the tear of silk. More feet down the hallway; sobs
that were filled with coughing; Mrs. Neugass, pitched high in the key of
termagency; the faint, expostulatory voice of Alma Neugass; and finally
one throat-torn sob that grated like a buzz saw against the night and
the banging, reverberating slam of a door.
Barefooted, trembling in the chill, Lilly peered out into the hallway,
the grotesque procession returning down its length. Mr. Neugass bent to
his tired angle, nightshirt striking him midships as it were, the two
dim white women creeping after.
"What has happened?"
"It's nodding, Miss Parlow. It's a shame for decent beoble they should
have to listen. Wash your ears out of it, Alma, and go back to bed."
But instead, to Lilly's importuning arm, Miss Neugass slid into her
room, closing the door softly behind her, standing there shivering in
the blue kind of darkness.
"It's the old story," she said--"some girl in a fix and trying to get pa
to help her. It makes me sick, positively sick."
"A fix?"
"Every once in a while some poor creature comes begging pa to break the
law and help her. It gets him wild. Any girl who doesn't want her child
is a monster and every girl in trouble a vicious sinner. This poor
little thing didn't look seventeen; I couldn't quite understand her. A
Pole, I think. Something about the beach at Coney Island. A man she'd
never seen before or since. My mother in her righteousness! Her
terrible, untempted righteousness. Her easy righteousness. The law in
its righteousness. It can be just as wrong and horrible to have children
as it can be sublime. What right has that little underbred girl to bring
an illegitimate life into the world? The law doesn't provide for the
illegitimate child. Why should it provide for its birth? What right had
my father to withhold his help? ... There are worse crimes than taking
human life; one of them is to give life under such conditions."
"You mean, Alma, there's a way not to--a way out?"
"Why, you poor baby! Of course there is if you see to it in time. That
is, during the first few weeks."
"How--many?"
"Oh, five or six at the outside. Go back to bed, girl; you'll catch your
death. O Lordy! such is life!" And went out.
For the third time in her life, Lilly fainted that night, standing
shivering in her nightdress for a second after Miss Neugass had left. In
a room barely wide enough to contain her length she dropped softly
against the bed, and, her fall broken, slid the remaining distance to
the floor.
After a while the chill air from the open window revived her and she
crept shudderingly into bed.