The window gratings were only half washed. The pail was still there.
"Chita," cried Bertha and plunged in her brush. "Oh God--my
Chita--gone----"
Rub-a-dub-dub. Scrub-a-dub-dub.
***
Annie paid Bertha twenty dollars a month, when she paid it. Usually
during these bedridden weeks of Annie's, there was a household
deficit which Bertha dug down into the pocket of her gray flannel
petticoat to meet.
The wad with the rubber band about it, which had a friendly way of
hitting against Bertha's leg when she walked, was very light now.
At the Wallensteins' it had fattened out into quite a roll of soft
dirty bills. Her wants were so meager. The Sailors' Supply Store
filled them mostly, and a sliver of a shop on the Bowery where the
kind of flannel waists she wore, flopped on hangers outside the door.
But invariably in the end, one way or another, Annie wormed away
these little savings, so that her intervals of unemployment had a
frightening way of draining her petticoat pocket. Frightening,
because somehow that wad, hitting against her when she walked, meant
a pad between her and she knew what! The women one passed at night
with dragging hems and twitching faces. The crones picking out of
refuse boxes and asleep in doorways. The girls in dreadful finery
soliciting along the wharves.
That hit-hit against her leg. It could seem as if someone were
walking in step with her.
Then one day the wad petered out into a mere handful of change, left
from a dollar bill with which she had purchased a bottle of
sarsaparilla for Jocko, who loved to drink it out of the bottle and
rub his little belly.
A shudder went down her back. Ninety-five cents in silver. The hit
gone from against her leg. The women one passed at night with the
dragging hems....
***
There was new management at Raussman's. An unctuous Bohemian with a
pimply face sorted out the human stock. All the young girls sat in
the front row with their big red hands like beef-steaks on their
laps. The older women were placed against the wall. They seemed to
sit hugging themselves underneath their jackets and sighed a great
deal. Some of cold, because the gin fires had gone out. Some of
fatigue, and some of an unutterable hopelessness that pulled down
their eyelids like window shades. There was considerable traffic
among the young girls in the front row. The alert Bohemian was kept
busy between the telephone, the passing out of slips, and the arrival
of clients.
The assorted display in the front row was in a constant state of
change, as if someone kept plucking bonbons from a box and almost
immediately the little fluted container would be replaced with
another.
The row against the wall did not change much. The faces were grimmer
and the slow frieze of them would sit sometimes uninterrupted
throughout the day.
Bertha found herself in this back row of the waiting faces, most of
them flecked with fear. Not Bertha's. Hers was so big and so pale.
Like a light. It burned roundly and patiently through the greasy
twilit days at Raussman's. But after several of the futile ones of
waiting, there were just twenty-five cents left in the petticoat
pocket.
Then she began to buy newspapers and pore over them. It was November
and the parks were old and gray-looking and newspapers ballooned up
in the wind unless you sat on one end and nailed the other to the
bench with your palm.