Columns of it, yet the dread of going the rounds. The women
aggrieved with the servant problem, who asked abashing intimate
questions, and weighed out the weekly consignment of second-grade
butter and eggs for the help. The women aggrieved with the servant
problem, who provided kennels for sleeping and railed at high wages
for the fourteen-hour day. The dread of starting those rounds. Help
Wanted, Female.
The park benches were strewn with discarded newspapers, turned almost
invariably to the classified advertisement page. Sometimes a little
oblong had been torn out with a hair pin or penknife. One day in
City Hall Park, poring over one of these left overs, this one burned
up at Bertha from its little enclosure:
Wanted: Practical nurse to assist governess in care of five-year-old
boy. Must be well trained and efficient. References. Apply W.
Bixby, 3450 Madison Avenue.
It was a rowdy of a day. Whistling, prankish winds that flew up
under capes and rushed newspapers along the curving walks of the
park. A pecksniffy little gale that filled the air with dust and
paper. Pedestrians hustled before it and the benches were pretty
well swept, except for one or two hunches of men asleep under their
hats and the hoppings of sparrows aiming for empty peanut hulls. And
Bertha. She sat forward, her torso a little oblique as if someone
had placed a broken urn there on a slant, and the look that she had
lifted up from that newspaper insertion, pinioned to her face.
The city ran past her. Dived into subway hoods. Clamored over
cobbles. Honked, whizzed, banged. Park Row had just spewed out a
red-hot edition and the newsboys' howls ran high.
It was strange to be there in the midst of life when the heart was as
dreary as a moor. Wasteland down which she could see herself
stalking, brooding and terrible with the tears that were dry and sobs
that were silent. She began to walk. It was very far. The city
blocks streamed behind, one after another. They were so full of
life. But the moor gathering around her heart, it encompassed her.
The house on Madison Avenue was as handsome and portly as a park
statue of a gentleman in a frock coat. It had an air and a gracious,
portentous dignity, as if any moment the double oak doors might swing
back and someone important and lovely sweep down the fine curve of
stone steps. Candlelight would gleam on old silver in such a house
and the kettles in such a house would be of polished copper that
swelled what they reflected. Fine, drum shaped kettles, that would
draw the juices out of fowl.
The curtains were frilled net and did an elaborate crisscross in the
center of the long windows, and then drew back to reveal the shoulder
of a chair or the dim loveliness of marble statuary. A child in such
a house could, if he wanted, peer out of that little open place
between the curtains. He would probably leave five fingerprints
against the pane. Spudgy little fingerprints that would polish off
with a dry cloth. But there were no fingerprints against the panes.
They were very shiny. Peer as she would with the corners of her eyes
as she passed the house, up the block, down the block, there were no
fingerprints against the panes.
It was easy to pass and repass. That is, if one kept shoulders bent
into the wind as if with destination. There was a constant trickle
of pedestrians along the fine wide avenue. One swung back and forth
with the little tides. No stopping to stare, of course. Just that
tail of the eye, ready!
It was a block of portly houses. Of great wide windows and curving
stoops and motor cars at the curb. There were several ways of not
passing up and down too often. Walking on the opposite side.
Appearing to stand at a corner for the traffic to pass. Strolling
around the block and loitering a little along the way.
Not even the smudge of a sprawled little palm against the window
pane. How precious had there been!
Once a young woman entered the trade entrance. She had a click to
her broad heels and there was a gleam of starched white under her
long blue cape. The door was opened to her only the fraction of an
inch and closed again, gently. She went away on heels not so
clicking. Bertha, passing, could have touched her.
Almost immediately after, a big heavy-busted woman, with hair on her
chin and also in white uniform that crackled under her cloak, rang
the bell. Bertha knew her! A Mrs. Mahaffy! She had once tended the
senile grandfather in a private house on Lexington Avenue where
Bertha had cooked for a month. "Hateful Mahaffy" the waitress had
called her. She was always fussing around the kitchen with trays,
mostly her own, and had let the old man fall in his bath one morning,
for which she was dismissed. Her arms were pock-marked too. The
waitress had stumbled across a little nest of hypodermic needles
under her mattress after she left.
Hateful Mahaffy!
Passive Bertha with her slow, white face. A sudden, a new, an
aggressive rage laid hold of her. A frenzy that made her want to
tear and strip and choke. She started after the largely undulating
figure of Mrs. Mahaffy, but the one inch of door had already been
opened and closed to her, so that they met on the sidewalk.
"Save yourself the trouble," said Mrs. Mahaffy, "the place is already
filled."
She had a horrid kind of voice for a woman. It seemed to want to
boom because she had hair on her chin. Then she recognized Bertha.
"Wasn't we in a place together once? Lexington Avenue."
"Yah----"
"Well, you're in wrong here. Practical nurse is wanted. Big
automobile moguls from Detroit. Just moved here. New-rich. Give me
the new-rich every time. They got proper respect for their servants,
and not too much for themselves. Well, stung here, but they're
engaging a new staff in that big brown house over on the corner.
Want to come with me?"
"No," said Bertha. "No."
"Well, you always was good company for yourself," said Mrs. Mahaffy
and stalked off on a diagonal across the street.
Hateful Mahaffy, who, they said of her, pinched children, and had let
the old man slip and break his hip. To think that hateful Mahaffy,
with the boom of voice, might have gained custody over the child
within that house.
Or someone like her might already have been hired! Or someone worse!
Fear flashed through her. Flash after flash of it. Then again the
swelling anger. Mrs. Mahaffy. She pinched children. She started
across the street, striking into her solemn golem trot, her lower lip
pursed out.
Mrs. Mahaffy had disappeared. She hurried a block after her, her
stiff Inverness cape blowing out from her, and her face thrust out
ahead.
Mrs. Mahaffy. What had she to do with it? Do with it? Why, there
was a child over there in that house--five years old--who made it
unbearable that any child should be pinched.
She hurried. Mrs. Mahaffy had disappeared. After a while she began
to cry. Slow ashamed tears. The house looked soft through the blur
of them. Almost as if you could poke in a dimple through the wall
with your finger, as you could in the cheek of a child.
A man in shirt sleeves and a black apron came out of the service
entrance and began to polish the brass doorbell. He was shaved to
the skull, and his neck was fat, and he danced up and down from the
knees as he rubbed. A gay feather duster stuck up from his rear hip
pocket. He whistled. She could not tear her eyes from him. His
jouncing legs and the little jelly-dance of the fat along his neck!
Perhaps as recently as an hour ago--ten minutes ago--five--he had
passed the five-year-old child in a hallway. That gay little duster
might have flecked a chair that he had sat upon.
The excitement of that! It ran like a fever through her. She stood
and looked at him. Just stood there in front of the house and
watched him rubbing the bell. After a while he turned, because the
irises of her eyes must by this time have been like hot disks on his
back. He had a face of loose fat and the jowls fell in pleats like a
spaniel's. A soft face that you could mash up softly with your hand
like pie dough. Ugh.
She began to walk and he followed her by swinging his head around to
glance over the other shoulder.
Perhaps so recently as an hour ago--ten minutes--five--he had passed
the five-year-old in a hallway----
He winked.
Slowly and with the horrid sensation that she could softly mash up
his face into pie dough, Bertha winked back.
"Fine day for a walk," he said, and sucked back his words and made a
noise like a kiss.
"Yah," she said and lifted her lips back off her square white teeth
to make a smile.
He was chewing something and he spat, quid and all, on to the stoop
of the house adjoining.
"Big 'un, ain't you?"
"Me? I dunno----"
"Ticklish? Slk-k-k-k-k," he said, and made a sound between his
tongue and his cheek. Nasty. Frightening.
"Naw."
His face was shaved, but the day's stubble of beard was out, and when
he rubbed it you could hear the bristles scrape.
"Good time?"
"What?"
He bunched up his mouth again with the little hissing, kissing sound.
Someone lowered a window with a slam. He flecked open his polishing
rag and began to rub at the bell again.
"Wait for me a few minutes down at the drug store on Thirty-ninth.
I'm off at five. Big 'un, heh?"
She moved off. That face of old dough--ugh!
It was horrible waiting. It grew dusk and she shivered and her
tongue thickened and her distaste kept welling. But her feet stood
rooted, sullen, there. Waiting. The ruby urn in the drug store
window lit up and threw a stain on the sidewalk. He came, looking
stuffed into his coat, and his derby hat sat high on his head like a
rocking chair. He was short. She had not noted how short. Why, she
could have almost leaned an elbow on his head and rested her cheek
comfortably upon her palm.
Silly Willy.
Idiotically enough, that transpired to be his name. Willy. She was
never to utter it without the aftermath of a little chime in her
brain. Silly.
His soft mouth slid around so in his face. It was a little sunken
because his molar teeth were gone. Slk-k-k-k-k! He was always
making that noise between his tongue and his cheek and making a
boring gesture with his forefinger, Slk-k-k-k-k. He met her that way.
"Slk-k-k-k-k, you're a husky one."
"You bane a _little_ one," she said with elephantine coquetry.
"I'm little," he said, "but oh my," and beat himself upon the chest.
"You bane short and I bane long, heh?"
"That's me! Little but oh my--is what they used to label me in
Winnipeg."
"Oh, that bane a big fine place."
"Winnipeg! She's a dream. There's a little city with a gizzard. I
was born there. My boss comes from Detroit. You know him? Ever
been in a Bixby Six? That's him. Every third time you bat your eye
a Bixby car runs past you."
"You bane house-man?"
"Yeh, but I don't live in. I got a room. Good time?"
"It bane a big fine house. It's a fine big family?"
"Big family! There's him and her--fine as silk--and a kid--the
little devil is five----"
"You--know--him----?"
"Little devil--let me so much as be washin' the window of his nursery
and he gets me down on all-fours for a ride on me back."
"Your--back----"
"To-day, if anybody be askin' you--I can feel his little heels in my
shins yet----."
"You!"
"Slk-k-k-k-k! I live over there--near First Avenue. I got a room."
"He rode you--to-day----"
"He's a card--kicked my shins----"
"Will he ride you to-morrow----?"
"Mebbe."
"You like me?"
He threw up a killing glance from under his rocking-chair derby and
poked her under the cape with his forefinger. "Slk-k-k-k-k."
They turned down a crosstown street that ran toward First Avenue.
***
Willy's room was over a garage where a great mercantile establishment
kept its regiment of trucks. It was large, with one end filled with
traces; the body of an old horse-drawn delivery wagon and some old
leather harnesses that smelled.
The front part of the room had a bed and a chair and a table and a
small stove the shape of a snow man. Bertha hung some muslin
portières up one day. That cut the room in two and shut off the
wagon top, with a red star and R.H. Stacy and Company painted across
it. This seemed to move the chair, the table, the bed, and the stove
into a cozier propinquity. Otherwise, it was rather an awful room.
It stood there cold and mean and bare all day, scarcely more than a
kennel, waiting for the occupants who called it home, to creep back
into it at night.
Willy usually came first. It was a straight cut cross town, from the
house on Madison Avenue. Bertha's hours were more irregular. Her
work took her far and wide.
Once, during Christmas holidays, an agency on East Twenty-third
Street which kept her constantly supplied with day-work sent her,
along with a staff, to clean a schoolhouse on East One Hundred and
Ninety-second Street. It was ten o'clock before she climbed to the
room.
Willy was asleep on the bed with his shoes on and his derby hat over
his face. There was no fire and no supper. Willy could cook. He
had always lived off like this in a room with a bed and a stove. But
with the advent of Bertha an atavism cropped out in him. The stove
might be laid, but unless she struck the match, there was no fire.
It was easier to be cold and hungry and lie on the bed with his derby
over his face, waiting.
"You're a lunk," Bertha cried one night and hit him across the soles
of his shoes with a poker, as he lay stretched and waiting on top of
the bed.
"Then get out," he said, and turned over and dozed off until the fire
began to crackle in the round little belly of the stove and the
strong smell of tripe stew to wind through the room.
He was vicious, but in the small ways that a terrier can be vicious.
Yappy. Snappy. But the crack of a whip could curl his legs under
him and make him slink. He had the mind of a child. Colored picture
cards amused. He could not drink, and what he chewed was tobacco
substitute, and his pockets were filled with bits of bright glass and
twine and pencil stubs and old screws. Even his vices were not man
size. He was sly and he was a thief, but he stole only pennies and
doll's eyes and no one in the Bixby household could call a pen-knife
or scratch-pad his own. He was constantly filching the smaller coins
from Bertha's pocketbook. Coppers. She could feel his hand steal
under the leather cushion that was her pillow and would lie there in
the darkness with her eyes wide open, looking at the dim white smear
his teeth made across the darkness when he laid them bare in his
effort at stealth.
Silly Willy. He was not even a man. That made it less horrible,
even while it made it more horrible. She slept on the other side of
the muslin curtain, on the long leather seat of the old delivery
wagon. It made quite a couch. Only her feet dangled off, and she
could crowd them in if she drew up her knees. It was almost private,
except that he liked to peer through to see the gleam of her hair.
Unbound it fell in a slow cascade of heavy, solemn, taffy-looking
yellow.
"Get out! Sca-at!"
He didn't always, and had to be pushed out like a hateful boy. She
despised him and was never free of the feeling that his face was
boneless and made of dough, and that by the pressure of her palm
against it something terrifying and feature-less would be left there
before her.
And yet when Bertha came home from work with her pulpous brown
butcher's package, and her arms stinging from lye water and the
sockets aching, sometimes she could not run up the stairs fast
enough, skinning her shins and stumbling in her haste.
Willy would be there. Silly Willy. And he could show her the very
spot along his back where the boy had straddled, riding him horseback
and kicking into his shins. Once he had come home with the skin on
his arm torn. The boy had flecked him too hard with a whip. Bertha
washed it and kissed it. Kissed that wound on the hairless arm of
Silly Willy.
It was easy to make him talk. A sack of little cone-shaped chocolate
drops would accomplish it, or a new screw driver, or a roll of
adhesive plaster. Any little tinkery thing. And because he was sly,
he would only answer Slk-k-k-k-k to her questions until she produced
the bribe. It never bothered him to know the why of her trembling
interest in the boy. He just was silly and would talk for a
cone-shaped chocolate drop.
Sometimes at the Bixby house, instead of his emptying ashes or
washing windows or polishing brass, they would detain him in the
nursery on a rainy day to play those straddling floor games that the
starchy nurse could not manage. Silly Willy could amble on all fours
for hours. He would buckle on a leather harness that had bells,
shake himself and roar, and the boy, straddling his back, would kick
with his heels and shout.
Silly Willy was good at these games. He played them sincerely and
with the mind of a child.
Sometimes the boy stole down to the furnace rooms, where Willy kept
fires banked, and looked with solemn pools of eyes into the red maw
of the boiler. He had rather a frail, choir-boy face with long
cheeks and very straight yellow bangs which came down to his brows.
He could stare into the fire until the black irises almost crowded
out the blue in his eyes and his cheeks began to redden. He liked
fire. It fascinated him. Infuriated him. He would contemplate it,
then catch up a broom and ride hobby-horse astride it like one
possessed. Usually Willy followed, more feebly, on a second
broomstick.
His nurse or his mother usually precipitated this and Willy on his
springy knees would wabble back to the fire, to feed it, to sit in
its red stain, and to chuckle.
Sometimes in good outdoor weather or with the family away, there
would be no sign of the boy for days, for weeks. That was dull for
Willie. He liked to play. But Willie was sly.
For a bag of the chocolate drops or a screw or a ball of twine, he
would invent the day's encounter with the boy. Nothing very
ingenious. Willy's imagination was a feeble affair. Just a sort of
refurbishings of oft told tales.
Bertha did not mind. No sooner had they sat down with their dish of
dinner steaming up between them, than her hand made its insidious
curve down toward her pocket.
And then without any particular preamble Willy would begin: "He's a
devil for fire. He is. Gets his owl eyes full of it from staring
and then goes crazy with it. He's a fire horse. So am I. We're a
team of fire horses."
"Willy--that's a dangerous play!"
"Dangerous! You got to straddle your horse tight. That's all. Hold
'im in--is what I tells him--hold 'im in and you're all right."
"Is he strong enough to hold 'im in?"
"Naw. That's where I come in. Slk-k-k-k! I rein him up!"
"Willy--tell me again--what does he look like--the little boy?"
"Didn't I tell you--again and again and again----"
"Yoost once--more, Willy."
"Is it chocolates? Gimme."
"What does he look like?"
"He's a boy--he is, with eyes and hair----"
"Yellow, Willy? His hair bane yellow--like mine?"
"It's yellow all right."
"He's a big boy, Willy?"
"I showed you on the wall--he bane that high."
"That was last week--he bane bigger now?"
"Aw--not quick--like that--gimme what you've got. Chocolate?"
She handed him the sack of cones, for his dessert.
One evening over the strong smell of their kidney stew he screwed up
his eyes at her!
"I give him one--to-day."
"What?"
His eyes looked sly and almost at once that frightened her.
"What--Willy----?"
They disappeared as if dough had crowded up around two raisins.
"Willy--one what?"
"One of my chocolates!"
She rose up sudden and threatening as an apparition, her two arms
towering as if they would crash down upon him, and he cowed in his
chair with his mouth fallen open.
"You gave him from those----"
"Yeh----"
"He ate----"
"Naw--we put it in the fire. It melted up. Get away. You!"
She came down from the great towering gesture of her wrath, which he
interpreted not at all, and her fingers unclenched and the blood went
back into her face. She shook him then, by the scroff of his coat
until his head bobbed loosely.
"Don't you ever--don't you ever again--give him those ten cent cones."
"Stingy-gut, Slk-k-k-k-k--I only gave one----"
"Never. You hear, Willy. It bane bad for the boy. You--you'll get
fired. Make him sick. I'll bring you chocolates for him. Not your
kind. Chocolates for him----"
"Yeh, we're fire horses."
Chocolates for him! She could not sleep that night. Her feet kept
plunging off the end of the seat and sometimes she sat up in the
leather-smelling darkness because she breathed too fast and felt
crowded.
She bought a dollar box the next day. A red paper affair with a dog
and a boy on the cover. Stale bonbons that had lain in the
incandescent glare of a Third Avenue window for weeks.
The boy never received them. Bertha did not know, but he had been in
Asheville, North Carolina, for three weeks with his foster parents.
Willy ate the chocolates beside the glow of his furnace, popping them
whole into his mouth.
***
Willy had slacked. Shamefully. He no longer paid the rent for the
room, eight dollars a month. Bertha did. The first time she did it
because he wanted a tool chest for seven dollars and eighty-five
cents in a First Avenue show window. After that he never paid
anything. Bertha didn't demur. It was too precious, coming home in
the evening to Willy who that very day might have been galloping like
a fire horse for the boy.
Tools. They grew in a pile. His complete earnings, forty dollars a
month, went into them. He liked to sit and polish them. Test the
ductility of saws, run his plane around the floor for the curl of the
shavings. There were boxes of nails in assorted sizes. Screws.
Gimlets of every graduated variety. He could bore with them for an
entire evening into a bit of plank or the flank of the old delivery
wagon top. Bore and bore with a little mousy sound. He liked that
best. Slk-k-k-k-k! He never made anything. Only bored and sawed
and piddled.
Sometimes Bertha sewed. Made the muslin portières. Patched his
denim house-jacket.
Usually she was so tired evenings that to the sound of the mousy
borings she fell asleep behind her portières. Day-work was draining.
It was like undergoing the dreadful preliminaries of a new job each
morning.
"You can put your shoes there under the sink and there's a chair down
in the basement where you can hang your hat and coat. You don't go
stocking-footed, do you? Gracious, that agency is getting the limit
for day-help. Here's a pail and a mop. You can scrub this whole
courtyard in a morning, if you're spry. My former girl did it before
she got consumption. If that drain there backs water on you, ram
your arm down."
Day after day of it. Day-jobs where the residuum of dirty work was
apt to lie waiting and accumulated. Wet, sloppy, puddled days.
Cold, gaunt houses about to be occupied. Public buildings with rooms
full of the stench of neglect. Once, at a fishmonger's, scales clung
to her arms. Shining fish scales that hung to the flesh like burrs
and would not wash off. She scrubbed at the faucet, and suddenly
panic of them, the wet, slimy things, seized her and she screamed.
The fishmonger, enormous and stained and with a mallet for pounding
down codfish steaks in his hand, came and plucked off a few of them
for her and laughed, and then, because her arm was white and firm,
kissed her with wet, fish-smelling lips. She struck him with his own
mallet by jerking back his arm until he hit himself in the head, and
in his rage he struck back and she went home discharged and with a
blue welt coming out above her cheek bone.
Cold dirty days. Then hot days, equally dirty.
That way the months swung around and, through the poor silly eyes of
Willy, she beheld the boy grow older.
And as the eyes of Willy became sillier, and the face around them
more and more horridly doughy, Bertha, who hated him, was glad. As
he receded more and more into childishness, he played with the mind
and the heart of an innocent. Sometimes, on spring evenings, after
his supper, he joined the street boys at baseball or swapped some of
his shiny screws for chinies. Bertha, sitting up behind the window
curtain, would watch him. Carefully. He was kind to children.
He had come to hate her in a sly and secret kind of way. He was
cunning enough to know she paid the rent and bought the meat for
stews and that, by grace of her, the stack of his shining tools grew
high, but there festered in him, day by day, the desire to torture
her.
The same impulse, doubtless, that led him to delight in tearing off
the wings of flies. Or perhaps dimly she was to him the badge of his
impotence, and so he smouldered against her and hated. He had never
been a man, and yet the pangs of impotence made him more horrible
than he might have been with desire.
He liked to grimace at her with every torturous twist of feature he
could connive. To awaken her by hanging over her couch with his face
all drooly and loose of feature like an idiot's, and his hands
drooping loosely from the wrists so that they swept her face.
The horror of this made her wild. She would tremble for an entire
day from the start of waking up to this loose, drooling face of
Willy's. He was devilish at these little abuses. One day he brought
the window sharply on her hands as she leaned over the sill, so that
it made her finger nails blue. He never failed to scratch down
deeply into her palms if he had occasion to take anything from her,
and one evening he wanted to hand her the red hot poker and when she
saw the ruse and held the hand behind her, he brought it down on her
shoulder so that it singed her waist and the flesh.
But he was kind to children.
There was only about one way to deal with him. To slap him.
Usually, with his ears boxed, he could be trusted to trot over to his
tools and begin to plane or bore. Sometimes the cartwright's child
next door would come to play. Together they would set up the racket
of carpentry. Particularly with the plane, improvising mustachios
and fierce whiskers out of the shavings. Sometimes he carried a
handful of the shavings to the boy.
The mystery of the will to live. Not a morning but what Bertha knew
the terrible reluctance of awakening to reality. She came up out of
sleep with a struggle, fighting off another day; turning her back to
it and lying there sick with its imminence as the muslin portières
began to lighten. To come out of sleep so enamored of it that to
feel the lids lift back from the eyes was torture. To die a little
every night and yet fear the beauty of death more than the starkness
of life. Sometimes when Bertha came up out of sleep, fighting and
sobbing against the awakening and the grimacing face of Willy hung
over her terrible with reality, the impulse to throttle herself back
to sleep seemed too strong to withstand. And yet that wink of dawn
against the muslin. The tiny vibratory messages of life that were
waiting to run across the floor when her bare feet would swing down
to it. Ah, that will to live.
The little runs of life at her from all directions. The cartwright
in his shop next door was already striking sparks off an iron bar.
She could hear the deep-throated sledge hammer. The mystery of the
will to live. The mystery of the cartwright's arm, that could make
the iron boom. And so morning after morning she rose, and wrapped
the gunny sack she wore for an apron into its wad of newspaper, and
trotted off to the agency that seldom failed to have a day's
assignment awaiting her.
Days of rub-a-dub-dub. As if the floor of the universe were an
enormous penny to be scoured and polished, and the emblem on the coin
was the face of the boy.
***
Almost three weeks of the November of that year were so sleet riddled
that the city seemed merely glimpsed through bead portières. Horses
danced on their haunches and smote sparks. Shrubbery was embalmed
under ice, and urban trees stood like fountains whose ornamental
waters had frozen as they curved.
That year the Inverness cape fell literally to pieces like "the one
hoss shay." An uncompromising death. The weave simply would not hold
the thread and the patches fell off in scales. She bought a reefer
at the Sailors' Supply Store. It buttoned about her warmly enough,
but it reached only to her hips and the cold got through to her legs
and, worse than that, the sleeves were too short and too tight and
the armholes cut her. There were always red rims on her flesh where
she had strained through the harsh prison of this reefer, and at the
very first wearing a seam at the shoulder opened in a grin.
Chita's reefer had been like this one, only smaller. It was hard to
disassociate reefers from Chita. Sometimes, buttoning it up, it was
almost as if Chita's eyes popped through the buttonholes with a wink.
A row of Chita's hard, bright, suffering little eyes down the front
of her jacket.
Ah me--Chita----.
***
Lashing its tail, November plunged on. It was pitch dark at six in
the morning and sometimes after their breakfast of tripe-stew and
strong coffee she had literally to take Willy by the wrist and lead
him to his corner. He cried when it was cold, like a child, and
would run along the sidewalks wringing his hands as if they would
fall off, and crying and whimpering with the pain.
Bertha hated him for this. Once he came home with a red welt across
his neck where the boy had stropped him soundly as he came in crying
one day with the cold.
Bertha knew why, exultantly. He hated what she hated. Sniveling,
mewling Willy.
The agency opened at seven. First come, first served. For almost a
week the water froze everywhere in the pipes and there was no work.
One of these days she was put at swabbing out the lobbies and
lavatories of a theater, where the water was hot and plentiful and
plunged out from the faucets in great clouds of steam.
She had never been in a theater. This one was on Broadway near
Twenty-seventh Street, and its lobby was already bombastic with the
sunrise of the cinema. Promises in lithograph. Empyrean ecstasies
in three colors, of girl-cheek to boy-cheek. That swoop of the
senses to a woman's figure with her dilated eyes upside down, as she
hurtled head first off a trestle. A circus for the emotions here,
the human heart their trapeze.
All the forenoon she swabbed the tiled floors, worming with her rag
in between the feet of the little groups that stood before these
posters of escape. Snow-caked shoes. The feet of the city. Gay
feet, old feet, young feet, tired feet. The square little feet of
children and the bulbous feet that had grown lopsided with the
journey. Skulking feet with soft soles and eager feet with kicked
toes. Little girls' feet with tassels and the feet of a crone
wrapped in gunny sacks. Derelict boats. In, out, among those feet
all forenoon. The feet of the seekers after surcease from reality.
After noon an attendant with a festoon of gold braid across his
breast, threw open one of the baize green doors. The feet began to
turn into the theater. Eager pushing feet with little runs to them.
After a while Bertha was sent inside, too. There were lavatories to
be swabbed.
It was dark there and flesh smelling and slanting. To Bertha, as if
she were walking down an incline into the drown of phantom plush.
She floundered and her pail made a ringing noise and that brought her
up suddenly, behind the curtain of a box....
Square gem of light mounted on facets of darkness. A green field
flowing gently toward her, and a child with a handful of flowers
plucked up out of that field turning to smile at her with lips that
the darkness sped up against hers, pucker and all. Silence that
began to throb like the felon that sometimes attacked her third
finger. It was the organ rumbling up into a prelude. A chord came
through like a wave breaking. She slid in. The music of the chimes
goldily--
Then the lettering. It was difficult to follow, because she picked
out the words so slowly, mouthing their bathos aloud. Glitter of
jeweled sands that sped across and ran away.