He must have the heart of a woman, the brain of a poet, and the valor
of a man. Ah, Charvet--there is a new master for you. Charvet."
"Ah, Charvet"--you tiptoed out with the platters. "Ah, Charvet." To
be moon-haunted was to live with an opal mist about one's heart.
Bertha knew....
***
Go. Go. Go. Mrs. Oessetrich started out early as usual, but in the
excellent quality, badly fitting tweed now instead of the khaki, and
in the place of the fawn-colored ambulance, Eddie was out at the curb
again, usually with the small sedan.
Difficult as it was to keep the tall house from swooning into its
silence, somehow she partially accomplished it with the bang-bangings
of her comings and goings. The telephone. The telephone.
"_Bertha, if Madam Gerbhardt calls, tell her I will be glad to use
those tickets for the Vatican Choir at Carnegie Hall to-night. Tell
the carpenter when he comes, to meet me at Miss Olga's studio, I want
him to build those flower boxes before she gets back. It's beginning
to rain. Have those three trunks in the storeroom, with red stars on
them, dragged out into the hallway by the time I get home and I'll
spend this wet afternoon unpacking some things for Miss Paula. Dr.
Ehrenfest call up? Any mail? Nothing from Hill's End? Paris? Miss
Ermangarde? Look at the postmarks. No cables--Paris--Miss
Ermangarde?--sure? Oh--well----_"
There never were.
"_Well, I'll be home by two. If the awning man comes tell him to
wait._"
Hammer. Hammer. Hammer. Mrs. Oessetrich fighting the house's
silence. Awnings went up as early as April. Gay orange ones with
blue scallops. The old-fashioned little dressing room adjoining
Ermangarde's bedroom, with the built-in wardrobe and the stationary
washstand, was torn out and a shining rink of a bathroom installed.
Hammer. Hammer. The rippling, striped awnings and then one day the
entire house front lit up with new window shades. Festooned silk
ones that shirred up with the soft rush of a laugh. The piano in
Paula's room had been tuned and stood open. Smiling. Waiting. But
Paula never came. The door always stood open, too. But you never
looked in. Somehow the smile of that piano could seem more like a
grin.
Then this happened.
Those three trunks with the red stars on had been dragged into the
hallway that faced Paula's room, before it turned off into the ell
that led to Bertha's door.
All afternoon, while a slanting rain flew at the roof, Mrs.
Oessetrich puttered up there among Paula's things. Bertha, waxing
the newly installed hardwood floor in Paula's room could glance out
into the hallway and see her stooped there with her dry shattered
eyes roving among the dry things. Paula's little things. Paula
loved little things. There was a whole trayful of the kind of
trinkets that amused her. Jade elephants. Nubs of chrysoprose and
malachite. Carved intaglios. Cat's eye trifles and chalcedony.
Rock-crystal hens. A silver filigree shrine the size of a thimble
and wrought with amazing detail. There was a Christus with the ewe
lamb, hand carved out of the yellow eye of a topaz. Green jasper
amulet. A little girl's pocket-book, red lined and fashioned out of
two shells with Niagara Falls written across it. Shoes. The soles a
little thinned in the delicate way that Paula would wear them down.
Letters. A tray of them sorted in stacks. The curious rain-tapped
silence and Mathilde Oessetrich with her eyes that still had the look
of the cracked shoe buttons.
Paula's tray of letters. There was something so faint and pale about
them. They seemed to rise up in the vapor of a sigh.
After the waxing of the floor there were potatoes to peel and the
great red eye of a roast for dinner required larding to make the
juices run.
You picked your way down the back stairs, carefully, to save the
squeaks.
The afternoon drew in the silence like a poultice.
The red roast when you larded it with the stripes of suet swelled up
around your finger clammily, and with the heart gone from the meat,
out came your finger from the hole with a sucky little pop. The
house felt like that. It flowed around you so coldly, with the heart
gone out of it, and the pop of the rain drops--pop--pop----
Finally Mrs. Oessetrich came down into the kitchen. Her skin was all
dry, like a fowl's, and it was beginning to wattle at the neck. She
was much thinner. It made everything about her lower. Her waistline
and the sags underneath her eyes.
"Bertha." she said, and sat down on the edge of a chair, "has anyone
had access to the storeroom besides you?"
"No."
"You have always followed my instructions and permitted none of the
day help in there?"
"Yah----"
"Sure? Think carefully."
"Yah----"
"Well, something has happened. Bear in mind that these questions I
am about to ask are disagreeable ones, but they must be asked."
"What?"
"Bertha, there has been a systematic rifling of things going on in
the storeroom. Trunks have been pried open. Articles are missing.
There is a leak in my household."
"A--what----"
"A thief."
"You mean----"
"I mean that articles of Miss Paula's that I have been putting away
from time to time in trunks, during the period that she has not
been--so--well--have been stolen. Two of the trunks have been pried
open with hairpins and articles of more or less value are missing."
"You mean----"
"I mean nothing until I have gone further into this matter. You are
still a trusted servant. Now come upstairs with me."
The sickening process of that. Bertha, to whom things were so
trivial, suddenly quivering before their omnipotence.
Paula's trunk had been looted. All the neat little stacks of her
lovely handiwork were in swirls of confusion on the trays. A
pasteboard box had been gouged at one end and its contents dragged
out. A hairpin had got itself twisted about the lock and a hurried
hand had left it there.
"You can see for yourself, Bertha, someone from the inside has been
at work. Can you think of any explanation for these rifled trunks?"
"I--no----"
"This amounts to more than petty thievery. There were beautiful silk
garments here. Some of them imported and some of them beautifully
made by Miss Paula herself of the sheerest materials."
"Yah ..."
"I was going to take some of them to her at the san--hospital, She
will be shocked when she comes home and learns what has happened.
Her things. Paula loved things. Why, there were three white crepe
gowns on this tray that I remember distinctly packing away.
Beauties, with yards and yards of real Valenciennes that her
godmother had especially made for her in Valenciennes."
"White _crêpe de chine_--real Valenciennes."
"Just see! Oh. Oh. This box torn open and a rose quartz brooch
that was very precious to her--Harrison's--a gift to her from a dear
friend--stolen. Who has dared?"
You just stood and felt your nails dig up into your palms, and your
lips were so heavy. You kept trying to move them, but they would not
lift.
"I intend to get to the bottom of this--regardless."
"Mrs. Oessetrich----"
"Why Bertha, you are crimson! Bertha?"
"I--you see--yoost remembered---yoost thought----"
"Just thought what?"
"Answer me."
"I--don't--know----"
"Bertha!"
"It isn't possible. Not you. The most trusted servant I ever had!"
"But Mrs. Oessetrich, I----"
"So this is the mystery of you."
"I----"
"You strange white creature, you. This is the meaning----"
"I didn't know--"
"You thief! I never in my wildest dreams would have suspected you.
Who knows what systematic process of stealing has been going on all
these years under my very eyes."
"No--no--no!"
"Paula. My daughter Paula who trusted you. Who loved you."
"Please----"
"Thief! I shall call in detectives."
"No--no--please--I didn't know----"
"I too trusted you. I respected you. Oh, I cannot believe my
senses."
"Mrs. Oessetrich, I only----"
"What nonsense has been talked in this household about you. Miss
Olga who always insisted that you had the soul of a poet trapped in
the body of a peasant. The soul of a thief!"
Dumb Bertha standing there with her lips all shirred in like an old
woman's and her eyes down. It was horrible keeping her eyes down.
It made her face a bonfire around them.
"Come upstairs into your room with me. I intend to go to the bottom
of this."
The ignominy of that. Standing there with her arms huddled up and
her eyes seeming to suck back into her head like raisins into dough.
The opening and closing of drawers. Each dragging time the wood
seemed to run against the grain of her flesh and leave her shivering
there with a sense of splinters plunging horridly into her. Jagged
little needles.
Open. Shut. Open. Shut.
"What's that, in there?"
"Yoost my aprons."
"And that heavy thick stuff?"
"Yoost my nightgowns."
"Umph. You were clever enough to dispose of what you took, I see.
Why come to think of it, I've seen you carting packages out of the
house. I remember stopping you in the passageway one day. You were
furtive then. I realize it now. What's this?"
"Yoost music, Mrs. Oessetrich. Please--don't touch. Yoost some old
sheets of music I had before I came here."
"Humph. Loot from somewhere else, I suppose."
"Oh--oh----"
"Ugh, what a task! To think that I should ever have to resort to
such degrading methods with you. Well, I see that you are clever
enough to keep your clothes closet bare as a bone. Let's see, now.
Oh, get up on that chair and open up those two cupboard doors above
the closet. I intend to go to the bottom of this."
"Mrs. Oessetrich--those little doors I have never once opened since I
am here."
"Hand me that chair. I don't believe in half-way methods."
Your lips, they were so heavy they would not lift.
To reach the pair of small doors Mrs. Oessetrich had to strain tiptoe
on the chair.
"Please Mrs. Oessetrich, if you would just let me say----"
"Oh. Oh. Oh."
The little chills ran off you like sand down a dune. Cold
goosefleshing chills. The small cupboard doors jerked open with a
spill of things. To stand indicted before the stern irrefutable law
of ownership. The indubitable right of Mrs. Oessetrich to her
things. The colossal rights of ownership. Those rights had been
outraged. It brought out in Mrs. Oessetrich's face the lean look of
wolf.
The webby lovelinesses of Paula's. Chiffon with its pollen-like
power to cling to a woman's flesh. Articles that had been jammed up
there quickly. To stand there and gaze was to turn the eyes into
blisters. The cream lace boudoir cap of Mrs. Oessetrich's, for which
there had been a topsy-turvy search one Saturday morning, tucked up
there behind one of Paula's little fluted silk negligees. The blue
fox scarf that Ermangarde had been finally forced to decide she had
left in a taxicab. A gold and vermilion batik scarf of Olga's.
Stacks of unworn white gloves, Paula's narrow size. More of the
filmy things. Peach-colored gowns with the rills of Valenciennes.
Things. The scalding wrath of Mrs. Oessetrich over her silk
rag-a-tags. Her inalienable right to them.
To stand branded with the puniness of desire for them. To stand
there blanched to the very color of her teeth before Mrs. Oessetrich,
whose face had begun to narrow until the nose sharpened like the
blade of a knife. The shame ... you could scarcely breathe....
"So! These fur-lined bedroom slippers of mine that I haven't even
missed. Silk stockings. Bath salts. Sachet. You stupid,
luxury-loving girl. You of all people! A great coarse peasant girl
who seemed utterly impervious to creature things. But you have not
taken all this for the sake of the things themselves. You have
carted it out of the house. You are in league with someone. With
whom?"
"No. No."
"Miss Ermangarde's French batiste blouse! More sachet! My silver
shoe buckles. Why--why this is a case for the police."
"Mrs. Oessetrich, you would not----"
"Up here alone is stored several hundred dollars' worth of my
possessions. What quantities you must have carted away without my
knowing it. Come here, you. Stand there and look me in the eye.
How long has this been going on?"
"I--don't--know----"
"You don't know. Well, I advise you to find out and be pretty quick
about it. Maybe the police can help you to remember. This string of
lapis lazuli and carnelian beads. Do you realize that it in itself
is worth several hundred dollars?"
"Dollars..."
"Yes, dollars and don't dare let on that you did not know the value
of them."
"Dollars. Let me pay in dollars. Mrs. Oessetrich. I'll give it
back in dollars."
It was impossible to fumble down into the petticoat pocket quickly
enough. The fingers were so numb and did not seem separate.
"See, Mrs. Oessetrich, if only you will please be so kind. Dollars.
More than two hundred. I will pay for the things with dollars."
"Stolen money, too, I suppose. Thank goodness, my vaults have been
safe from you."
"No. No. Saved money."
"Money cannot buy exemption from punishment for crime."
"Mrs. Oessetrich, here, if you will please to take it--my Liberty
Bond----"
"You must accept your punishment like anyone else. Our penal system
is to protect society from such as you."
"Take what I got."
"Why should I? You are a thief. I do not know why I even listen to
you."
"You do--because----"
"Because I am a foolish, sentimental woman, my children to the
contrary notwithstanding."
"Please----"
"I am a weakling for permitting you to prevail upon me. You swear to
me that you are in league with no one."
"Oh, I do. I do."
"What was it that I saw you carrying out of the house that day I
stopped you----"
"----for Helga--at the hospital----"
"I don't seem able to deal with you as you deserve. There is
something about you--what is it?"
"Let me pay, Mrs. Oessetrich--see--money, and my bond."
"Put what you have down there on the table."
"Here it is."
"I shall take it and give it to the Red Cross: It is your
restitution. You should be made to pay a harder one. Now you leave
my house. Get out your valise or whatever you call the bag that you
brought your things in. Open it and let me see what is in it. More
loot, no doubt."
"No, Mrs. Oessetrich, there is nothing but----"
"Open it, I said."
"There."
"What is that green chiffon? Where did you get that old-fashioned
thing?"
"It's mine! Someone gave it to me."
"Ugh, fuzzy old evening wrap. Well, you didn't get that here. Now
pack your things. What is this? A book. _The Cathedral Under_----"
"No. No. Don't touch that book. It is mine."
"What are you doing with that volume of Rollo Farley in your bag?
You must have stolen that from Miss Ermangarde's desk. Why that book
is almost her bible. How dared you!"
"No! No! No! I tell you, no! Mine! Don't you! That book, Mrs.
Oessetrich--is mine."
"I am convinced now that you are vicious. Don't you dare hold my arm
that way. Put down that book or I shall telephone this minute for
the police."
"Put it down! How dare you ransack even our books. Give me that
book. You are not fit to touch it. You! _The Cathedral Under the
Sea_!"
"You don't know----"
"I know that if you do not put it down immediately I shall call the
police."
"Please----"
"Immediately, or I'll----"
"There."
"Now pack your things. I'll be waiting for you down in the kitchen.
You cannot leave this house without I take a final look into your
belongings. I am actually ill from this outrageous scene. Now pack.
Remember, just that pile of thick ugly things on the table there.
I'll be waiting ... come down the rear stairs...."
It was hard with all her fingers swollen thumbs, to cram the things
into the bag and the chills seemed to run down off her spine just
like sand. The stiff, unwieldy sailor's union suits. When they were
folded over once, they rose up solemnly in the bottom of the bag and
had to be weighted down with shoes. The striped, clean-smelling
flannel petticoat. The cake of hard brown soap. The bit of
Bulgarian embroidery. The green of Mrs. Farley's evening wrap. It
crowded over the top. Ocean green. To close your eyes a moment and
feel that spread of ocean green. The tears ran down and suddenly
they too were ocean. Things. Things. Things. Mrs. Oessetrich's
things. Helga's. Olga's. Ermangarde's. The green thought of ocean
flowed over and wiped them out and left the old stark uncluttered
silence. And to sit in that silence the second before you pinned on
your disk of a hat was to gather back strength.
The silence that still seemed full of the mewlings of Mrs. Oessetrich
over the things. Things. Helga who had loved them and had never
felt the green thought of ocean flow over and obliterate them.
The book was not a thing. It was a dear hurt heart lying forbidden
there on the table. It throbbed, when you held it up against your
cheek. It grew warm with the tears, the hot searing tears of
degradation that flowed out finally into that calm wide sense of
ocean.
"Bertha--you--up there, why are you so long? Hurry down here the
rear way and see to it that you pack only what strictly belongs to
you."
The book belonged. It belonged as warmly and as closely as
heartbeat. To leave it lying there on that table would be to leave a
heart. Then Bertha grew sly. So sly that the carpetbag closed
without even a click of a hasp over the volume of _The Cathedral
Under the Sea_.
To tiptoe down the front flight of stairs, the bag in one hand,
carefully away from the banisters, and her little purse of loose
change in the other, was like walking on cushions. The carpet rose
so roundly to the step. There was not so much as a creak and even
though the dreadful chills were running off her spine again, just the
lifting of the front door by the handle as it swung in, saved the
little squeal of its hinges and with Mrs. Oessetrich's voice rising
again from the rear of the house, the door closed again, noiselessly,
with Bertha on its outer side.
***
Annie was gone. It was a shock to come upon the house standing
eyeless there, with iron shutters across the windows and the front
stoop removed. A produce company used it for a warehouse. A crane
jutted out of one of the second story windows that had been converted
into a sliding door.
Change. The city swirling and sucking in the days had sucked in
Annie and the lodging house with the sour halls. It felt strange
coming down to face the warehouse with the crane hanging out. It had
some hay clinging to it as if it had not quite licked its chops.
There had stood Annie's lodging house, lean as a witch.
Quicksands. You could imagine the building, story by story
disappearing to the subtle suction, until only the dirty roof
remained and Jocko with a stiff, terrorized tail. And Annie. She
would have gone down last with her hands waving and protesting. They
would be the very last above the sands, Annie's hands, with the
fingers that were the shape of potatoes. Annie's strangling
hands--even Annie--love of life....
Front Street banged along. Down toward Bowling Green the produce
firms stood banked up in front with the boxed vegetables and fruits.
Frozen smells with the green coming softly through the mild February
day. Bang. Bang. Trucks over cobblestones. One of them stood
backed to the curb while a negro with a red cave for a mouth flung
crates of fruit, the yellow light of the oranges showing through,
across the sidewalk to another negro who caught them on the fly.
Bang. Bang. Trucks over cobblestones. Sh-h-h. Sh-h-h. Trucks
over quicksands.
At Bowling Green the fan of the sea came in. The carpetbag, even
though she shifted hands as she lugged it, began to cut. There was a
bench close to the railing.
When you sat down and leaned over, you stared right down into the
face of the harbor. To sit down there with a sigh, your back to the
city and your eyes to the sea, rested you and made that terrifying
day seem to recede.
The silly, terrifying day of the carnelian beads.
The puny little day on the edge of the ocean. Presently it would
pass out with the tide. As Annie's day had passed out, the day of
the carnelian beads and the cream lace boudoir cap would roll into
that immensity out there clothed in fog. The beauty, through the
fog, of that immensity!
She kept dreaming into it. Even that night when she finally found a
bed, up three flights in a cubby-hole of a filthy tenement on
Desbrosses Street, she kept dreaming into it. That pyramid of
immensity out there that was built out of days.
A certain phrase began to run along the weeks.
She's too old. She's too old. She's too old.
At first it gripped her breath and made her heart shy back in a hot
sort of flush. She's too old. She could read the phrase on the lips
of clients as they discussed her at the desk with the Bohemian who
conducted the employment office. Sometimes when she applied at homes
with the slip from the agency, they told her point blank.
"No. No. We don't want a middle-aged woman. Tell them at the
agency to send us a young girl. You're too old."
"But----"
"I know. You look like a strong, honest woman, but you're too old."
After a while the phrase began to rock. To have a cadence. It even
lulled. It made it suddenly easy to sit in the back row of the
office and wait until the younger girls were accounted for. It was
like sitting out of the crowd in a shady spot and watching the
troubled barterers in a market place. They hurried so and cared so
and their eyes were all crowded with self. While you sat back
against the wall and waited, you could imagine those faces all in
one. The faces of the barterers. The faces of those who could be
eager over the carnelian beads. A long, lean, composite face, with a
nose like a scimitar and the eyes that were full of self, so close
together that they almost seemed one.
You sat in the back row along with the charwomen, because you were
old with your hair and your skin and your bones and the zest in your
arms.
Clients with the eyes full of self that were so close together that
they almost seemed one, did not know that to be young with your heart
was to be a garden surrounded by the high gray walls of the flesh.
They saw only the high gray wall of the flesh, the tired shoulders,
and the white wing in the hair.
There was no evading it. Bertha was getting older with her skin and
her hair and the zest in her arms. Day work tired her terribly,
because it was mostly scrubbing. Sometimes when she returned to the
cubby-hole in Desbrosses Street the entire surface of her body gave
off a singing sensation.
It was a mean room without a place to wash, but there was a public
sink in the hallway of each of the tenement floors. Sometimes Bertha
did a furtive thing. The tin basin in her room was so small. You
could only slap the face with water. Often when the halls were quiet
of the squalling of children and the black skull of a house seemed to
sleep, Bertha, in her bare feet, stole out softly to the sink and
slipped down her chemise.
If she bent down double under the faucet the cool water poured over
her back. She could feel the smoothness of her flesh with the
evenness of the flow. At first it sent a delicious shudder through
her right up into her throat, and then it flowed so clean and so pure
and so cool. It was like being as still as a mountain with a rill
running down it. The water slid off her white back and around up
under the warmth of her breasts. It dripped down into the sink with
green little forest noises. They helped the ache, these furtive
rinses, and sometimes when her feet were great swollen pads, she let
the water pour over them too. It was easier then not to lie awake of
tiredness.
The fact was to be faced that even day work was no longer easily
obtainable. Sometimes the janitors and the superintendents of
buildings passed her by for the next. "She's too old."
Without the little hitting friendliness of her savings in her
petticoat pocket, that was a little terrifying. The room in
Desbrosses Street was a dollar a week and there were strict fire laws
against cooking in the rickety old building over gas jets or alcohol
lamps. The quick lunch rooms, even the meanest of them, made heavy
inroads on the day's pay. At best they were dreadful, fume-fogged
places, where the fried foods clung to the cold plates on rims of
grease and the coffee was the color and consistency of clay-bank.
Often it seemed to Bertha that it simply would not go down. The warm
slush of it in her mouth. To close the eyes and gulp until the tears
sprang, accomplished it. It was easier to bear than the knife-pangs
of hunger which could come slashing down on Bertha. They cut her in
two. Bertha dreaded hunger. It made her shamble when she walked.
It lifted the top off her head. It cut.
Sometimes, that rather terrifying year, even though you were the
first to report at the agency, there was only work three days in the
week. To be a little hungry was not so bad if you stayed in the room
on your cot. That was what Bertha did on the idle days. Stretched
out there, the hunger gnawed up and down her great body like a rat
and would not let her sleep. But it was easier lying there. The top
stayed on your head.
There was the peasant of her for you. Strong hot foods. Meats.
Sour rye bread with a tight and heavy mesh. Pea soup so thick that
it poured from the pot in clumps. Without them the pull died in her
legs and the lunge from her arm sockets. The concocted foods of the
lunch room, the gray-looking stews, and custards with the ooze of
water on top were pallid on her tongue.
All that winter, while on three days' earnings she must live for
seven, and the reefer jacket grew horrible of the patches that the
fabric could no longer hold, the blades kept slashing. The hunger
blades.
Sometimes in washing down a corridor the floor began to wave, or
walking home or standing in the crush of a street car, you could
never foretell just when, that dreadful top-of-your-head feeling;
that lightness that would make you want to
sway--loose-kneed--down--down. And then that little singing
sensation, like a kettle boiling, that you felt against your
windpipe. The nervousness of that. It was not easy to feel
light-headed and cold and pursued by that little singing irritation
in your throat, and still plunge a high power arm into the pail and
fling out a wide and soapy fan of wet.
Bertha suffered that winter after a fantastic fashion. The days
seemed etched on glass. Thin cold flat days. Like the window pane
when you awoke in the morning with the wild mountain scenery frozen
to it. The unreality of those days. One after another after
another, as if you could put your fist through and crash them.
The idle days stretched on the cot with that incessant little
sensation of the boiling tea kettle along your throat. Sometimes the
hours became a little crazy with tilting walls and sagging ceiling.
Sometimes it was like lying on the under side of a wave. The
perversity of a bare spot on the wall where the plaster had crumbled
and a lath or two grinned through! Sometimes it became the amber
tunnels of Jocko's eyes, through which you ran along lovely
opalescent floors calling--calling--and all the motes in the amber
were faces. The faces of boys frozen into the translucence. The
face of the boy in the window that she had not looked upon. The
faces of boys. Boys. She did not glance at them as she ran calling,
but there was one face among the many down in the beautiful drown of
the amber--a dear, dear one. She did not look. She couldn't.
Couldn't. But the streamer of her hair with the wing of white in it,
drifted past his face as she ran calling--calling--Rollo--no, not
Rollo. Rollo was out there on the hill. Rollo was dead. That was
not the name. Willie had known the name of the boy. Silly Willy who
had felt the dig of his heels into his haunches. Felix! That was
the name. It snapped like a little coin purse when you said it.
Felix. Of course! Felix, son of Rollo.
***
A windfall came along. In one night she earned sixteen dollars. It
happened this way.
On a Saturday morning at the agency the front row emptied itself
before eleven and the younger girls, many of them on tall heels, went
out jauntily, a little impudently, with their slips of paper. So the
back row came out suddenly in its horrific sort of frieze. The
frieze of the scrubwomen. Old women with sucked-in faces like the
swirl of water down a drain hole. Women with white jade faces.
Women with veiny noses and cheek venules and lips that the muscles
would not hold into place. Women with eyes about as lifeless as
gelatin. Women with dead breasts.
Bertha stood out. Just as surely as an old horse sags to sway-back,
Bertha's shoulders were down, for good, but her eyes were blue with
water and sky. Mediterranean bays.
That is why, because her gaze seemed to project her in full relief
out from the frieze, and the front row was already emptied, Bertha
was selected. Delsher's had sent down for a cloakroom attendant for
a ball that evening.
"Here you! You're too old for that kinda job, but I can't give 'em
what I ain't got. Report there at nine to-night and ask for Gerard,
the steward."
_You're too old. You're too old. You're too old._
Delsher's was in Fifty-eighth Street near Fifth Avenue. An awning
jutted out over the sidewalk and the little striped cave was all lit
with electric bulbs. A puff of hot scented breath came out even at
the service entrance. Flesh. Warm, scented, excited flesh. That
odor always hung over Delsher's. From ball to ball to ball. The
unfastidious fact is that Delsher's smelled like a jungle. Young,
excited, breathing flanks.
There were cloakrooms on each floor. Passing along, you could see
the ballroom. The enchanted lake of floor, sly with wax. The jungle
bowed back from it with a gesture of palms with enormous fronds and
the crystal hanging moss of the side lights, and the tree stripes of
great gilt pillars. Mirrors caught at the effect and tattled it on.
Sometimes you could see the same tapestry and gold chair repeated six
stately times.
Bertha's allotted cloakroom was gray. The dressing tables had gold
pointed roofs and there were long aisles formed by the coat racks.
It was very simple. You exchanged a brass tag for a dazzle of
field-of-ermine or of cloth-of-gold.
The shrill, young-fleshed beauty of the old-eyed girls as they began
to arrive. They stepped out of the splendid surf of the wraps,
breastless as boys, and with wise scarlet threads for lips. The
insolence of them with their bobbed, flaring heads that made their
necks look slender and nervous. The fine fettle of young horses with
docked tails and pink lightening of nostrils.
It was bewildering. The young herd of them rushing in. The perfumed
dust. You saw them through the astonishing fog of cigarette smoke
and face powder and fur and chiffon. The brocades had a way of
clinging to Bertha's hands. They almost had to be ripped away from
the flesh. Cutting, nasty sensation. The little splitting sounds of
the satins along the roughened fingers. Then there were the corsets.
They stepped out of them. Tiny, boneless, pink satin urns. A half
animate feeling as you laid them away, still warm from the ripple of
ribs and the excited breathing.
The heat rose in waves and the powder began to taste in a soft
scented mud that lay along the tongue and back into the throat. The
walls had a little sway to them as the wraps mounted and mounted.
The brass checks. You could scarcely hand them out fast enough.
Slashing bareness of shoulders. Slim things with V's of nakedness
down to the waistline in back. More and more of the discarded, pink,
slim little corsets and more and more of the confluent planes of
torsos gliding under chiffons. That odor of jungle. The excited
released flanks.
You leaped! It was the first crash of flesh-shuddering music. The
naked undulating V's. A contortion ran along the cloakroom, as if
everyone had moved on little running muscles and yet not advanced.
You shivered almost, ecstatically at that. Eyelids. The white flash
of them lowering. Sudden slitted eyes. Insouciance of the docked
heads. A tree shake through the cloakroom. Only it did not begin at
the heart. It lay to the flesh. The shivering, shimmying flesh....
That gelatinous room. It nauseated. It seemed to be moving away on
the running muscles and yet not moving at all. It made you a little
sick, the motionless motion. There was nothing to clutch. The
insidious horridness of it. The slitted eyes. The wise red threads
for mouths. The ripple of torsos.
You sat down in the emptied cloakroom finally. You remembered the
lancinating pains in the ambulance. Mothers of men, was it for this?
You seemed to remember again--you seemed to remember--sweat and love
and solitary childbirth on wide moors. Swing of the grinning scythes
and the women who toil and who bear and who weep, and the wide-legged
men with the necks like tree boles. Peril of solitary childbirth on
wide moors. Mothers of men--was it for this....
The crashing and the jazzing never ceased. Where one band left off
another took up. Syncopated wilderness of a night. The saxophones
screamed into the jungle. Corsages died into the heat and cloyed it
up. The strange new breastless girls with the docked heads and the
naked V's for backs swarmed past the door with the men whose shirt
fronts had gone a little awry and whose irreverent eyes slid toward
the V of back and the willful rippling of the torsos under chiffon.
It was not easy to keep awake. The velvets and the furs of the wraps
crowded up the heat so and the tongue was all slippery with the fine
scented powder. That maniac, the saxophone! The smoke began to
sting Bertha's eyes. She commenced to doze in the miasma. They
started to drift in again. Some of them a little drunk. One with a
broken shoulder strap and the mark of teeth on the knowing little
knoll of her shoulder.
You were tempted, sewing the strap across that tender bit of flesh,
to spank it. The petted peacock flesh of the new generation
squalling its emancipation in naked backs and tipsy eyes and wriggle
of insinuating torso.
The tipsy eyes. The cloakroom began to crowd up with them. The new
eyes of the new youth. They were clear enough, but brilliant with
the hard shine of blades. The cutting, slashing blades of mowing
machines. The mowed-down little gardens that sometimes bloom in
young girls' eyes. Bold, unveiled, inquisitive eyes, these.
Impudent eyes, without illusion, without fear, but without the mist
of wonder.
It was strange, the young men with the awry shirt fronts who passed
the door, looked into the new eyes of new youth without illusion,
too, and without reverence and without the mist of wonder. The new
eyes of the new youth. New eyes but old lusts. The mowed-down
wastes of the garden. The star flowers that sometimes bloom in
women's eyes and make them madonna-like. They were mowed down by the
impudent steel blades. Cool, clear, matter-of-fact eyes as real as
Pittsburgh.
The burning raging hours. There was no end. Crash. The gale of
jazz that shook the torsos. Crash. The rumble of jungle. The odor
of jungle.
There was a young man stretched out on the couch in the hallway just
outside the cloakroom. He was dreadful. Bla. His mouth was a mere
roving rhomboid in the fleshiness of his face and his eyes silly
pools. One of the girls held his head on her lap and played with his
hair. Slick clumps of polished hair. She had a startled lovely
face, shaped like a heart. A cigarette hung between her lips and she
talked through it. Once she reached into the young man's waistcoat
pocket and drew out a silver flask about the size and flatness of a
hand and tilted it to her lips. A stream oozed sidewise and down
along her neck. The young man lifted that four-sided mouth of his
and kissed the trickle.
You held yourself tight against the nausea of that.
Bertha, standing and looking at them with the deep blue channels of
her eyes, a silent sort of peasant tower.
"Who's your friend, the Woolworth Building, _Chérie_!"
"That's not the Woolworth Building, Jerry my only, that's Grant's
Tomb. Can't you tell by the dome?"
"I'll dance with you for that."
"Then make haste, Lochinvar. I'm growing awfully wobbly on my toddle
toddle-toddlers."
The wild horse of a night plunged on. The figures of the
trampled-down girls. The cloakroom was strewn with them. They were
on the sofas and some as limp as dolls propped up against chairs.
Bare arms and silk legs strewn at the haphazard angles of sawdust
dolls. You stepped among the debris of them.
The maniacal laughter of the jazz. You began to feel a little mad
with it yourself. Your brain was one of those Coney Island devices
for noise. Raz-z-z-z daz-z-z-z. The terrible sting of fumes against
your eyeballs. The rising simoon of the heat. The flung bare,
beautiful necks there--about--everywhere--and the wise impudent lips.
You stepped among the slim forms and propped them up and straightened
out the sawdust legs and ordered the tossed loveliness of chiffon
down over the legs. Raz-z-z-z daz-z-z-z. It helped as you pushed
through the fumes, to try and swing out on the short quick beats of
the brain, far away from what the hands did.
Somewhere, you tried to think--raz-z-z-z daz-z-z-z--somewhere, Lake
Como's twilights are deep purple. Slow purple like the widening wine
stain on a tablecloth. Raz-z-z-z daz-z-z-z. To lean out into that
thought. It was like opening a window. Slow twilights. The
standing forests with folded arms. To lean out--raz-z-z-z daz-z-z-z.
One girl asleep in a chair with neatly closed but fumy lips had to be
picked up as if she were a little bag of sachet, crammed into her
wrap and handed bodily to one of the young men with the irreverent
eyes. He left a dollar bill on the counter that separated the
cloakroom from the corridor. That was the beginning. Until dawn the
coins and a few more dollar bills showered there. There was a china
saucer for catching them in one of the dressing table drawers.
Bertha did not know that.
At four o'clock the jazz sort of reared itself up on its hind legs,
neighed enormously, and stopped like a great fantastic, fabled horse,
frozen there on his dancing haunches with horror at his bray.
The strange silence began to pour. It pressed on the eardrums. It
sang. A ringing silence as full of shuddering little atoms as a
brass gong after a beating. You tiptoed through it, picking up
oddments of a glove, a ribbon, a comb. The exhausted air was full of
fog. There were three thickness of brocade across the window and the
sash was hard to budge.
Finally, with all the strength of her, Bertha jerked it open. A wet
cool dawn blew in. You scooped your hands into it and laved it over
your face. Cool dawn that had traveled over wide and brooding
silences. You fell on your knees beside the open window and drank it
in as it pinkened.
It was time to go, but there was still one coat left on the rack. A
lovely one of pink silver and silver fox. The money made quite a wad
in Bertha's petticoat pocket. It was pleasant while you waited, to
walk about the room to the friendly hit-hit. It made the rising day
seem kindly. The little ducts in her mouth were running. The
hit-hit meant tripe stew for breakfast.
Bertha standing there in the ruins of that cluttered bejazzed night,
her silhouette against the new day....
A vacuum cleaner started to whine on a lower floor. The coat of pink
silver began to tarnish against the day. Voices. The girl with the
heart-shaped face and one of the young men with the patent leather
hair and the irreverent eyes. There had been so many of them.
Hundreds of them passing and repassing that door. You wanted to
laugh at the identical procession of them. A shirt front for a shirt
front. An eye for an eye. A silhouette for a silhouette. Hundreds
of the lean-faced young men. They had passed and they had passed
until there was only the one left. He was leaning up against the
door frame in an easy and insolent hypotenuse with his hands plunged
into his pockets and crawling about in there, and his easy face none
too steady, with the mouth off on its rhomboid every so often.
"_Chérie_, I adore you."
"Jerry, you darling villain."
"Get your wraps. I'll run down and get mine. Here's a dollar for
the Woolworth Tower."
"Grant's Tomb, darling."
"Hurry along, there's a girl."
"But Jerry--I----"
"Darling, haven't my two hours of eloquence upon the subject
convinced you that no one will ever know?"
"But the family--Jerry, and Father is so--so----"
"Will you leave all that to me, _Chérie_? Do you trust me enough?
You'll be home tucked in your little bed by the time your maid comes
in to draw your curtains. I want you, _Chérie_, with
me--to-night--my rooms--for an hour only----"
"Jerry."
"I'll be back with my coat ... wait, sit here, darling...."
"Oh, Jerry----"
"No, no--no nonsense--say to me, 'Yes, Jerry darling.' Say it
pretty, so I can kiss it off your lips."
"Yes--Jerry darling----"
The wrap of pink silver. She slid into it like a star into a cloud.
It was hard to tear your eyes off the pale, frightened beauty of her.
Somehow you wanted to keep her. Close. Close to your bigness. To
make her listen if she would, to the calmness, to the great calm tick
of your heart. Your eyes, you could not take them off. You stood
there drawing on her wrap for her. But your eyes. You could not
tear them off. Bertha, standing there big and pale and tranquil
against the daylight.
"You! Let go, please. What are you looking at?"
"I--why, miss----"
"You think I'm drunk. I'm not."
"No."
"I won't be looked at like that. You hear me? I won't."
She began to cry. Tipsy little tears that ran down to the point of
her heart-shaped face.
"You! I won't be looked at like that. I hate it. I won't have it.
I want to go home."
"Go----"
"Tell him--the young man--tell him when he comes that I've gone.
Tell him I left the message. I've gone home. I--you--I hate you for
staring like that. I won't have it. I want to go home...."
She gathered the shimmer of wrap all about her and ran down the
right-hand curve of the staircase. You could follow the shimmer of
her through the mirror. The shimmer--the whine of the vacuum cleaner.
The empty cloakroom, it was the color of cloyed grease. Presently he
came.
"Where----"
"She's gone----"
"Gone where----"
"Gone----"
"Hell," he said and started toward the right staircase.
"No. No. Wait. She'll be back in yoost a minute. Wait here, she
said."
"Oh." He sat down a little unsteadily.
She closed the window so that the heat crowded up again. Tiptoe.
Her movements about the room had a slow sedative rhythm. Tiptoe.
There was a corsage of double Parma violets kicked under a table and
dying into the heat. She picked it up and placed it on the table at
his elbow. Slow tease of perfume. His eyelids began to wave like an
old green frog's. Finally, he slumped over sidewise. Asleep.
Bertha, tiptoeing out, with her lips lifted back off her shining
square teeth.
It was sun-up when she came out into the street. Even the city can
be sweet with morning. She strode through the tender light, the
bold, reassuring hit-hit against her leg. There was a certain Quick
Lunch Room on Lexington Avenue. Tripe stew. The juices along the
sides of her tongue were running.
***
The half-days were humiliating. They were the crumbs from the
agencies. Almost invariably they fell to the frieze of the
charwomen. One day for the first time one of these part-time
allotments fell to Bertha. Fell like a clod of fear. She took it
and went out with her shoulders round, and the slip of paper clutched
in her dread smitten fingers.
It was as if you had passed a milestone. An old stump of a milestone
all worn down and shaped like the last tooth of one of the scrubwomen.
The morning's work was in an automobile showroom on Fifty-ninth
Street near Columbus Circle. Polishing brass railings and the
mirrors nailed to the floor underneath the motor cars to reflect
their lowermost perfections. A soft morning of mousy little rubbings
along smooth surfaces. At two o'clock the workaday was finished. A
sun-drenched spring day swam over the Park and along the streets that
were running with new thaw. Women wore bright hats and overshoes.
What snow remained had great gaps in it that widened, and everywhere
little rivulets were hurrying toward the gutters. It was pleasant
just to stroll.
At Carnegie Hall on Fifty-seventh Street the motor cars were dense
and the bright hats were bobbing. Traffic ran toward the great
building in spokes. Up from the subways. Down from the elevated
trains. Along the side streets. Out from the motors. Concert
crowds. Bertha knew. Madam Gerbhardt had once given her the tickets
to the Ukrainian Chorus.
The crowd hit into you from all sides. You began to elbow. The
broad steps were crammed and everyone's face was uplifted. Two
policemen swung benign clubs. This was a kid-glove crowd with a
scent and a rustle to it. Once the swirl tightened so that no one
could move, but everybody swayed. The well-bred little squeals of
the women. The firm, well-clad arms of the men forging ahead for
them. Slamming of motor doors. Slow pouring upward of the crowd on
the steps. The eager, fluty voices of the women....
The swirl held Bertha like a vise. The women, ever so slightly, and
kindly enough, veered a little from the contact with her worn old
reefer. It was horrible in the spring light. Like a scab. You had
to hold yourself away from it by breathing in. Bertha could do that
until it almost seemed a mere box, with herself quite slimly and
fastidiously down its center.
Something curious happened. A child caught down in the jam had his
face crushed up softly against the reefer. His mother slid in a
quick hand between his cheek and the contact.
"Daddy," she said, "see if you cannot lift Junior over on your side.
Don't touch, Junior. Ugh, darling, not nice. Come over on this side
with Daddy--don't touch lady's coat."
She was as snug as a plover and as plump. Sweet fleshed. Something
eupeptic about her. Something about her....
"Go over to Daddy and Brother Ben." she said and veered. The veering
women.
The father lifted the child. His smile was very white in a brown
face. Liver spotted eyes....
"Come, Junior Boy," he said, "away from there. Here, Mother, you
come too. Away."
It was the Musliners. The firm pat tight little group of them. You
watched them edge up the steps with the crowd.
***
It was the spring made you hate that reefer. So with simulated
unconsciousness you looked over the heads of the veering women as you
tried to force your way through. And over the heads of the veering
women you saw a picture. A lithograph pasted on to a panel beside
the entrance. It stood out like the spot cast by a sun glass. It
riveted the eye. Willy-nilly the crowds jammed around. Bertha with
her big hands and wrists hanging bare in a huddle in front and her
gaze sucked up against the lithograph in the panel.
The spot that stood out as if cast by a sun glass was a head. It
leaned out over one shoulder and then everything was black, like a
silence, until farther down over the keyboard of a piano were two
hands. You wanted to cry. Such ineffably tender hands. Why--why
the white hands at your heart! There they were. And that head
leaning over one shoulder out of that background of silence. That
luminous, tawny-looking head with the long tender cheeks and the eyes
that looked tranced with the music of the chimes goldily. Who? The
name ran in script across the corner. Charvet.
Ah, Charvet. That evening at dinner. Madam Gerbhardt.
Moon-haunted. To be moon-haunted was to live with an opal mist about
the heart....
It was so hard to move. The eyes held so. They held, with that
feeling of suction....
"Move on."
There was still something of the sixteen dollars in that petticoat
pocket. Friendly little wad. It burned. It made your body glow
suddenly like a hot coin. An excoriating kind of heat that made your
lips feel cracked and your eyes glossy.
The crowd bent up the steps. There was a long line before the box
office. It moved up inch by inch, and Bertha, suddenly a part of it,
moved too. The wad was tied into a handkerchief and it had to be
bitten open with the teeth.
"Ticket please."
"Admission only."
"What?"
"Standing room only. One dollar."
"Yah...."
You slid in through a baize door. The auditorium was dim and
enormous and the waiting silence all arched up like a cat's back.
The stage was so far--off somewhere beyond the intervening sea of all
the soft breathings. You could see a little, if you tiptoed to peer
between the heads. The piano. A curve of black. The white hands.
The ineffably tender hands. Heart flutters that had flown out there.
Someone rammed in ahead, pressing you there against the wall.
***
[Illustration: Music fragment]
The shelving slipping beach. The white keys ran down it with the
purr of surf. You could feel the floor of sand moving out subtly
from under your feet. The floor that led under the sea.
***
Bertha standing pinioned there to the wall with her hands caught up
and crowded to her breast by the crush of the standees and her throat
flexed outward and beating. It was like bleeding. As if the
melodies of her heart were arteries and that running of the keys out
there the precious bleeding of them. It was like that. Oh, it
was....
[Illustration: Music fragment]
The tears came out in a dew along your eyes.
[Illustration: Music fragment]
It stepped down the keys in heartbeats. You could scarcely keep
back. You knew that cry. It had lain in your heart for so long.
There it was on the outside of yourself, strewn along the keys. You
were free of the hurt of it--where it had lodged like a knife in the
plushy case of your heart.
The bleeding out of all the little inner turmoils. The dammed-up
ecstasies. The music of the chimes goldily. The glad releases. The
rilling beauty. The white hands at your heart. Just by tilting
yourself up tiptoe you could see them flown out there above the keys.
The white flutterings. To be pinioned there against the wall all of
that afternoon with your hands caught up against your breast and the
arteries of your heart uncocked and flowing....
The applause beat itself out and then began all over again. It died
down and then, on the momentum of a few little scattered claps, rose
again. The crowd loosened and moved down the aisle, blackening and
jamming around the platform. The cramming against the wall eased up.
You could hurry, too, if you wanted.
But is was enough, just to remain there against the wall with the
eyes closed and the throat flexing. She could no more have
moved--down there--those white hands--the white hands at her
heart--down there--fluttering. She could no more have moved....
It was enough to be standing back there against the wall weak and
glad.
It did not matter that her eyes somehow could not open to see the
face of Felix Charvet down there beyond the opal mist, the face with
the chimes tranced so goldily in the eyes and the long, choir-boy
cheeks that were lit with their first faint down.
It did not matter, now that she felt so glad and weak and bled free
of those lovely torments that were without dimension ... it did not
matter that she was never to know that Felix Charvet was Felix--son
of Rollo.
***
It was frightening to see the houses board up and the exodus of the
families set in. Summer. Truck loads of perilously piled trunks.
Nonplussed cats mewling at sealed doors. Handbills collecting on
stoops in little snow drifts.
The agencies began to crowd.
The room in Desbrosses Street was as black and as narrow as a flue
and all day it drew in the heat and all night long breathed it out.
There was a window, but it opened upon a brick wall that you could
touch without leaning. The darkness seemed to embalm the heat.
Dreadful furry thickness like the fuzz on the tongue of a fever
patient.
Sometimes at night, Bertha dragged herself to the sill and crouched
on the floor with her cheek to it. The wall breathed like a flank.
If you looked straight up there was a bit of sky about the size of a
quill. On certain nights a star wandered into it. It made Bertha
laugh to see it. Like a wise eye to a keyhole. Until she fell
asleep Bertha gazed, eye to eye.
But this very slit of a room was the reason why it was frightening to
see the houses board up. Its rental was a dollar a week and with the
exodus to the country even part time work with the families, scarcer
and scarcer.
Once she did jump a week and the agent who collected each Saturday
into a dirty canvas bag with a drawstring showed a tooth at her. A
sort of fang and the more terrifying because she had thought his gums
were empty.
One day an innkeeper engaging a staff for his back street little
hostelry in Asbury Park debated between Bertha and a great green
Swedish girl who spoke no English, but whose lips hung down like ripe
plums.
For the life of him he could not decide. Bertha sitting back in the
frieze kept saying something that was her little prayer.
"Please make him," she kept saying--"please make him."
The bald spot on his head was all crimson and beaten from the sun.
It must have taken a good warm sun through clean salted air to do
that. Asbury Park. Please make him. Please make him.
"You're too old," he said finally and turned to lay his hand on the
Swedish girl's hip.
_You're too old. You're too old. You're too old_. The phrase was
so sly. It ran after you like a shadow. It would never let you be.
But that same day there came along a week of half-days at Coronation
Point Inn. Airing rooms preparatory to the opening of the season.
Prying closed windows from their winter stripping. Swabbing floors
and unswathing the wrapped bedsteads which were hung slightly from
the floor, against winter dampness.
Oh, but it was pleasant. Coronation Point stood on a terrace and
overlooked a curve of bay. You took a subway to the end of the line
and then a surface car and then you walked fifteen minutes through
sun-shot leafage that speckled the road and made it dance. Chipmunks
made precious noises scuttling over leaves. Orioles the color of the
batting of an eye flashed through. Tit-a-weet of cock robin. And
smells. The damp lush ones of sun making moist places steam and the
green ones of stems when they are snapped in two and bleed. The
green smells came from a little tramp stream of new water without
even a bed for itself which ran through the grasses. It had a trill.
It made the morning a hurrying loveliness. Quick, delicate, tumbling
thing--sometimes on the homeward walk, Bertha took off her shoes and
stockings, stooped for a handful of skirt and waded in against its
tiny tide. The toes bit down and the mud squnched up....
Where the woods left off, the highway and hot little wooden houses
took up. Then it was hot! Trudging along toward the surface car,
motors tore along that macadam road, so that it was best to walk on
the little rim of cinders at the edge. That was the worst of the
half-day at Coronation Point. The half pay and the walk back to the
surface car through the blazing noon.
Sometimes in front of the occasional frame houses there were wooden
planks. They eased the feet of the burn from the macadam and before
a shanty that had been rigged up as a gasoline station, an old
overturned chassis, rotting there through sun and storm, was at least
a resting place.
A hot, bald-faced little shanty-town squatting there on the bare clay
stretch beyond the surface cars. You could see the tracks shining in
the distance like forceps and on clear days the minarets of the city.
Children and hens wallowed themselves out dust-baths in the patches
of yard before these houses. The women were slattern. But sometimes
there were neat corrugated truck gardens. Ruffles of lettuce.
Lattice work of peas. Ridged potato patches like the roof of a
mouth. Tough, good-smelling gardens. Just to trudge past them could
set the knife blades of hunger to slashing in Bertha.
There was a bake shop farther along. A dilapidated little packing
case of a building, with a brood of dirty children wallowing in the
back yard and a weedy truck garden that had somehow been eked out of
the clay.
MEYERBOGEN'S BAKERY. LUNCH ROOM.
CROTON'S ICE CREAM SOLD HERE.
Its breath was so sweet. The fragrance of hot bread. You could
smell it as you came along the road. It teased at Bertha's
faintness. It made the noonday road turn into a garter snake that
rippled. The swimming, buzzing bread-scented haze. One day, because
it was unendurable to wait for the three o'clock tripe stew in the
city, which must serve as lunch and dinner, she turned in.
A mat of flies clung to the screen door and buzzed off as she opened
it. There was a table near the door with a mustard pot on it. The
bread and rolls on the counter were covered with pink netting. The
proprietor served. He was enormous. A white apron girded his
middle. His white cap was awry on his curly head. You saw him
through a fog of flour. Great fellow, most of the objects in the
shop shook as he walked. The T of chandelier that hung down in the
show window of tilted loaves of bread. The coffee mugs on the shelf.
A stack of saucers.
"Veenie sandwiches, five zents. Baked beans, five zents. Gorned
beef hash vid boached egg, fiveteen."
"Beans."
"Coffee?"
"Yah...."
The noonday buzzed with the flies and the broken little shouts of the
children. It was hard not to doze as she waited. Once her head did
fall forward.
"It's a hot day," said Meyerbogen the baker, and set down a brown
dish of the beans with a pale cube of pork on top.
"Yah."
Suddenly it was hard to eat. Even while her nostrils flared with the
need of the strong hot food the heat was full of disks, spinning
little juggler's plates and the shouts of the children were so far
away--so far----
"Here--quick! You going to vaint? No. Don't. Here--drink----"
"I--where----"
"It's all right. You god a liddle stroke from the zun. Here, sit
while I fan you."
The noonday drone swam back again. It was good to feel it, hot and
buzzing and full of the shouts of the children.
"I'm all right," she said, and shook herself like a spaniel, and
looked up at Meyerbogen with the blue channels of her eyes.
"You're all right, sure, now," he said and went off on his waddle
about the business of unstacking buns from a wooden tray which a
helper had just brought up from a basement.
But the lunch. For the life of her the beans would not go down or
the cup of the light tan coffee. That was terrible. To feel all
warm again and free of the chill of cold sweat and back safely once
more in the drone of the noon and the lunch spread out on the clean
wooden top of the table, untasted. Waste. The half days made one
calculate so. Inevitably the slashing blades of hunger that cut
through and through the great organism of Bertha would begin to champ
again, a little later and the day's food allotment was already spent
down to the last penny. Slowly and against a restricted throat she
began to swallow the coffee.
Presently Meyerbogen sat down on the chair opposite.
"It's a heat," he said and the fog of the flour rose up off him.
"Yah."
He was like a great milk-fed baby. Pink polished cheeks. Tight,
spring-tight curls and fat hands with dimples. And the enormous
girth of him! He swayed back from himself for all the world like a
tenor drinking in breath for Pagliacci's sob. And, ridiculously
enough, he was almost dainty.
His big white throat was soft, and when he laughed he shook from head
to toe, and the cloud of flour exuded as if someone were beating him
with a baby's cornstarch bag.
"You lost your abbidite?"
"Yah--a little----"
"Take your time----"
"The heat----"
"Yah--yah---the heat--my woman--she died on me in heat like this."
He looked off toward the roadway and screwed up his face. There was
something about him actually of a baby about to cry.
"Yah----"
"Meningitis," he said--"down two days----"
"Oh--oh----"
"A good woman. Never down with child more than three days--and then
in two days--meningitis--gone----"
"Oh--oh----"
"Five of them needing her. From two years old to ten."
"The children?"
"Yah--we had it neat like a pin here once. Now look!--I had a good
woman----"
"Oh."
His great baby face was still screwed and resolutely out toward the
road.
"Zummer," he said cryptically, "is zummer. It's good but not too
much----"
Foolishly you could have cried for him. Big baby.
"Some zinnamon buns? Just hot from the ofen."
"No."
He waddled out on the porch and began carrying a sack of flour around
the side entrance. You could hear him wheeze and the white haze was
everywhere. Gradually it was pleasant to be eating. The coarse,
strong food--the steam of it was appetizing, and after the first
forkfuls appetite came back.
Clank. Clank. One of the children wandered in. Oh, how your heart
leaped back, wounded. He had a poor little leg in a brace that
clanked. A fat baby, too, only it was as if the father resembled the
child and not the child the father. A dirty baby. A not nice baby.
Eggy. With a smeared and too-large little girl's dress hung on him
and horrid, dirt-ground underthings. He was lugging something. A
man's ground down and discarded shoe that he must have found in the
roadway.
"Shoe," he said and held it out toward Bertha.
"Ugh, dirty," she said, and made a grimace.
"Dirty," he said, and made an identical grimace with his already
dirt-grimaced face, and took the shoe by thumb and forefinger and
threw it out of the door.
That was adorable and made you want to pinch the dirty little cheek.
"Lady?"
She lifted him up and sat him rather gingerly on the knee of her neat
skirt. The brace bit through and down into her flesh. It was
heavier than the child. Cruel. Sickening.
"Baby."
"Lady."
Meyerbogen came in. There were lines of perspiration running down
his face.
"Chimmie," he said, "go back out in the yard. Get down off the
missis. Here's a zinnamon bun."
"It's all right."
"He's dirty. I can't ged help in the gountry."
"Yah--dirty."
"I'm dirty," said Jimmie, and looked up at her with his clear eyes
shining in their smeary sockets. The brace cut in.
"I'll wash him."
"Ach--blease--"
"Where is the----"
"Ach, no, but you ain't so good yourself with zunstroke----"
"I'm all right. Where?"
"Back there."
"Come, Chimmie."
Clank. Clank.
Incredible disorder of that room behind the shop. The fantastic
confusion of a chair sitting crazily on a carpet sofa. A red hen had
wandered in through a hole in the screen door. The dishes of what
seemed many a breakfast were stacked on the table and half covered
with the flung-up edges of the red tablecloth. Flies. There were
swiss curtains at the windows, but they had dried on their poles into
strings. A pet tortoise hung halfway up one. Boys' caps and flung
off aprons and half a basket of new dug potatoes. A broken high
chair. Dumped-out coffee grounds. Sack of grass seed. A child's
slate hung on the wall with this chirography in the nonsense hand of
boyhood.
[Illustration: The Meyerbogens]
It made the disorder suddenly not so terrible. It made you want to
laugh.
Poor little Jimmie. He was so dirty. The smudge ran deep down into
his pores and he cried at the rubbing. The brace was hard to lift
off. Meyerbogen knew the device and did that, and the welts on the
plump curving leg were so deep that you kissed them.
"He can ged all right. The doctor says he needs to be shown two
hours every day how to walk so he don't throw his little leg out. I
don't ged the time."
You kissed them again, the red fiery welts.
"I can ged all right." That was his way. The little mimic!
There were no towels and Meyerbogen ran downstairs into the basement
where the baking ovens were, for some flour sacks, but while he was
gone, Bertha found a clean bed sheet and rolled Jimmie into it.
He came out as round and as plump as a mushroom.
"O-o-o-o-o."
"O-o-o-o-o."
Patty-pat-pat up and down the bare back.
The children came trooping in. Three of them in dirty little steps.
Oscar and Petey and Essie. Meyerbogens all. Dumpy. Thick. Sturdy.
The girl had two beautiful brown braids that she could sit on. Oscar
and Pete were just shaved, like little convicts.
"We gotta house-girl. We gotta house-girl."
"Shut up. It's only a gustomer gifing us help."
"I'll stay. I do day work."
"Ach, if you knew how I need help. I'll pay good."
There was a clean dress found for Jimmie. Almost immediately he fell
asleep and the chair was lifted down off the carpet couch so that
Bertha could stretch him out there. The children drifted off. You
could hear the pleasant treble of them all through the somnolent
afternoon. Thin, high incessant talk of children. Meyerbogen was
downstairs baking. Once he called up for one of the large tin trays
from the shop. Bertha carried it down. It was clean and full of the
sweet hot breath down there in the basement, and one of the two
helpers kept stoking the roaring ovens. Meyerbogen, leaning back
from himself, enormous and flour-dusted and pink in the face. He
lunged at the dough with a rolling pin; flattened it to a mat,
flopped over the mat, lunged. The smell was strong. Full of life.
Firm sweet bread. It was the realest smell of all. Almost with
dimension. Bread.
"It's no blace down here in this heat for you. Go right back. You
had a touch from the zun."
It was hard to know where to begin. The four tiny bedrooms up under
the hot eaves were wrathy-looking with confusion. The tossed
children's beds. What had once been neat enough carpets had rents in
them where children's feet had skated. More of the once dainty
curtains had sagged on their rods. The room where the boys slept was
filled with the bulk of an elaborately contrived aeroplane. You had
to climb around it to get at the window to open it. There was not
enough fresh bed-linen but finally Bertha found a chest of it tucked
away in a small slanting garret over the back porch.
A neat, old-world trunk full of coarse, carefully laundered linens,
some with cotton crochet. Homely, strong things that the wife of
Meyerbogen must have hemmed, crocheted, laundered, and packed away.
They made all the tumbled-looking beds in that house seem suddenly
cool, as if the mother of the Meyerbogens had laid a placid hand
suddenly on the hot tossed brow of her household.
And Meyerbogen's room, with the great solemn walnut bed and the
wardrobe that just grazed the ceiling. The wife of Meyerbogen had
given life four times on that ugly brown bed. She must have been a
strong woman. An odor still hung over the room. The green and milky
sweetness of cows' breath when they lick their calves. Something had
happened to the mirror over the dresser. It had come unscrewed and
stood with its face to a corner. There was a chair rigged up beside
the bed with a bit of looking-glass as jagged as lightning propped up
against it and a razor and a shaving mug stiff with old suds beside
it.
Great baby of a Meyerbogen. It must have made him red to bursting to
stoop to shave. Bertha found out the trouble with the mirror against
the wall. Its screws were threadbare. It was not easy to stand on a
chair and unhinge the top ruffle of mill-work that made the wardrobe
just graze the ceiling, and take out its screws and lean it against
the wall and drag back the mirror for mounting on the dresser. It
was a man's job, and a great pox of sweat broke out as she hoisted
and screwed. It was astonishing, though, how it seemed to quiet the
room of its state of confusion. That adjusted mirror and the made
bed. There was little hope to do more in that afternoon than to
untie the strings of swiss curtains from someone's attempt to get
them up out of the way, and pin up one of the neat "splashers" that
came out of the trunk behind the washstand. It was especially
designed for there. An oblong of white crash with a little girl and
a little boy embroidered in red and underneath in scrolled red
script, "Good Morning."
It made the room begin to shine.
At long intervals the screen door to the shop slammed and the bell
tittered. You could hear Meyerbogen lumbering up the cellar stairs.
The house shuddered. Or sometimes one of the children ran around
from the side yard across the wooden porch, slamming the kitchen
screen sharply.
By late afternoon the beds were at least fresh and made and the
dishes washed and a clean red cloth laid out on the table. Four
hours of hoisting, scrubbing, straightening, that had scarcely made
their dent. The red hen still clucked among the stove cinders and
would not remain shooed out. And Jimmie. Constantly in and out
through the hole in the screening he was lurid again with dirt. The
crusty dirt of damp little hands and clay and unsavory objects about
the yard.
"Chimmie, you bane all dirty!"
"Chimmie bane all dirty." Clank. Clank.
There was something about that little way of repeating your phrases.
You held him very closely. The brace made him so heavy.
Meyerbogen was generous.
"Here is three dollars! You done a big day's work in a few hours."
"Oh, no----."
"Oh yes. Could you, blease, come to-morrow all day?"
"I got morning work promised at Coronation Point."
"To-morrow afternoon, then. Part time like to-day?"
"Yah----."
"Dot's good. You can stay for zupper now, if you want."
"Oh no--no----."
The shy inexplicability of that. She wanted to stay for supper. She
wanted to putter over the stove with Essie. There was a great
dish-pan of greens with the dirt from the garden still brown against
their roots on the sink, and a ham end. Chimmie's low little body
down there about her knees. The boys tussling out in the dust. It
was pleasant there in that room with the new red tablecloth. The
late sun slanted in through the screen and one step down led right
out into the weed-ridden kitchen garden with the thin leafage of the
peas stuck on sticks against the pinkening sky.
"You live in the city, not?"
"Yah."
"It's a long way."
"Yah."
"I bay carfare."
"Yah."
"You won't dissaboint--to-morrow?"
"No."
"Dot's good. I need help, blease. It's a confusion----"
"I'll come."
"Good night."
"Good night."
The sun was gone. The road back to the city was like a long gray
river and the light on the forceps of car tracks had died.
***
The bread. Every noon of that week as you came down from Coronation
Point Inn, the smell ran out a little ways to meet you and the treble
shouts of the children and once Essie with her pigtails, came flying.
"Bertha's here. Bertha's here."
Why, that was a greeting! The words ran down your spine. Bertha's
here.
"Say, oughtta see. Chimmie fell off the counter and shinnied his
nose."
"Oh Essie----"
"It bled."
"Oh----"
"Papa couldn't make it stop. Papa can't do nothing. Blood makes him
sick."
"Oh, Chimmie, Chimmie. Where is he?"
"There he is, laying out in the road. Get up, you. Papa will get
you. Automobile will get you."
"Oh, Chimmie, you got hurt?"
"Chimmie got hurt. Look."
Clank. Clank. There was a great wad of cotton across his nose, held
there precariously with strips of adhesive plaster. The brace that
made him twice too heavy. And now his shinnied nose. You pulled
back the cotton. It stuck and already some of the grime from the
smeared little face was under.
There was a long siege of washing with the warm water from the basin
that Essie held, and Pete tore off the hem of one of Meyerbogen's
clean handkerchiefs and Oscar stood by with the vaseline.
So! The little dressing on Chimmie's nose was neater and flatter and
cleaner. It made you glad, the neat little flatness and cleanness.
"Now, Chimmie's well."
"Now, Chimmie's well."
The children ran off. There were the curtains to be hung. They had
been washed and ironed the day before and lay out, waiting.
Meyerbogen came around the side of the house with a sack of flour on
his back. The white fog made him dim.
"You, Bertha?"
"Yah."
"Dot's good."
"Yah."
"Want lunch?"
"Yah, but I can fix it----"
"No, I'll fix. Veenie sandwich. Baked beans. Corned beef hash with
boached egg."
"Beans."
It was pleasant at the little table in the bake shop. The motors
spun past and left a little trail of quiet after the whizz. The mat
of flies clung to the screen door but could not force in. The bread.
The sweet rich smell of it from the ovens beneath. The beans were
fragrant too.
Meyerbogen sat down opposite. His knees were very short and very
wide apart and his great paunch threw him sway-back, so that he could
not see them. Pouf! Out came the little fog of flour when he sat.
His spring-tight curls and his eyelashes were all gray with it.
Pouf! Out came a little fog when his hand struck the table. A short
hand as dainty as a woman's and all bleached and soft from knuckling
into the dough.
"It's a heat," he said.
"Yah."
"Want some mustard?"
"Yah----"
"Chimmie shinnied his nose."
"You didn't know how to dress it."
"Blood goes against me----"
"Yah----"
"Want some mustard?"
"I got some."
"You fixed it good."
"What?"
"Chimmie's nose."
"Yah----"
"It takes a woman. I can't keep help in the gountry. Since my woman
is--gone, I got only confusion."
"They don't need me no more at Coronation Point."
"If, blease, you could come by us. There is a good room for you
upstairs and----"
"By the week, you mean?"
"By the month. By the--always, if you would blease. I can pay...."
"Yah...."
"It ain't easy to find such a woman like you. The children, they
like you. There is dot something about you--they know it always
first. Children do."
"I can come."
"Dot's good. Oh, dot is very good. The confusion, it's bad. I need
a woman. You. We would treat you like one of the family."
"Yah----"
The drone of high noon. The treble of the children. The little
shining of the beads of sweat on Meyerbogen's nose.
He began to shamble out. Presently you could see him walking around
the side of the house, bent, with a sack of flour on his back.
Family. A snug kind of a word. Like a new reefer that buttoned you
in up the front. Only the buttons this time were Chimmie's eyes.
Family. A snug kind of a word.
There were the curtains to be hung. They were very starched and
stood away from the windows, and more than ever the rooms began to
shine.
The dining room was the best. The red tablecloth helped and a potted
petunia, revived a bit with watering, stood in the center. The red
rooster was a trial. Finally, you had to sit on the floor and shir
together a piece of red calico and hang it for a curtain across the
lower half of the screen. For some reason the tortoise chose that to
cling to now. Four times he had to be returned to his place under
the stove. Petey's tortoise was named Pete. Once when Bertha
exclaimed at him, for clinging to the new red curtain, Petey himself
came running.
"Want me?"
"Not you. I meant Pete under the stove."
"Gimme piece of bread and apple sauce?"
"Here."
"M-m-m-m."
His shaved yellow head. You ran your hand around and around its
bristliness and could feel his temples munching.
"Ouch."
"Don't run so hard, Petey."
"Aw quit. What you taking that down for? That's my slate, with my
drawing on it. Give me."
"I yoost want to wipe down the wall, Petey, I'll hang it back."
"Give me. Where's my slate pencil?"
"Here."
He curled himself up in a corner. You could hear the soft stalkings
of the pencil across the slate. The walls had to be brushed down
with a broom with a cloth tied about it. They were very dusty.
"Watch out, Petey."
"M-m-m-m."
"Petey, get out of the dust."
"Lookie. Haw, lookie. Here we are. The whole family. I got you in
this time--haw, lookie!"
There they were. The Meyerbogens as Petey had drawn them, only there
was something that made your heart catch on its beat.
[Illustration: The Meyerbogens]
"Why Petey, that's me, on the end. Why Petey----"
After he had gone like a streak through the door with his bread and
his apple sauce, she hung it back on the wall. Carefully. The
Meyerbogens.
***
Chimmie had to be dressed and walked up and down the room without his
braces and drilled not to curve out his leg. He cried because that
hurt, and after she had helped him up and down for a cruel twenty
minutes, he fell asleep. Then there was the sink drain pipe to be
poked out. Essie was such a little girl and of course she had let
the grease clog it up. Squnch. Ugh. It was not so bad if you
turned your head....
Meyerbogen was coming up the stairs. You could tell by the little
vibrations. They ran up the wall. The dishes shook. He carried a
tray of cinnamon buns. You could almost hear their soft hot breath
and get the whiff of the currants.
"Bertha, is dot you?"
"Yah...."
"Dot's good," he said, and went into the shop with the tray of hot
buns.
The day began to slant. There were potatoes to be dug. The screen
snapped as she went out with the dish pan, and the red calico curtain
swung. The clayey earth gave forth grudgingly and showed up hard and
yellow through the green. But the peas ran up the sticks gayly and
there was an arbor that was all spangled with tiny green grapes that
were no bigger than buckshot. Presently they would swell and purple
and soften. The way to press wine out of grapes was with the feet.
The bare, white toes.
Bertha's toes were hurting in her bluchers. The warm clay came
burning through to them, making them climb and wriggle. It was easy
to kick off the shoes and slide down the stockings. The soft, naked
earth. Its warmth ran up her legs in a lightning of gooseflesh. Her
toes bit down. White spatulate beauties, she could lift up little
dredges of clean dirt with them.
To be bled free of the torments of the ecstasies. To sit there in
the wide, westering light with the flat, eager faces of the toes down
tasting earth, the good earth, peasantly. Breathers. Suckers in of
the little vibratory messages.
Gladnesses here with dimension. The treble shrilling of the
children. Pretty leafage of peas up a stick. Clank. Clank.
Chimmie must be awake. Meyerbogen disappearing around the house with
a sack of flour on his back. The tawny smell of the bread.