Big Money (32 page)

Once she got desperate and ran out alone to Central Park to an American drugstore she'd noticed there one evening when the old women had taken her to hear the military band play. Every man she passed stared at her. She got to the drugstore on a dead run and bought all the castoroil and quinine she had money for. Going home she couldn't seem to go a block without some man following her and trying to take her arm. “You go to hell,” she'd say to them in English and walk all the faster. She lost her way, was almost run over by a car and at last got to the house breathless. The old women were back and raised Cain.

When Tony got home they told him and he made a big scene and tried to beat her up, but she was stronger than he was and blacked his eye for him. Then he threw himself on the bed sobbing and she put cold compresses on his eye to get the swelling down and petted him and they were happy and cozy together for the first time since they'd come to Havana. The trouble was the old women found out about how she'd blacked his eye and everybody teased him about it. The whole street seemed to know and everybody said Tony was a sissy. La mamá never forgave Margo and was mean and spiteful to her after that.

If she only wasn't going to have the baby Margo would have run away. All the castoroil did was to give her terrible colic and the quinine just made her ears ring. She stole a sharppointed knife from the kitchen and thought she'd kill herself with it, but she didn't have the nerve to stick it in. She thought of hanging herself by the bedsheet, but she couldn't seem to do that either. She kept the knife under the mattress and lay all day on the bed dreaming about what she'd do if she ever got back to the States and thinking about Agnes and Frank and vaudeville shows and the Keith circuit and the St. Nicholas rink. Sometimes she'd get herself to believe that this was all a long nightmare and that she'd wake up in bed at home at Indian's.

She wrote Agnes every week and Agnes would sometimes send her a couple of dollars in a letter. She'd saved fifteen dollars in a little
alligatorskin purse Tony had given her when they first got to Havana, when he happened to look into it one day and pocketed the money and went out on a party. She was so sunk that she didn't even bawl him out about it when he came back after a night at a rumbajoint with dark circles under his eyes. Those days she was feeling too sick to bawl anybody out.

When her pains began nobody had any idea of taking her to the hospital. The old women said they knew just what to do, and two Sisters of Mercy with big white butterfly headdresses began to bustle in and out with basins and pitchers of hot water. It lasted all day and all night and some of the next day. She was sure she was going to die. At last she yelled so loud for a doctor that they went out and fetched an old man with yellow hands all knobbed with rheumatism and a tobaccostained beard they said was a doctor. He had goldrimmed eyeglasses on a ribbon that kept falling off his long twisted nose. He examined her and said everything was fine and the old women grinning and nodding stood around behind him. Then the pains grabbed her again; she didn't know anything but the pain.

After it was all over she lay back so weak she thought she must be dead. They brought it to her to look at but she wouldn't look. Next day when she woke up she heard a thin cry beside her and couldn't imagine what it was. She was too sick to turn her head to look at it. The old women were shaking their heads over something, but she didn't care. When they told her she wasn't well enough to nurse it and that it would have to be raised on a bottle she didn't care either.

A couple of days passed in blank weakness. Then she was able to drink a little orangejuice and hot milk and could raise her head on her elbow and look at the baby when they brought it to her. It looked dreadfully little. It was a little girl. Its poor little face looked wrinkled and old like a monkey's. There was something the matter with its eyes.

She made them send for the old doctor and he sat on the edge of her bed looking very solemn and wiping and wiping his eyeglasses with his big clean silk handkerchief. He kept calling her a poor little niña and finally made her understand that the baby was blind and that her husband had a secret disease and that as soon as she was well enough she must go to a clinic for treatments. She didn't cry or say anything but just lay there staring at him with her eyes hot and her
hands and feet icy. She didn't want him to go, that was all she could think of. She made him tell her all about the disease and the treatment and made out to understand less Spanish than she did, just so that he wouldn't go away.

A couple of days later the old women put on their best black silk shawls and took the baby to the church to be christened. Its little face looked awful blue in the middle of all the lace they dressed it in. That night it turned almost black. In the morning it was dead. Tony cried and the old women all carried on and they spent a lot of money on a little white casket with silver handles and a hearse and a priest for the funeral. Afterwards the Sisters of Mercy came and prayed beside her bed and the priest came and talked to the old women in a beautiful tragedy voice like Frank's voice when he wore his morningcoat, but Margo just lay there in the bed hoping she'd die too, with her eyes closed and her lips pressed tight together. No matter what anybody said to her she wouldn't answer or open her eyes.

When she got well enough to sit up she wouldn't go to the clinic the way Tony was going. She wouldn't speak to him or to the old women. She pretended not to understand what they said. La mamá would look into her face in a spiteful way she had and shake her head and say, “Loca.” That meant crazy.

Margo wrote desperate letters to Agnes: for God's sake she must sell something and send her fifty dollars so that she could get home. Just to get to Florida would be enough. She'd get a job. She didn't care what she did if she could only get back to God's Country. She just said that Tony was a bum and that she didn't like it in Havana. She never said a word about the baby or being sick.

Then one day she got an idea; she was an American citizen, wasn't she? She'd go to the consul and see if they wouldn't send her home. It was weeks before she could get out without one of the old women. The first time she got down to the consulate all dressed up in her one good dress only to find it closed. The next time she went in the morning when the old women were out marketing and got to see a clerk who was a towheaded American collegeboy. My, she felt good talking American again.

She could see he thought she was a knockout. She liked him too but she didn't let him see it. She told him she was sick and had to go back to the States and that she'd been gotten down there on
false pretenses on the promise of an engagement at the Alhambra. “The Alhambra,” said the clerk. “Gosh, you don't look like that kind of a girl.”

“I'm not,” she said.

His name was George. He said that if she'd married a Cuban there was nothing he could do as you lost your citizenship if you married a foreigner. She said suppose they weren't really married. He said he thought she'd said she wasn't that kind of a girl. She began to blubber and said she didn't care what kind of a girl she was, she had to get home. He said to come back next day and he'd see what the consulate could do, anyway wouldn't she have tea with him at the Miami that afternoon.

She said it was a date and hurried back to the house feeling better than she had for a long time. The minute she was by herself in the alcove she took the marriagelicense out of her bag and tore it up into little tiny bits and dropped it into the filthy yellow bowl of the old watercloset in the back of the court. For once the chain worked and every last bit of forgetmenotspotted paper went down into the sewer.

That afternoon she got a letter from Agnes with a fiftydollar draft on the National City Bank in it. She was so excited her heart almost stopped beating. Tony was out gallivanting around somewhere with the sugarbroker. She wrote him a note saying it was no use looking for her, she'd gone home, and pinned it on the underpart of the pillow on the bed. Then she waited until the old women had drowsed off for their siesta, and ran out.

She wasn't coming back. She just had the clothes she had on, and a few little pieces of cheap jewelry Tony had given her when they were first married, in her handbag. She went to the Miami and ordered an icecreamsoda in English so that everybody would know she was an American girl, and waited for George.

She was so scared every minute she thought she'd keel over. Suppose George didn't come. But he did come and he certainly was tickled when he saw the draft, because he said the consulate didn't have any funds for a case like hers. He said he'd get the draft cashed in the morning and help her buy her ticket and everything. She said he was a dandy and then suddenly leaned over and put her hand in its white kid glove on his arm and looked right into his eyes that were blue like hers were and whispered, “George, you've got to help me some more.
You've got to help me hide. . . . I'm so scared of that Cuban. You know they are terrible when they're jealous.”

George turned red and began to hem and haw a little, but Margo told him the story of what had happened on her street just the other day, how a man, an armyofficer, had come home and found, well, his sweetheart, with another man, well, she might as well tell the story the way it happened, she guessed George wasn't easily shocked anyway, they were in bed together and the armyofficer emptied all the chambers of his revolver into the other man and then chased the woman up the street with a carvingknife and stabbed her five times in the public square. She began to giggle when she got that far and George began to laugh. “I know it sounds funny to you . . . but it wasn't so funny for her. She died right there without any clothes on in front of everybody.”

“Well, I guess we'll have to see what we can do,” said George, “to keep you away from that carvingknife.”

What they did was to go over to Matanzas on the Hershey electriccar and get a room at a hotel. They had supper there and a lot of ginfizzes and George, who'd told her he'd leave her to come over the next day just in time for the boat, got romantic over the ginfizzes and the moonlight and dogs barking and the roosters crowing. They went walking with their arms round each other down the quiet chalky-colored moonstruck streets, and he missed the last car back to Havana. Margo didn't care about anything except not to be alone in that creepy empty whitewalled hotel with the moon so bright and everything. She liked George anyway.

The next morning at breakfast he said she'd have to let him lend her another fifty so that she could go back firstclass and she said honestly she'd pay it back as soon as she got a job in New York and that he must write to her everyday.

He went over on the early car because he had to be at the office and she went over later all alone through the glary green countryside shrilling with insects, and went in a cab right from the ferry to the boat. George met her there at the dock with her ticket and a little bunch of orchids, the first she'd ever had, and a roll of bills that she tucked into her purse without counting. The stewards seemed awful surprised that she didn't have any baggage, so she made George tell them that she'd had to leave home at five minutes' notice because
her father, who was a very wealthy man, was sick in New York. She and George went right down to her room, and he was very sad about her going away and said she was the loveliest girl he'd ever seen and that he'd write her every day too, but she couldn't follow what he was saying she was so scared Tony would come down to the boat looking for her.

At last the gong rang and George kissed her desperate hard and went ashore. She didn't dare go up on deck until she heard the engineroom bells and felt the shaking of the boat as it began to back out of the dock. Out of the porthole, as the boat pulled out, she got a glimpse of a dapper dark man in a white suit, that might have been Tony, who broke away from the cops and ran yelling and waving his arms down to the end of the wharf.

Maybe it was the orchids or her looks or the story about her father's illness, but the captain asked her to his table and all the officers rushed her, and she had the time of her life on the trip up. The only trouble was that she could only come on deck in the afternoon because she only had that one dress.

She'd given George a cable to send so when they got to New York Agnes met her at the dock. It was late fall and Margo had nothing on but a light summer dress, so she said she'd set Agnes up to a taxi to go home. It was only when they got into the cab that she noticed Agnes was wearing black. When she asked her why Agnes said Fred had died in Bellevue two weeks before. He'd been picked up on Twentythird Street deaddrunk and had died there without coming to. “Oh, Agnes, I knew it . . . I had a premonition on the boat,” sobbed Margo.

When she'd wiped her eyes she turned and looked at Agnes. “Why, Agnes dear, how well you look,” she said. “What a pretty suit. Has Frank got a job?” “Oh, no,” said Agnes. “You see Miss Franklyn's tea-shops are doing quite well. She's branching out and she's made me manageress of the new branch on Thirtyfourth Street at seventyfive dollars a week. Wait till you see our new apartment just off the Drive. . . . Oh, Margie, you must have had an awful time.”

“Well,” said Margo, “it was pretty bad. His people are pretty well off and prominent and all that but it's hard to get on to their ways. Tony's a bum and I hate him more than anything in the world. But after all it was quite an experience . . . I wouldn't have missed it.”

Frank met them at the door of the apartment. He looked fatter
than when Margo had last seen him and had patches of silvery hair on either side of his forehead that gave him a distinguished look like a minister or an ambassador. “Little Margo. . . . Welcome home, my child . . . What a beautiful young woman you have become.” When he took her in his arms and kissed her on the brow, she smelt again the smell of bayrum and energine she'd remembered on him. “Did Agnes tell you that I'm going on the road with Mrs. Fiske? . . . Dear Minnie Maddern and I were children together.”