Horizontal Woman (12 page)

“All right,” Willie says. He inhales. “I tell you but you’re not going to like it very much Miss Moore. I don’t like it myself. But I’ll tell you and that’s that. Miss Moore, it turned out that I got the clap.”

Sometime later, in slightly different circumstances, Elizabeth finds that she is riding the Fulton Street bus once again, heading back toward the welfare center. Her fieldbook is in her handbag now, her handbag gripped desperately between her thighs. Exactly how she got on the Fulton Street bus and what has happened later in the Buckingham apartment and what the nature of her thoughts were as she walked to the bus she has no idea. There seems to be no sense of transition: for the moment she is living the life that she has understood relief clients to live: time working only in terms of impulses, all chronologically subdued to emotion, the concept of normal time destroyed by energy and from the moment when Willie gave her, finally, his secret, up until this moment on the bus Elizabeth has no clear recollection. Obviously something has happened; a whole series of events, in fact, she could not have made it from the apartment to the bus devoid of thought without anything at all happening but she cannot get hold of it. Maybe it was the loosening of certain emotional blocks, a small breakdown of the defense mechanisms when Willie gave her his revelation. Certainly she is not infallible; she has a great deal to learn about the art and science of social work, she may have over-reacted.

She has, in fact, a vague recollection of screaming: screaming and shouting and twisting as she left the apartment scuttling past Mrs. Buckingham and her broom, leaving Willie standing in isolation and penitence in the frame of the bedroom door. Some cursing as well. She must have cursed because she has some memory of their faces and the reactions were as if she had spoken curse words. But this is not important. Nothing that she did is important; there is no way to take it seriously. A fugue is a fugue … that is all there is to it … and the important thing is that she is seated on the bus, headed back toward the welfare center. Others in adjoining seats are looking at her strangely, some are peering into her fieldbook and shaking their heads, but this has nothing to do with her; only with the strange ethos of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Better to put all of this out of her mind. It is better to carry on as if none of this happened. The only thing to do is to see a doctor tonight — she can think of several in the neighborhood whose ground floor signs she has often seen — and that will be the end of that.

She is willing to concede, thinking the issue through quietly and rationally now, she is willing to concede the possibility that she has made certain mistakes. By all means she should have thought more of consequences before she performed certain acts; above and beyond that it is true that she might have been better off trying to get into graduate-school and obtaining a social work degree before she began to attempt to relate to clients in the way that she has over these past months.

But where was she going to go to graduate school? And how would she have financed it? And didn’t the Department of Welfare give her the trust and opportunity to engage in casework? And above and beyond all of this, what could a school of social work have taught Elizabeth Moore that she did not instinctively know in her heart and was unable to verify every day from all of her experience?

Well, these are interesting questions: they will be worth a good deal of thought someday. When she has worked into the home economics job at Fordham Welfare Center she may have long afternoons free when all of the workers are in the field and she will be able to sit quietly and review her past life; these are definitely some of the questions which she will want to go over. Maybe she has erred, Elizabeth decides. She never had any pretensions to infallibility. She was better than the clients and knew that in the relative sense as compared to them she might be infallible but in the higher scheme she was definitely not. Where did she ever try to pretend that she was, anyway?

Time past. Not to be considered, not part of the situation. The bus lurches, it spills forth passengers, it takes in passengers, it proceeds on its route. Elizabeth looks past the dismal relief faces across from her and out the window, ponders her future. She will come back to the welfare center now. She is definitely out of the field; there are many disappointments she will leave behind her and much unfinished casework but unquestionably she cannot go to the field again. Not after today. She cannot be blamed for this.

Back to the welfare center. There, she will do her casework from her desk. In the long run, this will be the better way. She will write letters to all of her clients, those she has not seen that is:

Not
Elizabeth Moore
with all of the stately, Victorian formality of that name which she has always hated (and wanted to break free from) but
Elizabeth
to show them what she really thinks of them. This first caress of intimacy, however distant, will touch them with warmth and they will respond. If only she had had the time to do the work herself! If only her time had not been so cruelly limited! If only she had been allowed to dedicate herself in the way she wanted! But there is no time for regrets. The regrets will come later. She has done the best she could.

The bus stops. It is at the corner of the welfare center. Elizabeth, wrapped within herself stands, holds her fieldbook and handbag, moves musing to the stairwell, steps down and out. Only when she is on the sidewalk does she become aware that there seems to be something of a disturbance in the vicinity of the welfare center, directly across the street.

Police are there. Prowl cars are there, flashing their deadly beams in and out of her eyes. Reporters seem to be there or at least a press car or two. The street is filled with noise, tumult. The entryway of the welfare center is blocked by a wooden stand and three policemen. Workers and clerks dangle their heads out of the second floor loft to see what is going on. Clients on the Intake level have hoisted themselves on benches and are looking through open spaces in the windows. Sirens flare. More police cars seem to be on the move.

Milling around the entrance to the welfare center are orthodox Jews. Elizabeth, in her stunned appraisal, believes that she is seeing what has long since been prophesied in the testaments: every Jew in the world must be there. Frock-coated and hatted, bearded and solemn, holding prayer books and wearing shawls, Jews are walking back and forth in front of the center, some of them pushing to move past the resistant police, others, in small, ambitious streams, trying to get in through the window.

Jews are up the street, they are down the street. Elizabeth, as she looks, realizes that they must be in the Intake section as well. Several hundred of them, as a matter of fact, seem to be in the Intake section; now a window bulges outward under pressure from police clubs or struggles and in the open, shattered glass she can look fully within. Jews are on the floor of Intake, milling around and shouting. They are not as relatively peaceful as the ones without. Those who have gotten within the Intake section are a hardier, more physical group of
chassids
. They are screaming. Some are chanting. Others appear to be seated on the floor in silent, terrible protest.

Elizabeth looks at all of this. She stands and considers it; might consider it forever. There is no reason to move. But just at the moment of timeless ascension, when she feels that she is moving upward and outward in relation to all of this, contemplating it in eternity, the Jews turn. First one, then two, then five and a hundred. Talking to themselves, gesticulating wildly. They focus upon her. Five hundred arms go in her direction. Police look at her as well. The workers from the second floor of intake looked at her. There are more sirens. A fire engine seems to be panting up the block.

“There she is!” she thinks she hears someone shout, “that’s her, that’s her!” and before Elizabeth can do anything else at all(not that there is really any reason to do anything else: what could she have done?) she is suddenly pursued by not one, not ten, not even a hundred but very possibly the entirety — it is hard to judge the right statistics — of the well-known Lubavitcher Congregation.

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Copyright © 1973 by Barry Malzberg
All rights reserved.

Cover Images ©123RF/Angela Hawkey; ©istockphoto/Natalia Aleksandrova

Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 10: 1-4405-4562-6
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4562-7
eISBN 10: 1-4405-4419-0
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4419-4