Ladies In The Parlor (13 page)

If one wore a dress made on Good Friday she would never live to wear it out.

If a hair from a girl’s head curled in her hand, her lover was true to her. If anyone swept under a chair while a girl was sitting on it, she would not be married for two years.

Rain on a wedding day meant calamity for the married couple in the end. Rain at a funeral signified that the dead would rest in peace. If the sun set clear on the second Tuesday in the month it would rain on the last Friday.

Mother Rosenbloom disliked a thin priest, and believed that he would betray the secrets of the confessional to the bishop.

The house doctor, with droll humor, had given her a Gideon Bible as a Christmas present. It had been stolen from a hotel.

It remained always by her bed, under the reading lamp with the vivid red shade.

She had underlined the words of Job with a red lead pencil,

My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,

and are spent without hope.

The house doctor was much larger around than Mother Rosenbloom and many inches shorter. He was so fat that if one pushed a finger into his body the dent would long remain.

He carried his huge paunch before him as though he were balancing a rain barrel. The flesh had crowded his eyes until they resembled a pig’s. Even when smooth-shaven, the black bristles still showed in his face. Behind his ears and above his neck were thin remnants of hair. Otherwise he was completely bald. His neck rolled over his collar.

His movements were quick. He puffed constantly.

It was often hinted that he was Mother Rosenbloom’s cousin. They were of the same proportions physically, and each walked with the same quick movement despite enormous weight.

He was not a licensed physician. A specialist in venereal disease, his practice was enormous. He knew nothing of ethics. He would overcharge all patients and now and then treat a poor person for nothing.

His pig-like eyes stared from advertisements in the leading daily newspapers. He had an interpreter for all foreigners. All payments were in advance of treatment.

A strict disciplinarian, if one of his employees happened to be a minute late, he was told that he was destroying the morale of his force. He would run a blind advertisement in the newspapers and send cards to all people who answered to call at a specified time. Such interviews gave him a feeling of importance.

He would expound for hours on the blessings of motherhood. It pleased him to be addressed as “Doctor.” Accordingly, Mother Rosenbloom and her girls treated him with the utmost deference.

His chief diversion was fondling the girls at Mother Rosenbloom’s house.

As his office was closed on Sunday, he would spend the greater portion of that day with them.

He would boast loudly to them of the great doctors he knew. The medical profession had tried for years to drive him from practice, without success.

He had made a life study of venereal diseases. An errand boy for a doctor at fifteen, he remained with him for nine years. During this time he read and observed everything possible on the subject.

Heavy as he was, his acquired knowledge bore him down. Pompous and pretentious, he was brittle as glass and as easily seen through. No impression remained long with him, and his childish moods were as fleeting as shadows on the ground.

He was never so proud as when accompanied to a public place by a beautiful girl. He became fond of Leora, and took her to dinner whenever possible. He would have his secretary telephone restaurants and hotels. The menu would be read; she would take it down in shorthand and copy it later. He would then tell Leora what each place was serving and ask her to make a choice.

One day he told Mother Rosenbloom of an expensive diamond ring being stolen from the finger of a wealthy woman as she lay in her coffin. The old woman said, “The thief was right, a skeleton has no business with a diamond—but I want to be buried with mine.”

The doctor was astonished.

“The vanity of ladies,” he said.

No farmer loved the sound of rain in drought more than the doctor the sound of words. The many-colored cloud to the poet, the port of home to the world-wandering sailor, meant no more to them than rolling words to the doctor. He would use all his words on Mother. Though heavy as the earth in movement, his tongue was quick. It relieved Mother’s alert mind, and brought her solace when her heart was low.

One quiet day, Mother sat in her stiff-backed chair and discussed the sad riddle of all things with the doctor.

She had not forgotten the canary that was flushed to oblivion. Its cage remained near her for weeks, and she would gaze at it long and often.

“How could that split-tail bitch have killed my canary, Doctor—I ask you?” She shook with anger at the thought—”Why God damn her black soul to hell.”

“Do not enrage yourself, Mother. All the preponderant stars are in favor of your meeting the glorious bird again.”

“Where, for Christ’s sake,” exclaimed Mother, “in a sewer?”

The doctor’s eyes were full of commiseration.

“Mother,” he soothed, “you have too much faith for such a thought. For all you know that bird is not in a sewer, but is flying from star to star, a happy threnody of golden song. Where were you before you came here —some place, surely—as you had no beginning and no end. Neither had that bird.”

“Oh hell, if I was any place it was some whorehouse in Iowa—but that bird had no immortal soul.”

“How do you know, Mother—would you deny to a bird that which you have in full measure? It’s as reasonable to suppose that the bird is immortal as anything else. No fluff of golden feathers was ever made to die. And because it went swooping down in its own Niagara is no sign that it has perished.”

“But I can’t forgive that damned whore,” sobbed Mother. “No one but a whore would do such a trick.”

“Wrong again, Mother,” said the doctor. “She would have done no differently had she been a Methodist bishop’s daughter. She might even have eaten the bird. Had she not been a whore she would have been no differently composed. Slightly more inhibited and repressed, perhaps, but in the main, no different. It is wrong, Mother, to call people names—your intelligence is too vast for that. Let the girl remain a whore—even a canary killer. The multifarious restraints of millions of women have not helped society. They have merely made it more hypocritical and docile. For instance, Mother, where are the whores of my boyhood? All are doing very well indeed. The vast majority of them are now happily married club women, and they belong to all the churches and cults. And many of those who are still my friends have lost the color of their girlhood and the direct honesty they had when content to be simple and satisfied whores.”

Mother was chuckling.

“And a few of them are lawyers, Mother, and one, much duller than the rest, is a judge.” A note of resignation came into his voice, and he added, “no, Mother, it’s a mistake to think that only a whore could have sent your canary to a watery grave.”

“All right, Doctor, I’ll take it back. My little angel may be hopping around up in heaven, but I saw it go down the sewer—and that God-damn bitch of a whore did it.”

The doctor sighed and said, “
Oh well
.”

When another young prostitute was in legal trouble, Selma engaged a lawyer for her. His fee was a hundred dollars. When Selma called at his office to pay the money, the lawyer became amorous. Selma shook her head, saying, “Your price was a hundred dollars and I paid it—mine is ten.”

Selma might have been of gypsy or Indian parents. She did not know. Her mother had drifted to a small town on the banks of the Mississippi River when Selma was three years old. She was too busy with other things to talk much of her past to Selma.

She lived in a hovel along the river, the neighbors said for the favors she gave the man who owned it. As she was broken down, her favors were none too desirable. They were at least equal to the hovel in which she lived.

It was of one room. It contained a chair, a bed, and a rusty stove. The outside was plastered with mud to keep the wind away.

No other children would play with Selma. The neighbors again claimed that the mother entertained the men who floated up and down the river. If this were true, her entertainment was free, as all her days were spent in squalor.

Such things made an impression upon Selma.

Other incidents impressed her more—logs floating down the river, guided by a small tugboat, the crew looking out of the window and waving at her as they passed, the far blue sky with its white-dotted clouds, and the wind making waves of the wheat in distant fields.

Her childhood, if lonely, was not painful. It might have been an unconscious training for a bigger destiny, had it not contained too many other elements. She learned to know the river, the riffraff along its banks, and the animal life in the water.

She had marked a turtle which came to the same neighborhood for eight years. One day it grabbed a stick and clung to it. She suddenly discovered a brass ring which some person had put around its neck. In a few more years, as the turtle grew, the ring would choke it to death. She made the turtle a prisoner, and then, with the help of a young hobo along the river, stretched its wrinkled neck and cut the ring.

They then turned the turtle loose. It hurried away as swiftly as possible, and returned later.

She was seduced at thirteen by the young hobo who had helped her with the turtle. Her mother had furnished him a cot, and he slept under the eave of the hovel. During the day he would wander about the banks of the river, and around the town, and return with faded magazines and paper-bound books. He remained in the neighborhood for nearly three years.

He told her that his name was Eddie Ryan.

“That ain’t my name,” he said, “but it’s just as good as any other. People should change their names, anyhow, like they do their clothes—I mean the rich people.”

An adept at begging, he would bring food to the house. Having picked up a knowledge of cooking in many jungles, he could prepare it skillfully.

He had a strange assortment of knowledge. He would tell Selma of far-away places, and of life in large cities. Sometimes he would go away for several days at a time and return with money. As lazy as the river, he did his washing once a week, and allowed his clothes to become smooth, and sometimes even to dry on his body.

If she talked of other boys, he was indifferent. Jealousy over a girl was too slight for one who had traveled so far. From having lived in red-light districts upon the charity of its citizens, he knew much about women. He told her many things she was never to forget. Like Selma, the young hobo was solitary, and was content to be alone.

She would spend hours with him in an old canoe. He would tell her about the moon and the stars and how far away they were. Living simply as a dog, he would often talk of riches to Selma. She would listen more attentively than usual.

One night she asked him more about his life, and where he was born.

“I wasn’t born no place,” he replied. “All my life I’ve been driftin’ around like the clouds. I don’t want to be nothin’ but a bum—my dad tried to be somethin’ else and all he got was what the little boy shot at.”

“But suppose,” suggested Selma, “you got to be a rich man.”

“I’d still be a bum,” was the return.

“But tell me about yourself, Eddie—how’d you ever come to this town?”

“On a freight train. The brakie put me off this side of the bridge. I looked up and down the river, and thought it would be a good place to jungle up. I’d been up in Alaska, and I was tired anyhow—then I saw you playin’ along the bank, and I began to talk to you, and here I am ever since.”

“But don’t you ever get homesick?” Selma asked him.

“No more than a bird. It don’t pay to get too stuck on people—you’ve got to leave ‘em anyhow when you die; so you might as well begin right away.”

Some Negroes across the river sang,

I’m goin’ to libe anyhow until I die—

I know this kind ob libin’ ain’t very high.

The hobo boy and Selma listened until the echo of the words were lost along the river.

“They’ve got the right dope,” said the boy. “They can talk all they want about a rollin’ stone gatherin’ no moss, but a ramblin’ dog always picks up a bone.”

The friendship between them was broken as suddenly as it began.

They were picking clams along the river one April morning when Selma said, as if the thought had just struck her, “You know, Eddie, I’m
that way.
”

“That way—what?” asked Eddie.

“You know what I mean—
that way
.” He still looked bewildered. “I’m goin’ to have a baby.”

“A baby—what’ll you ever do with a baby—you can’t eat a baby.”

“No, but I’m goin’ to have one—and what’s more, I want to have one—I’ve been hoping a long time, but nothing ever happened.”

“So you’re goin’ to have a baby, huh—and you want one—gosh, but women are funny—what do you want all that trouble for?”

“I don’t know—I just do—that’s all.”

The hobo boy frowned.

To placate him, she said, “And we’ll call it after you, Eddie.”

“All the people’ll laugh,” said the boy.

“Mother said it was all right with her—she’s glad. Nobody ever knows what we do along the river anyhow.”

“Well,” said the boy, “you’re the one that’s havin’ it, not me—it ain’t my funeral.”

No more was said about the coming child.

In two days the hobo boy drifted down the river on a raft of logs.

Selma waved at him at the bend in the river beyond her home. For several hundred feet she could still see him waving.

She never saw him again.

The baby was born. She called it Eddie.

That was seven years before. She left home and became a waitress. Consumed with a passion to better the condition of her mother and child, she worked early and late, and often earned as much as two dollars in tips.

A few men gave her money for favors.

Young hoboes often begged food at the restaurant. She never failed to give them a few dimes, besides the food.