Manhattan Transfer (38 page)

A nickel before midnight buys tomorrow… holdup headlines, a cup of coffee in the automat, a ride to Woodlawn, Fort Lee, Flatbush… A nickel in the slot buys chewing gum. Somebody Loves Me, Baby Divine, You’re in Kentucky Juss Shu’ As You’re Born… bruised notes of foxtrots go limping out of doors, blues, waltzes (We’d Danced the Whole Night Through) trail gyrating tinsel memories… On Sixth Avenue on Fourteenth there are still flyspecked stereopticons where for a nickel you can peep at yellowed yesterdays. Beside the peppering shooting gallery you stoop into the flicker A H
OT
T
IME
, T
HE
B
ACHELOR’S
S
URPRISE
, T
HE
S
TOLEN
G
ARTER
… wastebasket of tornup daydreams… A nickel before midnight buys our yesterdays.

Ruth Prynne came out of the doctor’s office pulling the fur tight round her throat. She felt faint. Taxi. As she stepped in she remembered the smell of cosmetics and toast and the littered hallway at Mrs Sunderlands. Oh I cant go home just yet. ‘Driver go to the Old English Tea Room on Fortieth Street please.’ She opened her long green leather purse and looked in. My God, only a dollar a quarter a nickel and two pennies. She kept her eyes on the figures flickering on the taximeter. She wanted to break down and cry… The way money goes. The gritty cold wind rasped at her throat when she got out. ‘Eighty cents miss… I haven’t any change miss.’ ‘All right keep the change.’ Heavens only thirtytwo cents… Inside it was warm and smelled cozily of tea and cookies.

‘Why Ruth, if it isn’t Ruth… Dearest come to my arms after all these years.’ It was Billy Waldron. He was fatter and whiter than he used to be. He gave her a stagy hug and kissed her on the forehead. ‘How are you? Do tell me… How distinguée you look in that hat.’

‘I’ve just been having my throat X-rayed,’ she said with a giggle. ‘I feel like the wrath of God.’

‘What are you doing Ruth? I havent heard of you for ages.’

‘Put me down as a back number, hadn’t you?’ She caught his words up fiercely.

‘After that beautiful performance you gave in The Orchard Queen…’

‘To tell the truth Billy I’ve had a terrible run of bad luck.’

‘Oh I know everything is dead.’

‘I have an appointment to see Belasco next week… Something may come of that.’

‘Why I should say it might Ruth… Are you expecting someone?’

‘No… Oh Billy you’re still the same old tease… Dont tease me this afternoon. I dont feel up to it.’

‘You poor dear sit down and have a cup of tea with me.’

‘I tell you Ruth it’s a terrible year. Many a good trouper will pawn the last link of his watch chain this year… I suppose you’re going the rounds.’

‘Dont talk about it… If I could only get my throat all right… A thing like that wears you down.’

‘Remember the old days at the Somerville Stock?’

‘Billy could I ever forget them?… Wasnt it a scream?’

‘The last time I saw you Ruth was in The Butterfly on the Wheel in Seattle. I was out front…’

‘Why didn’t you come back and see me?’

‘I was still angry at you I suppose… It was my lowest moment. In the valley of shadow… melancholia… neurasthenia. I was stranded penniless… That night I was a little under the influence, you understand. I didn’t want you to see the beast in me.’

Ruth poured herself a fresh cup of tea. She suddenly felt feverishly gay. ‘Oh but Billy havent you forgotten all that?… I was a foolish little girl then… I was afraid that love or marriage or anything like that would interfere with my art, you understand… I was so crazy to succeed.’

‘Would you do the same thing again?’

‘I wonder…’

‘How does it go?…
The moving finger writes and having writ moves on…’

‘Something about
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it…
But Billy,’ she threw back her head and laughed, ‘I thought you were getting ready to propose to me all over again… Ou my throat.’

‘Ruth I wish you werent taking that X-ray treatment… I’ve heard it’s very dangerous. Dont let me alarm you about it my dear… but I have heard of cases of cancer contracted that way.’

‘That’s nonsense Billy… That’s only when X-rays are improperly used, and it takes years of exposure… No I think this Dr Warner’s a remarkable man.’

Later, sitting in the uptown express in the subway, she still could feel his soft hand patting her gloved hand. ‘Goodby little girl, God bless you,’ he’d said huskily. He’s gotten to be a ham actor if there ever was one, something was jeering inside her all the while. ‘Thank heavens you will never know.’… Then with a sweep of his broadbrimmed hat and a toss of his silky white hair, as if he were playing in Monsieur Beaucaire, he had turned and walked off among the crowd up Broadway. I may be down on my luck, but I’m not all ham inside the way he is… Cancer he said. She looked up and down the car at the joggling faces opposite her. Of all those people one of them must have it. F
OUR
O
UT OF
E
VERY
F
IVE
G
ET
… Silly, that’s not cancer. E
X-LAX
, N
UJOL
, O’S
ULLIVAN’S
… She put her hand to her throat. Her throat was terribly swollen, her throat throbbed feverishly. Maybe it was worse. It is something alive that grows in flesh, eats all your life, leaves you horrible, rotten… The people opposite stared straight ahead of them, young men and young women, middleaged people, green faces in the dingy light, under the sourcolored advertisements. F
OUR
O
UT OF
E
VERY
F
IVE
… A trainload of jiggling corpses, nodding and swaying as the express roared shrilly towards Ninetysixth Street. At Ninetysixth she had to change for the local.

Dutch Robertson sat on a bench on Brooklyn Bridge with the collar of his army overcoat turned up, running his eye down Business Opportunities. It was a muggy fogchoked afternoon; the bridge was dripping and aloof like an arbor in a dense garden of steamboatwhistles. Two sailors passed. ‘Ze best joint I’ve been in since B.A.’

Partner movie theater, busy neighborhood… stand investigation… $3,000… Jez I haven’t got three thousand mills… Cigar stand, busy building, compelled sacrifice… Attractive and completely outfitted radio and music shop… busy… Modern
mediumsized printingplant consisting of cylinders, Kelleys, Miller feeders, job presses, linotype machines and a complete bindery… Kosher restaurant and delicatessen… Bowling alley… busy… Live spot large dancehall and other concessions. W
E
B
UY
F
ALSE
T
EETH
, old gold, platinum, old jewelry. The hell they do. H
ELP
W
ANTED
M
ALE
. That’s more your speed you rummy. Addressers, first class penmen… Lets me out… Artist, Attendant, Auto, Bicycle and Motorcycle repair shop… He took out the back of an envelope and marked down the address. Bootblacks… Not yet. Boy; no I guess I aint a boy any more, Candy-store, Canvassers, Carwashers, Dishwasher. E
ARN
W
HILE
Y
OU
L
EARN
. Mechanical dentistry is your shortest way to success… No dull seasons…

‘Hello Dutch… I thought I’d never get here.’ A grayfaced girl in a red hat and gray rabbit coat sat down beside him.

‘Jez I’m sick o readin want ads.’ He stretched out his arms and yawned letting the paper slip down his legs.

‘Aint you chilly, sittin out here on the bridge?’

‘Maybe I am… Let’s go and eat.’ He jumped to his feet and put his red face with its thin broken nose close to hers and looked in her black eyes with his pale gray eyes. He tapped her arm sharply. ‘Hello Francie… How’s my lil girl?’

They walked back towards Manhattan, the way she had come. Under them the river glinted through the mist. A big steamer drifted by slowly, lights already lit; over the edge of the walk they looked down the black smokestacks.

‘Was it a boat as big as that you went overseas on Dutch?’

‘Bigger ’n that.’

‘Gee I’d like to go.’

‘I’ll take you over some time and show you all them places over there… I went to a lot of places that time I went A.W.O.L.’

In the L station they hesitated. ‘Francie got any jack on you?’

‘Sure I got a dollar… I ought to keep that for tomorrer though.’

‘All I got’s my last quarter. Let’s go eat two fiftyfive cent dinners at that chink place… That’ll be a dollar ten.’

‘I got to have a nickel to get down to the office in the mornin.’

‘Oh Hell! Goddam it I wish we could have some money.’

‘Got anything lined up yet?’

‘Wouldn’t I have told ye if I had?’

‘Come ahead I’ve got a half a dollar saved up in my room. I can take carfare outa that.’ She changed the dollar and put two nickels into the turnstile. They sat down in a Third Avenue train.

‘Say Francie will they let us dance in a khaki shirt?’

‘Why not Dutch it looks all right.’

‘I feel kinder fussed about it.’

The jazzband in the restaurant was playing Hindustan. It smelled of chop suey and Chinese sauce. They slipped into a booth. Slickhaired young men and little bobhaired girls were dancing hugged close. As they sat down they smiled into each other’s eyes.

‘Jez I’m hungry.’

‘Are you Dutch?’

He pushed forward his knees until they locked with hers. ‘Gee you’re a good kid,’ he said when he had finished his soup. ‘Honest I’ll get a job this week. And then we’ll get a nice room an get married an everything.’

When they got up to dance they were trembling so they could barely keep time to the music.

‘Mister… no dance without ploper dless…’ said a dapper Chinaman putting his hand on Dutch’s arm.

‘Waz he want?’ he growled dancing on.

‘I guess it’s the shirt, Dutch.’

‘The hell it is.’

‘I’m tired. I’d rather talk than dance anyway…’ They went back to their booth and their sliced pineapple for dessert.

Afterwards they walked east along Fourteenth. ‘Dutch cant we go to your room?’

‘I ain’t got no room. The old stiff wont let me stay and she’s got all my stuff. Honest if I dont get a job this week I’m goin to a recruiting sergeant an re-enlist.’

‘Oh dont do that; we wouldn’t ever get married then Dutch… Gee though why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t want to worry you Francie… Six months out of work… Jez it’s enough to drive a guy cookoo.’

‘But Dutch where can we go?’

‘We might go out that wharf… I know a wharf.’

‘It’s so cold.’

‘I couldn’t get cold when you were with me kid.’

‘Dont talk like that… I dont like it.’

They walked leaning together in the darkness up the muddy rutted riverside streets, between huge swelling gastanks, broken-down fences, long manywindowed warehouses. At a corner under a streetlamp a boy catcalled as they passed.

‘I’ll poke your face in you little bastard,’ Dutch let fly out of the corner of his mouth.

‘Dont answer him,’ Francie whispered, ‘or we’ll have the whole gang down on us.’

They slipped through a little door in a tall fence above which crazy lumberpiles towered. They could smell the river and cedarwood and sawdust. They could hear the river lapping at the piles under their feet. Dutch drew her to him and pressed his mouth down on hers.

‘Hay dere dont you know you cant come out here at night disaway?’ a voice yapped at them. The watchman flashed a lantern in their eyes.

‘All right keep your shirt on, we were just taking a little walk.’

‘Some walk.’

They were dragging themselves down the street again with the black riverwind in their teeth.

‘Look out.’ A policeman passed whistling softly to himself. They drew apart. ‘Oh Francie they’ll be takin us to the nuthouse if we keep this up. Let’s go to your room.’

‘Landlady’ll throw me out, that’s all.’

‘I wont make any noise… You got your key aint ye? I’ll sneak out before light. Goddam it they make you feel like a skunk.’

‘All right Dutch let’s go home… I dont care no more what happens.’

They walked up mudtracked stairs to the top floor of the tenement.

‘Take off your shoes,’ she hissed in his ear as she slipped the key in the lock.

‘I got holes in my stockings.’

‘That dont matter, silly. I’ll see if it’s all right. My room’s way back past the kitchen so if they’re all in bed they cant hear us.’

When she left him he could hear his heart beating. In a second she came back. He tiptoed after her down a creaky hall. A sound of
snoring came through a door. There was a smell of cabbage and sleep in the hall. Once in her room she locked the door and put a chair against it under the knob. A triangle of ashen light came in from the street. ‘Now for crissake keep still Dutch.’ One shoe still in each hand he reached for her and hugged her.

He lay beside her whispering on and on with his lips against her ear. ‘And Francie I’ll make good, honest I will; I got to be a sergeant overseas till they busted me for goin A.W.O.L. That shows I got it in me. Onct I get a chance I’ll make a whole lot of jack and you an me’ll go back an see Château Teery an Paree an all that stuff; honest you’d like it Francie… Jez the towns are old and funny and quiet and cozylike an they have the swellest ginmills where you sit outside at little tables in the sun an watch the people pass an the food’s swell too once you get to like it an they have hotels all over where we could have gone like tonight an they dont care if your married or nutten. An they have big beds all cozy made of wood and they bring ye up breakfast in bed. Jez Francie you’d like it.’