Place in the City (3 page)

“She ain't a chicken any more,” Timy whispered, “but she's a hell of a woman, all right.”

Mary stared at them. Something was up, and just on a day when she wanted to be home early, with the kids.

“Yu can pick up forty bucks,” Shutzey told her. “You just go along with Timy. That ain't bad fur a night, forty bucks.”

“A stag?”

“Yeah—but there ain't nothin' tu be afraid of. Timy'll treat yu right.”

“I know,” she said quietly.

“Come on,” Timy said. Then they went out together. Shutzey chewed on his cigar, shook his head. Then he grinned. “Geesus,” he whispered.

T
HE PRIEST
said to John Edwards: “—All in two things, right and wrong. It's hard to be a priest in New York; maybe it's wrong—I don't know. But good against evil remains, over everything.”

“The good doesn't win. It's chance.”

“We try. We believe,” the priest said.

“I know—I don't doubt you. Look at me, all gone. But if I had one ounce of your faith, only one small part of your belief in the lasting right of things—But I don't have it, and what's the use of talking about it? I don't even have the will to live.”

“You have it.” The priest smiled. “Get out of here tonight. Walk in the snow and breath deeply. Start slowly, and learn to live—all over.”

Then the priest went, and left alone, Edwards sank deeper into his chair. If he went out—Looking at the window, he saw the snowflakes tilting against the pane. Outside, New York was being purified. Snow would make the streets as white as a dove's breast, and the traffic would move very, very slowly. Then, as the night went on, the traffic would almost stop. The city would sleep in the snow. Dreaming and thinking, he saw himself walking for many, many blocks. Out of one small street, but through a thousand others, windows etched in frost, the night-wind blowing. And behind every window life, and more and more life. He drank it in. He stopped on one lonely avenue, looked at the sky where the storm-clouds were blowing away….

Anna brought him back. Almost noiselessly, she re-entered the room, came and bent over him, with her warm breath in his face. And that woke him from his dream.

As simply as a child, Anna said to him: “I'm not afraid any more. No more, Johnny.” She sat down on the arm of his chair, placing one cool hand against his cheek, turning his face to her, and as he looked at her, he was bewildered as always by a child's face. The eyes were set wonderfully far apart, and the gaze was clear and untroubled.

Somewhere, two years ago, the music master had found her. Remember that this is a folk-tale. He gave her food and shelter, and she married him because she was afraid, not so much of him as of being alone. She always recalled the two nights before that the way you recall a dream.

She had no place to sleep, so she sat in the subway. Two nights in the subway. Underground, and sometimes outside. Piles of girders, with the train roaring on and on into nowhere. Once she slept, with her head on a man's shoulder. He woke her up, and said to her:

“Now look, baby, come along with me, and I'll fix you up for the night.”

She ran from car to car, frightened at the way the tracks flashed underneath. Sometimes, she got out at a station. There is nothing in New York that is lonelier than a subway station in the early hours of the morning. The silence is heavy and real enough to carve with a knife, and the trains don't come often. Maybe once in a half-hour; but you begin to think that there will be no more trains; like being in a tomb and forgotten.

On an elevated track, the lights seemed to drop further and further beneath her. That meant the train was going up and up, like a bird taking wing. The whole train would soar into the sky; she laughed with anticipation, and then she fell asleep. On another station, a drunk slept beside her, and after a while she was glad, even for his company. But when he woke up, she ran away….

The music master was as good as he was gentle, and he was gentle as a woman with her. That made it wrong, all she was going to do now; but what did right and wrong matter when you were with the man you loved?

“Johnny—you hear me? I'm not afraid,” she said. “Not any more. I'm not wise, the way you are—except tonight. I know, tonight; I know about everything. If you die, then you're born again, and that's the way it is with me.”

He looked at her, and thought of the snow. Tonight, the world was changing. He wanted to live. Deep snow, and the two of them walking through it together, arm in arm, walking with long, powerful steps, while fresh flakes splashed in their faces, laughing, too, and living with all there was in life.

Upstairs the piano sounded. The tall, thin, stooped man was playing, striking ivory keys and turning his soul inside out.

“I wish he wouldn't play,” Anna said. “When he plays like that, I know that he's thinking. He's thinking that he might have been great. All the time, he's thinking that. I don't know anything about music. How does he play?”

“As if he might have been great,” Edwards said. “As I write. If you love me—I'll turn over the world.”

“I love you,” she told him, “only you.”

A
T THE
time of his ruin, Meyer thought of his daughters. No son to lean on, only daughters, who had nothing now.

His ruin crept up on him. He read it in the New York
Times
for three years, while eleven thousand dollars dwindled away to nothing, and now, on a winter night, while the snow fell in large, damp flakes, he read the last. Stocks go down. He had eleven thousand, and now he had nothing.

Money is the god. When your god dies, what is the use of going on? Twenty-two years on the corner of this single street with the cigar store, and then, all of a sudden, everything is gone. He sat behind the counter with his head in his hands. Shutzey sold bodies and accumulated a fortune. Meanwhile—

His wife called from the staircase: “Meyer, come and eat your supper!”

He stared at the
Times.

“Come and eat!”

A picture is one thing, and the reality is another. All the time, from the day he set foot in this country, it had been money. For twelve years he saved to buy a cigar store. Dreams went, and he sat behind a counter until he knew nothing else. Well, a man is a man, and shouldn't a man think? For twenty-two years more he saved carefully, no, he hoarded, and in the end there was eleven thousand dollars. But twenty-two years is too much, and when he tried the market, the market took it all away from him. What did he have now?

Twenty-two years and twelve years, a lifetime. He was an old man.

“Meyer!”

“Leave me alone.”

“Meyer, what's the matter?”

“Leave me alone, I say. Shouldn't I have any peace, even for a moment?”

“Meyer, you're in trouble,” she said, coming over to him. She was a stout woman with light hair. When she was young, she had looked like one of Meyer's daughters.

“Only leave me alone. There's no trouble.”

She glanced down at the paper he was reading, and then shook her head in quick disgust. “All the time stocks—is that something to bother your head with?”

“Nagging again!”

“Go and eat.”

“For God's sake, leave me alone.”

“All right. I'll go upstairs. But come and eat. Do you want everything should get cold?”

When she went away, he put his head down on the paper and began to cry.

I
N THE
darkness of the music master's room, the city moved vaguely. You see, in this folk-tale, all things move and mingle in the hours of twilight. New York is in and out of a million homes. If the city has a soul, you see it now; if it has a voice, you hear it now. The twilight encroaches upon everything, and windows and walls are no bar to it. It comes from the outside, but it comes from the inside, too.

The tall, thin man sat in the dark room and played. His fingers drifted over the keys, and his mind wandered, the way men's minds will at this hour of twilight. The music came soft and strong, according to his thoughts. And he was smiling, now and again. Whenever he thought of Anna, he smiled.

Going back, his life lay behind him. He wasn't young any more, old rather, twice as old as his wife, and an alien in a strange land. Always an alien, although he lived in a city of aliens, where all men dream of some place other than the island they are on.

It was a strange mood he was in tonight. Germany lay in the background, a warm land before the war. In the old empire, a man gave his soul to music. Youth, beer, and singing in an open garden, and way off on the horizon a thin line of black mountains. Then dusk was coming, too. Clouds dimmed the sky and dimmed out the picture; and on the piano his fingers drummed out the exile.

Until Anna came, he was all alone. And after Anna came it seemed that all the things that had been before her faded away. Even his dreams of fame.

Fame had been the most bitter pill. Some men are made small men. Others are not. The best dreams had come during the war, when death was so close that dreams had no limits. He remembered how he had once crouched on a muddy parapet watching the star-shells burst, each sending a glorious silver radiance over the broken land. He would come like that, like one of those shells.

(Then they heard him downstairs, and the poet, listening, realized that the music master was the greater of the two. His fingers were crashing into a wild, sobbing counterpoint.)

But the light faded. Playing more evenly, he thought of Anna. All alone, he had wandered from place to place for God only knows how many years. Then he taught music in this alley. If it was New York's Bohemia, why was he always alone? If there were artists here, why didn't he know one of them—only one? But he didn't. Until Anna came, he was as utterly alone as any human being could be.

He made a composition once and took it to a publisher. After he played it, the man shook his head. “For that sort of thing, study Gershwin,” he said.

But now it didn't matter. When he thought of Anna, he smiled. That was all that mattered.

He had never had any children, and now he wouldn't have any. So he loved Anna the way he would have loved a child, and at the same time, as a wife. It was a love that carried him out of himself. If you became great in this way, he began to reason, then it doesn't matter that you become great in no other way. His love was big.

He played on in the dark, and if the boy had seen his face now, maybe the boy would have understood.

The snow fell, and all over the city lights came on. Men walking made tracks in the snow, and many turned around to look at where their feet had dirtied it, almost with regret.

T
HE PRIEST
walked out into the snow, a tall figure of a man, standing solidly on his two legs. He tilted his face, so that the snow fell on his ruddy cheeks, and he smiled the comfortable knowing smile of a healthy man. Snow is a good thing; and snow coming so near to Christmas is the right thing. Snow cleanses.

With long, swinging strides he walked toward the avenue, turning over in his mind what Edwards had said. His disease was plain enough. There is no healthy mind without a healthy body, and inside of Edwards, his soul was rotting. Whether the soul would die, or whether Edwards would save soul and body, was entirely up to him. That, indeed, seemed to be the accounting the city demanded of every person.

Tonight, the city came down to the priest. Windows reaching to the sky, and walking figures without end; yet withal, there was more laughter behind the windows than tears. You had to believe before you could understand. Only—when you didn't understand, when there was meaning to nothing, you became like Edwards. Then each twilight gathered around you like smoke….

Meanwhile, the darkness soothed him, and the snowflakes fell on his face like a soft, cool caress. What did he know that the others lacked? What, in the simple fact of being a priest, gave him the courage to look through the dark, to see through it and know that beyond it was something?

But he didn't want to be alone this night. A night for knowing, a wonderful, deep, silent night, when people would turn their souls inside out, tell how and why they doubted. He could go now, seek and find. He was all a part of the great mystery that lay in the city, and he was knowing—

Opposite the house, the priest met Shutzey. Shutzey stood in the snow, smoking a large cigar, one hand held out in front of him, palm up. The hand seemed to fascinate him, the way the snow fell, each flake melting on the warm skin, leaving a spot of moisture.

“Wonder,” the priest reflected, “all the air is filled with wonder. What a night to know things! If the world goes round, even Shutzey knows—”

“Hello, Jack,” Shutzey said.

They were of a size, two mighty men, full of life and strength, with their feet set solidly on the ground. They were even similar in appearance, cheeks shaven smooth, with the ruddiness creeping out from beneath the blue sheen; and now they eyed each other. Two strong men can eye each other like that.

“There'll be a pile of snow in the morning,” Shutzey remarked. Then he looked at his hand, wiped it impatiently on his coat, and drew on a pair of yellow pigskin gloves.

“To cover the dirt,” the priest said.

“If yu look that way, Jack.”

“I look straight ahead.”

“Awright—if yu can. Funny though, I like tu stand in the snow like this, stand and feel cold air. Now what the hell's got me, huh?”

“You tell me, Shutzey.”

“Ahdunno.”

“You're not afraid—?”

Laughing, Shutzey blew out smoke, while frost from his nostrils steamed over his collar. Behind the glow of his cigar, the hard blue outlines of his face stood sharp.

“Listen,” he said. “I ain't afraid, Jack; I ain't cut that way. I'm in a tough racket, an' I don't pack no gat. Aw—wot the hell—”