The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride (7 page)

On the way to the viaduct, I looked back at what was already yesterday. Yesterday is a village now, already a place so little on the move that I shall always be able to look back to see how all the life-stories have worked out, including mine. I moved on.

The viaduct is a particularly coveted one, having at its opposite arch a public convenience, far enough away so that there is no smell, even downwind. Fires are not allowed by the city, of course, nor sleeping, but several niches in its fin-de-siècle architecture are excellent for either. The neighborhood, too, still a family one though on the fringe of the peculiarly livid hells of the Bowery, attracts a remarkably high class of loiterer, few winos, no hopheads, no feelies. Old men with Joaquin Miller beards still abound in the world; young ones “on the beat bit,” as they like to say, are setting up their new generation of the same (though I sometimes think it a shame to waste all that sincerity on such little experience); then there’s usually a scattering of Puerto Ricans who haven’t made it to Harlem yet or are making away from there, also now and then a crone or two (princesses-royal of the paper bag and always the least chummy), and here and there a tart. The Seamen’s Institute is nearby; though we see none of them here, it lends a churchly presence. Down the alley is the all-night Chinese restaurant. Altogether, in the gradation, not a bad setup for a novice.

As far as I could see, no one was installed there yet, certainly no fire, though that might be due to time of year. Down here, the obscurities of night become doubly soft as one approaches the river, doubly tender, as if hiding only babes in cabbages. The cop’s last round was at four, but some of the nicer ones rarely made it—what they don’t see don’t hurtem. Doesn’t. (Hmm—why not?—don’t.) Out in front of the arch, some yards distant, there is a public bench, under a lamppost.

I sat down on it, weary, not gay any more, but not sad either, perhaps in just that state of mind when the noumenon stops nagging and not-so-blind young phenomenon gets its chance. Or perhaps it was just that in the bad sections of New York the old lampposts are so beautiful. This one hung its long, graceful urn against a sky dark as the inside of a much larger urn that enclosed both of us. It swung itself a creaking inch or two; get born, sister; get born. The wind that blows my shore is a small one. I wished for the society of my kind—those under many hats in many places, or at home in their most private wigs a-sleeping. I wished for my brother. But my crusade is the smallest also, running to a company of one. So it was just here, that it began.

Without scarf, I could feel how the light shone gladly on the forehead that keeps us from the apes they say—with the help of that even whiter, high naked oval above it—below which my eyes, without their false shadow, must be gleaming beyond their fair green share. I didn’t need a mirror to unveil in, or swear a resolve to, but arched my neck like a swan’s, shifted my scalp, reserved ear-wiggling for a less sacred moment, but let the breeze play like a sixth sense around them. When the time comes, it’s like grace or death, perhaps. When the time comes, it’s nothing much. Except that you don’t always hear the cop behind you.

It was my first formal confrontation. I spoke first, as one always should to the establishment, and very distinctly. “Good evening, officer.”

He gasped; he must have thought me a boy. It was rather a comfort that he didn’t gasp more than he did. The New York police have of course seen everything and twice around, including the man who regularly walks lower Fifth Avenue in tam, perfect Glenurquhart kilt—and lace panties—or the beggar who stands in full beard, a costume out of Parsifal and a smile like a sneer from a pulpit, in the West Fifties, on wild-weather Sundays. At the thought that I might be classed with these, I held my heritage the higher, if wanly. What could I say to him, except as it has been said by plumpers-for-the-fact eternally: Officer, it’s mine.

He drew nearer; my uptown accent had stayed him, but he came on nevertheless. “Wotyer doing here … Miss?” Nearer, he looked puzzled; perhaps he had caught a resemblance. I decided to declare myself, thinking that this might settle it. One learns.

“Don’t you know me, Officer?” Delicately I framed my hands over my brow, just enough to bring out the face.

“Why,
Miss—
” he said. “Why, Miss—” Pity crept over his cheeks with its mild, coronary pink, and I knew I was lost. “Why, it’s the lady from the agency. Whatever are you doing here?”

“Oh … just … taking the air. Lovely, isn’t it?” It was no use; he was already backing away from me.

“Work done now, eh? You’ll be getting along home, eh. Not a place to hang around this late, even though we—” he gulped—“know you.”

“Oh, after a while. It’s the first night of spring, you know.” That
was
a mistake.

“Mmm,” he said. “Live far?”

“Not very far,” I said. I was learning, but one last try. “Officer, would you oblige me in something?”

“Why yes, of course, Miss.” Eager. “Get you a cab?”

“No. Just take off your hat.”

Without the hat, I could see that his hairline was well receded, almost gone. He was a middle-aged man, not bad-featured but heavy-headed, with small ears and a flaccid, white jowl; when that faded red line had finally left him, he was going to look, from the front at least, like a polar bear whose grandmother had come from County Kildare. Yet, if he took off his hat, no one would run him in for it.

“Thank you,” I said. “That’s all.”

“And you’re welcome, dear,” he said. “Fine evening, indeed now. You enjoy it, love.” He crooned it. “Stay right where you are.”

When he came back from the call-box, of course I wasn’t there. Ruses and stratagems were all coming on as well as could be expected. But I was still an apprentice, on a warm evening. I had left behind my precious Aquascutum.

From the side-window of the Chinese restaurant, where I ordered a pot of tea, I watched the officer come back and go away again. Under the lamppost, in the pool of light where I had first asserted my birthright, the bench was bare. Except for the loss of my raincoat, it seemed almost as if it had never happened. I was as used to this “except-for” brand of kismet as anybody else on the planet. But I found I had no desire to live by my losses only, no matter what graceful interpretations I might make of them. Oh, I had so much to learn, and at this hour, all of it stared at me at once. Is there a preferred style to be honest in? Was it quite the rough-and-ready to do a bunk on a cop by having tea?

The restaurant, empty now, was just that sort of land’s-end in which people so often sit at the end of their own wits, or at the beginning of them. The tiled floor, of the pattern of beer parlors in the days of Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model, had had scratched on it all the intervening sorrows of grime; the walls had once been painted in landscape, in those peculiar Corot-forests of varnish and gravy-fleck down which one could never wander far. Yet, over even the dingiest of such Sing Wu’s, there hangs always a certain paper fantasy, something of fans and kites, and out there in the kitchen, moth-plaints of a language not cognate—not the worst kind to hear in the background when one is taking stock. I wasn’t out to be a heroine—I wasn’t serious enough for it, I just wanted to be ordinary. But I didn’t seem to be Freudian enough for that either, at least not to the police. From his croon I was sure he was a man who knew all about how to be. The ones who do, they’re always the enemy. Watch out for good will, sociological and psychological—all those of kind intention who would kill me for my own good, either by keeping me in my place or sending me back to it. Oh, up with the coattails and all that, of course, but it was a long way between signals, and already the second day of spring. And right now, at the hour before dawn, when the blood-sugar level is lowest, I needed to be told that taking something off could be as positive and worthy an act as putting something on—a policy our children aren’t bred to. I could make use of a fortune cookie that said it.

When I shouldered my bag again, and put down the money for the tea, the two Chinese who had been cluttering in the back came forward. Though the old Chinatown
tongs
that brought them here were said to be dying, recruits like these still arrived regularly in the poorer eating-houses. Two pale boys with coarsely shining hair, lips swollen with youthful serenity, and inquiring nostrils, they had waited upon me together, teaching each other how to learn by serving a single pot of tea in unison. Three weeks ago, perhaps, they had been in Taiwan, and their landscape still walked with them; I could see their bent backs sculptured in the field. There is a kind of innocence that hangs for a long time about people who leave their homeland early. They don’t know precisely what events, which people in the new land, must be called strange.

And now once more, as these two ovaled up to me, bowing and curving, I was reminded of how, in Bangkok, Oriental gesture had always seemed to me to be fluently addressed to a point beyond me, its immediate object—as if all but me were chorus to a play whose main roles were being played elsewhere.

Surely my tip, modestly suited to my new status, couldn’t have caused all this twittering. “English?” I said into it. “Do you happen to speak any—”

In their seashell language, they deprecated themselves, humbly powerful. Grow grass they could, or set a table of teakwood thoughts in this wilderness, or mend the sky—with a gesture—when it was in danger of falling—but no, they spoke no English.

When I finally understood them, I couldn’t speak either. For, finally, one brought me a small wooden salad bowl, cupped my hands round it gently, as if valet to a personage, and even more humbly set my money—the quarter for the tea also—inside it. So, once again, I saw myself in somebody’s mirror, and this time I smiled.

As I left, tucking the bowl under an armpit, I pressed my palms together and bowed over them, glad that my travels had educated me enough to say thank you in monk language. In their final flurry of bows, they seemed even to be pointing me on my way—to the viaduct.

When I looked back, they had stopped bowing. One leaned in the doorway, staring out into the neon-thumbed night. The other, head bent, studied the carnation reek of our gutters. And I?—I’m a silly woman—I tripped along mystically, thinking of all the new roles my new head might have in store for me. I thought I saw the pattern of the life it held out to me and all wanderers, a life that was all episodes, through which I was the connecting string. Though these were to fall tangential as snow, it was my fate to unite them. Is
this
ordinary?

And is it customary to stand still on the pathway and give thanks to the general scene that you are in it, uncomfortable as you are? I did that! When the wild jackass coughs by night in the desert, bringing up all the poetry he has chewed by day, that’s what it must sound like. For, think of it, I had never before felt the absolute hilarity which comes of knowing that one’s equipment is equal to one’s intentions! Face to face with the diorama of where I could go—(and would) up to and including captain death’s table—my head fairly dizzied itself. I turned it yet once again—this large, superbly bare fact on my shoulders. I wanted to thank the boys back there for being my signal. Then it came to me—that I had been theirs. And that this was the inexhaustible doubleness of the world.

When I got to the viaduct, I found out why they had urged me here. One of the niches was occupied, by I-don’t-know-who, rolled up in my raincoat. I sat down next to him, pushed my pouch against the wall for a pillow, and considered him, snug in my coat there, if it rained.

Would he lend his half, in that case?

Does the future of the world depend upon it?

And would I steal it back for my own, when I woke?

Does the future of the world depend upon it?

Along toward dawn, he roused himself, stumbled toward the public convenience, didn’t get that far, but in a gentlemanly, sleepwalking way, managed to put a fair distance between us. Behind him, the night went up one lucent step. Head bent, he looked from the rear as if he were praying. I appreciated his courtesy.

So, when he came back, I said in a cheery voice, “I’ll lend you back the half you stole, eh?” Bleary-eyed, he nodded, without another look at me, and so we lay down to sleep, back to back, in mutual trust, or a draw. He and I were harmless.

I lay for a while on my elbow. Before me, the ordinary phoenix-fire of day was rising. We are born, we live and we die; crouch and adore. I watched the waterbugs streak like lizards from the Chinese restaurant, the men stride like catamounts, from plain doors. In the inexhaustible doubleness of the world, are there signals everywhere, wild as grass, that unite us? Or must we unite them?

What is imagination? I used to think it was to struggle against the facts like a fly trying to get out of the cosmos.

Come, you narks, cops, feds, dicks, railway police, members of the force everywhere! Run with us! If the world is round, who’s running after who?

In the cold of morning, I wrapped a scarf about my ears, but loosely, no deception, and lay down to rest with plenty of leeway until well after sunup, when the first rounds are once again made. Children can learn to be bald. And so to bed. What is imagination? And so to dream the answer, which I knew of course, but could never say. And so—I was born.

T
HERE WERE ONCE, SAID
my grandfathers Jim—
this was years ago—two sisters named Emily and Lottie Pardee, nice girls with pleasant enough small faces and ankles too, but they lived at the end of the town, and nobody could keep them in mind. Ever so often, people would suddenly remember this fact, that nobody could keep the Pardee girls in mind, and this would last for a while, but then that would pass out of mind too. Their parents had been the same way; they would be at church and at church suppers like anybody else, and they were invited to weddings too, like everybody else—and afterwards, when people were going over the affair in their minds, they could recall very well that the Pardees had been there. But scarcely anybody ever recalled afterward that they ever got to any of the really important places where things were transacted, like last minute phone calls to come to supper, or small meetings in the vestry or grange, which hadn’t been arranged for, or even picnics and pajama-parties, when they were young. And when the parents died, leaving the girls with the neat little house out of town to keep, and, it was said, a tidy little sum to do it with, alas, it was soon clear that they had been left this other inheritance too. For one might have thought that lots of young sparks would be drawn to that cozy fireside—even two at a time, since there were two Pardees—and that with the automobile coming in as strong as it was, there would be a double wedding out there in jigtime. But it just didn’t seem as if this would ever happen. There are some people born to live at the end of a town.