The Man with the Golden Arm

by Nelson Algren

  That Pasterzy had taken as much as any doctor could. Frankie would have to wait outside and when Sophie was returned to him she would look so careworn that Frankie would hardly have the heart to question her. Yet couldn’t help wondering humbly.

  ‘What he do, Zosh?’

  ‘He took a sample of blood. He says I got real good blood. Wait till he takes a smear, see what he says then.’

  ‘He don’t hurt you, does he?’

  ‘It ain’t hurtin’ like that, Frankie, it’s just he’s such a squirrel. His roof is leakin’ – he don’t even look at the pins no more. He don’t even touch me, he don’t even taken my pullis, maybe I got a fever. He just asts them person’l questions. He’s a stinkin’ t’ing hisself, I think,’ cause I don’t like how he talks. You should of heard what I told him when he started pikin’ around to find out what you do for a livin’, how much dough you make. I told him you’re out of work ’n that stopped him cold.’

  ‘You done just right there,’ Frankie had conceded. They had to be pretty sharp to get around his Zosh, he knew. ‘Didn’t he give you no perscription for medicine though?’

  ‘He don’t give me nuttin’ but talk, talk, talk, that’s what I’m tryin’ to tell, he’s one big stinkin’ t’ing.’

  ‘Don’t say “stinkin’ t’ing,”’ Frankie had suggested, ‘say “reekin’.”’

  ‘He’s a reekin’ t’ing all right. He wears me down till I’m reeker’n he is. Tells me to go home ’n rest, get fresh air. Where the hell does he think I live – by the Humboldt Park lagoon? “Get built up,” he says. “Built up fer what?” I ast him. “So’s you can tear me down again?” He wants to know too much, why I said that.’

  ‘What he say then?’

  ‘He says he’s a sort of siko-patic doctor, he got to find out everythin’ – “Did I like to play wit’ little girls ’r little boys when I was a little girl?” Is that his business, Frankie? I told him sure I liked the little boys, the nice ones anyhow, I liked the little girls too, if they just wasn’t sheenies. Then I ast him a thing or two myself.’

  ‘What you ask him, Zosh?’ Frankie sounded worried.

  ‘I ast him why don’t he wear boxin’ gloves when he goes to bed.’ N you know what? He took off his glasses, blew on ’em, put ’em down ’n then starts walkin’ around lookin’ for ’em. I had to tell him where he just put ’em. Why do I have to have some popeye kike like that quackin’ at me anyhow, Frankie? Ain’t there no real doctors no more?’

  ‘Don’t say “kike,”’ Frankie protested mildly. ‘He’s a Polak.’

  ‘Some Polak. He’s a reekin’ t’ing is all.’

  Frankie was relieved when she and Doc Pasterzy had at last washed their hands of each other. Those trips down Division, wheeling her in the chair, had left him feeling half crippled himself.

  But she wouldn’t go to County. ‘We give them my mother’s heart there,’ she claimed, ‘they put a auto-topsy on her.’

  Eventually she had run through a whole series of quacks, faith healers and, for as long as Frankie’s terminal-leave pay had lasted, an ‘electric blood reverser’ manipulated by Old Doc Dominowski.

  It didn’t do any good to tell her what all the neighborhood hustlers knew: that old Doc Dominoes, as they called him, wasn’t Doc Dominowski at all. The original Doc Dominowski had had a license. But after his passing his daughter had rented his office to this blood-reversing impostor who’d left the deceased doc’s shingle up. A ruse as simple as that. Though in print he had never claimed to be anything but a wandering masseur.

  The present Dr D. had had a slogan stamped over his Damen Avenue door: Ad Electrica Necessitas Vitae. An inner legend announced Big Boy Is In.

  A diploma in the waiting room revealed Big Boy to be a member of The American Association of Medical Hydrology, whatever that might be. Furthermore he was a deacon of the Royal Aryan Society for Positive Christianity and as such was privileged to throw in divine healing without extra charge. That went right along with the three-dollar treatment for a touch of the astral power and a short lecture on the latent powers possessed by all of us. ‘Pow-wers what vassly transent our normaller ones,’ was just how Big Boy put it. The whole trouble with Sophie, he saw as soon as he set eye on her, was that she hadn’t been awakened; and had the brass to tell her husband so.

  ‘God help me when she comes to then,’ Frankie sulked to himself. He knew a rogue when he saw one and this mild-looking, white-haired, stoop-shouldered coneroo with the flat pink snout, a toothpick stuck in one corner of his mouth and his initials embroidered in red upon the pocket of an army-surplus surgeon’s smock, looked like an old hand to Frankie. He boasted that he was the most popular spine manipulator and ray caster on the Northwest Side. He still looked like the business end of a fugitive warrant to Frankie.

  It was true. The diplomas hung about the waiting room, just high enough to make reading difficult, were mostly grammar-school graduation certificates. The only course Big Boy had completed was the one offered by the House of Correction, where he’d done a stretch for prescribing cinchophen, a drug for which he’d once entertained such a fondness that he’d succeeded in tearing up some three dozen human livers before his supply had been cut off. He’d picked up his present racket in the bucket, as being safer than either peddling cinchophen or living on the curette.

  Safer, more respectable and more profitable, what with red and green light rays, a bit of fancy bone snapping, neck twisting and pills of every hue, shade, shape and size. He liked to wet his fingertips from his lips, when he felt the psychic approach was required, place them tenderly upon the patient’s forehead and gaze into her eyes steadily, seemingly entranced by something there. Then he’d come out of it, prescribe Holland gin, collect his three-fifty and send out for a pint of Cream of Kentucky for himself.

  ‘I’m gettin’ the astral pow-wer,’ he would confide in some matron who lay supine and stripped to the waist before him. ‘You got to relax, you got to tell yourself you’re not afraid of anything.’ While his hands caressed her so warmly that she felt herself starting to burn with rare courage. He had found most matrons brave enough after a while.

  He never made verbal propositions: those hot damp hands did his proposing. Proposed and fulfilled. For old Doc D. wasn’t working for nothing. ‘We don’t do business in an alley,’ he warned any woman wearing a fur coat; though his side entrance opened onto an alley all the same. He charged as much as the traffic would bear and when the payments began coming harder the patient was cured, he’d decide after a glance at a book in which no records were kept at all. ‘You’ve cured me all right,’ the patient would have to conclude. For by the time he was through with a woman he had more on her than she had on him; he himself never got out of line until the patient was so far off base she couldn’t get back in a month of extra innings.

  ‘I can see it now,’ he told Sophie, breathing heavily above her, ‘I can see the astral pow-wer.’ The sheet was covering her modestly from throat to knee, he hadn’t yet been able to figure how much of a charge she’d stand.

  ‘With some patients it is little white dots, with others colored dots. Each person has his own color.’

  This was true too. Big Boy’s own special color was the hard cold green of ten-dollar bills.

  ‘What’s my color?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘Turk-woiz blue. You can feel something, can’t you?’

  ‘Yeh. I feel somethin’.’ It was his right hand growing moderately bold as his breath grew warmer and the astral power really began to move. ‘My husband takes care of that angle,’ Sophie told him quietly, wishing Frankie really did. For Frankie’s physical interest in her, increasingly casual since their marriage, had passed altogether with the accident.

  Old Doc D. immediately became professional. ‘You got the blood pressure of a five-mont’-old baby – but that’s nothin’ serious. Eat lots of hot t’ings – pepper ’n hot sauces. Drink a little wine before meals or a little whisky. But never mix them. And believe you’
re going to get well. Now turn over and we’ll wibrate the wertebrays.’

  Big Boy loved to wibrate the wertebrays. When he’d wibrated each one he applied a grease to her back, sharpened a pencil and recorded, down the spinal column, the location of something he called ‘ligatites.’ They were the real cause of Sophie’s trouble. He showed her a rough diagram of her spine. ‘You can see for yourself what shape you’re in.’

  She saw. But he sensed her doubt and decided that the root of her difficulty was Lack of Faith – which was also curable. So she attended a meeting of the Royal Aryan Crusaders and the Aryans sold her so many varieties of pills, pamphlets, booklets, wormwood tea and senna leaves that she couldn’t afford to have the wertebrays wibrated for three weeks following.

  When she resumed treatments, largely because of Frankie’s gloomy aversion to the doc, Big Boy introduced her to the electric blood reverser. This was simply a frosted twenty-five-watt bulb which glowed with a lavender light. He also had some pale green bulbs for the better-heeled clientele and if necessary he could, literally, make sparks fly. It was only by sheerest chance that he had as yet electrocuted no one.

  ‘I’m talkin’ cold turkey to you now,’ he warned Sophie. ‘How many treatments can you take a week? You ought to take them every day so the good effect don’t wear off in between. But you got to come t’ree times a week or they won’t do no good at all. It’ll be the greatest investment you ever made. Have your husband wash your feet in ice water every night, don’t drink no liquor except beer, no eggs in hot weat’er ’n come back T’ursday for wibrate the wertebrays.’

  Frankie knew he was being played for a mark but it took Violet to put her foot down. When she no longer had anyone to wheel her down Division to Big Boy’s, Sophie finally resigned herself to forgoing his ministrations.

  Thus Frankie had robbed her again, of course, of her one chance to get well. If he wouldn’t let her go to Big Boy’s she wouldn’t go anywhere at all. For weeks she wouldn’t let anyone help her upstairs but Frankie.

  Even though Vi had helped her down the stairs it had to be on Frankie’s shoulder she must now come up. Once, wearied like a child by hours of horror films and animated cartoons, she clung with all her weight to the banister, crying that no one must touch her any more but Frankie.

  ‘Let me help you, Sissie,’ Violet urged her, wiping Sophie’s forehead, ‘Frankie’s gone to work.’

  ‘He ain’t suppose to go so soon,’ she complained miserably in the darkening hall, ‘he’s suppose to help me up, he’s the one who done it, he’s suppose to, he’s suppose to-’ She began beating the scarred newel post with both fat fists. ‘He went early just so’s he wouldn’t have to ’n I told him to wait – I told him, I told him-’

  ‘He got to earn a livin’ first, Sissie. He ain’t even got the clinic paid off yet.’

  ‘You call this livin’?’ Sophie wanted to know, and her voice rose into such a hysterical rattle that Violet slapped her cleanly across the cheek. For one moment Sophie’s full-moon face stared out in white shock at Violet’s impudence. ‘Now my best friend turns on me,’ she mourned, ‘he made me this way ’n you stick up fer him – you got a name like a flower but you’re a devil all the same. Go on, get upstairs, the sheeny shoplifter is waitin’ to give you some hot lovin’, you’ll just have time before Stash gets home – I’ll get upstairs by myself ’r die right here in the hall.’ She was pale with sweat and leaned heavily upon the post for support. Violet waited, hands on hips, for the tantrum to pass.

  But at last had turned slowly away, so sorry that Sophie, of all people, should talk like that. Violet had hardly felt the stairs beneath her feet. In the hall at the top of the flight a red light shone over the gas meter, among a dark maze of pipes, with the meter’s single hand pointing to some midnight when no cripple would be crying below with her head on the dark newel post. Some midnight when neither Sparrow nor Frankie would be near at hand nor anyone at all, of all the friends she knew. She looked down over the banister. Sophie was in the middle of the first flight and coming on strong.

  Stiffly, like a woman who has overslept, holding the banister with both hands, but still coming. ‘I knew all the time you could do it, honey!’ Violet cried down and Sophie went down in a heap, her fingers clawing piteously at the rail. To hold herself there tensely, without a single cry, till Violet had hurried down and helped her all the way up.

  ‘Did you see me?’ Sophie asked like a child caught in mischief.

  ‘You were comin’ along somethin’ wonderful, Sissie,’ Violet assured her, ‘you were climbin’ as good as anybody – it shows you can do it if you just want.’

  ‘You saw what happened when I tried too hard, didn’t you?’

  ‘I shouldn’t ought to of hollered,’ Violet realized too late. ‘I’m sorry about slappin’ you, Sissie, it was just to keep you on the ground.’ She waited for Sophie to say she was sorry too.

  ‘Am I gettin’ awful fat, Vi? Is that why he won’t help me upstairs no more? I just couldn’t stand his not lovin’ me like he used.’

  ‘Stop whimperin’,’ Violet scolded her, ‘of course he loves you like he used. He wouldn’t be takin’ care of you so good if he didn’t.’ Which was true enough, Violet knew: he loved her as little as ever and took just as small care of her as before.

  When he did help her up the stairs she needed his arm to lean on across the floor and, once in the chair, needed to be wheeled and, being wheeled, needed to be comforted. Till there was no end, no end to her asking at all.

  When he refused to wheel her it was as if a priest had suddenly refused to confess her. ‘Tell me what I done to you, you can’t even wheel me a little. You think I want to be laid up in a chair all my life? You remember me ever askin’ you, “Please smash me up?”’

  Frankie would give in to her as he always gave in. As he gave in to Schwiefka in arguments over the take. As he gave in to Louie in arguments over the price of ‘God’s medicine.’ As he gave in to Zygmunt and Antek and Schwabatski. ‘There’s just one guy I don’t give in to in this world,’ Frankie considered, ‘the punk got to take what the others hand to me.’

  And would hear an echo of Sparrow’s protest: ‘It’s just since you come back you’re givin’ me gas, Frankie. You never used to give me gas before.’

  ‘It’s what I got you around for,’ Frankie would remind him brutally. Thus even Sparrow had to feel the edge of those fragments of jealousy into which Sophie’s love, like her crockery, had been shattered.

  Long, ugly fragments for Frankie and slenderer, more delicate ones for Violet and Violet’s iron health. ‘If I go downtown ’n see somethin’ I like I’ll buy for you too,’ Violet would try to assuage her.

  ‘You don’t have to buy me nuttin’,’ Sophie would scorn everyone. ‘Just buy that Frankie a set of drums. He’s gettin’ a job wit’ a big-name band one of these days – he ain’t said which day. Just don’t hold yer breath till then, that’s my advice to all you Division Street hustlers.’

  For those nearest our hearts are the ones most likely to tread upon them. What she could not gain through love she sought to possess by mockery. He was too dear to her: into everything he did she must read some secret hatred of herself.

  ‘Whyn’t you come right out ’n say you wisht I’d got killed ’stead of crippled?’ she accused him without warning.

  ‘I didn’t say nothin’ like that, Zosh,’ he threshed about trying to clear himself. ‘All I said was I wish you’d just try to walk again.’

  Yet she had planted the doubt in his mind. ‘Of course I don’t wish nothin’ like that,’ he would have to tell himself. With the pang of guilt in the very words.

  Violet helped him. ‘I don’t think you want to get well,’ she told Sophie. Then would wait for Sophie to stop whimpering so she could make it all up to her for saying that by wheeling her down the street to the Pulaski, chain the chair in the lobby, help her into a seat and call for her when the double feature was done.

  ‘I coul
d die listenin’ to that Dick Haymes,’ Sophie would say while being wheeled home.

  On days when the bill remained unchanged Violet would pop her hennaed head in the door and ask, ‘Zosh, you want to play checkerds?’

  And all the while they were playing would keep up a stream of idle reminiscence calculated to keep Sophie’s mind off Frankie and all the trouble he’d brought her just like her father had warned her.

  ‘I’ve had trouble with my eyes lately,’ Vi would hint till Sophie would ask why she didn’t get glasses.

  ‘It’s not that kind of trouble. It’s from flirtin’, that kind of trouble. Me ’n my bedroom eyes.’

  That was Violet’s idea of high humor and Sophie’s idea of nothing at all. ‘You ought to cut all that out, it just ain’t right,’ Sophie would scold her, ‘bein’ hooked to old Stash ’n flirtin’ around with Sparrow.’

  It was true. Violet let the punk make hurried love to her on rainy afternoons – then rushed him out into the rain in time to have dinner on the stove by the time old Stash returned from work. When Stash wanted to know where she’d been all afternoon it was always ‘takin’ Zosh to the movies, Old Man.’

  Only once had Old Husband taken the trouble to check with Sophie, and Sophie had been loyal enough to reply, ‘Vi was settin’ by me all afternoon by the Pulaski, we set t’rough two stinky shows. One was white gorillas ’n the other was Carmen Bolero – he had two orchesters ’n did they make glad.’

  A girl like Violet, a warm one like that, to marry an old icicle like Stash Koskozka, whose need for her stopped when she’d finished warming up yesterday’s pierogi.