The Ballad of West Tenth Street

by Marjorie Kernan

  “Yes, excellent thinking,” the colonel said. “Perhaps we should have steel barricades installed inside all the doors, and possibly rig up a way to repel invaders. The children could be trained to deploy it on anyone who tries to force their way in.”

  “Now look, let’s not go off on a boiling oil tangent,” Mrs. D said. “Let’s stick to protecting the girl, while keeping ourselves out of the hoosegow, all right?”

  “I guess we got a bit carried away,” Robert said sheepishly. “Guess I just felt so strongly that that girl’s had a rough time of it that I got plumb mad. But here’s something else I was thinking—Deen told me that the girl’s taken a real shine to Liall, and I think we ought to ask Liall to come whenever he can, to spend time with her. It seems like she talks to Liall more than anybody, feels easy with him. Now Liall’s quiet like, but has a way of asking direct questions about things he doesn’t understand. Says things some other people might be afraid to say, if you get what I mean. Ettie’s a fine, fine woman and will mother that girl and rock her to sleep every night if she wants, but it might be good for her to have someone else around who doesn’t just smooth the problems away, if you get what I’m saying.”

  At that moment Ettie came in with the trolley. She gave Robert a hard look.

  “Oh, Ettie,” Mrs. D said. “Look, all my favorites. Cress sandwiches, smoked salmon and cream cheese, chicken salad, and homemade potato chips! Is that caviar?”

  “Yes, beluga. On endive leaf. The colonel, he say Ettie, spend money, so I spend money. I say you three sit up here, deciding everything, and me I sit in the kitchen, crying and praying for that girl. I never saw such a good girl. I tell you, Colonel, I leave right now if you don’t take care of that girl. Find someone else to make you roast beef sandwiches.”

  “My dear,” the colonel said, looking very contrite, “You don’t possibly think we might send her back to that institution? I assure you, all we were discussing was how best to care for her. And I solemnly deputize you to be her mother in absentia, so you cannot leave. I’m awfully sorry, I should have included you in the conversation, have blundered in not asking you especially to join in making plans for her. Will you forgive me?”

  “Oh, everything’s all right?” Ettie said.

  “Yes, quite all right. We’ve agreed to keep mum about the girl being here, so you mustn’t answer either the door or the phone if you think it might be anyone coming to look for her, do you understand?”

  “Oh yes, if anyone ask, I know nothing of such a girl. And I make sure the Capitain he know nothing too.”

  “What if you made her some of your famous duck broth?” the colonel suggested. “There’s nothing like your duck broth to fix someone up.”

  “She a vegetarian.”

  “Oh dear,” the colonel said.

  “She can hear the animals scream. I make her vegetable broth, with mushrooms. Even better than duck.”

  Ettie went down to her kitchen, happily thinking of a bouquet garni, new onions, celery, carrots, leeks, and oyster mushrooms. With some juniper berries, she decided, and a turnip. It would be the best broth ever made, clear and rich.

  She stayed up late to reduce it in a heavy copper pot. The vent over her eight-burner stove fed out a pipe to a small fan above a window in the area, and people passing sniffed the air, wishing the smell were coming out of their own kitchen. One of them, a distraught, drunken bum, sank down on his knees and moaned, clutching the iron bars of the area railing as he stared at the woman in the kitchen below. Fortunately Ettie did not see him, for she would surely have taken pity on him and offered him a mug of broth, and just as surely he would’ve been back every night after that, yowling outside the door like a stray cat. A nightstick pressed into his side by a cop eventually moved him along.

  The next morning, as Ettie was preparing breakfast, Gretchen came quietly down.

  “I’ll make the toast,” she said.

  “No, no, you sit,” Ettie said.

  Gretchen stayed where she was, looking at Ettie.

  “Okay, yes, you make toast,” Ettie finally said.

  When the colonel’s trolley was ready Gretchen reached for the handle, asking Ettie with her eyes, could she take it up, please?

  Ettie argued back with her own eyes, but Gretchen’s will was stronger.

  Ah, breakfast,” the colonel said, turning down the music. “What wonderful things have you made this morning, Ettie?” The colonel broke off, realizing that it had not been Ettie’s tread. Nor Deen’s. “Why, it’s Gretchen. My dear, I’m so charmed to see you, what a pleasure. Won’t you join me?”

  Gretchen looked at him; he was exactly like Hamish had described him, basking in his chair like an old seal, his fat belly covered by a tweed waistcoat. There was something though, that he hadn’t told her.

  “You’re blind,” she said.

  “Yes, my dear.”

  “Hamish…”

  “Never said? No, I don’t suppose he would have. Afraid I’m a terrible old fraud, pretend to be able to see. Think I’ve fooled the boy, and your sister. Most everyone, for that matter. Ettie and Mrs. D know, they are my eyes.”

  “How long?”

  “Since I lost my sight? Let’s see now, a very long time, almost half a century it must be now.”

  Gretchen sat and tentatively put her hand on his.

  “I’m so awfully glad you’re here,” he said. “May I touch your hand? My, what a delicate hand it is. You know, as a southerner I never feel quite right when a house isn’t filled with visitors. In the South, you know, once a visiting relative or friend comes through the front door they may stay until doomsday, and we cry terrible tears if they have to leave before that. Let’s have some breakfast, shall we? Since you’ve found out my secret you won’t be shocked to see me spill a good many crumbs. Have you made the acquaintance of the Cap’n and his cat, who live in the garden? A quite remarkable cat, with fur as rich as an empress’s sables. The Cap’n lives in a little cabin, which I am told he keeps as neat as a pin. He rescued your sister, you know, when she ran away from that poor madwoman. I find your presence immensely soothing. I do hope you will come and sit by me whenever you like.”

  34

  The colonel stood at the open window of the parlor, his face held up to feel the spring sun.

  “Morning, sir!” the Cap’n said below him in the garden.

  “Morning, Corporal,” the colonel returned, saluting. “Fine day. Billet all right, is it?”

  “Yes sir. Very much all right, sir.”

  “Fine, fine. Carry on the good work.”

  The Cap’n sat on his pocket-size porch, the door to the cabin open behind him to dry the floor, which he’d just washed. He’d taken his boots off and cleaned their soles with his knife, now he was polishing them with a rag and a bit of Crisco. There was nothing like Crisco for keeping boots in good order. Titus was also attending to his person, he was giving himself a thorough washing from the tufts of his ears to the end of his tail, which he’d caught between his paws.

  Hamish came out the kitchen door, having finished off a stack of pancakes, three poached eggs, two English muffins with jam, and a half pound of bacon. He was less weedy these days, the Cap’n noted, but still thin—all that food Ettie shoveled into him was just being burned up as his bones grew.

  “Come join us, my boy,” the Cap’n said. “We are grooming. Look at that cat, at the contortions he does to get every speck off his coat. He always does his whiskers last. That cat has been a shining example to me. I was down and out and quite frankly smelled, when that cat showed me better ways.”

  “Deen says my hair looks like something that’s washed up on the beach after a storm,” he said, sitting next to the Cap’n.

  “Well, you might consider running a comb through it now and again. I recall when I first saw young men with hair as long as yours. I confess, I was a bit shocked. Now look at me, with hair down my back and a beard as long as Methuselah’s. Hair, my boy, is an essential part of se
lf. It grows out of our heads after all.”

  “I guess so. It’s funny stuff when you think about it. Kind of like an alien life form.”

  “That’s it, my boy, in a nutshell. I was wondering, do you think you and your sisters might like to come to the cabin this afternoon, for some lemonade? And a cake?”

  “Sure. I mean, Deen and I can come for sure, but Gretchen, she’s a bit hard to predict. But I bet she’ll come. Anyway, I’ll ask her.”

  The Cap’n roamed the Village, panhandling. He needed some money to buy a nice cake for the children, something special. He hoped desperately that Gretchen would come, each small way she rejoined the world was so important.

  He’d never been much good at begging though; it was an art he’d never quite mastered. The only reason he’d survived at all was that once in a while, against all odds, someone would give him a much larger sum than normal. Usually someone who’d stopped and actually talked to him.

  After three hours he’d garnered only a couple of bucks and was feeling dejected. Then a man gave him a dollar—maybe things were looking up. He spotted a woman who looked likely, not too old—old ladies were almost always hopeless, and not too young, young ladies were far less hopeless but more easily frightened. This woman was well dressed and didn’t have one of those hard, city faces.

  “Ma’am, some money to buy food?” he said.

  She looked the other way, as disdainfully as she could while still seeming not to notice his existence.

  “I only asked because I wanted to give some children who’ve been nice to me a little cake,” he said sadly, after she’d passed.

  “Really?” a young man with spiky lemon hair said. “That’s so cute. How much do you need?”

  “I’m not really sure. I’ve never bought a pretty cake.”

  “Oh my dear, one lives to buy pretty cakes. I always say, the prettier the cake, the prettier life is. Do you know where to buy a pretty cake? No? Well I do. Come on.”

  Taking the Cap’n’s arm, he turned him uptown. “There’s the most marvelous pastry shop, just a couple of blocks from here. I’ll show you. Are they really nice children or just a set of your own phantods? No, don’t answer that, I might be disappointed. You really smell quite nice for a bum, you know. I’m sure they are the most delightful children. Do they have names?”

  “Oh yes. Gretchen, Hamish, and Deen.”

  “Names that simply could not be made up on the spot, names that have the jangle of reality to them. Look, behold yonder window! Oh my God, just look at those darling pink cupcakes! Forget the cake, honey, you’ve got to have those divine little cupcakes. One for you, three for me, yummie yum yum. Let’s see, three children and you, three apiece and two extra to fight over, that makes fourteen. Don’t be silly, I shall certainly buy them for you. Really, I work for what they call a ‘major’ magazine, and a few cupcakes will hardly break me. Wait here and I’ll just nip in and get them, all right?”

  The Cap’n waited outside, hoping he didn’t look too conspicuous, but not wanting to move out of sight of the shop window, in case his benefactor might think he wasn’t on the up and up about wanting a cake.

  “What a dragon!” the yellow-haired man said, coming out with a large striped box. “First, I thought she’d roast me with her hatred, then gouge my eyes out. I’d thought that breed had died out. At least here, in the birthplace of la vie Bohème. Ah well, clichés are so eternal. Here, not like that, silly—put your thumb out, there, that’s how you hold a cake box.

  “And if anyone asks, especially any man under the age of fifty, do be an angel and tell them that I’m slipping this twenty into your pocket because I’m the most charming and kind-hearted girl on this planet. I always feel one should act beautifully, because there are so many beautiful people around one. You know, your teddy bear’s tea gives me the most wicked idea for a photo shoot. Like that terribly sick book about a doll that I stole from my sister as a child. It made me weep absolute rivers of tears. Must dash, love you.”

  With that, he disappeared into the whirl of bodies on the avenue. The Cap’n stood still, looking for him, catching a glimpse of crocus yellow hair in the throng heading uptown. He reached into his pocket, and sure enough, there was a bill there. Pulling it out he saw that it was a twenty. Gretchen must surely come now, he thought.

  When he returned to the cabin, telling Titus the news, he fussed about, getting everything ready. He lit the fire, set out lemonade and glasses, then arranged the cupcakes on a platter. I’m afraid he was a bit clumsy and got a fingerprint on the shell-pink icing of one, a rather grimy fingerprint, for he’d added some more newspaper to the fire. He didn’t see it though, as he stood admiring them on the willowware plate.

  Gretchen reached for that particular cupcake and ate the bit with the fingerprint before anyone could notice it. Then she smiled up at the Cap’n, who was handing round glasses of lemonade and beaming. She was entranced by the cabin, how everything in it was so tidy and fitted into corners and under windows. The Cap’n had lit the lamps against the growing twilight and she admired their haloes of golden light. She picked up another cupcake and nibbled off a layer of icing, then took a bite of cake, enjoying how the drier, floury bits jumbled with the melting sweetness of the icing in her mouth.

  Smoke drifted from the stovepipe on the roof, carried slowly away to the west by the wind. The Cap’n had brought out a picture he was working on, with a file of cut-out paper animals, birds, and flowers he’d painted. Three young heads and one old one bent over the table, studying ways to arrange the creatures and plants, as Hamish carefully ate the last cupcake in tiny bites, so that it would last as long as possible.

  When the Hollander children had gone the Cap’n tidied up, wanting to have everything shipshape before Ettie knocked with his supper. She always left it on the table outside the door and let him do the rest, serving it from the sealed containers to his dishes, or rather, the dishes in the cabin. It was in no way his cabin, or they his dishes, he knew. The Cap’n felt that Ettie’s system had a delicate balance, that she gave him food but otherwise expected him to be independent. It was one of the thousand or so things that he admired about her.

  After supper he sat reading in the armchair, feeding the wood stove from time to time and as often as not staring at the flickering flames beyond its grate rather than reading. His mind kept wandering back to the children’s visit and the young man who’d been so interested in getting a special cake. It was the first time he’d asked any visitors to the cabin specially, and he felt it had been a great success. Gretchen had even spoken a few words, and had seemed to enjoy those silly cut-out tigers he’d made, the ones that looked just like Titus, and the owls he’d done, in checked waistcoats, with faces just like the colonel’s.

  Finally, he put the book down; it was no use. He couldn’t recall a thing about Little Dorrit, except that she’d been a very serious child. He thought, Why not celebrate this most wonderful day by taking a late stroll around the neighborhood? A fellow he knew, a bum called Frankie, who had a specialty act in doing an exact imitation of Al Pacino, and who the Cap’n was friendly with, could often be found on MacDougal in the late hours. He’d like to meet with him again, tell him that he was doing well and inquire after Frankie’s health. He could even give him some money, by gum.

  He banked the fire down, blew out the lamps, and lit the battery-powered night-light. That was for Titus, who didn’t like being left alone in the dark. He patted the cat’s head after he put on his coat, telling him he’d be an hour or two at most.

  Not long after the Cap’n had let himself out the garden door, a figure slipped down the quiet street, then slid into a shadow across from the colonel’s house. Watching from under his hood, the Angry One observed the lights going out in the house, from the downstairs rooms to the bedrooms upstairs. He also observed that all the lights were out in the house next door, as he waited patiently for that one last light on the top floor to go out. Finally, it did. Moving silently across
the street the Angry One swarmed up and over the wooden gate to the Hollanders’ garden. He slithered across it, around the mulberry tree, then slithered up and over the fence to the garden next door. Crouching behind some shrubs he stared with rage and disbelief at the miniature house, a perfect tiny house with perfect pretty porch, and wood smoke coming from its chimney. Here at last was the lair of that fat bum someone seemed to love so much. The place where he would die. Where he’d stick a knife into his belly and watch all that food they fed him on golden plates come sliding out, along the tip of his blade.

  Knock, knock, he breathed, holding his carve-up knife as he stood before the door. Then he took a deep breath and blew the door down.

  The bum was not at home. Not at home. He knew it at once. He closed the door behind him, edging in, the knife ready in his hand. Why was that fat bum not home? Why was he not where he’d watched him be every night for the last six nights? Why was he not in his little-bitty kingdom?

  Look at that bed, will you just look at that? All cozy and covered with a quilt, a clean, Mamma kind of quilt. He took his knife to the bed, stabbing it and stabbing it, ripping it apart with the point of his knife.

  He saw a movement, an orange tail beneath the table. He grabbed at it and clutched it, heard a squawk and pulled the cat up. He fought off its claws, taking it by the scruff of its neck, holding it out and shaking it. He ran out to the garden and spotted something exactly to his purpose, an old stone well. As Titus fought to get free he pulled off the wooden cover and flung the cat down the well. There was a splash, then the Angry One put back the cover and fled.

  Titus tried to climb the stone walls, tried and tried. Cried out, Help me. Scrabbled again and again to find a purchase, but always slipped back down to the cold water. It was pitch black inside the well as he struggled to get out. He tried with all his strength, but with each try grew weaker.