“I hated to wake you out of a sound sleep,” I said, “but I’m leaving.”
Helen sat up in bed immediately. “Leaving? ‘Where?”
“Job hunting.” I grinned at her alarm. “Not a drop of whiskey in the house.”
“No money at all, huh?”
“No money, no coffee, nothing at all.”
“What time will you be back?”
“I don’t know. Depends on whether I can get a job, and if I do, when I get through. But I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Helen got out of bed, slid her arms around my neck and kissed me hard on the mouth. “You shouldn’t have to work, Harry,” she said sincerely and impractically. “You shouldn’t have to do anything except paint.”
“Yeah,” I said, disengaging her arms from my neck, “and make love to you. I’d better get going.” I left the room, closing the door behind me.
There was a little change in my pocket, more than enough for carfare, and I caught the cable car downtown to Market Street. I had always been lucky finding jobs on Market, maybe I could again. There are a thousand and one cafes. One of them needed a man like me. From Turk Street I walked toward the Civic Center, looking for signs in windows. I wasn’t particular. Waiter, dishwasher, anything, I didn’t care. I tried two cafes without success. At last I saw a sign: FRY COOK WANTED, hanging against the inside of a window of a small cafe, attached with scotch tape. I entered the cafe. It was a dark, dingy place with an overpowering smell of fried onions. I reached over the shoulder of the peroxide blonde sitting behind the cash register and jerked the sign out of the window.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she said indifferently.
“I’m the new fry cook. Where’s the boss?”
“In the kitchen.” She jerked her thumb toward the rear of the cafe, appraising me with blue, vacant eyes.
I made my way toward the kitchen. The counter was filled, all twelve stools, and the majority of the customers sitting on them were waiting for their food. There wasn’t even a counterman working to give a glass of water or pass out a menu. The boss, a perspiring, overweight Italian, wearing suit pants and a white shirt, was gingerly dishing chile beans into a bowl. Except for the old, slow-moving dishwasher, he was the only one in the kitchen.
“Need a fry cook?” I grinned ingratiatingly, holding up the sign.
“Need one? You from the Alliance?”
“No, but I’m a fry cook.”
“I been trying to get a cook from the Alliance for two days, and my waitress quit twenty minutes ago. The hell with the Alliance. Get busy.”
“I’m your man.” I removed my coat and hung it on a nail.
He wore a greasy, happy smile. “Sixty-five a week, meals and laundry.”
“You don’t have to convince me,” I told him, “I’m working.”
I wrapped an apron around my waist and took a look at the stove. The boss left the kitchen, rubbing his hands together, and started to take the orders. Although I was busy, I could handle things easily enough. I can take four or five orders in my head and have four or more working on the stove at the same time. When I try to go over that I sometimes run into trouble. But there was nothing elaborate to prepare. The menu offered nothing but plain food, nothing complicated. The boss was well pleased with my work. I could tell that by the way he smiled at me when he barked in his orders. And I had taken him out of a hole.
At one my relief cook came on duty, a fellow by the name of Tiny Sanders. I told him what was working and he nodded his head and started to break eggs for a Denver with one hand. I put my jacket on, found a brown paper sack, and filled it with food out of the ice-box. I don’t believe in buying food when I’m working in a cafe. The boss came into the kitchen and I hit him up for a five spot. He opened his wallet and gave me the five without hesitation.
“I’m giving you the morning shift, Jordan. Five a.m. to one.”
“That’s the shift I want,” I told him. “See you in the morning.” It was the best shift to have. It would give me every afternoon and evening with Helen.
I left the cafe and on the corner I bought a dozen red carnations for a dollar from a sidewalk vendor. They were old flowers and I knew they wouldn’t last for twenty-four hours, but they would brighten up our room. On the long ride home I sniffed the fragrance of the carnations and felt well-pleased with myself, revelling in my good fortune.
I was humming to myself as I ran up the stairs and down the hall to our room.
I opened my door and jagged tendrils of perfume clawed at my nostrils. Tweed. It was good perfume, but there was too much of a good thing. Helen, fully dressed in her best suit, was sitting nervously on the edge of the unmade bed. Across from her in the strongest chair was a formidable woman in her late fifties. Her hair was a streaked slate-gray and she was at least fifty pounds overweight for her height—about five-nine. Her sharp blue eyes examined me like a bug through a pair of eight-sided gold-rimmed glasses. The glasses were on a thin gold chain that led to a shiny black button pinned to the breast of a rather severe blue taffeta dress.
“Harry,” there was a catch in Helen’s throat, “this is my mother, Mrs. Mathews.”
“How do you do?” I said. I put the carnations and sack of food on the table. “This is a pleasant surprise.”
“Is it?” Mrs. Mathews sniffed.
“Well, I didn’t expect you—”
“I’ll bet you didn’t!” She jerked her head to the right.
“The hospital notified Mother I was ill,” Helen explained.
“That was very thoughtful of them,” I said.
“Yes,” Mrs. Mathews said sarcastically, “wasn’t it? Yes, it was very thoughtful indeed. They also were thoughtful enough to inform me that my daughter was released from the hospital in the custody of her common-law husband. That was a nice pleasant surprise!”
For a full minute there was a strained silence. I interrupted it. “Helen is all right now,” I said, trying a cheery note.
“Is she?” Mrs. Mathews asked.
“Yes, she is.”
“Well, I don’t think so.” Mrs. Mathews jerked her head to the right. “I think she’s out of her mind!”
“Please, Mother!” Helen was very close to tears.
“I’m taking good care of Helen,” I said.
“Are you?” Mrs. Mathews hefted herself to her feet, clomped heavily across the room to the portrait. “Is this what you call taking good care of her? Forcing her to pose for a filthy, obscene picture?” Her words were like vitriolic drops of acid wrapped in cellophane, and they fell apart when they left her lips, filling the room with poison.
“It’s only a portrait,” I said defensively. “It isn’t for public viewing.”
“You bet it isn’t! Only a depraved mind could have conceived it; only a depraved beast could execute it; and only a leering, concupiscent goat would look at it!”
“You’re too hard on me, Mrs. Mathews. It isn’t that bad,” I said.
“Where have you been so long, Harry?” Helen asked me, trying to change the subject.
“I got a job, and that sack’s full of groceries,” I said, pointing.
“What kind of a job?” Mrs. Mathews asked. “Sweeping streets?”
“No. I’m a cook.”
“I don’t doubt it. Listen, er, ah, Mr. Jordan, if you think anything of Helen at all you’ll talk some sense into her. I want her to come home with me, where she belongs. Look at her eyes! They look terrible.”
“Now that I’ve got a job she’ll be all right, Mrs. Mathews. Would you like a salami sandwich, Helen?”
“No thanks, Harry,” Helen said politely. “Not right now.”
“Why not?” Mrs. Mathews asked with mock surprise. “That’s exactly what you should eat! Not fresh eggs, milk, orange juice and fruit. That stuff isn’t any good for a person right out of a sick bed. Go ahead. Eat a salami sandwich. With pickles!”
“I’m not hungry, Mother!”
“Maybe it’s a dri
nk of whiskey you want? Have you got whiskey in that sack, Mr. Jordan, or is it all salami?”
“Just food,” I said truthfully. “No whiskey.”
“That’s something. Are you aware that Helen shouldn’t drink anything with alcohol in it? Do you know of her bad heart? Did she tell you she was sick in bed with rheumatic fever for three years when she was a little girl? Did she tell you she couldn’t smoke?”
“I’m all right, Mother!” Helen said angrily. “Leave Harry alone!”
Again we suffered a full minute of silence. “I brought you some carnations,” I said to Helen; “you’d better put them in water.” I crossed to the table, unwrapped the green paper, and gave the flowers to Helen.
“They’re lovely, Harry!” Helen exclaimed. She placed the carnations in the water pitcher on the dresser, arranged them quickly, inexpertly, sat down again on the edge of the bed, and stared at her mother. I sat beside her, reached over and took her hand. It was warm, almost feverish.
“Now listen to me, both of you.” Mrs. Mathews spoke slowly, as though she were addressing a pair of idiots. “I can perceive that neither one of you has got enough sense to come in out of the rain. Helen has, evidently, made up what little mind she has, to remain under your roof instead of mine. All right. She’s over twenty-one and there’s nothing I can do about it. If you won’t dissuade her and I can see you won’t—not that I blame you—will you at least let me in on your plans?”
“We’re going to be married soon,” Helen said.
“Do you mind if I call to your attention that you’re already married?” Mrs. Mathews jerked her head to the right, as though Helen’s husband was standing outside the door waiting for her.
“I mean, after I get a divorce,” Helen said.
“And meanwhile, while you’re waiting, you intend to continue to live here in sin? Is that right?”
Helen didn’t answer for a moment and I held my breath. “Yes, Mother, that’s what I’m going to do. Only it isn’t sin.”
“I won’t quibble.” Mrs. Mathews sniffed, jerked her head to the right and turned her cold blue eyes on me. “How much money do you make per week, Mr. Jordan? Now that you have a job.” The way she said it, I don’t believe she thought I had a job.
“Sixty-five dollars a week. And I get my meals and laundry.”
“That isn’t enough. And I doubt in here—” she touched her mammoth left breast with her hand— “whether you can hold a position paying that much for any length of time. Here’s what I intend to do. As long as my daughter won’t listen to reason, I’ll send her a check for twenty-five dollars a week. But under one condition: both of you, stay out of San Sienna!”
“We don’t need any money from you, Mother!” Helen said fiercely. “Harry makes more than enough to support me.”
“I’m not concerned with that,” Mrs. Mathews said self-righteously. “I know where my duty lies. You can save the money if you don’t need it, or tear up the check, I don’t care. But starting right now, I’m giving you twenty-five dollars a week!”
“You’re very generous,” I said.
“I’m not doing it for you.” Mrs. Mathews jerked her head to the right. “I’m doing it for Helen.”
Mrs. Mathews removed a checkbook and ballpoint pen from the depths of a cavernous saddle-leather bag and wrote a check. She crossed the room to the dresser, drying the ink by waving the check in the air, and put the filled-in check beside the pitcher of carnations. She sniffed.
“That’s all I have to say, but to repeat it one more time so there’ll be no mistake: Stay out of San Sienna!”
“It was nice meeting you, Mrs. Mathews,” I said. Helen remained silent.
Mrs. Mathews jerked her head to the right so hard her glasses were pulled off her nose. The little chain spring caught them up and they whirred up to the black button pinned to her dress. She closed the shirred beaver over the glasses, sniffed, and slammed the door in my face.
But the memory lingered on, in the form of a cloud of Tweed perfume.
Helen’s face was pale and her upper lip was beaded with tiny drops of perspiration. She wound her arms around my waist tightly and pressed her face into my chest. I patted her on the back, kissed the top of her head.
“Oh, Harry, it was terrible!” Her voice was low and muffled against my chest. “She’s been here since ten o’clock this morning. Arguing, arguing, arguing! Trying to break me down. And I almost lost! I was within that much”—she pulled away from me, held thumb and forefinger an inch apart—“of going with her.” She looked at me accusingly; her face wore an almost pitiful expression. “Where were you? When I needed you the most, you weren’t here!”
“I wasn’t lying about the job, Helen. I found a job as a fry cook and had to go to work to get it.”
“Why do you have to work? It isn’t fair to leave me here all alone.”
“We have to have money, sweetheart,” I explained patiently. “We were flat broke when I went out this morning, if you remember.”
“Can’t we live on what money Mother sends us?”
“We could barely exist on twenty-five dollars a week. The room rent’s ten dollars, and we’d have to buy food and liquor out of the rest. We just can’t do it.”
“What are we going to do, Harry? It’s so unfair of Mother!” she said angrily. “She could just as easily give us two hundred and fifty a week!”
“Can’t you see what she’s up to, Helen? She’s got it all planned out, she thinks. She doesn’t want you to go hungry, but if she gave us more money, she knows damned well you’d never go back to her. This way, she figures she has a chance—”
“Well, she’s wrong! I’m never going back to San Sienna!”
“That leaves it up to me then, where it belongs. I’ll work this week out, anyway. Maybe another. We’ll pay some room rent in advance that way, and the tab at Mike’s. And maybe we can get a few loose dollars ahead. Then I’ll look for some kind of part time work that’ll give me more time with you.”
We left it at that.
Helen picked the check up from the dresser and left for the delicatessen. She returned in a few minutes with a bottle of whiskey and a six-pack carton of canned beer. I had one drink with her and I made it last. I didn’t want to drink that one. I felt that the situation was getting to be too much for me to handle. Helen drank steadily, pouring them down, one after the other, chasing the raw whiskey with sips of beer. Her mother’s visit had upset her badly, and she faced it typically, the way she faced every situation.
By six that evening she sat numbly in the chair by the window. She was in a paralyzed stupor. I undressed her and put her to bed. She lay on her back, breathing with difficulty. Her eyes were like dark bruises, her face a mask of fragile, white tissue paper.
I didn’t leave the room; I felt like a sentry standing guard duty. I made a salami sandwich, took one bite, and threw it down on the table. I sat in the chair staring at the wall until well past midnight.
After I went to bed, it was a long time before I fell asleep.
ELEVEN
Bottle Baby
THE LITTLE built-in, automatic alarm clock inside my head waked me at four a.m. and I hadn’t even taken the trouble to set it. I tried to fight against it and go back to sleep, but I couldn’t. The alarm was too persistent. I reluctantly got out of the warm bed, shiveringly grabbed a towel, and rushed next door to the bathroom. Standing beneath the hot water of the shower almost put me back to sleep. With an involuntary yelp I twisted the faucet to cold and remained under the pelting needles of ice for three minutes. On the way back to my room I dried myself, and then dressed hurriedly against the background of my chattering teeth. The room was much too cold to hang around for coffee to boil and I decided to wait and get a cup when I reached Vitale’s Cafe. I got my trenchcoat out of the closet and put it on over my corduroy jacket. The trenchcoat was so filthy dirty I only wore it when I had to, but it was so cold inside the house I knew I would freeze on the street without something to
break the wind.
Helen was sleeping on her side facing the wall and I couldn’t see her face. Her hip made a minor mountain out of the covers and a long ski slope down to her bare round shoulder. I envied Helen’s warm nest, but I pulled the blanket up a little higher and tucked it in all around her neck.
Helen had been so far under the night before when I put her to bed I thought it best to leave a note. I tore a strip of paper from the top of a brown sack and wrote in charcoal:
Dearest Angel,
Your slave has departed for the salt mine. Will be home by one-thirty at latest. All my love,
Harry
Helen’s bottle of whiskey was still a quarter full. I put the note in the center of the table and weighted it with the bottle where I knew she would find it easily when she first got out of bed. I turned out the overhead light and closed the door softly on my way out.
It was colder outside than I had anticipated it to be. A strong, steady wind huffed in from the bay, loaded heavily with salt and mist, and I couldn’t make myself stand still on the corner to wait for my car. Cable cars are few and far between at four-twenty in the morning and it was far warmer to run a block, wait, run a block and wait until one came into view. I covered four blocks this way and the exertion warmed me enough to wait on the fourth corner until a car came along and slowed down enough for me to catch it. I paid my fare to the conductor and went inside. I was the only passenger for several blocks and then business picked up for the cable car when several hungry-looking longshoremen boarded it with neatly-lettered placards on their way to the docks to picket. I dismounted at the Powell Street turnaround and walked briskly down Market with my hands shoved deep in my pockets. The wide street was as nearly deserted as it can ever be. There were a few early-cruising cabs and some middle-aged paper boys on the corners waiting for the first morning editions. There was an ugly mechanical monster hugging the curbs and sploshing water and brushing it up behind as it noisily cleaned at the streets. Later on there would be the regular street cleaners with brooms and trash-cans on wheels to pick up what the monster missed. I entered Vitale’s Cafe.
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