The Living is Easy

by Dorothy West

  To Ike

  Published in 1982 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406, New York, NY 10016 feministpress.org

  Copyright © 1948, 1975 by Dorothy West

  Afterword © 1982 by the Feminist Press at CUNY

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, or otherwise without prior written permission of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  The characters in this novel are fictitious; any resemblance to actual persons is wholly accidental and unintentional.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  West, Dorothy, 1907–1998

  The living is easy.

  Reprint. Originally published: Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1948.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  I. Title.

  [PS3545.E82794L5 . 1982] 813'.54 81-22062

  eISBN 9781558617322

  This publication is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts

  CONTENTS

  Front Cover

  Title page

  Copyright page

  Contents

  The Living Is Easy

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part Two

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Afterword

  About the Author

  About the Feminist Press

  Also Available from the Feminist Press

  The Living Is Easy

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  “WALK UP,” hissed Cleo, somewhat fiercely.

  Judy was five, and her legs were fat, but she got up steam and propelled her small stout body along like a tired scow straining in the wake of a racing sloop. She peeped at her mother from under the expansive brim of her leghorn straw. She knew what Cleo would look like. Cleo looked mad.

  Cleo swished down the spit-spattered street with her head in the air and her sailor aslant her pompadour. Her French heels rapped the sidewalk smartly, and her starched skirt swayed briskly from her slender buttocks. Through the thin stuff of her shirtwaist her golden shoulders gleamed, and were tied to the rest of her torso with the immaculate straps of her camisole, chemise, and summer shirt, which were banded together with tiny gold-plated safety pins. One gloved hand gave ballast to Judy, the other gripped her pocketbook.

  This large patent-leather pouch held her secret life with her sisters. In it were their letters of obligation, acknowledging her latest distribution of money and clothing and prodigal advice. The instruments of the concrete side of her charity, which instruments never left the inviolate privacy of her purse, were her credit books, showing various aliases and unfinished payments, and her pawnshop tickets, the expiration dates of which had mostly come and gone, constraining her to tell her husband, with no intent of irony, that another of her diamonds had gone down the drain.

  The lesser items in Cleo’s pocketbook were a piece of chamois, lightly sprinkled with talcum powder, and only to be used in extreme necessity if there was no eye to observe this public immodesty, a lollipop for Judy in case she got tiresome, an Irish-linen handkerchief for elegance, a cotton square if Judy stuck up her mouth, and a change purse with silver, half of which Cleo, clandestinely and without conscience, had shaken out of Judy’s pig bank.

  Snug in the bill compartment of the bag were forty-five dollars, which she had come by more or less legitimately after a minor skirmish with her husband on the matter of renting a ten-room house.

  She had begun her attack in the basement kitchen of their landlady’s house, a brownstone dwelling in the South End section of Boston. Judy had been sent upstairs to play until bedtime, and Bart had been basking in the afterglow of a good dinner. Ten years before, he had brought his bride to this address, where they had three furnished rooms and the use of the kitchen and the clothesline at a rent which had never increased from its first modest figure. Here, where someone else was responsible for the upkeep, Bart intended to stay and save his money until he was rich enough to spend it.

  Cleo had bided her time impatiently. Now Judy was nearing school age. She had no intention of sending her to school in the South End. Whenever she passed these schools at recess time, she would hustle Judy out of sight and sound. “Little knotty-head niggers,” she would mutter unkindly, while Judy looked shocked because “nigger” was a bad-word.

  These midget comedians made Cleo feel that she was back in the Deep South. Their accents prickled her scalp. Their raucous laughter soured the sweet New England air. Their games were reminiscent of all the whooping and hollering she had indulged in before her emancipation. These r’aring-tearing young ones had brought the folkways of the South to the classrooms of the North. Their numerical strength gave them the brass to mock their timid teachers and resist attempts to make them conform to the Massachusetts pattern. Those among them who were born in Boston fell into the customs of their southern-bred kin before they were old enough to know that a Bostonian, black or white, should consider himself a special species of fish.

  The nicer colored people, preceded by a similar class of whites, were moving out of the South End, so prophetically named with this influx of black cotton-belters. For years these northern Negroes had lived next door to white neighbors and taken pride in proximity. They viewed their southern brothers with alarm, and scattered all over the city and its suburbs to escape this plague of their own locusts.

  Miss Althea Binney, Judy’s private teacher, who for the past three years had been coming four mornings weekly to give Judy the benefit of her accent and genteel breeding, and to get a substantial lunch that would serve as her principal meal of the day, had told Cleo of a house for rent to colored on a street abutting the Riverway, a boulevard which touched the storied Fens and the arteries of sacred Brookline.

  On the previous night, Thea’s brother, Simeon, the impoverished owner and editor of the Negro weekly, The Clarion, had received a telephone call from a Mr. Van Ryper, who succinctly advised him that he would let his ten-room house for thirty-five dollars monthly to a respectable colored family. Notice to this effect was to be inserted in the proper column of the paper.

  Thea, The Clarions chronicler of social events, had urged Simeon to hold the notice until Cleo had had first chance to see the house. Cleo had been so grateful that she had promised Thea an extravagant present, though Thea could better have used her overdue pay that Cleo had spent in an irresistible moment in a department store.

  The prospect of Judy entering school in Brookline filled her with awe. There she would rub shoulders with children whose parents took pride in sending them to public school to lea
rn how a democracy functions. This moral obligation discharged, they were then sent to private school to fulfill their social obligation to themselves.

  “It’s like having a house drop in our laps,” said Cleo dramatically. “We’d be fools, Mr. Judson, to let this opportunity pass.”

  “What in the name of common sense,” Bart demanded, “do we want with a ten-room house? We’d rattle around like three pills in a box, paying good money for unused space. What’s this Jack the Ripper want for rent?”

  “Fifty dollars,” Cleo said easily, because the sum was believable and she saw a chance to pocket something for herself.

  “That’s highway robbery,” said Bart, in an aggrieved voice. It hurt him to think that Cleo would want him to pay that extravagant rent month after month and year after year until they all landed in the poorhouse.

  “Hold on to your hat,” Cleo said coolly. “I never knew a man who got so hurt in his pocketbook. Don’t think I want the care of a three-story house. I wasn’t born to work myself to the bone. It’s Judy I’m thinking of. I won’t have her starting school with hoodlums. Where’s the common sense in paying good money to Thea if you want your daughter to forget everything she’s learned?”

  Bart had never seen the sense in paying Thea Binney to teach his daughter to be a Bostonian when two expensive doctors of Cleo’s uncompromising choosing could bear witness to her tranquil Boston birth. But he did not want Cleo to think that he was less concerned with his child’s upbringing than she.

  Slowly an idea took shape in his mind. “I’ll tell you how I figure we can swing the rent without strain. We can live on one floor and let the other two. If we got fifteen dollars a floor, our part would be plain sailing.”

  “Uh huh,” said Cleo agreeably.

  He studied her pleasant expression with suspicion. It wasn’t like her to consent to anything without an argument.

  “You better say what you want to say now,” he advised her.

  “Why, I like a house full of people,” she said dreamily. “I’ve missed it ever since I left the South. Mama and Pa and my three sisters made a good-size family. As long as I’m the boss of the house, I don’t care how many people are in it.”

  “Well, of course,” he said cautiously, “strangers won’t be like your own flesh. Matter of fact, you don’t want to get too friendly with tenants. It encourages them to fall behind with the rent.”

  “I tell you what,” she said brilliantly, “we can rent furnished rooms instead of flats. Then there won’t be any headaches with poor payers. It’s easier to ask a roomer to pack his bag and go than it is to tell a family to pack their furniture.”

  He saw the logic of that and nodded sagely. “Ten to one a roomer’s out all day at work. You don’t get to see too much of them. But when you let flats to families, there’s bound to be children. No matter how they fell behind, I couldn’t put people with children on the sidewalk. It wouldn’t set right on my conscience.”

  Cleo said quietly, “I’d have banked my life on your saying that.” For a moment tenderness flooded her. But the emotion embarrassed her. She said briskly: “You remind me of Pa. One of us had a sore tooth, Mama would tell us to go to sleep and forget it. But Pa would nurse us half the night, keeping us awake with kindness.”

  He accepted the dubious compliment with a modest smile. Then the smile froze into a grimace of pain. He had been hurt in his pocketbook.

  “It’ll take a pretty penny to furnish all those extra bedrooms. We don’t want to bite off more than we can chew. Don’t know but what unfurnished flats would be better, after all. We could pick settled people without any children to make me chicken-hearted.”

  She stared at him like an animal at bay. Little specks of green began to glow in her gray eyes, and her lips pulled away from her even teeth. Bart started back in bewilderment.

  “You call yourself a businessman,” she said passionately. “You run a big store. You take in a lot of money. But whenever I corner you for a dime, it’s like pulling teeth to get it out of you. You always have the same excuse. You need every dollar to buy bananas. And when I say, What’s the sense of being in business if you can’t enjoy your cash, you always say, In business you have to spend money to make money. Now when I try to advise you to buy a few measly sticks of bedroom furniture, a man who spends thousands of dollars on fruit, you balk like a mule at a racetrack.”

  He rubbed his mustache with his forefinger. “I see what you mean,” he conceded. “I try to keep my store filled with fruit. I can’t bear to see an empty storeroom. I guess you got a right to feel the same way about a house. In the long run it’s better to be able to call every stick your own than have half your rooms dependent on some outsider’s furniture.”

  She expelled a long breath. “That’s settled then.”

  He thought it prudent to warn her. “We’ll have to economize to the bone while we’re furnishing that house.”

  She rolled her eyes upward. “Well even eat bones if you say so.”

  He answered quietly: “You and the child will never eat less than the best as long as I live. And all my planning is to see to it that you’ll never know want when I’m gone. No one on earth will ever say that I wasn’t a good provider. That’s my pride, Cleo. Don’t hurt it when you don’t have to.”

  “Well, I guess you’re not the worst husband in the world,” she acknowledged softly, and added slowly, “And I guess I’m the kind of wife God made me.” But she did not like the echo of that in her ears. She said quickly, “And you can like it or lump it.”

  Bart took out an impressive roll of bills, peeled off a few of the lesser ones, and laid them on the table. The sight of the bank roll made Cleo sick with envy. There were so many things she could do with it. All Mr. Judson would do with it was buy more bananas.

  She sighed and counted her modest pile. There were only forty-five dollars.

  “It’s five dollars short,” she said frigidly.

  “Yep,” he said complacently. “I figure if this Jack the Ripper wants fifty dollars he’ll take forty-five if he knows he’ll get it every month on the dot. And if he ever goes up five dollars on the rent, we still won’t be paying him any more than he asked for in the first place. In business, Cleo, I’ve learned to stay on my toes. You’ve got to get up with the early birds to get ahead of me.”

  CHAPTER 2

  HER EYES FLEW OPEN. The birds were waking in the Carolina woods. Cleo always got up with them. There were never enough hours in a summer day to extract the full joy of being alive. She tumbled out of the big old-fashioned bed. Small Serena stirred, then lay still again on her share of the pillow. At the foot of the bed, Lily and Charity nestled together.

  She stared at her three younger sisters, seeing the defenselessness of their innocent sleep. The bubbling mischief in her made her take one of Lily’s long braids and double knot it with one of Charity’s. She looked back at Serena, who tried so hard to be a big girl and never let anyone help her dress. She picked up Serena’s little drawers and turned one leg inside out.

  She was almost sorry she would be far away when the fun began. She could picture Lily and Charity leaping to the floor from opposite sides of the bed, and their heads snapping back, and banging together. As for Serena, surprise would spread all over her solemn face when she stepped into one leg of her drawers and found the other leg closed to her. She would start all over again, trying her other foot this time, only to find she had stepped into the same kettle of hot water. She would wrassle for fifteen minutes, getting madder and madder. Cleo had to clap her hand to her mouth to hush her giggles.

  She would get a whipping for it. Mama would never see the joke. Mama would say it was mean to tease your sisters. You had to walk a chalkline to please her.

  Sometimes Cleo tried to walk a chalkline, but after a little while, keeping to the strait and narrow made her too nervous. At home, there was nothing to do except stay around. Away from home, there were trees to climb, and boys to fight, and hell to raise with Jo
sie Beauchamp.

  She climbed out of the open window and dropped to the ground at the moment that Josie Beauchamp was quietly creeping down the stairs of her magnificent house. Some day Cleo was going to live in a fine house, too. And maybe some day Josie was going to be as poor as church mice.

  They met by their tree, at the foot of which they had buried their symbols of friendship. Josie had buried her gold ring because she loved it best of everything, and Cleo best of everybody. Cleo had buried Lily’s doll, mostly because it tickled her to tell her timid sister that she had seen a big rat dragging it under the house. Lily had taken a long stick and poked around. But every time it touched something, Lily had jumped a mile.

  Cleo and Josie wandered over the Beauchamp place, their bare feet drinking in the dew, their faces lifted to feel the morning. Only the birds were abroad, their vivid splashes of color, the brilliant outpouring of their waking songs filling the eye and ear with summer’s intoxication.

  They did not talk. They had no words to express their aliveness. They wanted none. Their bodies were their eloquence. Clasping hands, they began to skip, too impatient of meeting the morning to walk toward it any longer. Suddenly Cleo pulled her hand away and tapped Josie on the shoulder. They should have chosen who was to be “It.” But Cleo had no time for counting out. The wildness was in her, the unrestrained joy, the desire to run to the edge of the world and fling her arms around the sun, and rise with it, through time and space, to the center of everywhere.

  She was swift as a deer, as mercury, with Josie running after her, falling back, and back, until Josie broke the magic of the morning with her exhausted cry, “Cleo, I can’t catch you.”

  “Nobody can’t never catch me,” Cleo exulted. But she spun around to wait for Josie. The little sob in Josie’s throat touched the tenderness she always felt toward those who had let her show herself the stronger.

  They wandered back toward Josie’s house, for now the busyness of the birds had quieted to let the human toilers take over the morning. Muted against the white folks’ sleeping, the Negro voices made velvet sounds. The field hands and the house servants diverged toward their separate spheres, the house servants settling their masks in place, the field hands waiting for the overseer’s eye before they stooped to servility.