“She dawnces ona dime, gents; she shakes that thing! Hey, Nick—look at it shake!” Nick slapped her on the rump as she walked and ducked quick as a cat when she turned on him. “Look at it shake! Oh sister!” They followed down to Ninth and Dearborn.
After that Norah never used the front entrance any more. She used the alley-exit until the job was ended. And it ended within two weeks.
Had Herman been less simple the job might have lasted longer. Norah was having a cigarette in the dressing-room with two of the other girls when Herman walked in without knocking. But he always came in without knocking, he had never feigned that his trick was not deliberate. Why should he? Whose show was this, anyhow? What was this here anyhow? Is this the Drake Hotel or something private here anyhow? Norah tossed a towel across her shoulders, but he had caught the wavering sheen of the light on her breasts. She felt the flare that resentment was lighting in her eyes—and then, because she saw that that flare was pleasing his eyes and mouth, resentment flared to anger. Spirit—that was it. Norah Egan had spirit. How Herman loved a spirited woman!
Norah’s head flung back, and she gathered into one word her whole indignation.
“Schwein!”
The other girls had tittered to hear that word on Norah’s tongue, for Norah had learned it solely from Herman; as all of them had, every day they had danced for him.
“Schwein!”
It had been surprising then to see that Herman became neither excited nor angry; he just stood above Norah looking down sheepishly, didn’t say so much as one word—only smiled a little as though to conceal how much he was wishing that one of the other girls had just said that to him instead. Then one stubby finger went under the towel, the unclean nail of it touched a tip. That was when she had let him have it: right across his smile with the back of her hand so that the upper lip cracked and left blood on her knuckles. Whew! It had rung out like a pistol shot in that tiny room. The other girls had stopped tittering, and Herman had gone scarlet. But he hadn’t shown anger, even then. He had just kept looking down as he might have on an ill-behaved child, reproving her mildly, in an offended voice, over a broken lip. He shook his poor wronged head a while, licking the lip with his tongue, and it seemed to take every ounce of his self-possession just to keep from choking up.
“Oh, Egan, I am so surprised at you, always for two weeks you being such a good llttie girl, and now you do this because I tease you just one time . . .”
Norah felt suddenly sick within: not at the sight of the blood of the man nor at the reaction from her anger, but rather at something she sensed beneath his words. Something that, under his words’ sweet warmth, hissed and was cold. And she could not quite bring herself to apology.
“Don’t you think now, Egan”—he was sterner now—“Don’t you think now you should be saying something to me?” He did not want to fire her. “Think only a minute now, Egan . . .” and Norah hadn’t wanted to be fired. Yet she just sat there looking down at her palms and wishing she could say something real friendly now. But when she looked up it was too late to speak, for Herman was gone, and the job was gone with him, and the other girls were all saying how foolish she’d been and what will you do now, honey.
Norah dressed and went out the rear entrance. It took longer to get to Harrison Street through the alley, but she didn’t want to take any chance on the newsboys. Walking up that dim passage, Norah had tried to console herself a little: it had been a dirty job from the start, she’d been sick of it from the very first day. There were better jobs. She’d find something decent pretty soon. Only, something inside told her maybe she wouldn’t. Something said: “Go back and say that you’re sorry, Norah. Say anything that he wants you to say, but get that job back before it’s too late.” Only it was already too late, of course, so that was simply silly.
The next morning Norah went to the County Free Employment Bureau on Dearborn. Behind a desk a woman dressed in black bombazine said, “There ain’t nothin’ here this mornin’, dearie,” and Norah just stood there and kept on waiting, even when the woman repeated that there was nothing at all this mornin’ dearie. Norah said, “You got to give me somethin’, anythin’, that’s what you’re here for.” She had been told that this was the way that people got jobs. The woman appeared startled, because most people went away when you said there’s nothin’ at all this mornin’, dearie. She fumbled papers, coughed, looked at the girls waiting on the bench against the wall, glanced at the line of boys filing into the boss’s office with applications in their hands.
“You mean you know someone?” Black Bombazine asked, but not too loud.
Norah said, “No, I don’t know nobody. I just want a job. My uncle lived in Cicero, but he’s dead two years. I’m broke. I ate once yesterday. I can’t make a loan.”
“But I got nothin’ at all this mornin’, dearie. Whyn’t you try Direct Relief on Wabash?”
“I been there twice now. They gave me an order, but the stuff didn’t come, an’ now they told me I should come here. They said you’d give me somethin’, that this was the place.”
“Dearie, whyn’t you try the place on South Mich?”
“I know about that too,” Norah said. “I want a job. The place on South Mich is for whores.”
Black Bombazine blushed and then dialed swiftly. She whispered something into the phone, and she frowned, and she looked up all smiles. Then she dialed again. She frowned again. She pleaded over the wires. She scribbled addresses, she dialed wrong numbers, and finally she said, ‘I guess this is your lucky day, dearie.’
Norah Egan had a job again.
Every morning now she sat, with twenty other women and girls, in a room on the fourteenth floor of the Montfield building. She listened to a booster-talk for an hour, was given carfare and a black briefcase, and rode out to the West Side. There was shaving soap in the black briefcase, and shaving cream in tubes, and shaving talc in tins, and razor blades, and three different colors of toothpaste, and two different colors of hair tonic, both guaranteed, and four different colors of toothbrushes. Her commission was twenty percent, and her territory the whole West Side from Division to Twelfth.
“Garages are good,” Mr Marcus, Sales Manager, advised Norah on her first morning. “Hit all the garages, tire-shops, battery-places—places like that. Don’t bother no barber shop though. Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer, neither. Be pers’nable.”
Mr Marcus gave her a little book to study at night. It was called “Personality In Salesmanship.”
One girl on the force made as much as twelve and fifteen dollars every week, and she told Norah exactly how she did it.
“I’m friendly with ’em, hon, that’s all, you got to get up close when you talk. Don’t be afraid to take his hand even when it ain’t washed. Smile. Get up close.”
This was all a part of “Personality In Salesmanship,” Mr Marcus assured her. He added that not all of the best ideas were printed in the books.
So Norah got up close. She smiled. She did everything she was supposed to do.
Yet at the end of two weeks she had earned only three dollars over her car-fare, and more than that had gone for lunches. But she decided to try it another week, and be just as personable as possible. Norah knew she could smile. She knew she was rather pretty, in a light blonde-babyish way.
On a Thursday afternoon, and that was the second Thursday in September, she strolled into the office of a garage on Division and began spooshing her line at a mechanic lolling in a swivel chair with his feet on a desk. She had just begun spooshing when a tall fellow walked in and said he’d take two tubes of toothpaste; then he asked the price of razor blades. And then he took a look at the briefcase, and Norah smiled, and he said he needed shaving talc badly. Norah got up a little closer, and the closer up she got the more he ordered. Toothpaste. Hair tonic. How about pomade? Norah made out his order while she talked, and before he was through the order came to three and a quarter. Her hand trembled a little when she handed it to him to sign, and
the fellow in the chair guffawed like a mule. That was when Norah caught on—when he laughed. She looked at the tall fellow just to make certain, and he began grinning. She got out as fast as she could then, and it seemed to Norah that laughter followed, as the shoe-shine kids had pursued.
You got to be friendly: Norah knew now what that meant. It meant that to earn more than expenses you had to sell more than shaving soap.
When she told Black Bombazine why she had quit, the woman was horrified. Then she admitted that some jobs were that way, in these times, and men were all devils anyhow. And then she added a word.
“But I really don’t think a young woman like yourself, Miss Egan, with no one to help you as you say you haven’t, a girl without even a college education even—do you really think you can afford to be quite so demanding in the type of work you prefer? Do you know, Miss Egan, that we have young women registered here with degrees from the University of Illinois? and Purdue? And Holy Name! Not to mention a number of business colleges, and St Swithin’s Academy—girts who are wilting to start from the ground up, as it were. In these times, you know, dearie, we all got to take what we can get and be satisfied. You should know that by this time, dearie. So I’m just that dreadful sorry. You can drop in early part of next week, but I wouldn’t say now just what good it’ll do you, dearie.”
Norah didn’t go back there, but she did return to the Little Rialto. She returned to tell Herman that she was sorry—and would he give her just one more chance? He was out front barking, like the first time she had seen him. The megaphone at his mouth seemed a part of that mouth now, a kind of funnel-shaped extension of it. He tipped his derby when he saw her, and went on barking.
“Stella, the little dawncin’ girrul! This show ain’t decent, foiks—don’t come in! She dawnces on a dime an’ she shakes all she’s got! She dawnces on one leg an’ then on the other—”
Norah worked through traffic until she reached him. “How’s gescheft, Mr Hauser?” she asked. There were men and women passing, white and brown and biack.
“Fine, Egan, fine,” he lied, wondering why in the worid she had stopped.
“Good enough to give me my job back again?”
It was funny, watching the look that came over him then. Watching his expression, Norah recalled an oid story-book thought: “I weep for you,” (she said this to herself while watching Herman’s sorry look) “I weep for you, the walrus said, and deeply sympathize.”
That was just the kind of a look it was.
“I am so extremely sorry,” Herman said, “but I gave last week to everyone a one-dollar cut. Even to myself I gave. So how could I be paying you seven-fifty like before?”
“I’ll work for six,” Norah said simply. “He knows a lot of fast tricks,” she thought, “most everyone knows some, but I don’t know any yet.”
He was having his fun out of this, too; she could see with half an eye. The shoe-button mouth looked as pleased as it had the time it had caught her without a brassiere. And somehow, she still felt half-naked with him. She wished he’d grin or even laugh outright, instead of always keeping the corners of his mouth pressed down that way when they wanted so badly to turn up. Then she saw that he was still waiting for words she had failed to speak two weeks earlier.
“I’m sorry what I said that time, Mr Hauser, I didn’t mean it really, you know.” She had the feeling that this paunchy little man in front of her held her life cupped, like his blue megaphone, in the palm of his pudgy hand: he could throw it down now, or toss it away to the street, or crush it under his heel, or merely blow through it; she had this strange feeling while waiting for him to reply, and she didn’t quite understand how one person’s life could be at another’s whim.
Herman’s eyes twinkled. He’d gotten his apology from her, and it felt good to get it. He’d taken her down off her high horse, and now he’d take her down a little more.
“Why, Egan,” he said, feigning astonishment, “you ain’t afraid you’ll have to start hustling your bustle, is you?”
She saw it then of course, that that was what he’d been aching to say all along. For fifteen minutes he’d been playing with her just to say that, and get even. He wasn’t going to take her back; he’d just been having a little fun. To get even.
She turned away, in order not to give him the further satisfaction of seeing her eyes.
Spindles went here, bobbins too; fall rain came and fall wind blew. Belt slapped. September passed.
Something had come loose all right.
Back in her little room in South Dearborn, after that whole long summer had passed, Norah went to her window to look down at the street far below: a littered, shadowy street, black children played now in its shadows. Something about its desolate aspect made her think of the face of some sightless thing: it seemed with blind eyes to look up, it seemed no sun ever cut its shadows; dimly Norah Egan perceived, waiting in one darkened doorway, the dim form of a woman. Waiting.
Nigger street. Nigger street in September. Nigger, stay in it, it’s where you belong. “I hate nigger kids,” Norah told herself listlessly.
Norah Egan, free, white, female and twenty-one, alumna of Cicero high-school class of ’thirty-one, Norah wasn’t thinking now that just because she was hungry she might go downstairs and stroll slowly past strangers. Not a bit of it, for there wasn’t the slightest need of that. She wasn’t nearly that hungry yet, and she told herself firmly that she wasn’t.
Yet.
•
Out of a two-bit flop on Wells Street, Cass and Nubby O’Neill slipped into the Wells Street night. Arm in arm down darkening streets they scurried toward a dime dance-hall. Like two amorous terriers in pursuit they trotted to where women were.
“Ah aim to dance with that little Swede Signe,” Cass told Nub.
“I’ve seen worser-lookin’ frails than that un,” Nubby replied, “only I ferget where.”
They kept their silence then, all the way down to Clark and Center. Then they turned to the left, went two flights up a musty staircase, and entered a room which was all moving shadow and red crepe paper and dim blue light. Nubby bought tickets, handed half to Cass, and dropped a warning word.
“Take care that Swede ain’t diseased, son.”
Cass went wandering through the colored fog, the string of tickets dangling from his hand, until he found the plump little person named Signe. It was the fourth time that week that he had been here to “dance” with the girl. For fifteen minutes they clung together, Cass paying no heed at all to the music.
The music was only a river of sound in his brain, a tom-tom pounding which sanctioned, somehow, the slow thrusting of a knee between the girl’s thighs. She held the tickets in fingers enclasped behind his neck; at each pause in the pounding she ripped one more off the string. In return for this privilege she wriggled, pressed, and suddenly jerked. In a corner he slid one hand down to her buttocks.
“I told you twicet now you can’t do that here,” she admonished without malice. “Every time you come up I got to scold. Maybe you want to walk toward the park? We’en buy apple-taffies on the way.”
Cass nodded and followed her through the fog. As they came out onto the crowded street the girl paused next to a vendor of pop. “I’m thirsty, Red,” she announced, and the vendor looked hard at Cass. Cass’s nickels were numbered; but he bought two bottles of a thin pinkish lymph and thought, “Damn the cost anyhow.”
“I oney wisht it was bananer-cream soda instead,” the girl complained after taking but one peevish sip. “Whyn’t you just ast me first did I want pink?”
They stood on the curb appraising each other, in mild unconcern over yellow straws. She saw a pair of bushy red brows, a crooked gray scar, and a ten-cent tie of several hues; he saw a spoiled mouth and a waspish air, a bloodless face above a sleazy green dress.
“Ain’t you gonna buy nothin’ but this dinky pink pop?” she asked before she had half-finished the bottle. “Ain’t I even gonna have peanuts even?”
&n
bsp; At the Center Street entrance to Lincoln Park Cass bought a lone bag of peanuts. They sat deep in shadow to eat them, and Signe dug into the bag with such ready fingers that he felt a mild alarm lest she take too many. Out of the corner of his eye he glanced down into her small cupped palms: she had taken five. Then he saw that she was counting too.
She counted up to four, popped the two smallest into her mouth, and looked to see how many remained. There were three.
“But they’re the stale kind,” she pouted. “Whyn’t you get fresh, on account of I don’t like stale?”
Cass thought, “When the money’s gone me an’ Nub got to hoist a joint somewheres. Nub says so. He’s done it afore so ah guess he knows how. Ah guess his dough’s most gone.” He regarded Signe longingly, thinking of bushes behind him. “But a man needs dough to make a gal like this,” he concluded to himself, “an’ everybody got to take a chance oncet in a while.”
“You could buy them apple-taffies now,” she said, crossing her legs, “or you could buy gum ’n we could just chew it.”
“Ah like you,” Cass said; the girl looked at him blankly.
“If ah could jest buy somethin’,” Cass thought, slipping one hand here and the other there till his arms were about and between her like prongs, “ah bet ah could make her tonight.”
She let him have his way with her, passive and disheveled, for several minutes. Then:
“If we ain’t gonna have them apple-taffies, why, then, let’s go back ’n dance.”
“Tomorrow night we’ll have apple-taffies,” was all he could think to say.
“You been handin’ me that fer a week now,” she answered.
And all the way back to the dance-hall she sulked.
Late that night, in the two-bit boarding house on Wells, Cass complained to Nubby. They stood in a two-by-four garret-like room, and neither felt ready for sleep.
Somebody in Boots Page 22
