The tavern, too, was deserted except for a yawning bartender preparing to close up, and one customer leaning heavily on the bar. One large globe of light hung from the ceiling. The place smelt of beer and stale sweat. Frank stood at the bar and ordered his beer. The bartender knew him. “A minute more, Frank, and you’da found us closed,” he said. “Cold out, ain’t it?” Frank nodded, drank his beer. The bartender rested his elbows on the bar, sighed wearily, ruffled up a fringe of hair around his bald head. He was a fat and shapeless man, of middle-age, with tiny kind eyes and a flabby face. He regarded Frank with sleepy friendliness.
“Couple of chippies in here ’bout an hour ago,” the bartender confided. “Lookin’ for business. Chased ’em out fast. Have to watch yourself, these days, with the Nosy Parkers try-in’ to put over Prohibition. Well, the people won’t stand for it, that’s all. Funny thing about one of them girls,” he resumed, in a livelier tone. “Kid only about sixteen, or maybe fifteen. One of them war generations, like the papers call ’em. Pretty as a pitcher, too, with her skirt hiked up almost to her knees, and a big Merry Widow hat. No, it was somethin’ like a toadstool, I guess.” He grinned. “Well. That kid walked in here with the older girl, swayin’ her hips and chewin’ gum, and actin’ bold. Older girl wasn’t no good; you could see that, but there was somethin’ about the kid that kinda hurt me. Got one the same age myself. I said: ‘Whyn’t you go home, honey, and wash that paint off your mug, and go to school?” Know what she said: ‘Ain’t got no damned home, and Ma’s out hustlin’, herself.’” The bartender shook his head. “‘Brave new world,’ that’s what they said, in the papers, after the war. ‘Brave new world’ for who? There wasn’t any ‘brave new world’ after the Spanish-American War, but I guess people just keep on foolin’ themselves all the time. Don’t seem to get it that if they want that kinda world they gotta make it, with their own hands, not wait for someone else to do it, sittin’ back on their hams and just waitin’.”
The bartender sighed again, and again ruffled up his fringe of hair. He said: “They blame the saloons. They blame the war. They blame everybody. But there ain’t a goddam mother’s son of ’em who looks in the mirror when he shaves, and says to hisself: “There’s what’s keepin’ that ‘brave new world’ from comin’. There’s the son of a bitch that’s gum-min’ up the works. Get busy, brother, and throw your weight in. No, they don’t do that.” The bartender shook his head sadly.
“What are you doing, Tom, about that ‘brave new world’?” asked Frank idly.
The bartender grinned sheepishly, rubbed his chin. “Me? I listen to their sad stories. A man’s gotta have somebody to talk to, don’t he, and let me tell you, kid, that’s hard work, listenin’. Harder’n you think, maybe. I give ’em advice, when I ain’t too rushed. I tell the gripers to go home to their wives, and play with the kids. I tell the veterans to stop whinin’ about the Government not doin’ right by ’em. I tell the boys to stop lookin’ for soft snaps, and get down to hard work. I tell the silk-shirt fellers not to cash their Liberty Bonds, and to stop buyin’ big cigars, and talkin’ big about just changin’ a twenty-dollar bill. I tell ’em all that hard times is on their way agin, right around the corner, and they’ll be grubbin’ for pennies instead of tossin’ around dollars like they was big guys. I tell ’em the easy jobs are on the way out, and that there ain’t anythin’ less permanent than ‘permanent prosperity.’ Everybody’s got to get down to hard work—that’s what I tell every bastard that comes in.”
“Do they listen?”
Tom considered ponderously, lifted himself from the bar, and scratched his head, pursing up his fat lips. “Well, sir, some do, some don’t.”
Frank smiled amiably and said: “Looks as if you are ‘a force for good,’ Tom.” He paid for his beer, finished his beef sandwich. He heard the ring of the cash register.
Tom said, his back to Frank: “There’s some that thinks the workin’ fellers haven’t any brains. They’re just mules, they think. But you’d be surprised how much they think. The whole American people.”
Frank’s eyes narrowed as they stared at the fat, sweat-stained back of the bartender. He got up abruptly, said goodnight, and walked out. The bartender watched him go, turning slowly on his heel. He looked at the last occupant of the bar, winked, and sighed. “That’s a young feller that thinks he’s got all the answers. He’ll wake up some day. I hope. He could be a regular guy, if he’d just let hisself go. Hope he won wake up too late. Didja notice his mug? Like it had a false-face on? Betcha his own is better, if he’d only show it.”
CHAPTER 37
Frank ate breakfast at eight-fifteen in Miss Woods’ dining room. He looked forward to this meal, foe then those who were least important had finished and gone, and the more “desirable” ate leisurely, or drank a last cup of good coffee. But Sunday mornings were the best of all.
Miss Woods’ dining room was very pleasant, with old panelled walls of rich walnut. It was true that little sunlight entered here, for the red-brick houses on Linwood Avenue had been built in a dreary spirit by uninspired architects afraid of sun. Miss Woods’ dining room was at the side, behind one of the parlors; its dimness gave it an aristocratic air, which was further enhanced by tall narrow windows discreetly clouded with lace curtains and thick velvet draperies of brown brocade to match the walnut panelling. The massive sideboard, with its mirror and pillared ends, the huge round table, glossy as heavy glass, and as ponderous, the old chairs upholstered in black leather, the serving table, with its bottom mirror and silver candlesticks, had belonged to Miss Woods’ mother, and ugly and massive though it all was, the furniture was her great pride.
On winter mornings, the dining room was especially pleasant. An arrangement of electric candles, quite cleverly installed in the ancient gas chandelier above the table, shone down on pure white damask, bright silver, excellent Haviland china of a pale cream color with a border of tiny roses, and the coffee urn. Sometimes, on Sunday mornings, Miss Woods would light a log or two on the black marble hearth at the far end of the room, and the fire, combined with the rich smell of coffee, the crisp smoky sweetness of well-grilled bacon, the hunger-inspiring scent of hot rolls, made of the dining room the most welcome and beloved haven in the house.
Frank, as he came downstairs at nine o’clock this Sunday morning in early March, was pleased to see that Miss Woods had lighted the fire. He knew it was very cold outside, probably far below zero, for his windows had been blind with white frost, and he had had to blow his warm breath against it for quite some time before his finger could rub a hole in it for a sight of the street. In the morning, the bedrooms were somewhat chilly, and it was agreeable to see the fire and smell the coffee and the bacon and the rolls. All the guests were downstairs, waiting for the first course, prunes in cream. The noise of the wind, hurled violently against the windows, the shrieking in the chimneys, had awakened all of them unusually early this morning.
Miss Woods sat at the head of the table, a very stout little woman, almost as broad as she was tall. But this grossness of flesh, this expanse of breast and shoulder, this massiveness of short arm, had the most peculiar effect of adding to her innate aristocracy rather than diminishing it. She wore the black silk of a widow, though she had never been a bride, and as she was seventy-two years old and old-fashioned and “proud of it,” she never appeared without a wisp of white lace on the top of her brilliantly white hair. Her small pudgy features, her little gray eyes set in rolls of fat, ought to have given a coarseness to her broad, thick face, but again, they oddly gave refinement. There was an air about Miss Woods, a solidity, a majestic zest, an intelligence and good sense, which imparted to her some queenly attribute. Her speech was pure and excellently phrased, for she was a woman of considerable education; she enjoyed a joke and loved subtlety. She was vain of her little white hands, which even in the mornings were heavily ringed.
It was inexplicable how those fat little features of hers could express, with mobility, the changes, the
sorties and dashes and summings-up of a very lively and astute mind. Miss Woods had no illusions about the excellences of human nature. But she was no cynic; she was too old for cynicism. Nor was she comfortable and complacent about her fellow-beings; she did not, in the least, think “the best of them.” She merely accepted them, with imperturbable good humor, a little dryness of private comment, a quizzical if kindly indifference. No one expected sympathy from Miss Woods; she was no one’s confidante. It was not that she was bored by anyone; she was too interested in life for that, and too intelligent. But she had evolved some philosophy of her own, insisted upon preserving her own privacy, and discreetly demanded that others preserve theirs. She did not wish to be involved. To many of her guests, she must have appeared a hard and insensible woman, even selfish, in her refusal to be drawn into the maelstrom of another’s troubles and griefs and anguishes, in her demand that life in her house take on the atmosphere of permanent pleasantness and agreeable calm and tranquillity.
At her right—and this was strange—sat a most unattractive young man. Miss Woods preferred comely people; they did not snare any unwary interest on her part. Moreover, they were pleasant to look upon, and she liked people who did not present a disagreeable aspect to her discriminating eye. But as Miss Woods never explained, or complained, or attempted to justify or rationalize her actions, no one dared question why Irving Schultz sat at her right hand and was the recipient of more sincere kindliness and interest than she had ever extended to any other guest. She had even gone to the length of giving a thumb-nail sketch of the young man to the other guests, after his first appearance at her table, and for the first time, and inexplicably, the others were astonished to hear the faintest echo of emotion in her well-bred voice.
Irving Schultz was the son of Alsatian immigrants. This much Miss Woods imparted. He had once lived on Plymouth Avenue, near Albany Street, so that though Frank was well acquainted with his background he was convinced that Miss Woods was not, and he derived a cynical amusement in wondering just what her reactions might be if she really knew. (Miss Woods knew.)
Irving’s parentage was somewhat ambiguous. He never knew whether his father was Adrian Schultz, or his ostensible uncle, Rudolph Schultz, Adrian’s brother. The family of father, uncle and rollicking wife and eight children had lived on Plymouth Avenue in a horrible shell of a house, next to a barn which contained Adrian’s two draft horses. For Adrian was a teamster, working at odd intervals for local trucking concerns, while his horses, if not his children, waxed fat. Even the neighbors in that poorish neighborhood, none too particular themselves about the outer appearance of their raddled houses, or the condition of the interiors, found the Schultzes intolerable. It had been at least twenty years since the clapboards of the Schultz house had been painted, and the shingles of the broken roof curled in summer suns and wilted like cardboard under winter snows and rains. At least one third of the windows had holes stuffed with wads of newspaper and old rags. What few curtains there were were so filthy, so torn, so ragged and so limp, that they were scarcely more than rags themselves. The verandah in front was so full of broken gaps, so tilted, scarred, upheaved and shattered that negotiating it successfully in the dark ranked as a major triumph. Only Adrian and Rudolph, in their drunken interludes, could miraculously wind their way safely to the door, which sagged on its hinges. The grounds, front and back, were heaped with ash barrels, with soggy boxes and crates, with garbage of every description, with mounds of trash, sticks, stones and miscellany, including heaps of empty beer-bottles which apparently constituted the main liquid refreshment of the Schultzes. A dreadful stink hung over the grounds and the house, so that neighbors made an ostentatious point of holding their noses when passing, especially when Mrs. Schultz had contrived to find a safe spot on the verandah upon which to sit in a broken rocking-chair. When they did this, which was almost always, Mrs. Schultz, her arms comfortably folded across her breast, would lean forward to make a robust and obscene noise, to thumb her nose in an immemorial gesture, or to burst into strong and hearty laughter prefaced by a colorful oath.
No neighbor’s child played with the Schultz children, for the latter were invariably filthy, barefoot from early spring to late fall, and ragged. They swarmed like squirrels over house and grounds, sometimes appearing on the precarious roof of the verandah, the younger children squatting there unconcernedly to give passersby a view which polite society had decreed must not be presented to the public eye. The children swore richly, picked their noses on the sidewalks, played dice on the verandah, fought, screamed, roared, yelled, in a constant bedlam, from dawn until almost midnight. As no screens ever guarded the windows, flies, swarms of them, came and went at their leisure. The interior of the house boasted no rugs at all, and was at least as foul as the exterior. The children slept anywhere, at any hour they desired, like pigs in a pen. There was no such thing as “a proper meal,” as Maybelle called it.
To enliven these proceedings, Mrs. Schultz, Adrian and Rudolph generally chose Saturday night for a real set-to, accompanied by screams, threats, curses and blows. Adrian could be clearly heard roaring a demand at his wife, accompanied by the threat of death, that she sort out whose children were whose. Mrs. Schultz, a stout, short, very dark little woman of forty, and a lady of spirit, would advise him where he could go, and in a hurry. Once, when the demand became particularly urgent, she was heard to reply, in a very carrying voice: “How the hell should I know, you—bastard?”
Irving was the eldest of this ambiguous family, and was about a year or two older than Frank. Like all the other children, he was distinctly unattractive, being excessively tall, thin, stooping, dark, and possessed of his mother’s large beaklike nose, little black eyes, swarthy skin, long pointed chin and thin mouth. Moreover, he had an untidy mass of black curling hair, almost Negroid in its crinkles. But Irving had always been the sole quiet member of the household, a silent, uncommunicative boy who unaccountably was brilliant at school whereas his brothers and sisters were hardly above the idiot class. He had always been one or two grades ahead of Frank Clair, but rumors of his exploits in mathematics, English and grammar had reached above and below him on the scholastic ladder. He had passed through Miss Bendy’s hands, and she had given him all the warm encouragement at her disposal.
He had gone to high school, oblivious to the sneers of the other children at his patched torn clothing, his grimy hands, his Negroid hair, his enormous nose, his rags of handkerchiefs. Unlike Frank, he apparently was completely indifferent to the persecutions he suffered. He never fought, never spoke to his classmates, and his voice was heard only when he got up to recite, which he did with aplomb, gentlemanly poise, and eloquence. Not even Miss Bendy ever knew what he thought.
He had contrived to go to high school by the simple expedient of working all night in a local box factory. Upon graduation, he passed with the incredible average of one hundred percent in all his studies, and won a scholarship to the University of Bison.
He had, by then, advanced to the position of foreman in the box factory. By the time the war had broken out, wages had gone up, and Irving continued on the shift from midnight till eight in the morning. He went directly to the University, arrived home at four, slept for a few hours, rose and did his lessons, got himself a haphazard meal at one of the tables, and went off to work. By this time Frank had lost sight of him completely, and as Mrs. Schultz, Adrian and Rudolph had reached the comparative tranquillity of late middle-age, the Schultzes were no longer the bright and refreshing scandal they had been in the earlier years. Then in 1917 Mrs. Schultz had died of delirium tremens, and the family had vanished.
It was a shock to Frank to find Irving at the select home of Miss Woods. No sign of recognition, however, passed between them. Irving had nodded courteously, had continued to eat, for the two were introduced at the first breakfast Frank had enjoyed in the pleasant dining room.
Later, Frank was informed that Irving was in his third year at the University of Bison, that he was
the most respected worker at the box factory, at a salary of fifty dollars a week, and that he rented the cheapest and least desirable room at the top of the house. Irving, said Miss Woods, was going to be a physician, a research worker in mental diseases, a “specialist”!
She displayed her favoritism only by allowing him to sit at her right hand, and by giving him, on occasion, a warm and almost maternal glance. She never asked him a question, understanding and respecting his queer dark silences, and was content, when she addressed a remark exclusively to him, with a quiet nod or a faint smile in return.
If she knew what he really was! Frank would think, with contempt.
Nothing passed between the two young men but the briefest of silent nods. Eventually, Frank ignored Irving’s existence. It was Frank’s firm opinion that sooner or later Irving would end up, as his parents had ended, in the gutter. Water could never rise higher than its source, as Francis had said. The sons of thieves, drunkards and degenerates must become thieves, drunkards and degenerates in their turn. Irving’s pretensions were the grossest impudence.
Frank found it pleasanter to contemplate the other roomers.
There Was a Time Page 31
