The Street

by Ann Petry

  ‘No,’ the boy repeated. ‘I don’t want to do it. Thanks just the same, Supe.’

  And before Jones realized his intention, Bub had run out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him. He was left standing in the middle of the room still holding the key in his outstretched hand and with the knowledge that the kid could ruin him by telling Lutie what he, Jones, had suggested.

  He cursed with such vehemence that the dog walked over to him, thrust his muzzle into his hand. He kicked the dog away. The dog howled. It was a sharp, shrill outcry that filled the apartment, reached to the street outside.

  Mrs. Hedges nodded her head at the sound. ‘Cellar crazy,’ she said softly. ‘No doubt about it. Cellar crazy.’

  13

  IT WAS TIME for intermission at the Casino. The men in the bandstand got up from their chairs, shoved the music racks in front of them aside, yawned and stretched. Some of them searched through the crowd, seeking the young girls who had eyed them from the dance floor, intent on getting better acquainted with them, even at the risk of incurring the displeasure of their escorts. Others headed straight for the bar like homing pigeons winging toward their roosts.

  The pianist and one of the trumpeters stayed in the bandstand. The trumpeter was experimenting with a tune that had been playing in his head for days. The pianist turned sideways on the piano bench listening to him.

  ‘Ever hear it before?’ he asked finally.

  ‘Nope,’ replied the pianist.

  ‘Just wanted to make sure. Sometimes tunes play tricks in your head and turn out to be somep’n you heard a long while ago and all the time you think it’s one you made up.’

  The pianist groped for appropriate chords as the man with the trumpet played the tune over softly. Together they produced a faint melody, barely a shred, a tatter of music that drifted through the big ballroom. Conversation and the clink of glasses and roars of laughter almost drowned it out, but it persisted—a slight, ghostly sound running through the room.

  The soft rainbow-colored lights shifted as they slanted over the smooth surface of the dance floor, softening the faces of the couples strolling by arm in arm; making gentle the faces of the Casino’s bruisers as they mingled with the crowd. The moving lights and the half-heard tones of the piano and the trumpet created the illusion that the people were still dancing.

  Lutie Johnson and Boots Smith were sitting at one of the small tables near the edge of the dance floor. They had been silent ever since they sat down.

  ‘When will my salary start? And how much will it be?’ she asked finally. She had to know now, tonight. She couldn’t wait any longer for him to broach the subject. The intermission was half over and he was still staring at the small glass of bourbon in front of him on the table.

  ‘Salary?’ he asked blankly.

  ‘For singing with the band.’ He knew what she meant and yet he was pretending that he didn’t. She looked at him anxiously, conscious of a growing sense of dismay. She waited for his answer, leaning toward him, straining to hear it and hearing instead the faint, drifting sound of music. It disturbed her because at first she thought it wasn’t real, that she was imagining the sound. She turned toward the bandstand and saw that two of the boys were practicing. Boots started speaking when her head was turned so that she didn’t see the expression on his face.

  ‘Baby, this is just experience,’ he said. ‘Be months before you can earn money at it.’

  Afterwards she tried to remember the tone of his voice and couldn’t. She could only remember the thin, ghostly, haunting music. But he had told her she could earn her living by singing. He had said the job was hers—tied up and sewed up for as long as she wanted it.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘Nothing happened, baby. What makes you think something happened?’

  ‘You said I could earn my living singing. Just last night you said the job was mine for as long as I wanted it.’

  ‘Sure, baby, and I meant it,’ he said easily. ‘It’s true. But I don’t have all the say-so. The guy who owns the Casino—guy named Junto—says you ain’t ready yet.’

  ‘What has he got to do with it?’

  ‘I just told you,’ patiently. ‘Christ, he owns the joint.’

  ‘Is he the same man that owns the Bar and Grill?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The music faded away, returned, was lost again. She remembered Junto’s squat figure reflected in the mirror behind the bar. A figure in a mirror lifted a finger, shook his head, and she was right back where she started. No, not quite; for this still, sick feeling inside of her was something she hadn’t had before. This was worse than being back where she started because she hadn’t been able to prevent the growth of a bright optimism that had pictured a shining future. She had seen herself moving away from the street, giving Bub a room of his own, being home when he returned from school. Those things had become real to her and they were gone.

  She had to go on living on the street, in that house. And she could feel the Super pulling her steadily toward the stairway, could feel herself swaying and twisting and turning to get away from him, away from the cellar door. Once again she was aware of the steps stretching down into the darkness of the basement below, could feel the dog leaping on her back and Mrs. Hedges’ insinuating voice was saying, ‘Earn extra money, dearie.’

  ‘No!’ she said sharply.

  ‘What’s the matter, baby? Did it mean so much to you?’

  She looked at him, thinking, He would like to know that it meant everything in the world to me. There was nothing in his expression to indicate that the knowledge that she was bitterly disappointed would concern him or that he was even faintly interested. But she knew by the eager way he was bending toward her across the table, by the intentness with which he was studying her, that he was seeking to discover the degree of her disappointment.

  ‘I suppose it did,’ she said quietly.

  She got up from the table. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘thanks for the chance anyway.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said vaguely. He was fingering the scar on his cheek. ‘Hey, wait a minute, where you goin’?’

  ‘I’m going home. Where did you think I was going?’

  ‘But you ain’t going to stop singing with the band, are you?’

  ‘What would be the point? I work all day. I’m not going to sing half the night for the fun of it.’

  ‘But the experience—’

  ‘I’m not interested,’ she said flatly.

  He put his hand on her arm. ‘Wait and I’ll drive you home. I want to talk to you, baby. You can’t walk out on me like this.’

  ‘I’m not walking out on you,’ she said impatiently. ‘I’m tired and I want to go home.’

  ‘Okay’—he withdrew his hand. ‘Junto sent you this—’ He pulled a small white box out of his vest pocket and handed it to her.

  The cover stuck and she pulled it off with a jerk that set the rhinestone earrings inside to glinting as the rainbow-colored lights touched them. They were so alive with fiery color that they seemed to move inside the small box.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, and her voice sounded hard, brassy to her own ears. ‘I can’t imagine anything I needed more than these.’

  She turned away from him abruptly, hurried across the dance floor, down the long, massive staircase to the cloakroom. She took her coat from the hat-check girl, put a quarter on the thick white saucer on the shelf. As she went out the door, she thought, I should have left the earrings with the girl, she probably needs them as badly as I do.

  The Casino’s doorman, resplendent in his dark red uniform, paused with his hand on a taxi-door and looked after her as she walked toward Seventh Avenue. He thought the long black skirt made an angry sound as she moved swiftly toward the corner.

  She was holding the earring box so tightly that she could feel the cardboard give a little, and she squeezed it harder. She tried not to think, to keep the deep anger that boiled up in her under control. There wasn’t any r
eason for her to be angry with Boots Smith and Junto. She was to blame.

  Yet she could feel a hard, tight knot of anger and hate forming within her as she walked along. She decided to walk home, hoping that the anger would evaporate on the way. She moved in long, swift strides. There was a hard sound to her heels clicking against the sidewalk and she tried to make it louder. Hard, hard, hard. That was the only way to be—so hard that nothing, the street, the house, the people—nothing would ever be able to touch her.

  Down one block and then the next—135th, 134th, 133d, 131d, 131st. Slowly she began to reach for some conclusion, some philosophy with which to rebuild her shattered hopes. The world hadn’t collapsed about her. She hadn’t been buried under brick and rubble, falling plaster and caved-in sidewalks. Yet that was how she had felt listening to Boots.

  The trouble was with her. She had built up a fantastic structure made from the soft, nebulous, cloudy stuff of dreams. There hadn’t been a solid, practical brick in it, not even a foundation. She had built it up of air and vapor and moved right in. So of course it had collapsed. It had never existed anywhere but in her own mind.

  She might as well face the fact that she would have to go on living in that same street. She didn’t have enough money to pay a month’s rent in advance on another apartment and hire a moving-man. Even if she had the necessary funds, any apartment she moved into would be equally as undesirable as the one she moved out of. Except, of course, at a new address she wouldn’t find Mrs. Hedges and the Super. No, but there would be other people who wouldn’t differ too greatly from them. This was as good a time and place as any other for her to get accustomed to the idea of remaining there.

  She hoped what Mrs. Hedges had said about Jones not bothering her any more was true, for she knew she couldn’t force herself to register a complaint against him. The thought of telling some indifferent desk sergeant about the details of his attack on her was one she didn’t relish.

  But that’s what she should do. Then she thought, Suppose they locked him up for thirty days or sixty days or ninety days, or whatever the sentence was for such things. Then what? He couldn’t be kept in jail indefinitely. He was the kind of man who would carry a grudge against her as long as he lived and once out of jail she was certain he would make an effort to strike back at her.

  Harlem wasn’t a very big place and if he was dead set on revenge he wouldn’t have any difficulty in finding her. Besides, there was Bub to be considered, for instead of harming her he might seek to avenge himself on Bub.

  No. She wouldn’t go to the police about him. She paused for a stop light. Have you got used to the idea of staying there? she asked herself.

  From now on they would have to live so carefully, so frugally, so miserly that each pay-check would yield a small sum to be put in the bank. After a while they would be able to move. It would be hard. She might as well get used to that, too.

  They would have to live so close to a narrow margin that it wouldn’t really be like living; never going anywhere, never buying the smallest item that wasn’t absolutely essential, even examining essential ones and eliminating them whenever possible. It was the only way they could hope to move. She thought with regret of the quarter she had so lavishly given the hat-check girl. She ought to go back and tell the girl it was a mistake, that she was angry when she gave it to her, and she tried to picture how the girl’s face would look—startled, incredulous at first, and then sullen, outraged.

  Nights at home she would start studying in order to get a higher civil service rating. Perhaps by the time the next exam came up, she would be able to pass it. The job at the Casino that had looked like such an easy, pat, just-right thing was out of the question and her common sense should have told her that in the beginning. Yet she found she was thinking of it with regret and of all the things it would have meant—those things that seemed to be right within reach last night when Boots said, ‘The job is yours, baby.’

  And she began thinking about him. ‘All you gotta do is be nice to me, baby.’ She hadn’t done or said anything that would indicate that she had no intention of being ‘nice’ to him. It must have been something else that had made him lose interest in her so quickly.

  She tried to remember all the things he had said to her to find some clue that would explain his indifference. For he had been indifferent, she decided. He had sat there at the table tonight, making no effort to talk, absorbed in his own thoughts, and even when he had talked to her he had looked at her impersonally as though she were a stranger in whom he didn’t have even a passing interest.

  ‘I could fall in love with you easy, baby.’ He had said that just last night. And that first night she had met him, ‘The only thing I’m interested in is you.’

  When he drove her home last night, he had scarcely spoken. He had made no effort to touch her. She sought a reason and remembered that he had fallen silent after the bouncer at the Casino told him Junto wanted to see him.

  She walked a little faster. If Junto owned the Casino, then Boots worked for him. Even so, what could Junto have said to him that would make him lose his obvious desire for her so abruptly? It must have been something else that disturbed him, she decided. Perhaps it had something to do with his not being in the army, for she remembered how he couldn’t conceal his annoyance when she persisted in asking him why he hadn’t been drafted.

  It didn’t matter anyway. Perhaps it was just as well the thing had ended like this. At least she no longer had to duck and dodge away from his brutal hands. Even if she had been hired at a fat weekly salary, his complete lack of scruple might have been something she couldn’t have coped with.

  She pushed open the door of the apartment house where she lived. The hall was quiet. There was no movement in the pool of shadow that almost obliterated the cellar door. And she wondered if every time she entered the hall, she would inevitably seek to locate the tall, gaunt figure of the Super.

  The cracked tile of the floor was grimy. The snow that had been tracked in from the street during the morning had melted and mixed with the soot and dust on the floor. She looked at the dark brown varnish on the doors, the dim light that came from the streaked light fixture overhead, the tarnished mail boxes, the thin, worn stair treads. And she thought time had a way of transforming things.

  Only a few hours had elapsed since she stood in this same doorway, completely unaware of the dim light, the faded, dreary paint, the filth on the floor. She had looked down the length of this hall and seen Bub growing up in some airy, sunny house and herself free from worry about money. She had been able to picture him coming home from school to snacks of cookies and milk and bringing other kids with him; and then playing somewhere near-by, and all she had to do was look out of the window and see him because she was home every day when he arrived. And time and Boots Smith and Junto had pushed her right back in here, deftly removing that obscuring cloud of dreams, so that now tonight she could see this hall in reality.

  She started up the stairs. They went up and up ahead of her. They were steeper than she remembered them. And she thought vaguely of all the feet that had passed over them in order to wear the treads down like this—young feet and old feet; feet tired from work; feet that skipped up them because some dream made them less than nothing to climb; feet that moved reluctantly because some tragedy slowed them up.

  Her legs were too tired to move quickly, so that her own feet refused to move at their usual swift pace. She became uneasily conscious of the closeness of the walls. The hall was only a narrow passageway between them. The walls were very thin, too, for she could hear the conversations going on behind the closed doors on each floor.

  Radios were playing on the third and fourth floors. She tried to walk faster to get away from the medley of sound, but her legs refused to respond to her urging. ‘Buy Shirley Soap and Keep Beautiful’ was blared out by an announcer’s voice. The sounds were confusing. Someone had tuned in the station that played swing records all night, and she heard, ‘Now we have the
master of the trumpet in Rock, Raleigh, Rock.’

  That mingled with the sounds of a revival church which was broadcasting a service designed to redeem lost souls: ‘This is the way, sisters and brothers. This is the answer. Come all of you now before it’s too late. This is the way.’ As she walked along, she heard the congregation roar, ‘Preach it, brother, preach it.’ Suddenly a woman cried loud above the other sounds, ‘Lord Jesus is a-comin’ now.’

  The congregation clapped their hands in rhythm. It came in clear over the radio. And the sound mingled with the high sweetness of the trumpet playing ‘Rock, Raleigh, Rock,’ and the soap program joined in with the plunking of a steel guitar, ‘If you wanta be beautiful use Shirley Soap.’

  A fight started on the third floor. Its angry violence echoed up the stairs, mingling with the voices on the radio. The conversations that were going on behind the closed doors that lined the hall suddenly ceased. The whole house listened to the progress of the fight.

  And Lutie thought, The whole house knows, just as I do, that Bill Smith, who never works, has come home drunk again and is beating up his wife. Living here is like living in a structure that has a roof, but no partitions, so that privacy is destroyed, and even the sound of one’s breathing becomes a known, familiar thing to each and every tenant.

  She sighed with relief when she reached the fifth floor. The stairs had seemed like a high, ever-ascending mountain because she was so tired. And then she thought, No, that wasn’t quite true, because the way she felt at this moment was the way a fighter feels after he’s been knocked down hard twice in succession, given no time to recover from the first smashing blow before the second one slams him back down again.

  And the second blow makes him feel as though he were dying. His wind is gone. His heart hurts when it beats, and it goes too fast, so that a pain stays in his chest. The air going in and out of his lungs adds to the pain. Blood pounds in his head, so that it feels dull, heavy. All he wants to do is crawl out of sight and lie down, not moving, not thinking. She knew how he would feel, because that about summed up what had happened to her, except that she had received, not two blows, but a whole scries of them.