Manhattan Transfer

by John Dos Passos

  ‘You’re some great crapshooter I’ll say, Slats.’

  Dirty hands added each a nickel to the pile in the center of the circle of patched knees stuck forward. The five boys were sitting on their heels under a lamp on South Street.

  ‘Come on girlies we’re waitin for it… Roll ye little bastards, goddam ye, roll.’

  ‘Cheeze it fellers! There’s Big Leonard an his gang acomin down the block.’

  ‘I’d knock his block off for a…’

  Four of them were already slouching off along the wharf, gradually scattering without looking back. The smallest boy with a chinless face shaped like a beak stayed behind quietly picking up the coins. Then he ran along the wall and vanished into the dark passageway between two houses. He flattened himself behind a chimney and waited. The confused voices of the gang broke into the passageway; then they had gone on down the street. The boy was counting the nickels in his hand. Ten. ‘Jez, that’s fifty cents… I’ll tell ’em Big Leonard scooped up the dough.’ His pockets had no bottoms, so he tied the nickels into one of his shirt tails.

  A goblet for Rhine wine hobnobbed with a champagne glass at each place along the glittering white oval table. On eight glossy white plates eight canapés of caviar were like rounds of black beads on the lettuceleaves, flanked by sections of lemon, sprinkled with a sparse chopping of onion and white of egg. ‘Beaucoup de soing and dont you forget it,’ said the old waiter puckering up his knobbly forehead. He was a short waddling man with a few black strands of hair plastered tight across a domed skull

  ‘Awright.’ Emile nodded his head gravely. His collar was too tight for him. He was shaking a last bottle of champagne into the nickelbound bucket of ice on the serving-table.

  ‘Beaucoup de soing, sporca madonna… Thisa guy trows money about lika confetti, see… Gives tips, see. He’s a verra rich gentleman. He dont care how much he spend.’ Emile patted the crease of the tablecloth to flatten it. ‘Fais pas, como, ça… Your hand’s dirty, maybe leava mark.’

  Resting first on one foot then on the other they stood waiting, their napkins under their arms. From the restaurant below among the buttery smells of food and the tinkle of knives and forks and plates, came the softly gyrating sound of a waltz.

  When he saw the headwaiter bow outside the door Emile compressed his lips into a deferential smile. There was a long-toothed blond woman in a salmon operacloak swishing on the arm of a moonfaced man who carried his top hat ahead of him like a bumper; there was a little curlyhaired girl in blue who was showing her teeth and laughing, a stout woman in a tiara with a black velvet ribbon round her neck, a bottlenose, a long cigarcolored face… shirtfronts, hands straightening white ties, black gleams on top hats and patent leather shoes; there was a weazlish man with gold teeth who kept waving his arms spitting out greetings in a voice like a crow’s and wore a diamond the size of a nickel in his shirtfront. The redhaired cloakroom girl was collecting the wraps. The old waiter nudged Emile. ‘He’s de big boss,’ he said out of the corner of his mouth as he bowed. Emile flattened himself against the wall as they shuffled rustled into the room. A whiff of patchouli when he drew his breath made him go suddenly hot to the roots of his hair.

  ‘But where’s Fifi Waters?’ shouted the man with the diamond stud.

  ‘She said she couldnt get here for half an hour. I guess the Johnnies wont let her get by the stage door.’

  ‘Well we cant wait for her even if it is her birthday; never waited for anyone in my life.’ He stood a second running a roving eye over the women round the table, then shot his cuffs out a little further from the sleeves of his swallowtail coat, and abruptly sat down. The caviar vanished in a twinkling. ‘And waiter what about that Rhine wine coupe?’ he croaked huskily. ‘De suite monsieur…’ Emile holding his breath and sucking in his cheeks, was taking away the plates. A frost came on the goblets as the old waiter poured out the coupe from a cut glass pitcher where floated mint and ice and lemon rind and long slivvers of cucumber.

  ‘Aha, this’ll do the trick.’ The man with the diamond stud raised his glass to his lips, smacked them and set it down with a slanting look at the woman next him. She was putting dabs of butter on bits of bread and popping them into her mouth, muttering all the while:

  ‘I can only eat the merest snack, only the merest snack.’

  ‘That dont keep you from drinkin Mary does it?’

  She let out a cackling laugh and tapped him on the shoulder with her closed fan. ‘O Lord, you’re a card, you are.’

  ‘Allume moi ça, sporca madonna,’ hissed the old waiter in Emile’s ear.

  When he lit the lamps under the two chafing dishes on the serving table a smell of hot sherry and cream and lobster began to seep into the room. The air was hot, full of tinkle and perfume and smoke. After he had helped serve the lobster Newburg and refilled the glasses Emile leaned against the wall and ran his hand over his wet hair. His eyes slid along the plump shoulders of the woman in front of him and down the powdered back to where a tiny silver hook had come undone under the lace rushing. The baldheaded man next to her had his leg locked with hers. She was young, Emile’s age, and kept looking up into the man’s face with moist parted lips. It made Emile dizzy, but he couldn’t stop looking.

  ‘But what’s happened to the fair Fifi?’ creaked the man with the diamond stud through a mouthful of lobster. ‘I suppose that she made such a hit again this evening that our simple little party dont appeal to her.’

  ‘It’s enough to turn any girl’s head.’

  ‘Well she’ll get the surprise of her young life if she expected us to wait. Haw, haw, haw,’ laughed the man with the diamond stud. ‘I never waited for anybody in my life and I’m not going to begin now.’

  Down the table the moonfaced man had pushed back his plate and was playing with the bracelet on the wrist of the woman beside him. ‘You’re the perfect Gibson girl tonight, Olga.’

  ‘I’m sitting for my portrait now,’ she said holding up her goblet against the light.

  ‘To Gibson?’

  ‘No to a real painter.’

  ‘By Gad I’ll buy it.’

  ‘Maybe you wont have a chance.’

  She nodded her blond pompadour at him.

  ‘You’re a wicked little tease, Olga.’

  She laughed keeping her lips tight over her long teeth.

  A man was leaning towards the man with the diamond stud, tapping with a stubby finger on the table.

  ‘No sir as a real estate proposition, Twentythird Street has crashed… That’s generally admitted… But what I want to talk to you about privately sometime Mr Godalming, is this… How’s all the big money in New York been made? Astor, Vanderbilt, Fish… In real estate of course. Now it’s up to us to get in on the next great clean-up… It’s almost here… Buy Forty…’

  The man with the diamond stud raised one eyebrow and shook his head. ‘For one night on Beauty’s lap, O put gross care away… or something of the sort… Waiter why in holy hell are you so long with the champagne?’ He got to his feet, coughed in his hand and began to sing in his croaking voice:

  O would the Atlantic were all champagne

  Bright billows of champagne.

  Everybody clapped. The old waiter had just divided a baked Alaska and, his face like a beet, was prying out a stiff champagnecork. When the cork popped the lady in the tiara let out a yell. They toasted the man in the diamond stud.

  For he’s a jolly good fellow…

  ‘Now what kind of a dish d’ye call this?’ the man with the bottlenose leaned over and asked the girl next to him. Her black hair parted in the middle; she wore a palegreen dress with puffy sleeves. He winked slowly and then stared hard into her black eyes.

  ‘This here’s the fanciest cookin I ever put in my mouth… D’ye know young leddy, I dont come to this town often… He gulped down the rest of his glass. An when I do I usually go away kinder disgusted…’ His look bright and feverish from the champagne explored the contours of her neck and shoulder
s and roamed down a bare arm. ‘But this time I kinder think…’

  ‘It must be a great life prospecting,’ she interrupted flushing.

  ‘It was a great life in the old days, a rough life but a man’s life… I’m glad I made my pile in the old days… Wouldnt have the same luck now.’

  She looked up at him. ‘How modest you are to call it luck.’

  Emile was standing outside the door of the private room. There was nothing more to serve. The redhaired girl from the cloakroom walked by with a big flounced cape on her arm. He smiled, tried to catch her eye. She sniffed and tossed her nose in the air. Wont look at me because I’m a waiter. When I make some money I’ll show ’em.

  ‘Dis; tella Charlie two more bottle Moet and Chandon, Gout Americain,’ came the old waiter’s hissing voice in his ear.

  The moonfaced man was on his feet. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen…’

  ‘Silence in the pigsty…’ piped up a voice.

  ‘The big sow wants to talk,’ said Olga under her breath.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen owing to the unfortunate absence of our star of Bethlehem and fulltime act…’

  ‘Gilly dont blaspheme,’ said the lady with the tiara.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, unaccustomed as I am…’

  ‘Gilly you’re drunk.’

  ‘… Whether the tide… I mean whether the waters be with us or against us…’

  Somebody yanked at his coat-tails and the moonfaced man sat down suddenly in his chair.

  ‘It’s terrible,’ said the lady in the tiara addressing herself to a man with a long face the color of tobacco who sat at the end of the table… ‘It’s terrible, Colonel, the way Gilly gets blasphemous when he’s been drinking…’

  The Colonel was meticulously rolling the tinfoil off a cigar. ‘Dear me, you dont say?’ he drawled. Above the bristly gray mustache his face was expressionless. ‘There’s a most dreadful story about poor old Atkins, Elliott Atkins who used to be with Mansfield…’

  ‘Indeed?’ said the Colonel icily as he slit the end of the cigar with a small pearlhandled penknife.

  ‘Say Chester did you hear that Mabie Evans was making a hit?’

  ‘Honestly Olga I dont see how she does it. She has no figure…’

  ‘Well he made a speech, drunk as a lord you understand, one night when they were barnstorming in Kansas…’

  ‘She cant sing…’

  ‘The poor fellow never did go very strong in the bright lights…’

  ‘She hasnt the slightest particle of figure…’

  ‘And made a sort of Bob Ingersoll speech . .’

  ‘The dear old feller… Ah I knew him well out in Chicago in the old days…’

  ‘You dont say.’ The Colonel held a lighted match carefully to the end of his cigar…

  ‘And there was a terrible flash of lightning and a ball of fire came in one window and went out the other.’

  ‘Was he… er… killed?’ The Colonel sent a blue puff of smoke towards the ceiling.

  ‘What, did you say Bob Ingersoll had been struck by lightning?’ cried Olga shrilly. ‘Serve him right the horrid atheist.’

  ‘No not exactly, but it scared him into a realization of the important things of life and now he’s joined the Methodist church.’

  ‘Funny how many actors get to be ministers.’

  ‘Cant get an audience any other way,’ creaked the man with the diamond stud.

  The two waiters hovered outside the door listening to the racket inside. ‘Tas de sacrés cochons… sporca madonna!’ hissed the old waiter. Emile shrugged his shoulders. ‘That brunette girl make eyes at you all night…’ He brought his face near Emile’s and winked. ‘Sure, maybe you pick up somethin good.’

  ‘I dont want any of them or their dirty diseases either.’

  The old waiter slapped his thigh. ‘No young men nowadays… When I was young man I take heap o chances.’

  ‘They dont even look at you…’ said Emile through clenched teeth. ‘An animated dress suit that’s all.’

  ‘Wait a minute, you learn by and by.’

  The door opened. They bowed respectfully towards the diamond stud. Somebody had drawn a pair of woman’s legs on his shirtfront. There was a bright flush on each of his cheeks. The lower lid of one eye sagged, giving his weasle face a quizzical lobsided look.

  ‘Wazzahell, Marco wazzahell?’ he was muttering. ‘We aint got a thing to drink… Bring the Atlantic Ozz-shen and two quarts.’

  ‘De suite monsieur…’ The old waiter bowed. ‘Emile tell Auguste, immediatement et bien frappé.’

  As Emile went down the corridor he could hear singing.

  O would the Atlantic were all champagne

  Bright bi-i-i…

  The moonface and the bottlenose were coming back from the lavatory reeling arm in arm among the palms in the hall.

  ‘These damn fools make me sick.’

  ‘Yessir these aint the champagne suppers we used to have in Frisco in the ole days.’

  ‘Ah those were great days those.’

  ‘By the way,’ the moonfaced man steadied himself against the wall, ‘Holyoke ole fella, did you shee that very nobby little article on the rubber trade I got into the morning papers… That’ll make the investors nibble… like lil mishe.’

  ‘Whash you know about rubber?… The stuff aint no good.’

  ‘You wait an shee, Holyoke ole fella or you looshing opportunity of your life… Drunk or sober I can smell money… on the wind.’

  ‘Why aint you got any then?’ The bottlenosed man’s beefred face went purple; he doubled up letting out great hoots of laughter.

  ‘Because I always let my friends in on my tips,’ said the other man soberly. ‘Hay boy where’s zis here private dinin room?’

  ‘Par ici monsieur.’

  A red accordionpleated dress swirled past them, a little oval face framed by brown flat curls, pearly teeth in an open-mouthed laugh.

  ‘Fifi Waters,’ everyone shouted. ‘Why my darlin lil Fifi, come to my arms.’

  She was lifted onto a chair where she stood jiggling from one foot to the other, champagne dripping out of a tipped glass.

  ‘Merry Christmas.’

  ‘Happy New Year.’

  ‘Many returns of the day…’

  A fair young man who had followed her in was reeling intricately round the table singing:

  O we went to the animals’ fair

  And the birds and the beasts were there

  And the big baboon

  By the light of the moon

  Was combing his auburn hair.

  ‘Hoopla,’ cried Fifi Waters and mussed the gray hair of the man with the diamond stud. ‘Hoopla.’ She jumped down with a kick, pranced round the room, kicking high with her skirts fluffed up around her knees.

  ‘Oh la la ze French high kicker!’

  ‘Look out for the Pony Ballet.’

  Her slender legs, shiny black silk stockings tapering to red rosetted slippers flashed in the men’s faces.

  ‘She’s a mad thing,’ cried the lady in the tiara.

  Hoopla. Holyoke was swaying in the doorway with his top hat tilted over the glowing bulb of his nose. She let out a whoop and kicked it off.

  ‘It’s a goal,’ everyone cried.

  ‘For crissake you kicked me in the eye.’

  She stared at him a second with round eyes and then burst into tears on the broad shirtfront of the diamond stud. ‘I wont be insulted like that,’ she sobbed.

  ‘Rub the other eye.’

  ‘Get a bandage someone.’

  ‘Goddam it she may have put his eye out.’

  ‘Call a cab there waiter.’

  ‘Where’s a doctor?’

  ‘That’s hell to pay ole fella.’

  A handkerchief full of tears and blood pressed to his eye the bottlenosed man stumbled out. The men and women crowded through the door after him; last went the blond young man, reeling and singing:

  An the big baboon by the light of the
moon

  Was combing his auburn hair.

  Fifi Waters was sobbing with her head on the table.

  ‘Don’t cry Fifi,’ said the Colonel who was still sitting where he had sat all the evening. ‘Here’s something I rather fancy might do you good.’ He pushed a glass of champagne towards her down the table.

  She sniffled and began drinking it in little sips. ‘Hullo Roger, how’s the boy?’

  ‘The boy’s quite well thank you… Rather bored, dont you know? An evening with such infernal bounders…’

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘There doesnt seem to be anything left to eat.’

  ‘I didnt know you’d be here or I’d have come earlier, honest.’

  ‘Would you indeed?… Now that’s very nice.’

  The long ash dropped from the Colonel’s cigar; he got to his feet. ‘Now Fifi, I’ll call a cab and we’ll go for a ride in the Park…’

  She drank down her champagne and nodded brightly. ‘Dear me it’s four o’clock…’ ‘You have the proper wraps haven’t you?’

  She nodded again.

  ‘Splendid Fifi… I say you are in form.’ The Colonel’s cigarcolored face was unraveling in smiles. ‘Well, come along.’

  She looked about her in a dazed way. ‘Didnt I come with somebody?’

  ‘Quite unnecessary!’

  In the hall they came upon the fair young man quietly vomiting into a firebucket under an artificial palm.

  ‘Oh let’s leave him,’ she said wrinkling up her nose.

  ‘Quite unnecessary,’ said the Colonel.

  Emile brought their wraps. The redhaired girl had gone home.

  ‘Look here, boy.’ The Colonel waved his cane. ‘Call me a cab please… Be sure the horse is decent and the driver is sober.’

  ‘De suite monsieur.’

  The sky beyond roofs and chimneys was the blue of a sapphire. The Colonel took three or four deep sniffs of the dawnsmelling air and threw his cigar into the gutter. ‘Suppose we have a bit of breakfast at Cleremont. I haven’t had anything fit to eat all night. That beastly sweet champagne, ugh!’

  Fifi giggled. After the Colonel had examined the horse’s fetlocks and patted his head, they climbed into the cab. The Colonel fitted in Fifi carefully under his arm and they drove off. Emile stood a second in the door of the restaurant uncrumpling a five dollar bill. He was tired and his insteps ached.