Manhattan Transfer

by John Dos Passos

  ‘Can you play Five Hundred, Jimmy?’ asked Maisie.

  ‘No I cant.’

  ‘What do you think of that James, he cant play jacks and he cant play Five Hundred.’

  ‘Well they’re both girl’s games,’ said James loftily. ‘I wouldn’t play em either xept on account of you.’

  ‘Oh wouldn’t you, Mr Smarty.’

  ‘Let’s play animal grabs.’

  ‘But there aren’t enough of us for that. It’s no fun without a crowd.’

  ‘An last time you got the giggles so bad mother made us stop.’

  ‘Mother made us stop because you kicked little Billy Schmutz in the funnybone an made him cry.’

  ‘Spose we go down an look at the trains,’ put in Jimmy.

  ‘We’re not allowed to go down stairs after dark,’ said Maisie severely.

  ‘I’ll tell you what lets play stock exchange… I’ve got a million dollars in bonds to sell and Maisie can be the bulls an Jimmy can be the bears.’

  ‘All right, what do we do?’

  ‘Oh juss run round an yell mostly… I’m selling short.’

  ‘All right Mr Broker I’ll buy em all at five cents each.’

  ‘No you cant say that… You say ninetysix and a half or something like that.’

  ‘I’ll give you five million for them,’ cried Maisie waving the blotter of the writing desk.

  ‘But you fool, they’re only worth one million,’ shouted Jimmy.

  Maisie stood still in her tracks. ‘Jimmy what did you say then?’ Jimmy felt shame flame up through him; he looked at his stubby shoes. ‘I said, you fool.’

  ‘Haven’t you ever been to Sunday School? Don’t you know that God says in the Bible that if you call anybody Thou fool you’ll be in danger of hellfire?’

  Jimmy didn’t dare raise his eyes.

  ‘Well I’m not going to play any more,’ said Maisie drawing herself up. Jimmy somehow found himself out in the hall. He grabbed his hat and ran out the door and down the six flights of white stone stairs past the brass buttons and chocolate livery of the elevator boy, out through the hall that had pink marble pillars in to Seventysecond Street. It was dark and blowy, full of ponderous advancing shadows and chasing footsteps. At last he was climbing the familiar crimson stairs of the hotel. He hurried past his mother’s door. They’d ask him why he had come home so soon. He burst into his own room, shot the bolt, doublelocked the door and stood leaning against it panting.

  ‘Well are you married yet?’ was the first thing Congo asked when Emile opened the door to him. Emile was in his undershirt. The shoebox-shaped room was stuffy, lit and heated by a gas crown with a tin cap on it.

  ‘Where are you in from this time?’

  ‘Bizerta and Trondjeb… I’m an able seaman.’

  ‘That’s a rotten job, going to sea… I’ve saved two hundred dollars. I’m working at Delmonico’s.’

  They sat down side by side on the unmade bed. Congo produced a package of gold tipped Egyptian Deities. ‘Four months’ pay’; he slapped his thigh. ‘Seen May Sweitzer?’ Emile shook his head. ‘I’ll have to find the little son of a gun… In those goddam Scandinavian ports they come out in boats, big fat blond women in bumboats…’

  They were silent. The gas hummed. Congo let his breath out in a whistle. ‘Whee… C’est chic ça, Delmonico… Why haven’t you married her?’

  ‘She likes to have me hang around… I’d run the store better than she does.’

  ‘You’re too easy; got to use rough stuff with women to get anything outa them… Make her jealous.’

  ‘She’s got me going.’

  ‘Want to see some postalcards?’ Congo pulled a package, wrapped in newspaper out of his pocket. ‘Look these are Naples; everybody there wants to come to New York… That’s an Arab dancing girl. Nom d’une vache they got slippery bellybuttons…’

  ‘Say, I know what I’ll do,’ cried Emile suddenly dropping the cards on the bed. ‘I’ll make her jealous…’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ernestine… Madame Rigaud…’

  ‘Sure walk up an down Eighth Avenue with a girl a couple of times an I bet she’ll fall like a ton of bricks.’

  The alarmclock went off on the chair beside the bed. Emile jumped up to stop it and began splashing water on his face in the washbasin.

  ‘Merde I got to go to work.’

  ‘I’ll go over to Hell’s Kitchen an see if I can find May.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool an spend all your money,’ said Emile who stood at the cracked mirror with his face screwed up, fastening the buttons in the front of a clean boiled shirt.

  ‘It’s a sure thing I’m tellin yer,’ said the man again and again, bringing his face close to Ed Thatcher’s face and rapping the desk with his flat hand.

  ‘Maybe it is Viler but I seen so many of em go under, honest I dont see how I can risk it.’

  ‘Man I’ve hocked the misses’s silver teaset and my diamond ring an the baby’s mug… It’s a sure sure thing… I wouldn’t let you in on it, xept you an me’s been pretty good friends an I owe you money an everythin… You’ll make twentyfive percent on your money by tomorrow noon… Then if you want to hold you can on a gamble, but if you sell three quarters and hold the rest two or three days on a chance you’re as safe as… as the Rock of Gibraltar.’

  ‘I know Viler, it certainly sounds good…’

  ‘Hell man you dont want to be in this damned office all your life, do you? Think of your little girl.’

  ‘I am, that’s the trouble.’

  ‘But Ed, Gibbons and Swandike had started buying already at three cents when the market closed this evening… Klein got wise an’ll be right there with bells on first thing in the morning. The market’ll go crazy on it…’

  ‘Unless the fellers doin the dirty work change their minds. I know that stuff through and through, Viler… Sounds like a topnotch proposition… But I’ve examined the books of too many bankrupts.’

  Viler got to his feet and threw his cigar into the cuspidor. ‘Well do as you like, damn it all… I guess you must like commuting from Hackensack an working twelve hours a day…’

  ‘I believe in workin my way up, that’s all.’

  ‘What’s the use of a few thousands salted away when you’re old and cant get any satisfaction? Man I’m goin in with both feet.’

  ‘Go to it Viler… You tellem,’ muttered Thatcher as the other man stamped out slamming the office door.

  The big office with its series of yellow desks and hooded typewriters was dark except for the tent of light in which Thatcher sat at a desk piled with ledgers. The three windows at the end were not curtained. Through them he could see the steep bulk of buildings scaled with lights and a plankshaped bit of inky sky. He was copying memoranda on a long sheet of legal cap.

  Fan Tan Import and Export Company (statement of assets and liabilities up to and including February 29)… Branches New York, Shanghai, Hongkong and Straights Settlements…

  Balance carried over $345,789.84

  Real Estate $500,087.12

  Profit and Loss $399,765.90

  ‘A bunch of goddam crooks,’ growled Thatcher out loud. ‘Not an item on the whole thing that aint faked. I dont believe they’ve got any branches in Hongkong or anywhere…’

  He leaned back in his chair and stared out of the window. The buildings were going dark. He could just make out a star in the patch of sky. Ought to go out an eat, bum for the digestion to eat irregularly like I do. Suppose I’d taken a plunge on Viler’s red hot tip. Ellen, how do you like these American Beauty roses? They have stems eight feet long, and I want you to look over the itinerary of the trip abroad I’ve mapped out to finish your education. Yes it will be a shame to leave our fine new apartment looking out over Central Park… And downtown; The Fiduciary Accounting Institute, Edward C. Thatcher, President… Blobs of steam were drifting up across the patch of sky, hiding the star. Take a plunge, take a plunge… they’re all crooks and gamblers anyway… take a plunge a
nd come up with your hands full, pockets full, bankaccount full, vaults full of money. If I only dared take the risk. Fool to waste your time fuming about it. Get back to the Fan Tan Import. Steam faintly ruddy with light reflected from the streets swarmed swiftly up across the patch of sky, twisting scattering.

  Goods on hand in U. S. bonded warehouses… $325,666.00

  Take a plunge and come up with three hundred and twentyfive thousand, six hundred and sixtysix dollars. Dollars swarming up like steam, twisting scattering against the stars. Millionaire Thatcher leaned out of the window of the bright patchouliscented room to look at the darkjutting city steaming with laughter, voices, tinkling and lights; behind him orchestras played among the azaleas, private wires click click clickclicked dollars from Singapore, Valparaiso, Mukden, Hongkong, Chicago. Susie leaned over him in a dress made of orchids, breathed in his ear.

  Ed Thatcher got to his feet with clenched fists sniveling; You poor fool whats the use now she’s gone. I’d better go eat or Ellen’ll scold me.

  5 Steamroller

  Dusk gently smooths crispangled streets. Dark presses tight the steaming asphalt city, crushes the fretwork of windows and lettered signs and chimneys and watertanks and ventilators and fireescapes and moldings and patterns and corrugations and eyes and hands and neckties into blue chunks, into black enormous blocks. Under the rolling heavier heavier pressure windows blurt light. Night crushes bright milk out of arclights, squeezes the sullen blocks until they drip red, yellow, green into streets resounding with feet. All the asphalt oozes light. Light spurts from lettering on roofs, mills dizzily among wheels, stains rolling tons of sky.

  A steamroller was clattering back and forth over the freshly tarred metaling of the road at the cemetery gate. A smell of scorched grease and steam and hot paint came from it. Jimmy Herf picked his way along the edge of the road; the stones were sharp against his feet through the worn soles of his shoes. He brushed past swarthy-necked workmen and walked on over the new road with a whiff of garlic and sweat from them in his nostrils. After a hundred yards he stopped over the gray suburban road, laced tight on both sides with telegraph poles and wires, over the gray paperbox houses and the gray jagged lots of monumentmakers, the sky was the color of a robin’s egg. Little worms of May were writhing in his blood. He yanked off his black necktie and put it in his pocket. A tune was grinding crazily through his head:

  I’m so tired of vi-olets

  Take them all away.

  There is one glory of the sun and another glory of the moon and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead… He walked on fast splashing through puddles full of sky, trying to shake the droning welloiled words out of his ears, to get the feeling of black crêpe off his fingers, to forget the smell of lilies.

  I’m so tired of vi-olets

  Take them all away.

  He walked faster. The road climbed a hill. There was a bright runnel of water in the ditch, flowing through patches of grass and dandelions. There were fewer houses; on the sides of barns peeling letters spelled out LYDIA PINKHAM’S VEGETABLE COMPOUND, BUDWEISER, RED HEN, BARKING DOG… And muddy had had a stroke and now she was buried. He couldn’t think how she used to look; she was dead that was all. From a fencepost came the moist whistling of a songsparrow. The minute rusty bird flew ahead, perched on a telegraph wire and sang, and flew ahead to the rim of an abandoned boiler and sang, and flew ahead and sang. The sky was getting a darker blue, filling with flaked motherofpearl clouds. For a last moment he felt the rustle of silk beside him, felt a hand in a trailing lacefrilled sleeve close gently over his hand. Lying in his crib with his feet pulled up cold under the menace of the shaggy crouching shadows; and the shadows scuttled melting into corners when she leaned over him with curls round her forehead, in silkpuffed sleeves, with a tiny black patch at the corner of the mouth that kissed his mouth. He walked faster. The blood flowed full and hot in his veins. The flaked clouds were melting into rosecolored foam. He could hear his steps on the worn macadam. At a crossroad the sun glinted on the sticky pointed buds of a beechsapling. Opposite a sign read YONKERS. In the middle of the road teetered a dented tomatocan. Kicking it hard in front of him he walked on. One glory of the sun and another glory of the moon and another glory of the stars… He walked on.

  ‘Hullo Emile!’ Emile nodded without turning his head. The girl ran after him and grabbed his coatsleeve. ‘That’s the way you treat your old friends is it? Now that you’re keepin company with that delicatessen queen…’

  Emile yanked his hand away. ‘I am in a ‘urree zat’s all.’

  ‘How’d ye like it if I went an told her how you an me framed it up to stand in front of the window on Eighth Avenue huggin an kissin juss to make her fall for yez.’

  ‘Zat was Congo’s idea.’

  ‘Well didn’t it woik?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Well aint there sumpen due me?’

  ‘May you’re a veree nice leetle girl. Next week my night off is Wednesday… I’ll come by an take you to a show… ‘Ow’s ‘ustlin?’

  ‘Worse’n hell… I’m tryin out for a dancin job up at the Campus… That’s where you meet guys wid jack… No more of dese sailor boys and shorefront stiffs… I’m gettin respectable.’

  ‘May ’ave you ’eard from Congo?’

  ‘Got a postalcard from some goddam place I couldn’t read the name of… Aint it funny when you write for money an all ye git’s a postal ca-ard… That’s the kid gits me for the askin any night… An he’s the only one, savvy, Frogslegs?’

  ‘Goodby May.’ He suddenly pushed the straw bonnet trimmed with forgetmenots back on her head and kissed her.

  ‘Hey quit dat Frogslegs… Eighth Avenue aint no place to kiss a girl,’ she whined pushing a yellow curl back under her hat. ‘I could git you run in an I’ve half a mind to.’

  Emile walked off.

  A fire engine, a hosewagon, and a hookandladder passed him, shattering the street with clattering roar. Three blocks down smoke and an occasional gasp of flame came from the roof of a house. A crowd was jammed up against the policelines. Beyond backs and serried hats Emile caught a glimpse of firemen on the roof of the next house and of three silently glittering streams of water playing into the upper windows. Must be right opposite the delicatessen. He was making his way through the jam on the sidewalk when the crowd suddenly opened. Two policemen were dragging out a negro whose arms snapped back and forth like broken cables. A third cop came behind cracking the negro first on one side of the head, then on the other with his billy.

  ‘It’s a shine ‘at set the fire.’

  ‘They caught the firebug.’

  ‘’At’s ’e incendiary.’

  ‘God he’s a meanlookin smoke.’

  The crowd closed in. Emile was standing beside Madame Rigaud in front of the door of her store.

  ‘Cheri que ça me fait une emotiong… J’ai horriblemong peu du feu.’

  Emile was standing a little behind her. He let one arm crawl slowly round her waist and patted her arm with his other hand, ‘Everyting awright. Look no more fire, only smoke… But you are insured, aint you?’

  ‘Oh yes for fifteen tousand.’ He squeezed her hand and then took his arms away. ‘Viens ma petite on va rentrer.’

  Once inside the shop he took both her plump hands. ‘Ernestine when we get married?’

  ‘Next month.’

  ‘I no wait zat long, imposseeble… Why not next Wednesday? Then I can help you make inventory of stock… I tink maybe we can sell this place and move uptown, make bigger money.’

  She patted him on the cheek. ‘P’tit ambitieux,’ she said through her hollow inside laugh that made her shoulders and her big bust shake.

  They had to change at Manhattan Transfer. The thumb of Ellen’s new kid glove had split and she kept rubbing it nervously with her forefinger. John wore a belted raincoat and a pinkishgray felt hat. When he turned to her and smiled she couldn’t
help pulling her eyes away and staring out at the long rain that shimmered over the tracks.

  ‘Here we are Elaine dear. Oh prince’s daughter, you see we get the train that comes from the Penn station… It’s funny this waiting in the wilds of New Jersey this way.’ They got into the parlorcar. John made a little clucking sound in his mouth at the raindrops that made dark dimes on his pale hat. ‘Well we’re off, little girl… Behold thou art fair my love, thou art fair, thou hast dove’s eyes within thy locks.’

  Ellen’s new tailored suit was tight at the elbows. She wanted to feel very gay and listen to his purring whisper in her ears, but something had set her face in a tight frown; she could only look out at the brown marshes and the million black windows of factories and the puddly streets of towns and a rusty steamboat in a canal and barns and Bull Durham signs and roundfaced Spearmint gnomes all barred and crisscrossed with bright flaws of rain. The jeweled stripes on the window ran straight down when the train stopped and got more and more oblique as it speeded up. The wheels rumbled in her head, saying Man-hattan Tran-sfer. Manhattan Tran-sfer. Anyway it was a long time before Atlantic City. By the time we get to Atlantic City… Oh it rained forty days… I’ll be feeling gay… And it rained forty nights… I’ve got to be feeling gay.

  ‘Elaine Thatcher Oglethorpe, that’s a very fine name, isn’t it, darling? Oh stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples for I am sick of love…’

  It was so comfortable in the empty parlorcar in the green velvet chair with John leaning towards her reciting nonsense with the brown marshlands slipping by behind the rainstriped window and a smell like clams seeping into the car. She looked into his face and laughed. A blush ran all over his face to the roots of his redblond hair. He put his hand in its yellow glove over her hand in its white glove. ‘You’re my wife now Elaine.’

  ‘You’re my husband now John.’ And laughing they looked at each other in the coziness of the empty parlorcar.

  White letters, ATLANTIC CITY, spelled doom over the rainpitted water.

  Rain lashed down the glaring boardwalk and crashed in gusts against the window like water thrown out of a bucket. Beyond the rain she could hear the intermittent rumble of the surf along the beach between the illuminated piers. She lay on her back staring at the ceiling. Beside her in the big bed John lay asleep breathing quietly like a child with a pillow doubled up under his head. She was icy cold. She slid out of bed very carefully not to wake him, and stood looking out the window down the very long V of lights of the boardwalk. She pushed up the window. The rain lashed in her face spitefully stinging her flesh, wetting her nightdress. She pushed her forehead against the frame. Oh I want to die. I want to die. All the tight coldness of her body was clenching in her stomach. Oh I’m going to be sick. She went into the bathroom and closed the door. When she had vomited she felt better. Then she climbed into bed again careful not to touch John. If she touched him she would die. She lay on her back with her hands tight against her sides and her feet together. The parlorcar rumbled cozily in her head; she fell asleep.