Manhattan Transfer

by John Dos Passos

  ‘I’ll finish my tea, but why dont you have a gin fizz? I love to see people drink gin fizzes. It makes me feel that I’m in the tropics sitting in a jujube grove waiting for the riverboat to take us up some ridiculous melodramatic river all set about with fevertrees.’

  ‘Waiter I want a gin fizz please.’

  *

  Joe Harland had slumped down in his chair until his head rested on his arms. Between his grimestiff hands his eyes followed uneasily the lines in the marbletop table. The gutted lunchroom was silent under the sparse glower of two bulbs hanging over the counter where remained a few pies under a bellglass, and a man in a white coat nodding on a tall stool. Now and then the eyes in his gray doughy face flicked open and he grunted and looked about. At the last table over were the hunched shoulders of men asleep, faces crumpled like old newspapers pillowed on arms. Joe Harland sat up straight and yawned. A woman blobby under a raincoat with a face red and purplish streaked like rancid meat was asking for a cup of coffee at the counter. Carrying the mug carefully between her two hands she brought it over to the table and sat down opposite him. Joe Harland let his head down onto his arms again.

  ‘Hay yous how about a little soivice?’ The woman’s voice shrilled in Harland’s ears like the screech of chalk on a blackboard.

  ‘Well what d’ye want?’ snarled the man behind the counter. The woman started sobbing. ‘He asts me what I want… I aint used to bein talked to brutal.’

  ‘Well if there’s anythin you want you kin juss come an git it… Soivice at this toime o night!’

  Harland could smell her whiskey breath as she sobbed. He raised his head and stared at her. She twisted her flabby mouth into a smile and bobbed her head towards him.

  ‘Mister I aint accustomed to bein treated brutal. If my husband was aloive he wouldn’t have the noive. Who’s the loikes o him to say what toime o night a lady ought to have soivice, the little shriveled up shrimp.’ She threw back her head and laughed so that her hat fell off backwards. ‘That’s what he is, a little shriveled up shrimp, insultin a lady with his toime o night.’

  Some strands of gray hair with traces of henna at the tips had fallen down about her face. The man in the white coat walked over to the table.

  ‘Look here Mother McCree I’ll trow ye out o here if you raise any more distoirbance… What do you want?’

  ‘A nickel’s woirt o doughnuts,’ she sniveled with a sidelong leer at Harland.

  Joe Harland shoved his face into the hollow of his arm again and tried to go to sleep. He heard the plate set down followed by her toothless nibbling and an occasional sucking noise when she drank the coffee. A new customer had come in and was talking across the counter in a low growling voice.

  ‘Mister, mister aint it terrible to want a drink?’ He raised his head again and found her eyes the blurred blue of watered milk looking into his. ‘What ye goin to do now darlin?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘Virgin an Saints it’d be noice to have a bed an a pretty lace shimmy and a noice feller loike you darlin… mister.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Oh mister if my poor husband was aloive, he wouldn’t let em treat me loike they do. I lost my husband on the General Slocum might ha been yesterday.’

  ‘He’s not so unlucky.’

  ‘But he doid in his sin without a priest, darlin. It’s terrible to die in yer sin…’

  ‘Oh hell I want to sleep.’

  Her voice went on in a faint monotonous screech setting his teeth on edge. ‘The Saints has been agin me ever since I lost my husband on the General Slocum. I aint been an honest woman.’… She began to sob again. ‘The Virgin and Saints an Martyrs is agin me, everybody’s agin me… Oh wont somebody treat me noice.’

  ‘I want to sleep… Cant you shut up?’

  She stooped and fumbled for her hat on the floor. She sat sobbing rubbing her swollen redgrimed knuckles into her eyes.

  ‘Oh mister dont ye want to treat me noice?’

  Joe Harland got to his feet breathing hard. ‘Goddam you cant you shut up?’ His voice broke into a whine. ‘Isnt there anywhere you can get a little peace? There’s nowhere you can get any peace.’ He pulled his cap over his eyes, shoved his hands down into his pockets and shambled out of the lunchroom. Over Chatham Square the sky was brightening redviolet through the latticework of elevated tracks. The lights were two rows of bright brass knobs up the empty Bowery.

  A policeman passed swinging his nightstick. Joe Harland felt the policeman’s eyes on him. He tried to walk fast and briskly as if he were going somewhere on business.

  *

  ‘Well Miss Oglethorpe how do you like it?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Oh you know… being a nine days’ wonder.’

  ‘Why I don’t know at all Mr Goldweiser.’

  ‘Women know everything but they wont let on.’

  Ellen sits in a gown of nilegreen silk in a springy armchair at the end of a long room jingling with talk and twinkle of chandeliers and jewelry, dotted with the bright moving black of evening clothes and silveredged colors of women’s dresses. The curve of Harry Goldweiser’s nose merges directly into the curve of his bald forehead, his big rump bulges over the edges of a triangular gilt stool, his small brown eyes measure her face like antennae as he talks to her. A woman nearby smells of sandalwood. A woman with orange lips and chalk face under an orange turban passes talking to a man with a pointed beard. A hawkbeaked woman with crimson hair puts her hand on a man’s shoulder from behind. ‘Why how do you do, Miss Cruikshank; it’s surprising isn’t it how everybody in the world is always at the same place at the same time.’ Ellen sits in the armchair drowsily listening, coolness of powder on her face and arms, fatness of rouge on her lips, her body just bathed fresh as a violet under the silk dress, under the silk underclothes; she sits dreamily, drowsily listening. A sudden twinge of men’s voices knotting about her. She sits up cold white out of reach like a lighthouse. Men’s hands crawl like bugs on the unbreakable glass. Men’s looks blunder and flutter against it helpless as moths. But in deep pitblackness inside something clangs like a fire engine.

  George Baldwin stood beside the breakfast table with a copy of the New York Times folded in his hand. ‘Now Cecily,’ he was saying ‘we must be sensible about these things.’

  ‘Cant you see that I’m trying to be sensible?’ she said in a jerking snivelly voice. He stood looking at her without sitting down rolling a corner of the paper between his finger and thumb. Mrs Baldwin was a tall woman with a mass of carefully curled chestnut hair piled on top of her head. She sat before the silver coffeeservice fingering the sugarbowl with mushroomwhite fingers that had very sharp pink nails.

  ‘George I cant stand it any more that’s all.’ She pressed her quaking lips hard together.

  ‘But my dear you exaggerate…’

  ‘How exaggerate?… It means our life has been a pack of lies.’

  ‘But Cecily we’re fond of each other.’

  ‘You married me for my social position, you know it… I was fool enough to fall in love with you. All right, It’s over.’

  ‘It’s not true. I really loved you. Dont you remember how terrible you thought it was you couldnt really love me?’

  ‘You brute to refer to that… Oh it’s horrible!’

  The maid came in from the pantry with bacon and eggs on a tray. They sat silent looking at each other. The maid swished out of the room and closed the door. Mrs Baldwin put her forehead down on the edge of the table and began to cry. Baldwin sat staring at the headlines in the paper. ASSASSINATION OF ARCHDUKE WILL HAVE GRAVE CONSEQUENCES. AUSTRIAN ARMY MOBILIZED. He went over and put his hand on her crisp hair.

  ‘Poor old Cecily,’ he said.

  ‘Dont touch me.’

  She ran out of the room with her handkerchief to her face. He sat down, helped himself to bacon and eggs and toast and began to eat; everything tasted like paper. He stopped eating to scribble a note on a scratchpad he kept in his
breast pocket behind his handkerchief: See Collins vs. Arbuthnot, N.Y.S.C. Appel. Div.

  The sound of a step in the hall outside caught his ear, the click of a latch. The elevator had just gone down. He ran four flights down the steps. Through the glass and wroughtiron doors of the vestibule downstairs he caught sight of her on the curb, standing tall and stiff, pulling on her gloves. He rushed out and took her by the hand just as a taxi drove up. Sweat beaded on his forehead and was prickly under his collar. He could see himself standing there with the napkin ridiculous in his hand and the colored doorman grinning and saying, ‘Good mornin, Mr Baldwin, looks like it going to be a fine day.’ Gripping her hand tight, he said in a low voice through his teeth:

  ‘Cecily there’s something I want to talk to you about. Wont you wait a minute and we’ll go downtown together?… Wait about five minutes please,’ he said to the taxidriver. We’ll be right down.’ Squeezing her wrist hard he walked back with her to the elevator. When they stood in the hall of their own apartment, she suddenly looked him straight in the face with dry blazing eyes.

  ‘Come in here Cecily’ he said gently. He closed their bedroom door and locked it. ‘Now lets talk this over quietly. Sit down dear.’ He put a chair behind her. She sat down suddenly stiffly like a marionette.

  ‘Now look here Cecily you have no right to talk the way you do about my friends. Mrs Oglethorpe is a friend of mine. We occasionally take tea together in some perfectly public place and that’s all. I would invite her up here but I’ve been afraid you would be rude to her… You cant go on giving away to your insane jealousy like this. I allow you complete liberty and trust you absolutely. I think I have the right to expect the same confidence from you… Cecily do be my sensible little girl again. You’ve been listening to what a lot of old hags fabricate out of whole cloth maliciously to make you miserable.’

  ‘She’s not the only one.’

  ‘Cecily I admit frankly there were times soon after we were married… when… But that’s all over years ago… And who’s fault was it?… Oh Cecily a woman like you cant understand the physical urgences of a man like me.’

  ‘Havent I done my best?’

  ‘My dear these things arent anybody’s fault… I dont blame you… If you’d really loved me then…’

  ‘What do you think I stay in this hell for except for you? Oh you’re such a brute.’ She sat dryeyed staring at her feet in their gray buckskin slippers, twisting and untwisting in her fingers the wet string of her handkerchief.

  ‘Look here Cecily a divorce would be very harmful to my situation downtown just at the moment, but if you really dont want to go on living with me I’ll see what I can arrange… But in any event you must have more confidence in me. You know I’m fond of you. And for God’s sake dont go to see anybody about it without consulting me. You dont want a scandal and headlines in the papers, do you?’

  ‘All right… leave me alone… I dont care about anything.’

  ‘All right… I’m pretty late. I’ll go on downtown in that taxi. You don’t want to come shopping or anything?’

  She shook her head. He kissed her on the forehead, took his straw hat and stick in the hall and hurried out.

  ‘Oh I’m the most miserable woman,’ she groaned and got to her feet. Her head ached as if it were bound with hot wire. She went to the window and leaned out into the sunlight. Across Park Avenue the flameblue sky was barred with the red girder cage of a new building. Steam riveters rattled incessantly; now and then a donkey-engine whistled and there was a jingle of chains and a fresh girder soared crosswise in the air. Men in blue overalls moved about the scaffolding. Beyond to the northwest a shining head of clouds soared blooming compactly like a cauliflower. Oh if it would only rain. As the thought came to her there was a low growl of thunder above the din of building and of traffic. Oh if it would only rain.

  Ellen had just hung a chintz curtain in the window to hide with its blotchy pattern of red and purple flowers the vista of desert backyards and brick flanks of downtown houses. In the middle of the bare room was a boxcouch cumbered with teacups, a copper chafingdish and percolator; the yellow hardwood floor was littered with snippings of chintz and curtainpins; books, dresses, bedlinen cascaded from a trunk in the corner; from a new mop in the fireplace exuded a smell of cedar oil. Ellen was leaning against the wall in a daffodilcolored kimono looking happily about the big shoebox-shaped room when the buzzer startled her. She pushed a rope of hair up off her forehead and pressed the button that worked the latch. There was a little knock on the door. A woman was standing in the dark of the hall.

  ‘Why Cassie I couldn’t make out who you were. Come in… What’s the matter?’

  ‘You are sure I’m not intwuding?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Ellen leaned to give her a little pecking kiss. Cassandra Wilkins was very pale and there was a nervous quiver about her eyelids. ‘You can give me some advice. I’m just getting my curtains up… Look do you think that purple goes all right with the gray wall? It looks kind of funny to me.’

  ‘I think it’s beautiful. What a beautiful woom. How happy you’re going to be here.’

  ‘Put that chafingdish down on the floor and sit down. I’ll make some tea. There’s a kind of bathroom kitchenette in the alcove there.’

  ‘You’re sure it wouldn’t be too much twouble?’

  ‘Of course not… But Cassie what’s the matter?’

  ‘Oh everything… I came down to tell you but I cant. I cant ever tell anybody.’

  ‘I’m so excited about this apartment. Imagine Cassie it’s the first place of my own I ever had in my life. Daddy wants me to live with him in Passaic, but I just felt I couldn’t.’

  ‘And what does Mr Oglethorpe… ? Oh but that’s impertinent of me… Do forgive me Elaine. I’m almost cwazy. I don’t know what I’m saying.’

  ‘Oh Jojo’s a dear. He’s even going to let me divorce him if I want to… Would you if you were me?’ Without waiting for an answer she disappeared between the folding doors. Cassie remained hunched up on the edge of the couch.

  Ellen came back with a blue teapot in one hand and a pan of steaming water in the other. ‘Do you mind not having lemon or cream? There’s some sugar on the mantelpiece. These cups are clean because I just washed them. Dont you think they are pretty? Oh you cant imagine how wonderful and domestic it makes you feel to have a place all to yourself. I hate living in a hotel. Honestly this place makes me just so domestic… Of course the ridiculous thing is that I’ll probably have to give it up or sublet as soon as I’ve got it decently fixed up. Show’s going on the road in three weeks. I want to get out of it but Harry Goldweiser wont let me.’ Cassie was taking little sips of tea out of her spoon. She began to cry softly. ‘Why Cassie buck up, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Oh, you’re so lucky in everything Elaine and I’m so miserable.’

  ‘Why I always thought it was my jinx that got the beautyprize, but what is the matter?’

  Cassie put down her cup and pushed her two clenched hands into her neck. ‘It’s just this,’ she said in a strangled voice… ‘I think I’m going to have a baby.’ She put her head down on her knees and sobbed.

  ‘Are you sure? Everybody’s always having scares.’

  ‘I wanted our love to be always pure and beautiful, but he said he’d never see me again if I didn’t… and I hate him.’ She shook the words out one by one between tearing sobs.

  ‘Why don’t you get married?’

  ‘I cant. I wont. It would interfere.’

  ‘How long since you knew?’

  ‘Oh it must have been ten days ago easily. I know it’s that… I dont want to have anything but my dancing.’ She stopped sobbing and began taking little sips of tea again.

  Ellen walked back and forth in front of the fireplace. ‘Look here Cassie there’s no use getting all wrought up over things, is there? I know a woman who’ll help you… Do pull yourself together please.’

  ‘Oh I couldn’t, I couldn’t.’… The saucer
slid off her knees and broke in two on the floor. ‘Tell me Elaine have you ever been through this?… Oh I’m so sowy. I’ll buy you another saucer Elaine.’ She got totteringly to her feet and put the cup and spoon on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Oh of course I have. When we were first married I had a terrible time…’

  ‘Oh Elaine isn’t it hideous all this? Life would be so beautiful and free and natural without it… I can feel the howor of it cweeping up on me, killing me.’

  ‘Things are rather like that,’ said Ellen gruffly.

  Cassie was crying again. ‘Men are so bwutal and selfish.’

  ‘Have another cup of tea, Cassie.’

  ‘Oh I couldn’t. My dear I feel a deadly nausea… Oh I think I’m going to be sick.’

  ‘The bathroom is right through the folding doors and to the left.’

  Ellen walked up and down the room with clenched teeth. I hate women. I hate women.

  After a while Cassie came back into the room, her face greenish white, dabbing her forehead with a washrag.

  ‘Here lie down here you poor kid,’ said Ellen clearing a space on the couch. ‘… Now you’ll feel much better.’

  ‘Oh will you ever forgive me for causing all this twouble?’

  ‘Just lie still a minute and forget everything.’

  ‘Oh if I could only relax.’

  Ellen’s hands were cold. She went to the window and looked out. A little boy in a cowboy suit was running about the yard waving an end of clothesline. He tripped and fell. Ellen could see his face puckered with tears as he got to his feet again. In the yard beyond a stumpy woman with black hair was hanging out clothes. Sparrows were chirping and fighting on the fence.

  ‘Elaine dear could you let me have a little powder? I’ve lost my vanity case.’

  She turned back into the room. ‘I think… Yes there’s some on the mantelpiece… Do you feel better now Cassie?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Cassie in a trembly voice. ‘And have you got a lipstick?’

  ‘I’m awfully sorry… I’ve never worn any street makeup. I’ll have to soon enough if I keep on acting.’ She went into the alcove to take off her kimono, slipped on a plain green dress, coiled up her hair and pushed a small black hat down over it. ‘Let’s run along Cassie. I want to have something to eat at six… I hate bolting my dinner five minutes before a performance.’