Manhattan Transfer

by John Dos Passos

  I am a bachelor and I live all alone

  And I work at the weaver’s trade…

  Stan finds himself singing at his own face in a mirror. One of his eyebrows is joining his hair, the other’s an eyelash… ‘No I’m not bejases I’m a married man… Fight any man who says I’m not a married man and a citizen of City of New York, County of New York, State of New York…’ He’s standing on a chair making a speech, banging his fist into his hand. ‘Friends Roooomans and countrymen, lend me five bucks… We come to muzzle Caesar not to shaaaave him… According to the Constitution of the City of New York, County of New York, State of New York and duly attested and subscribed before a district attorney according to the provisions of the act of July 13th 1888… To hell with the Pope.’

  ‘Hey quit dat.’ ‘Fellers lets trow dis guy out… He aint one o de boys… Dunno how he got in here. He’s drunk as a pissant.’ Stan jumps with his eyes closed into a thicket of fists. He’s slammed in the eye, in the jaw, shoots like out of a gun out into the drizzling cool silent street. Ha ha ha.

  For I am a bachelor and I live all alone

  And there’s one more river to cross

  One more river to Jordan

  One more river to cross…

  It was blowing cold in his face and he was sitting on the front of a ferryboat when he came to. His teeth were chattering. He was shivering… ‘I’m having DT’s. Who am I? Where am I? City of New York, State of New York… Stanwood Emery age twentytwo occupation student… Pearline Anderson twentyone occupation actress. To hell with her. Gosh I’ve got fortynine dollars and eight cents and where the hell have I been? And nobody rolled me. Why I havent got the DT’s at all. I feel fine, only a little delicate. All I need’s a little drink, dont you? Hello, I thought there was somebody here. I guess I’d better shut up.’

  Fortynine dollars ahanging on the wall

  Fortynine dollars ahanging on the wall

  Across the zinc water the tall walls, the birchlike cluster of downtown buildings shimmered up the rosy morning like a sound of horns through a chocolatebrown haze. As the boat drew near the buildings densened to a granite mountain split with knifecut canyons. The ferry passed close to a tubby steamer that rode at anchor listing towards Stan so that he could see all the decks. An Ellis Island tug was alongside. A stale smell came from the decks packed with upturned faces like a load of melons. Three gulls wheeled complaining. A gull soared in a spiral, white wings caught the sun, the gull skimmed motionless in whitegold light. The rim of the sun had risen above the plumcolored band of clouds behind East New York. A million windows flashed with light. A rasp and a humming came from the city.

  The animals went in two by two

  The elephant and the kangaroo

  There’s one more river to Jordan

  One more river to cross

  In the whitening light tinfoil gulls wheeled above broken boxes, spoiled cabbageheads, orangerinds heaving slowly between the splintered plank walls, the green spumed under the round bow as the ferry skidding on the tide, gulped the broken water, crashed, slid, settled slowly into the slip. Handwinches whirled with jingle of chains, gates folded upward. Stan stepped across the crack, staggered up the manuresmelling wooden tunnel of the ferryhouse out into the sunny glass and benches of the Battery. He sat down on a bench, clasped his hands round his knees to keep them from shaking so. His mind went on jingling like a mechanical piano.

  With bells on her fingers and rings on her toes

  Shall ride a white lady upon a great horse

  And she shall make mischief wherever she goes…

  There was Babylon and Nineveh, they were built of brick. Athens was goldmarble columns. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets flame like great candles round the Golden Horn… O there’s one more river to cross. Steel glass, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skyscrapers. Crammed on the narrow island the millionwindowed buildings will jut, glittering pyramid on pyramid, white cloudsheads piled above a thunderstorm…

  And it rained forty days and it rained forty nights

  And it didn’t stop till Christmas

  And the only man who survived the flood

  Was longlegged Jack of the Isthmus…

  Kerist I wish I was a skyscraper.

  The lock spun round in a circle to keep out the key. Dexterously Stan bided his time and caught it. He shot headlong through the open door and down the long hall shouting Pearline into the livingroom. It smelled funny, Pearline’s smell, to hell with it. He picked up a chair; the chair wanted to fly, it swung round his head and crashed into the window, the glass shivered and tinkled. He looked out through the window. The street stood up on end. A hookandladder and a fire engine were climbing it licketysplit trailing a droning sirenshriek. Fire fire, pour on water, Scotland’s burning. A thousand dollar fire, a hundredthousand dollar fire, a million dollar fire. Skyscrapers go up like flames, in flames, flames. He spun back into the room. The table turned a somersault. The chinacloset jumped on the table. Oak chairs climbed on top to the gas jet. Pour on water, Scotland’s burning. Don’t like the smell in this place in the City of New York, County of New York, State of New York. He lay on his back on the floor of the revolving kitchen and laughed and laughed. The only man who survived the flood rode a great lady on a white horse. Up in flames, up, up. Kerosene whispered a greasyfaced can in the corner of the kitchen. Pour on water. He stood swaying on the crackling upside down chairs on the upside down table. The kerosene licked him with a white cold tongue. He pitched, grabbed the gasjet, the gasjet gave way, he lay in a puddle on his back striking matches, wet wouldn’t light. A match spluttered, lit; he held the flame carefully between his hands.

  ‘Oh yes but my husband’s awfully ambitious.’ Pearline was telling the blue gingham lady in the grocery-store. ‘Likes to have a good time an all that but he’s much more ambitious than anybody I ever knew. He’s goin to get his old man to send us abroad so he can study architecture. He wants to be an architect.’

  ‘My that’ll be nice for you wont it? A trip like that… Anything else miss?’ ‘No I guess I didn’t forget anythin… If it was anybody else I’d be worryin about him. I haven’t seen him for two days. Had to go and see his dad I guess.’

  ‘And you just newly wed too.’

  ‘I wouldnt be tellin ye if I thought there was anythin wrong, would I? No he’s playin straight all right… Well goodby Mrs Robinson.’ She tucked her packages under one arm and swinging her bead bag in the free hand walked down the street. The sun was still warm although there was a tang of fall in the wind. She gave a penny to a blind man cranking the Merry Widow waltz out of a grindorgan. Still she’d better bawl him out a little when he came home, might get to doing it often. She turned into 200th Street. People were looking out of windows, there was a crowd gathering. It was a fire. She sniffed the singed air. It gave her gooseflesh; she loved seeing fires. She hurried. Why it’s outside our building. Outside our apartmenthouse. Smoke dense as gunnysacks rolled out of the fifthstory window. She suddenly found herself all atremble. The colored elevatorboy ran up to her. His face was green. ‘Oh it’s in our apartment’ she shrieked, ‘and the furniture just came a week ago. Let me get by.’ The packages fell from her, a bottle of cream broke on the sidewalk. A policeman stood in her way, she threw herself at him and pounded on the broad blue chest. She couldnt stop shrieking. ‘That’s all right little lady, that’s all right,’ he kept booming in a deep voice. As she beat her head against it she could feel his voice rumbling in his chest. ‘They’re bringing him down, just overcome by smoke that’s all, just overcome by smoke.’

  ‘O Stanwood my husband,’ she shrieked. Everything was blacking out. She grabbed at two bright buttons on the policeman’s coat and fainted.

  8 One More River to Jordan

  A man is shouting from a soapbox at Second Avenue and Houston in front of the Cosmopolitan Café: ‘… these fellers, men… wageslaves like I was… are stitin on your chest… they�
�re takin the food outen your mouths. Where’s all the pretty girls I used to see walkin up and down the bullevard? Look for em in the uptown cabarets… They squeeze us dry friends… feller workers, slaves I’d oughter say… they take our work and our ideers and our women… They build their Plaza Hotels and their millionaire’s clubs and their million dollar theayters and their battleships and what do they leave us?… They leave us shopsickness an the rickets and a lot of dirty streets full of garbage cans… You look pale you fellers… You need blood… Why dont you get some blood in your veins?… Back in Russia the poor people… not so much poorer’n we are… believe in wampires, things come suck your blood at night… That’s what Capitalism is, a wampire that sucks your blood… day… and… night.’

  It is beginning to snow. The flakes are giltedged where they pass the streetlamp. Through the plate glass the Cosmopolitan Café full of blue and green opal rifts of smoke looks like a muddy aquarium; faces blob whitely round the tables like illassorted fishes. Umbrellas begin to bob in clusters up the snowmottled street. The orator turns up his collar and walks briskly east along Houston, holding the muddy soapbox away from his trousers.

  Faces, hats, hands, newspapers jiggled in the fetid roaring subway car like corn in a popper. The downtown express passed clattering in yellow light, window telescoping window till they overlapped like scales.

  ‘Look George,’ said Sandbourne to George Baldwin who hung on a strap beside him, ‘you can see Fitzgerald’s contraction.’

  ‘I’ll be seeing the inside of an undertaking parlor if I dont get out of this subway soon.’

  ‘It does you plutocrats good now and then to see how the other half travels… Maybe it’ll make you induce some of your little playmates down at Tammany Hall to stop squabbling and give us wageslaves a little transportation… cristamighty I could tell em a thing or two… My idea’s for a series of endless moving platforms under Fifth Avenue.’

  ‘Did you cook that up when you were in hospital Phil?’

  ‘I cooked a whole lot of things up while I was in hospital.’

  ‘Look here lets get out at Grand Central and walk. I cant stand this… I’m not used to it.’

  ‘Sure… I’ll phone Elsie I’ll be a little late to dinner… Not often I get to see you nowadays George… Gee it’s like the old days.’

  In a tangled clot of men and women, arms, legs, hats aslant on perspiring necks, they were pushed out on the platform. They walked up Lexington Avenue quiet in the claretmisted afterglow.

  ‘But Phil how did you come to step out in front of a truck that way?’

  ‘Honestly George I dunno… The last I remember is craning my neck to look at a terribly pretty girl went by in a taxicab and there I was drinking icewater out of a teapot in the hospital.’

  ‘Shame on you Phil at your age.’

  ‘Cristamighty dont I know it? But I’m not the only one.’

  ‘It is funny the way a thing like that comes over you… Why what have you heard about me?’

  ‘Gosh George dont get nervous, it’s all right… I’ve seen her in The Zinnia Girl… She walks away with it. That other girl who’s the star dont have a show.’

  ‘Look here Phil if you hear any rumors about Miss Oglethorpe for Heaven’s sake shut them up. It’s so damn silly you cant go out to tea with a woman without everybody starting their dirty gabble all over town… By God I will not have a scandal, I dont care what happens.’

  ‘Say hold your horses George.’

  ‘I’m in a very delicate position downtown just at the moment that’s all… And then Cecily and I have at last reached a modus vivendi… I wont have it disturbed.’

  They walked along in silence.

  Sandbourne walked with his hat in his hand. His hair was almost white but his eyebrows were still dark and bushy. Every few steps he changed the length of his stride as if it hurt him to walk. He cleared his throat. ‘George you were asking me if I’d cooked up any schemes when I was in hospital… Do you remember years ago old man Specker used to talk about vitreous and superenameled tile? Well I’ve been workin on his formula out at Hollis… A friend of mine there has a two thousand degree oven he bakes pottery in. I think it can be put on a commercial basis… Man it would revolutionize the whole industry. Combined with concrete it would enormously increase the flexibility of the materials at the architects’ disposal. We could make tile any color, size or finish… Imagine this city when all the buildins instead of bein dirty gray were ornamented with vivid colors. Imagine bands of scarlet round the entablatures of skyscrapers. Colored tile would revolutionize the whole life of the city… Instead of fallin back on the orders or on gothic or romanesque decorations we could evolve new designs, new colors, new forms. If there was a little color in the town all this hardshell inhibited life’d break down… There’d be more love an less divorce…’

  Baldwin burst out laughing. ‘You tell em Phil… I’ll talk to you about that sometime. You must come up to dinner when Cecily’s there and tell us about it… Why wont Parkhurst do anything?’

  ‘I wouldnt let him in on it. He’d cotton on to the proposition and leave me out in the cold once he had the formula. I wouldn’t trust him with a rubber nickel.’

  ‘Why doesnt he take you into partnership Phil?’

  ‘He’s got me where he wants me anyway… He knows I do all the work in his goddamned office. He knows too that I’m too cranky to make out with most people. He’s a slick article.’

  ‘Still I should think you could put it up to him.’

  ‘He’s got me where he wants me and he knows it, so I continue doin the work while he amasses the coin… I guess it’s logical. If I had more money I’d just spend it. I’m just shiftless.’

  ‘But look here man you’re not so much older than I am… You’ve still got a career ahead of you.’

  ‘Sure nine hours a day draftin… Gosh I wish you’d go into this tile business with me.’

  Baldwin stopped at a corner and slapped his hand on the briefcase he was carrying. ‘Now Phil you know I’d be very glad to give you a hand in any way I could… But just at the moment my financial situation is terribly involved. I’ve gotten into some rather rash entanglements and Heaven knows how I’m going to get out of them… That’s why I cant have a scandal or a divorce or anything. You dont understand how complicatedly things interact… I couldnt take up anything new, not for a year at least. This war in Europe has made things very unsettled downtown. Anything’s liable to happen.’

  ‘All right. Good night George.’

  Sandbourne turned abruptly on his heel and walked down the avenue again. He was tired and his legs ached. It was almost dark. On the way back to the station the grimy brick and brownstone blocks dragged past monotonously like the days of his life.

  Under the skin of her temples iron clamps tighten till her head will mash like an egg; she begins to walk with long strides up and down the room that bristles with itching stuffiness; spotty colors of pictures, carpets, chairs wrap about her like a choking hot blanket. Outside the window the backyards are striped with blue and lilac and topaz of a rainy twilight. She opens the window. No time to get tight like the twilight, Stan said. The telephone reached out shivering beady tentacles of sound. She slams the window down. O hell cant they give you any peace?

  ‘Why Harry I didnt know you were back… Oh I wonder if I can… Oh yes I guess I can. Come along by after the theater… Isnt that wonderful? You must tell me all about it.’ She no sooner puts the receiver down than the bell clutches at her again. ‘Hello… No I dont… Oh yes maybe I do… When did you get back?’ She laughed a tinkling telephone laugh. ‘But Howard I’m terribly busy… Yes I am honestly… Have you been to the show? Well sometime come round after a performance… I’m so anxious to hear about your trip… you know… Goodby Howard.’

  A walk’ll make me feel better. She sits at her dressingtable and shakes her hair down about her shoulders. ‘It’s such a hellish nuisance, I’d like to cut it all off… spreads apace.
The shadow of white Death… Oughtnt to stay up so late, those dark circles under my eyes… And at the door, Invisible Corruption… If I could only cry; there are people who can cry their eyes out, really cry themselves blind… Anyway the divorce’ll go through…

  Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

  Whose sails were never to the tempest given

  Gosh it’s six o’clock already. She starts walking up and down the room again. I am borne darkly fearfully afar… The phone rings. ‘Hello… Yes this is Miss Oglethorpe… Why hello Ruth, why I haven’t seen you for ages, since Mrs Sunderland’s… Oh, do I’d love to see you. Come by and we’ll have a bite to eat on the way to the theater… It’s the third floor.’

  She rings off and gets a raincape out of a closet. The smell of furs and mothballs and dresses clings in her nostrils. She throws up the window again and breathes deep of the wet air full of the cold rot of autumn. She hears the burring boom of a big steamer from the river. Darkly, fearfully afar from this nonsensical life, from this fuzzy idiocy and strife; a man can take a ship for his wife, but a girl. The telephone is shiveringly beadily ringing, ringing.

  The buzzer burrs at the same time. Ellen presses the button to click the latch. ‘Hello… No, I’m very sorry I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me who it is. Why Larry Hopkins I thought you were in Tokyo… They havent moved you again have they? Why of course we must see each other… My dear it’s simply horrible but I’m all dated up for two weeks… Look I’m sort of crazy tonight. You call up tomorrow at twelve and I’ll try to shift things around… Why of course I’ve got to see you immediately you funny old thing.’… Ruth Prynne and Cassandra Wilkins come in shaking the water off their umbrellas. ‘Well goodby Larry… Why it’s so so sweet of both of you… Do take your things off for a second… Cassie wont you have dinner with us?’

  ‘I felt I just had to see you… It’s so wonderful about your wonderful success,’ says Cassie in a shaky voice. ‘And my dear I felt so terribly when I heard about Mr Emery. I cried and cried, didnt I Ruth?’