‘Oh did you know that unfortunate young man? That was a horrible thing,’ said Mrs Merivale. ‘So many horrible things have been happening these years… I’d almost forgotten about it.’
‘Yes I knew him,’ said Ellen.
The leg of lamb came in accompanied by fried eggplant, late corn, and sweet potatoes. ‘Do you know I think it is just terrible,’ said Mrs Merivale when she had done carving, ‘the way you fellows wont tell us any of your experiences over there… Lots of them must have been remarkably interesting. Jimmy I should think you’d write a book about your experiences.’
‘I have tried a few articles.’
‘When are they coming out?’
‘Nobody seems to want to print them… You see I differ radically in certain matters of opinion…’
‘Mrs Merivale it’s years since I’ve eaten such delicious sweet potatoes… These taste like yams.’
‘They are good… It’s just the way I have them cooked.’
‘Well it was a great war while it lasted,’ said Merivale.
‘Where were you Armistice night, Jimmy?’
‘I was in Jerusalem with the Red Cross. Isn’t that absurd?’
‘I was in Paris.’
‘So was I,’ said Ellen.
‘And so you were over there too Helena? I’m going to call you Helena eventually, so I might as well begin now… Isn’t that interesting? Did you and Jimmy meet over there?’
‘Oh no we were old friends… But we were thrown together a lot… We were in the same department of the Red Cross – the Publicity Department.’
‘A real war romance,’ chanted Mrs Merivale. ‘Isn’t that interesting?’
‘Now fellers it’s this way,’ shouted Joe O’Keefe, the sweat breaking out on his red face. ‘Are we going to put over this bonus proposition or aint we?… We fought for em didnt we, we cleaned up the squareheads, didnt we? And now when we come home we get the dirty end of the stick. No jobs… Our girls have gone and married other fellers… Treat us like a bunch o dirty bums and loafers when we ask for our just and legal and lawful compensation… the bonus. Are we goin to stand for it?… No. Are we goin to stand for a bunch of politicians treatin us like we was goin round to the back door to ask for a handout?… I ask you fellers…’
Feet stamped on the floor. ‘No.’ ‘To hell wid em,’ shouted voices… ‘Now I say to hell wid de politicians… We’ll carry our campaign to the country… to the great big generous bighearted American people we fought and bled and laid down our lives for.’
The long armory room roared with applause. The wounded men in the front row banged the floor with their crutches. ‘Joey’s a good guy,’ said a man without arms to a man with one eye and an artificial leg who sat beside him. ‘He is that Buddy.’ While they were filing out offering each other cigarettes, a man stood in the door calling out, ‘Committee meeting, Committee on Bonus.’
The four of them sat round a table in the room the Colonel had lent them. ‘Well fellers let’s have a cigar.’ Joe hopped over to the Colonel’s desk and brought out four Romeo and Juliets. ‘He’ll never miss em.’
‘Some little grafter I’ll say,’ said Sid Garnett stretching out his long legs.
‘Havent got a case of Scotch in there, have you Joey?’ said Bill Dougan.
‘Naw I’m not drinkin myself jus for the moment.’
‘I know where you kin get guaranteed Haig and Haig,’ put in Segal cockily – ‘before the war stuff for six dollars a quart.’
‘An where are we goin to get the six dollars for crissake?’
‘Now look here fellers,’ said Joe, sitting on the edge of the table, ‘let’s get down to brass tacks… What we’ve got to do is raise a fund from the gang and anywhere else we can… Are we agreed about that?’
‘Sure we are, you tell em,’ said Dougan.
‘I know lot of old fellers even, thinks the boys are gettin a raw deal… We’ll call it the Brooklyn Bonus Agitation Committee associated with the Sheamus O’Rielly Post of the A. L.… No use doin anythin unless you do it up right… Now are yous guys wid me or aint yer?’
‘Sure we are Joey… You tell em an we’ll mark time.’
‘Well Dougan’s got to be president cause he’s the best lookin.’
Dougan went crimson and began to stammer.
‘Oh you seabeach Apollo,’ jeered Garnett.
‘And I think I can do best as treasurer because I’ve had more experience.’
‘Cause you’re the crookedest you mean,’ said Segal under his breath.
Joe stuck out his jaw. ‘Look here Segal are you wid us or aint yer? You’d better come right out wid it now if you’re not.’
‘Sure, cut de comedy,’ said Dougan. ‘Joey’s de guy to put dis ting trough an you know it… Cut de comedy… If you dont like it you kin git out.’
Segal rubbed his thin hooked nose. ‘I was juss jokin gents, I didn’t mean no harm.’
‘Look here,’ went on Joe angrily, ‘what do you think I’m givin up my time for?… Why I turned down fifty dollars a week only yesterday, aint that so, Sid? You seen me talkin to de guy.’
‘Sure I did Joey.’
‘Oh pipe down fellers,’ said Segal. ‘I was just stringin Joey along.’
‘Well I think Segal you ought to be secretary, cause you know about office work…’
‘Office work?’
‘Sure,’ said Joe puffing his chest out. ‘We’re goin to have desk space in the office of a guy I know… It’s all fixed. He’s goin to let us have it free till we get a start. An we’re goin to have office stationery. Cant get nowhere in this world without presentin things right.’
‘An where do I come in?’ asked Sid Garnett.
‘You’re the committee, you big stiff.’
After the meeting Joe O’Keefe walked whistling down Atlantic Avenue. It was a crisp night; he was walking on springs. There was a light in Dr Gordon’s office. He rang. A whitefaced man in a white jacket opened the door.
‘Hello Doc.’
‘Is that you O’Keefe? Come on in my boy.’ Something in the doctor’s voice clutched like a cold hand at his spine.
‘Well did your test come out all right doc?’
‘All right… positive all right.’
‘Christ.’
‘Dont worry too much about it, my boy, we’ll fix you up in a few months.’
‘Months.’
‘Why at a conservative estimate fiftyfive percent of the people you meet on the street have a syphilitic taint.’
‘It’s not as if I’d been a damn fool. I was careful over there.’
‘Inevitable in wartime…’
‘Now I wish I’d let loose… Oh the chances I passed up.’
The doctor laughed. ‘You probably wont even have any symptoms… It’s just a question of injections. I’ll have you sound as a dollar in no time… Do you want to take a shot now? I’ve got it all ready.’
O’Keefe’s hands went cold. ‘Well I guess so,’ he forced a laugh. ‘I guess I’ll be a goddam thermometer by the time you’re through with me.’ The doctor laughed creakily. ‘Full up of arsenic and mercury eh… That’s it.’
The wind was blowing up colder. His teeth were chattering. Through the rasping castiron night he walked home. Fool to pass out that way when he stuck me. He could still feel the sickening lunge of the needle. He gritted his teeth. After this I got to have some luck… I got to have some luck.
Two stout men and a lean man sit at a table by a window. The light of a zinc sky catches brightedged glints off glasses, silverware, oystershells, eyes. George Baldwin has his back to the window. Gus McNiel sits on his right, and Densch on his left. When the waiter leans over to take away the empty oystershells he can see through the window, beyond the graystone parapet, the tops of a few buildings jutting like the last trees at the edge of a cliff and the tinfoil reaches of the harbor littered with ships. ‘I’m lecturin you this time, George… Lord knows you used to lecture me enough in the old days. Honest
it’s rank foolishness,’ Gus McNiel is saying. ‘… It’s rank foolishness to pass up the chance of a political career at your time of life… There’s no man in New York better fitted to hold office…’
‘Looks to me as if it were your duty, Baldwin,’ says Densch in a deep voice, taking his tortoiseshell glasses out of a case and applying them hurriedly to his nose.
The waiter has brought a large planked steak surrounded by bulwarks of mushrooms and chopped carrots and peas and frilled browned mashed potatoes. Densch straightens his glasses and stares attentively at the planked steak.
‘A very handsome dish Ben, a very handsome dish I must say… It’s just this Baldwin… as I look at it… the country is going through a dangerous period of reconstruction… the confusion attendant on the winding up of a great conflict… the bankruptcy of a continent… bolshevism and subversive doctrines rife… America…’ he says, cutting with the sharp polished steel knife into the thick steak, rare and well peppered. He chews a mouthful slowly. ‘America,’ he begins again, ‘is in the position of taking over the receivership of the world. The great principles of democracy, of that commercial freedom upon which our whole civilization depends are more than ever at stake. Now as at no other time we need men of established ability and unblemished integrity in public office, particularly in the offices requiring expert judicial and legal knowledge.’
‘That’s what I was tryin to tell ye the other day George.’
‘But that’s all very well Gus, but how do you know I’d be elected… After all it would mean giving up my law practice for a number of years, it would mean…’
‘You just leave that to me… George you’re elected already.’
‘An extraordinarily good steak,’ says Densch, ‘I must say… No but newspaper talk aside… I happen to know from a secret and reliable source that there is a subversive plot among undesirable elements in this country… Good God think of the Wall Street bomb outrage… I must say that the attitude of the press has been gratifying in one respect… in fact we’re approaching a national unity undreamed of before the war.’
‘No but George,’ breaks in Gus, ‘put it this way… The publicity value of a political career’d kinder bolster up your law practice.’
‘It would and it wouldn’t Gus.’
Densch is unrolling the tinfoil off a cigar. ‘At any rate it’s a grand sight.’ He takes off his glasses and cranes his thick neck to look out into the bright expanse of harbor that stretches full of masts, smoke, blobs of steam, dark oblongs of barges, to the hazeblurred hills of Staten Island.
Bright flakes of cloud were scaling off a sky of crushing indigo over the Battery where groups of dingy darkdressed people stood round the Ellis Island landing station and the small boat dock waiting silently for something. Frayed smoke of tugs and steamers hung low and trailed along the opaque glassgreen water. A threemasted schooner was being towed down the North River. A newhoisted jib flopped awkwardly in the wind. Down the harbor loomed taller, taller a steamer head on, four red stacks packed into one, creamy superstructure gleaming. ‘Mauretania just acomin in twentyfour hours lyte,’ yelled the man with the telescope and fieldglasses… ‘Tyke a look at the Mauretania, farstest ocean greyhound, twentyfour hours lyte.’ The Mauretania stalked like a skyscraper through the harbor shipping. A rift of sunlight sharpened the shadow under the broad bridge, along the white stripes of upper decks, glinted in the rows of portholes. The smokestacks stood apart, the hull lengthened. The black relentless hull of the Mauretania pushing puffing tugs ahead of it cut like a long knife into the North River.
A ferry was leaving the immigrant station, a murmur rustled through the crowd that packed the edges of the wharf. ‘Deportees… It’s the communists the Department of Justice is having deported… deportees… Reds… It’s the Reds they are deporting.’ The ferry was out of the slip. In the stern a group of men stood still tiny like tin soldiers. ‘They are sending the Reds back to Russia.’ A handkerchief waved on the ferry, a red handkerchief. People tiptoed gently to the edge of the walk, tiptoeing, quiet like in a sickroom.
Behind the backs of the men and women crowding to the edge of the water, gorillafaced chipontheshoulder policemen walked back and forth nervously swinging their billies.
‘They are sending the Reds back to Russia… Deportees… Agitators… Undesirables.’… Gulls wheeled crying. A catsup-bottle bobbed gravely in the little ground-glass waves. A sound of singing came from the ferryboat getting small, slipping away across the water.
C’est la lutte finale, groupons-nous et demain
L’Internationale sera le genre humain.
‘Take a look at the deportees… Take a look at the undesirable aliens,’ shouted the man with the telescopes and fieldglasses. A girl’s voice burst out suddenly, ‘Arise prisoners of starvation,’ ‘Sh… They could pull you for that.’
The singing trailed away across the water. At the end of a marbled wake the ferryboat was shrinking into haze. International… shall be the human race. The singing died. From up the river came the longdrawn rattling throb of a steamer leaving dock. Gulls wheeled above the dark dingydressed crowd that stood silently looking down the bay.
2 Nickelodeon
A nickel before midnight buys tomorrow… holdup headlines, a cup of coffee in the automat, a ride to Woodlawn, Fort Lee, Flatbush… A nickel in the slot buys chewing gum. Somebody Loves Me, Baby Divine, You’re in Kentucky Juss Shu’ As You’re Born… bruised notes of foxtrots go limping out of doors, blues, waltzes (We’d Danced the Whole Night Through) trail gyrating tinsel memories… On Sixth Avenue on Fourteenth there are still flyspecked stereopticons where for a nickel you can peep at yellowed yesterdays. Beside the peppering shooting gallery you stoop into the flicker A HOT TIME, THE BACHELOR’S SURPRISE, THE STOLEN GARTER… wastebasket of tornup daydreams… A nickel before midnight buys our yesterdays.
Ruth Prynne came out of the doctor’s office pulling the fur tight round her throat. She felt faint. Taxi. As she stepped in she remembered the smell of cosmetics and toast and the littered hallway at Mrs Sunderlands. Oh I cant go home just yet. ‘Driver go to the Old English Tea Room on Fortieth Street please.’ She opened her long green leather purse and looked in. My God, only a dollar a quarter a nickel and two pennies. She kept her eyes on the figures flickering on the taximeter. She wanted to break down and cry… The way money goes. The gritty cold wind rasped at her throat when she got out. ‘Eighty cents miss… I haven’t any change miss.’ ‘All right keep the change.’ Heavens only thirtytwo cents… Inside it was warm and smelled cozily of tea and cookies.
‘Why Ruth, if it isn’t Ruth… Dearest come to my arms after all these years.’ It was Billy Waldron. He was fatter and whiter than he used to be. He gave her a stagy hug and kissed her on the forehead. ‘How are you? Do tell me… How distinguée you look in that hat.’
‘I’ve just been having my throat X-rayed,’ she said with a giggle. ‘I feel like the wrath of God.’
‘What are you doing Ruth? I havent heard of you for ages.’
‘Put me down as a back number, hadn’t you?’ She caught his words up fiercely.
‘After that beautiful performance you gave in The Orchard Queen…’
‘To tell the truth Billy I’ve had a terrible run of bad luck.’
‘Oh I know everything is dead.’
‘I have an appointment to see Belasco next week… Something may come of that.’
‘Why I should say it might Ruth… Are you expecting someone?’
‘No… Oh Billy you’re still the same old tease… Dont tease me this afternoon. I dont feel up to it.’
‘You poor dear sit down and have a cup of tea with me.’
‘I tell you Ruth it’s a terrible year. Many a good trouper will pawn the last link of his watch chain this year… I suppose you’re going the rounds.’
‘Dont talk about it… If I could only get my throat all right… A thing like that wears you down.’
‘Remember the old days
at the Somerville Stock?’
‘Billy could I ever forget them?… Wasnt it a scream?’
‘The last time I saw you Ruth was in The Butterfly on the Wheel in Seattle. I was out front…’
‘Why didn’t you come back and see me?’
‘I was still angry at you I suppose… It was my lowest moment. In the valley of shadow… melancholia… neurasthenia. I was stranded penniless… That night I was a little under the influence, you understand. I didn’t want you to see the beast in me.’
Ruth poured herself a fresh cup of tea. She suddenly felt feverishly gay. ‘Oh but Billy havent you forgotten all that?… I was a foolish little girl then… I was afraid that love or marriage or anything like that would interfere with my art, you understand… I was so crazy to succeed.’
‘Would you do the same thing again?’
‘I wonder…’
‘How does it go?… The moving finger writes and having writ moves on…’
‘Something about Nor all your tears wash out a word of it… But Billy,’ she threw back her head and laughed, ‘I thought you were getting ready to propose to me all over again… Ou my throat.’
‘Ruth I wish you werent taking that X-ray treatment… I’ve heard it’s very dangerous. Dont let me alarm you about it my dear… but I have heard of cases of cancer contracted that way.’
‘That’s nonsense Billy… That’s only when X-rays are improperly used, and it takes years of exposure… No I think this Dr Warner’s a remarkable man.’
Later, sitting in the uptown express in the subway, she still could feel his soft hand patting her gloved hand. ‘Goodby little girl, God bless you,’ he’d said huskily. He’s gotten to be a ham actor if there ever was one, something was jeering inside her all the while. ‘Thank heavens you will never know.’… Then with a sweep of his broadbrimmed hat and a toss of his silky white hair, as if he were playing in Monsieur Beaucaire, he had turned and walked off among the crowd up Broadway. I may be down on my luck, but I’m not all ham inside the way he is… Cancer he said. She looked up and down the car at the joggling faces opposite her. Of all those people one of them must have it. FOUR OUT OF EVERY FIVE GET… Silly, that’s not cancer. EX-LAX, NUJOL, O’SULLIVAN’S… She put her hand to her throat. Her throat was terribly swollen, her throat throbbed feverishly. Maybe it was worse. It is something alive that grows in flesh, eats all your life, leaves you horrible, rotten… The people opposite stared straight ahead of them, young men and young women, middleaged people, green faces in the dingy light, under the sourcolored advertisements. FOUR OUT OF EVERY FIVE… A trainload of jiggling corpses, nodding and swaying as the express roared shrilly towards Ninetysixth Street. At Ninetysixth she had to change for the local.
Manhattan Transfer Page 29
