by John Sanford
“Because if you are, I can go across the hall. This isn’t the only agency.”
“That outfit over there couldn’t land you in a lumber-camp if you were a blue ox. Stick to me, Johnson, and sooner or later I’ll get you exploited.”
“Something with a future, remember. No piker-stuff for the Boy Wonder of Harlem.”
“The only thing with a future these days is a calendar.”
“I wouldn’t even swear for that,” Dan said. “Hoover might try an eight-month year.”
“You’re knocking one of the two men I love,” the man said. “The other is Calvin K. Coolidge. Cal set things up for me, and Herb made me a success. First I had to ream out the barrel for everybody who could stand up for eight hours without wires, and now I do a land-office business in finks and scabs. Are you a fink? If so, I’ll put you to work for a princely bagatelle.”
“What a way to make a living!” Dan said. “A combination of pawnbroking and slave-trading, with a dash of pimping thrown in to make it unique. I take my hat off to you: you’ve found the bottom of the bottom. You could study all your life and never hit on a business that made more of a business out of misery. Observe the bared head, sir.”
“Forget about misery,” the man said. “Misery has nothing to do with this business or any other. The long and short of it is, there’s a scarcity of jobs and an overproduction of people, and with a situation like that, Capitalism has only two ways out: it can make more jobs, which is socialistic, or it can kill more people, which is suicidal. Nice to talk to you. Drop you a card if.”
WE’VE GOT A LOT OF BLACK STARS NOW
In the spring evening, they had walked across Harlem and Morningside Heights to the Drive, and there they stood looking out over the Hudson. A soft air ran downstream, jarring icicles of light that hung from the Jersey shore, and below them a fat ferry waded toward Fort Lee.
“I’ve been saving something for you, kid,” Mig said. “In the fall, I’ll be quitting my job and going far away across the sea.”
Dan looked at his friend for a moment before speaking, and when he spoke, all he could say was, “I’ll miss you, Mig.”
“I’ll miss three people—and my father and mother are two of them.”
“It’ll be lonely here,” Dan said. “The world is full of faces, but if you know of one you won’t see among them, none of the others seems to count. It’ll be lonely, Mig, but over and above that, I’ll worry, because there’s no good for you in Italy.”
“I don’t remember saying anything about Italy.”
Again Dan turned to Mig, and again there was an interval before he could speak. “My God,” he said, “don’t tell me it’s Russia!”
Mig laughed. “You say that like Italy was safer,” he said.
“I only meant to show surprise, as if you’d told me you were going to be married, but come to think of it, what’s there to be surprised about? You’ve been engaged for a long time.”
“Ever since they killed the wops in Massachusetts.”
“I could’ve guessed that,” Dan said. “But tell me, what’re you going to do over there?”
“Same thing as over here—presswork. They get out a magazine, International Literature, that appears in different languages. I managed to talk them out of a job in the bureau handling the English edition. Sound good?”
“Couldn’t be better,” Dan said.
“I got to thinking that with me leaving the plant here, there’ll be an opening you just might plug. What do you say I bring up your name?”
“What good would it do?” Dan said. “There must be hundreds out of work in the printing-trade, and all of them would qualify ahead of me. Besides, I don’t carry a card, and with things what they are, I doubt like hell that I could get one, and even if I could, where would I raise the fee?”
“I’ll loan you the money, and you can pay it back out of wages.”
“How much do you think I’d get?” Dan said.
“Well, I’ve been making forty.”
“They wouldn’t pay me any forty.”
“Naturally, but whatever you got, it’d be more than zero.”
“I’d have to get enough to chip in at home ….”
“You chipping in much right now?”
“… And have something left for myself.”
“I honest to Christ ought to get sore, Danny,” Mig said. “Here you been going along for months, living off your old man and not ponying up a nickel for your keep, and now, with a chance to carry your weight, you give me some razmataz about what’s going to be left for you. What’re you waiting for—somebody to tap you in the street and say, ‘You’re just the guy I been looking for to run my railroad.’?”
“The loan is what bothers me. Hell knows how long you’d have to wait for the money.”
“If I could afford it, I’d make you a gift of it.”
“I guess you would, Mig, but I’ll be damned if I know why.”
“You know why, kid.”
“Two-three years ago I’d’ve known, but not now.”
“You’re no different. You’re the same guy I slipped that throw-away to at De Witt.”
“Haven’t you ever thought that maybe this is the real Dan Johnson? Haven’t you ever thought that maybe the little man had only one flash in him, like a match?”
“I read something once,” Mig said, “and I liked it enough to memorize it ‘… The way this country started out, everybody thought it was going to be the greatest place on earth, with liberty and justice for all, but we got less and less fine things and more and more cheap things, and every time one of them happened, a white star in our flag turned black. We’ve got a lot of black stars now….’”
“Ah, forget it!” Dan said. “Forget it!”
“‘…And it can’t go on much longer, or we’ll run out of white ones, and then it won’t be a flag any more, but a rag so dirty that no decent man will wipe his feet on it, let alone take his hat off to it or die for it….’”
“Jesus Christ, Mig, quit!”
The ferry, having crossed the river, was recrossing now, and the wind had played itself out, leaving the slow-moving water flat.
“The guy that wrote those words isn’t fooling me,” Mig said. “He’s fooling himself, Mr. Lovejoy.”
EVER IN BANKRUPTCY?
“You here again?” the man said.
Dan said, “I wanted you to know I’ve been offered a job.”
“What doing and for how much?”
“Back in the old print-shop. Twenty a week, maybe.”
“You should’ve grabbed a broom and swept like all get-out.”
“This didn’t happen to be a broom-job.”
“I don’t care what kind of a job it was. You should’ve grabbed something and made a blur with it.”
“I have a little while to think it over.”
“So has the Boss. It cuts both ways.”
“If he could think, he wouldn’t be the Boss.”
“That idea is going to be paid for with a lot of socialist blood.”
“What else’ve we got to pay with?”
“Closing time,” the man said, and leaving the office, they went downstairs and walked northward along Sixth Avenue. “Nice afternoon.”
“If you like afternoons,” Dan said.
“Holy Smoke, don’t you even like the weather?”
“I’m afraid I don’t like anything, myself included and myself least.”
“A natural aversion,” the man said, “but if you saw more people, you’d get over it. How about supper downtown tonight?”
“I’m flat broke.”
“I’m loaded.”
“What’m I supposed to do—watch you eat?”
“I ought to kick your ass for that,” the man said. “Mr. Johnson, will you do Mr. Peterson the honor of being his guest, you son-of-a-bitch?”
“I always wondered what your name was,” Dan said.
They ate in an Italian restaurant off Longacre Square, and afterward, through coff
ee-flavored smoke, Peterson said, “Kid, how’d you like to go to work?”
“Right now, this bulging gut of mine says, ‘Why worry?’”
“What’ll it say when it’s lank again?”
“Oh, it’ll mumble something under its breath. ‘Capitalist slavery,’ it’ll say. ‘Unequal distribution.’”
“A nice soft job,” Peterson said. “Thirty a week, starting Monday. Hours nine to six, Saturdays nine to noon. No chance of advancement.”
“If it weren’t for the half-Saturdays, I’d say somebody put in a call for a bouncer in a whorehouse.”
“Mr. Peterson wants a clerk in his agency.”
“By God,” Dan said, “somebody does want a bouncer in a whore-house!”
“Life is a whorehouse,” Peterson said.
[You remembered a Negro boy watching you eat a sundae and trying to eat it himself, trying to eat it with his mind through a sheet of plate-glass, and you remembered his defeat as he turned away, and you remembered, because it’d been part of your own defeat, that all you’d been able to do was abandon the sundae and save him a token of a feast gone sour, a maraschino cherry—and now, you thought, you were about to eat your sundaes before millions who would be all eyes with longing, and this time there’d be no turning away, neither you from them nor they from you, and there’d be no tokens to save for the beaten, because even those would have to be eaten before their unbroken stare.] Dan laughed.
“That’s a laugh with cold teeth,” Peterson said. “What’s killing you?”
“I’m killing myself—by filling your God damn job!”
“Come Monday, kid, you’re going to be God yourself. Don’t take the name in vain.”
TWO AUDIENCES WITH GOD
A dim and disembodied hand rose to rap against the frosted pane of a door. “Come in,” Dan said, and a young woman entered his office.” What can I do for you, miss?”
“They told me outside that this is where I make my application.”
“Sit down, please,” Dan said, and drawing the form-pad to-ward him, he looked up at the applicant. “Last name?”
“Paul.”
“First name?”
“Genevieve.”
“Middle initial?”
“None.”
“Date of birth?”
“April 6th, 1910.”
“Father’s name?”
[Vincent Paul was born on a hundred-acre patent near Ticonderoga, and during the seventy-odd years of his life, only once did he travel beyond a hard day’s walk from his own land. Eighteen years old when his father died with the deed in his hand, he pried the stiff fingers loose and fell to work to plow his earth to hell-and-gone. No square yard escaped the blade where a team could tread, no side-hill, no ditch, no stone-strewn swale, and the lawns went under, and the spaces between the buildings, and even the faces of dead ancestors were turned to make feed for seed—and in the end, the house, the privy, the crib, the silo, the barn, all floated like coops and crates on a groundswell of green. “As the feller puts it,” Paul would say, “I only want the land that touches mine,” and in thirty years, his hundred acres became seven hundred, a great bulging belly that he rode with far more passion than ever he rode the bellies of turnpike tarts or those, old and new, of neighbors’ wives. But there was one kind of leaf it had never yielded him, one kind of fruit it had never borne in season, and he grew to be fifty before he realized that some day he would end a planting by being planted himself, to live on in worms, in grass, in a jet of wheat, and now he would say, “My trouble is, I got the fifties,” One summer evening, therefore, he unlocked his Bible and turned to the Family Record for the forgotten name of a female cousin in the Fort Edward district, and in the morning he set out on the sole pilgrimage of his life: on his return, in a fortnight, his wife was some days gone with child. The child when born, was called Genevieve, and the wife, when delivered, was buried in an alley of pine-stumps too narrow to be plowed. And so Paul recovered from the fifties only to catch the sixties, a sickness he could never shake off, and his seven hundred acres shrank piece by piece to the original patent, and then to half, and finally to a house-lot that he stumbled over with a hoe, singing a one-line song to himself, always the same little one-line song—“Lord” he would sing, “I wish a crop’d grow like weeds”—and the Lord sent him the seventies, and he died.]
“If we find something,” Dan said, “we’ll let you know.”
The girl said, “Thank you,” and went to the door, but at the door she turned, saying, “I’ve got to get a job.”
“We’ll do our best to place you, Miss Paul.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “I’ve got to get a job.”
“We receive twenty applications a day from typists, Miss Paul. I’m sure you realize that there are more typists than jobs. We can’t make jobs; we can only fill vacancies.”
“I’m listed with four agencies, and they all say the same thing. What’m I to do? I answer every ad, and wherever the place is, I walk to save the carfare. Even so, I only eat once a day. When I came to New York, I had just enough to see me through business school, but by skimping on everything, I’ve managed to make it last. It’ll go just so far, though, and that’ll be the end. I only eat once a day! Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Dan said.
“You don’t understand at all. You sit there, looking at me and nodding your head, but you’re not really listening to me; you’re just waiting for me to go away. You’ve heard all this before—twenty times a day, you said. When I tell you I’ve only had fourteen meals in the last two weeks, you hear the words, but they have no meaning.”
“I’m very sorry, Miss Paul.”
“Another week, and I’ll have nothing, not even one meal a day.”
“I wish I could promise you something definite, but these’re tough times, and I’d be lying if I made any promises at all. Don’t you think it might be a good idea to go home till things get better?”
“I have no home,” she said. “I’ve got to get a job, and I’ll do anything for it. Do you understand that? I’ll do anything!”
“There’s nothing that you have to do, Miss Paul. We’re as eager to place you as you are to be placed. That’s how we pay our rent. We don’t charge for listing you, only for putting you to work.”
“I’ll do anything to get a job—anything!”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘anything.’ Why do you say that?”
“I’ll do anything!” she said. “My God, don’t you even understand me?”
* * *
“Last name?”
“Hill.”
“First name?”
“John.”
“Middle initial?”
“C.”
“C for…?”
“Carlos.”
“Date of birth?”
“October 14th, 1906.”
“Father’s name?”
“Do you have to know all this?”
“I guess so,” Dan said. “It’s on the blank.”
“His name was Lloyd—Lloyd Hill.”
[A one-windowed room in an office-building on Park Row contained a five-dollar desk, three camp-chairs, a law-school diploma framed in oak, and a sectional bookcase holding an incomplete set of Hun’s New York Law Reports. Lloyd Hill, the tenant of the one-windowed room, had been disbarred for maintenance in 1905, and his clients—not some, but all, even the two whose actions he had financed—had called for their papers and gone elsewhere forever with their custom. Lawyer Hill was unaware of his permanent ruin, and in the belief that his clientele would return with his reinstatement, he filed petition after petition with the Appellate Division, always hopefully but always vainly, until at length one of his numerous pleas found the Presiding Justice of the Court in the mood for a brief speech to his associates. The speech was as follows: “Every three months, gentlemen, this poor devil presents us with one of these documents. This one now before us must be the tenth or twelfth, and
suddenly I find that I can no longer face the prospect of more. There are no extenuating circumstances in the case, and as we well know, the record is perfectly clear on the score of the petitioner’s admission of guilt. Nevertheless, I’d rather resign from this Bench than read another of his feeble and begging affidavits. They’re poorly written and loosely reasoned, and they promise nothing that every other wretch in his fix hasn’t promised before, and although I’m certain that no good can come of it, I deeply desire to give him a second chance. I’ve never spoken to you in this manner, but perhaps from that fact alone you can deduce my motive: pity, gentlemen, pure and simple pity. I move that we reinstate this discredit to our profession. He touches me, God damn it!” In the year 1908, Lawyer Hill was restored to good standing, and only then did he see the end of the track. It took him three more years to reach it: three years of letting himself into his one-window room at nine sharp; three years of staring at the peeling buckram of his Hun’s Reports while he waited for clients who never came; three years of putting on his derby at twelve sharp and going around the corner to Max’s Busy Bee for a meat sandwich and a cup of coffee; three years of closing the office at six sharp and starting for home, two rooms in a boarding-house on West 122nd Street; three years of rocking a rocker and talking to his wife until ten sharp; and three years of brushing his teeth and going to bed. On a summer afternoon in 1911, the police were summoned to the one-window room to remove his body: after nine hundred trips to Park Row, after nine hundred meat sandwiches at the Busy Bee, Lawyer Hill had come to know that he was looking upon his diploma for the last time, that he would never again sit in a boarding-house rocker, that in a moment or two he would put his derby hat on his head and blow two holes through each. A policeman said, “I wonder why he wore the hat” but no one answered, because no one knew: not even Lawyer Hill had known.]
IT IS TIME FOR THEE, LORD, to WORK
“From a rack on his desk, Dan took a card on which were printed the trade-name and address of the agency and the company motto: If any would not work, neither should he eat. On the reverse side were three dotted lines, each headed by a single word: after DATE, he wrote November 18,1931; after TO, Caribbean Fruit Growers; and after INTRODUCING, Miss Genevieve Paul. Then, putting the card in his pocket, he turned out the office lights, went downstairs, and boarded a southbound streetcar.
