Walking in. Psyche saw a large, ill-lit hall, innocent of carpeting, or of furniture other than a single wooden bench. Her glance encompassed a circle of closed doors and a staircase that mounted to a landing before disappearing in a further upward climb. Nowhere was there any visible movement, but she received an impression of hidden, subdued activity more oppressive than reassuring.
The girl opened a door on the left. “Wait in here. I’ll go and find somebody.”
Still carrying her suitcase, Psyche went into the room thus discovered, and, hearing the door close behind her, fought an almost ungovernable impulse to wrench it open again, to escape from what, to her troubled mind, seemed little better than a prison.
The room was small, and a yellow blind, drawn nearly to the bottom of the single window, threw an unhealthy saffron light over walls badly in need of repapering. Worn brown linoleum covered the floor; a brown repeated in a scarred desk, a monumental filing cabinet, and a regimentation of wooden chairs. On the high ceiling an uneasy conference of house-flies clustered, from time to time dispatching emissaries to explore the room below.
Sitting down on the edge of one of the chairs facing the desk. Psyche thought, “I should hate Nick for this.” Then, her mind a determined blank, her eyes fixed on the exact centre of the yellow blind, she waited.
Miss Smith, an unwilling member of the underpaid, overworked permanent staff of the Community Shelter, was, when informed that still another stray needed her attention, in what was even for her a very bad frame of mind. The volunteer who ought to have relieved her at tea-time had failed to put in an appearance. Two of the homeless girls who should, in her opinion, have fawned upon her in grateful humility, had chosen instead to be insolent. And the unseasonal heat, added to these annoyances, was producing behind her narrow, lined forehead the initial symptoms of what she was wont to refer to as a sick headache.
An embittered spinster, the dreams she might once have nourished long since turned to gall and wormwood by her own unfortunate disposition, her sole qualification for the job she held was the fact that her father had been a Presbyterian minister. A man who had, when he died, taken his pension with him, leaving his ageing daughter with nothing to offer the world other than a familiarity with-r-and presumed interest in—charitable undertakings. Actually, the only charity connected with her work as she practised it was the mistaken impulse that had prompted someone to bestow it upon her. She had accepted the position without gratitude, looking upon the necessity to do so as simply a further injustice in a life made up of injustices. That she was, and always had been, more handicapped by selfishness than by lack of money or plainness of appearance, she neither could nor would see. Unconsciously hating herself for being physically unattractive, she hated all women in degrees determined almost entirely by the extent to which they compared favourably with herself.
Descending the stairs on her way to the office and the more stagnant warmth of the lower floor, she felt as if she were progressing downward through suffocating layers of injustice. And the soft, even slap of her large, rubber-soled shoes on the bare treads found a rhythm with her slow pulsing dislike of this existence, this place, this moment, and the immediate task ahead of her.
Wishing to startle, to seize and keep the upper hand in an interview which had robbed her of the solace of solitary self-pity, she opened and closed the door of the small, stuffy office in one sharp movement, and was already seated behind the desk by the time Psyche had risen to her feet.
For a moment they faced one another without speaking, the lovely young girl, and the sour, thin-mouthed spinster, and an instant mutual dislike was born of that moment.
“Sit down.” Miss Smith’s voice was dry without being crisp; harsh without being forceful.
Slowly Psyche sat down again, but her chin remained tilted upwards, and her straight, supple back was unrelaxed.
Without introducing herself, or making any pretense of welcome, Miss Smith drew a block of printed forms toward her. “You have no home?”
“No,” Psyche told her.
“Any relations?”
“No.”
“Howold are you?”
Psyche hesitated. Was she eighteen or nineteen? This was the time of year when she could not state her age with even passable certainty.
Watching her. Miss Smith found her beauty a personal affront, and her pride of carriage a deliberate insult. “Please don’t lie.”
With an extraordinary effort of will, Psyche kept her temper. “I’m nineteen,” she said evenly.
“Your name?”
“Psyche.”
Miss Smith’s prim lips drew together in a hard, tight line. She had been exposed to such unlegalized fancies as Rosalind, Juanita, and Marigold. And most of Hollywood’s first names had, at one time or another, been paraded before her acid disbelief. This, however, was an apparent affectation which, to her somewhat confused way of thinking, bordered on the blasphemous.
“Your last name. And have the goodness to make it a little more credible.”
“You mean?” Psyche asked, and her voice was not as even as it had been. “I mean I want your last name.”
Again Psyche hesitated. She had borne the name Moran long enough to get used to it, to feel that since Butch and Mag had willingly given it to her, she had some right to it. Yet as Maggie Moran she had never felt she was herself, and here and now she knew it was intensely important to be herself, Psyche, and no one else.
“I don’t know my last name.”
Miss Smith, evaluating her direct blue gaze, and the intelligent clean-drawn contours of her face with the bright hair waving back from it, could not help knowing that there was some quite unusual discrepancy in the situation before her. Deliberately refusing this knowledge and the opportunity it offered, her conscience the vassal of a mind small in every way, she continued to hew the strict line of bureaucratic procedure.
Her small eyes flickering from Psyche to the form in front of her, she both wrote, and said, “Illegitimate.”
“What does that mean?”
It had been quite unnecessary to say the word aloud. In doing so, she had not expected the added, and venomous pleasure of elucidating. “It means that your mother and your father were not married.”
Psyche’s anger brought fresh colour to cheeks already flushed by the heat. “You have no damned right to say that!”
Miss Smith felt almost happy. “You will either go, or apologize at once for speaking so rudely.”
Alarm cooled Psyche’s fury, and then as quickly faded, leaving her quiet and emotionless. She looked at the woman opposite her, at the mean mouth and antagonistic eyes. She looked around the depressingly ugly room. She looked up at the ceaselessly circling flies. And she knew that it was not here, whatever it was she needed; that there was nothing for her here, and never would be. That she had been maliciously steered toward this conclusion, she realized quite clearly, but this did not matter, for it was, she knew, a conclusion she would inevitably have reached by herself. In one sense she had never been independent; in another, and more important sense, she had always been entirely independent, and she intended to remain so.
With a sweep of her arm, she gathered her belongings together, and getting up, walked swiftly to the door. On the threshold she paused, turned, and said distinctly, “You bitch!”
Then she was crossing the still empty, still oppressive hall; was opening, undetained, the door with the false knocker on it; was going down the walk to the street and a future that was, as the sun sank toward a western horizon serrated by a cubist pattern of chimney-pots, now without signposts of any kind at all.
7 THE PROSTITUTE
1
BEL was, in spite of her lack of height, a noticeable figure as she walked through the southern entrance of the park at sunset. Horizontal bars of sunlight struck ruddy sparks from the black curls beneath her wide-brimmed black hat, and turned her red dress, tightly moulded onto a plump well-corseted shape, to flame colour. Even her
face, beneath a thick coat of make-up that disguised neither her age nor her hard-bitten good humour, was transiently ruddier than artifice had made it, more alive than those of the loungers who watched her make her way along the gravelled paths.
Walking slowly in fabulously high-heeled pumps, she exchanged greetings, a casual word or a flick of a short carmine-tipped hand, with the men who still sprawled at the day’s end on the wooden benches or on the short, scorched grass. Mentally she classified them, and quite correctly, as bums, but they were familiar to her by sight as she was to them, and Bel was no snob.
Psyche’s was the only head that did not turn, even when Bel seated herself on the other end of the bench on which she was sitting. Her gaze travelling between the gnarled trunks of two huge oaks, between the straight spears of a tall iron fence, and across the street beyond, she kept her eyes rivetted—as she had for more than an hour—on the front door of the Community Shelter.
She had never known, and would never know again, a despair equal to that which overwhelmed her in the moment when she discovered the loss of her purse.
When she had walked away from the Shelter, she had begun at once to marshal her thoughts. She felt remarkably self-assured, strengthened rather than the reverse by her passage-at-arms with the social worker. Her first consideration, she knew, must be a roof over her head, and in order to find this she must get a newspaper. Very few newspapers had ever penetrated as far as the shack, but she had read these few over and over again, the classified advertisements in their own way as interesting to her as the usually out-of-date news. Pleased with herself that she should know what to do in this present crisis, she decided that room and board were what she wanted, and that, ignorant as she was of the city, it would pay her to use a taxi. Did cities have maps? They must have. She would buy one, if she could, when she bought a newspaper. Automatically, scarcely conscious that she was doing so, she felt for the shoulder-bag containing the money which would make these things possible.
The knowledge that she no longer had it, and a precise memory of exactly where she had left it, smote her almost simultaneously. She had put it down after paying the taxi-driver—and had not picked it up again. As if it were there in front of her, she saw it lying on the worn leather upholstery, and unconsciously reached out in front of her in a vain attempt to pluck it back out of time already three-quarters of an hour distant, while she thought frantically, “Oh, God—oh, God help me, what will I do now!”
All the spreading noise and movement of the city, held in abeyance by her previous preoccupation, seemed to strike her then, to batter her with the manifold fists of a menace against which she was no longer capable of defending herself.
Shackled by her own awful helplessness, she stood, as if in the middle of a living nightmare, unaware of the passers-by, of the shape and form of the street scene around her, of anything beyond the fact that when she moved away from the small piece of public pavement she occupied she would be moving to nowhere. Ahead of her there was nothing. And behind her? She saw a long corridor divided into compartments by locked and bolted doors. What lay behind the first door she did not even know. And the second—if she were to beg food, sleep in fields, and finally find her way back to the shack, it would not be to the shack but to a reform school. The green door to the studio was shut fast by her own fierce pride as much as by Nick’s probable refusal to reopen it to her. And the last, with its charity as false as its tarnished knocker—she would die on the street before she would attempt to open that one again.
She pictured herself walking, walking, walking, along streets whose names she did not know, streets which led endlessly into still more streets; walking through the alternate light and darkness of day and night, a black-and-white chequer-board laid across increasing exhaustion: walking amongst crowds whose faces were turned always away from her, the unknown and unwanted; walking until, at last unable to go on, she fell, to be ground to dust by regiments of hurrying feet that found her so slight an obstacle they noticed her no more than the fallen leaves.
Was there anything she could do to help herself? Any positive step she could take in any direction? Trying to think clearly, she saw a sliver of hope to which she might cling for a time at least. The taxi-driver, when he found her purse, might bring it back to the place where he had left her. Remembering his unlovely face and disposition, she knew that he probably would not. But he might, and as long as there was this possibility she could act upon it.
Turning quickly, she went back the way she had come.
For a time she stood against the fence of the park on the opposite side of the street from the Shelter. Then, disliking the curious glances she was beginning to attract, and realizing that she could continue to keep her vigil from inside the park itself, she moved to the bench on which she was still sitting when Bel sat down beside her.
Bel was always interested in people. They were, in effect, her business. At first sight she had taken Psyche for one of the art students who, coming to the art gallery on the north side of the park, introduced an element otherwise out of place in that district. However, as she seated herself, her quick dark eyes told her that this original estimate was a mistaken one. Appraising the simple but good clothes, the old suitcase, and the clean decided profile, she was both curious and puzzled.
“Hot, isn’t it?” she remarked casually.
Psyche looked around, but her eyes scarcely focused on the woman in red before swinging back to the only centre of vision which at the moment meant anything to her. “Yes,” she said, and no more.
Startled by the open desperation in the blue eyes which had met hers so briefly, Bel did not immediately speak again. She was by nature sympathetic, but she had grown up in a hard school, and minding her own business as she expected others to mind theirs was a basic principle of her existence. Looking up at a sky striated with clouds fast turning from rose to grey, she knew that it was almost time to return to an establishment which, belonging to her, required her presence after nightfall. Yet, compelled by something in the taut figure beside her, she lingered where she was, hesitating between a renewed attempt at conversation, and, as she phrased it to herself, letting well enough alone. Just why she should have given way to an impulse of which she disapproved she could not have said.
Opening a black purse, she pulled out a package of cigarettes and held it out. “Smoke?”
Looking at Bel again, this time Psyche did not turn away, and, in failing to do so, admitted that a hope which had been at best apocryphal was now no hope at all. If the taxi-driver had intended to come back, he would have done it before this.
Butch had once told her that a condemned man was always granted a last wish.
She had asked, “Would a person care? Would they want anythin’?”
“They cares, all right,” Butch had said heavily. “Nearly always they wants a cigarette.”
There seemed to her now to be something symbolical in Bel’s offer, coming as it did at the darkening close of the darkest day of her life, and she understood Butch’s reply to her long-ago question as she had not understood it at the time. She should by rights have wanted food, a shoulder to weep on, many things, but all she wanted was a cigarette. And this she wanted very badly. Yet so great was the apathy of her hopelessness that she did not at once make any move toward accepting it.
Bel’s red lips hardened. “You thinking Mrs. Astor should of introduced us?”
“I wasn’t thinking anything—except that you are kind.”
“Then for the love of Mike take one! My arm’s getting tired.”
Giving her a light, Bell did not miss the quick, deep inhalation which gave her away as a smoker who would not have been without cigarettes if she had had any choice in the matter.
“You from out of town?”
“Yes,” Psyche said.
“Ever been in this burg before?”
“Yes.”
Bel could usually place people with astonishing accuracy, and it bothered her that she s
hould be unable to bracket Psyche anywhere within her wide experience. What’s the matter with the kid that she can’t say anything but ‘yes’, she wondered. And what’s the matter with me that I stay here talking to her? I’m getting the hell on home before I talk myself into something.
Snapping the clasp of her purse, she got up abruptly. “Well, I’ve got to be going. Nice to have known you, baby. Happy landings.”
“Good-bye,” Psyche said, and she essayed a smile which did not reach her eyes.
She had not expected Bel to stay, to mean anything to her beyond that brief encounter, and so was not disappointed when she went. She did not even watch her go, but unconsciously she listened to the sound of high heels, picking their way over loose gravel, until they could no longer be heard.
Remotely she considered moving on herself, but with nowhere to go it seemed an illogical thing to do, so she simply stayed where she was in the centre of a vacuum in which outside sights and sounds, though recorded by her eyes and ears, had no significance for her.
She saw the street lights come on, sudden pools of yellow light accentuating the darkness outside their individual orbits; saw the men who had loafed in the park get up and drift away, one by one: saw a tall, blue-uniformed figure begin a measured circuit of the now deserted paths. She heard a dog barking; was aware of car doors slamming, of car horns blaring; heard a woman’s voice calling a child in to bed; heard the distant strains of a radio playing a popular tune that tried to be gay, and was not; heard the soft rustle of leaves above her head, stirred by a breeze that promised to relieve the heavy heat, and then died before fulfilling its promise.
Bel, standing by the open casement of one of the two bay windows in the large, ornately furnished living-room of her second-storey apartment, saw and heard these same things. A prey to memories she had thought buried for good, unable to dismiss a mental image of the face that brought these memories to the surface of her mind, she had been standing there since she came in.
Now, speaking over her shoulder, she said, “The cop’s doing his rounds.”
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