Manhattan Transfer (26 page)

‘Well perhaps you can tell me why in this country nobody ever does anything. Nobody ever writes any music or starts any revolutions or falls in love. All anybody ever does is to get drunk and tell smutty stories. I think it’s disgusting…’

‘’Ear, ’ear… But speak for yourself. I’m going to stop drinking… No good drinking, liquor just gets monotonous… Say, got a bathtub?’

‘Of course there’s a bathtub. Whose apartment do you think this is, mine?’

‘Well whose is it Herfy?’

‘It belongs to Lester. I’m just caretaker while he’s abroad, the lucky dog.’ Stan started peeling off his clothes letting them drop in a pile about his feet. ‘Gee I’d like to go swimming… Why the hell do people live in cities?’

‘Why do I go on dragging out a miserable existence in this crazy epileptic town… that’s what I want to know.’

‘Lead on Horatius, to the baawth slave,’ bellowed Stan who stood on top of his pile of clothes, brown with tight rounded muscles, swaying a little from his drunkenness.

‘It’s right through that door.’ Jimmy pulled a towel out of the
steamertrunk in the corner of the room, threw it after him and went back to reading.

Stan tumbled back into the room, dripping, talking through the towel. ‘What do you think, I forgot to take my hat off. And look Herfy, there’s something I want you to do for me. Do you mind?’

‘Of course not. What is it?’

‘Will you let me use your back room tonight, this room?’

‘Sure you can.’

‘I mean with somebody.’

‘Go as far as you like. You can bring the entire Winter Garden Chorus in here and nobody will see them. And there’s an emergency exit down the fire escape into the alley. I’ll go to bed and close my door so you can have this room and the bath all to yourselves.’

‘It’s a rotten imposition but somebody’s husband is on the rampage and we have to be very careful.’

‘Dont worry about the morning. I’ll sneak out early and you can have the place to yourselves.’

‘Well I’m off so long.’

Jimmy gathered up his book and went into his bedroom and undressed. His watch said fifteen past twelve. The night was sultry. When he had turned out the light he sat a long while on the edge of the bed. The faraway sounds of sirens from the river gave him gooseflesh. From the street he heard footsteps, the sound of men and women’s voices, low youthful laughs of people going home two by two. A phonograph was playing
Secondhand Rose
. He lay on his back on top of the sheet. There came on the air through the window a sourness of garbage, a smell of burnt gasoline and traffic and dusty pavements, a huddled stuffiness of pigeonhole rooms where men and women’s bodies writhed alone tortured by the night and the young summer. He lay with seared eyeballs staring at the ceiling, his body glowed in a brittle shivering agony like redhot metal.

A woman’s voice whispering eagerly woke him; someone was pushing open the door. ‘I wont see him. I wont see him. Jimmy for Heaven’s sake you go talk to him. I wont see him.’ Elaine Oglethorpe draped in a sheet walked into the room.

Jimmy tumbled out of bed. ‘What on earth?’

‘Isn’t there a closet or something in here… I will not talk to Jojo when he’s in that condition.’

Jimmy straightened his pyjamas. ‘There’s a closet at the head of the bed.’

‘Of course… Now Jimmy do be an angel, talk to him and make him go away.’

Jimmy walked dazedly into the outside room. ‘Slut, slut,’ was yelling a voice from the window. The lights were on. Stan, draped like an Indian in a gray and pinkstriped blanket was squatting in the middle of the two couches made up together into a vast bed. He was staring impassively at John Oglethorpe who leaned in through the upper part of the window screaming and waving his arms and scolding like a Punch and Judy show. His hair was in a tangle over his eyes, in one hand he waved a stick, in the other a cream-andcoffeecolored felt hat. ‘Slut come here… Flagrante delictu that’s what it is… Flagrante delictu. It was not for nothing that inspiration led me up Lester Jones’s fire escape.’ He stopped and stared a minute at Jimmy with wide drunken eyes. ‘So here’s the cub reporter, the yellow journalist is it, looking as if butter wouldnt melt in his mouth is it? Do you know what my opinion of you is, would you like to know what my opinion of you is? Oh I’ve heard about you from Ruth and all that. I know you think you’re one of the dynamiters and aloof from all that… How do you like being a paid prostitute of the public press? How d’you like your yellow ticket? The brass check, that’s the kind of thing… You think that as an actor, an artiste, I dont know about those things. I’ve heard from Ruth your opinion of actors and all that.’

‘Why Mr Oglethorpe I am sure you are mistaken.’

‘I read and keep silent. I am one of the silent watchers. I know that every sentence, every word, every picayune punctuation that appears in the public press is perused and revised and deleted in the interests of advertisers and bondholders. The fountain of national life is poisoned at the source.’

‘Yea, you tell em,’ suddenly shouted Stan from the bed. He got to his feet clapping his hands. ‘I should prefer to be the meanest stagehand. I should prefer to be the old and feeble charwoman who scrubs off the stage… than to sit on velvet in the office of the editor of the greatest daily in the city. Acting is a profession honorable, decent, humble, gentlemanly.’ The oration ended abruptly.

‘Well I dont see what you expect me to do about it,’ said Jimmy crossing his arms.

‘And now it’s starting to rain,’ went on Oglethorpe in a squeaky whining voice.

‘You’d better go home,’ said Jimmy.

‘I shall go I shall go where there are no sluts… no male and female sluts… I shall go into the great night.’

‘Do you think he can get home all right Stan?’

Stan had sat down on the edge of the bed shaking with laughter. He shrugged his shoulders.

‘My blood will be on your head Elaine forever… Forever, do you hear me?… into the night where people dont sit laughing and sneering. Dont you think I dont see you… If the worst happens it will not be my fault.’

‘Go-od night,’ shouted Stan. In a last spasm of laughing he fell off the edge of the bed and rolled on the floor. Jimmy went to the window and looked down the fire escape into the alley. Oglethorpe had gone. It was raining hard. A smell of wet bricks rose from the housewalls.

‘Well if this isnt the darnedest fool business?’ He walked back into his room without looking at Stan. In the door Ellen brushed silkily past him.

‘I’m terribly sorry Jimmy…’ she began.

He closed the door sharply in her face and locked it. ‘The goddam fools they act like crazy people,’ he said through his teeth. ‘What the hell do they think this is?’

His hands were cold and trembling. He pulled a blanket up over him. He lay listening to the steady beat of the rain and the hissing spatter of a gutter. Now and then a puff of wind blew a faint cool spray in his face. There still lingered in the room a frail cedarwood gruff smell of her heavycoiled hair, a silkiness of her body where she had crouched wrapped in the sheet hiding.

Ed Thatcher sat in his bay window among the Sunday papers. His hair was grizzled and there were deep folds in his cheeks. The upper buttons of his pongee trousers were undone to ease his sudden little potbelly. He sat in the open window looking out over the blistering asphalt at the endless stream of automobiles that whirred in either direction past the yellowbrick row of stores and the redbrick station under the eaves of which on a black ground gold letters glinted feebly in the sun: P
ASSAIC.
Apartments round
about emitted a querulous Sunday grinding of phonographs playing
It’s a Bear
. The Sextette from
Lucia,
selections from
The Quaker Girl
. On his knees lay the theatrical section of the New York
Times
. He looked out with bleared eyes into the quivering heat feeling his ribs tighten with a breathless ache. He had just read a paragraph in a marked copy of
Town Topics
.

Malicious tongues are set wagging by the undeniable fact that young Stanwood Emery’s car is seen standing every night outside the Knickerbocker Theatre and never does it leave they say, without a certain charming young actress whose career is fast approaching stellar magnitude. This same young gentleman, whose father is the head of one of the city’s most respected lawfirms, who recently left Harvard under slightly unfortunate circumstances, has been astonishing the natives for some time with his exploits which we are sure are merely the result of the ebullience of boyish spirits. A word to the wise.

The bell rang three times. Ed Thatcher dropped his papers and hurried quaking to the door. ‘Ellie you’re so late. I was afraid you weren’t coming.’

‘Daddy dont I always come when I say I will?’

‘Of course you do deary.’

‘How are you getting on? How’s everything at the office?’

‘Mr Elbert’s on his vacation… I guess I’ll go when he comes back. I wish you’d come down to Spring Lake with me for a few days. It’d do you good.’

‘But daddy I cant.’… She pulled off her hat and dropped it on the davenport. ‘Look I brought you some roses, daddy.’

‘Think of it; they’re red roses like your mother used to like. That was very thoughtful of you I must say… But I dont like going all alone on my vacation.’

‘Oh you’ll meet lots of cronies daddy, sure you will.’

‘Why couldnt you come just for a week?’

‘In the first place I’ve got to look for a job… show’s going on the road and I’m not going just at present. Harry Goldweiser’s awfully sore about it.’ Thatcher sat down in the bay window again and began piling up the Sunday papers on a chair. ‘Why daddy what on earth are you doing with that copy of
Town Topics?
’

‘Oh nothing. I’d never read it; I just bought it to see what it was like.’ He flushed and compressed his lips as he shoved it in among the
Times
.

‘It’s just a blackmail sheet.’ Ellen was walking about the room. She had put the roses in a vase. A spiced coolness was spreading from them through the dustheavy air. ‘Daddy, there’s something I want to tell you about… Jojo and I are going to get divorced.’ Ed Thatcher sat with his hands on his knees nodding with tight lips, saying nothing. His face was gray and dark, almost the speckled gray of his pongee suit. ‘It’s nothing to take on about. We’ve just decided we cant get along together. It’s all going through quietly in the most approved style… George Baldwin, who’s a friend of mine, is going to run it through.’

‘He with Emery and Emery?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hum.’

They were silent. Ellen leaned over to breathe deep of the roses. She watched a little green measuring worm cross a bronzed leaf.

‘Honestly I’m terribly fond of Jojo, but it drives me wild to live with him… I owe him a whole lot, I know that.’

‘I wish you’d never set eyes on him.’

Thatcher cleared his throat and turned his face away from her to look out the window at the two endless bands of automobiles that passed along the road in front of the station. Dust rose from them and angular glitter of glass enamel and nickel. Tires made a swish on the oily macadam. Ellen dropped onto the davenport and let her eyes wander among the faded red roses of the carpet.

The bell rang. ‘I’ll go daddy… How do you do Mrs Culveteer?’

A redfaced broad woman in a black and white chiffon dress came into the room puffing. ‘Oh you must forgive my butting in, I’m just dropping by for a second… How are you Mr Thatcher?… You know my dear your poor father has really been very poorly.’

‘Nonsense; all I had was a little backache.’

‘Lumbago my dear.’

‘Why daddy you ought to have let me know.’

‘The sermon today was most inspiring, Mr Thatcher… Mr Lourton was at his very best.’

‘I guess I ought to rout out and go to church now and then, but you see I like to lay round the house Sundays.’

‘Of course Mr Thatcher it’s the only day you have. My husband was just like that… But I think it’s different with Mr Lourton
than with most clergymen. He has such an uptodate commonsense view of things. It’s really more like attending an intensely interesting lecture than going to church… You understand what I mean.’

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do Mrs Culveteer, next Sunday if it’s not too hot I’ll go… I guess I’m getting too set in my ways.’

‘Oh a little change does us all good… Mrs Oglethorpe you have no idea how closely we follow your career, in the Sunday papers and all… I think it’s simply wonderful… As I was telling Mr Thatcher only yesterday it must take a lot of strength of character and deep Christian living to withstand the temptations of stage life nowadays. It’s inspiring to think of a young girl and wife coming so sweet and unspoiled through all that.’

Ellen kept looking at the floor so as not to catch her father’s eye. He was tapping with two fingers on the arm of his morrischair. Mrs Culveteer beamed from the middle of the davenport. She got to her feet. ‘Well I just must run along. We have a green girl in the kitchen and I’m sure dinner’s all ruined… Wont you drop in this afternoon… ? quite informally. I made some cookies and we’ll have some gingerale out just in case somebody turns up.’

‘I’m sure we’d be delighted Mrs Culveteer,’ said Thatcher getting stiffly to his feet. Mrs Culveteer in her bunchy dress waddled out the door.

‘Well Ellie suppose we go eat… She’s a very nice kindhearted woman. She’s always bringing me pots of jam and marmalade. She lives upstairs with her sister’s family. She’s the widow of a traveling man.’

‘That was quite a line about the temptations of stage life,’ said Ellen with a little laugh in her throat. ‘Come along or the place’ll be crowded. Avoid the rush is my motto.’

Said Thatcher in a peevish crackling voice, ‘Let’s not dawdle around.’

Ellen spread out her sunshade as they stepped out of the door flanked on either side by bells and letterboxes. A blast of gray heat beat in their faces. They passed the stationery store, the red A. and P., the corner drugstore from which a stale coolness of sodawater and icecream freezers drifted out under the green awning, crossed the street, where their feet sank into the sticky melting asphalt, and stopped at the Sagamore Cafeteria. It was twelve exactly by the clock in the window that had round its face in old English lettering,
T
IME TO
E
AT.
Under it was a large rusty fern and a card announcing Chicken Dinner $1.25. Ellen lingered in the doorway looking up the quivering street. ‘Look daddy we’ll probably have a thunderstorm.’ A cumulus soared in unbelievable snowy contours in the slate sky. ‘Isnt that a fine cloud? Wouldnt it be fine if we had a riproaring thunderstorm?’