Manhattan Transfer (47 page)

‘Oh Jimmy,’ sighed Alice, ‘do order some coffee.’

Outside a fire engine moaned throbbed roared down the street. Their hands were cold. They sipped the coffee without speaking.

*

Francie came out of the side door of the Five and Ten into the six o’clock goinghome end of the day crowd. Dutch Robertson was waiting for her. He was smiling; there was color in his face.

‘Why Dutch what’s…’ The words stuck in her throat.

‘Dont you like it…?’ They walked on down Fourteenth, a blur of faces streamed by on either side of them. ‘Everything’s jake Francie,’ he was saying quietly. He wore a light gray spring overcoat and a light felt hat to match. New red pointed Oxfords glowed on his feet. ‘How do you like the outfit? I said to myself it wasnt no use tryin to do anythin without a tony outside.’

‘But Dutch how did you get it?’

‘Stuck up a guy in a cigar store. Jez it was a cinch.’

‘Ssh dont talk so loud; somebody might hear ye.’

‘They wouldnt know what I was talkin about.’

Mr Densch sat in the corner of Mrs Densch’s Louis XIV boudoir. He sat all hunched up on a little gilt pinkbacked chair with his potbelly resting on his knees. In his green sagging face the pudgy nose and the folds that led from the flanges of the nostrils to the corners of the wide mouth made two triangles. He had a pile of telegrams in his hand, on top a decoded message on a blue slip that read: Deficit Hamburg branch approximately $500,000; signed Heintz. Everywhere he looked about the little room crowded with fluffy glittery objects he saw the purple letters of
approximately
jiggling in the air. Then he noticed that the maid, a pale mulatto in a ruffled cap, had come into the room and was staring at him. His eye lit on a large flat cardboard box she held in her hand.

‘What’s that?’

‘Somethin for the misses sir.’

‘Bring it here… Hickson’s… and what does she want to be buying more dresses for will you tell me that… Hickson’s… Open it up. If it looks expensive I’ll send it back.’

The maid gingerly pulled off a layer of tissuepaper, uncovering a peach and peagreen evening dress.

Mr Densch got to his feet spluttering, ‘She must think the war’s still on… Tell em we will not receive it. Tell em there’s no such party livin here.’

The maid picked up the box with a toss of the head and went
out with her nose in the air. Mr Densch sat down in the little chair and began looking over the telegrams again.

‘Ann-ee, Ann-ee,’ came a shrill voice from the inner room; this was followed by a head in a lace cap shaped like a libertycap and a big body in a shapeless ruffled negligée. ‘Why J. D. what are you doing here at this time of the morning? I’m waiting for my hair-dresser.’

‘It’s very important… I just had a cable from Heintz. Serena my dear, Blackhead and Densch is in a very bad way on both sides of the water.’

‘Yes ma’am,’ came the maid’s voice from behind him.

He gave his shoulders a shrug and walked to the window. He felt tired and sick and heavy with flesh. An errand boy on a bicycle passed along the street; he was laughing and his cheeks were pink. Densch saw himself, felt himself for a second hot and slender running bareheaded down Pine Street years ago catching the girls’ ankles in the corner of his eye. He turned back into the room. The maid had gone.

‘Serena,’ he began, ‘cant you understand the seriousness…? It’s this slump. And on top of it all the bean market has gone to hell. It’s ruin I tell you…’

‘Well my dear I dont see what you expect me to do about it.’

‘Economize… economize. Look where the price of rubber’s gone to… That dress from Hickson’s…’

‘Well you wouldnt have me going to the Blackhead’s party looking like a country schoolteacher, would you?’

Mr Densch groaned and shook his head. ‘O you wont understand; probably there wont be any party… Look Serena there’s no nonsense about this… I want you to have a trunk packed so that we can sail any day… I need a rest. I’m thinking of going to Marienbad for the cure… It’ll do you good too.’

Her eye suddenly caught his. All the little wrinkles on her face deepened; the skin under her eyes was like the skin of a shrunken toy balloon. He went over to her and put his hand on her shoulder and was puckering his lips to kiss her when suddenly she flared up.

‘I wont have you meddling between me and my dressmakers… I wont have it… I wont have it…’

‘Oh have it your own way.’ He left the room with his head hunched between his thick sloping shoulders.

‘Ann-ee!’

‘Yes ma’am.’ The maid came back into the room.

Mrs Densch had sunk down in the middle of a little spindlelegged sofa. Her face was green. ‘Annie please get me that bottle of sweet spirits of ammonia and a little water… And Annie you can call up Hickson’s and tell them that that dress was sent back through a mistake of… of the butler’s and please to send it right back as I’ve got to wear it tonight.’

Pursuit of happiness, unalienable pursuit… right to life liberty and… A black moonless night; Jimmy Herf is walking alone up South Street. Behind the wharfhouses ships raise shadowy skeletons against the night. ‘By Jesus I admit that I’m stumped,’ he says aloud. All these April nights combing the streets alone a skyscraper has obsessed him, a grooved building jutting up with uncountable bright windows falling onto him out of a scudding sky. Typewriters rain continual nickelplated confetti in his ears. Faces of Follies girls, glorified by Ziegfeld, smile and beckon to him from the windows. Ellie in a gold dress, Ellie made of thin gold foil absolutely lifelike beckoning from every window. And he walks round blocks and blocks looking for the door of the humming tinselwindowed skyscraper, round blocks and blocks and still no door. Every time he closes his eyes the dream has hold of him, every time he stops arguing audibly with himself in pompous reasonable phrases the dream has hold of him. Young man to save your sanity you’ve got to do one of two things… Please mister where’s the door to this building? Round the block? Just round the block… one of two unalienable alternatives: go away in a dirty soft shirt or stay in a clean Arrow collar. But what’s the use of spending your whole life fleeing the City of Destruction? What about your unalienable right, Thirteen Provinces? His mind unreeling phrases, he walks on doggedly. There’s nowhere in particular he wants to go. If only I still had faith in words.

‘How do you do Mr Goldstein?’ the reporter breezily chanted as he squeezed the thick flipper held out to him over the counter of the cigar store. ‘My name’s Brewster… I’m writing up the crime wave for the
News
.’

Mr Goldstein was a larvashaped man with a hooked nose a little
crooked in a gray face, behind which pink attentive ears stood out unexpectedly. He looked at the reporter out of suspicious screwedup eyes.

‘If you’d be so good I’d like to have your story of last night’s little… misadventure…’

‘Vont get no story from me young man. Vat vill you do but print it so that other boys and goils vill get the same idear.’

‘It’s too bad you feel that way Mr Goldstein… Will you give me a Robert Burns please…? Publicity it seems to me is as necessary as ventilation… It lets in fresh air.’ The reporter bit off the end of the cigar, lit it, and stood looking thoughtfully at Mr Goldstein through a swirling ring of blue smoke. ‘You see Mr Goldstein it’s this way,’ he began impressively. ‘We are handling this matter from the human interest angle… pity and tears… you understand. A photographer was on his way out here to get your photograph… I bet you it would increase your volume of business for the next couple of weeks… I suppose I’ll have to phone him not to come now.’

‘Well this guy,’ began Mr Goldstein abruptly, ‘he’s a welldressed lookin feller, new spring overcoat an all that and he comes in to buy a package o Camels… “A nice night,” he says openin the package an takin out a cigarette to smoke it. Then I notices the goil with him had a veil on.’

‘Then she didnt have bobbed hair?’

‘All I seen was a kind o mournin veil. The foist thing I knew she was behind the counter an had a gun stuck in my ribs an began talkin… you know kinder kiddin like… and afore I knew what to think the guy’d cleaned out the cashregister an says to me, “Got any cash in your jeans Buddy?” I’ll tell ye I was sweatin some…’

‘And that’s all?’

‘Sure by the time I’d got hold of a cop they vere off to hell an gone.’

‘How much did they get?’

‘Oh about fifty berries an six dollars off me.’

‘Was the girl pretty?’

‘I dunno, maybe she was. I’d like to smashed her face in. They ought to make it the electric chair for those babies… Aint no security nowhere. Vy should anybody voirk if all you’ve got to do is get a gun an stick up your neighbors?’

‘You say they were welldressed… like welltodo people?’

‘Yare.’

‘I’m working on the theory that he’s a college boy and that she’s a society girl and that they do it for sport.’

‘The feller vas a hardlookin bastard.’

‘Well there are hardlooking college men… You wait for the story called “The Gilded Bandits” in next Sunday’s paper Mr Goldstein… You take the
News
dont you?’

Mr Goldstein shook his head.

‘I’ll send you a copy anyway.’

‘I want to see those babies convicted, do you understand? If there’s anythin I can do I sure vill do it… Aint no security no more… I dont care about no Sunday supplement publicity.’

‘Well the photographer’ll be right along. I’m sure you’ll consent to pose Mr Goldstein… Well thank you very much… Good day Mr Goldstein.’

Mr Goldstein suddenly produced a shiny new revolver from under the counter and pointed it at the reporter.

‘Hay go easy with that.’

Mr Goldstein laughed a sardonic laugh. ‘I’m ready for em next time they come,’ he shouted after the reporter who was already making for the Subway.

‘Our business, my dear Mrs Herf,’ declaimed Mr Harpsicourt, looking sweetly in her eyes and smiling his gray Cheshire cat smile, ‘is to roll ashore on the wave of fashion the second before it breaks, like riding a surfboard.’

Ellen was delicately digging with her spoon into half an alligator pear; she kept her eyes on her plate, her lips a little parted; she felt cool and slender in the tightfitting darkblue dress, shyly alert in the middle of the tangle of sideways glances and the singsong modish talk of the restaurant.

‘It’s a knack that I can prophesy in you more than in any girl, and more charmingly than any girl I’ve ever known.’

‘Prophesy?’ asked Ellen, looking up at him laughing.

‘You shouldnt pick up an old man’s word… I’m expressing myself badly… That’s always a dangerous sign. No, you understand so perfectly, though you disdain it a little… admit that… What we need on such a periodical, that I’m sure you could explain it to me far better.’

‘Of course what you want to do is make every reader feel Johnny on the spot in the center of things.’

‘As if she were having lunch right here at the Algonquin.’

‘Not today but tomorrow,’ added Ellen.

Mr Harpsicourt laughed his creaky little laugh and tried to look deep among the laughing gold specs in her gray eyes. Blushing she looked down into the gutted half of an alligator pear in her plate. Like the sense of a mirror behind her she felt the smart probing glances of men and women at the tables round about.

The pancakes were comfortably furry against his ginbitten tongue. Jimmy Herf sat in Child’s in the middle of a noisy drunken company. Eyes, lips, evening dresses, the smell of bacon and coffee blurred and throbbed about him. He ate the pancakes painstakingly, called for more coffee. He felt better. He had been afraid he was going to feel sick. He began reading the paper. The print swam and spread like Japanese flowers. Then it was sharp again, orderly, running in a smooth black and white paste over his orderly black and white brain:

Misguided youth again took its toll of tragedy amid the tinsel gayeties of Coney Island fresh painted for the season when plainclothes men arrested ‘Dutch’ Robinson and a girl companion alleged to be the Flapper Bandit. The pair are accused of committing more than a score of holdups in Brooklyn and Queens. The police had been watching the couple for some days. They had rented a small kitchenette apartment at 7356 Seacroft Avenue. Suspicion was first aroused when the girl, about to become a mother, was taken in an ambulance to the Canarsie Presbyterian Hospital. Hospital attendants were surprised by Robinson’s seemingly endless supply of money. The girl had a private room, expensive flowers and fruit were sent in to her daily, and a well-known physician was called into consultation at the man’s request. When it came to the point of registering the name of the baby girl the young man admitted to the physician that they were not married. One of the hospital attendants, noticing that the woman answered to the description published in the
Evening Times
of the flapper bandit and her pal, telephoned the police. Plainclothes men sleuthed the couple for some days after they had returned to the apartment on Seacroft Avenue and this afternoon made the arrests.

The arrest of the flapper bandit…

A hot biscuit landed on Herf’s paper. He looked up with a start; a darkeyed Jewish girl at the next table was making a face at him.
He nodded and took off an imaginary hat. ‘I thank thee lovely nymph,’ he said thickly and began eating the biscuit.

‘Quit dat djer hear?’ the young man who sat beside her, who looked like a prizefighter’s trainer, bellowed in her ear.

The people at Herf’s table all had their mouths open laughing. He picked up his check, vaguely said good night and walked out. The clock over the cashier’s desk said three o’clock. Outside a rowdy scattering of people still milled about Columbus Circle. A smell of rainy pavements mingled with the exhausts of cars and occasionally there was a whiff of wet earth and sprouting grass from the Park. He stood a long time on the corner not knowing which way to go. These nights he hated to go home. He felt vaguely sorry that the Flapper Bandit and her pal had been arrested. He wished they could have escaped. He had looked forward to reading their exploits every day in the papers. Poor devils, he thought. And with a newborn baby too.