The Man With the Golden Arm (12 page)

‘This is just her boy friend,’ a helpful bystander offered, ‘that’s her husband settin’ on the curb holdin’ his dirty head. He tried to run the soldier down for datin’ his wife. Looks like an internal triangle to me. If you ask me they’re all three of them no good.’

‘Nobody asked you.’

Yet the law could see there was something to the story all right. Frankie sat on the curb with his army shoes in the gutter and his combat jacket ripped below the shoulder halfway to the overseas stripes below the elbow. Dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief and wondering how to get the booze off his breath in a hurry.

‘You kids got a stick of gum?’ he whispered to two ten-year-old girls studying him placidly, both of them chewing like twin calves side by side. One came up with a single dirty stick, its wrapper long unpeeled, and offered it just out of Frankie’s reach.

‘Joosy Froot. Only cost you a nickel.’ Her accomplice nodded approvingly. ‘That stuff is pretty hard to get these days, mister.’

Frankie found a lone dime and when the girl had it safely in her hand she advised him further, in lieu of a nickel change, ‘You don’t have to worry about that stupid bull, mister. He’s as stiff as you are.’

‘He can fwisk you but he can’t search you,’ the other told him softly, with the softest lisp possible. ‘Don’t let him search you without a wawwant.’

The corner pharmacist brought Sophie around and slapped a bandage above Frankie’s right eye. When the wagon arrived to take the sergeant away for lack of papers Frankie was sober enough to get by by identifying himself and pleading the old tune: ‘Only two small beers, Officer, all I had. I’m a combat vet. Purple Heart. Good Conduct. Buddy of Captain Bednar by Saloon Street.’

While they waited for the ambulance the cop walked about, a wadded
Tribune
jutting out of his hip pocket, with the deliberate gait of any stewed flatfoot, around and around the battered car, slapping his big feet righteously up and down while the crowd grew and some newspaper joker took a flash-bulb photo of Sophie, stretched out on the wrinkled running board with somebody’s corduroy cap under her head, resting against the fender’s slope. The bulb burst, splattering glass for a dozen feet around, so that the pharmacist had to run back for more bandage and the cop had to run the photographer off, press card or no press card.

Yet the photographer remained, a small man in a raincoat almost dragging the ground, shivering with either humiliation or the cold early morning air. Pretending, on the border of the crowd, that he’d abandoned the idea of getting a close-up shot while furtively preparing another bulb. When the cop regarded him suspiciously once more he spoke up humbly, ‘I just like to watch.’ And inched up ever so little. ‘I’m neurotic, I like to get up close to accidents.’

A weak excuse.

It was half an hour before the ambulance arrived, the early morning trolleys were blocked halfway to North Avenue and everyone but Frankie and Sophie and the sergeant felt it had been well worth the trouble. The pharmacist and photographer, the cop, the audience, trolley conductors and motormen, all agreed tacitly that this had been a better summer night than most.

‘Not a bone broken,’ an intern had assured Frankie of Sophie’s condition. ‘Just shock.’ She was lying on the receiving-room table, eyes wide and pupils dilated. ‘Open the door,’ she asked in an oddly altered voice; the door to the long white corridor stood wide.

‘It is open, Zosh,’ Frankie told her, stepping close to her.

‘Open the door,’ she asked again, as though she had not heard and did not know who he was.

There was only one door to open. A closet door, and he opened it just to please her. Inside it, leaning against a wheelchair, stood a crutch with a cracked handle. He closed the door again softly. When the intern came in to look at her again she slept like one who hadn’t slept in weeks, without help of any drug at all.

Four mornings later she was back home and no worse for wear, apparently, except for a bluish wound on her lip, where she had bitten herself through the force of the smashup into the light pole and a tiny cut over her ear where the flash bulb had burst above her. Yet she did not seem to share Frankie’s elation at all. He’d gotten the super’s man, Zygmunt the Prospector, on the job and felt confident of beating any drunken-driving charge with which the Traffic Bureau might confront him.

‘You sore ’cause you didn’t get your back broke?’ he asked her. ‘You ought to be singin’ ’n you’re moonin’.’

‘I just don’t feel like it’s
over
, Frankie,’ she told him. ‘Last night I had a sleep warnin’ – my leg jerked ’n woke me up, it was a pre-motion, what they call it.’

‘So long as you’re feelin’ awright, what you got to holler?’ he wanted to know, and had hauled out the practice board against the time when he could afford a set of real traps of his own, quit Zero Schwiefka cold and go on the legit with a big-name band.

Listening to the light mechanical beat, it began to sound for the first time, to Sophie, like a hammer’s rapid tapping. When she’d closed her eyes his hammer went tap-tap-tapping down a thousand little bent rusty nails. She had had to clench her palms tightly to fight off the panic rising within her and when he’d looked up at her her eyes had had the same immovable stare they’d had on the receiving-room table.

It wasn’t till he’d stopped beating the board that that look had faded out and she had shuttered her eyes.

But he had known right then, however inadmissibly, that something had gone wrong with his Zosh.

Zygmunt, a man continually clutching, for one reason or another, at other men’s sleeves, had attended so many night schools in his early manhood that now, in his bustling middle age, he retained the pallor of his Kent College nights: the look of the downtown pavements after the rush-hour window-shoppers are doing all their window-shopping through the bright interiors of dreams. The light on his glasses seemed a reflection of the light of law-school chandeliers in those desperate days when he felt that if he didn’t pass the bar he’d be tending one the rest of his life. He looked like a man who had never seen a cloud.

He’d passed the bar, put out his shingle, won his first case in a blaze of patriotic oratory – and had been disbarred for representing conflicting interests three months later. Now he called himself a claim adjuster and had been known to reach a hospital ahead of the ambulance. Railroad brakemen, switchmen, ambulance drivers, nurses and interns beheld him with cries of sheerest joy. Only insurance men felt pain. Each year he gave precisely one thousand dollars worth of Christmas presents to railroad men and hospital attendants while the sour-looking insurance adjusters sent greeting cards in unsealed envelopes bearing half-rate postage.

‘Zygmunt does us poor people a big favor,’ one old contented cripple informed Frankie, ‘if it wasn’t for him I would of settled for fifty dollars ’n I would of been screwed cold. Zygmunt got fifteen hundred out of court ’
n
five hundred
of it was all my own!
It’s what I call a deed for Justice, what Prospector done for me that time. If he ever runs for coroner he got my whole family’s vote.’

The bruised, the cut, the fractured, the shocked, the maimed and the slightly frayed, all loved the Prospector with a deep, calm love. He was their Division Street Jesse James boldly defying the impersonal giants of the insurance trusts.

Zygmunt, in turn, loved the bruised, the cut and the frayed. He loved each sweet sufferer of them for all they were worth. What was more, he loved his country and, yet more ardently, the city that had given him his chance to serve mankind. ‘I’ll tell you what my ideal is,’ he told Frankie, ‘it’s to make Chicago the personal injury capital of the United States of America.’

He was well on his way toward achieving just that. Hustling down hospital corridors with a fountain pen at the ready and a legal retainer blank flying like the Stars and Bars at Bull Run, he brought news of new hope to those still under shock. It was those under shock, he had learned, in whom the true faith abided.

His tipsters gave him head starts to hospitals where doctors competed with nurses for the chance of making a ten-spot on the side. For it wasn’t always the easiest thing in the world to visit a victim still too woozy to know what had hit him. Yet as often as not Zygmunt got past the reception desk and out again without any hospital official knowing, officially, that he’d been prospecting the wards at all.

For the reception desks regarded ambulance chasing as some sort of felony or other and Zygmunt himself, at certain moments, wasn’t altogether too sure it might not turn out to
be denounced as such on Judgment Day. Therefore he played it safe by hustling both sides of the street, the churches as well as the hospitals, and had more novenas to his credit than defrauded cripples. He kept the ledger balanced slightly in Heaven’s favor.

In the instance of Francis Majcinek vs. a city light standard his earliest concern was, ‘How much disability you get, Dealer?’

‘Twenty-five a month.’ Frankie had had the presence of mind to cut it down a bit.

‘In six months you’ll have me paid off. Sign here.’

Six months was exactly what it had taken. It would have taken longer had Frankie admitted to his forty-a-month disability. But fifteen of that was already going to Louie Fomorowski and a man had to keep his nose above water one way or another.

‘Just a couple lucky Polaks,’ Zygmunt congratulated Frankie and Sophie whenever he dropped in to collect his twenty-five and remind them that the drunken-driving charge had been dismissed and the light standard billed to the taxpayers at large. And clutched at Frankie’s sleeve when Sophie wasn’t looking.

‘I’ll say,’ Sophie would agree without heart. ‘If I get any luckier I’ll be the luckiest woman in the cemetery.’

For the second time Zygmunt collected she was in the chair.

On the night of V-J Day she had sat up in bed and shaken Frankie. ‘Wake up, honey. Somethin’s goin’ to happen.’ In the first faint light he had seen that her face was buttoned up like a locked purse – then something behind her eyes had shifted with fear as in those of a cornered cat’s.

‘It feels like air bubbles in my neck –
honey
, I feel so
queer
.’ She was trying to smile at him: an embarrassed, apologetic smile, not like her own smile at all. ‘I was dreamin’ about the accident, like in the car when we started tippin’—’

‘You must of been readin’ about that couple in the paper, their car caught fire.’

‘What happened to
them?
’ Her breath felt cut off. Her hands were crossed upon her throat and on the wall the luminous Christ glowed faintly above the clock. ‘I’m sweatin’ on my palms.’ She put one fat damp hand upon his own.

‘They were trapped, that’s all.’

‘Oh.’ With relief. Things that happened out of town never seemed to have happened to real people somehow. ‘But
we
didn’t,’ Frankie assured her hurriedly, turning toward her onto his side. That was the first time he had seen her breasts, full to the pink and rigid nipples, without feeling any attraction at all. ‘You got a headache?’ he asked.

‘I just feel sort of choky-like. Like I’m drinkin’ ginger ale I can’t taste.’

‘You want a real drink?’

‘No. It’s
somethin
’. Frankie’ – she paused as if it were too foolish to say – ‘I can’t get up.’

She tried to smile but the lips froze with a rising fright. He touched her knee. ‘A little charley horse is all you got.’ And massaged her legs gently while she braced herself by her elbows against the pillow.

‘I – I can’t feel you rubbin’ so good.’

‘Lay back ’n take it easy,’ he ordered her professionally, ‘your nerves is exhausted. I think that croaker missed a joint lookin’ you over.’

‘Don’t say “croaker,” honey. Say “Doctor.”’ She lay wide-eyed, looking up at the shadowed ceiling for some friendlier shadow there. ‘Frankie, if it was just somethin’ bust, wouldn’t it hurt like
everythin’?’

‘Somethin’s bust awright,’ he decided. Not knowing quite what he meant by that himself. 

The analyst at the people’s clinic was young, pure in heart, and dressed in theories as spotless as his own chaste white jacket.

‘The name is Pasterzy,’ he introduced himself, gripping Frankie’s hand in a med-school grip. ‘A good name for a doctor,’ Frankie told him, ‘this is my wife.’

He had brought her in a borrowed wheelchair and she’d raised one hand listlessly to take the doctor’s hand. Then had simply sat regarding them both with a sort of puffed-up hostility.

Young Dr P. had immediately taken her by surprise with a needle jabbed into the tender back of her calf. Her eyelids had fluttered but she had not cried out.

‘You felt that,’ he’d accused her gently.

‘Of course I felt it, goldarn t’ing.’ She had turned to Frankie indignantly. ‘This dummy
pinched
me, Frankie – what’s the big idea?’ But all Frankie had done was to stand there like a goof watching another man stroking his wife’s leg clear to the knee.

‘You’re lying to yourself, Mrs Majcinek,’ Dr P. had told her tactlessly and she’d turned in a flood of tears to Frankie. ‘Don’t just
stand
there when he’s talkin’ like that –
gawpin
’ while he calls your wife aliar ’ncopsfree feels – get me to a doc who
respects
people.’ She turned with condescension upon the doctor kneeling at her feet. ‘
Do
you mind?’

Dr P. stood up and the two men had exchanged understanding glances. ‘Bring her back after she’s better rested,’ he’d told Frankie.

Halfway through the door Sophie had grabbed the chair’s wheels to keep from being pushed all the way through before taking one over-the-shoulder parting shot: ‘If you’re so damned smart why ain’t you a millionaire?’

That night she had dreamed that she was about to be jabbed
by a flaming needle in Frankie’s hand: she’d gotten out of bed, turned on the light and wakened screaming. Frankie had carried her back to the bed and she hadn’t gotten out of bed unaided since. Living between the bed and the wheelchair, her arms had grown flabby while her legs had lost flesh from disuse. The skin had crowded pendulously upon itself beneath her chin to make her eyes mere pale gray slits reflecting her sick despair.

That Pasterzy had taken as much as any doctor could. Frankie would have to wait outside and when Sophie was returned to him she would look so careworn that Frankie would hardly have the heart to question her. Yet couldn’t help wondering humbly.

‘What he do, Zosh?’

‘He took a sample of blood. He says I got real good blood. Wait till he takes a smear, see what he says then.’

‘He don’t hurt you, does he?’

‘It ain’t hurtin’ like
that
, Frankie, it’s just he’s such a squirrel. His roof is leakin’ – he don’t even
look
at the pins no more. He don’t even touch me, he don’t even taken my pullis, maybe I got a fever. He just asts them person’l questions. He’s a stinkin’ t’ing hisself, I think,’ cause I don’t like how he talks. You should of heard what I told him when he started pikin’ around to find out what you do for a livin’, how much dough you make. I told him you’re out of work ’n that stopped him cold.’

‘You done just right there,’ Frankie had conceded. They had to be pretty sharp to get around his Zosh, he knew. ‘Didn’t he give you no perscription for medicine though?’

‘He don’t give me nuttin’ but talk, talk, talk, that’s what I’m tryin’ to tell, he’s one big stinkin’ t’ing.’

‘Don’t say “stinkin’ t’ing,”’ Frankie had suggested, ‘say “reekin’.”’

‘He’s a reekin’ t’ing all right. He wears me down till I’m
reeker’n he is. Tells me to go home ’n rest, get fresh air. Where the hell does he think I live – by the Humboldt Park lagoon? “Get built up,” he says. “Built up fer what?” I ast him. “So’s you can tear me down again?” He wants to know too much, why I said
that.
’

‘What he say then?’

‘He says he’s a sort of siko-patic doctor, he got to find out
every
thin’ – “Did I like to play wit’ little girls ’r little boys when I was a little girl?” Is that
his
business, Frankie? I told him sure I liked the little boys, the nice ones anyhow, I liked the little girls too, if they just wasn’t sheenies. Then I ast him a thing or two myself.’

‘What you ask him, Zosh?’ Frankie sounded worried.

‘I ast him why don’t he wear boxin’ gloves when he goes to bed.’ N you know what? He took off his glasses, blew on ’em, put ’em down ’n then starts walkin’ around lookin’ for ’em. I had to tell him where he just put ’em. Why do I have to have some popeye kike like that quackin’ at me anyhow, Frankie? Ain’t there no
real
doctors no more?’

‘Don’t say “kike,”’ Frankie protested mildly. ‘He’s a Polak.’

‘Some Polak. He’s a reekin’ t’ing is all.’

Frankie was relieved when she and Doc Pasterzy had at last washed their hands of each other. Those trips down Division, wheeling her in the chair, had left him feeling half crippled himself.

But she wouldn’t go to County. ‘We give them my mother’s heart there,’ she claimed, ‘they put a auto-topsy on her.’

Eventually she had run through a whole series of quacks, faith healers and, for as long as Frankie’s terminal-leave pay had lasted, an ‘electric blood reverser’ manipulated by Old Doc Dominowski.

It didn’t do any good to tell her what all the neighborhood hustlers knew: that old Doc Dominoes, as they called him, wasn’t Doc Dominowski at all. The original Doc Dominowski had had a license. But after his passing his daughter had rented his office to this blood-reversing impostor who’d left the deceased doc’s shingle up. A ruse as simple as that. Though in print he had never claimed to be anything but a wandering masseur.

The present Dr D. had had a slogan stamped over his Damen Avenue door:
Ad Electrica
Necessitas
Vitae.
An inner legend announced
Big Boy Is In.

A diploma in the waiting room revealed Big Boy to be a member of The American Association of Medical Hydrology, whatever that might be. Furthermore he was a deacon of the Royal Aryan Society for Positive Christianity and as such was privileged to throw in divine healing without extra charge. That went right along with the three-dollar treatment for a touch of the astral power and a short lecture on the latent powers possessed by all of us. ‘Pow-wers what vassly transent our normaller ones,’ was just how Big Boy put it. The whole trouble with Sophie, he saw as soon as he set eye on her, was that she hadn’t been awakened; and had the brass to tell her husband so.

‘God help me when she comes to then,’ Frankie sulked to himself. He knew a rogue when he saw one and this mild-looking, white-haired, stoop-shouldered coneroo with the flat pink snout, a toothpick stuck in one corner of his mouth and his initials embroidered in red upon the pocket of an army-surplus surgeon’s smock, looked like an old hand to Frankie. He boasted that he was the most popular spine manipulator and ray caster on the Northwest Side. He still looked like the business end of a fugitive warrant to Frankie.

It was true. The diplomas hung about the waiting room,
just high enough to make reading difficult, were mostly grammar-school graduation certificates. The only course Big Boy had completed was the one offered by the House of Correction, where he’d done a stretch for prescribing cinchophen, a drug for which he’d once entertained such a fondness that he’d succeeded in tearing up some three dozen human livers before his supply had been cut off. He’d picked up his present racket in the bucket, as being safer than either peddling cinchophen or living on the curette.

Safer, more respectable and more profitable, what with red and green light rays, a bit of fancy bone snapping, neck twisting and pills of every hue, shade, shape and size. He liked to wet his fingertips from his lips, when he felt the psychic approach was required, place them tenderly upon the patient’s forehead and gaze into her eyes steadily, seemingly entranced by something there. Then he’d come out of it, prescribe Holland gin, collect his three-fifty and send out for a pint of Cream of Kentucky for himself.

‘I’m gettin’ the astral pow-wer,’ he would confide in some matron who lay supine and stripped to the waist before him. ‘You got to relax, you got to tell yourself you’re not afraid of
anything
.’ While his hands caressed her so warmly that she felt herself starting to burn with rare courage. He had found most matrons brave enough after a while.

He never made verbal propositions: those hot damp hands did his proposing. Proposed and fulfilled. For old Doc D. wasn’t working for nothing. ‘We don’t do business in an alley,’ he warned any woman wearing a fur coat; though his side entrance opened onto an alley all the same. He charged as much as the traffic would bear and when the payments began coming harder the patient was cured, he’d decide after a glance at a book in which no records were kept at all. ‘You’ve cured
me
all right,’ the patient would have to conclude. For by the time he was through with a
woman he had more on her than she had on him; he himself never got out of line until the patient was so far off base she couldn’t get back in a month of extra innings.

‘I can see it now,’ he told Sophie, breathing heavily above her, ‘I can see the astral pow-wer.’ The sheet was covering her modestly from throat to knee, he hadn’t yet been able to figure how much of a charge she’d stand.

‘With some patients it is little white dots, with others colored dots. Each person has his own color.’

This was true too. Big Boy’s own special color was the hard cold green of ten-dollar bills.

‘What’s my color?’ Sophie asked.

‘Turk-woiz blue. You
can
feel
something
, can’t you?’

‘Yeh. I feel
some
thin’.’ It was his right hand growing moderately bold as his breath grew warmer and the astral power really began to
move
. ‘My husband takes care of that angle,’ Sophie told him quietly, wishing Frankie really did. For Frankie’s physical interest in her, increasingly casual since their marriage, had passed altogether with the accident.

Old Doc D. immediately became professional. ‘You got the blood pressure of a five-mont’-old baby – but that’s nothin’ serious. Eat lots of hot t’ings – pepper ’n hot sauces. Drink a little wine before meals or a little whisky. But
never
mix them. And
believe
you’re going to get well. Now turn over and we’ll wibrate the wertebrays.’

Big Boy loved to wibrate the wertebrays. When he’d wibrated each one he applied a grease to her back, sharpened a pencil and recorded, down the spinal column, the location of something he called ‘ligatites.’ They were the
real
cause of Sophie’s trouble. He showed her a rough diagram of her spine. ‘You can see for yourself what shape you’re in.’

She saw. But he sensed her doubt and decided that the root of her difficulty was Lack of Faith – which was also curable. So she attended a meeting of the Royal Aryan
Crusaders and the Aryans sold her so many varieties of pills, pamphlets, booklets, wormwood tea and senna leaves that she couldn’t afford to have the wertebrays wibrated for three weeks following.

When she resumed treatments, largely because of Frankie’s gloomy aversion to the doc, Big Boy introduced her to the electric blood reverser. This was simply a frosted twenty-five-watt bulb which glowed with a lavender light. He also had some pale green bulbs for the better-heeled clientele and if necessary he could, literally, make sparks fly. It was only by sheerest chance that he had as yet electrocuted no one.

‘I’m talkin’ cold turkey to you now,’ he warned Sophie. ‘How many treatments can you take a week? You ought to take them every day so the good effect don’t wear off in between. But you got to come t’ree times a week or they won’t do no good at all. It’ll be the greatest investment you ever made. Have your husband wash your feet in ice water every night, don’t drink no liquor except beer, no eggs in hot weat’er ’n come back T’ursday for wibrate the wertebrays.’

Frankie knew he was being played for a mark but it took Violet to put her foot down. When she no longer had anyone to wheel her down Division to Big Boy’s, Sophie finally resigned herself to forgoing his ministrations.

Thus Frankie had robbed her again, of course, of her one chance to get well. If he wouldn’t let her go to Big Boy’s she wouldn’t go anywhere at all. For weeks she wouldn’t let anyone help her upstairs but Frankie.

Even though Vi had helped her down the stairs it had to be on Frankie’s shoulder she must now come up. Once, wearied like a child by hours of horror films and animated cartoons, she clung with all her weight to the banister, crying that no one must touch her any more but Frankie.

‘Let me help you, Sissie,’ Violet urged her, wiping Sophie’s forehead, ‘Frankie’s gone to work.’

‘He ain’t
suppose
to go so soon,’ she complained miserably in the darkening hall, ‘he’s suppose to help me up,
he’s
the one who done it, he’s
suppose
to, he’s
suppose
to—’ She began beating the scarred newel post with both fat fists. ‘He went early just so’s he wouldn’t have to ’n I
told
him to wait – I
told
him, I
told
him—’

‘He got to earn a livin’ first, Sissie. He ain’t even got the clinic paid off yet.’

‘You call this
livin
’?’ Sophie wanted to know, and her voice rose into such a hysterical rattle that Violet slapped her cleanly across the cheek. For one moment Sophie’s full-moon face stared out in white shock at Violet’s impudence. ‘Now my best friend turns on me,’ she mourned, ‘he made me this way ’n you stick up fer him – you got a name like a flower but you’re a devil all the same. Go
on
, get upstairs, the sheeny shoplifter is waitin’ to give you some hot lovin’, you’ll just have time before Stash gets home – I’ll get upstairs by myself ’r die right here in the hall.’ She was pale with sweat and leaned heavily upon the post for support. Violet waited, hands on hips, for the tantrum to pass.

But at last had turned slowly away, so sorry that Sophie, of all people, should talk like that. Violet had hardly felt the stairs beneath her feet. In the hall at the top of the flight a red light shone over the gas meter, among a dark maze of pipes, with the meter’s single hand pointing to some midnight when no cripple would be crying below with her head on the dark newel post. Some midnight when neither Sparrow nor Frankie would be near at hand nor anyone at all, of all the friends she knew. She looked down over the banister. Sophie was in the middle of the first flight and coming on strong.