The Man With the Golden Arm (48 page)

The evening of the night that no one came at all and she wanted the moon to move.

Only the moon to move, it seemed so little to ask, for it moved for everyone else.

All anyone ever did for her was to flush the toilet down the hall and when would he ever quit flushing that nasty thing anyhow?

Not one of them heard, hours later, the stranger’s step in the hall below, listening there to hear whether he were expected, then begin coming on heavily, like one almost too tired to mount one more flight. She peered out, the door an inch ajar, like an animal expecting pursuit and knew: ‘It’s Frankie comin’ home.’ To make it all up to her for leaving like that without even saying goodbye.

Without even telling her what it was for that the wagon men had wanted him. Without even telling her it was all a lie about him and that public hide on the first floor front. Without giving her so much as a word to fight with when the neighbors said things behind her back. It would serve him right if she told him now: ‘You’ve brought it all on yourself. It’s every bit your fault.’ But by the way he came on, so heavily with every step, she could tell how sorry he really was. He was sorry at last, truly truly sorry, he’d come back to make it all up to her now.

To make it all up, and have something to eat, a place to sleep and a place to hide – what was the difference whether he’d slept with this one or that, whether he’d hit some other bum on the head sometime or other – the main thing was he was coming back, he was sorry, for he loved her after all. She bit her nails with excitement.

Heard the struggler below lean for breath hard against the rickety rail – she hoped he just wasn’t drunk again. If he was she’d have to get him sober right away, she would have to work fast and be ever so still, he’d be so tired, so hungry and sick and broke and everyone against him – he would need her so badly and she whispered through the door all the way down the stairwell: ‘Hurry, honey,’ as loudly as she dared.

Then that same old fool down the hall, who by right should have been in bed for hours, began the same old record on the same dreary old all-night vic.

The struggler heard, she heard him turn, he thought there was a party going on and had best not take such a chance after all. The door closed though the record went on.

When it stopped she realized he must be going around the block, he was going to use the fire escape and fool them all, she would have to have the fire-escape door open for him.

Then down the hall he would come so softly, no one would hear his step at all. No one would know where her Frankie was so safely hiding.

No one, not even that Vi would know, she would feed him and bathe him and make him sleep and take care that passers-by didn’t waken him.

But the moon seemed too bright. Past all the blind doors to the rust-colored escape window that only long disuse had fastened: she got the shoehorn between the door and the sash and it came wide with a tiny flaking of rust onto the blanket across her knees. She had to stand up to let him know it was safe now to come up from the alley shadows.

Yet heard no steps on the iron stairs. No feet feeling for rusted rungs. No low whistle in the winter night to tell he was coming at last to her now.

Leaning upon the rust-colored wall, her feet felt blindly for the iron, her eyes blurred with winter moonlight; a tenement moon, a fire-escape moon, so bright, so steady, so unmoving – if it would move just ever so little, then he could come – he was afraid while it was shining so bright, and from behind her, from the room where the vic had played, a woman’s head was thrust out of a bright-lit door to ask, ‘Who’s prowlin’ around here?’

Then saw the vacant wheelchair and Sophie leaning for support upon the rail. From the moonlit air above, the troubled air below and the unbalanced air all about Sophie heard their voices clamoring toward her.

She could walk by herself if they just didn’t all hold her so tightly, she knew.

‘Take it easy, sister. One footsy at a time. That’s our girl.’

She was going, much too fast, down the gutter-colored hall between two square-capped voices and the pin-curled neighbors in their doors watching all the way down to the very last door of all. Where that double-crossing Vi stood wringing her hands because everything in the world happened to her even when it happened to somebody else.

‘All night she been wheelin’, back ’n fort’, back ’n fort’,’ someone complained, ‘I couldn’t get a wink, but I know what troubles she’s had so I let her be, I’m not the kind to make trouble for others, I’ve had too much myself.’

Then Violet’s compassionate voice, telling the neighbors just how everything had happened. ‘Them two, him ’n her, wantin’ to love each other just ever so long. Wantin’ so much ’n never knowin’ how, neither one of ’em.’

Sophie felt the Division Street wind slap her cheek and the winter air nip at her throat – it had been so long since she’d been in the open. Then the air came close and stuffy, houses and store fronts and people were passing in great dips exactly as though she were riding the roller coaster once more. And laughing softly to herself at such a pleasant surprise, felt herself coasting right down into some whitewashed hall toward a cornerless room.

In the city’s cornerless heart.

Little dull red lights burning all in a row and the terrible odor of insanity, yellow and cloying, forever just one door down, almost underfoot and just overhead and following softly forever like a moving pall in the disinfected, bought-and-measured air. Seeping out from behind some whitewashed door where, so remote, so lost to all, some lost one sang in a young girl’s voice, like a voice circling endlessly on a lopsided merry-go-round.

While Somebody nearer at hand kept asking faraway questions of Someone who’d rather laugh than answer a sensible word.

Someone who kept turning her head so daintily instead of answering like she should. Till Somebody took her arm and everyone pretended to be a little sad, going down the hall all together without touching the floor at all till they came to a certain numbered door where nobody had a key.

‘We’re all locked out,’ Sophie told them solemnly, and they laughed, though why that was so funny nobody knew.

The room was bare from the ceiling to the cold stone floor except for a built-in cot covered by one clean and well-worn sheet and a familiar-looking khaki blanket across its foot.

She felt a sick dread of the walls, they were as white as the corridors, as white as the cot, as the sheet, as the ceiling and as the faces that urged her inside: she drew back, sensing she would not return from here, making a polite child’s excuse. ‘Somebody lives here, I mustn’t go inside – but I’ll come back tomorrow and we’ll all have a little talk.’

They turned on the light to show her there was no one waiting for her here. Though she knew whoever lived in here was only hiding – he would come when they had gone and the light was out and the door locked behind her.

A room with neither window nor door, a room within many other rooms unlighted at evening by either neon or moonlight, where neither the city’s sounds nor Frankie’s cherished voice would sound for her again. But, feeling herself urged on either side, went forward with the crushed docility of the utterly doomed.

Heard the door click behind her for keeps and something
locked in her heart with that same automatic key. When she looked around from where she lay on the clean and well-worn sheet, she saw no way to tell where the door had been at all: the walls merged into the door in a single whitewashed surface. Her slow eyes followed for some corner that would rest them, but wall merged into wall in a single curve and there was no place for the eye to rest. Around and around and around, on a whitewashed merry-go-round, ceiling to floor and back again. Till the heart grew sick and the sick brain wheeled, around and around and around.

Till the whiteness was a dull pain on the eyeballs, then a weight on the lids, and the merry-go-round slowed down, slowed down; till it moved on only to the timeless tunes of sleep.

She wakened in a low, sad light, with rumors of evening all down the hall and hearing, from the other side of the wall, a low animal moaning. It was that Drunkie John beating that poor hide of a Molly Novotny again, he was beating her harder than ever before, he was beating her with a certain contentment.

‘If he loves her, what are a few blows?’ Sophie thought with sudden clarity. ‘If a man tells you you’re his – what are a few slaps to
that?
’ Then, relapsing into an infantile smile as the nurse entered, asked, pretending to lisp a little, ‘Nursy, I want to brush my toothies, please.’

And after her teeth had all been nicely brushed began telling the nurse, still with the same babyish lisp, all the names she knew.

‘Sparrow. Vi. Stash. Rumdum. Zygmunt. Old Doc D. Piggy-O. Nifty Louie.’ Saying each one aloud lying on her stomach while the nurse sponged her back with something cool. Picturing their strange lost faces, faces never truly cherished at all and yet now seeming, suddenly, so dear, so dear.

Saying them like a child counting numbers. ‘Umbrella
Man. Cousin Kvorka. Record Head. Schwiefka. Chester from Conveyor. Meter Reader from Endless Belt. Widow Wieczorek. Jailer Schwabatski and Poor Peter. Shudefski from Viaduct. Molly N. Drunkie John.’

And not till after the nurse had left, only then and more tenderly than any, softer than all, somehow more terribly, she whispered at last the last sad name of all––

‘Francis Majcinek. We got married in church.’

The sorrowful name of Frankie Machine.

And now they had been hunting him three weeks already. And where, in all Chicago, a junkie stud-poker dealer might be hiding, this season of thunderous winds and bitter skies, Zygmunt the Prospector might inquire, Antek the Owner might surmise, a certain ward super had to know; and Record Head Bednar could only try to find out. The captain had not reckoned on a woman whose heart could be trod upon by army brogans.

For none but God and Molly Novotny knew for sure.

They had searched the back-room stud sessions and listened in the gin mills for mention of a name. Beneath the hollow merriment of the backstreet cabarets they had watched the midnight creepers and the last-jag weepers; they had questioned forty lushes and pinched one hyped-up Purple-Heart blond. They had let the 26-girls cheat them without a rumble: the music and the traffic passed, great freighters forced the river ice, the murmurous bridges strained slowly upward, paused and as slowly fell. The clocks in all the railroad depots were synchronized to a second’s fraction; yet no one heard that name. The night’s last drunk left with the wind at his heels and the snow turning into a smoke-colored rain.

They followed drunks in a driving sleet and finished following a changeable rain. A rain that wandered aimlessly, like any hatless drunk, down sidestreet and alley and boulevard
looking for any open door at all. In a Lake Street alley they found a five-foot-seven Pole wrapped in an army overcoat, with the marks of the needle like two knotted nipples tattooed into the breasts of a nude on his arm. So they beat him in a different station at exactly the same hour every evening for five nights running. Then kicked him out right on the sixth night’s hour.

Just as the smoke-colored rain began once more.

They picked up a six-foot-four North Clark Street drummer with a stick of marijuana in his wallet almost as long as himself and on South State they found an aging stripper who wept, ‘That’s the same guy walked out on me wit’ my watch after we run up a twenty-six-dollar tab at the Jungle Club – he said I could go to work doubling for Thelma Todd any time I wanted – Who the hell is Thelma Todd?’

They picked up weed hounds, shook down every peddler they spotted coming out of the Cloudland, badgered tavern hostesses and talked price with the hustling girls. And God help the weary hustler without a connection then.

Weed hounds, peddlers, hostesses and hustlers, all gave the law the names of half a hundred other hustlers and hostesses. Then names, alibis, threats, protests and counterthreats, all ran down and were drowned in the snow that, white as uncut morphine, melted in whitish surgical streams along the city’s walks and drains.

They had searched the Polish taverns, they had stood listening in the washroom at Guyman’s Paradise and had inspected the stag line at St Wenceslaus Kostka. They had picked up four blond dealers, three with broken noses and one with no nose at all, and Bednar himself still conducted the showups at Central Police with the unwavering knowledge that, sooner or later, the West Madison Street dragnet would seine up his fair-haired smash-nosed boy.

But his fair-haired boy wasn’t in the Polish bars and he
wasn’t on West Madison. He slept on an army cot in a two-room first-floor cold-water flat where no one knocked but a Negro housekeeper called Dovie and the only other white who entered was Molly-O herself.

‘Everythin’s blowed over,’ Frankie assured Molly-O, ‘there ain’t been a line in the papers about it.’

‘If there ain’t nothin’ in the papers about it,’ Molly told him, ‘it just means they’re keepin’ it out so you’ll get careless ’n walk into the chair for them.’

Frankie sounded hurt. ‘There ain’t no chair about it, Molly-O. It’s manslaughter is all. Happens every day of the week.’

‘It must be nice not to have to worry about a little thing like doin’ one to twenty then,’ she feigned admiration of anyone so lucky.

He grinned wryly. ‘Don’t forget that good-conduct time. I may get out in sixteen.’

‘You couldn’t behave yourself that long if they handcuffed you to the warden.’

Of course Molly-O was right, she had that way of knowing what was wisest and best for Frankie; it was only for herself she couldn’t tell what was wisest.

‘One to twenty’d be worse than the chair for you,’ she told him. ‘The shape you’re in you wouldn’t live four.’ Then she was sorry for saying it like that and came to him, he looked so beat, where he sat at the bare little table where he always sat, dealing to men he’d never deal to again; and took the deck from his hand. ‘Nothin’ blows over Record Head’s head but smoke,’ she told him, and perched on his lap with her hands on his shoulders. ‘You never did tell me what happened that night.’ It was by now only her right to know.