The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride (6 page)

Then they faced me, lyric abstracts of the human head, even almost the poem of it, but too much the appendage of human use ever to be sculpture, and being all alike, one sad step away from art. I suppose that is what most idols are. I stood there for quite a while saying what I thought was goodbye, long enough until I understood what I was really saying. Hello.

Oh larks and gaiety!—for that’s what it can be, sometimes, when we finally desert everything we have, in order to greet everything there is. Did you never wonder how it feels to be one of those—the men who walk out of the door one morning natural as life but are never to be seen again, at least not in the proper places? Or perhaps one of those whose unlaid ghosts are still reported—the owners of puddles of clothes left on beaches, of the ownerless car, left for all to see, on a bridge? I often used to wonder how it felt to be one of those—the de-campers. And now I have a notion of how it must be, even for the wife-deserters, the fathers of five who tiptoe out and over a back fence of broken bottles—how it feels for all those who light out and start walking the underside of the pavement, upside down, like a child’s drawing of Chinamen on the lower rim of the world.

Glee—that’s what it feels like. Half of it, of course, is for the stone rolled away from the neck-bone, but the other half is the glee of running. Queer then though, how they’ll still give each other little helping flips of the hand, or sit, though silent, in each other’s company—for the fire perhaps, but even on a warm day, as if each saw the same, funny, handmade grail in front of him. Or not really. For I never met a manjack among them who didn’t believe he was running toward the facts.

Rough champagne, that, and the price is high—but it’s the drink we’re made for. On the fizz of it, I went round gathering up my portfolio, while the door to the wig closet, a silent choir loft looking down, remained open. I chose toilet articles, at first trying to stick strictly to a philosophy of need, but that’s not to be had for the asking; in the modern world, what is need? I would be taught it.

I took a plaid car-blanket of consoling Scotch warmth and color, and a change of inner and outer clothing—unfortunate that the lightest and warmest should be cashmere and other silky telltales—to supplement the sturdy undergarments, slacks and stout shoes I had already donned. (If the vagrant is often dressed too warmly for year-round weather, it’s because Aesop is a liar; it’s not the ant who knows most about winter.)

To these I added a head-scarf (for colds) and then, thoughtfully, one of my old turbans from Cooksley. Even nudists must be practical, and I would in time have to get my living. Did I mean to beg, steal, or wash dishes?—here again it came to me that circumstances must be my moral instruction. (It’s so hard to remember that just because one is running toward the facts doesn’t necessarily mean that one has got them—or ever will.) And at the last minute I added a short veil of gauze.

The veil was connected with a slight ambition of mine already burgeoning. For it’s entirely possible to be both honest and frivolous, a role that men deny exists, of course, since only women are perfect for it. It seems to me in no way odd that Paris, the goal of so many professions from eaters to lovers, should also be mine. Not that the underside of New York is to be despised; a vagrant who has got even as far as one of its boroughs has come very far. But from books I’ve read, Bohèmes I’ve listened to, there appeared to be no place for one of our sort quite like the banks of the Seine, or perhaps the barges. (After that, with the onset of age and maybe wisdom, perhaps Athens.) And though from now on I mightn’t look it, I knew myself to be very conventional really, if not at heart, as they say, then perhaps from the bottom, where the conventions are more normally located. So, for Paris in the spring, I carried gauze.

Then I shouldered my strap-bag. An Abercrombie pouch of fine leather and canvas, veteran of picnic weekends of yore, it made me look all too much like the
poule de luxe
of vagabonds, but time would soon darken us both, tanning us not with holiday but with the truths of exposure, like bright pennies in water. Then I turned to go.

And then, it was my heart—which I have, oh I have—that rose in me, bubbled like a drain in which too much had been cast, but stood by for service as hearts do, imperfectly beating. The door to the wig closet was open—what use now, locks?—but I had intended to go straight past it. Had I? Had I forgotten what was hanging there? Have you?

It hung in its own niche, well above the wigs, or did until yesterday—Knoller’s picture, Knoller’s Picasso. I have sometimes suspected it to be of rather too small a size for the general run of those of his works classified as of that period of his known as the “bone period,” but even if it shouldn’t really be a Picasso, neither the donor nor I had been bilked. Surely the blue behind the figures is his blue, the shore they sit on his pebble-crazed, wind-eaten shore, the canvas itself only a pause between two claps of wind. They are his figures, the two terrible bones with knobs for heads and an eye between them. Sad clasped, they sit against the blue, and how human is bone! Who, in their bleak sight, would call for hair, or even flesh, to cover it? But in their lower parts they are joined, as if to remember where flesh was quickest and bone may still be, in the parts where love is made. Sad clasped they sit, against the blue. I took off my last wig, and laid it before them.

Though I might stand there until Christendom come again and all the bones did rise, I should never be as free, white and equal as they were. They were art and I was life, with a hey nonny nonny—I won’t say for which of us. Meanwhile, though I had already disposed of them by bequest—to Ernest—I found that I didn’t want him to have them after all, or not without me. Someday, they and I might present ourselves before him, for such a family reunion as is given to few stars of the cinema. In
Californie,
on my way to Paris, perhaps, on the odd beeline which is the zigzag one must expect of roads that were to be as open as mine. Meanwhile, I would take them along with me for my personal, the very psalm of my life, as sung by somebody else.

I found they wouldn’t fit in the pouch as yet, someday perhaps, as needs wore out or were discarded. I wrapped them in a chamois—useful for windows, should I go out washing them—and put the picture in a Harvard book-bag, which it fitted exactly. Then I had a glass of water. Then I ate a chocolate. Then I went to the bathroom, came out again, shouldered both bags, and stood in front of the door. Scarved for the journey, but otherwise rather cold about the ears, my head hung down, a donkey awaiting its Giddy-ap and Gee. I stamped my foot at myself, but the door did not open. And finally, I was able to open it and then shut it behind me, first tossing the keys inside. So I abandoned the roost for the road, the long, sweet domestic life of “What-I-feel” for the sterner shake-a-leg of “What-I-am.” It was nothing like my young dreams of going for a cabinboy—though it might turn out to be the most masculine thing I’ve done yet.

In the elevator, luckily self-service, I was nervy. All of me felt weak and exposed, like an invalid up on his pins again but not without a suspicion that there’d been more to the operation than supposed. I got past the doorman without difficulty.

“Taxi, Miss?” he said, but of course I declined. Ever since a certain event in both our lives he had been particularly respectful; unless my scarf slipped, he would remain so.

“Cheerio, Duggins,” I said. “And watch out for more armored cars.”

It wasn’t until I boarded the subway that I realized those words had been my last address to the first-class-with-loungeseats world I was leaving. I decided they would do.

It was just dusk when I got off in the neighborhood of my case-load, the locale I’d chosen to start out in. Honeymoons might be nothing more than unveiling, but all unveilings were not exactly—well, yes it was cowardly of me. But I couldn’t afford to start out on 42nd, a street under constant patrol for all the exhibitionists that were there already; yet in the subway, where the bashed-in people will tolerate anything, I would never be noticed at all. Later on, when I was really in practice, in that happy future when all would be ordinary again—at least for me—I planned to work my way uptown, even to hare off to the better country resorts, at weekends. Right now, I found myself not really conservative, but choosy. Which means timid. I suppose there’s no exactly right place to be reborn in, but I’ve not done so badly. This neighborhood is ruined, but lively. If the same is said of me, I shan’t be sorry.

One way to start the ruination was to get rid of all the extra money I had by me, all in packets thin enough to be slipped under a door, but when totaled, rather a sum. The teller had been horrified; banks so disapprove of cash one would think they hadn’t got any. It’s credit, of course, that makes the planet whirl smartly; cash is for scum. I was scummed to the ears with it. It wasn’t that I still kept any special brief for the poor-in-houses as people; I had long since been aware that their mechanisms of kindness or the reverse were at best about the same as anybody else’s; nor was I even any longer romantical enough to expect any change in that area in those of the viaduct, though I preferred them. But the difference between rich and poor isn’t only cash or credit; it’s scope. To my professional knowledge, windfalls were scarce down here. These were my reasons; the facts were, that even in the most decently uncovered heads, the poor can still be a damn headache.

I had a modest forty-five cases in my load—and they were all special, of course; that is, they were the ones I knew. As the evening darkened, and I toiled up one after the other of the tenement stairs as I had done so often before—one couldn’t trust the mailboxes, from which even government checks were regularly burgled—I carefully kept myself from any sly satisfactions of charity that I might have dragged with me from Tudor City, but couldn’t help being merry. I delivered to dark fanlights only, but had all their habits so closely by me that few return visits were needed. Now and then I stopped at a stall to have a slice of pizza or a knish or an ice, and almost every other one of the old hallways still had toilets—the whole evening was like an old household whose marvelously simple conveniences I was learning.

In my envelopes were bills of small denomination, in sums ranging no higher than $250, the limit I had set in order not to have the matter noised about, or to alarm the receivers, to many of whom good fortune was never anonymous or gratuitous. On most, I had written something not instructional, just enough to show good intention, and that it was for them. And on each, I tried to hit a note median between their fantasies and their needs—“For Rosie’s piano”—she would never play it; “For Mannie’s funeral”—he had already had it; “For luck” to the gambler; “For the patent leathers”; “For the pimp”—since after all, wasn’t this what I was doing for myself?

As I went up the stairs to leave the last envelope—for my old client whose politeness was always to warn me away from her own bedbugs, I felt relaxed and yet a-tingle, greased for the long birth-canal and ready to slide into the light. The fact was that my scarf, a Liberty tie-silk, ill-chosen to stay on a bare skull, must have slipped its knot sometime back—later I found it caught inside the lining of my Aquascutum. But I was by now too tired to notice anything but that the old woman’s door was dark, or to recall that her insomnia went without electricity except when visited. Her hearing too, was as sharp as the rats she kept at bay with her broom handle. I had no sooner stepped to the door, hand not yet in pouch, when the door opened. She knew me, almost at once, I think. But she was a resourceful woman. She didn’t want to.

“A dybbuk, a dybbuk!” she shouted—which wasn’t likely to wake anybody in this house of Italians. Then she shut the door. But she was lonely. A minute later, it opened a crack. “If you are a dybbuk,” her voice said, “touch the mezuzah on the door above, it will rest you, then leave yet, hah? If you are the worker from the agency, come in.”

Her kindness to dybbuks melted me. I entered. She was ready for me, already moaning and ritually gnashing. “Oy, what an accident. What to happen, Oy.”

“Not … an accident.” Confiding was new to me. “I—we—” I don’t know where I meant to begin.

She opened her eyes. “Those Italienisches. A
fight
maybe?”

I opened mine. Could she think they had scalped me? “No—no—”

“So, ah-hah, I thought so. Those crooks,” she said. “You go to the priest,” she said. She hissed it. “Go to their priest; he’ll get it back for you before they sell it, such a beautiful wig.”

I wept then, from shock.

“Oy, dolling,” she said, rocking me. “All of them you have, so byudifful. Musta cost a fortune. Those crooks.”

We were on the couch. I noticed she no longer bothered to warn me about the boggles. It’s no trick at all to come down in the world.

That cheered me. I dried my tears. “Does everybody know? That I wear them?”

“I don’t know wedder from everybody?” she said sulkily. “Me. My friend Mrs. Levin the beautician, she said it. And maybe we told Mrs. Yutzik in Hester Street, she’s an invalid.”

“And the Italians,” I said. I thought it best to leave it at that.

When I was ready to go, having found the scarf, she scuttled off, telling me to wait, and returned with something wrapped in newspaper. “Put on to go home,” she said. “And good riddance to it.” She struck her own brow. “Such connections it has, in the mind. Wait till donstairs, hah. To put.”

It was a sheitel, the ugly wig worn after marriage and meant to be known as such, shiny red-brown and bumpy as their Friday bread. That reminded me. Down the block, yes, there the baker was already at his ovens, it must be half-past three. I missed having a watch, but the disciplines must begin; later I would be rewarded for its loss by a spryer time-sense, the total loss of One that comes to those without watches. For every so-called loss, I could look forward to other gains.

I went in to buy rolls, and while the baker’s back was turned, dropped the sheitel lightly on a tray of the breads which would always tell me, newspaper-less though I might be, that it was indeed Friday. I did this in imitation of my friends under the viaduct, who saved as queerly as anybody who was not on the move, but when they threw something away, did so with an indefinable elegance. Then I retraced my steps to the old lady’s house—she would have to chance it on the mailbox—and dropped in my last delivery, whose inscription read: “For a couch.”