The Street (20 page)

‘Pop,' she said, ‘now that the kids are gone, you might as well sleep in one of the bedrooms.'

‘Okay,' he said humbly.

She undressed and went to bed, but she couldn't go to sleep. She remembered how she had kept getting out of bed to look up the street, glancing at the clock, listening to footsteps. When Jim finally came at eleven o'clock, she didn't hear him until he opened the front door. He came straight up the stairs and she turned the light on so he would know she was awake.

He stopped in the tiny upstairs hall and opened the bedroom doors—both of them. She strained her cars to get some clue to his reaction when he saw that
Bub was in one of the rooms and Pop was in the other. But there was only silence.

Then he was standing in the door. He was still wearing his hat and overcoat and the sight angered her. He came over to the bed and the room was filled with the smell of cheap gin. And, she thought, he reeks of it. That's the way he looks for a job—in bars and drinking joints and taverns.

‘Where are the kids?' he demanded.

‘Did you have any supper?' she asked.

‘What the hell—you heard me. Where are the kids?'

‘They're gone. The State woman came and got them this morning.'

‘I suppose you figured if those little bastards were taken away, I'd have to find a job. That I'd go out and make one. Buy one, mebbe.'

‘Oh, Jim, don't—' she protested.

‘You knew what would happen when you brought that old booze hound here to live.'

Perhaps if she kept quiet, and let him go on raving without answering him, he would get tired and stop. She bit her lip, looked away from him, and the words came out in spite of her, ‘Don't you talk about my father like that.'

‘A saint, ain't he?' he sneered. ‘He and those old bitches he sleeps with. I suppose I'm not good enough to talk about him.'

‘Oh, shut up,' she said wearily.

‘Mebbe it runs in the family. Mebbe that's why you had him come here. Because you figured with him here you'd be able to get rid of the kids. And that would give you more time to sleep with some
Harlem nigger you've got your eye on. That's it, ain't it?'

‘Shut up!' This time she shouted. And she saw Pop go quietly down the hall, his worn old traveling bag in his hand. The sight shocked her. He didn't have any place to go, yet he was leaving because of the way she and Jim were carrying on. ‘Oh, Jim,' she said. ‘Don't let's fight. It's all over and done with. There isn't any point in quarreling like this.'

‘Oh, yeah? That's what you think.' He leaned over the bed. His eyes were bloodshot, angry. ‘I oughtta beat you up and down the block.' He slapped her across the face.

She was out of bed in a flash. She picked up a chair, the one chair in the bedroom—a straight-backed wooden one. She had painted it with bright yellow enamel shortly after they were married. And she had said, ‘Jim, look. It makes sunlight walk right into the room.'

He had looked at her squatting on the floor, paintbrush in hand, her face glowing as she smiled up at him. He had leaned over and kissed her forehead, saying, ‘Honey, you're all the sunlight I'll ever need.'

It was the same chair. And she aimed it at his head as she shouted, ‘You come near me and so help me I'll kill you.'

It had been a loud, bitter, common fight. It woke Bub up and set him to crying. And it was more than a week afterward before they were able to patch it up. In the meantime the mortgage money was due and, though Jim didn't say so, she felt that if they lost the house by not being able to pay the interest, it would be her fault.

The Fifth Avenue bus lurched to a stop at 116th Street. She climbed down the steep stairs from the top deck, thinking that if they hadn't been so damn poor she and Jim might have stayed married. It was like a circle. No matter at what point she started, she always ended up at the same place. She had taken the job in Connecticut so they could keep the house. While she was gone, Jim got himself a slim dark girl whose thighs made him believe in himself again and momentarily released him from his humdrum life.

She had never seen him since the day she had gone to the house in Jamaica and found that other woman there. The only time she had heard from him was when he had forwarded the letter from Mrs. Chandler—and then all he had done was put Pop's address on the envelope. There had been no messages, no letters—nothing for all these years.

Once Pop had said to her, ‘Hear Jim's left town. Nobody knows where he went.'

And she was so completely indifferent to anything concerning Jim that she had made no comment. She watched the bus until it disappeared out of sight where Seventh Avenue joins noth Street. This clear understanding she had of what caused Jim to acquire that other woman was because the same thing was happening to her. She was incapable of enduring a bleak and lonely life encompassed by those three dark rooms.

She wondered uneasily if she was fooling herself in believing that she could sing her way out of the street. Suppose it didn't work and she had to stay there. What would the street do to her? She thought
of Mrs. Hedges, the Super, Min, Mrs. Hedges' little girls. Which one would she be like, say five years from now? What would Bub be like? She shivered as she headed toward home.

IT WAS A COLD, CHEERLESS NIGHT. But in spite of the cold, the street was full of people. They stood on the corners talking, lounged half in and half out of hallways and on the stoops of the houses, looking at the street and talking. Some of them were coming home from work, from church meetings, from lodge meetings, and some of them were not coming from anywhere or going anywhere, they were merely deferring the moment when they would have to enter their small crowded rooms for the night.

In the middle of the block there was a sudden thrust of raw, brilliant light where the unshaded bulbs in the big poolroom reached out and pushed back the darkness. A group of men stood outside its windows
watching the games going on inside. Their heads were silhouetted against the light.

Lutie, walking quickly through the block, glanced at them and then at the women coming toward her from Eighth Avenue. The women moved slowly. Their shoulders sagged from the weight of the heavy shopping bags they carried. And she thought, That's what's wrong. We don't have time enough or money enough to live like other people because the women have to work until they become drudges and the men stand by idle.

She made an impatient movement of her shoulders. She had no way of knowing that at fifty she wouldn't be misshapen, walking on the sides of her shoes because her feet hurt so badly; getting dressed up for church on Sunday and spending the rest of the week slaving in somebody's kitchen.

It could happen. Only she was going to stake out a piece of life for herself. She had come this far poor and black and shut out as though a door had been slammed in her face. Well, she would shove it open; she would beat and bang on it and push against it and use a chisel in order to get it open.

When she opened the street door of the apartment house, she was instantly aware of the silence that filled the hall. Mrs. Hedges had been quiet, too, for if she was sitting in her window she had given no indication of her presence.

There was no sound except for the steam hissing in the radiator. The silence and the dimly lit hallway and the smell of stale air depressed her. It was like a dead weight landing on her chest. She told herself that she mustn't put too much expectation in
getting the singing job. Almost anything might happen to prevent it. Boots might change his mind.

She went up the stairs, thinking, But he can't. She wouldn't let him. It meant too much to her. It was a way out—the only way out of here and she and Bub had to get out.

On the third-floor landing she stopped. A man was standing in the hall. His back was turned toward her. She hesitated. It wasn't very late, but it was dark in the hall and she was alone.

He turned then and she saw that he had his arms wound tightly around a girl and he was pressed so close to her and was bending so far over her that they had given the effect of one figure. He wore a sailor's uniform and the collar of his jacket was turned high around his neck, for it was cold in the hall.

The girl looked to be about nineteen or twenty. She was very thin. Her black hair, thick with grease, gleamed in the dim light. There was an artificial white rose stuck in the center of the pompadour that mounted high above her small, dark face.

Lutie recognized her. It was Mary, one of the little girls who lived with Mrs. Hedges. The sailor gave Lutie a quick, appraising look and then turned back to the girl, blotting her out. The girl's thin arms went back around his neck.

‘Mary,' Lutie said, and stopped right behind the sailor.

The girl's face appeared over the top of the sailor's shoulder.

‘Hello,' she said sullenly.

‘It's so cold out here,' Lutie said. ‘Why don't you go inside?'

‘Mis' Hedges won't let him come in no more,' Mary said. ‘He's spent all his money. And she says she ain't in business for her health.'

‘Can't you talk to him somewhere else? Isn't there a friend's house you could go to?'

‘No, ma'am. Besides, it ain't no use, anyway. He's got to go back to his ship tonight.'

Lutie climbed the rest of the stairs fuming against Mrs. Hedges. The sailor would return to his ship carrying with him the memory of this dark narrow hallway and Mrs. Hedges and the thin resigned little girl. The street was full of young thin girls like this one with a note of resignation in their voices, with faces that contained no hope, no life. She shivered. She couldn't let Bub grow up in a place like this.

She put her key in the door quietly, trying to avoid the loud click of the lock being drawn back. She pushed the door open, mentally visualizing the trip across the living room to her bedroom. Once inside her room, she would close the door and put the light on and Bub wouldn't wake up. Then she saw that the lamp in the living room was lit and she shut the door noisily. He should have been asleep at least two hours ago, she thought, and walked toward the studio couch, her heels clicking on the congoleum rug.

Bub sat up and rubbed his eyes. For a moment she saw something frightened and fearful in his expression, but it disappeared when he looked at her.

‘How come you're not in bed?' she demanded.

‘I fell asleep.'

‘With your clothes on?' she said, and then added: ‘With the light on, too? You must be trying to make the bill bigger—' and she stopped abruptly. She
was always talking to him about money. It wasn't good. He would be thinking about nothing else pretty soon. ‘How was the movie?' she asked.

‘It was swell,' he said eagerly. ‘There was one guy who caught gangsters—'

‘Skip it,' she interrupted. ‘You get in bed in a hurry, Mister. I still don't know what you're doing up—' Her eyes fell on the ash tray on the blue-glass coffee table. It was filled with cigarette butts. That's funny. She had emptied all the trays when she washed the dinner dishes. She knew that she had. She looked closer at the cigarette ends. They were moist. Whoever had smoked them had held them, not between their lips, but far inside the mouth so that the paper got wet and the tobacco inside had stained and discolored it. She turned toward Bub.

‘Supe was up.' Bub's eyes had followed hers. ‘We played cards.'

‘You mean he was in here?' she said sharply. And thought, Of course, dope, he didn't stand outside and throw his cigarette butts into the ash tray through a closed door.

‘We played cards,' Bub said again.

‘Let's get this straight once and for all.' She put her hands on his shoulders. ‘When I'm not home, you're not to let anyone in here. Anyone. Understand?'

He nodded. ‘Does that mean Supe, too?'

‘Of course. Now you get in bed fast so you can get to school on time.'

While Bub undressed, she took the cover off the studio couch, smoothed the thin blanket and the
sheets, pulled a pillowslip over one of the cushions. He seemed to be taking an awfully long time in the bathroom. ‘Hey,' she said finally. ‘Step on it. You can't get to heaven that way.'

She heard him giggle and smiled at the sound. Then her face sobered. She looked around the living room. One of these days he was going to have a real bedroom to himself instead of this shabby, sunless room. The plaid pattern of the blue congoleum rug was wearing off in front of the studio couch. It was scuffed down to the paper base at the door that led to the small hall. Everything in the room was worn and old—the lumpy studio couch, the overstuffed chair, the card table that served as desk, the bookcase filled with second-hand textbooks and old magazines. The blue-glass top on the coffee table was scratched and chipped. The small radio was scarred with cigarette burns. The first thing she would do would be to move and then she would get some decent furniture.

Bub got into bed, pulled the covers up under his chin. ‘Good night, Mom,' he said.

He was almost asleep when she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. She turned the light on in her bedroom, came back and switched the light off in the living room.

‘Sleep tight!' she said. His only reply was a drowsy murmur—half laugh, half sigh.

She undressed, thinking of the Super sitting in the living room, of the time when she had come to look at the apartment and he had stood there in that room where Bub was now sleeping and how he had held the flashlight so that the beam of light from it was
down at his feet. Now he had been back in there—sitting down, playing cards with Bub—making himself at home.

What had he talked to Bub about? The thought of his being friendly with Bub was frightening. Yet what could she do about it other than tell Bub not to let him into the apartment again? There was no telling what went on in the mind of a man like that—a man who had lived in basements and cellars, a man who had forever to stay within hailing distance of whatever building he was responsible for.