Chapter V: Part 5

"God--God, what her poor little life must have been here alone in this room--nights. Mama forgive me. Mama, forgive me."

"She was a good sleeper, Wally. I used to hear her snoring and always tiptoe by the door. I was always careful not to wake her."

May, craven with death.

He looked at her with his eyes full up with misery, and kept repeating over and over again his phrases--"Mama forgive me. Poor little life. I knew what you suffered, mama. There wasn't an hour of the day or night it wasn't over me. I did it. I did it. Mama, mama forgive--why did you leave me----?"

"Wally, you've got your May. Poor, poor Wally, don't cry--ain't you got your May?"

He kissed her wildly, his wet lips smearing over her cheeks and the twisted, crazy look in his eyes.

"Help me--help me to bear my remorse. I used to snap her off. I never had patience with her. We left her alone when we went to the country--alone here--she might have died like a dog--she did die alone--like a dog--alone----"

"No, Wally. No. Bertha was with her!"

"Bertha! Then why didn't she give my mother her drops? She let her die like a dog. That's what the doctor asked--why didn't the person in whose arms she died, give her the drops? Murderer--where is she--get out--where is she--I want her to get out!"

And Bertha, carrying down through the gloom of the hallway the seven branch candlestick for the foot of old lady Wallenstein's bed, stood hearing, her face picked out in light above the pointing flames. A white face, floating in shadow and shining out of the darkness that poured around it.

A clear, prophetic face above the seven lights.

It was then, gazing upon her, that Wally turned on his wife and struck her three times on the very cheek that his lips had smeared. "Mama," he screamed, "forgive me," and smoking hot off his lips came words that had long since lain dead like dried roseleaves in his memory.

Then he turned around on May.

"You go," he said, with his fingers curling inward to form little cages, "go--go--while God gives me strength not to kill you. My mama--my God--my darling, heartbroken mama--you made me a traitor to her--you--you--you! Go--go--or so help me God--if ever I see you again--God strike me dead if I don't kill you."

"Wally--for God's sake--don't--don't! Let me loose. I'll go, Wally. Leave me go, Wally--for God's sake. You hurt! I'll go--Wally."

After a while it was quiet in the house. There was still the little frangipani scent of May in her room, where she had fussed about in the hysteria of packing. It followed her trail along the hallway as she backed down it in terror, her little valise, with a twist of lace caught in the fastening, held out before her. Then the hall door--and out.

Quiet. With the light from the seven candles burning against the transom and out palely into the hall, and Wally silent in there hour after hour, cramped up against the bedside of his dead.

At midnight the first Mourner sprang up. One of the Old Testament women off the stoop in Division Street, and from behind the closed door, when she slid in beside Wally, her cry went down like a rapier into the heart of the silence. A cry that stuck there to the hilt.

Toward morning when the Mourner dozed in a rocker at the foot of the old woman's bed, Wally, who had never moved from his crouch at the headboard, sprang up suddenly, his hair torn down over his face, but his eyes clear.

"Bertha," he called, and ran out to the hallway and into her room. "Bertha--you--you knew! Bertha--you cook! Bertha--Bertha--come--back--Bertha--I see it now--Bertha----"

At that moment, in a dawn that ran thinly along the edge of the roofs, Bertha with her carpetbag hooked to her fingers was walking. East. A wettish wind, the wind before the dawn, blew her all forward. Her skirts. Some strands of her paling yellow hair and the terribly dilapidated old rose on her hat.

There were no pedestrians. Not even milk carts yet. Only Bertha, walking before the wind.

***

Annie Wennerberg was on her back. Tied in a knot there on a cot of a rheumatism that made bulbs of her knuckles, and swelled up her legs as if they had been great goatskin water bags.

It was horrid, coming out of the clear morning, to walk in on her, tucked way back in the lurking room she shared with the Australian sailor when he was in port.

An iron shutter from the warehouse next door blocked the window, so that it was dark and the jet of gas burned in there all day and kept the smells warm. A sickening, stinking room, with Annie knotted into it as fast to its walls as a fungus.

And Annie in all her knots of pain, looked fat--a swollen fat that was the color of the goatskin water bags.

There were several pillows in their dingy tickings stacked behind Annie's back, and a gray blanket wrapped around her legs that were as lifeless looking as an old bundle. Jocko slept up against them.

A child of about fourteen, with a three-cornered face and a three-cornered shawl spanning her little shoulders that were held in as if from the shivers, was spreading a thick paste along a bit of cloth. Antiphlogistine.

Bertha knew. The poultices like those she had made for Annie when she herself was a child! And the cry that met Bertha as she entered. She knew that, too. A whinny.

"I'm sick as a dog--lying here nine weeks come next Monday. My joints won't untie. Nobody to do a turn. You're a lunk or you'd look in on a body year in and year out. Me that raised you and fed you when your tongue might have been hanging out for want of a home. Clean me up--Bertha. There's eight cots upstairs walking away with themselves, and only this brat doing the work of 'em. There's a fruit freighter of boys in to-morrow--clean me up--Bertha."

And so that morning, with her carpetbag and coat on a chair in the kitchen, Bertha moved Annie out of the hot, unaired nest of her blanket, rubbed her with a liniment the doctor from the clinic had left, combed out the gray dribble of hair, and got her back somehow into the knot that was easiest for her to lie in. Poor Annie cried out at Bertha lifting her ever so gently from her huddle, and the little girl's shoulders shivered narrower together, and Jocko let himself be dragged along with the blanket sooner than uncurl out of his warmth. Annie wanted gin terribly and screamed for it. Its acid was what was burning in her joints, but at noon she finally fell asleep, shuddering and groaning. That afternoon, on her hands and knees, Bertha washed down two of the dirty flights of stairs, did the unmentionable chores of slops and bedding, turned over a drunken sailor on his cot, and washed open his grit-bound eyes.

For eleven months, while Annie slowly untwisted and the swelling went down, Bertha scrubbed these floors, tended the twenty cots, and helped countless drunken sailors to bed by pulling off their heavy shoes and piling them, like great lolling sacks of potatoes, underneath the thin gray blankets, sometimes hoisting them upstairs by the armpits, with an occasional boost of her knee from the rear.

One boy died up there one night of delirium tremens. No one could get hold of his arms to twist them behind him. Bertha did finally, squatting on his head as if he were a fallen horse, while a sailor sat on his feet and still another on his middle. He was a Scandinavian with a thin blond beard and a neck as lovely as a woman's. With his wrists tied together he lay back in Bertha's arms. She held him across her lap, he kicking and plunging his shoulders this way and that. It was horrible to feel his great body fling back against her knees and the strange foreign words flying on flecks of foam from his lips. She began to croon to him one of the Polish melodies that she knew somehow with her heart. He turned his eyes to her, and watching the little beating movement her throat made as she sat singing there in the dirty gas light, began to grow quiet. She unloosed his hands. Finally, when the ambulance came he was asleep, with his cheek to her heart and one arm about her neck, like a child. Dead.

Months of these fantastic, sailor-infested nights. Night after night of brawl after brawl. The slapping of hands against the walls of the narrow hallways from the lurching this way and that. Little yellow seamen with eyes that could seem to hang in the darkness of those halls long after they had passed through it. Slant gashes. The squawks and cries of men bestial in their sleep or dreaming of thirst and typhoon, mutiny and sudden death.

The lowing of steamers. Enormous cries, as if a strange breed of sea cattle were swimming in with the tide.

Wide, impersonal nights that the sense of the nearness of the sea could make seem vast and booming. And all these little men of every clime groping in its enormous darkness, dreaming their puny bestial dreams into it, cowing away from the stars, most of them, on their bellies up there on Annie's cots, their lids granulated and their breathing sour.

***

Chita, the little slavey, came every day. She was one of fourteen children in a Minetta Lane tenement and she was as wiry as Jocko and as quick upstairs and down. She never ran her errands but rode her way, curled up in a little cocoon on the back of a truck and dodging the driver's each crack of the whip. She could sidestep a blow from Annie with one beautiful curve of her little body, and once she ran up Bertha's great flank, for all the world like Jocko, and turned a double somersault down off her shoulder.

In winter her hands bled from chapping and her little nose was horrid and her eyes grew into great disks as her face became smaller under the pinch of cold.

Bertha bought her a reefer and mittens at the Sailors' Supply Store and hemmed her two muslin handkerchiefs, which she bunched into dirty little wads, and immediately lost.

She was as incessant as a buzz. Quick, capering, noiseless on her feet. Never actually ill, but always with the head colds and her little arms so skinny that it hurt to see them strain to lift a pail.

This was little Chita who came, as that slow damp winter wore on, to live in the big, dim shadow of Bertha. She was fourteen and Bertha, who knew what the sailors could say in their bestial dreams, kept her close.

It was not a cold year, only sullen and penetrating and full of soot. Bertha and Chita were covered with it. It blew in on the plumes of smoke off the harbor tugs. The furnace belched it out at them. Chita's little face was like a feeble light behind her mask of this soot and, looking in a straight line down her own nose, Bertha could see the black marks, smeared along the flesh.

Sometimes the sailors sent Chita out for stogies or tobacco or beer. She was greedy of the pennies and foreign coins they threw, sometimes sucking them up under her tongue all day and holding her mouth grim and tight when Bertha tried to pry in a finger to force them out.

A long winter that, more like a cloudy November dusk. Annie knotted into her bed and looking out through the door of her room, which she always kept open, upon the two of them moving so tirelessly upstairs and down, at slops, scrubbing until the wet stench rose, and when a fruit steamer or a freighter came in, running with the gray blankets and the pillows.

Chita feared Annie and the vituperative words. She seemed to shrink and the disks of her eyes to become larger. Annie's hands were too crippled to strike her, but all the same she would quiver back, her arm dodging up before her eyes, and the great bony bulbs of her knees clicking together.

But in the shadow of Bertha it was safe. There she could play around with Jocko, herself so curiously like Jocko, cheating on the job outrageously. They would start, she and Bertha, at the opposite ends of a floor, scrubbing toward the center, only Chita never arrived. She liked to sit in a huddle and rock herself, arms locked about her ankles and chitter--chitter questions at the great crawling hulk of Bertha as she came scrubbing toward her on all fours, her arm plunging from the socket and sweeping its great circle of dirty suds.

Darting, steely little questions that she threw like knives in mumblety-peg, landing them straight up.

"Bertha, b'Jesus-- Whozee? Huh?"

"Jesus? He was a man, Chita."

"A man nawthin'! He's God."

"He bane a perfect man."

"Bloke, you! God wusn't a man. God, he had curls and a white dress."

"Yah--He--was drenched in Light--that was his white dress."

"Bloke, you! Light ain't no white dress. Silk is. That's you!" said Chita and slid out with her palm a splash of greasy water from her scrub pail upon Bertha--"that's you--drenched in slop."

Bertha boxed her then, roundly against the ear, so that the little imp, strung on her wires of legs, jumped and dangled.

"You bane a--a bad rowdy--brat--."

"Bertha--drenched in--slop--."

She looked down to fleck off some webby stuff that had clung to her gray woolen skirt.

"Slop cannot drench--like Light!"

"What light?"

"His!"

"Aw you--square head--there ain't no light."

"Aw you--curly head, there ain't unless you see it."

Sometimes Bertha kissed her, right down into the riot of short curls that rose off her head like the suds of a shampoo.

But Chita was nervous and vicious from being afraid. Once she bit Bertha on the lips until they bled.

"Bloke, you fooled me--diden you? Bloke you! I thought you wuz gonna hit."

Chita had black and blue marks on her arms and down her lean little legs. Usually when she came to work in the morning she could display new ones. Not without pride.

"Me mudder give me this one. Me old man. Me brud! Look at 'em and make a snoot, Bertha."

The sight of these blue and green bruises, burning there so sullenly along the tan little limbs of Chita, could cause Bertha's lips to fold back in a quivering ejaculation of sickness. That was a "snoot."

"I don't know any snoots, Chita."

"There, bloke you--you're doing one now--a snoot like there was somebody sticking a knife and fork in you and then cutting you up in little bittsa pieces----"

Chita was fond of the torturous phrase. She liked to devise them. Her father's favorite threat to her was, "I'll brekka your leg."

"Bertha, what if somebody 'ud cut off Annie Wennerberg's head and cook it with cabbage."

"Chita, you think only bad thoughts."

"Me brud stuck a pin in my wrist once, all the way in."

"Poor Chita."

"If I was a jackknife I'd cut all bad people's eyes out----"

"Poor Chita--it bane terrible bad for you with your people----"

"I'd slit a Chinaman if I had a butcher knife."

"Chita!"

"Looka, he gimme this--me old man--he pinched--look--make a snoot now--look--ouch--don't touch."

It was a savage-looking black and blue mark on her shoulder, and one day it began to fester and Chita, a little stoic for pain, started whimpering and reaching up her lower lip to suck in the tears.

Squatting in their puddles, as they scrubbed toward one another down one of the pitch-black upper halls, Bertha, who had grown bold in words with this child, began to piece out a story to soothe her.

"Don't cry, Chita."

"Hurts. Hurts."

"Poor little Chita your tears are falling right in the scrub-bucket----"

"I hurt so, Bertha----"

"Sh-h, don't cry, Chita. Once upon a time, there was a good little girl like you----"

"Me?"

"Yah. She cried too, little Chita, because her wounds they hurt."

"Pinches, like mine."

"Yah, pinches."

"An' bloody sores--I got bloody sores, too----"

"And bloody sores----"

"And she lived by the ocean----"

"The Cunard piers?"

"No--no--out somewhere--old countree--a gray ocean--with rocks----"

"Old countree. Naples is old countree----"

"It was lonely by the ocean. Sometimes she cried much."

"No mudder--no brud?"

"Nobody. Only wind that tore her and rain that wet her and snow that froze her."

"No bread? No spagett'?"

"Sometimes a fisherman out of a boat on the sea brought her fish----"

"A beau----"

"N-no--yoost--a man."

"Did he like 'er?"

"She--could--clean--fish----"

"Ugh!"

"But that was yoost ugly to her hands and she did not mind."

"Phew!"

"She used to cry--sometimes because it was so beautiful--the rocks and the sea--or so lonely--the sky and the rocks and the sea--so big--like she felt inside of-herself--big----"

"Big as--New York?"

"Yah--she used to cry--right out of her heart--into the waves--yoost like you cry into the bucket--and whadda you think?"

"What?"

"Her tears got folded up in the water of the waves and one day a little girl way off in New York----"

"Me?"

"Yah--took a drink of water and whadda you think was in the drink of water?"

"A bug!"

"The tears--the beautiful tears that the lonely girl in old countree had cried because the sea was so lonely and the sky and the rocks and the sea--so big and--and heart-breaking and----"

"She drank 'em--the same tears----"

"Yah--and whadda you think?"

"What?"

"When she drank 'em--the little girl off in New York----"

"Me?"

"Yah--they began to boil inside of her----"

"How----"

"Just boil--and swell--like waves--and she was all full--of the sky and rocks and the sea and the heart-break and whadda you think?"

"What? She busted!"

"She began to sing, Chit--the tears inside they were hurting--and she began to sing--all the beauty of the sea and the sky and the rocks and the--loneliness and the heart beauty--wasn't that grand, Chita--and from all over the people came to hear her--the most beautiful singing in the world all filled with the tears that were shed by the sea----"

"Was that me----"

"Yah--I guess so and----"

"And the girl in the old countree?"

"Oh she--I dunno--she----"

"Didn't her beau----"

"Yah--her beau--the fisherman, I guess, came one day in the fishing boat----"

"And was she glad?"

"Yah--all her tears--the beautiful tears--were gone and she went with him then----"

"To clean--the fish?"

"To--clean--the fish."

"I'd rather be me--with all the people in the world coming to hear me--than cleaning fish----"

"I dunno--Chita--I dunno----."

The upper hall was full of the black twilight and Chita in her puddle had scarcely scrubbed her way forward at all. It was Bertha who had come scouring down the hallway toward her. They met on all fours there at one end of the gloom. Chita with her little bright eyes shining in amber tunnels like Jocko's. The hulk of Bertha.

"Kiss me, Bertha."

"Oh Chita. Chita."

***

Something hateful happened. On Dearborn Street near Front was a pretty brick house, conspicuous for its undilapidated shutters and polished doorplate. Bertha passed it upon those rare occasions when she walked out. It was next to a meat stall, where she went to buy lamb-neck for stew. Annie's favorite dish. A small meticulous house with something of the narrow-shouldered air of a lady missionary. The little white ruching of front steps. The pious precisions. The exactitude of window shades like eyelids discreetly lowered for prayer. That polished doorplate! It has a habit of moving along sedately before Bertha's eyes to the meat stall and back again.

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Society for the prevention of cruelty to children.

Chita's tan, taut little body with the blue spots running up her leg. There was even one on her tiny, lovely breast. A lurid, frightening purple. And Chita's eyelids were peculiarly red at the rims and her feet inflamed looking, probably merely because she loved so to dance, but her toes were all curled under, in a prehensile fashion.

Bertha liked to rub them warm, until the blood circulated, and to anoint the bruises with the many different liniments she was lavish at buying. And the reefer! To unbutton it from its warm fastenings when Chita arrived in the morning and to button it up snugly in double-breasted fashion when Chita went home at night! Sometimes as it hung on its peg all day Bertha would button it there, and then unfasten it again. Chita's little reefer. Chita.

So resolutely, she kept her head away from that small polished sign. But even so, it was screwed to her eyes. "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children." She scrubbed floors through it, she stirred stew of veal through it. She saw Chita through it. She shook open a gray blanket to make up a sailor's cot, and there it stared up at her. Society-for-the-Pre-vention-of-Cruelty-to-Children.

Then the something hateful happened.

There were three freighters in and the men were sleeping two on a cot, and floor pallets were to be made up, and all morning Bertha had been hoisting mattresses up the narrow stairway, even Annie, who could walk a little now, hobbling as far as the foot of the steps with an armful of pillows. Chita was like Jocko and Jocko like Chita. They scampered over banisters. Slid downstairs and rode up on Bertha's shoulder. Only with Annie about, one had to be very spry, and by noon Chita had made sixteen cots and filled all the wash pitchers. Usually Bertha filled these for her, but Annie's eyes seemed to have the power of turning the corner of the upper halls, so Chita lugged and tugged alone and her breath came very short, and the red rims around her eyes seemed almost wet with blood.

The men began to swagger in on sea legs. Rum. The smell of it ticklingly through the hallways. Annie back in the keg room now, whacking her knees with the best of them.

"Chita--you bane tired, poor baby. You can rest now. I will do it for you."

"They hurt," said Chita and rubbing her arms began to cry. She never cried to Annie.

Bertha rubbed them, the little bony fragile things, and blew on them with her strong, hot breath. The room was in appalling disorder, the sprawling cots, the mounds of mattresses, the dirty waters of yesterday gathering scum in bowls. Thirty cots to be made and already the seamen, lurching as if the world were a deck beneath them, were sprawling in, loony with land.

One came in on her tussling with her man's task of getting mattresses laid, a Scandinavian whom she knew by the name of Tor. He was one of the troublesome ones, and he swung his arms around her waist, and she shoved him from her with a force that sent him backward, down on one of the half unfurled mattresses, and almost immediately he was asleep and she dragged him to a corner, and there he lay for twenty-two hours, like a dog, snoring.

And then suddenly, while she was dragging these mattresses into place, Bertha missed Chita. Chita who danced so nimbly in her shadow all day and ran up her shoulder like Jocko.

"Chita," she cried, and j'erked the pillows this way and that as if she might have been a kitten, hiding. "Chita!"

There should have been nothing frightening about Chita bounding off that way. But suddenly the silence seemed to have a little pulse to it. It beat in Bertha's throat. And so she ran about the long ward-like room, peering under pillows and mattresses for all the world as if she were looking for the kitten.

"Chita!"

In the hallways was the hot pulsing silence too, except down in the keg room there was laughter; crazy, skating laughter.

"Chita!"

There was a closet at the end of the hall, almost as large as a room and with a skylight. It was filled with such miscellaneous old refuse as a broken chair, leaky pails, the Australian sailor's lambswool jacket, bottles, brooms, and a rusty gas stove.

Somehow, the door to this closet seemed to blow out at Bertha like a woman's skirt. She opened it. There were Chita and a young Italian sailor off a fruit ship. He had a face like a carved almond. Narrow. Slit. White. And his fingers were quick and caressing over Chita's little body, as if she had been a harp, and there she lay back in his arms, her eyes, usually as quick as Jocko's, suddenly like fresh and flowing waters that had been dammed. Stagnant and a little heavy with mud. Chita lying back there, drugged-looking and with her agile young limbs tranced. Chita--Chita lying back there with her stagnant-looking eyes and her dancing limbs that were suddenly full of a dreadful kind of languor.

The sailor oozed away. Literally. Because under Bertha's very eyes, he was gone, leaving Chita on the chair like a doll that had been cast there, along with other broken things.

"Chita----"

She began to whimper and dodge back.

"Diden do nawthin'----"

"Come here--to Bertha----"

"You can't hit me--you're not me mudder."

"Bertha won't hit you, Baby. Chita--come--to me----"

But Chita was still afraid, and it was almost like luring Jocko, to unlock her tight fingers from the chair arm, and draw her out of her tight crouch in the corner.

"I diden do nawthin'--lemme alone."

"Chita--little Chita."

It was dead in the old closet. Stale smelling. For an hour Bertha held Chita there, in her big, man-sized arms. Close. Pressing her little boniness against her breast, while the beat of her heart pounded through.

Below the men were swaggering in now, outlandish with their packs and bags of luggage, and downstairs Annie's voice, shouting for Bertha and shouting for Chita, kept screaming out oaths between greetings.

"Bertha--was I almost being bad----"

"Yes, Chita. Terribly. Terribly bad."

"I won't no more, Bertha. My Bertha. You're cryin'----"

"For you, Chita."

"No, Bertha, I'm gonna be good--Bertha--what's that on your insides? A heart--it's ticking--like a clock."

"For you, Chita."

"Tick--Bertha--for me----"

She fell asleep, and finally Annie's oaths died down in the hullabaloo of arrivals, and the great empty barracks of a room with the unmade cots and the half-furled mattresses stood waiting, and the skylight over the closet turned taupe, and down in the keg room the shoutings rose and somebody must have overturned a tray of glasses because a crash splintered the silence and, under cover of it, Bertha shook Chita gently awake and buttoned her into her reefer. It was dusk and she walked home with her down to the mouth of a filthy street on the lower West Side.

"Good night, Bertha--my--Bertha----"

"Good night--Chita--mine----"

She watched her scamper down the street, nimble once more as Jocko, and up into the black mouth of a tenement.

The way back was through a district of torchlit pushcarts and the flicker of pale wastrel faces. There was a waving light before the meat stall. The meticulous little house with the narrow shoulders of a lady missionary stood out of the glare. Neatly. The shutters were closed, but there was a fan of lit transom above the door.

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Ringing the bell above that small sign, a tear meandered down to the corner of Bertha's lips.

***

It was noon of the next day when they came to take Chita. She was washing the iron grating of a ground-floor window, the grotesque bulbs of her knees rubbing and shivering as she reached.

Bertha lifted back her wisp of furiously sooty little panties to show the purple smears. A cranberry of a little man rubbed his chin and said "M-m-m-m" and a young woman in an alpine hat opened her notebook.

"Chita--these bane good people here--to help you."

Suddenly the little monkey-like focus of Chita's gaze seemed to slide right down the bridge of her nose and up to Bertha!

"Cops!" she cried and sprang back.

"No, Chita--good people----"

"Cops! You dirty snitch. You got the cops on me--the plain closes bulls--you dirty bloke--I diden do nawthin--he was a dago sailor and he gimme a dime--that's all--you dirty square head--snitch--the lord hates a snitch--me brud'--he'll knock the stuffin's out of you--snitch you--dirty square head snitch--I'll sick me brud' on you----"

They carried Chita struggling between them into the little enclosed wagonette at the curb. A light tan omnibus with curtains at the window of the rear door.

"Chita," cried Bertha, and stood there with the tears raining down her cheeks, "Chita--mine----"

"Bloke--you--dirty--snitch--bloke!"

Against the little window of the rear door of the omnibus, her simian little furious face with the Jocko eyes and the twitchings of rage grimaced back at her.

"Bloke--dirty snitch--square-head--hate yuh--lunk----"

Chita who had loved so to listen to the tick of Bertha's heart. Chita. After a while the face became a blur.

Chita----

The window gratings were only half washed. The pail was still there.

"Chita," cried Bertha and plunged in her brush. "Oh God--my Chita--gone----"

Rub-a-dub-dub. Scrub-a-dub-dub.

***

Annie paid Bertha twenty dollars a month, when she paid it. Usually during these bedridden weeks of Annie's, there was a household deficit which Bertha dug down into the pocket of her gray flannel petticoat to meet.

The wad with the rubber band about it, which had a friendly way of hitting against Bertha's leg when she walked, was very light now.

At the Wallensteins' it had fattened out into quite a roll of soft dirty bills. Her wants were so meager. The Sailors' Supply Store filled them mostly, and a sliver of a shop on the Bowery where the kind of flannel waists she wore, flopped on hangers outside the door.

But invariably in the end, one way or another, Annie wormed away these little savings, so that her intervals of unemployment had a frightening way of draining her petticoat pocket. Frightening, because somehow that wad, hitting against her when she walked, meant a pad between her and she knew what! The women one passed at night with dragging hems and twitching faces. The crones picking out of refuse boxes and asleep in doorways. The girls in dreadful finery soliciting along the wharves.

That hit-hit against her leg. It could seem as if someone were walking in step with her.

Then one day the wad petered out into a mere handful of change, left from a dollar bill with which she had purchased a bottle of sarsaparilla for Jocko, who loved to drink it out of the bottle and rub his little belly.

A shudder went down her back. Ninety-five cents in silver. The hit gone from against her leg. The women one passed at night with the dragging hems....

***

There was new management at Raussman's. An unctuous Bohemian with a pimply face sorted out the human stock. All the young girls sat in the front row with their big red hands like beef-steaks on their laps. The older women were placed against the wall. They seemed to sit hugging themselves underneath their jackets and sighed a great deal. Some of cold, because the gin fires had gone out. Some of fatigue, and some of an unutterable hopelessness that pulled down their eyelids like window shades. There was considerable traffic among the young girls in the front row. The alert Bohemian was kept busy between the telephone, the passing out of slips, and the arrival of clients.

The assorted display in the front row was in a constant state of change, as if someone kept plucking bonbons from a box and almost immediately the little fluted container would be replaced with another.

The row against the wall did not change much. The faces were grimmer and the slow frieze of them would sit sometimes uninterrupted throughout the day.

Bertha found herself in this back row of the waiting faces, most of them flecked with fear. Not Bertha's. Hers was so big and so pale. Like a light. It burned roundly and patiently through the greasy twilit days at Raussman's. But after several of the futile ones of waiting, there were just twenty-five cents left in the petticoat pocket.

Then she began to buy newspapers and pore over them. It was November and the parks were old and gray-looking and newspapers ballooned up in the wind unless you sat on one end and nailed the other to the bench with your palm.

HELP WANTED, FEMALE

Columns of it, yet the dread of going the rounds. The women aggrieved with the servant problem, who asked abashing intimate questions, and weighed out the weekly consignment of second-grade butter and eggs for the help. The women aggrieved with the servant problem, who provided kennels for sleeping and railed at high wages for the fourteen-hour day. The dread of starting those rounds. Help Wanted, Female.

The park benches were strewn with discarded newspapers, turned almost invariably to the classified advertisement page. Sometimes a little oblong had been torn out with a hair pin or penknife. One day in City Hall Park, poring over one of these left overs, this one burned up at Bertha from its little enclosure:

Wanted: Practical nurse to assist governess in care of five-year-old boy. Must be well trained and efficient. References. Apply W. Bixby, 3450 Madison Avenue.

It was a rowdy of a day. Whistling, prankish winds that flew up under capes and rushed newspapers along the curving walks of the park. A pecksniffy little gale that filled the air with dust and paper. Pedestrians hustled before it and the benches were pretty well swept, except for one or two hunches of men asleep under their hats and the hoppings of sparrows aiming for empty peanut hulls. And Bertha. She sat forward, her torso a little oblique as if someone had placed a broken urn there on a slant, and the look that she had lifted up from that newspaper insertion, pinioned to her face.

The city ran past her. Dived into subway hoods. Clamored over cobbles. Honked, whizzed, banged. Park Row had just spewed out a red-hot edition and the newsboys' howls ran high.

It was strange to be there in the midst of life when the heart was as dreary as a moor. Wasteland down which she could see herself stalking, brooding and terrible with the tears that were dry and sobs that were silent. She began to walk. It was very far. The city blocks streamed behind, one after another. They were so full of life. But the moor gathering around her heart, it encompassed her.

The house on Madison Avenue was as handsome and portly as a park statue of a gentleman in a frock coat. It had an air and a gracious, portentous dignity, as if any moment the double oak doors might swing back and someone important and lovely sweep down the fine curve of stone steps. Candlelight would gleam on old silver in such a house and the kettles in such a house would be of polished copper that swelled what they reflected. Fine, drum shaped kettles, that would draw the juices out of fowl.

The curtains were frilled net and did an elaborate crisscross in the center of the long windows, and then drew back to reveal the shoulder of a chair or the dim loveliness of marble statuary. A child in such a house could, if he wanted, peer out of that little open place between the curtains. He would probably leave five fingerprints against the pane. Spudgy little fingerprints that would polish off with a dry cloth. But there were no fingerprints against the panes. They were very shiny. Peer as she would with the corners of her eyes as she passed the house, up the block, down the block, there were no fingerprints against the panes.

It was easy to pass and repass. That is, if one kept shoulders bent into the wind as if with destination. There was a constant trickle of pedestrians along the fine wide avenue. One swung back and forth with the little tides. No stopping to stare, of course. Just that tail of the eye, ready!

It was a block of portly houses. Of great wide windows and curving stoops and motor cars at the curb. There were several ways of not passing up and down too often. Walking on the opposite side. Appearing to stand at a corner for the traffic to pass. Strolling around the block and loitering a little along the way.

Not even the smudge of a sprawled little palm against the window pane. How precious had there been!

Once a young woman entered the trade entrance. She had a click to her broad heels and there was a gleam of starched white under her long blue cape. The door was opened to her only the fraction of an inch and closed again, gently. She went away on heels not so clicking. Bertha, passing, could have touched her.

Almost immediately after, a big heavy-busted woman, with hair on her chin and also in white uniform that crackled under her cloak, rang the bell. Bertha knew her! A Mrs. Mahaffy! She had once tended the senile grandfather in a private house on Lexington Avenue where Bertha had cooked for a month. "Hateful Mahaffy" the waitress had called her. She was always fussing around the kitchen with trays, mostly her own, and had let the old man fall in his bath one morning, for which she was dismissed. Her arms were pock-marked too. The waitress had stumbled across a little nest of hypodermic needles under her mattress after she left.

Hateful Mahaffy!

Passive Bertha with her slow, white face. A sudden, a new, an aggressive rage laid hold of her. A frenzy that made her want to tear and strip and choke. She started after the largely undulating figure of Mrs. Mahaffy, but the one inch of door had already been opened and closed to her, so that they met on the sidewalk.

"Save yourself the trouble," said Mrs. Mahaffy, "the place is already filled."

She had a horrid kind of voice for a woman. It seemed to want to boom because she had hair on her chin. Then she recognized Bertha.

"Wasn't we in a place together once? Lexington Avenue."

"Yah----"

"Well, you're in wrong here. Practical nurse is wanted. Big automobile moguls from Detroit. Just moved here. New-rich. Give me the new-rich every time. They got proper respect for their servants, and not too much for themselves. Well, stung here, but they're engaging a new staff in that big brown house over on the corner. Want to come with me?"

"No," said Bertha. "No."

"Well, you always was good company for yourself," said Mrs. Mahaffy and stalked off on a diagonal across the street.

Hateful Mahaffy, who, they said of her, pinched children, and had let the old man slip and break his hip. To think that hateful Mahaffy, with the boom of voice, might have gained custody over the child within that house.

Or someone like her might already have been hired! Or someone worse! Fear flashed through her. Flash after flash of it. Then again the swelling anger. Mrs. Mahaffy. She pinched children. She started across the street, striking into her solemn golem trot, her lower lip pursed out.

Mrs. Mahaffy had disappeared. She hurried a block after her, her stiff Inverness cape blowing out from her, and her face thrust out ahead.

Mrs. Mahaffy. What had she to do with it? Do with it? Why, there was a child over there in that house--five years old--who made it unbearable that any child should be pinched.

She hurried. Mrs. Mahaffy had disappeared. After a while she began to cry. Slow ashamed tears. The house looked soft through the blur of them. Almost as if you could poke in a dimple through the wall with your finger, as you could in the cheek of a child.

A man in shirt sleeves and a black apron came out of the service entrance and began to polish the brass doorbell. He was shaved to the skull, and his neck was fat, and he danced up and down from the knees as he rubbed. A gay feather duster stuck up from his rear hip pocket. He whistled. She could not tear her eyes from him. His jouncing legs and the little jelly-dance of the fat along his neck! Perhaps as recently as an hour ago--ten minutes ago--five--he had passed the five-year-old child in a hallway. That gay little duster might have flecked a chair that he had sat upon.

The excitement of that! It ran like a fever through her. She stood and looked at him. Just stood there in front of the house and watched him rubbing the bell. After a while he turned, because the irises of her eyes must by this time have been like hot disks on his back. He had a face of loose fat and the jowls fell in pleats like a spaniel's. A soft face that you could mash up softly with your hand like pie dough. Ugh.

She began to walk and he followed her by swinging his head around to glance over the other shoulder.

Perhaps so recently as an hour ago--ten minutes--five--he had passed the five-year-old in a hallway----

He winked.

Slowly and with the horrid sensation that she could softly mash up his face into pie dough, Bertha winked back.

"Fine day for a walk," he said, and sucked back his words and made a noise like a kiss.

"Yah," she said and lifted her lips back off her square white teeth to make a smile.

He was chewing something and he spat, quid and all, on to the stoop of the house adjoining.

"Big 'un, ain't you?"

"Me? I dunno----"

"Ticklish? Slk-k-k-k-k," he said, and made a sound between his tongue and his cheek. Nasty. Frightening.

"Naw."

His face was shaved, but the day's stubble of beard was out, and when he rubbed it you could hear the bristles scrape.

"Good time?"

"What?"

He bunched up his mouth again with the little hissing, kissing sound. Someone lowered a window with a slam. He flecked open his polishing rag and began to rub at the bell again.

"Wait for me a few minutes down at the drug store on Thirty-ninth. I'm off at five. Big 'un, heh?"

She moved off. That face of old dough--ugh!

It was horrible waiting. It grew dusk and she shivered and her tongue thickened and her distaste kept welling. But her feet stood rooted, sullen, there. Waiting. The ruby urn in the drug store window lit up and threw a stain on the sidewalk. He came, looking stuffed into his coat, and his derby hat sat high on his head like a rocking chair. He was short. She had not noted how short. Why, she could have almost leaned an elbow on his head and rested her cheek comfortably upon her palm.

Silly Willy.

Idiotically enough, that transpired to be his name. Willy. She was never to utter it without the aftermath of a little chime in her brain. Silly.

His soft mouth slid around so in his face. It was a little sunken because his molar teeth were gone. Slk-k-k-k-k! He was always making that noise between his tongue and his cheek and making a boring gesture with his forefinger, Slk-k-k-k-k. He met her that way.

"Slk-k-k-k-k, you're a husky one."

"You bane a _little_ one," she said with elephantine coquetry.

"I'm little," he said, "but oh my," and beat himself upon the chest.

"You bane short and I bane long, heh?"

"That's me! Little but oh my--is what they used to label me in Winnipeg."

"Oh, that bane a big fine place."

"Winnipeg! She's a dream. There's a little city with a gizzard. I was born there. My boss comes from Detroit. You know him? Ever been in a Bixby Six? That's him. Every third time you bat your eye a Bixby car runs past you."

"You bane house-man?"

"Yeh, but I don't live in. I got a room. Good time?"

"It bane a big fine house. It's a fine big family?"

"Big family! There's him and her--fine as silk--and a kid--the little devil is five----"

"You--know--him----?"

"Little devil--let me so much as be washin' the window of his nursery and he gets me down on all-fours for a ride on me back."

"Your--back----"

"To-day, if anybody be askin' you--I can feel his little heels in my shins yet----."

"You!"

"Slk-k-k-k-k! I live over there--near First Avenue. I got a room."

"He rode you--to-day----"

"He's a card--kicked my shins----"

"Will he ride you to-morrow----?"

"Mebbe."

"You like me?"

He threw up a killing glance from under his rocking-chair derby and poked her under the cape with his forefinger. "Slk-k-k-k-k."

They turned down a crosstown street that ran toward First Avenue.

***

Willy's room was over a garage where a great mercantile establishment kept its regiment of trucks. It was large, with one end filled with traces; the body of an old horse-drawn delivery wagon and some old leather harnesses that smelled.

The front part of the room had a bed and a chair and a table and a small stove the shape of a snow man. Bertha hung some muslin portières up one day. That cut the room in two and shut off the wagon top, with a red star and R.H. Stacy and Company painted across it. This seemed to move the chair, the table, the bed, and the stove into a cozier propinquity. Otherwise, it was rather an awful room. It stood there cold and mean and bare all day, scarcely more than a kennel, waiting for the occupants who called it home, to creep back into it at night.

Willy usually came first. It was a straight cut cross town, from the house on Madison Avenue. Bertha's hours were more irregular. Her work took her far and wide.

Once, during Christmas holidays, an agency on East Twenty-third Street which kept her constantly supplied with day-work sent her, along with a staff, to clean a schoolhouse on East One Hundred and Ninety-second Street. It was ten o'clock before she climbed to the room.

Willy was asleep on the bed with his shoes on and his derby hat over his face. There was no fire and no supper. Willy could cook. He had always lived off like this in a room with a bed and a stove. But with the advent of Bertha an atavism cropped out in him. The stove might be laid, but unless she struck the match, there was no fire. It was easier to be cold and hungry and lie on the bed with his derby over his face, waiting.

"You're a lunk," Bertha cried one night and hit him across the soles of his shoes with a poker, as he lay stretched and waiting on top of the bed.

"Then get out," he said, and turned over and dozed off until the fire began to crackle in the round little belly of the stove and the strong smell of tripe stew to wind through the room.

He was vicious, but in the small ways that a terrier can be vicious. Yappy. Snappy. But the crack of a whip could curl his legs under him and make him slink. He had the mind of a child. Colored picture cards amused. He could not drink, and what he chewed was tobacco substitute, and his pockets were filled with bits of bright glass and twine and pencil stubs and old screws. Even his vices were not man size. He was sly and he was a thief, but he stole only pennies and doll's eyes and no one in the Bixby household could call a pen-knife or scratch-pad his own. He was constantly filching the smaller coins from Bertha's pocketbook. Coppers. She could feel his hand steal under the leather cushion that was her pillow and would lie there in the darkness with her eyes wide open, looking at the dim white smear his teeth made across the darkness when he laid them bare in his effort at stealth.

Silly Willy. He was not even a man. That made it less horrible, even while it made it more horrible. She slept on the other side of the muslin curtain, on the long leather seat of the old delivery wagon. It made quite a couch. Only her feet dangled off, and she could crowd them in if she drew up her knees. It was almost private, except that he liked to peer through to see the gleam of her hair. Unbound it fell in a slow cascade of heavy, solemn, taffy-looking yellow.

"Get out! Sca-at!"

He didn't always, and had to be pushed out like a hateful boy. She despised him and was never free of the feeling that his face was boneless and made of dough, and that by the pressure of her palm against it something terrifying and feature-less would be left there before her.

And yet when Bertha came home from work with her pulpous brown butcher's package, and her arms stinging from lye water and the sockets aching, sometimes she could not run up the stairs fast enough, skinning her shins and stumbling in her haste.

Willy would be there. Silly Willy. And he could show her the very spot along his back where the boy had straddled, riding him horseback and kicking into his shins. Once he had come home with the skin on his arm torn. The boy had flecked him too hard with a whip. Bertha washed it and kissed it. Kissed that wound on the hairless arm of Silly Willy.

It was easy to make him talk. A sack of little cone-shaped chocolate drops would accomplish it, or a new screw driver, or a roll of adhesive plaster. Any little tinkery thing. And because he was sly, he would only answer Slk-k-k-k-k to her questions until she produced the bribe. It never bothered him to know the why of her trembling interest in the boy. He just was silly and would talk for a cone-shaped chocolate drop.

Sometimes at the Bixby house, instead of his emptying ashes or washing windows or polishing brass, they would detain him in the nursery on a rainy day to play those straddling floor games that the starchy nurse could not manage. Silly Willy could amble on all fours for hours. He would buckle on a leather harness that had bells, shake himself and roar, and the boy, straddling his back, would kick with his heels and shout.

Silly Willy was good at these games. He played them sincerely and with the mind of a child.

Sometimes the boy stole down to the furnace rooms, where Willy kept fires banked, and looked with solemn pools of eyes into the red maw of the boiler. He had rather a frail, choir-boy face with long cheeks and very straight yellow bangs which came down to his brows. He could stare into the fire until the black irises almost crowded out the blue in his eyes and his cheeks began to redden. He liked fire. It fascinated him. Infuriated him. He would contemplate it, then catch up a broom and ride hobby-horse astride it like one possessed. Usually Willy followed, more feebly, on a second broomstick.

His nurse or his mother usually precipitated this and Willy on his springy knees would wabble back to the fire, to feed it, to sit in its red stain, and to chuckle.

Sometimes in good outdoor weather or with the family away, there would be no sign of the boy for days, for weeks. That was dull for Willie. He liked to play. But Willie was sly.

For a bag of the chocolate drops or a screw or a ball of twine, he would invent the day's encounter with the boy. Nothing very ingenious. Willy's imagination was a feeble affair. Just a sort of refurbishings of oft told tales.

Bertha did not mind. No sooner had they sat down with their dish of dinner steaming up between them, than her hand made its insidious curve down toward her pocket.

And then without any particular preamble Willy would begin: "He's a devil for fire. He is. Gets his owl eyes full of it from staring and then goes crazy with it. He's a fire horse. So am I. We're a team of fire horses."

"Willy--that's a dangerous play!"

"Dangerous! You got to straddle your horse tight. That's all. Hold 'im in--is what I tells him--hold 'im in and you're all right."

"Is he strong enough to hold 'im in?"

"Naw. That's where I come in. Slk-k-k-k! I rein him up!"

"Willy--tell me again--what does he look like--the little boy?"

"Didn't I tell you--again and again and again----"

"Yoost once--more, Willy."

"Is it chocolates? Gimme."

"What does he look like?"

"He's a boy--he is, with eyes and hair----"

"Yellow, Willy? His hair bane yellow--like mine?"

"It's yellow all right."

"He's a big boy, Willy?"

"I showed you on the wall--he bane that high."

"That was last week--he bane bigger now?"

"Aw--not quick--like that--gimme what you've got. Chocolate?"

She handed him the sack of cones, for his dessert.

One evening over the strong smell of their kidney stew he screwed up his eyes at her!