Part 10

A doctor folded the brittle hands. Little gulls skimming the old breast. The preliminaries of death were set in motion. A soul had been set free and mortals were solemn. Almost immediately the shades somehow were down and there was a new odor. The odor of death.

May had gone out like a flame. Her face seemed suddenly very small between the two enormous blobs of pearl earrings, and she had pinned up the flowing sleeves so that she had the plucked, necky look of a fine bird that had lost its feathers, revealing the long pores of dingy flesh.

"Poor Wally. Poor Wally."

He looked at her through tear-scalded eyes that did not see her at all.

"My mother--my poor little mother--gone without a word----"

"Lots of them go that way, Wally. My old woman died in her sleep----"

"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.

[Illustration: Hebrew text]

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.