Part 11

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.