Part 12

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!

"I give him one--to-day."

"What?"

His eyes looked sly and almost at once that frightened her.

"What--Willy----?"

They disappeared as if dough had crowded up around two raisins.

"Willy--one what?"

"One of my chocolates!"

She rose up sudden and threatening as an apparition, her two arms towering as if they would crash down upon him, and he cowed in his chair with his mouth fallen open.

"You gave him from those----"

"Yeh----"

"He ate----"

"Naw--we put it in the fire. It melted up. Get away. You!"

She came down from the great towering gesture of her wrath, which he interpreted not at all, and her fingers unclenched and the blood went back into her face. She shook him then, by the scroff of his coat until his head bobbed loosely.

"Don't you ever--don't you ever again--give him those ten cent cones."

"Stingy-gut, Slk-k-k-k-k--I only gave one----"

"Never. You hear, Willy. It bane bad for the boy. You--you'll get fired. Make him sick. I'll bring you chocolates for him. Not your kind. Chocolates for him----"

"Yeh, we're fire horses."

Chocolates for him! She could not sleep that night. Her feet kept plunging off the end of the seat and sometimes she sat up in the leather-smelling darkness because she breathed too fast and felt crowded.

She bought a dollar box the next day. A red paper affair with a dog and a boy on the cover. Stale bonbons that had lain in the incandescent glare of a Third Avenue window for weeks.

The boy never received them. Bertha did not know, but he had been in Asheville, North Carolina, for three weeks with his foster parents. Willy ate the chocolates beside the glow of his furnace, popping them whole into his mouth.

***

Willy had slacked. Shamefully. He no longer paid the rent for the room, eight dollars a month. Bertha did. The first time she did it because he wanted a tool chest for seven dollars and eighty-five cents in a First Avenue show window. After that he never paid anything. Bertha didn't demur. It was too precious, coming home in the evening to Willy who that very day might have been galloping like a fire horse for the boy.

Tools. They grew in a pile. His complete earnings, forty dollars a month, went into them. He liked to sit and polish them. Test the ductility of saws, run his plane around the floor for the curl of the shavings. There were boxes of nails in assorted sizes. Screws. Gimlets of every graduated variety. He could bore with them for an entire evening into a bit of plank or the flank of the old delivery wagon top. Bore and bore with a little mousy sound. He liked that best. Slk-k-k-k-k! He never made anything. Only bored and sawed and piddled.

Sometimes Bertha sewed. Made the muslin portières. Patched his denim house-jacket.

Usually she was so tired evenings that to the sound of the mousy borings she fell asleep behind her portières. Day-work was draining. It was like undergoing the dreadful preliminaries of a new job each morning.

"You can put your shoes there under the sink and there's a chair down in the basement where you can hang your hat and coat. You don't go stocking-footed, do you? Gracious, that agency is getting the limit for day-help. Here's a pail and a mop. You can scrub this whole courtyard in a morning, if you're spry. My former girl did it before she got consumption. If that drain there backs water on you, ram your arm down."

Day after day of it. Day-jobs where the residuum of dirty work was apt to lie waiting and accumulated. Wet, sloppy, puddled days. Cold, gaunt houses about to be occupied. Public buildings with rooms full of the stench of neglect. Once, at a fishmonger's, scales clung to her arms. Shining fish scales that hung to the flesh like burrs and would not wash off. She scrubbed at the faucet, and suddenly panic of them, the wet, slimy things, seized her and she screamed. The fishmonger, enormous and stained and with a mallet for pounding down codfish steaks in his hand, came and plucked off a few of them for her and laughed, and then, because her arm was white and firm, kissed her with wet, fish-smelling lips. She struck him with his own mallet by jerking back his arm until he hit himself in the head, and in his rage he struck back and she went home discharged and with a blue welt coming out above her cheek bone.

Cold dirty days. Then hot days, equally dirty.

That way the months swung around and, through the poor silly eyes of Willy, she beheld the boy grow older.

And as the eyes of Willy became sillier, and the face around them more and more horridly doughy, Bertha, who hated him, was glad. As he receded more and more into childishness, he played with the mind and the heart of an innocent. Sometimes, on spring evenings, after his supper, he joined the street boys at baseball or swapped some of his shiny screws for chinies. Bertha, sitting up behind the window curtain, would watch him. Carefully. He was kind to children.

He had come to hate her in a sly and secret kind of way. He was cunning enough to know she paid the rent and bought the meat for stews and that, by grace of her, the stack of his shining tools grew high, but there festered in him, day by day, the desire to torture her.

The same impulse, doubtless, that led him to delight in tearing off the wings of flies. Or perhaps dimly she was to him the badge of his impotence, and so he smouldered against her and hated. He had never been a man, and yet the pangs of impotence made him more horrible than he might have been with desire.

He liked to grimace at her with every torturous twist of feature he could connive. To awaken her by hanging over her couch with his face all drooly and loose of feature like an idiot's, and his hands drooping loosely from the wrists so that they swept her face.

The horror of this made her wild. She would tremble for an entire day from the start of waking up to this loose, drooling face of Willy's. He was devilish at these little abuses. One day he brought the window sharply on her hands as she leaned over the sill, so that it made her finger nails blue. He never failed to scratch down deeply into her palms if he had occasion to take anything from her, and one evening he wanted to hand her the red hot poker and when she saw the ruse and held the hand behind her, he brought it down on her shoulder so that it singed her waist and the flesh.

But he was kind to children.

There was only about one way to deal with him. To slap him. Usually, with his ears boxed, he could be trusted to trot over to his tools and begin to plane or bore. Sometimes the cartwright's child next door would come to play. Together they would set up the racket of carpentry. Particularly with the plane, improvising mustachios and fierce whiskers out of the shavings. Sometimes he carried a handful of the shavings to the boy.

The mystery of the will to live. Not a morning but what Bertha knew the terrible reluctance of awakening to reality. She came up out of sleep with a struggle, fighting off another day; turning her back to it and lying there sick with its imminence as the muslin portières began to lighten. To come out of sleep so enamored of it that to feel the lids lift back from the eyes was torture. To die a little every night and yet fear the beauty of death more than the starkness of life. Sometimes when Bertha came up out of sleep, fighting and sobbing against the awakening and the grimacing face of Willy hung over her terrible with reality, the impulse to throttle herself back to sleep seemed too strong to withstand. And yet that wink of dawn against the muslin. The tiny vibratory messages of life that were waiting to run across the floor when her bare feet would swing down to it. Ah, that will to live.

The little runs of life at her from all directions. The cartwright in his shop next door was already striking sparks off an iron bar. She could hear the deep-throated sledge hammer. The mystery of the will to live. The mystery of the cartwright's arm, that could make the iron boom. And so morning after morning she rose, and wrapped the gunny sack she wore for an apron into its wad of newspaper, and trotted off to the agency that seldom failed to have a day's assignment awaiting her.

Days of rub-a-dub-dub. As if the floor of the universe were an enormous penny to be scoured and polished, and the emblem on the coin was the face of the boy.

***

Almost three weeks of the November of that year were so sleet riddled that the city seemed merely glimpsed through bead portières. Horses danced on their haunches and smote sparks. Shrubbery was embalmed under ice, and urban trees stood like fountains whose ornamental waters had frozen as they curved.

That year the Inverness cape fell literally to pieces like "the one hoss shay." An uncompromising death. The weave simply would not hold the thread and the patches fell off in scales. She bought a reefer at the Sailors' Supply Store. It buttoned about her warmly enough, but it reached only to her hips and the cold got through to her legs and, worse than that, the sleeves were too short and too tight and the armholes cut her. There were always red rims on her flesh where she had strained through the harsh prison of this reefer, and at the very first wearing a seam at the shoulder opened in a grin.

Chita's reefer had been like this one, only smaller. It was hard to disassociate reefers from Chita. Sometimes, buttoning it up, it was almost as if Chita's eyes popped through the buttonholes with a wink. A row of Chita's hard, bright, suffering little eyes down the front of her jacket.

Ah me--Chita----.

***

Lashing its tail, November plunged on. It was pitch dark at six in the morning and sometimes after their breakfast of tripe-stew and strong coffee she had literally to take Willy by the wrist and lead him to his corner. He cried when it was cold, like a child, and would run along the sidewalks wringing his hands as if they would fall off, and crying and whimpering with the pain.

Bertha hated him for this. Once he came home with a red welt across his neck where the boy had stropped him soundly as he came in crying one day with the cold.

Bertha knew why, exultantly. He hated what she hated. Sniveling, mewling Willy.

The agency opened at seven. First come, first served. For almost a week the water froze everywhere in the pipes and there was no work. One of these days she was put at swabbing out the lobbies and lavatories of a theater, where the water was hot and plentiful and plunged out from the faucets in great clouds of steam.

She had never been in a theater. This one was on Broadway near Twenty-seventh Street, and its lobby was already bombastic with the sunrise of the cinema. Promises in lithograph. Empyrean ecstasies in three colors, of girl-cheek to boy-cheek. That swoop of the senses to a woman's figure with her dilated eyes upside down, as she hurtled head first off a trestle. A circus for the emotions here, the human heart their trapeze.

All the forenoon she swabbed the tiled floors, worming with her rag in between the feet of the little groups that stood before these posters of escape. Snow-caked shoes. The feet of the city. Gay feet, old feet, young feet, tired feet. The square little feet of children and the bulbous feet that had grown lopsided with the journey. Skulking feet with soft soles and eager feet with kicked toes. Little girls' feet with tassels and the feet of a crone wrapped in gunny sacks. Derelict boats. In, out, among those feet all forenoon. The feet of the seekers after surcease from reality.

After noon an attendant with a festoon of gold braid across his breast, threw open one of the baize green doors. The feet began to turn into the theater. Eager pushing feet with little runs to them.

After a while Bertha was sent inside, too. There were lavatories to be swabbed.

It was dark there and flesh smelling and slanting. To Bertha, as if she were walking down an incline into the drown of phantom plush. She floundered and her pail made a ringing noise and that brought her up suddenly, behind the curtain of a box....

Square gem of light mounted on facets of darkness. A green field flowing gently toward her, and a child with a handful of flowers plucked up out of that field turning to smile at her with lips that the darkness sped up against hers, pucker and all. Silence that began to throb like the felon that sometimes attacked her third finger. It was the organ rumbling up into a prelude. A chord came through like a wave breaking. She slid in. The music of the chimes goldily--

Then the lettering. It was difficult to follow, because she picked out the words so slowly, mouthing their bathos aloud. Glitter of jeweled sands that sped across and ran away.

TRAVELOGUE

"Within Easy View Of Vesuvius, Sorrento Lies Dreaming In The Sun. Note Donkeys In Distance."

Quiver of hills....

"In Capri The Italian Takes His Best Girl Out Riding In A Sail Boat. Better Than The Subway, Isn't It?"

To ride in a slim sailboat....

"Sunset in Venice." "Lake Como's Twilights Are Deep Purple."

***

There on the outside of herself, a twilight the color of her silence. Grays--with the purple bleeding in. She cried out at its passing----

"Shh-h-h-h----

Mountains next. And after them a magnified view of a rosebud opening. An intrusion almost, to behold this slim thing bowing with life. Once petals like that had kissed the very sides of her being. She began to cry....

Next, a love story. A shoddy sop to reality. A man and a maid worrying at their emotions like terriers. Scurrying little field mouse motions that live on chaff.

And yet to Bertha and the rows and rows like her sitting there in the darkness, it was as if they had been kissed on a bunched-up mouth by love in a brown velveteen smoking jacket and prettified eyes. Stinging vicarious sweetness....

Lights. The pale froufrou of shifting audience. Of course--lavatory floors to be swabbed. The water scurried in little pools before her brush.

All the way home, while the sleet flew at and bit her, she kept smiling. "Lake Como's Twilights Are Deep Purple." Herself on the outside of herself.

At one corner, a taxicab skidded within an inch of pinning her to the curb. Oaths. A blur of faces, fatty looking with curiosity. A policeman brushing the water and ice off the flank of her reefer. The taxicab driver had a zigzag of cut on his face from flying glass. Red through the glassy fog and he sopped it against his bare hand, great fellow, and was sick.

She stalked on, big, boxed and smiling, the bulk of her displacing the dance of the storm.

"Lake Como's Twilights Are Deep Purple." To think of that! The deep winey purple of her forests.

***

Banners. Banners. Banners. Streamers of them from roofs and poles. Little licking tongues of flame curling out. The ripple and snap of them was a pleasant dazzle. Even the cartwright had a two-penny flag in his window and a photograph of Roosevelt pasted flat against the pane.

That was the occasion. The return of Roosevelt from African adventure. The city fluttered, knife edges of stone softened into waves by the dance of pennants; the street a fluted alley of them.

Willy, vociferous as ever over his tripe stew, was wild to be off.

"The parade will pass the house. Me and the boy--you watch--we'll be in the window!"

"Willy--he'll be in the window?"

"Sure. We got broncho caps. I made them. Slk-k-k-k--Roosevelt--he shoots lions. We'll be watching for him in broncho caps."