Part 13

He was sly, he was excited, and he jumped up and down again, until he choked on his coffee and was horrid and she left him there.

It was delicate June in the streets. Pink and blue sky and awnings with stripes. The bazaar of the city in spring. Bertha was due for her weekly day's work in a rooming house in West Fortieth Street near Eighth Avenue. Her feet were so loth. Again and again she dragged them toward Eighth Avenue, only to turn back and eastward toward Madison. In two years, with the exception of those days when the water pipes were frozen, she had not failed a day's assignment.

Flags kept snapping. The air was May wine. The city ran of excitement. Quickened steps. Pennants. A great man was coming home. The boy at the window. There would be a boy at the window to greet him.

The window! Her feet kept trying to walk on resolutely. Seventh Avenue. Eighth Avenue. Finally, it was no use. She turned back and began to run a little, with the quickened city. Clumps of people hurrying and dragging children by the hand. Curbs and balconies and wagon-tops began to blacken and one truck filled with chairs rattled by, to shouts and squawking horns.

It was hard not to run. Madison Avenue! The jammed curbs. They were three deep. And the sidewalk was a little groove between walls of buildings and of human flesh. The blazing balconies. The fluttering windows! A window of the house was black. She could not look. She stood on the opposite curb, and with the tail of her eyes she knew that a window of the house was black! But she could not look. For the life of her, the life of her, she could not look.

Blare! A curve of music through the sunlight. Brass. Bright. Screaming. The street a metal strip. A major domo came over the top of the hill. Everything ran toward him. The fluttering. The sway of the crowds. The blowing hair from the heads out of windows. The shouts.

She stood wedged, her elbows pinned to her hips. The window. She could not, could not look, but the tail of her eye kept tattling. There were heads and halves of bodies out of it. Flutterings. One head was very bright. It caught the light in pools, like the silver ball of the major domo. She fainted a little standing up there. Just let go, and the crowd sustained her of its denseness.

The pulse of the living wall that held her--it sang against her--it wakened her--she leaned out--the major domo was stalking past. Roosevelt then, standing up in a motor car and flashing and bowing, with the light on his spectacles and his teeth and his cheek bones. _There_ was a man who felt the little vibratory messages run in and flashed them out again, broadcast! He was like a magnet with them and the nap of the crowd rose up to his passing! Cheers! He stood as he rode, always smiling, and always with the light on his spectacles and his teeth and his cheek bones.

Smiling! Bowing! Bowing to the window! Bowing to the window! Her eyes would not lift, but the tail of her glance kept knowing. The Colonel bowing to the window. The Colonel and that very bright head that caught the light in pools.

The crowd began to loosen. A disintegrating snowbank. It was frightening to feel the support withdraw. The Colonel had passed. It was easier to move. She was going to look. She had found the strength to look. It was hard to breathe and to swing her heavy burning eyes just a little upward--there!

But the heads were withdrawn and someone was jerking down a shade. The window stared over at her blandly. A slap in the face.

***

All the little flutterings had run out of the street. The asphalt flowed in a stiff river up to the peak, over which the major domo had come up shining. The houses, the brown, proper, hateful houses that could look so closed, had bowed back into themselves. She kicked in the impotence of her despair, against the stone trim of one of them, stubbing her shoes and her toes. It was hard for her to cry. The sobs came through her throat slowly and inflamed it. But for blocks she walked weeping them, dryly.

Her boy shining up there in the window. Her boy upon whose face she had not dared to look.

***

Willy was building something. The small mousy noises of his boring seemed suddenly to have destination. Sometimes an hour or two after she had fallen asleep on her wagon seat behind the curtain, Bertha would wake up to the sound of hammering. For the first time Something was taking shape under his tinkerings.

"Willy, what are you making?"

"Slk-k-k-k-k!"

"Huh? Tell me, Willy."

"Slk-k-k-k-k--wouldn't you like to know?"

"What is it, Willy?"

"Puddintame, ask me again and I'll tell you the same."

One evening, however, the object took shape as he puttered at it. A box with hinges and a little padlock and various little compartments inside for irregular shaped objects. That same evening as Bertha rinsed off the dishes and ranged them in their poor array above the faucet, he painted it a bright green and with a surprising ingenuity for him, finished off with a large yellow polka dot on the lid. This dot seemed to punctuate the finality of his achievement. He could not keep his hands off the box there drying beside the stove, touching it every few moments for the assurance of drying paint, going through the ludicrous pantomime of carrying it before him like a page. In the bit of broken mirror above the faucet Bertha watched him. Silly Willy.

Suddenly he came up behind her, making the boring sound between his tongue and cheek that went in through the back of her ear like a gimlet.

"Slk-k-k-k--a tool box! I made it. Slk-k-k-k. It's for him. To-morrow is his birthday. I made it."

Birthday. The birthday of the boy! The clang of an ambulance through the mauve of a dawn. The incredible warm little bulb of a head in the crook of her arm. The music of the chimes tranced goldily there on the outside of her. The birthday of the boy. To-morrow! Why, it must be--yes--the hurrying, hurrying years!

She put on her pancake of a hat with a new and skiddering rose she had fashioned from a bit of ribbon. There were forty-five cents in her small black pad of a purse.

It was spring again. The lovely quality to it of a petal to the cheek. Somewhere through that night as it traveled, buds had dozed into it, cozily. Even the city could not entirely dissipate that smell of garden. Faces on stoops, dim lily pads lifted to the warmth. The thin high clink of water running along gutters. Children with dry noses. The open doors of shops and the musk smells of winter pouring out of them. The delicate mist with the lavender in it smeared with the soft gold of lighted show windows. Show windows! The blocks and blocks of them. They were beginning to blink out as Bertha roved them. Flimsy painted toys, with the glue bleeding out of the jointures and forming scabs. Stale candies in glass jars and powdered with city grime. Sticks of wood. Lumps of glucose. The abominable makeshifts of poverty.

Up and down a score of city blocks, not a toy, for ten times the forty cents in her pad of purse, worthy of the birthday of the boy.

The curve of lavender in the evening; that rill of beauty clinking in the gutters. Something as tender as these for the birthday of the boy! She could have cried, and did on the homeward turn.

Willy was asleep. There was a darkish mound of him on his cot, and a white night flowed in and filled the room with light the pallor of a bridal veil. That dreadful room, and its green box with the yellow polka dot drying by the stove. Willy face downward and clutched into his pillow, with his silly heels up. And yet it could be the color of moon, that dreadful room. Clear and cool and strewn with bridal veil. There was a gift for you! To capture that color of moon into a balloon that might burst with a pop in the heart of the boy.

She sat behind the muslin curtain, her mouth moving for the words that could bring this frail thought out without shattering it into the blunt grunting things she could say.

She began to undress, the white of her body climbing up out of the muslin underthings. Great ox-like pallor. The slow rhythm of her arms rising and falling. The two enormous and clankless chains of her hair. The whisper of sliding into the boxy whiteness of the coarse, clean nightgown. It stood off from her like a little bathhouse, her calm, spatulate feet moving about under it.

The birthday of the boy! She sat on the edge of her carpetbag, wrapped in the gray blanket that presently she would spread along the leather wagon seat and roll herself into. The unbleached muslin portières on their crazy draw string of twine blew in as if they were animate and wanted to nudge her. They towered and were alive in the white darkness and seemed to breathe back at her. The tears in her heart, like the clink of the clear water in the gutter.

The birthday of the boy! Even Willy could bear him gifts. The pad of black purse lay on the carpet bag beside her. Hateful symbol of the shopkeeper's hand crawling down into the glass jars for the glucose lumps! That was the limit of her purchasing power for the birthday of the boy! The glucose lumps or the painted gimcracks.

She slid down finally with her cheek to the carpetbag. It had a give to it that was friendly. Its nap cut softly up into her flesh. The tears rolled down and made a smell of must, as when she scrubbed too near a rug. A familiar smell that she dozed into, and cried into through the doze. It was still the lightish night when she awoke. There was a red triangle on her wet cheek where a sharp edge had cut up through the carpetbag. She awoke to the small pain of it, pressed there by the sharp edge of the concertina in her carpetbag. The outlandish one with the steamship stamp upon it. Old World.

She fell at the straps of her bag. The concertina! It bulged up at her there from a background of the lovely ocean of Mrs. Farley's cast-off evening cloak. Silver ends to it and a silver label engraved in a Russian phrase:

[Illustration: Russian text]

The little grin of white keys. The waffled sides. They were broken at the creases, but there were some little fugitive notes. She knew them. They ran upward as the keys sank down in a little delighted crescendo. La-dee-da-dee! La-dee-da-dee! She made a cave of her body over the pretty bleat. It ran up. It ran down. And then there was a way to skip in the middle that made it seem like a mournful dawn in a valley and another way to skip at the end that made it seem very glad. Four beautiful tender little ways to play it.

She fell to polishing the silver label, breathing on it and rubbing it with an edge of the green chiffon. It was a lovely chore, polishing, dusting down into the tiny crannies with a broom-straw wrapped in a bit of tissue paper, and every once in a while, down, deep, under the cave of her body, greedily away from the ears of Willy--La-dee-da-dee!

A spring day came up over the roofs. She dressed in its early chill, her fingers bungling as she buttoned with too much haste.

She came out from behind her muslin portières bearing her gift shyly.

"It bane for the boy--his birthday," she said, and placed the concertina on the table beside the plate of hominy she had fried and dished up for him. "My gift."

"Say, say, a little old accordion! That's a good 'un--where'd you dig that little old accordion up? Say now--Slk-k-k-k--won't he like that!"

"It bane from me--Willy--he won't know it but--it bane from me----"

"What'll it play? A tune?"

She could not keep her fingers from fluttering over it.

"Don't be rough with it, Willy."

He broke the sinuous fluted case, his head cocked and his eyes in their corners.

"La--dee--da--dee----

"Say--won't he like that! Me and the boy--we'll give a concert down in the furnace room--slk-k-k-k."

He could scarcely wait to strut off, the green box and the concertina crowded under one arm and tipping him lopsided.

He started off, his little pot belly leading and Bertha after him, until at the corner, under the elevated, their ways parted.

"It bane from me, Willy--he won't know it--but it bane from me."

"Slk-k-k-k----"

It was Saturday, Bertha's day for the kindergarten floors of St. Rose's Parochial School on Ninth Avenue.

The water ran in wide pools and her arm went in big swoops after it. There was a rhythm to each stroke.

La-dee-da-dee. La-dee-da-dee.

***

The house in West Fortieth Street near Eighth Avenue was tall and thin, and small grill work balconies, mere pretenses, swelled out slightly from the two first-floor windows.

They were fairly neat windows, with a hideous _jardinière_ containing cotton palms in each. Day by day they stood there revealing, between the tiresome lace curtains, the brown and yellows of the bulbous _jardinières_. The three upper stories were all closely drawn, dark green shades blotting out the look of dwelling and leaving something tall and thin, blind and a little sinister.

Every Wednesday morning when she arrived, Bertha was given a pail and brush and put to washing down the hallways and the four flights of stairs. A curious odor of lysol and scented soap drifted about in the stale silence of these corridors, a nub of gaslight burning at each landing. Sometimes in swabbing the woodwork, a flare of the dirty scrub water ran under the padded stair-carpet. Then the musty stench arose.

There was something mysterious about these halls. Occasional women in kimonos scurried from room to room and laughter and voices sometimes beat against the closed doors. But for the most part they stood black and silent and orderly. Sometimes there were big footsteps ground into the carpets and broken bits of glass, women's elaborate garters, and evidences of unsavory revelry strewn about the stairs, but Bertha's day was invariably long and black and narrow. The four floors of airless hallways to be swept; woodwork to be washed down; banisters to be rubbed with furniture oil, and the four red gas globes with warts blown into them to be unscrewed, rinsed in warm water, and readjusted.

Mrs. McMurtry, who walked without sound, supervised all this. She was very prim and very slight, and her lips had the thin, unkissed look of triumphant asceticism. A man's hand could have spanned the width of her shoulders. She wore keys at her belt, a black alpaca waist with a standing collar without ruche, so that there was a red rim around her neck, and when she paid Bertha her two dollars and ten cents every Wednesday evening, her thin dry fingers high-stepped gingerly away from too close contact with the currency. She was about forty and had let that forty come, grayly.

One Wednesday morning someone in the third-floor-back must have been very ill. There was a sweetish, etheric odor in the house, and Mrs. McMurtry hurried back and forth with ice packs and blankets. A narrow black doctor with a narrow black bag oozed up through the halls. A group of the kimono-clad women gathered at the end of the hall, bleating like frightened quail. One of them had left her door open. The room was papered in light red, the drawn shades were green, and four of the jets on a very ornate center chandelier were burning. An imitation tapestry of nude Leda and her swan hung over the mantel. A man was seated on the side of the wide bed, bending to lace his shoes. Mrs. McMurtry, passing with a bowl of cracked ice, leaned in to close that door hurriedly. Then she shooed away the girls. They scattered like doves off of crumbs. One of them, trailing the edge of her light sateen kimono in the pool of Bertha's scrub water so that it slapped against her bare legs, glanced down with a kick and an oath.

It was Helga.

***

Helga was so thin! And pretty. A delicate, convalescent kind of prettiness, as if she had been ill a long while, and her hands had whitened and her skin softened and her eye sockets were like enormous pans with a jewel in them. This soft-handed Helga whose wrists used to crack open from chapping and bleed until she cried!

"Helga!"

"Fortheluvvaga! So help me--it's the lump! Bertha!"

Pretty, pretty Helga, with her brown hair frizzed and her face full of pink light from the sateen kimono. Bertha on her knees, with her hands dripping the sloppy water, could only sit back on her heels and stare her fill.

"Helga, you remember me?"

"You're the square head from Farley's. You're the quitter walked off one breakfast time and left us cold. If it ain't old Berth!"

She began to cry, for all the world like a convalescent too weak to know quite why.

"It's old Berth--still scrubbing."

"You're so pretty, Helga--that way."

"And you're so white, Berth. Still like a white old tomb, you, sittin' on the world, listening to it."

"You don't work no more, Helga? You're so fine. Helga--Helga--you ain't----"

"Yes--I am! Oh I work all right, I work! Come in my room."

"Mrs. McMurtry won't like that!"

"The hell Mrs. McMurtry won't. I don't owe her nothing. She does all the owing there is around here. I don't owe her nothing. Not even an apology."

Helga's room was papered in light green and there was an atrocity of a great green satin bow, sprawled like a spider, pinned on the lace curtains. The shades were drawn against the relenting spring sunshine and the gas jets sang. A brass bed and a base burner and a carpet with an enormous floral wreath crowded up the room. Between the windows was a full-length repetition of the tapestry of the nude Leda and her Swan.

It was somehow a horrible room, the kind Willy was fond of looking at through the lenses in the Fourteenth Street nickelodeons. You half expected girls in corsets and ruffled panties to be sitting about smoking cigarettes.

"Helga! Helga!"

"Why not? Whose got the right to stop me, I'd like to know? I've slung my last pot for the privilege of keeping the slanting roof of somebody's garret over my head."

"This place----?"

"Yah--yah--what do you think? A convent? Don't look so holy or you'll sprout a halo. Sit down. Oh, I know all your Sunday school gab. You're afraid to touch me. Your scrub water has made you clean and I'm unclean. I know--the line of talk. You're clean with slops and me I--I'm dirty with stinkin' perfume--you don't need to touch me----"

"Why Helga--Helga--come here--kiss--me----"

Suddenly Helga began to cry again, the tears of physical weakness.

"I know what I'm doing. Pretty damn well. Where did I get off? Nobody's ever yet answered me why I had to get up at six, every tooth in my head rattling of cold and my back aching from a lumpy cot, so that four hours later a thin-lipped icicle that never done nothing for this world except get herself born into it right, could step out of her soft bed into a warm bath and then to her hot breakfast that three of us had been three hours bustling around in the cold dark getting ready for her. Not much!"

"How long, Helga, since you quit the Farleys?"

"I couldn't stand the young one! Rollo's wife. There's the one finished me. I stuck it out two years after she came. There was a hell-cat for you. The kind of a house-devil that wakes up with her eyes glued shut and can't straighten herself out into a presentable creature until along about noon when the society stuff starts to begin. I know 'em--the smooth-faced kind with the smooth-parted hair and the pecan-shaped faces. There was a woman could subscribe to a charity ball with one hand and pinch an orphan with another. She led me a merry hell for two years I won't soon forget. And Rollo--that poor piece of white meat! He can thank God he made himself famous writing a book before she copped him. He'll never write another. He's married to one that takes all and gives nothing. She couldn't inspire a man to write an entry in the butcher book."

"Why did you quit, Helga?"

"One month she had the old woman dock me for a little old terra cotta statue I knocked off of Rollo's desk, dusting it. She said Rollo had written his greatest poem in front of that little terra cotta on his desk and that no money could repay it, but she was for learning me a lesson. I learned her one. There was ten coming to dinner that night and me on second-floor duty. Well, that dinner party had to slide out of its fur coats and powder its noses alone that night. I quit!"

"And this?"

"I got to thinking, that's all. All back doors and slop cans for some--front doors and canopies for others--no reason--just happening that way. God couldn't mean it like that. And what if He did? He was God. I'm me! Little! Weak. I get so tired, Bertha. Nobody gets so tired as I do. My floatin' kidney. I love to sleep so. It's a sickness. I can't pull out of it. I ain't strong, Bertha. I couldn't--I--I ain't strong and white and all on the inside of me like you! Lye water hurts my hands! Slops stink. It eats my heart to have to peek through the swinging doors at the good things of life being gobbled by others that ain't earned 'em as much as we have. That's why I'm here. I thought maybe--God--I thought maybe----"

"Maybe--what?"

"Maybe some of the easiness--was coming to me. There--there was a fellow--you remember--while you was at Farley's--Joe Dike, the little plumber that always used to kid you about sitting and listening to the oleander tree grow. Joe liked me. I never made no bones, Bertha. I wanted kids. A two-by-four of my own somewheres and kids. That's all I ever asked out of it. Joe, he strung me along a while after you left and then--he quit. It used to go against his grain not even to be allowed to sit in the kitchen. He had self-respect Joe did. He didn't like courting in alleyways and elevated trains. I--didn't have nowheres except to sneak him--up. That's where I lost my chance, Bertha. Joe liked me while I was straight and used to talk marrying, but when he seen me up there in that dirty hole--living like a rat--he--I--aw--after him--I didn't--care--that's all. I don't care now!"

"I care, Helga."

"You! Lots anybody cares for me. But I fooled 'em. I fooled 'em--I--got a place--now--I--got a place now--to invite 'em in!"

Suddenly Helga, whose prettiness was drawn back from her face as if someone were pulling her by the hair, fell forward in a pink sateen huddle against Bertha.