Part 4

Upstairs it was still cold, and when she stooped to drag out her outlandish carpetbag from under the bed, her breath was illuminated. There was not much to pack. A suit of the man-size underwear to be folded over bulkily. A pair of black buttoned shoes with scalloped tops. The green chiffon coat and the oddments of crystal stars. Balbriggan stockings.

Some sheet music that had come down to the kitchen from time to time included with the colored supplement of the Sunday paper. It was pleasant to ride with the eye along the ups and downs of the frozen rhythm. Her piece of Bulgarian embroidery. The concertina. A large greenish glass marble she had found once in a rubbish heap, a beautiful spiral of candy stripe down its center. Quite a wad of saved wages sewed into the pocket of a red flannel petticoat. Her bit of tremor, _The Cathedral Under the Sea_.

Poor Bertha, her face could look out so cleanly and whitely and as uncluttered as a nun's from the little three-cornered shawl she wore sometimes against neuralgia when she sat out on the bit of back porch. But in her slab of hat, with its trumped-up rose on a wire stem, it became broader than long in a comedy squat.

Then her cloak. A discarded black Inverness cape of Mr. Farley's, that she had bought back from the dealer who came semiannually, as he was going out the kitchen way. A black broadcloth that boxed her in squarely, the shoulders horizontal and two inches wider than her own.

There was a look of steerage about Bertha, who had never tasted the sea except from Front Street. A bit of Old World flotsam flung into New World jetsam and drifting along into fantastic amalgam.

On the other hand, Helga, who had actually come over in a ship little larger than a trawl, bareheaded, shawled, and with a bundle of strange foods wrapped in a Swedish newspaper, now wore high heels, half-silk stockings, and a small hat so American that it completely obliterated one eye.

There were no old sounds coming through to trouble Helga and hurt of their imprisonment. Her heart was not a harp for them. Indeed, it was good not to be a hunk.

Helga had learned to bunny-hug in the Hippodrome Dance Hall down on Second Avenue, Ladies Free. Brilliantly lit egress from the long hours and the bearing down kidney pains. Pomaded men whose hands sweated through her shirtwaist danced there. She had gone to an hotel with one of them, sneaking in and up the Farley back stairs at five one morning with her shoes in her hand. He was a masseur in a Broadway hotel. A Swedish girl she knew had forced one to marry her that way. Frightening him with lies about a baby. Helga would go with her masseur again. Maybe if she were lucky she would "get caught." If not--if not, if one was clever like some, one could frighten a man into marriage. Helga was tired; bone tired and wanted a home. Oh yes, Helga had assimilated.

Her door was open as Bertha went out with her bag. Her bed unmade, the sheets still in the writhe of her tangled sleep. The halls were lighter now, the newspaper still leaning against Rollo's closed door. Mrs. Farley by means of a pink enamel bell that hung over her bed was ringing for her morning cup of hot water. Helga would pour it and carry it up on a silver tray. Now was Bertha's time while Helga was pouring.

It was rather strange going out through the front door and facing the Park from the eminence of the stoop. She was accustomed to emerge from the side entrance on a level with the sod.

It was six years and a half since she had changed places. Old dreads came flowing back. The Hungarian with short thick stumps for fingers who made her sign papers. Questions to be answered. Talk. New ways for old. You sat like a piece of cattle in a little fenced-off pen in the Intelligence Office. Waiting. Sometimes while you were being inspected, very closely, needles came out all over you and stung. Once a man had said laughingly to his wife, "Look at her teeth, too." That same woman had taken her directly from the Intelligence Office to her home. A handsome woman in a Persian lamb coat and lorgnettes, and the apartment on Broadway and Fifty-third Street was fine and new with a drawing-room hung in mulberry and light green. Apple orchards in June. But the servant's room was in the basement and half the floor covered with water that had backed from a drain. A kitten lay drowned in it. At midnight, without having undressed, Bertha took silent departure, traveling by elevated train down to the Front Street rooming house where her foster mother and a Danish sailor sat in a back room stewing in gin.

Old dreads. The lugging of the carpetbag into strange rear entrances. Strange pots and pans and palates. A family of rich Greeks on Madison Avenue had been kind, but the seasoning and the swim of olive oil sickened her. New waitresses to be encountered. They were a sniggering lot, often with filthy habits, such as drying the tumblers on the hand-towel, or sneaking up a bit of French pastry from the pantry to let it mould and draw vermin on a clothes closet shelf. One of them had once stolen Bertha's purse with her month's wages in it.

The thumbed-up old references to be dug up. And again drearily: "Every other Thursday out, you understand? Things fumigated. Grown daughter--no men in kitchen."

It was as if she had stepped out of the house into a swarm of these stinging recollections.

The postman was coming up the stoop as she went down, and she had almost to run and turn quickly to the east against Helga's imminent answering to his ring.

It was dirty with old snow on Third avenue, but there was the smell of melt in the air, and underneath the elevated structure the street ran with mud the color and consistency of a chocolate sauce.

The city, shuddering in its perpetual nervous chill of trucks over cobblestones, and elevated railroads, could always befuddle her. To-day it spun around her like a plate on a juggler's stick. Blurs of it.

Knut's Intelligence Office was on Second Avenue and First Street. She turned toward it. But no--not now--dizzy--where--what now?

It was suddenly easier to walk four blocks and board a bobtailed southbound car. A little sign swung over the motorman. Front Street.

***

Annie Wennerberg. For twenty-eight years she had lived near bilge water in a street that wound back from the harbor as crookedly as a sailor's stagger. She neither knew the sea nor loved it, but its stench, with the salt tang strangely out of it, was in the hallways of her lodging house and she tasted it in the beard of stokers who kissed her when they were drunk enough. Drunk enough, because this side of bestiality even stokers were fastidious of her soot-filled pores and furious pockings. Tripe. There was that kind of sponginess to the cheek of Annie Wennerberg.

But to men glutted with sea and half daft with the stare of sky, there was land cheer in Annie's basement dining room, with the red bows wrapped around the throats of the two china vases on a shelf and where one could stew in gin slowly and warmly. Sailors could find letters waiting for them there, too, on the hall rack. Sometimes they were months, even years old, grimy with waiting and fantastic with foreign stamps.

On those brief and intermittent occasions when she was out of work, Bertha slept on a carpet-covered sofa in the basement kitchen. Curious rather sinister nights of great clod-boots walking none too evenly through the black uncarpeted halls. Sailor badinage in the dining room..

One night, a ship's dishwasher off a big twin-screw trans-atlantic, sleeping with five sailors in a second-story room set up such a howling of delirium tremens that an ambulance, clanging into the lane of Front Street, had borne him off finally, biting and wrestling with two internes, a policeman, and Bertha.

Front Street, rancid with sea sculch. Sailors with red threads in their eyeballs two hours after they had come ashore. The women in dreadful finery who preyed upon them. Men of all yellows. Malay. East Indian. Chinese. Javanese. Cooks. Stokers. Mates. Stowaways.

It was fantastic down on Front Street, but not to Bertha who had grown up in it. Annie, who breathed great gin-smelling bubbles when she slept. Public schools where the cross-breeding of white skin and slant eyes was frequent, and little boys and little girls knew horrible lurking things. At eight, Bertha had worn a hat pin under her waist against the bestiality of lodgers.

So when Bertha turned her face once more toward Front Street, she knew why. Annie charged her fifteen cents the night on the carpet-covered sofa. And no talk. Annie never cared enough to ask questions. Besides, year by year now her hearing was failing and she was usually pretty sleepy. Gin-soaked.

When Bertha arrived with her carpetbag, Annie was in the sort of combination kitchen and keg-room, sucking up coffee out of a tin cup, a bottle by.

"I bane outtava yob," said Bertha and showed her carpetbag under the sofa.

"Fired?" asked Annie, who had not heard her.

"Quit."

"There's coffee," said Annie, who charged her five cents a cup and rose out of the huddle of herself, to remove a lot of dirty-looking rags from the sofa. A small exotic breed of South American monkey leaped out of them and skittered across the floor, making a noise like a boy running a stick along a picket fence.

An old Australian stoker off a fruit steamer who owned Annie, owned him, too. In the act of picking off the rags and cleaning the sofa of some of its debris, Annie suddenly began to limp, her hand back in a plaster over the small of her back.

"There's ten cots to be made up this morning, Berthy. Three freighters came in last night and they're sleeping all over themselves upstairs. I'm breaking in two of the twinges, Berthy, and ten cots to be made ... and the hallways, with me crippled up my back, rotting of dirt."

Sly old Annie. There were chores to be had out of Bertha, gratis, and she knew it. The last time between jobs, she had scrubbed three flights of stairs, the roaches scurrying over her hands. Bertha did not mind. It was easier than to sit and look at the furtive silence of Annie's house. She did not drink and the men knew she would jab them with hatpins.

"Hunky Dory," they called her, and "Milksop" and "Wench," and occasionally when an uninitiated one sprang out on her from a dark corner and with wet lips, she stabbed in deep and ruthlessly.

So usually in these intervals, she would work for Annie. Dirty chores, with her skirts pinned back, her feet bare, and her great white arms plunged to the elbow in dirty waters.

But not this time. "No, I bane going out," she said, stooping to unclutch the hand of the little monkey from the hem of her skirt and tossing him a small potato from a mound of them in the sink, "I got to go."

Annie began to sop bread in her coffee, chewing it along her empty gums. In her bloaty, befogged way she hated Bertha. Always had. She had cuffed her constantly as a child and the burr of an old couplet still clung:

Born of a dead mother Secrets of the grave you'll utter.

Great silent clod of a Bertha, it was as if she were spreading her skirts not to reveal the bones of eternities of dead men's thoughts--lying bleaching on the fields of her silence.

"Slut," said Annie without glancing up from her cup. Annie's toad-like words, sometimes they jumped out in her sleep.

Strange that they had never more than jounced off Bertha, although all of her formative days had been lived in a hailstorm of them. Her body was like a white fog, surrounding the imperviousness of her. That, too, was why she could scrape drain holes to a sense of goldy rhythm. That was why she could go out now, with a word like "slut" hurled impenetrably at her back.

The sun was shining outside, and the air from the hay and feed store next door, full of warm fertilizing smells.

She stood irresolute at the door watching the little dribbly life of the street. A suit of men's jumpers dangling on a pole before the Sailors' Supply Store flopped like a man on a gibbet. A marine came out of a lean house and turned recklessly left. A few moments later one of the women of dreadful finery came out of the same house and turned cautiously right. A pair of handsome dray horses were led from a stable down a wooden incline to the street and stood there being harnessed. There were hoots from tugs and long-drawn whistles that seemed to leave a trail of smoke across the morning.

After a while Bertha began to walk. Without destination. At Battery Park where the city bows to the sea, she sat down on a bench. How it beat, that ocean, even in the trapped harbor, over its treasures. Bertha beating, too, over hers.

The day wore on. There were children shrilling up and down the curves of granatoid walks and clumps of shawled women and bearded men all very much concerned and fiery with foreign languages. A pier house kept disgorging little emigrant tribes from Ellis Island, their skins sun and wind beaten, and lugging, most of them, carpetbags. Like Bertha's. The tired yield of tired countries.

At five o'clock it grew chilly and because her legs were growing numb Bertha began to walk again, stopping at a caravan on wheels with a short ladder leading up to it, to eat two sausage sandwiches, washing them down with the East Side's favorite soft drink of celery tonic. The streets were lighted by then and she began to walk again, on and on. Poor streets made kindly by the glow from petty shops.

Bertha, who expected nothing, had lost nothing, and yet, in the impotence of her dumb, hurting misery, she could have battered down closed doors for relief, jabbed at her arms and body with jagged stones, bitten down into her tongue, which she did and it bled.

It helped somehow to hurry along gaunt and boxed into her cape. To hurry and to hurry--alone, in her silence spangled with tears.

It was long past midnight when she finally rounded again into Front Street. There were drunks about, but no one molested her. On the contrary, they reeled rather away. Her face, fatty white, like jade, was so square, so riveted in its pain.

The hall was dead dark, a fitting lurchway for inflamed seamen. There was a seam of light beneath the dining-room door and a silence all corduroyed with snores. Annie and a Lithuanian sailor were asleep in their chairs, two bottles between them, her head and tongue lolling and he sleeping down into his beard. Sots. It was like looking in on a nightmare. Annie with her empty gums and breathing her bubbles.

It was dark in the kitchen, but without even benefit of the gas jet which was hard to reach, or the candle in a bottle on the sink, Bertha dragged the table across the door, barricading it and then piled it with an additional chair. The monkey leaped off the couch chittering, as fully dressed she lay down on it, spreading the Inverness cape for coverlet. He was a nervous little thing and sat huddling in a corner looking through the darkness at her with lit eyes. Amber tunnels.

"Yockie," she whispered, glad for those two phosphorescent disks in her darkness, "Yockie, yump up here." Finally he did, curling up in the crook of her elbow for warmth.

She lay with him that way all night, until her arms went numb and her fingers began to lose their sense of separateness.

But Jocko had ceased trembling and was asleep and to move would have been to awaken him.

***

Weeks of sitting six hours a day, in the railed pens of this and that employment agency, the wad of savings in her petticoat-pocket flattening. Long hours of women hesitating sometimes very long over her and then passing on.

One rather elderly matron in sealskin could not seem to get by her.

"You appear such a strong, clean European sort of girl. I'm sure you'll do very nicely. No. No. I can't seem to quite decide. I--well I don't know. I'll think it over."

A woman from Lexington Avenue dickered between Bertha and a Lettish girl at great length, finally deciding in favor of the latter.

A housekeeper engaging a new staff of servants for a Fifth Avenue menage hired her in one breath and changed her mind in the next.

Behind the fatted mask of her imperturbability, a fear smote Bertha. The sisterhood's long nose of intuition was beginning to quiver at the flanges.

Then one night down in Front Street, Annie, brewing herself a stew of lamb neck and regarding Bertha, began to squint up slyly, a word that was horrible hopping off her lips. Then Bertha knew for certain. After all, it was to be expected. March had already turned the corner. The eyes of the appraising women, focusing slightly, were beginning to suspect. And now Annie, soaked old hex, but wise in this from being a woman, dropping that hop-toad word.

"You bane one yourself," said Bertha back at her this time, trembling in her boxed cape, turning and walking out of the house. Walking and wanting again in her unassailed strength the relief of hurling down doors and hacking at herself with stones for the relief of pain. Rollo, help. Lord, drenched in Light, help.

Then again hours and hours of sitting in Battery Park watching the harbor waves, like lips, running out to the horizon to tell sky. Sky. The statue of Liberty pointing to it. Steamers hooting to it. Street cars crawling under it. Grass pointing toward it. A swimming sense of infinitude that drowned her finally into a state of quiet, and her pain went out like a match.

One day in a Delancy Street employment agency she obtained a job. Charwoman. Night work in one of those lower Broadway office buildings that house by day a vertical city of four thousand honeycombed, bumbling souls.

The woman with the drooping busts and machine stitched wig who conducted the intelligence office, had been sly about it.

"Say, for who sees you at night, you don't got to worry. In such a deserted office building like the Equitable, such a strong, healthy-looking girl like you should keep such a job until the last day."

Silent, tiled corridors, lavatories, elevators, and fire-proof stairs to be swabbed. Nights fitful with these mopping char-women weaving their long strokes through the long, long corridors. A battalion of witches of Endor. Women with old pools of eyes that were gathering scum. Crooked backs. Empty gums.

At nine o'clock they met with pails and mops, an army of the silent dead flitting through corridors and gathering up the footsteps that men leave after them. Ghouls preying upon the death of a day. At dawn they faded out again. Grayly. Gray into gray.

To Bertha, mopping, mopping through these corridors of the night, it was as if her scrub water, as it blackened, became alive with vibrations. Nervous floors still beating with men's anxious hastenings hither and thither. Whither? Squnching her mop in the bucket, the water crowded up thirstily around her wrists, like a mouth.

And then it was pleasant walking home before the city got its stranglehold on the day. There was a graveyard in lovely and impregnable tranquillity around Trinity Church, its silence louder than the typhoon of men that raged about it all day. Sometimes Bertha sat down against a headstone. Between two deaths. The little death before life that she was carrying. The tired death after life beneath the slabs.

Presently the death that Bertha had under her heart would be born into life. The little life of a little death. And under the slabs the death of a life. Life of death. Death of life. A cycle of perceptions twirling slowly in her consciousness. Not thoughts, just a slow kind of dizziness.

She dozed a great deal. Against the headstones. In parks. On the carpet-sofa in Annie's kitchen. Waiting. It was good to be working nights and rid of the fear of the sailor-infested darkness of Front Street. Days, with Annie bickering about, no matter how gin-soaked, there was more security to lying stretched out on the carpet sofa under the Inverness cape, Jocko trembling to her for warmth.

One night, swabbing up a tenth floor corridor of the Equitable Building, a pain smote at Bertha that caused her to cry out and clutch at herself, as if someone were trying to shove her off the top of a skyscraper. A leap of forked lightning that went through her like a jagged grin of steel....

Twenty minutes later in the ambulance on her way to city hospital, her baby was born. Painlessly. So without labor that the internes joked and told about it at experience clinics.

A son. The music of the chimes goldily tranced in his eyes. Tranced there, like the candy strip down the glass marble in her carpetbag.

***

When Bertha's boy was two and one half weeks old she signed him away, sprawlingly, as she would write, "prepared flour" and trying, with her left fingers about right wrist, to keep her hand to the dotted line.

A lawyer with a brief case on the desk beside her sucked up with a blotter the symbol of her deed. Ellen Dike Bixby. John Kendall Bixby, Detroit, Michigan, added their respective signatures. A nurse from Bertha's ward stood by and signed as witness. The champ of a seal. More blotting.

"There," said the lawyer passing around the folded documents and beginning to buckle up his brief case. "That's that."

He was like a clamp on a coffin lid and Bertha wanted to cry out against him, but she only stood very still holding her document.

"Well, my girl, what you have done is very sensible. You are not in a position to provide properly for the boy and you are placing him in the hands of two very splendid and trustworthy people, who by legal adoption have just now become his parents. You are a very fortunate girl. Mr. and Mrs. Bixby can give him the refinements and the opportunities of a beautiful home and the best of educational advantages. So my girl, instead of feeling unhappy, you should regard yourself as the object of congratulations."

Her throat hurt from holding down moans. There were little red glass mulberries on Mrs. Bixby's hat. Such a pretty hat and her face was plumpish and fresh, and her hand constantly in sympathy on Bertha's.

"We will be father and mother to him, dear. He will never know the difference. You see this--to-day is the fifth anniversary of our--of our little one being taken from us. That's why your little one--ours--his beauty is so like--like--our--little boy's--was--"

"Go. Go," cried the moans in Bertha's throat, caught there like a log jam, "Go. Go."

Mr. Bixby had short clipped hair and carried a well-brushed derby hat and wore a tiny Masonic emblem on his lapel.