Under the caption, “ALONE,” they printed the portrait of Bernice Sailor on the front page of a certain tangerine-tinted evening paper. Leaping photographers had whoomed at her with their flashlights as she came out of the coroner’s office, and the handkerchief which she crumpled against her mouth did not hide the hysterical tears. For once, she wasn’t anxious to have her picture in the papers.
“ORPHANED by GUNMEN’S BULLETS, pretty BERNICE SAILOR, 4698 Kenmore Avenue, leaving the room where her FATHER, a WORLD WAR HERO, lay COLD IN DEATH.”
Mrs. Pruitt had dragged her baffled husband there when she heard the news, and to the everlasting glory of that 44th Ward statesman, Michael McKeeve, it was chronicled that he had steadied Bun during the intimate testimony of her father’s life and habits. Gangdom became voluble with the doings of Spence Sailor—the bootleggers whom he had double-crossed, the cabaret owners who had borne his extortions. Detectives messed through his album of clippings and read letters found in his room, but there were few excuses for holding Bun (a woman in the case would have made a much better tale, of course), so the bloodhounds of justice yielded to the persuasion of her personal champions.
Bun stumbled down hallways with reporters rapidly pressing her with inquiries, and the Pruitts fuming in an excitable vanguard…. “It’s a dirty shame, the way they don’t leave that poor kid alone. You’d think she shot ‘em herself, the way they ack!”
If they couldn’t make a bona fide gangster out of Spence Sailor on the actual evidence presented, they could make a modern Billy the Kid out of him—which the newspapers proceeded to do very heartily. Not exactly Billy the Kid; a sort of hybrid between the lamented Billy, and Sergeant York, and S. Glenn Young and John Wilkes Booth.
They interviewed Cleo Henderson.
“He was a very quiet man, with charming manners,” put in the landlord’s pretty wife, “Never was there any complaint from other lodgers regarding either Mr. Wise or Mr. Sailor. Yes, both were very popular with all the tenants.
“Why,” she continued brokenly, “It was Mr. Sailor’s custom to join us in a quiet little game of cards each evening.”
But tonight, in that friendly building on Cambridge Avenue, no one will feel like playing cards.
It was conceded that the star woman feature writer, Donna Bubb, had done a most heart-rending and artistic piece of work. Even her literature, however, was excelled in popular appeal by the vivid words which flowed from the type-bars of Karl Keithway, writing for the flaming sheets of tangerine.
Cold and silent on a slab in the morgue of the Ukran Undertaking company at 2981 Diversey Parkway, a man is resting tonight. Steve Gold, alias Abe Wise, the uncrowned king of Chicago’s bootleggers, was dethroned early today. Dethroned—by a machine gun in the hands of unknown foes! … And so, Steve is taking his rest.
Unearthing the honorable discharge papers of both dead men, reporters avidly listed their acts of martial note, and busy artists were engaged on line drawings of German machine guns, German machine gunners flinging up their hands, and stalwart Americans menacing them with hand grenades. “Surviving the Blast of Prussian Steel; Dying by the Guns of Gangsters….” On a supposition that the Henderson was a hangout for bootleggers, a squad of police stalked through every room in the building, ignoring the angry wails of Cleo Henderson, who declared that nobody would ever want to live there again. It turned out to be an excellent advertisement; two unoccupied rooms were rented that very evening by curious people who sat with their doors open, anticipating more battles.
Logan, turned a sickly yellow under his brown skin, had set to work with a steaming pail to scour the sidewalk marks. He dug fresh earth in the backyard and scattered it over the hard turf where Abraham Wise had died; he took a pair of large shears and clipped broken stalks from the leafless hedge of barberry. A continual drift of staring persons meandered past, most of them voluble with questions…. Did he hear the shots? Were those bullet holes, there in the ground?
“No, ma’am. I dunno nothin’ bout it. I was makin’ baids upstahs. No, ma’am…. I dunno nothin’ bout what happened….” His soft response was full of agony…. He remembered how Mr. Wise used to toss him a package of cigarettes when he entered the apartment to clean up. “Here, you. Smoke?” And Mr. Sailor had been such a fine-looking man. He wondered who would fall heir to his shirts and neckties.
From the window of Number 9, Javlyn watched him. Across the foot of his bed lay a copy of that morning’s Chicago Messenger, and the poem was set in a narrow strip down the fifth column of the editorial page. A pair of manicure scissors lay beside it, and a ragged slip had been cut from the “Legal Advisor” column which nudged J.R.P.’s…. Just the little cut, as he had begun to clip the poem. And then, that sound of heavy cloth being ripped in their sober street…. He couldn’t finish clipping it, for a while.
The cops came, later in the day, and Marry was herded along with David Henderson to a series of conferences in which the mysterious shot of an early epoch—when Marry met the “burglar” on the back porch—was fully reviewed.
“How long had you known Steve Gold?”
“Who?”
“Gold—the fellow you call Wise.”
“Just a couple of days.” “What were you doing in his flat?” “Just went in to talk to him, and he went out to eat, later; I was there waiting for him and—”
With elaborate detail, Henderson recounted Marry’s astounding honesty. “First day Mr. Javling moved in he found that pocketbook. A brown one. Well, naturally, I was pretty surprised when he brought it to me—you know, the kind of people you get sometimes in rooming houses, they wouldn’t bother to tell anyone about it.”
Six pairs of blank, hard eyes glaring at your face. As if they were trying to batter words back into your mouth while you said them. Marry had an insane desire to leap from his chair and shriek, “All right! You’ve got me! I’ll confess everything!”
But that was silly, when he didn’t have anything to confess. The undertakers had Steve Gold, now, and were filling his body with cold embalming fluid…. Warm, husky body…. “Listen, kid. Let’s have some chicken. Can you make good coffee?” … There wasn’t any talk yet about a big funeral for Steve Gold. He didn’t seem to rate one. And, anyway, it would be like holding a funeral between the lines in No Man’s Land. Not many mourners would come back alive.
David Henderson was pitifully shaken by the whole thing. His front yard, where he’d planted cannas and made brick flowerbeds! … He didn’t want to go home, and insisted on trailing up Dearborn Street, shivering under a cloudy wind.
“Terrible, terrible thing.” Sighing. “Cleo was squawling around when I left—seems like it sort of shook her up. Shook up her nervous system. Well, it did mine, too…. Didn’t it sort of get your goat?”
Marry agreed that it did—sort of.
“Well, I don’t know why folks want to get mixed up in those things. Sailor was a fine fellow—nice–looking man for his age. Seemed real young, didn’t he? … Hm, yes.” Henderson glanced cautiously over his shoulder, and turned to Javlyn. “Maybe you noticed that I didn’t mention to anybody about Wise calling you up twice yesterday. Cleo didn’t, either. I guess I managed to impress that much on her, right away after it happened…. We didn’t want to see you get into any trouble. But if it isn’t asking too much, just why?—”
“You know as much as I do about it,” Marry said. “I hadn’t heard from him or seen him since he left, except one time when he dropped in after I got shot. I haven’t got an idea what he wanted.”
“Well, I guess you’ll never know now.” He shuffled along in silence for a time. They crossed Chicago Avenue and went on north past rusty rows of old houses. Ahead of them, Washington Square lifted its fuzz of wintry trees, and a rear-guard of hoboes crouched on benches, loath to desert the friendly park where they had crowded in the soapbox sessions of warmer days.
Henderson paused at a cross-street and glanced east. “You know, I think I could use a—a little drink. How about you? … There’s a fellow, lives over here—” He led the way to a musty ruin of ornamented brick and rang the doorbell. A drink would be nice, especially when you were so nervous…. Some fat girl appeared at the door, scrutinized them carefully, and muttered about calling Andy.
“Javling, I ain’t much of a hand for liquor. Not that I believe in prohibition. That’s the craziest idea that was ever put over on the American people. But there’s times when a man needs a drink—ain’t that so? … Of course, getting mixed up with the folks who sell it—that’s bad business. Spence Sailor ought to have known better—”
Andy appeared—a businesslike personage in shirt sleeves and rubber apron. He glanced at a small yellow card which Henderson displayed, welcomed Marry with a searching glance, and explained that he was busy “downstairs.” Lorene would look after them, he declared.
Lorene did. Very well. So well, in fact, that in half an hour the color had surged back into David Henderson’s dry cheeks and he was wagging an emphatic finger as he eulogized to Marry. “This is good liquor, Javling. Very good liquor. Hits you just like a flock of machine gun bullets…. .Ha, ha ! But as I was saying before, it doesn’t pay for a man to get mixed up in such things. No, sir. Look at Sailor. He’s dead, now. Dead as a doorknob—”
It wasn’t until Friday night that Josephine saw Mrs. Bellamy. She canceled a lunch engagement with Rose on Thursday noon, but had been unable to reach her by phone even then and left word with a girl in the office.
Bun had needed her. A strange, dozing Bun with spiritless voice and swollen, tearful face. It was a thing of wonder for Jo to find her thus subdued, when she had been fearing that Bun would shriek and faint every ten minutes. Her hand was still sore, she murmured—that taxi smash—and they had lunch in the impersonal racket at Stevens’, where Josephine did her best to talk of winter coats and Buster Keaton.
You couldn’t keep Bun on any subject for very long. It was pathetically surprising. She’d draw crooked lines on the tablecloth with her well hand and put only one lump of sugar in her coffee, instead of the four which she used to prefer…. “Uh-huh. I saw him in that one, too. They had a funny ole train he was ridin’ on.” And then, with fearful intensity, “Jo, honey, you don’t think My Dad was a crook? I juss wanta lay down an’ die when everybody makes out he was a—hijacker—an’ things—” She’d gape, dull-eyed, at the further wall while Josephine tried to reassure her. Spence Sailor was a handsome man. Splendid. He’d been a real hero in the war. Newspapers always tried to dig up things and twist them around…. She mustn’t think about it.
A mysterious person had materialized from New York—a man who signed his telegram, “Uncle Clifford,” and who looked shockingly like an older, refined Spence who had been pressed into conventional restraint. Bernice remembered him only as a bearded form in the family group which hung on Grandpa’s parlor wall, down in Indian, but she suffered herself to be kissed on the cheek and released from the county payroll, much to the dismay of Mr. Michael McKeeve.
“You’re to go back with me for a visit in Neeawk,” the strange Uncle Clifford had said. “Aunt Esther is fixing a room for you.” Perhaps they had a lot of money … anyway, she had always wanted to see Neeawk. She watched, hurt and fearful, while Uncle Clifford supervised the brief arrangements as if he were holding the thought of his brother at a convenient arm’s length…. It seemed that they had never written to one another since Spence left home.
There wouldn’t be any funeral in Chicago. All the other Sailors slept in a grass-grown lot down in Indian, and Spence was to go there in the baggage coach ahead. People would talk, probably. They’d read the Chicago papers which came every noon to the Busy Bee confectionery store, and you could imagine them wrangling in the chairs in front of Appleby’s hotel…. “Well, I knew he’d end up like this. He was always too smart—lookin’ for trouble, always. Remember how he put that pig in the principal’s room on Halloween? Yes, sure.” And this time Spence wouldn’t be able to spit on their shadows. That had been a favorite stunt of his.
Bun moaned about it when they met again on Friday noon. “Oh, my God, Jo—I don’t know whether to go or not. Mac says we better get married an’ I tole Unk about it. He juss growled; said this was fine time to talk about marryin’. Then he asked about McKeeve an’ I tole him he was a politician, an’ he says, ‘I understand that they don’t live very long here in Chicago, either.’ I—”
Jo insisted that Uncle Clifford was very much upset, too; Bun must make allowances for his nervousness.
“But he’s juss a stranger, far as I’m concern. He an’ Aunt Esther. I never thought I wanted to marry Mac— he’s so much older’n I am—but maybe—”
She went wearily to the county building to find a fountain pen and compact and other trifles which she had stowed away in a drawer of her desk, and when she met Jo at the library bus station in the evening, her eyes were snapping with a blaze of former curiosity. “I seen him! Marry. Jo, he loss his job. Honess, he did!”
“Lost his—”
“You know Wise recommended him. Well, he went through Eidle’s to get a letter to the county board, an’ I guess Eidle had somebody else he wanted to stick in there. So with Wise—dead—they juss handed Marry his ticket!”
Thinking of Marry, out of a job. Walking the streets, reading ads hungrily, racing at seven o’clock in the morning to be the first one to apply. Job was hard to get in Chicago…. “Did you—just see him? Or talk to him?”
“We talked. I met him while I was waitin’ for elevator. He sorta gave me his regrets an’ then I ask him why he wasen’ up in the office, an’ he tole me. He’d been up to the county board, but Mamenberg said he cooden do nothin’ for him. Gee, he sure looked down at the mouth.” She laughed harshly as they boarded a bus and squeezed through the aisle into a seat. “Gotta big head, anyway. Do him good!”
Jo’s face paled. “Don’t say that, Bun.”
“Why, whassa matter?” Bun peered at her in surprise as the bus jolted around a corner. “You sure don’t care about him anymore?”
“Maybe not. But you oughtn’t to say that about anybody.”
The coach rattled north—on north through the windy park where Jo had walked with Mrs. Bellamy and learned to say “Froyd” and “Loo-is.” Seemed an eternity since then…. It was months….
As they sped across the branch of the outer drive, Josephine arose suddenly and pressed the bell. “Bun, I can’t go out for dinner with you and your uncle tonight. I’ve got to see a friend. She left a call for me twice in the last two days, and I’m going to run over and see her a moment. I’m—I’ve got to—”
Bun was voicing protests, but Jo climbed from the coach at the next stop and hurried across the triangle of park lawn toward Deming Place. She hadn’t made a definite dinner date with Bun, anyway. And Bun’s uncle was there and … no matter how much Bernice needed her, she couldn’t stand to hear her talk about Marry. She couldn’t stand it. Mrs. Bellamy had been her port in time of stress before, and she would be again.
It was all so hideous—murder, and jobs vanishing, and winter coming on. Already the dim grass was bitten into a lifeless mat that crunched wearily beneath her feet. How would it be to lose her job, just then? If she could see Marry—talk with him. Tell him it wasn’t so bad, after all. Tell him—
But there was another girl. Someone else whom he had kissed and fondled. He’d admitted it to her himself and no one with any pride would go running back to be kicked in the face a second time…. She wouldn’t be able to seek him out. Not if he starved for lack of a job or even if he grew rich through finding a good one….
Suppose that he wanted to find her. How could he find her? Through Bun, perhaps. But knowing Marry, you couldn’t imagine him asking Bun Sailor. And he hadn’t asked about Jo that day when Bun met him, or she would have said so. No, perhaps Bernice was right. He was a wash-out. Had the big head. Had—
Oh, merciful God! And the winter swooping around— black with a glacial cold and burning its bleakness into your heart.
Mrs. Bellamy answered Jo’s ring with a steady clicking of the door latch, and she was peering over the rail as the girl came up. “Why, Jo, darling! Stranger!” She kissed her fiercely; perhaps it was because of that yellow light in the hall, but somehow Mrs. Bellamy appeared—older and more haggard—
She was clearing a litter of newspapers and several bundles of old letters from the davenport. “Here. I’ll just get these things out of the way, so you can sit down. Have you had dinner? There’s heavenly hash in the oven; did you ever eat heavenly hash? And where have you been?”
Always warm and sweet and kindly, in Rose Bellamy’s apartment. Jo slid into her seat with a contented sigh. “It’s been upsetting. I’ve had to be with Bun—you know, my old girlfriend—most of the time since Wednesday. She lost her father very suddenly.”
“Oh, how sad!” Rose intoned the word with a fervor which made you know that she felt it, too. She was putting on her apron, and stood in the kitchen doorway like a plump but weary statue of Hospitality.
“It was—diff’cult. You know, we seem to be separated by regular chasms. We scarcely speak the same language anymore. She has lots of casual acquaintances, but I’m about the only close friend she has. And then, it was all so horrible—the way he died.” Jo shook her head and glanced toward the heap of papers which Rose had removed to the piano bench. “I see you have the papers there. You probably read about it—”
“Read … read about it?” Mrs. Bellamy was coming out of the kitchen, very slowly, but Jo didn’t turn her head.
“You know. That shooting over on Cambridge, where I used to live. That’s Bun’s father.” Seemed pitiful, now, to think of Bun’s father dead….
Mrs. Bellamy was stricken by it, too. She mumbled rapidly. “Jo … Jo! You mean—you mean—Bun’s father—”
“Why, didn’t you read about it? The papers were just full. It was terrible, the way they featured it and printed Bun’s picture, too. Seems as if they could have left her out of it. Poor girl—it wasn’t her fault…. It didn’t surprise me so much about her father. He was always mixed up in politics and prohibition work and things like that.” Josephine reached over to take a paper from the pile. “Here is one picture. You must have seen it; maybe you don’t remember. The papers are so full of gang wars. The papers—Mrs. Bellamy! Are you—Mrs. Bellamy … What—”
The memory that he had met Bill Swanner outside the office of the county board gave Marry considerable joy, at least.
Mamenberg had been growling at an office full of Poles, and was not ripe for comment on the question of minor employees and their jobs. “No, I don’t know nothing about it. I’m very, very busy. Who did you come from? Eidle? You better go up and see him, mister.”
“I did,” Marry said. “The girl told me he wouldn’t be back all day. But he was there; I saw him when the door opened.”
“I don’t know nothing about it. You’ll have to pardon me. I’m very, very busy—” He mixed in a group of vociferating, gesturing men; Javlyn saw that there was nothing for him to do but close the gate quietly behind him. His service was over.
Bill Swanner lounged against the outer doorjamb, his hat pushed on the back of his head, and his grating voice describing a long series of profitable football bets to some glassy-faced clerk.
“Well, what’s the trouble?” He stared insolently as Marry passed him.
“What trouble?”
Swanner’s mouth curled in a sarcastic smile. “I just come from downstairs; ole Ryan says you ain’t going to be with us anymore.”
“I suppose that will break your heart, Swanner.” Not hating to leave that roily place, but wondering where else he could find $52.80 per week….
The man chuckled. “I could of tole you that, long time ago. You wise guys don’t last very long around here.”
“Oh, I’m wise guys, am I?” Marry turned toward the elevators.
Something in his tone changed Swanner’s sneer to insulting rage. “You’re too damn wise, you kid, you! You think you’re too damn smart!”
“Probably.” A nearby globe burned into red; one moment more and he’d be gone out of that growling hall. Not knowing why he did it … a filmy thought of avenging a thousand other wrongs filtered through Javlyn’s mind as he reached back and jerked Bill Swanner’s hat down over his face, while the brim ripped asunder and the gaping clerk hissed in surprise…. “Going down!” the operator droned, and Marry’s political career was ended.
He thought about it during the next hour as he wandered through the Loop. It was a comfort, while jobless and drifting, to know that you had torn Bill Swanner’s hat across his face; many others had longed to do the same thing…. As if Bill Swanner represented all that was gross and brutish in the sovereign County of Cook, and you had unveiled his leprosy to a horrified world.
“Crusader,” he mused to himself, and stood on Clark Street watching a tribe of street evangelists drag forth their gospel at an alley entrance.
Steadily colder, with flakes of soot drifting from roofs above, and the loudest evangelist’s nose running as he sniffled with a cold he’d probably bear all season…. “Come, brothers, come!” the thin voice echoed. “Come to Jesus. He saves, brothers, He knows. Jesus forgives everything; though thy sins be as scarlet—”
Scarlet. Wishing there could be something scarlet, even sin, in all that hustling grayness. Some man stood by Marry’s shoulder and protested sturdily. “Ought to call a cop over here. They ain’t allowed in the Loop; can’t hold meetings in the Loop.” He caught Javlyn’s glance and wagged his knowing head. “They ain’t allowed. Interfere with traffic. Somebody ought to—”
The great god, then, was Traffic. Interfere with Traffic and you got pinched. That was the trouble with Wise and Spence Sailor; they interfered with Traffic and got it—Wise in the head and Sailor in the body…. WeIl, it couldn’t pay you to dig any hard philosophy out of that. You’d have only a worried brain for your trouble. And as long as you had a check for more than one hundred dollars, Traffic could never hiss at you for too much interference…. But, job was hard to get in Chicago.
Jo always said that…. He wondered again, as he had wondered through all the days, where she had found her new job and where she was living, and if she found living very worthwhile. Her green dress … she’d be wearing that to work, and the dark one with tan cuffs. Not scarlet. He couldn’t imagine either himself or Jo wearing scarlet gowns to scorch their individual sins. Dull black, rather—with cowls to cover the bitter tears that would drip all day and all night, all week and all year, forever and ever.
He cashed his check in a nearby bank as before; it was easy; they knew a county check when they saw one. Then lunch, in a Triangle restaurant south of Jackson Boulevard, carefully reading frenzied panegyrics on the walls as he scooped out a baked potato. Perhaps he could get a job writing those…. “Fresh, tangy oysters from the limpid, crystal waters of historic Delaware Bay” and things like that. “Write anything else?” J.R.P. had asked him. Now was the time to put it to some account…. Advertising. People said there was lots of money to be made in that line. You’d read and hear every day of persons who were writing for the agencies and earning enormous salaries by merely dressing the desirability of shaving sticks or peanut butter in alluring terms. Might try for a job.
“I hate advertising!” Marry cursed as he left the table.
The mechanical cashier was waiting—a shell of slim efficiency behind her desk. He dropped the luncheon check before her and reached for his billfold. It wasn’t in his coat pocket…. Oh, must have put it in a side pocket when he left the bank. No. His trousers—he remembered—he had thrust it into his trouser pocket. It wasn’t there—it wasn’t—
Waiting customers coughed and grunted behind him; Marry had a vague remembrance of counting forty-five cents from the handful of change in his pocket, and floating dazedly to the street.
Somebody had got it. You didn’t lose billfolds that way; not out of a buttoned pocket or inner coat, even when you were carrying your topcoat scornfully over your arm…. As a matter of stricken ritual, Javlyn sorted through every wrinkle of his suit and coat. Then, which seemed more sensible and philosophical, he counted the change gleaned from vest and trousers. The small coins twinkled spitefully in his hand: seventy-eight cents.
You were out of a job; and you had seventy-eight cents, and you were in Chicago with the cold months already stalking around. Oh, but it was funny! And you couldn’t go bumming a freight back to Iowa, hunting for a job which you’d tossed aside that same year…. Marry had a ridiculous vision of himself, begrimed and dusty from the jolting maw of a boxcar, standing before the desk of the Eagle Falls Graphic-Republican, asking for a place. He wasn’t a tramp printer…. There was George Luce, of course. His bread would be Marry’s—or rather, his vegetables and licorice, for George was on a diet and couldn’t eat much bread. But to trot squealing back to Clay City, with all the loafers in Teddy Royce’s drugstore laughing whenever your back was turned! Or even when it wasn’t turned.
Seemed—seemed like there had been a girl back in Clay City. He couldn’t visualize her face then, but her name was Wilma Aintree and she drove a Ford sedan, and her father was a cold little manikin who sat in the Essex County State Bank…. Wilma liked to play bridge, and read the latest books from the Carnegie Library—the ones by Harold Bell Wright and Edward Bok—because they were quite the latest books. Clay City, and bridge— if indeed he could have his former job there—and Ford sedans, and Carnegie Libraries!
He would die in a flophouse on Halsted Street (he knew of such places; the city told him) before he’d catch a west-bound freight.
Well, there was J.R.P. He’d get a big kick out of it…. Marry strode north up Clark Street, walking confidently and trying to imagine that he was very affluent. He thought of advertising for the billfold, but one glance at the long, dark mob of marchers stretching ahead was all he needed to make him laugh at such absurdity. Out of that army there might be one person in every block who would answer such an ad. And again, there might not.
At Lake Street a whistling blue car grazed his toes, darting from behind a pillar of the El. Marry leered with hate at the driver’s fading back. Wintham Six, the kind Art Hunnacher sold. And it would be easy enough to see Art Hunnacher and get a job selling those confident things. Wearing sport togs and spilling a line of gushing sales talk at all who’d listen…. Good God! Better the boxcar jolting toward Clay City and rural disgrace.
He stalked through chilly slums north of the river, climbing to Rush Street over loading platforms and heaps of warehouse boxes. Negro children were kicking a torn, soggy football along Illinois Street and the hurtling sphere struck Marry’s chest as he picked his way past them. He caught it and flung it to the largest boy in a long spiral pass…. They shrieked delightedly. “Hey, you—hi, mister—pass it again! Hi, big boy, pass it.” He chuckled with some new, wild freedom as they bombarded him, and he kept passing the ball back all the way to the corner.
This would be life. To drowse through those vast rubbish heaps of which this was but a sample, watching the coarse life and death which teemed for those who could see it. Why, you’d never want to be encumbered with the trucky items which most people called life; and Marry had a good start, for he was unencumbered already. Burdened only with his memories, and a few clothes, and a box of books and knickknacks which he had never opened since it was shipped from Iowa.
You could throw the clothes away, and discard the box, but the memories would cling like honeyed or lecherous burrs against your heart…. Imagine, though. Made it easier, imagining. All right—you found some one who knew you could write and was willing to pay you for doing it. Not paying you much, but enough to buy waffles and hot cabbage and steaks. And you had Jo rustling beside you.
Dear one, are you, parching in the heat? I’ll catch the slatey rain out of girdered. clouds, and let it spray all over you…. Darling, are you, shivering from this city’s frost? I’ve plucked my claws full of warm wool—brown and russet from the backs of a million sheep….
Rom Pentecost would lend him a few dollars until he landed some sort of a job. Any sort. Had to have a little money for carfare, in order to chase after them…. What if he had thrown his other money into the coffers of theatres and bootleggers and taxicab companies? He didn’t begrudge it. You had to throwaway so much in order to learn how little it was really worth. But just a few dollars, now, was worth a great deal.
Lucky that there was a Pentecost who knew him and would care whether or not he ate…. The Elvina Hotel stood before him, a comforting, gingerbread mountain against the gray sky. Yes—it was two o’clock, and J.R.P. would be back from the Messenger until late in the afternoon, when always he went over to spank his column and put it to bed. Just now he would be sprawling asleep, or playing chess with the inevitable Canuck, or frowning at a heap of mail on the couch.
Marry rapped at the shuttered door several times before he realized that no one was in. No Canuck or J.R.P. or anybody…. Well … maybe he had been delayed at the office. Or been dragged off to speak at some luncheon club; they seized him often for such fatigues unless he beat them off with rudeness and profanity.
Javlyn paused in the lobby. “You don’t know when he’ll be in?” he inquired of the desk clerk.
Genial, white-headed clerk with mild eyes like a serene kitten. He scratched the marble desk thoughtfully. “About New Year’s, I would say. Possibly the week after Christmas. It’s hard to tell, you know; he’s a very—ah— unsystematic person. One couldn’t say, really.”
First a wild thought that he was being fooled, and then it all crushed over him out of bitter vacuum: Virgin Islands and hot sun and J.R.P. lolling under an awning with some lovable Danish author. “Leave … vacation … till after Christmas.” Forgetting all that! Laugh … laugh—
“What do you smoke?” the lonely clerk queried, and Marry became aware that he was automatically filling his pipe with a thin sift of tobacco from the bottom of his pouch. “Oh, yes? I used to smoke that, too—but it’s too sweet when you use it straight. Get a can of Edgeworth and mix it in equal parts. Try it; I think you’ll like it.”
That was all very well, too, but Edgeworth cost fifteen cents a can and then he’d have but sixty-three cents. And carfare home was seven cents more and then he’d have only fifty-six. And supper….
Javelyn walked home—from Ohio Street to Diversey, and he did not buy any tobacco. His fortune was intact still. Papers, he wouldn’t buy; Logan gathered them up all over the building. Visiting a basement shelf, Marry found all the morning editions and had clipped several likely ads before he remembered that it was too late to apply anywhere that day, and all those jobs had probably been taken already. Have to buy the first editions of morning papers that night, and set the alarm clock for an early start, for it would be Saturday and no chance again until Monday. And you couldn’t draw out seventy-eight cents to cover meals and carfare for that long a period.
Wandering to the window and staring down at the darkening ground where Wise and Sailor had died. You’d never know whether it was by design or accident that Spence was caught in the spatter of those bullets. He had been the most grotesque figure. Jiggling inscrutably from politics to ribald jests, and from T.B. to philosophy—very crude philosophy and not at all sweetened by thought of the twelve men who preceded him to the outer universe…. That day when he swaggered into the hospital room and recited some silly tale about Gruff going over a bridge and a Troll waiting down below! He knew that no burglar had been prowling on Steve Gold’s back porch, and he knew that Steve Gold was Steve Gold…. Marry fancied them trading comment at the brink of some whistling chasm where the bats of infinity herded together: “Did you know who I was all the time, Sailor?” “Oh, Christ, don’t make me laugh! Of course I did.” … “Christ! Did you say Christ? I’m not Christ; I saw Him driving a herd of singing horses across that last prairie, and I stopped to speak to Him—just as one Jew to another. He’ll be back here pretty soon. See! … There He comes now. The horses are taking Him for a ride….”
But after all, weren’t they a couple of weird outcasts, those Sailors, father and daughter? The sight of Bun’s sober lips and the vivid black eyes which weren’t quite so happy—it had brought home to him the choking void left by Jo. It seemed as if Bernice were the link with Jo, sent by Providence to grasp him as he stepped from the elevator that noon. But remembering how Spence had declaimed, “Funny thing; Bun hasn’t got an idea where she is!” he knew that her pale forehead held nothing for him behind it…. Just to mutter, “There’s nothing a person can say at a time like this, Bun. I hope that it—that he—” Peer covertly at the bandaged hand, and voice his regrets, and know that nobody would weep for Abe Wise except the kid brother who had never come on that other night.
Dreaming sadly about it all. Musing in dull, relentless horror—pacing back and forth across the room which Josephine had shared with him—jingling in his pocket the dimes and nickels and pennies which stood between him and the future. And knowing that he would have been insane with joy if for only a moment the cheap perfume she used, drifted in.
“When I was a little lad
With folly on my lips …”
That hurt too much, so he shut off the record before the boy of Duna had gone sailing over many seas.
There was large bologna for sale on Diversey, and puffy rolls over which the sugar glazed itself with brown raisins that resembled anything but raisins. Marry ate two slices of large bologna and three rolls, sitting in his room with a spotted glass of water beside him…. Thinking that he could live a long time on rolls and bologna if he had to, but wondering how long he could live with that bitter ache which welled like unshed tears behind his eyes.
Two morning papers. He bought them at ten o’clock and hurried back through the cold. Not to bed, though. The papers lay unclipped and rigid while he pounded at the typewriter, things whining and sobbing all around as he wrote.
With Uncle Clifford gone to his hotel, Bun could think.
Certain that she didn’t want to go down to Indian when the body was shipped back the next day, she was equally sure that she didn’t want to go on to New York alone and be received at the train by some strange Aunt Esther. Aunt Esther would find her shocking and barbarous, she knew.
Reasoning, “Gosh, I bet she’d be sore at me if she knew I ever slung hash. Uncle Clifford was. Thought it was awful…. And My Dad always thought it was cute.”
If she went down home with the funeral convoy, all the old hens along Seneca Street would be peeking out and commenting acidly on how short her skirt was, and how she looked just like a regular Chicago woman, now. They’d remember how she had crawled into the subcellar of the old stone brewery when everybody else was afraid to go there because of snakes; and how she had vanquished that oldest Hereford boy by slamming him on the head with a croquet mallet; and how she and little Wayne Mitchell had been discovered “playing doctor” in Carpenter’s granary. She couldn’t bear the pryings and pickings of all those village skeletons. But Unk didn’t seem to think it was right for her to stay in Chicago and then come on to New York alone … and God knew that she didn’t want to stay in Chicago anymore—at least not living on Kenmore near Wilson and thinking always of My Dad’s death.
Somewhere she had seen photographs of the deardeparted enhanced by vases for memorial sprays. Bun didn’t own any frame like that, but she did resurrect Spence Sailor’s picture from the trunk where she had thrust it a few days before, and she perched it on her mantel with two carnations bowing before it from an orange-and-black urn of alleged Chinese manufacture. The medals which he had won by deed and dice were draped in dangling garishness alongside, so that Spence looked heroically at you from a welter of pink, white, orange and black, with the yellow ribbon of the Medaille Militaire, the national colors of the D.S.C. and the green silk of the Croix du Guerre all spangling around him clownishly…. Looked artistic, his daughter believed, and she was apt to cry a little whenever she eyed the wild display.
Yes, she could think much easier with Uncle Clifford gone, and she wanted to curl her hair before she did anything else. Usually she wore it swinging straight from her crown, but one glimpse of the recent newspaper photograph had convinced her that mirrors lied: it was not a becoming style…. Debating in her mind about a permanent wave. You could get good ones for twenty-five dollars, everyone said, though lots of places were offering them for less. Still, Mrs. Bufitz, down at the office, had her hair just ruined in one of those cheap places….
Someone knocked at the door while she was screwing the cord of her electric curler into a tasseled lamp socket. “H’lo. Juss a minute.” Maybe it was McKeeve; often he came for late calls. She drew a purple negligee closer about her waist and ran to the door.
“Why, Jo!”
Understanding as she looked at her, that the Woman’s Store and the later months had placed some indefinable change in the girl who used to share her bed on Cambridge Avenue…. As if she were seeing a new Josephine for the first time. Not that her clothes were so different—that Hudson seal coat was a beauty, though Jo might have chosen such a coat any time before, had she been able to secure a twenty per cent reduction and time installments. The plain little hat with a perky green wisp on the side … no, it wasn’t that. Something in her eyes, maybe-not the plain pumps or gauntlet gloves….
“Jo, honey, you sure are the darndest caller—”
As if Josephine were staring questioningly into the room, a little afraid and yet fascinated. She hadn’t seen My Dad’s picture when she was there before; perhaps she wondered …
“I got those flowers this mornin’,” Bun explained with solemnity. “I think they look kinda nice up there with his medals an’ all. Guess I’ll keep flowers by his picture all the time, now.”
Jo stood by the foot of the couch, slapping a glove tenderly at her wrist, frowning at the pictures and Bun and the floor. “Then you’re not going to New York?”
“Oh, God, I don’t know whether I’m goin’ to New York or Indian or where. Ain’t seen Mac all day, an’ I promised I’d tell him before I tole Unk Clifford. Sure hard to know what you gotta do…. Say! You might take off your coat an’ stay a while! I’ll turn on that curler an’ you can talk to me while I curl my hair.”
Still slapping that glove and—
“Say! The cat’s sure got your tongue tonight. You won’t say hardly anything an’ juss stand there gawkin’ at me—” She laughed. My Dad had been dead for two days, and always she’d remember, but she had to go on living.
“Bun, turn off the iron for a minute. I want to talk to you.”
Astonished, Bernice cracked the switch and squirmed round in her chair, a lumpy purple figure with questioning mouth.
“This will maybe be a shock to you, Bun. Is it all right?”
She sat very quietly, then, jerking her head with one quick nod and pressing her eyes tightly on Jo’s face.
“You know, you never told me very much about your father and mother…. You just said that your mother ran away with another actor, and that was all you ever heard.” Jo wasn’t watching her; she was peering moodily at the fluffy lamp on the table. “You never saw your mother since you can remember—”
“I sure diden! My Dad took me to Gramp’s an’ then when I got bigger he took me around with him. I never seen her at all. Gee, what’s all the mystery? I—you—Jo, you never seen her?”
Josephine Ruska still squinted desperately at the gaudy lamp. “Yes, I did see her.”
Bun hissed it, clutching at the edge of the chair. “My God! … Well, whaddo you—When?”
“Tonight. And other times before.”
“Well, whass the big idea of waitin’ till tonight? My God, I—” Her eyes were even blacker, leaping fiercely from the pale roundness of her face.
Jo kept talking in a brave current. “You don’t understand, Bun. I never knew it at all. Not until tonight. She wants to see you. I came up to ask you—”
“Ask me? Ask me what? If she wants to see me, why diden she come? I guess she cooden have been very anxious if she ain’t interested enough to come herself! … I—My God! Jo—who is—where is she?”
“She’s in the office where I used to work. Patterson, Howells and Niefeldt. Maybe I mentioned her sometimes—of course, I must have. She’s Mrs. Bellamy.”
Bernice Sailor scratched her nails savagely on the bandage of her right hand. Her lips twisted as if she would break into wild sobs, but her gaze was still menacing. “Thass the name! Bell-amy! I remember he said it sometimes—My Dad. That baby-faced Herb Bellamy, he always said. Course I never noticed it when you said the name before, down at the Henderson. I never noticed—” She was up on her feet, suddenly, glaring over Josephine…. “Well! Whass she want? I spose she thinks My Dad left a lotta money an’ she thinks she can get hole of it—”
“Bun, she didn’t know that I knew you until tonight. I told her where I’d been—with you most of the time since Wednesday. And then, she’d been reading the papers—”
“The papers! Sure, thass it! She thinks—”
“Bun, please. She didn’t know until I came tonight that I—knew you. She read your name in the papers and tried to phone you out here but Information wouldn’t give her the number for this address. And then she came out here last night, but you weren’t here.”
“Sure, I wasen’ here! I had to be with—After all thass happened she comes tryin’ to butt in—”
“Oh, Bun, dear, please sit down and listen—”
“Sit down an’ lissen! Sit down an’ lissen!” Her hair was shaking like harsh thorns. “To hear about her, I spose. Well, you can tell her plenty! For me, you sure can. Tell her she wasen’ so anxious to see me when I was a poor helpless little baby! She diden care so much about me if she could go runnin’ off with some guy she wasen’ even married to! Maybe I ain’t thought about her. I sure have!”
Jo tried to grasp her clenched hands but Bun jerked them away. “Won’t you give her a chance to tell her side of it? She tried to take you with her, but your father caught the woman who was bringing you, and took you—”
“I should think he would! If you was a man, you wooden let some woman like that take your baby an’ run away with it, even if she was your wife. I guess you wooden! You don’t need to talk to me about her. My Dad, he took care of me an’—”
Couldn’t hold her, couldn’t bludgeon her heaving bulk into submission, and make her hear…. “Bun, you don’t realize what you’re saying. A man’s got a duty to his wife as well as his baby! And she wanted you—she tried to take you—”
“Wanted that fellow she run away with, is what you mean! If she was so stuck on me, why’d she ever run away in the firss place?”
“She wasn’t—happy with your father.”
“Wasen’ happy? Then why’d she ever marry him? I was aroun’ places with him all my life until the war—since I was a baby—an’ I was happy enough with him.”
“They couldn’t get along, she said. When he got angry with her, he’d twist her arm and—hurt her. He—”
Then Bun was on her, screeching dementedly.
“You be careful! You look out what you’re sayin’, Josephine Ruska! My Dad never hurt nobody! He was the mos’ wunnerful dad in the world to me, an’ you needn’t think you can get away with any dirty remarks about him after he’s dead an’ gone. You needn’t say a lotta things about him now, you diden dare say when he was alive! Guess I know. Think I ain’t got a mind, to remember? Times when I was juss a little kid, an’ sick, an’ he’d go out an’ ride twenty miles to get the right kinda med’cine, an’ rock me to sleep an’ tell me stories an’ things!”
Her face was a dull, puffing red as she hooted.
“This Mrs. Bell-amy! I don’t care if she was my mother. Far as I’m concern, I never had no mother. Juss My Dad. An’ now, they—k-killed him. Shot him when he come outa the door without a chance to reach his g-gun….” She sobbed heatedly, turning away and hunching her round shoulders as she groped for a handkerchief.
“Listen, Bun. I wouldn’t have come up here—only I thought any girl would want to see her mother. A time like this—it’s—you don’t know her. She’s been wonderful to me. She wants to see you. She—”
That was the end; Spence Sailor was living yet in the female shape of his daughter. Spence Sailor—the howling Berserk whom Josephine had never known.
Bernice grasped the cold curling iron in her wrapped fist; the lamp tumbled crazily as the cord pulled taut…. “You juss get outa here! Get outa here! You think you can come up here from that woman—talk about My Dad! Talk about My—Jo! Jo! … Jo! Get outa here before I—”
Knowing that she was insane. “You don’t need to worry, Bun. I’ll go.” Josephine turned the doorknob with deliberation, though she was trembling inwardly. Bun’s breath behind her, forcing through the mottled red of the room with little squeaky sobs…. “If you change your mind and want to see me again—or see her—you know where to reach me. Goodnight.” She had one last glimpse of Bernice, eyes squinted shut, like a contorted image clutching the curling iron before the mirror.
It had been easy to imagine, on the way up in a taxicab, how things would be. Bun gasping with incredible worship, “You mean—it’s my mother? My own mother? Honest?” And bringing her down to Deming Place where Mrs. Bellamy was nervously dusting bookcases as the tears stung her eyes. And Mrs. Bellamy soothing Bun—tenderly. As a mother would do….
Not that her own mother had ever done much soothing. Jo remembered her mainly as a frowning woman very fond of kidney beans and kolaches, who wore a brown-fringed shawl to the store, and who would have been very miserly if she’d had a great deal of money to be miserly with. But Mrs. Bellamy—taking Bun into her arms. Loving her. Smoothing off the jagged corners with gentlest hands.
“She’s a good girl,” Jo tormented herself as she came out on Wilson Avenue. “Bun’s a good girl. I’m not. I’ve been bad. Bun never had any affairs. Even McKeeve— he’s always come to see her, and yet I know he’s hardly ever kissed her….”
McKeeve was muscular and efficient, with gray hair clipped in a stiff Landwehr fuzz that was an inch in length above his forehead. Imagining him kissing anyone—the hard gray eyes boring closer and closer—the hard thin lips reaching out…. Seldom kissed her. “She’d be good— with him,” thought Jo. “Anyone would have to be. A girl couldn’t love him a great deal.” But Bernice Sailor was what people called “straight.” And she used much profanity when asserting herself, and vulgar idioms like “sweet patootie” and words at which Jo had always cringed, even before she tried to become—different.
Wilson Avenue was frisking from El to restaurant to hotel, with a flurry of chattering girls who rushed on spindle-heeled shoes and shook the drooping skins of gay furs as they hurried. Their jargon was a piping, hideous din to Josephine as she stood at the corner of Sheridan Road, waiting for the traffic lights to flash green…. They could tell you how to get fur coats without working (that is, working) for them, and what was the snappiest show downtown, and who would be sitting at the next-to-the-end table in Sally’s Waffle Shop the following morning—but there wasn’t a girl of them who could tell you what you must say to Rose Bellamy when you went back to Deming Place.
The southbound taxicabs sped past in a crush of dizzy lamps and whistling of exhaust pipes; Jo waved vainly at them as they whooped into being with their metal flags turned down. Fat men, affectionate couples, a lone woman—all rushing off into the mystic south behind a groan of gasoline…. Then a late bus lumbered against the curb, and Jo climbed the stairs to a deserted upper deck, breathing wearily into a front seat behind the glass windshield. Winter sang above her head as the lake wind fought the coach’s path.
A man—she scarcely knew he was there, except hearing his step—followed her up the stairs and ponderously seated himself in the opposite corner. As they crossed Buena Avenue, she knew that he slid to the aisle and was bending toward her, trying to speak ingratiatingly.
“Go away,” she said. “Hurry.” He stared toward the street and pretended to be unnoticing. Then, as her gloved finger pressed the bell, he hastily leaped up and retreated to the lower deck.
Rocking south, on south along the late road, and never knowing what she’d tell Rose Bellamy when she got there…. Rose would be standing at the window, all chilly with hope and fear, burning her gaze down through twigs of a scrawny elm. Watching for Josephine and the girl who’d come with her.
What to tell her … what to say. “Oh, my God!” She echoed Bun’s words unconsciously as she huddled away from the raw wind. “Oh, my God….”
Someone to advise her! She was tired now; it had been a battle for so long. If Marry were there—if he knew—
She could lie, of course. She had never done much lying, but sometimes that hurt other people the least. Smile bravely and know that Bun was happy—tell how the landlady said she’d gone off with her uncle to a wonderful home in New York. Make Mrs. Bellamy happy, believing it…. Make Mrs. Bellamy happy…. Oh—
By walking, perhaps she could pound it out—the lie. Dress it up with lace and ribbon, and powder its smug face so that Rose Bellamy could only smile when she saw it…. The coach roared past Sheridan’s statue. That was better: get off at Belmont and walk on to Deming Place. Time to think before she got there. It was late, but Rose would be waiting, staring from her window.
(“The landlady said she left tonight. With her uncle. They’re lovely people in New York, I’ve heard her say. She’ll have every chance in the world, now. It’s better.”)
The coach had pressed against the night so fiercely that it reached Wellington Avenue before Jo was able to step from the platform. She started down the gray sidewalk, a few cars hissing beyond her and the motor bus clanging ahead with a dwindling spasm of lights…. Couldn’t think of Bun and Mrs. Bellamy now. Only Marry…. They walked that way, when the leaves were fanning in midnight green over their heads, and locusts were buzzing across prairies of the Lehman estate. Now it was so cold….
(That’s Oakdale, crossing now. And the next is Surf, and then Diversey. You couldn’t forget those. The brown buses rumbling in sunshine, and Marry’s arm swinging you to the platform. “Let’s go, hon,” he’d breathe in your ear.)
Jo’s hand clenched tighter and tighter on the leather of her purse. She hadn’t turned her key back to David Henderson when she moved away so hurriedly, that distant morning. They both forgot it in the rush. And she had it in the purse, now. Could walk in easily. Just walk up to the front door, and up to Number 9. Straight ahead up the stairs. One little key opening it all—and everyone in the building….
He didn’t keep his door locked. Always forgot. She’d had to warn him so many times. And if it were locked, a low knock would rouse him…. She might meet a French girl, treading through the hall with her towels, who’d stare blankly and uninterestedly.
… Down on Deming Place, Mrs. Bellamy would be waiting. Hoping. Aching to hear.
Jo stood at the corner of Diversey Parkway for one long moment, and then forced her mouth into a rigid line as she crossed the street, south, toward Deming Place.
(“It’s all right,” Rose Bellamy would say, even though her eyes were glassy with tears. “She’ll be happier there in New York. Much happier. After all, she never knew me…. Jo—it’s late—you mustn’t go home. You’ll stay here tonight?”)
Wondering all the time whether she’d stay or not. Whether she’d go home in a Yellow Cab or whether she’d—just walk a while…. Take a walk around the neighborhood first.
It came to Marry, as he was slipping off his shoes—a line of Vachel Lindsay’s. He grinned while it chased through his brain.
“O broncho … would not
be broken of dancing … “
Remembering how a temperamental colt would pitch some trooper into the sawdust—dancing devilishly on his springy legs while the rest of them roared.
O broncho…. That was himself. Broncho. They’d play hell breaking him. He had fifty-eight cents in his pocket, but in the morning he’d borrow a few dollars from Henderson. Hadn’t thought of him until the last hour…. Kind faced old fellow. Jo had told of how he trusted her for rent until she got a job; and Henderson himself had spoken of his trust in Marry…. “Not everybody’s honest as Mr. Javling, here. Better be careful.”
Now, he didn’t care what came. He could drive a truck, clean stables for a riding academy, or pass circulars from house to house. Until he found something better, anything would do…. He’d found his dancing, now.
Before he slid into bed, he went over to his typewriter and gazed at the single-spaced sheet.
Glory! I heard them blasting it from their caverns—all clashing iron ingots and throbbing tawny muscles with the joy of mortar and curses. Their spires are splitting the thunder, their talons are full of gum and grease for building. Those are your yelling slaves, Boss of All Glory! Those—
… Or working with a pick and shovel. He’d done that in the army and afterward, before he read an ad for the Clay City Courier. There were a thousand things to do, when you weren’t particular how sore you made your arms and legs. He’d find them, now that his soul seemed to have cracked open.
J.R.P. would be back before long. “Big stuff,” he’d say. “Keep it up.” And that was all he wanted to do—keep it up. Not signing anything but “Javelin.” He could make Jo know, that way. Somewhere she’d be reading it—knowing what those seven letters were and who was behind them, waiting and reaching for her across the growling miles of wire and stone…. Would not be broken of dancing.
He snapped the electric switch and settled back in darkness, smiling squarely up at echoes of the parkway. Far away you could hear it—sobbing with the brush of wheels and rubber, spitting its soul into the frosty night…. Those who were ready to die, and those who were ready to drink gin, and ready to love, and ready to build with ingots or typewriter ribbons. All soaring outside his window; prying at his mind while he went to sleep.
Josephine Ruska turned the corner at Cambridge and Diversey sometime after twelve o’clock. It was a cold night and few people were walking out; there was no one coming from the Henderson or going there, and the building loomed harshly at her with no light in any of its windows. Remembering that Wise and Spence Sailor had died in front of it, she felt childishly nervous…. Her eyes watching the bright toes of her shoes beat evenly against the cement, and never knowing until she got there whether she’d turn in, or keep on going north.