THERE COULDN’T BE a colder—a lonelier place in the whole world, thought Margy Shannon, than a deserted Brooklyn street on a Saturday night. She pulled her firmly held coat more tightly about her as she turned a corner. She was out walking the cold wintry streets because she was seventeen and had a job. She was independent now. She didn’t have to be in the house by nine o’clock. She felt she had to use her hard-bought freedom even if it froze her to death. How easy to give up; go home and sit in the warm kitchen! But she had to hold out; get her mother used to the fact that there was a wider world outside the walls of the grudging home. So she walked the streets alone on a cold January night.
MARGY HAD LEFT school at sixteen after finishing two years at Eastern District High. She had looked forward to leaving school, getting a job, being independent, and having a little money of her own. She had been anxious to start leading a life of her own. She had found a job—an interesting job. She was mail reader in the Thomson-Jonson Mail Order House which had its offices and warehouses down near the Brooklyn docks; an hour’s trolley ride from her home.
But the expected independence had turned out to be merely technical. Her mother kept the silver cord taut and vibrant with possessiveness, and Margy, like many Brooklyn girls who came of poor families, had to turn in all of her salary at home.
She earned twelve dollars a week. Like her father, she placed her sealed pay envelope on her mother’s outstretched palm each Saturday afternoon. That was the tradition; a decent husband or a good child brought home the pay envelope unopened.
Flo gave Margy two dollars out of her envelope. Out of this Margy paid carfare to and from work and bought the daily bologna sandwich and cup of coffee which was the routine lunch of most of her coworkers. That left fifty cents a week for everything else; the hot dog she and a girl friend indulged in when they took a Sunday trolley ride to Canarsie in the summertime or the cup of hot chocolate with fake whipped cream on top and two crackers on the saucer which was the traditional treat at the end of a Sunday stroll in Brooklyn. An occasional dime-store lipstick had to come out of this fund, too.
Margy never had enough money for all the things a young girl wants so desperately. For instance she’d like to have one of the new-style wind-blown bobs, like her office friend, Reenie, had. But such a haircut meant frequent trips to the barber (with a nickel tip involved), to keep the hair in intricate trim. Since she couldn’t afford that, she had to be content with her shingle bob with thin, fishhook curls pasted to each cheek.
Sometimes she dreamed a little dream. Suppose she were to get a raise! Would she tell her mother? She could take the extra dollar or two out of the envelope and reseal it before bringing it home. And what Margy could do with that extra money! Still and all, she thought, that would be cheating. She remembered what a grade-school teacher had said that time she had caught Margy sliding her eyes over to a seatmate’s paper during a test.
“That’s how a criminal begins,” said the teacher. “He cheats in a test and gets away with it. Then he cheats in bigger and bigger things. Finally he ends up in Sing Sing.”
Margy had no intentions of becoming a criminal. Yet . . . ? Who’d ever find out? It was like the old childhood dilemma: If you’d press a button and a Chinaman died in China, leaving you a million dollars, would you press that button? Sometimes Margy had decided that she’d press it very firmly; other times she had decided that a million dollars would never compensate for causing a death—not even a Chinaman’s on the other side of the world. Well, she had never had a chance at the button and there was no immediate hope of getting a raise. So there was nothing to decide.
MARGY PLANNED TO pass Frankie’s house once more before she went home. She was not in love with Frankie but he was one of the few boys she knew. She had first become interested in him when he went up for his diploma the time both of them graduated from P.S. 18. She had known him only as “Frankie,” an obscure, dark, Irish boy. But at graduation they called out his full name: Francis Xavier Malone. The name sounded important—like a mystery revealed. And Frankie, himself, had seemed important from that time on.
She had passed Frankie’s house twice before in her walks around the block. This time she was rewarded. He clattered down the steps. She pretended to come out of a deep study with a slight start when he spoke to her.
“What do you say, Marge?”
“It’s awfully cold, isn’t it?” she replied in a tone that she tried to make lilting and provocative.
“You said it!”
He was off in the opposite direction, toward the corner candy store for a pack of cigarettes or to see if the morning paper had arrived. Margy cursed the luck that had made her walk around the block clockwise. If she had been walking the other way, he would have fallen in step with her and they would have walked as far as the corner together. Frankie wasn’t much, she knew, but he was better than nobody. He would have served until a real boy friend came along.
ALTHOUGH IT WAS only a little after nine when she got in, Flo questioned her suspiciously.
“Where you been?” she asked.
“Nowhere.”
“Nobody goes nowheres on a winter night.”
“I was just walking around.”
“Nobody just walks around in the cold. You was somewheres and you’re afraid to tell your mother.”
“Oh, Mama!” cried Margy.
“I’m only telling you for your own good. If you run around and some man gets you in trouble, don’t come crying home to me.”
“I don’t know any men. And even if I did, there’s no place to go to get into trouble.”
“There’s places, and ways, too, if you’re looking for them,” pronounced Flo darkly. “Tell me where you been.”
“I was only walking around the block. And that’s the God’s honest truth. Let me alone, Mama. Please!”
“You and your father! Get up on your high horse the minute I ask a plain question.”
“Where is Papa?” asked Margy, glad to change the subject.
“God only knows. And it’s getting to be all hours. Night after night he leaves me sitting home alone, and . . .”
Flo talked on, off on a familiar subject.
IT TOOK MARGY quite a while to get warm in bed. She finally accomplished it by pulling the covers over her head and breathing hard in the closed space. She relaxed in drowsiness, listening to the winter wind blowing against the window. How lucky I am, she thought, to have a home and to be warm. It must be terrible to have no place to go on a cold night—just to keep on walking the streets until you die from the cold. And if I get a raise, I’ll be glad to give it to Mama. It’s a wonderful thing to have a home and a family.
The dream started before she was sound asleep. It was an old recurrent dream: a reliving of the time when as a small child, she had been lost on the streets of Brooklyn. She knew the dream was coming and she knew the terror it held. Drowsily, she toyed with the idea of rousing herself before she drifted too far into sleep. But she could not fight off the delicious, relaxing weakness. She let herself sink into sleep.
IT WAS SUMMER in the dream; a hot summer morning. The dream started with the feeling of warm wind on her legs. She looked down. Yes, she was wearing socks and the new brown barefoot sandals that her mother had bought for her at Batterman’s for forty-nine cents. She had been so proud of those new sandals. The happiness about them had been one of her first memories. And in the dream she was proud of the sandals all over again.
She was a child of five in the dream and her mother was a beautiful woman of twenty-five—at least she seemed beautiful to the little girl. In some inexplicable way, the mother disappeared and the child was lost. Lost on the streets of Brooklyn. She wandered from one street to another, panic growing in her. Then she turned a corner onto a familiar street and was happy because she knew her home was around the next corner. But there was a pair of huge iron gates at the end of the street, closing it off. She hurried toward the gates. She saw Frankie standing behind the gates. It was Frankie, the youth, not Frankie the boy of P.S. 18. The child was relieved. Frankie would open the heavy iron gates for her. But as she approached the gates, she saw Frankie grin and heard a click. He had locked the gates and she couldn’t get past them. She sobbed.
A SOUND IN the room awakened her. She sat up and listened tensely a moment before she realized that the sound came from her. She had sobbed aloud in her dream. What a dope, she admonished herself, crying in my sleep! And how come Frankie was in the dream? She put out her hand and felt the wall. She looked through her bedroom door into the parlor and saw the long narrow windows luminous from the street lights beyond them. I’m home, she assured herself. I’m safe in my bed. But if I go to sleep again the dream will continue. I’ll count a hundred slowly.
But she was asleep before she reached sixty. This time she slept deep and dreamlessly—the way the young have a right to sleep.