4

Stumbling on his way back from his vigil (for a glimpse of Daniel) before the windows of the men’s club, Amos ran into the painter, Maureen O’Dell, who acted glad to see him. Her face, from which jutted a nose like Pinocchio’s and a vermilion line of mouth, contained a pair of large blue eyes red and puffy from crying.

“You’re in trouble, Maureen,” Amos volunteered.

Maureen studied him pokerface and did not reply. She had been kind to Amos in a sisterly way in times gone by, had counselled him, and had lent him money which he never returned. She had not seen him since he had moved in with Daniel Haws, and she recalled that it had been at her studio that Amos had first “clapped up a friendship” with Daniel. Though she had been “soft” on the landlord at that time, she had not seen either of them since that fatal introduction.

When Amos repeated his concern for her, “What’s your trouble?,” Maureen scowled, then regaining her good humor, spoke banteringly.

“I should be mad at you. Taking my fellow away from me.” She feigned anger.

Amos looked away sheepishly. He had nearly forgotten all about meeting Daniel Haws at her studio. And as to “taking him,” well! He shifted from one poorly shod foot to the other.

Then Maureen laughed her old hearty laugh. “Oh come along, Rat. I’m on my way to Eustace’s house. Going to have the whole thing out with him. My sorrow, as you call it. You can hear it there in full . . . and you’re indirectly connected in any case . . .”

They purposely then tried to talk about indifferent matters, or about topics such as politics and war, and Maureen mentioned that some Nazis were living in her building.

Having arrived at the corner of Fifth-fifth Street and Woodlawn Avenue, Maureen pointed up to Eustace’s lighted window, exclaiming: “God’s got his lamp lit and is waiting for me.”

Still snickering over this joke, on the way upstairs, Maureen suddenly stopped, seemed to break down, and grasping Amos’s hand and guiding it to her belly, said, “Listen honey, before we go up, old Maureen’s knocked up. That’s what I’ve come to talk to Eustace about.”

After she had cried a bit more, she burst out into her customary hilarity and laughed boisterously, filling the building with echoes.

“Do you think old Ace will know a good solution?” Maureen asked Amos.

“He’s a muller, Maureen, not a solver,” Amos said thoughtfully.

Laughing still more exuberantly at his reply, Maureen studied Amos’s face carefully and when he smiled at her, said:

“Amos, talk about pearls for teeth . . . you got ’em. No wonder the boys go for you, because I could too and if I had something to push between those pearly teeth I’d be first in line.”

Amos drew back from her then not so much because of the wounding effect of the remark as of her breath’s smelling strong of whiskey.

“Give old Maureen a nice kiss,” she asked, and she began kissing him inside the mouth industriously. Her hand strayed to his trousers and with professional speed unbuttoned him, pulled out his penis, and fondled it absentmindedly.

“Small but sculpturesque,” she pronounced.

When Amos bashfully put his peter back into his trousers, Maureen’s laughter again filled the building.

At that moment—they had reached the top of the flight of stairs leading to their destination—Eustace suddenly advanced down the hall.

“A raucous company if I ever heard one!” he sneered.

He looked bilious and quite put out. He was wearing only some underwear and because a draft from the street door blew down the hall (and he had also satisfied his curiosity as to who was making all the noise), he hurried back to his apartment.

When they entered, Eustace was seated on the floor playing solitaire, having flung a Scottish plaid bathrobe about his shoulders. He did not look up as they came in.

“I reckon you two have been out doing the streets together,” Eustace commented, studying his playing cards closely. “You two sure can holler when you come up the stairs, especially old Maureen, so that all my God-fearing Irish neighbors get the picture of my life reviewed good so they can report me again to the building superintendent.”

Eustace looked up at that moment direct at Maureen’s stomach. His eyes lingered there for a moment, then moved back to his card game.

“Somebody’s in an ornery temper,” Maureen grunted, sitting down in an easy chair with her coat still on.

“I hadn’t been informed, however,” Ace went on, dealing from a new deck of cards, “that you two cronies were friends again. It always was an odd friendship, but being resumed for a second time like this, I’d call it passing queer.”

“Right you are, to call it so, Eustace, my love,” Maureen retorted, winking at Amos, who meanwhile had sat down on the floor in a customary pose, and begun as was his custom to feel the sole of his shoe, when Eustace bellowed, “When are you going to go to the goddam shoemaker?”

Then without much change of expression, he called out in the direction of the kitchen: “Better make a few extra cups of something hot to drink, Carla, for unless you’re deaf you know we’ve got company.”

“Carla!” Maureen cried in surprise. “Is she back?”

“Everybody’s back,” Eustace growled.

“Well, I wish you had told me beforehand she was back.” Maureen seemed to sober up. “I’d have thought twice about bringing my bad news here tonight. Or I’d thought up a different speech than the one I planned just for you, Ace.”

“Oh come off your girly pose, Maureen,” Eustace whipped at her. “You know it doesn’t matter a hoot in hell whether Carla hears your bad news from you, me, or reads it chalked up on some wall, it won’t affect her or you. She has no friends, in any case, so how could she repeat your story except to strangers, and strangers never care enough to repeat anything. So dry up about your sensitive feelings.”

“Maybe Carla’s return is an omen.” Maureen seemed to speak from a sudden recurrence of the blues. “Anyhow I can’t tell you, Ace, not now.”

“Maureen got herself pregnant, Ace.” Amos brought it all out in one of his sudden flashes of information nobody ever was ready for.

Eustace dropped a card, and looked up. He looked at Maureen’s stomach again as if to check an earlier impression.

“Here I thought all the time that bulge meant you’d just been on a long beer binge,” Eustace said after a few moments silence. “So that’s what’s sticking out of you.”

He gathered up all the cards, put them away in a metal box, and waited a moment, blinking his eyes. It was clear the news had excited him and, because it was bad news, he gave it undivided attention.

“So you’ll be out of circulation for a while, Maureen,” Eustace finally pronounced. “Don’t suppose you know the father.”

“Afraid I’ll have to disappoint you there, Ace. I do.”

Surprised again, Eustace rose, put his arms through the sleeves of his bathrobe, tied the cord tight, and inquired, “And which of your bedfellows out of so many made such a definite impression on you?”

“Rat knows,” Maureen said, a deadly coyness in her voice. Her statement caught Amos unaware and he dropped the smiling look which the exchange of words between Maureen and Eustace had occasioned. He turned white as a sheet.

“Rat wouldn’t know a father if God came down to show him one!” Eustace cried. “Or have you been hoarding other people’s secrets from me, my beauty?” Eustace turned to Amos.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Maureen exclaimed. “Rat, the little bastard don’t know!”

Amos watched her, ashen.

“Father is Daniel Haws of course,” Maureen said softly, not taking her eyes off Amos.

Amos rose and went over to the window and looked out.

“Now see what you’ve done to our little playmate,” Eustace cried in glee to Maureen. Then, gravely for him, Eustace spoke up: “Guess maybe you didn’t know then, Maureen, Rat is head-over-heels with Daniel Haws and what’s more his landlord is ditto with him. There they both are,” he spoke to Maureen but addressed Amos, “both of them together hanging by their heels.”

“Ace, God damn you,” Amos wheeled on him with hard fists and clenched teeth.

Carla entered at that moment with her tray of hot beverage.

Turning toward her, Amos raised his right fist and knocked the tray from her hands, then rushing toward the door which he pulled open with such force its hinges gave a sickening groan, he turned to them to say:

“God damn the whole pack of you!”

He rushed out of the apartment, down the stairs, but they noted an odd discrepancy in the sound of his footsteps, as though a cripple were running. Then Carla, looking down at the damage of the spilled tray, pointed to one of Amos’s shoes lying by a broken cup and saucer.

Staring at the shoe which his wife now held in her hand, Eustace advised, “Sit down, Carla, and try to be as calm as Maureen and I are pretending we are.”

Maureen had welcomed Carla back with a silent kiss, while with deft quick sleight-of-hand she took Amos’s shoe from her, and said: “I’ll be back to talk with you both, at length, but before that I’m going after the little snot, and give him back his moccasin. After all, he won’t dare leave the building without it in this weather.”

Smiling warmly at Carla, Maureen waddled out the door.

Down below, in the vestibule, she found Amos, warming his shoeless foot and his ass against a radiator, his eyes red from angry weeping.

Maureen put her arms around him, but he repulsed her vehemently.

“Put on your shoe, honey,” she comforted him. “Then sit down here with me on the steps, why don’t you.”

Maureen, puffing for breath, had already seated herself.

Having put on his shoe as best he could—it was missing its laces—and giving himself time to pout a bit more, Amos obeyed and sat down next to her.

She kissed him on his ear, pulled at a strand of his hair, and then pressed against him.

“Just to think, we’ve both been in love with the same guy.”

“Don’t rub it in, Maureen.” Amos pulled away from her.

“I never dreamed you loved him too. I just thought you moved in with him by chance.”

“Oh cut it out, will you?” Amos began to get up, but she gently pulled him down again to her side.

“We’ll both get over it,” Maureen joked.

“Yeah, when we’re dead.”

“You don’t confide in me at all, do you, Amos? You don’t confide in anybody of course.” She looked at him. “You’re adrift in a real sea, kid. More even than me . . . Why don’t you trust me a little? I love you for being what you are, Rat, darling . . . Trust me.”

“Oh, Maureen,” Amos cried, exasperated, “quit harping on it, will you!”

“I understand what you’re going through,” she went on.

He shook his head wearily.

“Let me put it this way: if you’ll help me, I’ll help you,” she began her proposal.

“I don’t know how I could help you.” Amos scratched his chin. “Can’t even help myself . . . Don’t believe, come to think of it, anybody ever asked me to help them before.” He broke into a laugh. “Suppose I should feel complimented that you think I can.”

He took out his box of snuff and dipped, not offering her a pinch. “It reminds me of Cousin Ida all over again,” Amos mumbled.

“All right, let it remind you, but help me.”

“Sure, Maureen,” he said and put his arm around her now. He didn’t think she was serious.

“You wait though till you hear what I’m asking of you . . . You can back out then, if you don’t want to do it.”

“All right, I’m waiting, Maureen.”

“Amos, I want you to come with me to the abortion doctor, next Monday.”

The color went out of his cheeks, and his mouth tightened. He looked dumfounded.

“I’m not surprised you don’t want to. But there’s nobody else, if you won’t . . .”

He put his arm about her gingerly.

“I just can’t go alone,” she said, as if to herself.

“I’ll go with you, Maureen, so stop fretting.”

“I won’t lie to you, baby, it’ll be awful, really awful. I’ve been there, after all, before. Can you take it, I mean?”

“If you can take it, Maureen, I can.” He was decisive.

“All I need is your moral support, as they say in the movies, hon. You don’t have to do a thing but go with me, maybe hold my hand. Baby, you will?”

When he nodded vigorously, she covered him with wet kisses.

“Then we’re friends for life,” she told him.

He rose now, and walking over to the door rested his hand on the knob.

“I’ll have to go back and say good night to Carla and Ace,” she said. Her voice sounded relieved. “I’ll call you then, Amos, for I know you won’t go back on me.”