Barbary Shore

“I’ll drop by when I leave here. Probably I can help you.”

  When we were alone, Guinevere shook her head. “That girl friend of yours is an odd dame,” she said.

  “Mmm.”

  A nudge in my ribs. “I suppose it’s all over between you and me now.”

  “There never was anything.”

  Guinevere smiled sadly. “There could have been. Fate kept us from getting together and throwing a little party, but I’ve thought about you, Lovett.” She grinned. “I’ll say one thing. You like them older than you. First me, and then Lannie, or should I say, first Lannie and then me?”

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” I said indifferently.

  “I like that Miss Madison,” Guinevere mused aloud. “There’s something a little out of the ordinary about her.” She allowed her voice to trail over the words. “You know I could tell you something.”

  “But you won’t.”

  She deliberated. “Yes, I will. You know there was no vacancy sign up. What do you think of that?”

  “Then how did Lannie know there was a room?” I asked automatically.

  “Yeah, how did she?” Guinevere shrugged, and pointed a finger up the stairs. “Go ahead, go after your girl friend.”

  “Who offered you ten dollars?”

  How coy Guinevere could become. “Oh, that don’t matter. He won’t get it now, anyway.”

  “Who?” I persisted.

  She fingered a lock in her red hair. “It’ll all come out in the wash. That’s my philosophy. And you might just as well go ahead. I can see I’m passé as far as you’re concerned.”

  TWELVE

  I MOUNTED the stairs to Lannie’s new room. She opened the door for me, her face shining, her greeting rippling forth so easily that the questions Guinevere had asked seemed not important.

  “This is a wonderful place. Oh, you were marvelous. The way you talked to her.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  She gave the sad smile which illumined her face. “I knew you would be modest,” she said cryptically in a manner to indicate one had heard about me for years. “But it’s wrong. When we have something, we should be proud of it.” Lannie looked about the room, and sprawled in an armchair, her legs extended before her. “I can’t tell you how happy I am.”

  Certainly, it took little to please her. The room was large and had a high ceiling, but that was the best to be said for it. The windows, which rose from the floor to the molding, opened upon the back court with its clotheslines and fire escape. Here, too, a scale of cinders had bedded the woodwork, and the gray light diffused between the buildings could hardly improve the dull nap of the aged sofa and armchairs. For decoration there was only a calendar left by the last occupant, its nude maiden curling at the edges. Across the room was a washstand, and above, a metal dish, a piece of soap moldering within, its underside turned to jelly.

  Lannie sat contentedly, obviously ready to wait until I suggested what we should do. The ragged violet suit was tailored poorly to her bony frame, sagged to her knees, unpressed and wrinkled. Perhaps she had lost weight. The suit seemed to alienate her head from her long legs so that the young ravaged face with its dark eyes appeared to exist yards away from the brown scuffed moccasins where a large perforation in one sole exposed extravagantly the soiled flesh of her foot.

  “What about your baggage?” I asked. “Won’t you need help in moving it?”

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t dream of that. You’ve done enough for me already.” Her long stained fingers curled around a cigarette. “I’ve got friends. They’ll help me.”

  “I’d be glad to do it,” I insisted.

  “Oh, no.”

  “I would.”

  Lannie laughed at last, a husky contralto, and her brown eyes stared mischievously at me. “I don’t have any baggage.”

  “None at all?”

  “It’s with my father.” She laughed again. “With Father Pawnbroker.”

  “But what’ll you wear?” I exclaimed.

  “Oh, I saved something.” She rummaged through her pocketbook, and pulled out a rumpled pajama top and bottom.

  “You’ve got to have something else.”

  This only made her sullen. She laid her head against the top of the chair.

  “What are you going to do?” I insisted.

  Lannie was aloft in a private study. “I don’t care,” she said. “This morning I woke up, and I thought of all the dresses I had, and my typewriter, and all those little chains. I’m a cat. I don’t want strings to my legs. I gave them away to Father Pawnbroker.” She smiled. “Like Vincent I cut off my ear and gave it to my beloved, and now I hear sounds I never knew before.”

  “That was the money you gave for the rent.”

  “I don’t know, I suppose it was.” I might have been the fat man and she the sprite, and as I blundered after her, the audience she had assembled for herself must have roared with approval.

  “How will you eat?”

  “Oh, Mikey, I don’t care. Tomorrow I’ll eat. I’ve got money, money.” She dumped her purse upon the floor, and nudged the few singles with her foot.

  “And after tomorrow?” The weeks had gone by, each to the eye-dropper of twenty dollars. At bottom, I was jealous.

  “After tomorrow … people will feed me. People are good, that’s what no one understands.”

  “Who will feed you?”

  She laughed at me. “Mrs. Guinevere.”

  “She even begrudges me a cup of coffee.”

  “But that’s because she doesn’t love you, Mikey. She’ll love me.

  I was exasperated. “Do you want a loan of some money?”

  “You see, Mikey,” she pealed, “people always take care of me.” Lannie shook her head. “No, I can’t take your money; I’d never pay it back.” But then mock-seriously, finger to her chin, she reconsidered. “No, I would pay it back, I’d work and slave to pay you back because you’re so virtuous, and you’d make me ashamed. I hate bullies.” She puffed at her cigarette, and watched the smoke trail to the tips of her broken nails. “I love the color nicotine gives to your hands,” she said. “It makes them look like rich old wood.” She sniffed. “My father’s shirts always used to smell of tobacco. He was a wonderful man, a wonderful old drunk. He would have loved Mrs. Guinevere just as I do.”

  At the look of bewilderment on my face, she laughed. “Poor Mikey.”

  “I don’t like being called Poor Mikey.”

  She shook her head. “And you shouldn’t be. You’re proud. I love proud people. You can see the pride in Mrs. Guinevere.” Lannie’s voice was eager. “She knows so well she’s a woman she’s so big and her coloring is so beautiful, and she trumpets it. ‘I’m full of life, don’t hold me in,’ she cries, and all her life people held her in, and so she’s unhappy. I love her. I want to talk to her.”

  Somehow she wove an obligation to accept her verdicts, to feel she had discovered truths one had never discerned before. For a few minutes I could accept all the qualities she had bestowed upon me. I could be handsome, and I could be proud, and I could be even a bully. And in parallel to me, Guinevere would become beautiful, her coloring vivid, the large body assuming its strong curves with confidence.

  Under Lannie’s influence what could avoid its transformation? She had stood up and was pacing about the room. At the mantel of the dummy fireplace she halted and drew an imaginary face in the air. “He’s cute, isn’t he?” she demanded, and then before I could answer, she had gone to the window and was playing with the fastener on the middle sash. “It’s like a finger,” she said. “Look!” and crooked her hand. “When they finished the house, there were no locks for the windows, and so the builder, a cruel capitalist who later built a house at Newport, cried at the top of his lungs, ‘Cut off the fingers of the workmen, and nail them into place.’ And this is a poor workingman’s finger.” She stroked it. “It’s all that’s left of him now, his finger and his thumb.”

  I could not respond. At another
time, in another mood, I might have entered the game, but behind the gaiety, her mouth was strained, her eyes were vacant. Abstractedly she would finger the ends of her bedraggled hair.

  “We ought to dust the place,” I suggested.

  Lannie surprised me by nodding her head. With an effort she roused herself. “You find something to clean with, and I’ll open the windows,” she told me. “We can move the furniture around. I love rearranging. That will make the room mine.”

  I went into the hallway and found a broom and a cloth that Guinevere had left in a corner. When I returned, the windows were indeed open, and Lannie stood on the broad low sill and stared into the courtyard below. I made no sound. There was such absorption in her study that I hesitated to interrupt it. Arms on the window frame, her body inclined outward, a bird prepared for flight. Slowly she leaned forward, leaned forward even more, until one brief unclenching of her hands, and she would have plummeted to the concrete below.

  With a sudden gesture she pushed herself back into the room, and started when she saw me. “I like the view,” Lannie said quietly, all animation gone. “I looked down, and I thought, It’s the bottom of the ocean. It’s deep, and you’re all alone there.’ ”

  I nodded casually, as though nothing untoward had passed, and went to the sink, filled a glass with water, sprinkled it on the floor. Industriously, I swept. Lannie tugged feebly at an armchair, and then with a sigh perched herself upon it.

  “The furniture will be too heavy for you to move.”

  She moved her head in agreement. “Sit down with me, and let’s talk.”

  “I’ll continue sweeping. I can still talk, you know.”

  Her chin rested on her hand. “I wasn’t lying about getting a job,” she told me.

  “I believed you.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have. I usually lie. But this time I did get a job. I walked in on Mr. Rammelsby and told him I was an expert advertising woman.” She began to laugh. “I think Mr. Rammelsby’s real name is Ter-Prossamenianvili, or something like that. Poor little Turk. He’s so fat and he sweats so much, and he’s going to lose his job for hiring me. If there had been anyone but him, some lean efficiency expert, I would never have been taken.” She sighed.

  “What will you do there?”

  “Oh, I have to make slogans. You know they get hundreds of little men who work deep down in the earth trying to find new inventions, and then when one of them does, it’s given to hundreds of people like me who try to find slogans. And then when we find one, a product is made and sold to millions of people, and finally it works for somebody and the product is a success.” She smiled wearily. “I can do the job, but I hate it. I’ve had so many things like it, yes I have”—much as if I had contradicted her. “I was supposed to start this morning, but when I woke up I knew it was more important to find a room. Poor Mr. Rammelsby. He always puts his faith in the wrong people. But maybe they’ll fire him this time, and he’ll have to go back to Turkey, and he can sit on a hassock and have lots of wives with beautiful navels.” She watched me ladle the dust into her wastebasket. “Let’s arrange the furniture,” she said.

  To move the sofa and two armchairs took a disproportionate amount of effort. We had to discuss where to put each piece, and whenever we came to a decision, she would change her mind. We shifted the sofa several times—to the windows, against the fireplace, by a wall—but nothing pleased her. She agreed at last to place the armchairs with their backs to the window, and when we had accomplished this, she looked up and surveyed the room. “Why don’t we leave it?” she asked. The sofa was temporarily facing a wall, its back to the center of the room. She tugged it away perhaps a yard so that someone sitting there could touch the baseboard with his feet.

  “I think this is wonderful,” she announced.

  “Lannie, you can’t leave the sofa that way.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s separated from the rest of the room.”

  She nodded dumbly at this, her face stricken for a passing moment. “Oh, of course, how stupid of me,” she said airily, waving her hand in the air. “Come on, let’s turn it around.”

  So we tugged and hauled again, reversed the sofa’s position, and rested when we were done, perspiring from the summer heat. “It’s another room now,” she announced.

  But of course this was not true. The big bare chamber was still dirty, still gloomy, and the dull faded furniture rested stolidly in its new positions, heavy and inert. We were silent for several minutes, and I looked up to see her mouth trembling. “What’s the matter, Lannie?”

  “I don’t know.” She smoked a cigarette restlessly, the ashes tumbling into the fold of her skirt, and not until the ember touched her fingers did she let it fall to the floor.

  “I’m going to put some pictures into the room,” she said, “and I’m going to make some drapes. And for that, they won’t be able to stop me. And then”—her mouth curled, her small teeth were exposed for an instant—“I’m going to turn the sofa around, and leave it where it belongs, facing the wall.” She coughed, and said in her husky voice, “I wish you’d go now, Mikey.”

  I was startled. “Go?”

  “Yes, Mikey.” She sat still, not looking at me.

  “Well, maybe tonight or tomorrow we can …” I hardly knew how to finish.

  “Yes, yes.”

  She did not turn around as I left the room.

  THIRTEEN

  IN the evening I stopped by Lannie’s door, and no one answered. She would be sitting in an armchair, her legs tucked beneath her, chin upon her hand, the sound of my tapping penetrating so slowly through her reverie. Startled, she would come to let me in.

  But nothing stirred. Probably she was not there. I went downstairs and into the street, paused for a moment beside the brownstone balustrade, looking at the lights in Guinevere’s cellar apartment. Her husband must be home now, and between them was passing the daily exchange of their marriage, casual words I could not hear. On an impulse I thought of ringing her bell.

  Instead I walked through Brooklyn Heights and came to rest at the end of a little street which abutted the bluffs. My arms resting on an iron railing, I stared out across the docks and across the harbor to the skyline of New York deepening into the final blue of night. Among the skyscrapers, windows here and there were lit, the charwomen had started their work, and throughout those pinnacles of stone the fires were banked, the offices bare.

  The ferryboat to Staten Island had begun its trip. From where I stood the boat looked very small, its deck lights twinkling across the water to form the endless flickering legs of a centipede. An ocean freighter nosed across the harbor seeking anchorage, and in the distance bridges arched the river, supporting in a stream the weight of automobiles. Through the summer night, ships sounded their warnings, clear and unmuffled.

  I looked at the water and my thoughts eddied aimlessly.

  While I dreamed at the railing, an hour passed, night came. The outline of the ships which moved through the harbor could be discerned only by their lights.

  “Well, hello, it’s a fine evening, isn’t it?” a voice murmured.

  I must have started. Hardly had I been waiting for Hollingsworth.

  “I see you like to stand here, and think about things,” he insinuated softly.

  “Once in a while.”

  “I do myself.” He took a cigarette from his pack and offered it to me in a motion so persuasive I could hardly refuse. Then a lighter sprang from his pocket, and he clicked forth the flame, patently waving it before me to solicit my admiration. The gadget was made of silver with a black shield upon which were engraved two letters. “When did you get that?” I asked.

  “Oh, a day or two ago. You see the initials for my name. Leroy Hollingsworth. L. H. I think that’s very clever of them, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” With some regret I realized that he intended to keep me company. “Well, where did you buy it?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” He smiled apol
ogetically. “You see, it was a gift. A lady presented it to me.” He gazed complacently at the water, his blond hair and small curved nose illumined by the moonlight. “I don’t know why,” he said in a smug quiet voice, “the girls seem to like me a great deal.” Filling his pipe bowl, he drew the lighter again, and sucked reflectively at the stem. “Yes,” he said meaninglessly.

  Perhaps as a result of what happened the night before, I had become agitated at the sight of him. How he could have sensed this, I do not know, but when he opened his mouth it was to say, “Last night was interesting, wasn’t it?”

  “Mmm.”

  “That McLeod’s an odd fellow. I thought he had, if you’ll permit me, a lot of crust.” Hollingsworth paused delicately after this pale vulgarity. “But then, some of his ideas are interesting.”

  “What ideas?”

  “Well, the blowing up of people and poisoning them. Sometimes I can understand how a fellow can get to feel that way. Don’t you sometimes?”

  I decided he was going to question me now. “Invariably.”

  But he merely laughed. “I’d like to make a study of the Bolshevists,” he told me. “I think there’s a lot to history. It broadens your outlook.” He puffed at his pipe, released the smoke with a pouting motion of his lips as if he parted with something valuable. “What would you say to a libation?” he asked formally.

  I could not think how to refuse him, and so we walked back the street, Hollingsworth chatting about his job, about opportunities for himself, about the weather. We picked a bar finally, and at his insistence, installed ourselves in a red-leather booth. I ordered a beer; Hollingsworth, to my astonishment, a double Scotch. When the waitress brought the drinks, he insisted on paying for them. Then he smiled at the girl.

  Rather, he leered. The change smacked of alchemy. If he had comported himself with the politeness and formality of a divinity student who is without promise, that now vanished. As the waitress counted out the change, Hollingsworth cocked his head on his hand, cheek almost parallel to the table, and stared coolly at her, humming a phrase of music “I’ve seen you somewhere,” he said without preamble.