Frankie thought it over carefully. ‘In a couple minutes,’ he decided. ‘Half a cup anyhow.’
‘You better,’ Louie counseled him, ‘you’re likely to get so hungry around one o’clock you won’t be able to steal enough for another fix.’
Louie busied himself over the little gas plate in the corner and didn’t look around till he heard the dealer move. Frankie was swaying but he was on his feet and he’d make it fine, all night. All night and maybe the whole week end. It was hard to tell with these joy-poppers. ‘That stuff cost me more than the last batch,’ he said indifferently.
‘I know,’ Frankie grinned, ‘you told me,’ sounding bored while he used a dish towel on his chest beneath the soiled undershirt. ‘Keeps goin’ up all the time, like a kite with the string broke off.’ His eyes were growing heavy, the towel slipped out of his fingers and caught under his arm, hanging there like a flag at half-mast. The junkies’ flag of truce, to guard him as he slept. There beneath a single bulb, flat on his feet, the knees bending a little, the slight body swaying a bit, the flat-bridged nose looking peaked. Hush: he is sleeping the strange light sleep.
‘I can’t help it when they up the price on me,’ Louie added. ‘They got me, Dealer, that’s all.’
‘The way you got me,’ Frankie murmured knowingly. Then he smelled the coffee, got down to the table in front of a cup, took one sip and, smiling softly, started to let his head fall toward his chest. Louie got the cup out of the way of that blond mop before it bent to the table.
‘Now look at him sleep, with all his woes,’ Louie teased him almost tenderly; and Frankie heard from a dream of falling snow.
The snow fell in a soft, suspended motion, as snow does in dreams alone. He coasted without effort around and around and down a bit and then up like that kite with the broken string and came coasting, where all winds were dying, back down to the table where Fixer sat waiting.
‘I got no woes,’ he laughed among slow-falling flakes, seeing Louie smiling through the snow. ‘You got a woe, Fixer?’ he asked. ‘It’s what I been needin’ – a couple good old secondhand woes.’
‘You’ll have a couple dozen if you ain’t boxin’ that deck by Schwiefka’s suckers in half an hour,’ Louie reminded him.
Frankie got the rest of the coffee down. ‘Squarin’ up, Fixer,’ he assured Louie. He held the cup out at arm’s length. ‘Look at that.’ Not a tremor from shoulder to fingertip. ‘The sheep ’r gonna get a fast shearin’ t’night, Fixer,’ he boasted with a strange and steady calm.
‘I think you’re one of the weaker sheep yourself,’ Louie decided silently.
She remembered the years of their courtship like remembering an alien land. Years of the white wafer of friendship broken on Boze Narodzenie and its brittle fragments (that broke, like so many friendships, at the touch) being passed from hand to hand across the straw-strewn tablecloth. Years of the soft and wild ancestral songs: ‘Chlopek’ sung in the evergreen’s light. And on the tree’s very top a single star to which all good children must say: ‘Gwizadka tam na niebie.’ A starlet there on the heavens. Feasts of Epiphany, when she and Frankie together had marked neighbors’ doorways with the letters that remembered ancestral kings, K, M, and B, with tiny crosses between; that neighbors on waking might remember how Kasper, Melchior and Balthasar had borne gifts to Bethlehem.
Years when everything was so well arranged. When people who did right were rewarded and those who did wrong were punished. When everyone, in the long run, got exactly what was coming to him, no more or no less. God weighed virtue and sin then to the fraction of the ounce, like Majurcek the Grocer weighing sugar.
Together she and Frankie had carried Easter lamb to Old St Stephen’s for Father Simon’s blessing – could it really be so long? How had they both forgotten God so soon? Or had God forgotten them? Certainly God had gone somewhere far away at just the time when she’d needed Him most. Perhaps He too had volunteered and just hadn’t gotten His discharge yet. Perhaps He had been a full colonel and still felt the need of keeping His distance. If He had been only a private, then He must have re-enlisted. Or else the world had gone wrong all by itself.
He had been closer on those far-gone forenoons when she and Frankie had followed the malt-hop trucks down the horse-and-wagon alleys of home, each with a tin can to catch the malt-dripping. That was forbidden drink, the trucks hauled it out to the farmers for pig food. But one morning she and Frankie had drunk from the same can and gotten as stewed, all by themselves, as any two twelve-year-olds in a West Side horse-and-wagon alley can get.
Yet even then Frankie’s indifference had tortured her. So free and easy he’d been, into their free-and-easy teens, in a way she herself could never be and not like a really decent fellow ought to be at all. As careless of her love as if it were something he could pick up in any old can just by following a malt-hop truck.
‘I never run for streetcars,’ he’d had the brassbound nerve to tell her the year she was seventeen, after standing her up for half an hour in front of the Pulaski. ‘What’s the use? There’s always another big red rollin’ along right behind. Just like you dames – soon as a guy misses with one all he has to do is look back over his shoulder ’n here comes another down the block pullin’ up for a fast pickup.’
‘I just won’t stand for that kind of talk,’ she’d told him flatly, stamping with rage. ‘I want you to be where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be ’n dressed like you’re goin’ to the Aragon, not to shoot six-no-count pool by Wieczorek – that’s what I want.’
‘There’s people in hell want ice water too,’ he’d grinned at her. That unforgivable, careless grin that she couldn’t get out of her system and had to have all for herself and couldn’t ever quite seem to get all for her very own for keeps.
It had almost seemed at times that he didn’t really care what she thought in those years. When she’d reproach him for going with other girls he’d confirm anything she chose to suspect with that quick, confident grin. How could anyone make a fellow like that ashamed of himself? She didn’t know how. It hadn’t seemed to make any difference to him whether he dated a schoolgirl, a nurse, a dimwit, a shimmy dancer, a hillbilly, a married woman, an aging whore, a divorcee or just some poor tired trampie: he dated everything he saw in skirts and gave each the same corny play.
One afternoon he’d been promenading down Augusta Boulevard with some good-natured piece of trade who liked to say, ‘I was a lily of the valley in my time, now I’m just Lily of the Alley. Say – didn’t I turn out to be a beauty?’
Sophie had confronted him the very next morning with the fact that her very own father had seen him with the lily. For a moment Frankie hadn’t even seemed to remember. ‘Oh yeh,’ he’d recalled at last, ‘you mean Lily Splits. Yeh, sure, we lifted a few, we always do. Splits likes me. Well, I like Splits. Poor kid was born with one foot in a cathouse, I knew her when she first started travelin’ the bars. But you know she’s a funny little bum at that – they say she still won’t do it with two guys in the same room. What she really likes best is just clownin’ around.’
‘Is that all you were doin’ – clownin’ around?’
‘Not just clownin’ – Splits got her serious side too. Just like me. We were talkin’ on that Chester Shudefski – Shudefski from Viaduct not Shudefski by Whisky Taverns – you know, the real muscle-built one, not Old Uncle. That Shudefski, that was Splits’ fee-an-say, he was bartender by Widow Wieczorek then. When she went to see him she had to sit by the bar ’n have a double shot, all Widow served them days was doubles. Only Shudefski ratted on Splits, he went into the Marines. That wasn’t so good for Splits.’
‘Is that why she been livin’ off hard-boiled eggs ’n p’tato chips ever since?’ Sophie had wanted to know in her politest, most contemptuous tone.
‘That was it awright. She just kept comin’ by the p’tatochip bowl like Chester was still workin’ there.’
‘She ain’t come out yet.’
‘
Oh yeh, she had to come out, her credit give out by Widow, she had to get on the wagon. She’s gettin’ on the wagon again one of these days.’
‘You think so? Wait till the first rainy day.’
‘Yeh,’ Frankie had conceded gloomily, ‘I think that’s what lots of people are waitin’ for: the first rainy day.’
She would grasp his throat in exasperation after he’d strung her along awhile like that, pretending to choke him and really wanting to hurt him. Only when she played that way her fingers would touch the short hairs on the back of his neck and weaken till the weakness spread back to her shoulders; while his own hands would grow so firm on the slope of her hips.
‘You’re my honey, I wouldn’t choke you really,’ she’d assure him weakly at last.
He had won every single one of those skirmishes though he’d been dead in the wrong every time. And each time she’d been so right, so terribly right. Till each defeat she suffered had aroused a secret need for the sort of vengeance that a certain sort of love requires.
For that had been the endless pity of it: she had loved the clown. She had loved him deep in that curtained corner of her mind where, unknown to herself, she had planned an ultimate reckoning.
It had been in that curtained corner, at last, that her mock pregnancy had been devised. Out of that false pregnancy their marriage had been forged.
Had it been because she had really wanted a baby so badly? Or had needed so to punish him? Her breasts had swollen, she had suffered morning sickness – and after five months had wound up the game by lying nine days with an icebag instead of a baby at her breast. Empty-breasted and empty-armed while other women nursed their young. And when he’d come to see her hadn’t reproached him once. It wasn’t necessary. She had read in his eyes the realization of what he’d done. ‘Don’t look sorry, Frankie – it wasn’t your fault,’ she’d told him. He had been too miserable to reply. He knew whose fault it had been all right.
That had been the first time she’d gotten underneath his indifference. The hook was in. She had never let go since. He had been sick with concern for her.
After that no one but her father had continued to remind her that Frankie really wasn’t good enough for her. ‘A bad child often lies in a good mother’s lap,’ was the way the old man had put it. And it was true that Frankie hadn’t even finished grammar school while she’d gone on to almost a full year of high. ‘A girl like you with a good Polish education,’ the old man had sought to shame her, ‘goin’ with a gambler – for shame, Zoshka. You tell him right out when he comes tonight he isn’t good enough for you with his dice and cards and pool shooting all day – what kind of a husband is that?’
Yet all Frankie had done that night, when she’d told him, like a dutiful daughter, just what Papa had said, was to twiddle his thumb playfully in her ear till she’d protested, ‘Get out of my clean ear!’ and the dice and card playing were forgotten. Between such idle play and her thousand superstitions – ‘Always hand beer to me wit’ your right hand. A fallin’ picture means deat” – they had drifted at last, one windy Saturday morning, into marriage at Old St Stephen’s.
‘He told me he loved me that night,’ she still liked to recall. ‘I remember.’ Cause I asked him.’
‘You would of kicked me out of bed if I hadn’t said yes,’ Frankie Majcinek might have replied.
Because, right off, it hadn’t felt like holy wedlock at all. He’d celebrated his wedding night by taking over the drums in a three-piece band hired for the occasion and getting blind drunk to follow. Wedlock hadn’t changed a thing. His love-making was still maddeningly casual, a sort of routine which she couldn’t feel was anything more than he’d had with too many lilies of the valley. Once he’d even had the brass-bound nerve to ask her, ‘What’d you rather do – go to bed ’r listen to me keep time on the tubs to the radio?’
‘Neither,’ she’d told him. But had chalked up one more in her book of grudges all the same. For when he gave her pride the back of his hand she no longer protested openly. After their marriage her anger raged silently.
If only he would have hit her so that they would have been able to make it all up in bed later. ‘If Jesus Christ treated me like you do I’d drive in the nails myself,’ she told him in her mind as, in a passion of frustration, she watched him dealing, eternally dealing.
She could draw neither anger nor hate from him – until the accident that had left her in the wheelchair.
‘He nailed me to the wood that night,’ she told her friend Violet.
‘We all got a cross to bear,’ Violet assured her, ‘I got Stash ’n you got Frankie.’
‘Wrong both times,’ Sophie contradicted her flatly. ‘My cross is this chair. I’m settin’ on my cross. All you have to do is send yours to work ’n you’re back on the ground. I’m nailed to mine.’
‘Sometimes I think them nails is in your head, honey,’ Violet decided, ‘you’re drivin’ ’em in yourself.’
‘A lot you got to holler anyhow,’ Sophie evaded the accusation, ‘callin’ your meal ticket a cross – if you want to get rid of Stash all you have to do is go to work yourself.’
‘Don’t say “work”,’ Violet reproached Sophie softly as though she’d heard an obscene word, ‘it’s the nastiest word I know –’ n I know ’em all.’
So it was forever Frankie who drove in the nails and always her own palms, already bleeding, that must receive them. And all so matter-of-factly, like having some absent-minded carpenter about the house. Never once did he seem to see, even dimly, how inwardly she bled.
And you couldn’t get him to Mass with wild horses any more. She even gave him his choice of even-hour or odd-hour Mass. But it seemed, either way, he still didn’t have the time. He’d have to figure the Monday morning line instead.
‘I’ll make a man of him yet,’ she’d boasted to Violet shortly before the accident, ‘just like that Jane Wyman done that time with some goof battlin’ the bottle worse’n Frankie. When I’m through wit’ him he won’t want to look at another deck ’r the inside of a whisky bar.’
She hadn’t made much of a job of it, she had to admit now. The only thing that had kept him near her had been the accident. The blessed, cursed, wonderful-terrible God’s-own-accident that had truly married them at last. For where her love and the Church’s ritual had failed to bind, guilt had now drawn the irrevocable knot so fiercely that she felt he could never be free of her again. Every time he came in stewed to the gills, with Sparrow holding him up by the belt, he’d mumble the minute he saw her waiting in the chair, ‘I’m no good. Here. Hit me.’ He would offer her his chin to hit. To make up for everything.
‘The only time I get a decent word out of him is when he’s stewed,’ she complained to Violet, ‘if he has to get stewed to realize what he done to me, let him get stewed every night.’
‘That goes to show his heart is right when he’s sober,’ Violet assured her.
‘I lost my taste for the booze the night Zosh got banged up,’ Frankie told the punk like confiding news of a secret disease.
A secret disease: the disease of his crippled joy. All those things which had once lent him pleasure were being soiled by a slow and cancerous guilt: the image of her waiting, night after night, who had so loved to dance and be with dancing people. He heard her lost laughter in that of any girl on the street below. ‘She don’t even laugh like she used no more,’ he realized with a pang.
When she sat napping, one arm resting on the wheelchair’s arm, he saw her index finger pointing its long red-tinted nail – even in sleep she accused him. And between the cards her eyes reproved him. All night long. Her face, as it once had been, returned to him like an extra queen packed into a fixed deck; with each new deal returning him, over and over and over again, to that August night when the photostated discharge in his pocket was only two months old. In a week when every tavern radio was blaring triumphantly of what a single bomb had done on the other side of the world.
They had been drinki
ng at the Tug & Maul that night, with Owner serving something he called Antek’s A-Bomb Special, made simply by pouring triple shots instead of doubles into his glasses. It was almost time to go home and the barflies were pleading for just one more Special and just one more tune. Owner wouldn’t serve another but let the juke play one last sad bar of the final song of a world that had known neither A-bombs nor A-Bomb Specials.
‘There’s nothing left for me
Of days that used to be …’
While Antek’s own pallid eight-year-old scooped up the night’s last crumbs out of the potato-chip bowl.
‘Whose is that?’ Antek wanted to know, impatiently suspecting a practical joke too late in the evening. Between the juke and the 7-Up sign someone had abandoned a cracked crutch. It had struck Sophie so funny she’d wanted to buy Antek a shot on it.
‘Must be good whisky you’re sellin’, Owner,’ Frankie had flattered Antek. ‘They come in here on crutches ’n walk out by theirselves.’
‘Must be some guy got well on the horses,’ Antek decided, and bought both Frankie and Sophie a shot. So they bought him one back and by the time Antek went to turn off the back lights he was weaving so he could hardly find the switch and Frankie was so stiff he could hardly stay on the bar stool. Much too tight to worry about what fool or other had left a cracked crutch between a juke and a 7-Up sign. They were two doors down from their own doorway – but all of a sudden he had had to see ‘what the people ’r doin’ on Milwaukee’ and there was nothing to be done with him but to let him have his way.
So drunk that his head had fallen across the wheel in the late Ashland Avenue traffic – she grabbed once for the wheel and he shoved her off, mumbling some drunken singsong about ‘War’s over, war’s over, war’s over for Frankie – drives like he deals, deals like he lives ’n he lives all the time – war’s over, war’s over—’ Sophie cringed at the screech of metal upon metal as a northbound trolley pulled past and kicked his foot off the gas.