‘Hello Herf, think you’ll take the job?’ said a milkfaced young man who came up to him breezily and pointed to the pile of snow. ‘Why not, Dan. I dont know why it wouldnt be better than spending all your life rooting into other people’s affairs until you’re nothing but a goddam traveling dictograph.’
‘It’d be a fine job in summer all right… Taking the West Side?’
‘I’m going to walk up… I’ve got the heebyjeebies tonight.’
‘Jez man you’ll freeze to death.’
‘I dont care if I do… You get so you dont have any private life, you’re just an automatic writing machine.’
‘Well I wish I could get rid of a little of my private life… Well goodnight. I hope you find some private life Jimmy.’
Laughing, Jimmy Herf turned his back on the snowshovelers and started walking up Broadway, leaning into the wind with his chin buried in his coatcollar. At Houston Street he looked at his watch. Five o’clock. Gosh he was late today. Wouldnt be a place in the world where he could get a drink. He whimpered to himself at the thought of the icy blocks he still had to walk before he could get to his room. Now and then he stopped to pat some life into his numb ears. At last he got back to his room, lit the gasstove and hung over it tingling. His room was a small square bleak room on the south side of Washington Square. Its only furnishings were a bed, a chair, a table piled with books, and the gasstove. When he had begun to be a little less cold he reached under the bed for a basketcovered bottle of rum. He put some water to heat in a tin cup on the gasstove and began drinking hot rum and water. Inside him all sorts of unnamed agonies were breaking loose. He felt like the man in the fairy story with an iron band round his heart. The iron band was breaking.
He had finished the rum. Occasionally the room would start going round him solemnly and methodically. Suddenly he said aloud: ‘I’ve got to talk to her… I’ve got to talk to her.’ He shoved his hat down on his head and pulled on his coat. Outside the cold was balmy. Six milkwagons in a row passed jingling.
On West Twelfth two black cats were chasing each other. Everywhere was full of their crazy yowling. He felt that something would snap in his head, that he himself would scuttle off suddenly down the frozen street eerily caterwauling.
He stood shivering in the dark passage, ringing the bell marked Herf again and again. Then he knocked as loud as he could. Ellen came to the door in a green wrapper. ‘What’s the matter Jimps? Havent you got a key?’ Her face was soft with sleep; there was a happy cozy suave smell of sleep about her. He talked through clenched teeth breathlessly.
‘Ellie I’ve got to talk to you.’
‘Are you lit, Jimps?’
‘Well I know what I’m saying.’
‘I’m terribly sleepy.’
He followed her into her bedroom. She kicked off her slippers and got back into bed, sat up looking at him with sleepweighted eyes.
‘Dont talk too loud on account of Martin.’
‘Ellie I dont know why it’s always so difficult for me to speak out about anything… I always have to get drunk to speak out… Look here do you like me any more?’
‘You know I’m awfully fond of you and always shall be.’
‘I mean love, you know what I mean, whatever it is…’ he broke in harshly.
‘I guess I dont love anybody for long unless they’re dead… I’m a terrible sort of person. It’s no use talking about it.’
‘I knew it. You knew I knew it. O God things are pretty rotten for me Ellie.’
She sat with her knees hunched up and her hands clasped round them looking at him with wide eyes. ‘Are you really so crazy about me Jimps?’
‘Look here lets get a divorce and be done with it.’
‘Dont be in such a hurry, Jimps… And there’s Martin. What about him?’
‘I can scrape up enough money for him occasionally, poor little kid.’
‘I make more than you do, Jimps… You shouldnt do that yet.’
‘I know. I know. Dont I know it?’
They sat looking at each other without speaking. Their eyes burned from looking at each other. Suddenly Jimmy wanted terribly to be asleep, not to remember anything, to let his head sink into blackness, as into his mother’s lap when he was a kid.
‘Well I’m going home.’ He gave a little dry laugh. ‘We didn’t think it’d all go pop like this, did we?’
‘Goodnight Jimps,’ she whined in the middle of a yawn. ‘But things dont end… If only I weren’ so terribly sleepy… Will you put out the light?’
He groped his way in the dark to the door. Outside the arctic morning was growing gray with dawn. He hurried back to his room. He wanted to get into bed and be asleep before it was light.
A long low room with long tables down the middle piled with silk and crêpe fabrics, brown, salmonpink, emeraldgreen. A smell of snipped thread and dress materials. All down the tables bowed heads auburn, blond, black, brown of girls sewing. Errandboys pushing rolling stands of hung dresses up and down the aisles. A bell rings and the room breaks out with noise and talk shrill as a birdhouse.
Anna gets up and stretches out her arms. ‘My I’ve got a head,’ she says to the girl next her.
‘Up last night?’
She nods.
‘Ought to quit it dearie, it’ll spoil your looks. A girl cant burn the candle at both ends like a feller can.’ The other girl is thin and blond and has a crooked nose. She puts her arm round Anna’s waist. ‘My I wish I could put on a little of your weight.’
‘I wish you could,’ says Anna. ‘Dont matter what I eat it turns to fat.’
‘Still you aint too fat… You’re juss plump so’s they like to squeeze ye. You try wearing boyishform like I told an you’ll look fine.’
‘My boyfriend says he likes a girl to have shape.’
On the stairs they push their way through a group of girls listening to a little girl with red hair who talks fast, opening her mouth wide and rolling her eyes. ’…She lived just on the next block at 2230 Cameron Avenue an she’d been to the Hippodrome with some girlfriends and when they got home it was late an they let her go home alone, up Cameron Avenue, see? An the next morning when her folks began looking for her they found her behind a Spearmint sign in a back lot.’
‘Was she dead?’
‘Sure she was… A negro had done somethin terrible to her and then he’d strangled her… I felt terrible. I used to go to school with her. An there aint a girl on Cameron Avenue been out after dark they’re so scared.’
‘Sure I saw all about it in the paper last night. Imagine livin right on the next block.’
‘Did you see me touch that hump back?’ cried Rosie as he settled down beside her in the taxi. ‘In the lobby of the theater?’ He pulled at the trousers that were tight over his knees. ‘That’s goin to give us luck Jake. I never seen a hump back to fail… if you touch him on the hump… Ou it makes me sick how fast these taxis go.’ They were thrown forward by the taxi’s sudden stop. ‘My God we almost ran over a boy.’ Jake Silverman patted her knee. ‘Poor ikle kid, was it all worked up?’ As they drove up to the hotel she shivered and buried her face in her coatcollar. When they went to the desk to get the key, the clerk said to Silverman, ‘There’s a gentleman waiting to see you sir.’ A thickset man came up to him taking a cigar out of his mouth. ‘Will you step this way a minute please Mr Silverman.’ Rosie thought she was going to faint. She stood perfectly still, frozen, with her cheeks deep in the fur collar of her coat.
They sat in two deep armchairs and whispered with their heads together. Step by step, she got nearer, listening. ‘Warrant… Department of Justice… using the mails to defraud…’ She couldnt hear what Jake said in between. He kept nodding his head as if agreeing. Then suddenly he spoke out smoothly, smiling.
‘Well I’ve heard your side Mr Rogers… Here’s mine. If you arrest me now I shall be ruined and a great many people who have put their money in this enterprise will be ruined… In a week I can liquidate the whole conc
ern with a profit… Mr Rogers I am a man who has been deeply wronged through foolishness in misplacing confidence in others.’
‘I cant help that… My duty is to execute the warrant… I’m afraid I’ll have to search your room… You see we have several little items…’ The man flicked the ash off his cigar and began to read in a monotonous voice. ‘Jacob Silverman, alias Edward Faversham, Simeon J. Arbuthnot, Jack Hinkley, J. J. Gold… Oh we’ve got a pretty little list… We’ve done some very pretty work on your case, if I do say it what shouldnt.’
They got to their feet. The man with the cigar jerked his head at a lean man in a cap who sat reading a paper on the opposite side of the lobby.
Silverman walked over to the desk. ‘I’m called away on business,’ he said to the clerk. ‘Will you please have my bill prepared? Mrs Silverman will keep the room for a few days.’
Rosie couldnt speak. She followed the three men into the elevator. ‘Sorry to have to do this maam,’ said the lean detective pulling at the visor of his cap. Silverman opened the room door for them and closed it carefully behind him. ‘Thank you for your consideration, gentlemen… My wife thanks you.’ Rosie sat in a straight chair in the corner of the room. She was biting her tongue hard, harder to try to keep her lips from twitching.
‘We realize Mr Silverman that this is not quite the ordinary criminal case.’
‘Wont you have a drink gentlemen?’
They shook their heads. The thickset man was lighting a fresh cigar.
‘Allright Mike,’ he said to the lean man. ‘Go through the drawers and closet.’
‘Is that regular?’
‘If this was regular we’d have the handcuffs on you and be running the lady here as an accessory.’
Rosie sat with her icy hands clasped between her knees swaying her body from side to side. Her eyes were closed. While the detectives were rummaging in the closet, Silverman took the opportunity to put his hand on her shoulder. She opened her eyes. ‘The minute the goddam dicks take me out phone Schatz and tell him everything. Get hold of him if you have to wake up everybody in New York.’ He spoke low and fast, his lips barely moving.
Almost immediately he was gone, followed by the two detectives with a satchel full of letters. His kiss was still wet on her lips. She looked dazedly round the empty deathly quiet room. She noticed some writing on the lavender blotter on the desk. It was his handwriting, very scrawly: Hock everything and beat it; you are a good kid. Tears began running down her cheeks. She sat a long while with her head dropped on the desk kissing the penciled words on the blotter.
4 Skyscraper
The young man without legs has stopped still in the middle of the south sidewalk of Fourteenth Street. He wears a blue knitted sweater and a blue stocking cap. His eyes staring up widen until they fill the paperwhite face. Drifts across the sky a dirigible, bright tinfoil cigar misted with height, gently prodding the rainwashed sky and the soft clouds. The young man without legs stops still propped on his arms in the middle of the south sidewalk of Fourteenth Street. Among striding legs, lean legs, waddling legs, legs in skirts and pants and knickerbockers, he stops perfectly still, propped on his arms, looking up at the dirigible.
Jobless, Jimmy Herf came out of the Pulitzer Building. He stood beside a pile of pink newspapers on the curb, taking deep breaths, looking up the glistening shaft of the Woolworth. It was a sunny day, the sky was a robin’s egg blue. He turned north and began to walk uptown. As he got away from it the Woolworth pulled out like a telescope. He walked north through the city of shiny windows, through the city of scrambled alphabets, through the city of gilt letter signs.
Spring rich in gluten… Chockful of golden richness, delight in every bite, THE DADDY OF THEM ALL, spring rich in gluten. Nobody can buy better bread than PRINCE ALBERT. Wrought steel, monel, copper, nickel, wrought iron. All the world loves natural beauty. LOVE’S BARGAIN that suit at Gumpel’s best value in town. Keep that schoolgirl complexion… JOE KISS, starting, lightning, ignition and generators.
Everything made him bubble with repressed giggles. It was eleven o’clock. He hadnt been to bed. Life was upside down, he was a fly walking on the ceiling of a topsyturvy city. He’d thrown up his job, he had nothing to do today, tomorrow, next day, day after. Whatever goes up comes down, but not for weeks, months. Spring rich in gluten.
He went into a lunchroom, ordered bacon and eggs, toast and coffee, sat eating them happily, tasting thoroughly every mouthful. His thoughts ran wild like a pasture full of yearling colts crazy with sundown. At the next table a voice was expounding monotonously:
‘Jilted… and I tell you we had to do some cleaning. They were all members of your church you know. We knew the whole story. He was advised to put her away. He said, “No I’m going to see it through”.’
Herf got to his feet. He must be walking again. He went out with a taste of bacon in his teeth.
Express service meets the demands of spring. O God to meet the demands of spring. No tins, no sir, but there’s rich quality in every mellow pipeful… SOCONY. One taste tells more than a million words. The yellow pencil with the red band. Than a million words, than a million words. ‘All right hand over that million… Keep him covered Ben.’ The Yonkers gang left him for dead on a bench in the park. They stuck him up, but all they got was a million words… ‘But Jimps I’m so tired of booktalk and the proletariat, cant you understand?’
Chockful of golden richness, spring.
Dick Snow’s mother owned a shoebox factory. She failed and he came out of school and took to standing on streetcorners. The guy in the softdrink stand put him wise. He’d made two payments on pearl earings for a blackhaired Jewish girl with a shape like a mandolin. They waited for the bankmessenger in the L station. He pitched over the turnstile and hung there. They went off with the satchel in a Ford sedan. Dick Snow stayed behind emptying his gun into the dead man. In the deathhouse he met the demands of spring by writing a poem to his mother that they published in the Evening Graphic.
With every deep breath Herf breathed in rumble and grind and painted phrases until he began to swell, felt himself stumbling big and vague, staggering like a pillar of smoke above the April streets, looking into the windows of machineshops, buttonfactories, tenementhouses, felt of the grime of bedlinen and the smooth whir of lathes, wrote cusswords on typewriters between the stenographer’s fingers, mixed up the pricetags in departmentstores. Inside he fizzled like sodawater into sweet April syrups, strawberry, sarsaparilla, chocolate, cherry, vanilla dripping foam through the mild gasolineblue air. He dropped sickeningly fortyfour stories, crashed. And suppose I bought a gun and killed Ellie, would I meet the demands of April sitting in the deathhouse writing a poem about my mother to be published in the Evening Graphic?
He shrank until he was of the smallness of dust, picking his way over crags and boulders in the roaring gutter, climbing straws, skirting motoroil lakes.
He sat in Washington Square, pink with noon, looking up Fifth Avenue through the arch. The fever had seeped out of him. He felt cool and tired. Another spring, God how many springs ago, walking from the cemetery up the blue macadam road where fieldsparrows sang and the sign said: Yonkers. In Yonkers I buried my boyhood, in Marseilles with the wind in my face I dumped my calf years into the harbor. Where in New York shall I bury my twenties? Maybe they were deported and went out to sea on the Ellis Island ferry singing the International. The growl of the International over the water, fading sighing into the mist.
DEPORTED
James Herf young newspaper man of 190 West 12th Street recently lost his twenties. Appearing before Judge Merivale they were remanded to Ellis Island for deportation as undesirable aliens. The younger four Sasha Michael Nicholas and Vladimir had been held for some time on a charge of criminal anarchy. The fifth and sixth were held on a technical charge of vagrancy. The later ones Bill Tony and Joe were held under various indictments including wifebeating, arson, assault, and prostitution. All were convicted on counts of misfeasance, malfe
asance, and nonfeasance.
Oyez oyez oyez prisoner at the bar… I find the evidence dubious said the judge pouring himself out a snifter. The clerk of the court who was stirring an oldfashioned cocktail became overgrown with vineleaves and the courtroom reeked with the smell of flowering grapes and the Shining Bootlegger took the bulls by the horns and led them lowing gently down the courthouse steps. ‘Court is adjourned by hicky,’ shouted the judge when he found gin in his waterbottle. The reporters discovered the mayor dressed in a leopard skin posing as Civic Virtue with his foot on the back of Princess Fifi the oriental dancer. Your correspondent was leaning out of the window of the Banker’s Club in the company of his uncle, Jefferson T. Merivale, wellknown clubman of this city and two lamb chops well peppered. Meanwhile the waiters were hastily organizing an orchestra, using the potbellies of the Gausenheimers for snaredrums. The head waiter gave a truly delightful rendition of My Old Kentucky Home, utilizing for the first time the resonant bald heads of the seven directors of the Well Watered Gasoline Company of Delaware as a xylophone. And all the while the Shining Bootlegger in purple running drawers and a blueribbon silk hat was leading the bulls up Broadway to the number of two million, threehundred and fortytwo thousand, five hundred and one. As they reached the Spuyten Duyvil, they were incontinently drowned, rank after rank, in an attempt to swim to Yonkers.
And as I sit here, thought Jimmy Herf, print itches like a rash inside me. I sit here pockmarked with print. He got to his feet. A little yellow dog was curled up asleep under the bench. The little yellow dog looked very happy. ‘What I need’s a good sleep,’ Jimmy said aloud.
‘What are you goin to do with it, Dutch, are you goin to hock it?’
‘Francie I wouldnt take a million dollars for that little gun.’