Algren at Sea

  CAGE 14

  Indira grew up tending younger children in a missionary orphanage. Her lot was the storing of water and cleaning of floors. She was nine years old when this routine was interrupted by a trip to Bombay. The child was so charmed by the city that she ran away from the orphanage to return there. Since she spoke only Kannada, it was inevitable that the friends she found were the Kannada-speaking women of Kamathipura. She has since picked up a number of other languages.

  CAGE 15

  Sundari’s parents were weavers who owned their own looms. She was an only daughter, and was brought up strictly. At sixteen she married a man from Bombay, but he did not bring her back to Bombay with him as, he claimed, he did not have living accommodations for her. When he finally brought her to Bombay she had to live there with his mother, who mistreated Sundari because she had wanted her son to marry a widow who owned property. Sundari’s husband was afraid of his mother.

  When Sundari gave birth to a son, the husband’s mother began to beat Sundari at will while the husband stood by. The girl came to Kamathipura to avoid more beatings. The husband now visits her house regularly, and regularly pays the housekeeper for the privilege of sleeping with his own wife. He makes love to her passionately, Sundari says. But after he is through making love he reproaches her: “If I had listened to my mother I would never have married you.”

  CAGE 16

  Sukla’s parents were sellers of toddy, and Sukla was the youngest of several toddy-toddlers. She was married, at ten, to a farm-laborer, and began living with him when she was fourteen.

  Six months after her first experience of sex, her husband took a mistress whom he refused to give up, although she begged him desperately not to abandon her for the other woman. To this he responded by refusing to have anything to do with her.

  “How can I, a young girl, live without a sex-life?” Sukla thought, and left her husband for Bombay.

  She has now been a prostitute of Kamathipura for three years, and confesses to be weary of the love of men. She has not practiced Lesbianism; but has felt herself tempted.

  “I cannot say I will not drink of that well,” Sukla admits, “sooner or later, of that well I will have to drink.”

  CAGE 17

  Kamala’s father was a mill hand. After her mother died of tuberculosis he married Kamala to a farmer of their native village. Within a year of their marriage she had borne a son to her husband, and he had begun beating her. She carries the scar, on her forehead, of a blow he gave her that knocked her unconscious. When she recovered from this blow she walked out of his house with nothing that belonged to him, carrying her child and wearing only a house-dress, to return to her father.

  Her father became wild with her, claiming she had brought a terrible shame upon her family. Kamala left her father’s home and has never seen either her child or her father or husband since.

  At 4 A.M. the landlord wakens her for his rent of one rupee. At 4 annas as per man, this means she has to take four men merely to make the day’s rent. Then the brothel owner collects two rupees from her—eight more men. Thus Kamala has to accommodate twelve men before she has enough to buy food.

  “A poor life,” Kamala says, “but better than no life at all. God has more than He has spent.”

  CAGE 18

  Long before Ghandi came to the south of India, Kalyani was held in a brothel of the lowest order, against her will. But she succeeded in getting a note out addressed to her husband, advising him of where she was being held.

  Kalyani’s husband came immediately to that place, and fought bitterly (though no actual blows were exchanged) with his wife’s gharwalli. He finally got Kalyani out of the place by giving the gharwalli a promissory note covering Kalyani’s debt to the house.

  “As I am now deeply in debt,” her husband then told Kalyani, “I will put you in a much better house.”

  He was as good as his word. The house in which he put her, and in which Kalyani remains to this day, is one of the best in Bombay.

  But she is still in debt. It is now plain that no spinning wheel will get her out.

  This was why Kalyani asked The Master, “How is the wheel to save us whom the loom has brought such shame?”

  JULY 22ND

  ARABIAN SEA

  Crying hoarse warnings to a soundless sea, the ship slides and dips in the trough of the waters, under a weighted sky. Rail, rigging and deck break out in a coldclinging sweat: the ship is afraid of the sea.

  Two hours out of the Port of Cochin, we are running into heavy weather. Somewhere below, behind ladder or beam, Manning lurks, ready to pounce on contraband.

  Chips is the party I’m salty about. He hasn’t paid me the fifty he promised to return in Bombay.

  I discovered him heaped beneath a G.I. blanket on the fantail, pretending to be asleep. I yanked the blanket off him. He was lying face-down naked to the waist, hugging the pillow, like a man dreaming he’s having a woman. I kicked the sole of his big fat foot. He opened one great pale eye.

  “I want that fifty in Calcutta,” I told him.

  “You’ll get it when I get a draw,” he told me, and shut the great pale eye. He looked like something fished from the deeps that hadn’t been slit and hung to dry because the Captain thought we’d hooked something of interest to science.

  “I’ll get it draw or no draw,” I promised him, and walked away.

  I went up to the radio shack. The door was shut. Within, the ceaseless jot-jot-jot of Morse code informed me Sparks was on the job. When I opened the door he turned his head, headphones clamped, toward me.

  “It wasn’t any of your business,” he told me.

  “What business is that?” I wanted to know.

  He turned back to his work. I knew what he meant alright. He was still salty about my getting between him and Manning to keep him from kicking the man to death. Let him stay salty. I went down to see what the seaborne winos were up to.

  Where had I read that seamen had faces bronzed by sun and salt-sea air and that their eyes scanned far horizons? The only horizon I’d ever seen a seaman scan was a clothesline on which damp socks moved in the wind of a small electric fan, deep in the bowels of a ship. Their mugs were the hue of gin except for those who’d been born sunburned.

  According to the script, they got homesick in every port. But I’d never seen one hit the beach, with money in his pockets, whose thoughts weren’t cutting in closer to the closest whorehouse than to home. Nobody goes for a life on the roving deep whom life on the beach hasn’t first made sea-sick.

  Crooked-Neck was the only man in the crew’s lounge; he was stretched on his side to favor The Monstrous Boil. A deck of cards was scattered along the mess table. I shuffled them and began dealing myself make-believe draw poker.

  “I heard you wrote a poem,” Smith began his usual game.

  “My trade is writing,” I told him defensively.

  “Say a poem,” he ordered me.

  The first hand I dealt held a pair of deuces, a pair of fours and a five. I threw away the five; rather shrewdly, I felt. The strongest hand left was a pair of eights with a pair of aces and a deuce. There goes the first guy’s full house, I reflected, and took time out to accommodate Smith.

  “The Assyrians came down like a wolf on the fold—”

  I remembered—“And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold

  The sheen of his spears was like stars on the sea

  When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee

  Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green

  That host with their banners at sunset were seen

  Like the leaves of the forest when summer hath flown

  That host on the morrow lay withered and strewn—

  “That’s all I remember,” I told him, drew one card face-down, one to a possible straight, one to a possible flush and one to the aces and eights. The first card I turned up was a deuce: well what do you know, a full house with the case card. The other hands missed, every one
. I dealt around once more.

  “Come again,” Smith ordered. I waited till I had five cards to every hand—“They went forth to battle

  But they always fell

  Their eyes were fixed upon their sullen shields

  Bravely they fought, and nobly

  But not well

  And on the hard-fought field they always fell.”

  I looked at my players’ hands while Smith thought that one over. The first two hands were dead, but the third needed only one diamond to flush, the fourth held three sixes and the sixth hand held four clubs with a pair of jacks. I drew one card to the first hand, kept a king kicker to the three sixes and split the jacks on the last hand. The first hand missed the flush, the trips didn’t improve, but what do you know, the club came in to the last hand! Toward morning the farmer gets lucky.

  “It goes this way for days sometimes,” Smith began to grieve, “then it gets worse. Every time a man tries to do the right thing the world turns against him, sir.”

  When Smith added a “sir” he was planning a touch.

  “Don’t try me for a nickel,” I warned him, “I won’t bend.”

  “It isn’t money on my mind,” he complained, “it’s the clap. I developed a drip the morning after we went ashore in Bombay and reported it to Manning. He made me promise to pick up the girl I’d been with and take her with me to the company doc.”

  I kept dealing.

  “It took me half the morning trying to find her. She was living with another hooker and they were both friendly girls. But I couldn’t come straight out with my story because I didn’t want to get my old-lady-of-the-night-before in Dutch.

  “‘Do you feel like taking a walk with me?’ I asked her. ‘No, but if you do, bring back another bottle of rum,’ she asked me, and put on an old Johnny Ray record, all about a little white cloud that cried. I began dancing with my old lady’s friend.

  “I got along good with that one. It looked like I had me a new old lady, and my Night-Before-One jumped salty—‘We’re out of rum,’ she told me—‘How about it?’ ‘Are you coming down to get it with me?’ I asked her. ‘Get it yourself or blow,’ she told me. That made me salty.

  “‘I have to blow anyhow,’ I told her, ‘account I picked up a dose off you last night and I’m now on my way to the doc, so put on your hat and come with me unless your mind has snapped.’ She came at me like gang-busters. She shoved me halfway down the stair—‘And don’t come back!’ she hollered after me.

  “I done the best I could, didn’t I?” Smith asked me. “After all, I’m not a Health Officer. Then the company doc tells me to use a condom next time and sends me on my way. I didn’t have a thing!”

  “So what’s your beef? I should think you’d be happy to find out you’re not sick after all.”

  “I was happy about myself, but not about bugging that girl about being Infected. The only thing I could do was go back and tell her I was wrong. I wouldn’t sleep that night if I didn’t un-bug her. I went back.”

  “That was very decent of you, Smith,” I told him.

  “Wait till I tell you,” he cautioned me. “I went back and she was out—maybe gone to her own doctor—and the other girl was just sitting around looking restless. I asked her if I could wait for my Night-Before-Old-Lady and she said sure, and brought out rum and Cokes, and we had a couple of drinks. Then she put on Johnny Ray singing about that little white cloud, and before the cloud had finished crying we were in the sack making it—that girl was wound up so tight it felt like she never would unwind. But when she began unwinding she unwound so fast I had to hurry to catch up: it was absolutely The Greatest Lay—Ouch!”

  Smith sat up grimacing with pain—he’d shifted onto The Monstrous Boil a moment. Now he shifted off it with such enormous care that, by the time the move had been made, he’d lost the thread of his story.

  “Where was I? Oh yes—there we were, absolutely out. I had just strength enough left to fall off that girl and she was already asleep when in walks my Night-Before-Old-Lady—‘What the hell is going on here? Why you clappified double-backing sonofabitch’—she hauled me off the bed, straddled me and began banging my skull against the floor. She would have beat my brains out if she hadn’t reached to grab a hairbrush off the dresser so I could tumble her off. I grabbed my pants and shoes and got through the door with her after me with the hairbrush and down the stairs buck-naked. She came halfway down the stairs, pitched the brush and did a u-turn back into the room. I heard the door slam. I put my pants on in the street.”

  “What about The Greatest Lay?”

  “Either she was completely out or just pretending to be. All the while we were battling she didn’t stir Inch One. What happened after I don’t know, but I don’t think my Night-Before-Lady was hot at her. It was the idea she had that I was making out when I had a dose, and I didn’t get a chance to tell her I had the doc’s okay.”

  “Don’t let it get you down, Smith,” I consoled him, “we’re all human. We all make mistakes.”

  “We don’t all make mistakes like mine,” Smith grieved. “I’ve caught the worst dose I ever had in my life off The Greatest Lay—and all Manning will do for me is give me pills.”

  “Don’t worry,” I told him cheerfully, “maybe it’s only congenital.”

  Night in the Gardens of Horn & Hardart

  HEMINGWAY AND LARDNER

  The god of the Middle Border was a Now-you-see-me-now-you-don’tscratch-my-back-and-I’ll-be-back-Sporty-O-Jehovah, propitiable by prayer. So long as you gave him an hour of hymning on Sunday morning and provided an organ with a heavenward trump, he’d vibrate your soul with an I-Shall-Quit-This-Mournful-Vale sensation then let you sleep it off on apple pandowdy all Sunday afternoon.

  A God who wouldn’t stick needles and pins in your little ones because you cut a corner or two on a real estate deal. What was wrong with speculation so long as you didn’t use your own cash? Long before the Pentagon devised the phrase “military dialogue” the owners of the Middle Border knew there was nothing wrong with any war you didn’t go to yourself.

  If you didn’t make trouble for Him, He wouldn’t make trouble for you, this God-of-Good-Dividends who never tossed pebbles at your midnight window just to whisper “Hey you! He who gains his life shall lose it.” Nor ever tossed a rock through an Oak Park window wrapped in a warning—“Man shall not live by bread alone, man.”

  Hard times on the rivers and hard times on the plains, hard times on the farm and hard times in town, had bred a midland generation of Righteous Grandfathers who’d stayed right with Him. And now, by God, Grandpa had the property to show for it.

  Risks that were narrow had all been taken; times that were hard were over at last. What was there left to do in the world now for winners except to keep out losers?

  “They built high walls, not only about the walls of their houses,” Booth Tarkington observed, “but they walled up their associations with one another as well.”

  Coming from one Righteous Grandfather who owned a good piece of Indiana pandowdy himself, it is curious that Tarkington’s observation touches upon that of Chekhov, writing, of Russia’s landed gentry, that “there is poverty all around and the footmen are still dressed like court jesters.”

  For it was not only their homes, and their associations with one another that the winners of the Middle Border walled, but their mills and factories as well. This was not only a means of protecting private property, but also a way of removing their lives from those of the men and women who worked for them. They thus effected a separation of their lives from the life of American multitudes; and subsequently created a dream-world more real to them than the world of struggle going on in the streets. The men that their power and wealth nominated for public office, therefore, were consistently men who prided themselves upon their “practicality.”

  A practicality as wholly dedicated to keeping their dream-world inviolate as it was to keeping trespassers off their property: they had more success in keepin
g the violators of property out than in keeping out violators of their dreams.

  Among the footmen of literature dressed like court jesters, defending a world in which property and prestige were more real than love and death, were such writers as Tarkington, Clarence Buddington Kelland and William Dean Howells; whose classic comment was that literature should be written for maiden eyes alone.

  But American literature has not been made by writing about lives undeflowered. Literature is made upon those occasions when a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by a conscience in touch with humanity.

  When the city clerk of Terre Haute refused to issue warrants for arrest of streetwalkers despite his sworn legal duty to issue warrants for arrest of streetwalkers, and instead demanded of the Terre Haute police, “Why don’t you make war on people in high life instead of upon these penniless girls?” that little sport performed an act of literature.

  For he was sustaining the great beginning Whitman had made when he wrote “there shall be no difference between them and the rest.” A beginning marked by an exuberant good humor; that yet sought darkly for understanding of America.

  And sought through New York’s Bowery and down Main Street of Winesburg to the edge of town; where the last gaslamp makes all America look hired.

  A search past 4 A.M. gas stations upon nights when cats freeze to death on fire escapes and chimneys race the moon; down streets that Sister Carrie knew.

  Beyond the grandfathers’ walls there began to flow a bloodcolored current of vindictive life; that was fed into America’s heart by violators of the grandfathers’ dreams.

  These were impractical men who lived upon a street for whom nobody prayed; where the cries of the sick, the tortured and the maimed had gone unheard.