WHEN THERE IS too much going on, more than you can bear, you may choose to a.s.sume that nothing in particular is happening, that your life is going round and round like a turntable. Then one day you are aware that what you took to be a turntable, smooth, flat, and even, was in fact a whirlpool, a vortex. My first knowledge of the hidden work of uneventful days goes back to February 1933. The exact date won"t matter much to you. I like to think, however, that you, my only child, will want to hear about this hidden work as it relates to me. When you were a small boy you were keen on family history. You will quickly understand that I couldn"t tell a child what I am about to tell you now. You don"t talk about deaths and vortices to a kid, not nowadays. In my time my parents didnt hesitate to speak of death and the dying. What they seldom mentioned was s.e.x. We"ve got it the other way around.
My mother died when I was an adolescent. I"ve often told you that. What I didn"t tell you was that I knew she was dying and didn"t allow myself to think about it-there"s your turntable.
The month was February, as I"ve said, adding that the exact date wouldnt matter to you. I should confess that I myself avoided fixing it.
Chicago in winter, armored in gray ice, the sky low, the going heavy.
I was a high school senior, an indifferent student, generally unpopular, a background figure in the school. It was only as a high jumper that I performed in public. I had no form at all; a curious last-minute spring or convulsion pur me over the bar. But this was what the school turned out to see.
Unwilling to study, I was bookish nevertheless. I was secretive about my family life. The truth is that I didn"t want to talk about my mother. Besides, had no language as yet for the oddity of my peculiar interests.
But let me get on with that significant day in the early part of February.
It began like any other winter school day in Chicago-grimly ordinary. The temperature a few degrees above zero, botanical frost shapes on the windowpane, the snow swept up in heaps, the ice gritty and the streets, block after block, bound together by the iron of the sky. A breakfast of porridge, toast, and tea. Late as usual, I stopped for a moment to look into my mother"s sickroom. I bent near and said, "It"s Louie, going to school." She seemed to nod. Her eyelids were brown; the color of her face was much lighter. I hurried off with my books on a strap over my shoulder.
When I came to the boulevard on the edge of the park, two small men rushed out of a doorway with rifles, wheeled around aiming upward, and fired at pigeons near the rooftop. Several birds fell straight down, and the men scooped up the soft bodies and ran indoors, dark little guys in fluttering white shirts. Depression hunters and their city game. Moments before, the police car had loafed by at ten miles an hour. The men had waited it out.
This had nothing to do with me. I mention it merely because it happened. I stepped around the blood spots and crossed into the park.
To the right of the path, behind the wintry lilac twigs, the crust of the snow was broken. In the dead black night Stephanie and I had necked there, petted, my hands under her racc.o.o.n coat, under her sweater, under her skirt, adolescents kissing without restraint. Her c.o.o.nskin cap had slipped to the back of her head. She opened the musky coat to me to have me closer.
Approaching the school building, I had to run to reach the doors before the last bell. I was on notice from the family-no trouble with teachers, no summons from the princ.i.p.al at a time like this. And I did observe the rules, although I despised cla.s.swork. But I spent all the money I could lay hands on at Hammersmark"s Bookstore. I read Manhattan Transfer, The Enormous Room,_ and A Portrait of the Artist._ I belonged to the Cercle Franais and the Senior Discussion Club. The club"s topic for this afternoon was Von Hindenburg"s choice of Hitler to form a new government. But I couldn"t go to meetings now; I had an after-school job. My father had insisted that I find one.
After cla.s.ses, on my way to work, I stopped at home to cut myself a slice of bread and a wedge of Wisconsin cheese, and to see whether my mother might be awake. During her last days she was heavily sedated and rarely said anything. The tall, square-shouldered bottle at her bedside was filled with clear red Nem-butal. The color of this fluid was always the same, as if it could tolerate no shadow. Now that she could no longer sit up to have it washed, my mother"s hair was cut short. This made her face more slender, and her lips were sober. Her breathing was dry and hard, obstructed. The window shade was halfway up. It was scalloped at the bottom and had white fringes. The street ice was dark gray. Snow was piled against the trees. Their trunks had a mineral-black look. Waiting out the winter in their alligator armor, they gathered coal soot.
Even when she was awake, my mother couldn"t find the breath to speak. She sometimes made signs. Except for the nurse, there was n.o.body in the house. My father was at business, my sister had a downtown job, my brothers hustled. The eldest, Albert, clerked for a lawyer in the Loop. My brother Len had put me onto a job on the Northwestern commuter trains, and for a while I was a candy butcher, selling chocolate bars and evening papers. When my mother put a stop to this because it kept me too late, I had found other work. Just now I was delivering flowers for a shop on North Avenue and riding the streetcars carrying wreaths and bouquets to all parts of the city. Behrens the florist paid me fifty-cents for an afternoon; with tips I could earn as much as a dollar. That gave me time to prepare my trigonometry lesson and, very late at night, after I had seen Stephanie, to read my books. I sat in the kitchen when everyone was sleeping, in deep silence, snowdrifts under the windows, and below, the janitor"s shovel rasping on the cement and clanging on the furnace door. I read banned books circulated by my cla.s.smates, political pamphlets, read "Prufrock" and "Mauberley." I also studied arcane books, too far out to discuss with anyone.
I read on the streetcars (called trolleys elsewhere). Reading shut out the sights. In fact there were_ no sights-more of the same and then more of the same. Shop fronts, garages, warehouses, narrow brick bungalows.
The city was laid out on a colossal grid, eight blocks to the mile, every fourth street a car line. The days short, the streetlights weak, the soiled s...o...b..nks toward evening became a source of light. I carried my carfare in my mitten, where the coins mixed with lint worn away from the lining. Today 1 was delivering lilies to an uptown address. They were wrapped and pinned in heavy paper. Behrens, spelling out my errand for me, was pale, a narrow-faced man who wore nose gla.s.ses. Amid the flowers, he alone had no color-something like the price he paid for being human. He wasted no words: "This delivery will take an hour each way in this traffic, so it"ll be your only one. I carry these people on the books, but make sure you get a signature on the bill."
I couldn"t say why it was such a relief to get out of the shop, the damp, warm-earth smell, the dense mosses, the p.r.i.c.kling cactuses, the gla.s.s iceboxes with orchids, gardenias, and sickbed roses. I preferred the brick boredom of the street, the paving stones and steel rails. I drew down the three peaks of my racing-skater"s cap and hauled the clumsy package to Robey Street. When the car came panting up there was room for me on the long seat next to the door. Pa.s.sengers didn"t undo their b.u.t.tons. They were chilled, guarded, m.u.f.fled, miserable. I had reading matter with me-the remains of a book, the cover gone, the pages held together by binder"s thread and flakes of glue. I carried these fifty or sixty pages in the pocket of my short sheepskin. With the one hand I had free I couldnt manage this mutilated book. And on the Broadway-Clark car, reading was out of the question .1 had to protect my lilies from the balancing straphangers and people pushing toward the front.
I got down at Ainslie Street holding high the package, which had the shape of a padded kite. The apartment house I was looking for had a courtyard with iron palings. The usual lobby: a floor sinking in the middle, kernels of tile, gaps stuffed with dirt, and a panel of bra.s.s mailboxes with earpiece-mouthpieces. No voice came down when I pushed the b.u.t.ton; instead, the lock buzzed, jarred, rattled, and I went from the cold of the outer lobby to the overheated mustiness of the inner one. On the second floor one of the two doors on the landing was open, and overshoes and galoshes and rubbers were heaped along the wall. At once I found myself in a crowd of drinkers. All the lights in the house were on, although it was a good hour before dark. Coats were piled on chairs and sofas. All whiskey in those days was bootleg, of course. Holding the flowers high, I parted the mourners. I was quasi-official. The message went out: "Let the kid through. Go right on, buddy."
The long pa.s.sageway was full too, but the dining room was entirely empty. There, a dead girl lay in her coffin. Over her a cut-gla.s.s l.u.s.ter was hanging from a taped, deformed artery of wire pulled through the broken plaster. I hadn"t expected to find myself looking down into a coffin.
You saw her as she was, without undertaker"s makeup, a girl older than Stephanie, not so plump, thin, fair, her straight hair arranged on her dead shoulders. All buoyancy gone, a weight that counted totally on support, not so much lying as sunk in this gray rectangle. I saw what I took to be the pressure mark of fingers on her cheek. Whether she had been pretty or not was no consideration.
A stout woman (certainly the mother), wearing black, opened the swing door from the kitchen and saw me standing over the corpse. I thought she was displeased when she made a fist signal to come forward. As I pa.s.sed her she drew both fists against her bosom. She said to put the flowers on the sink, and then she pulled the pins and crackled the paper. Big arms, thick calves, a bun of hair, her short nose thin and red. It was Behrens"s practice to tie the lily stalks to slender green sticks. There was never any damage.
On the drainboard of the sink was a baked ham with sliced bread around the platter, a jar of French"s mustard and wooden tongue depressors to spread it. I saw and I saw and I saw.
I was on my most discreet and polite behavior with the woman. I looked at the floor to spare her my commiserating face. But why should she care at all about my discreetness; how did I come into this except as a messenger and menial? If she wouldn"t observe my behavior, whom was 1 behaving for? All she wanted was to settle the bill and send me on my way. She picked up her purse, holding it to her body as she had held her fists. "What do I owe Behrens?" she asked me.
"He said you could sign for this."
However, she wasn"t going to deal in kindnesses. She said, "No." She said, "I don"t want debts following me later on." She gave me a five-dollar bill, she added a tip of fifty cents, and it was I who signed the receipt, as well as I could on the enameled grooves of the sink. I folded the bill small and felt under the sheepskin coat for my watch pocket, ashamed to take money from her within sight of her dead daughter. I wasn"t the object of the woman"s severity, but her face somewhat frightened me. She leveled the same look at the walls, the door. I didn"t figure here, however; this was no death of mine.
As if to take another reading of the girl"s plain face, I looked again into the coffin on my way out. And then on the staircase I began to extract the pages from my sheepskin pocket, and in the lobby I hunted for the sentences I had read the night before. Yes, here they were: Nature cannot suffer the human form within her system of laws. When given to her charge, the human being before us is reduced to dust. Ours is the most perfect form to be found on earth. The visible world sustains us until life leaves, and then it must utterly destroy us. Where, then, is the world from which the human form comes?_ If you swallowed some food and then died, that morsel of food that would have nourished you in life would hasten your disintegration in death.
This meant that nature didn"t make life; it only housed it.
In those days I read many such books. But the one I had read the previous night went deeper than the rest. You, my only child, are only too familiar with my lifelong absorption in or craze for further worlds. I used to bore you when I spoke of spirit, or pneuma, and of a continuum of spirit and nature. You were too well educated, respectably rational, to take stock in such terms. I might add, citing a famous scholar, that what is plausible can do without proof. I am not about to pursue this. Still, there would be a gap in what I have to tell if I were to leave out my significant book, and this after all is a narrative, not an argument.
Anyway, I returned my pages to the pocket of my sheepskin, and then I didn"t know quite what to do. At four o"clock, with no more errands, I was somehow not ready to go home. So I walked through the snow to Argyle Street, where my brother-in-law practiced dentistry, thinking that we might travel home together. I prepared an explanation for turning up at his office. "I was on the North Side delivering flowers, saw a dead girl laid out, realized how close I was, and came here." Why did I need to account for my innocent behavior when it was_ innocent? Perhaps because I was always contemplating illicit things. Because I was always being accused. Because I ran a little truck farm of deceits-but selt-examination, once so fascinating to me, has become tiresome.
My brother-in-law"s office was a high, second-floor walk-up: PHILIP HAD-DIS, D.D.S. Three bay windows at the rounded corner of the building gave you a full view of the street and of the lake, due east-the jagged flats of ice floating. The office door was open, and when I came through the tiny blind (window-less) waiting room and didn"t see Philip at the big, back-tilted dentist"s chair, 1 thought that he might have stepped into his lab. He was a good technician and did most of his own work, which was a big saving.
Philip wasn"t tall, but he was very big, a burly man. The sleeves of his white coat fitted tightly on his bare, thick forearms. The strength of his arms counted when it came to pulling teeth. Lots of patients were referred to him for extractions.
When he had nothing in particular to do he would sit in the chair himself, studying the Racing Form_ between the bent mantis leg of the drill, the gas flame, and the water spurting round and round in the green gla.s.s spit-sink. The cigar smell was always thick. Standing in the center of the dental cabinet was a clock under a gla.s.s bell. Four gilt weights rotated at its base. This was a gift from my mother. The view from the middle window was divided by a chain that couldn"t have been much smaller than the one that stopped the British fleet on the Hudson. This held the weight of the druggist"s sign-a mortar and pestle outlined in electric bulbs. There wasn"t much daylight left. At noon it was poured out; by four it had drained away. From one side the banked snow was growing blue, from the other the shops were shining warmth on it.
The dentist"s lab was in a closet. Easygoing Philip peed in the sink sometimes. It was a long trek to the toilet at the far end of the building, and the hallway was nothing but two walls-a plaster tunnel and a carpet runner edged with bra.s.s tape. Philip hated going to the end of the hall.
There was n.o.body in the lab, either. Philip might have been taking a cup of coffee at the soda fountain in the drugstore below. It was possible also that he was pa.s.sing the time with Marchek, the doctor with whom he shared the suite of offices. The connecting door was never locked, and I had occasionally sat in Marchek"s swivel chair with a gynecology book, studying the colored ill.u.s.trations and storing up the Latin names.
Marchek"s starred gla.s.s pane was dark, and I a.s.sumed his office to be empty, but when I went in I saw a naked woman lying on the examining table. She wasn"t asleep; she seemed to be resting. Becoming aware that I was there, she stirred, and then without haste, disturbing herself as little as possible, she reached for her clothing heaped on Dr. Marchek"s desk. Picking out her slip, she put it on her belly-she didn"t spread it. Was she dazed, drugged? No, she simply took her sweet time about everything, she behaved with exciting la.s.situde. Wires connected her nice wrists to a piece of medical apparatus on a wheeled stand.
The right thing would have been to withdraw, but it was already too late for that. Besides, the woman gave no sign that she cared one way or another. She didn"t draw the slip over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, she didn"t even bring her thighs together. The covering hairs were parted. These were salt, acid, dark, sweet odors. These were immediately effective; I was strongly excited. There was a gloss on her forehead, an exhausted look about the eyes. I believed that I had guessed what she had been doing, but then the room was half dark, and I preferred to avoid any definite thought. Doubt seemed much better, or equivocation.
I remembered that Philip, in his offhand, lazy way, had mentioned a "research project" going on next door. Dr. Marchek was measuring the reactions of partners in the s.e.xual act. "He takes people from the street, he hooks them up and pretends he"s collecting graphs. This is for kicks; the science part is horses.h.i.t."
The naked woman, then, was an experimental subject.
I had prepared myself to tell Philip about the dead girl on Ainslie Street, but the coffin, the kitchen, the ham, the flowers were as distant from me now as the ice floes on the lake and the killing cold of the water.
"Where did you come from?" the woman said to me.
"From next door-the dentist"s office."
"The doctor was about to unstrap me, and I need to get loose. Maybe you can figure out these wires."
If Marchek should be in the inner room, he wouldn"t come in now that he heard voices. As the woman raised both her arms so that I could undo the buckles, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s swayed, and when I bent over her the odor of her upper body made me think of the frilled brown papers in a box after the chocolates had been eaten-a sweet aftersmell and acrid cardboard mixed. Although I tried hard to stop it, my mother"s chest mutilated by cancer surgery pa.s.sed through my mind. Its gnarled scar tissue. I also called in Stephanie"s closed eyes and kissing face-anything to spoil the attraction of this naked young woman. It occurred to me as I undid the clasps that instead of disconnecting her I was hooking myself. We were alone in the darkening office, and I wanted her to reach under the sheepskin and undo my belt for me.
But when her hands were free she wiped the jelly from her wrists and began to dress. She started with her bra, several times lowering her b.r.e.a.s.t.s into the cups, and when her arms went backward to fasten the hooks she bent far forward, as if she were pa.s.sing under a low bough. The cells of my body were like bees, drunker and drunker on s.e.xual honey (I expect that this will change the figure of Grandfather Louie, the old man remembered as this or that but never as a hive of erotic bees).
But I couldn"t be blind to the woman"s behavior even now. It was very broad; she laid it on. I saw her face in profile, and although it was turned downward, there was no mistaking her smile. To use an expression from the thirties, she was giving me the works. She knew I was about to fall on my face. She b.u.t.toned every small b.u.t.ton with deliberate slowness, and her blouse had at least twenty such b.u.t.tons, yet she was still bare from the waist down. Though we were so minor, she and I, a schoolboy and a floozy, we had such major instruments to play. And if we were to go further, whatever happened would never get beyond this room. It would be between the two of us, and n.o.body would ever hear of it. Still, Marchek, that pseudoexperimenter, was probably biding his time in the next room. An old family doctor, he must have been embarra.s.sed and angry. And at any moment, moreover, my brother-in-law Philip might come back.
When the woman slipped down from the leather table she gripped her leg and said she had pulled a muscle. She lifted one heel onto a chair and rubbed her calf, swearing under her breath and looking everywhere with swimming eyes. And then, after she had put on her skirt and fastened her stockings to the garter belt, she pushed her feet into her pumps and limped around the chair, holding it by the arm. She said, "Will you please reach me my coat? Just put it over my shoulders."
She, too, wore a racc.o.o.n. As I took it from the hook I wished it had been something else. But Stephanie"s coat was newer than this one and twice as heavy. These pelts had dried out, and the fur was thin. The woman was already on her way out, and stooped as I laid the racc.o.o.n over over her back. Marchek"s office had its own exit to the corridor.
At the top of the staircase, the woman asked me to help her down. I said that I would, of course, but I wanted to look once more for my brother-in-law. As she tied the woolen scarf under her chin she smiled at me, with an Oriental wrinkling of her eyes.
Not to check in with Philip wouldn"t have been right. My hope was that he would be returning, coming down the narrow corridor in his burly, sauntering, careless way. You won"t remember your Uncle Philip. He had played college football, and he still had the look of a tackle, with his swelling, compact forearms. (At Soldier Field today he"d be physically insignificant; in his time, however, he was something of a strongman.) But there was the long strip of carpet down the middle of the wall-valley, and no one was coming to rescue me. I turned back to his office. If only a patient were sitting in the chair and I could see Philip looking into his mouth, I"d be on track again, excused from taking the woman"s challenge. One alternative was to say that I couldn"t go with her, that Philip expected me to ride back with him to the Northwest Side. In the empty office I considered this lie, bending my head so that I wouldn"t confront the clock with its soundless measured weights revolving. Then I wrote on Philip"s memo pad: "Louie, pa.s.sing by." I left it on the seat of the chair.
The woman had put her arms through the sleeves of the collegiate, rah-rah racc.o.o.n and was resting her fur-bundled rear on the banister. She was pa.s.sing her compact mirror back and forth, and when I came out she gave the compact a snap and dropped it into her purse.
"Still the charley horse?"
"My lower back too."
We descended, very slow, both feet on each tread. I wondered what she would do if I were to kiss her. Laugh at me, probably. We were no longer between the four walls where anything might have happened. In the street, s.p.a.ce was unlimited. I had no idea how far we were going, how far I would be able to go. Although she was the one claiming to be in pain, it was I who felt sick. She asked me to support her lower back with my hand, and there I discovered what an extraordinary action her hips could perform. At a party I had overheard an older woman saying to another lady, "I know how to make them burn." Hearing this was enough for me.
No special art was necessary with a boy of seventeen, not even so much as being invited to support her with my hand-to feel that intricate, erotic working of her back. I had already seen_ the woman on Marchek"s examining table and had also felt the full weight of her when she leaned-when she laid her female substance on me. Moreover, she fully knew my mind. She was the thing I was thinking continually, and how often does thought find its object in circ.u.mstances like these-the object knowing_ that it has been found? The woman knew my expectations. She was,_ in the flesh, those expectations. I couldn"t have sworn that she was a hooker, a tramp. She might have been an ordinary family girl with a taste for trampishness, acting loose, amusing herself with me, doing a comic s.e.x turn as in those days people sometimes did.
"Where are we headed?"
"If you have to go, I can make it on my own," she said. "It"s just Winona Street, the other side of Sheridan Road."
"No, no. I"ll walk you there."
She asked whether I was still at school, pointing to the printed pages in my coat pocket.
I observed when we were pa.s.sing a fruit shop (a boy of my own age emptying bushels of oranges into the lighted window) that, despite the woman"s thick-cream color, her eyes were Far Eastern, black.
"You should be about seventeen," she said.
"Just."
She was wearing pumps in the snow and placed each step with care.
"What are you going to be-have you picked your profession?"
I had no use for professions. Utterly none. There were accountants and engineers in the soup lines. In the world slump, professions were useless. You were free, therefore, to make something extraordinary of yourself. I might have said, if I hadn"t been excited to the point of sickness, that I didn"t ride around the city on the cars to make a buck or to be useful to the family, but to take a reading or this boring, depressed, ugly, endless, rotting city. I couldn"t have thought it then, but I now understand that my purpose was to interpret this place. Its power was tremendous. But so was mine, potentially. I refused absolutely to believe for a moment that people here were doing what they thought they were doing. Beneath the apparent life of these streets was their real life, beneath each face the real face, beneath each voice and its words the true tone and the real message. Of course, I wasn"t about to say such things. It was beyond me at that time to say them. I was, however, a high-toned kid, "La-di-dah," my critical, satirical brother Albert called me. A high purpose in adolescence will expose you to that.
At the moment, a glamorous, s.e.xual girl had me in tow. I couldn"t guess where I was being led, nor how far, nor what she would surprise me with, nor the consequences.
"So the dentist is your brother?"
"In-law-my sister"s husband. They live with us. You"re asking what he"s like? He"s a good guy. He likes to lock his office on Friday and go to the races. He takes me to the fights. Also, at the back of the drugstore there"s a poker game...."
"He_ doesn"t go around with books in his pocket."
"Well, no, he doesn"t. He says, "What"s the use? There"s too much to keep up or catch up with. You could never in a thousand years do it, so why knock yourself out?" My sister wants him to open a Loop office, but that would be too much of a strain. I guess he"s for inertia. He"s not ready to do more than he"s already doing."
"So what are you reading-what"s it about?"
I didn"t propose to discuss anything with her. I wasn"t capable of it. What I had in mind just then was entirely different.
But suppose I had been able to explain. One does have a responsibility to answer genuine questions: "You see, miss, this is the visible world. We live in it, we breathe its air and eat its substance. When we die, however, matter goes to matter, and then we"re annihilated. Now, which world do we really belong to, this world of matter or another world, from which matter takes its orders?"
Not many people were willing to talk about such notions. They made even Stephanie impatient. "When you die, that"s it. Dead is dead," she would say. She loved a good time. And when I wouldn"t take her downtown to the Oriental Theatre she didn"t deny herself the company of other boys. She brought back off-color vaudeville jokes. I think the Oriental was part of a national entertainment circuit. Jimmy Savo, Lou Holtz, and Sophie Tucker played there. I was sometimes too solemn for Stephanie. When she gave imitations of Jimmy Savo singing "River, Stay Away from My Door," bringing her knees together and holding herself tight, she didn"t break me up, and she was disappointed.
You would have thought that the book or book fragment in my pocket was a talisman from a fairy tale to open castle gates or carry me to mountaintops. Yet when the woman asked me what it was, I was too scattered to tell her. Remember, I still kept my hand as instructed on her lower back, tormented by that s.e.xual grind of her movements. I was discovering what the lady at the party had meant by saying, "I know how to make them burn." So of course I was in no condition to talk about the Ego and the Will, or about the secrets of the blood. Yes, I believed that higher knowledge was shared out among all human beings. What else was there to hold us together but this force hidden behind daily consciousness? But to be coherent about it now was absolutely out of the question.
"Can"t you tell me?" she said.
"I bought this for a nickel from a bargain table."
"That"s how you spend your money?"
I a.s.sumed her to mean that I didn"t spend it on girls.
"And the dentist is a good-natured, lazy guy," she went on. "What has he got to tell you?"
I tried to review the mental record. What did Phil Haddis say? He said that a stiff p.r.i.c.k has no conscience. At the moment it was all I could think of. It amused Philip to talk to me. He was a chum. Where Philip was indulgent, my brother Albert, your late uncle, was harsh. Albert might have taught me something if he had trusted me. He was then a night-school law student clerking for Rowland, the racketeer congressman. He was Rowland"s bagman, and Rowland hired him not to read law but to make collections. Philip suspected that Albert was skimming, for he dressed sharply. He wore a derby (called, in those days, a Baltimore heater) and a camel"s-hair topcoat and pointed, mafioso shoes. Toward me, Albert was scornful. He said, "You don"t understand f.u.c.k-all. You never will."
We were approaching Winona Street, and when we got to her building she"d have no further use for me and send me away. I"d see no more than the flash of the gla.s.s and then stare as she let herself in. She was already feeling in her purse for the keys. I was no longer supporting her back, preparing instead to mutter "Bye-bye," when she surprised me with a sideward nod, inviting me to enter. I think I had hoped (with s.e.x-polluted hope) that she would leave me in the street. I followed her through another tile lobby and through the inner door. The staircase was fiercely heated by coal-fueled radiators, the skylight three stories up was wavering, the wallpaper had come unstuck and was curling and bulging. I swallowed my breath. I couldn"t draw this heat into my lungs.
This had been a deluxe apartment house once, built for bankers, brokers, and well-to-do professionals. Now it was occupied by transients. In the big front room with its French windows there was a c.r.a.p game. In the next room people were drinking or drowsing on the old chesterfields. The woman led me through what had once been a private bar-some of the fittings were still in place. Then I followed her through the kitchen-I would have gone anywhere, no questions asked. In the kitchen there were no signs of cooking, neither pots nor dishes. The linoleum was shredding, brown fibers standing like hairs. She led me into a narrower corridor, parallel to the main one. "I have what used to be a maid"s room," she said. "It"s got a nice view of the alley, but there is a private bathroom."
And here we were-an almost empty s.p.a.ce. So this was how wh.o.r.es operated-a.s.suming that she was a wh.o.r.e: a bare floor, a narrow cot, a chair by the window, a lopsided clothespress against the wall. I stopped under the light fixture while she pa.s.sed behind, as if to observe me. Then from the back she gave me a hug and a small kiss on the cheek, more promissory than actual. Her face powder, or perhaps it was her lipstick, had a sort of green-banana fragrance. My heart had never beaten as hard as this.
She said, "Why don"t I go into the bathroom awhile and get ready while you undress and lie down in bed. You look like you were brought up neat, so lay your clothes on the chair. You don"t want to drop them on the floor."
Shivering (this seemed the one cold room in the house), I began to pull off my things, beginning with the winter-wrinkled boots. The sheepskin I hung over the back of the chair. I pushed my socks into the boots and then my bare feet recoiled from the grit underfoot. I took off everything, as if to disa.s.sociate my shirt, my underthings, from whatever it was that was about to happen, so that only my body could be guilty. The one thing that couldn"t be excepted. When I pulled back the cover and got in, I was thinking that the beds in Bridewell prison would be like this. There was no pillowcase; my head lay on the ticking. What I saw of the outside were the utility wires hung between the poles like lines on music paper, only sagging, and the gla.s.s insulators like clumps of notes. The woman had said nothing about money. Because she liked me. I couldn"t believe my luck-luck with a hint of disaster. I blinded myself to the Bridewell metal cot, not meant for two. I felt also that I couldn"t hold out if she kept me waiting long. And what feminine thing was she doing in there-undressing, washing, perfuming, changing?
Abruptly, she came out. She had been waiting, nothing else. She still wore the racc.o.o.n coat, even the gloves. Without looking at me she walked very quickly, almost running, and opened the window. As soon as the window shot up, it let in a blast of cold air, and I stood up on the bed but it was too late to stop her. She took my clothes from the back of the chair and heaved them out. They fell into the alley. I shouted, "What are you doing!" She still refused to turn her head. As she ran away, tying the scarf under her chin, she left the door open. I could hear her pumps beating double time in the hallway.
I couldn"t run after her, could I, and show myself naked to the people in the flat? She had banked on this. When we came in, she must have given the high sign to the man she worked with, and he had been waiting in the alley. When I ran to look out, my things had already been gathered up. All I saw was the back of somebody with a bundle under his arm hurrying in the walkway between two garages. I might have picked up my boots-those she had left me-and jumped from the first-floor window, but I couldn"t chase the man very far, and in a few minutes 1 would have wound up on Sheridan Road naked and freezing.
I had seen a drunk in his union suit, bleeding from the head after he had been rolled and beaten, staggering and yelling in the street. I didn"t even have a shirt and drawers. I was as naked as the woman herself had been in the doctor"s office, stripped of everything, including the five dollars I had collected for the flowers. And the sheepskin my mother had bought for me last year. Plus the book, the fragment of an unt.i.tled book, author unknown. This may have been the most serious loss of all.
Now I could think on my own about the world I really belonged to, whether it was this one or another.
I pulled down the window, and then I went to shut the door. The room didn"t seem lived in, but suppose it had a tenant, and what if he were to storm in now and rough me up? Luckily there was a bolt to the door. I pushed it into its loop and then I ran around the room to see what I could find to wear. In the lopsided clothespress, nothing but wire hangers, and in the bathroom, only a cotton hand towel. I tore the blanket off the bed; if I were to slit it I might pull it over my head like a serape, but it was too thin to do me much good in freezing weather. When I dragged the chair over to the clothespress and stood on it, I found a woman"s dress behind the molding, and a quilted bed jacket. In a brown paper bag there was a knitted brown tarn. I had to put these things on. I had no choice.
It was now, I reckoned, about five o"clock. Philip had no fixed schedule. He didn"t hang around the office on the off chance that somebody might turn up with a toothache. After his last appointment he locked up and left. He didnt necessarily set out for home; he was not too keen to return to the house. If I wanted to catch him I"d have to run. In boots, dress, tarn, and jacket, I made my way out of the apartment. n.o.body took the slightest interest in me. More people (Philip would have called them transients) had crowded in-it was even likely that the man who had s.n.a.t.c.hed up my clothes in the alley had returned, was among them. The heat in the staircase now was stifling, and the wallpaper smelled scorched, as if it were on the point of catching fire. In the street I was struck by a north wind straight from the Pole, and the dress and sateen jacket counted for nothing. I was running, though, and had no time to feel it.
Philip would say, "Who was this floozy? Where did she pick you up?" Philip was unexcitable, always mild, amused by me. Anna would badger him with the example of her ambitious brothers-they hustled, they read books. You coulant fault Philip for being pleased. I antic.i.p.ated what he"d say-"Did you get in-Then at least you"re not going to catch the clap." I depended on Philip now, roi I had nothing, not even seven cents for carfare. I could be certain, however, that he wouldn"t moralize at me, he"d set about dressing me, he"d scrounge a sweater among his neighborhood acquaintances or take me to the Salvation Army shop on Broadway if that was still open. He"d go about this in his slow-moving, thick-necked, deliberate way. Not even dancing would speed him up; he s.p.a.ced out the music to suit him when he did the fox-trot and pressed his cheek to Anna"s. He wore a long, calm grin. My private term for this particular expression was p.u.s.s.y-Veleerum. I saw Philip as fat but strong, strong but cozy, purring but inserting a joking comment. He gave a little suck at the corner of the mouth when he was about to take a swipe at you, and it was then that he was p.u.s.s.y-Veleerum. A name it never occurred to me to speak aloud.
I sprinted past the windows of the fruit store, the delicatessen, the tailor"s shop. I could count on help from Philip. My father, however, was an intolerant, hasty man. Slighter than his sons, handsome, with muscles of white marble (so they seemed to me), laying down the law. It would put him in a rage to see me like this. And it was true that I had failed to consider: my mother dying, the ground frozen, a funeral coming, the dug grave, the packet of sand from the Holy Land to be scattered on the shroud. If I were to turn up in this filthy dress, the old man, breaking under his burdens, would come down on me in a blind, Old Testament rage. I never thought of this as cruelty but as archaic right everlasting. Even Albert, who was already a Loop lawyer, had to put up with the old man"s blows-outraged, his eyes swollen and maddened, but he took it. It never seemed to any of us that my father was cruel. We had gone over the limit, and we were punished.
There were no lights in Philip"s D. D. S. office. When I jumped up the stairs, the door with its blank starred gla.s.s was locked. Frosted panes were still rare. What we had was this star-marred product for toilets and other private windows. Marchek-whom nowadays we could call a voyeur-was also, angrily, gone. I had screwed up his experiment. I tried the doors, thinking that I could spend the night on the leather examining table where the beautiful nude had lain. From the office I could also make telephone calls. I did have a few friends, although there were none who might help me. I wouldn"t have known how to explain my predicament to them. They"d think I was putting them on, that it was a practical joke-"This is Louie. A wh.o.r.e robbed me of my clothes and I"m stuck on the North Side without carfare. I"m wearing a dress. I lost my house keys. I can"t get home."
I ran down to the drugstore to look for Philip there. He sometimes played five or six hands of poker in the druggist"s back room, trying his luck before getting on the streetcar. I knew Kiyar, the druggist, by sight. He had no recollection of me-why should he have? He said, "What can I do for you, young lady?"
Did he really take me for a girl, or a tramp off the srreet, or a Gypsy from one of the storefront fortune-teller camps? Those were now all over town. But not even a Gypsy would wear this blue sateen quilted boudoir jacket instead of a coat.
"I wonder, is Phil Haddis the dentist in the back?"
"What do you want with Dr. Haddis-have you got a toothache, or what?"
"I need to see him."