Back STreet (52 page)

It often happened that way. How frequently you could hear a widow refer to the loss of her husband and son all within a brief period, or a widower recite the quick and unexpected demise of a wife, followed by a son or daughter.

Death often chose visitations like that. Catastrophes could sometimes seem to come in schools, like porpoises around a ship. Corinne was bereft of a son now. Corinne and Ray were bereft of Richard and Walter. All within a quarter of a year.

Strangely, it was not until she reached home, sodden with perspiration that had drenched her, that another aspect of this terrible tragedy of the beauty and youth of a boy came flooding over her.

As she dumped the contents of her purse onto the table, there dropped out, among the miscellany of keys and a powder puff, two twenty-dollar bills and exactly sixty-eight cents in change. The remains of that first and what was to be the last deposit of the plain envelope into her letter box downstairs.

This time there was procrastination neither with herself, nor with her situation.

Within the fortnight, the pale blotches from removed pictures were everywhere on the walls, the windows uncurtained, and all the little objects labeled “elephants,” “tinkle-bells,” “Eiffel Tower,” packed into a wooden case, labeled “Mrs. Hugo Hanck, 1221 Topeka Avenue, Youngstown, Ohio.”

The thing to do until she got her bearings was to store away these trinket treasures in Freda’s attic. The cost of the slow freight seemed prohibitive, more than their value, but there was something about the sense of them tucked away safely in the top floor of that small house on that stale street in Youngstown, that seemed, utterly without congruity, to make them more definitely her own. The absurdity of the idea of anything tucked away in the attic of such a house being dear or special to anyone besides herself, made it more comforting. And out of the throes of such a move, any bit that brought its modicum of comfort, helped.

The day the dealers came was worse. Fourteen dollars for the cinnamon-colored velveteen divan with the high back, like the hunch of a camel. With its solid-walnut frame and hair-stuffings it must easily have cost Walter two hundred.

“Aren’t you ashamed to make such an offer for a handsome piece like that?”

“It’s out-of-date and the springs are broken and it has to be recovered. Take it or leave it.”

In the end she took. The folding-bed with the inset desk, three dollars. The extension-table with its timbers crowded with what must have been memories of the countless meals eaten off it, four dollars. Jardinière and rubber plant, whose glossy leaves she had bathed in milk for years, seventy-five cents. Dutch oven for Walter’s pot roasts, twenty cents. It had cost six dollars in Macy’s basement. Three mahogany chairs, two dollars and a half, each. Small rocker, one dollar. Nine-by-twelve Axminster rug, five dollars. Pair of china, gilt and flowered cuspidors, fifty cents. One china oil-lamp with globe which she had painted with yellow roses, fifty cents. One onyx-and-gilt table, one dollar. One cut-glass punch bowl, glass reflector, and eleven punch-glasses, two dollars. One gentleman’s mission chiffonier, five dollars. Bedding, two dollars. One large shaving-mirror, with strop, fifty cents. One carpet-sweeper, fifty cents. One antler’s horn chair (curiosity), fifty cents. Inlaid teak-wood taboret, fifty cents.

The galvanized washtub of kitchen utensils she divided between Mrs. Hopper and one of the West Indian houseboys, whose wife was going to have a baby.

One morning that smelled of October, as she sat, in her hat and feather boa, on the packing case marked Youngstown, the expressman came and literally moved it out from under her, leaving her alone in the now empty flat, with the Babe and a round-topped trunk.

There were a stack of neatly piled newspapers and an old art catalogue in a corner, an empty hatbox or two, too pretty in their flowered-paper coverings to toss away, and a coffeepot with only the tiniest of leaks. Otherwise she had swept out and left clean the vacated premises, polishing the windows with a dry cloth and drawing even the shades.

It was like sitting in the middle of last night’s dream—or nightmare. What remained of Walter was crammed in the tiny mementoes of a pair of gold link cuff-buttons she had found in the corner of a drawer of his chiffonier, a leather wallet with his monogram in
gold, a pair of his shoes, patent-leather made-to-order ones, with steel arch-supporters, all packed into the round-topped trunk. The remainder of his effects of clothing and whatnot of articles, she had divided between the delicatessen boy and the West Indian whose wife was going to have a baby.

The green walls, covered with the square pale eyes where had hung pictures, stared down at her as she stood there, the Babe and the trunk waiting beside her. Strangest of all was the absence of the counter-tickings of the small clocks, quite terrible in fact, that kind of silence, like the silence of a stopped heart.

Finally, the local expressman came for the trunk, and with only the look-back of one going to the corner, she followed, with the Babe, by taxicab, to the furnished room which she had found, by way of a
Times
advertisement, in an apartment over a Cushman bakery on Columbus Avenue, in the Seventies.

It was a bright-enough room, with two good-sized windows looking onto the side street, and the mirror to the dresser reflecting light. The bed was one of those sleeping couches that under their invariable green rep covers take on the look of prehistoric monsters. Within a half hour after she moved in, she had received two towels, a face and a Turkish, from Mrs. Cleveland, her landlady, and deposited twenty-five cents against a doorkey. Within the hour, the round-topped trunk had been unpacked, her German-silver toilet-set spread on top of the dresser, a few of the knickknacks she had salvaged arranged on the mantel, her dresses, coats, and hats hung in the shallow closet, and Emma’s picture, in communion-dress, placed on the table.

There remained in the trunk some of the bed linen, some of her underwear, and, in the tray, Walter’s shoes, the cuff links, and the wallet. By then it was time to go out and purchase sliced beef-liver for the Babe, which she prepared over her traveler’s spirit-lamp. He sat up for his food quite cunningly by now, yapping each time she let a tidbit fall into his mouth; but the very first day someone in the room adjoining rapped sharply against the wall, and since there had been quite a discussion over the matter of the Babe when she
engaged the room, thereafter she saw to it that his food was fed to him in a dish on the floor.

It was after this half-day of the chores of adjustment that a sense of absolutely nothing to do set in. There was something about this room, nice enough after its fashion, which gave one, however, the sense of a damp bathing suit donned at dawn. It was a room in which you stood about, rather than sat. When footsteps passed her door, she stood tense until they died. Usually they were bound for the bathroom at the end of the hall. The plunge of water into the bathtub was a sound to be heard all over the apartment. Entering the bathroom, the hot steam of somebody else’s bath usually smote one. After a while she acquired the technique of its use. Before eight in the morning, and after ten at night, were the best times to avoid the constant turning of the doorknob.

At first, the difficulty about going to the races every day was the Babe. It had been one matter to leave him alone at home in the flat, where he knew his cozy basket in the bedroom, his dish of water in the bathroom, his place on the cushion under the living-room table. It was a different matter leaving him here. It was as if the Babe also found no rest in that room, wandering about and usually ending by raising himself on his hind legs and scratching against her skirt, to be lifted.

A trunk store on Columbus Avenue, where she purchased, at a reasonable price, a wicker hamper with a cushioned bottom and a drinking-cup attachment, helped solve that.

It was a simple matter now, thus avoiding the rulings of trains and streetcars against dogs in arms, to take the Babe along. As a matter of fact, he came to be quite a figure at Belmont and Aqueduct, the women regulars and even the commissioners, stuffing him with sweets until Ray was forced to take a hand, forbidding.

Now there came to her the opportunity to put into practice her theory, often expounded to Walter, that there was a way to “beat the races.” Too modest, it is true, in its results, for most frequenters to bother about, but just the same, if you studied your favorite, bet on one or never more than two events, pocketed your winnings or
swallowed your loss, letting it go at that, you were fairly sure of a margin of small winnings by the end of the season.

The petty followers testified to that. Men and women, with taut faces, it is true, snide sport finery, nervous twitchings to their hands, dust-gray skins, voices raucous from shouting orders to favorites, but, just the same, the track their sole means of support.

Every morning at eleven o’clock, to avoid Mrs. Cleveland’s knowing her affairs, or she might have sent the chambermaid, Ray slid on a coat over her nightdress and scurried to a certain neighborhood stationer’s where her racing form was saved for her. It was no small technique, this studying of the day’s layout. Allowing for last-minute scratches, which were bothersome, these daily sheets, together with certain sources upon which the habitués relied, were an important part of the technique of playing the races as a business rather than a game. Women, forbidden access to the paddock, could not count on the added advantage of that last-minute opportunity to go down and inspect a horse closely, size up his legs and general condition, pick up the patter close to the post. But, in the main, there was a tight camaraderie among the day-by-day petty habitués. The women in particular, the lean-looking plucked birds of a shabby sort of elaborate grandeur, formed small flocks. You could invariably find them in the same section of the grandstand, buttonholing, trafficking in “tips,” marking up their scorecards, and then, as each race began to go its rounds, mounting their chairs, shouting, imploring or deploring as the case might be, and the terrible famished bird-look out in their faces, as the necks of the flying horses began to strain for place.

They were a heterogeneous hard-put bunch, who used “God damn” and “son-of-a-bitch” and “pimp” and “lousy” with frequency and lustiness that at first had been startling. Not all of them, though. There were fantastic and often incredible life-stories tucked under the elaborate coiffures of many of these ladies of the grandstand. Dimmed ladies of the evening. Conventional wives and mothers paying off secret debts. Grandmothers whiling away time of day. Ex-wives, widows, and sweethearts of deceased bookmakers. The
“family hotel” idle group, for that money-on-the-side. Then the life-and-deathers.

It was probably in this last category that Ray belonged. It was grim business with her. You bet ten, thoughtfully, having studied your horses with caution and a very certain attention to points. You hoped for only a fair return on your money. If it came, you called it a day, sitting about with admirable restraint, watching the suckers. If it failed, you ventured one more bet, taking your licking with finality, or your success with a sense of relief that made you realize how pinching had been your anxiety.

Sometimes, if the day yielded unusually well, she remained away for as much as a week, but chiefly to relax and freshen up her mind. It was not unpleasant at the grandstand, pleasanter certainly than in the room that never ceased to feel like the damp bathing suit donned at dawn.

For the first months, with ups and downs, on an initial capital of something like one hundred and ninety dollars, she remained consistently ahead of the game, sufficiently so to cover rent and food, and showing something like an average profit, after admission fees, of five or six dollars a day.

Not bad. It kept the mind agog, the horrible demon of loneliness from squatting too heavily on her chest; and, now that her schedule no longer demanded her presence anywhere at any time, it was possible, with one or two of the cronies garnered from the grandstand, to while away an evening at an Italian table d’hôte, or go occasionally to a musical show in one of the first-run Broadway houses.

Then came the shift of season; and, like homing birds, the grandstand women, along with the usual touts, runners, bookmakers, jockeys, owners, habitual followers, turned their faces south. Louisville, New Orleans, Latonia, Miami.

The first time it all seemed too difficult. She not only dreaded the expenditure of railroad fare, the problem of travel for Babe, but there was something went against her grain about leaving New York at this time. Walter was buried there. Without ever having been
near, she knew where, to the fraction of a mile, and, beside him, in a grave almost as new, Richard. She would no more have ventured there! But just the same, something was closer to her than it would be in Louisville, or New Orleans, or even in Covington, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.

It was sinful to feel like that. All that was near you was the clay of Walter. The pitiful disintegrating clay; and yet, lying there in that room over the Cushman bakery of Columbus Avenue, the Babe at her feet, the darkness oppressing her, it was somehow less horrible to think of him lying out there than it would seem from the distance of another city. Not infrequently she woke to a sense of fingers stroking her face. Pollywoggles she called it, crushing her face back into her pillow to recapture sleep.

But in December, after she had vainly tramped the streets in answer to various advertisements for salesladies, tea-room cashiers, wholesale milliners, insurance agents, and the margin of her reserve funds, a source of constant concern to her, began to narrow, she negotiated a checking-out arrangement with Mrs. Cleveland, whereby she was permitted, more for a sense of anchorage than anything else, to keep a valise of odds and ends at the Columbus Avenue address, and purchased transportation for herself and the Babe to New Orleans.

That was the beginning of years of the rounds of the lean-faced woman with the graying hair that had long since lost its receptivity to henna dyes, and her black French poodle. New York. Latonia. Louisville. Miami. New Orleans. New York.