Back STreet (55 page)

All day, from the crack of dawn, when the first sulphurous fumes began to rise from the bathhouse, she stood on her widespread bare feet, her stubby body nude, except for a loincloth of wrapped calico, shoulders sweating, hard nutlike breasts still with something of firm Greek beauty left them, horizontally hung onto that terrific old frame, kneading into human flesh.

Half the night she sat in the adobe kitchen of blackened walls, concocting and eating Italian and Greek foods and drinking Chianti, with Papatou, whose feet, when he sprawled them, reached more than two-thirds of the room. Most of the time, though, they rested, bare, in the snarled wool of Marchand, a huge and dirty wolf-dog, who constantly wore a muzzle, because of ferociousness.

There was a great-grandmother too. One of those Italian peasant women who marched through a century of years as if it were a tunnel, blackening them. The gamins about the street called her Ra-Ta-Plan, probably for no more relevant reason than that she stumped about on a wooden leg in lieu of the one she had lost in childbirth, back in those incredible years when that body must still have had fecundity. She was supposed to be one hundred and four years old. Her flesh, which seemed as if you could crumple it to dark powder between your fingers, looked it, but with Madame Papatou all day at the Thermal Establishment, and Papatou, in his oiled mustache, wanting all day to paw the women in the marketplaces and courtyards, she did an enormous amount of housework. She would have done Ray’s room too, but something about her was more repulsive than the carrying of her own slops, so by the end of the first year Ray had established the precedent of caring for her own quarters.

And what quarters. Not so bad, however, once you became adjusted, and there was the feather-bed luxury of an enormous four-poster, and furniture of a terrific weight and proportion, that made you wonder how it had ever been tilted through the narrow halls and doorways. Great-grandmother must have remembered, because she had been a young child in that house, but her mind was a ragtag.

At first, Papatou’s, where she had to scuttle through black halls, that were tunnels, to an outhouse, and where her allotment of water was lugged up three flights by a pervert neighborhood boy, from whose unmentionable desires she had even to protect the Babe, had at first seemed terrible, then bad, finally not so bad.

There was a patch of courtyard in which the Babe could run, while, high in her rooms, even though Marchand was muzzled day
and night, she sat beside the window to keep watch over him. Considering the fact that, in her heart, Madame Papatou carried venom of a jealous and vindictive sort for the Americans and English into whose flesh she had kneaded away practically her lifetime, there was little cause for complaint in that direction.

She was home so little, and then, too, the seeming impregnability of the ear of Ray to foreign languages was rather more of a phenomenon than a remarkable facility of acquisition might have been. With the patter of French and Italian rising all day from the courtyard, Papatou and Ra-Ta-Plan dickering in French, Italian, and Greek, tradespeople in top-of-the-voice sidewalk-conferences, she knew little more than the key words of greeting, passing the hour of day, food names, and elementary servant orders that she had already acquired during the lifetime of Walter.

In a way, particularly now since her months-old decision to return to the States, it was as if she had closed her mind and ears to as much as possible of the tintinnabulation of any tongue save her own. It became a manifestation, this stubborn adherence to her own language, of nostalgia. The tiny
épicerie
where she purchased the major portion of her provisions was run by an
ex-femme-de-chambre
at the Hotel Splendide, who spoke English quite fluently and had married a
valet-de-chambre
. Many of the petty tradespeople in this tiny cosmopolis, which drew its guests from over the face of the world, spoke English in one halting fashion or another.

You lived along all right on English. You lived along all right in general, and all the while it was miraculous that you lived along at all. The margin was so narrow. And yet, withal, there was pride in this admission. In all the stinting, incredibly alone months, she had never, not even counting the traveling expenses of the trip to Nice, fallen below the twenty-five-hundred-franc mark, and that, if you have ever known the bright madness that can overtake certain moments at the gaming table, was achievement. Not once, when the impulse to place just another franc on a color that sure as fate could no longer continue to elude, was perilously near being stronger than she was, had she let slip the iron chain of will which separated her by the margin of twenty-five hundred francs from the
kind of cleanup that sent men and women walking away, even from the petty
boule
tables, with that God-awful look of no destination in their eyes. Not once, mind you! Not even that first year, when she had made the trip to Nice, and it had looked for the moment as if there she were going to recoup the thousand that Ed had won for her.

Not once; but if only, alas, that night at Nice, when the shaven-headed, saber-scarred young baron from Heidelberg had kept shoving her the one-hundred notes every time he took a haul—if only that night she had not been content to stop at the five-hundred-franc mark!

But Walter would have played it that way. Walter would have wanted it that way. It was the safe and conservative way. But the next morning there had been an item in the paper commenting on the spectacular haul of this young baron. It seemed that after she had left the Casino, at one o’clock, following a sag in his luck, he had rebounded again, enormously. That night at Nice, with a little less caution, she might have canceled these subsequent months of—well, of near-horror. They had been that.

Long, lonesome stinting months between seasons, when the Casino and the larger hotels were closed, and wet damp intervals descended upon the little town of Aix, making it seem moody as a pregnant woman. Cold-to-the-bone months in that period when it had become no longer practicable for her to follow a season even so far as Nice; cold-to-the-bone months of sitting in her high-shouldered room over a brazier that held burning charcoal, living, cooking, shopping bits of meat for the Babe, whose appetite was growing finicky, as his teeth began to go, dreading the cold trips through the hallways in a house that boasted not one pipe of plumbing, and always, always, making out on the budget that was figured to the franc. So many of them a day, or, if one more today, than one less tomorrow. Intricate bookkeeping, which had to see to it, come opening day of the Casino, that over and above the twenty-five hundred francs stored in her stocking there remained sufficient to start her off at
boule
.

The clothes were a nuisance. She had a horror of ever taking on,
even remotely, the look of the flocks of grandmas-of-the-evening who, like fabled birds of some fabled ether, lit from nowhere and crowded for crumbs around the tables ruled by croupiers. They came with the seasons, honeycombing the pensions, out of sight by day, and venturing out by night in the dreadful finery of mended lace, splitting taffetas, shawls with gaps in the fringe, rhinestones on wrinkles, sequins on old flesh. Women without any more fertility left, whose breasts had shrunk and hung with the flesh dredged, as if water had flowed down a clay hill.

A curious, terribly afraid, terribly avid army, asking desperately, each of herself, as she beheld the other: “Do I look like that? No! A man might still feel himself glad to sleep with me. No! If only I had the clothes.…”

If only I had the clothes! To Ray, her brown net dress with the spangled bolero had come to feel like a scab. Horrid, lusterless, the rows of the sewed-on sequins like the tired eyes of tired women, desperately fending off sleep. It was still neat enough, it was still, underneath the invisible patchings, sufficiently presentable to admit her to the Casino as a lady of the tables, but its brownness was horrible to her. And yet, season after season, a yard of fresh malines fluffed up across bare shoulders upon which the powder sat dryly, sequin purse on her arm, lips rouged and lifted back off a porcelain smile to which she had long since become accustomed, this rig constituted, along with her “season card,” right to admission to the elaborate halls of her livelihood.

“Do I look like them, Babe? No. No.” Standing in her room that smelled of the breath of old bodies, decked out for the third consecutive year in the brown lace, that antedated, by another brace of years, her dinner to Ed Hofmeister in Cincinnati, staring at herself in her gaslit mirror, it seemed to her most surely that she did not. A man could do worse! Only yesterday a Frenchman in spats had bought her a glass of port and a package of cigarettes. There had been brown stains on his dirty goatee, but he had rolled his eyes and beckoned backward toward some rooms that were notorious in the town. Repulsive as a crow to her, but it just went to show that there was still life in the old bones. Good life.

She could not very well explain that to the Frenchman with the soiled goatee. She could, however, say it to herself in the night—in the silence of the room at the pension, the Babe wrapped in sleep at her feet.

She could, she must, say it to herself, when finally the days came to be, each one of them, like the black, stripped trees along the promenade in winter, which, one by one, she had to pass on her way to the
épicerie
, in order to buy food in order to live.…

“Pouf!” as Papatou used to shout when deeply in his cups. Pouf! You could hear him over the courtyard, with his terrific voice, like a dishpan that had been struck with a broom handle. Pouf! Pouf!
L’univers est ma mondaine. J’ai eu toute ma part de la chair de la femme. Si tu ne croies pas, chérie, que je suis encore homme, viens avec moi
.… If you do not believe, chérie, that I am any longer a man, come with me.…

“Pouf” was how it happened to Ray. “Pouf,” she kept saying to herself in terrible befuddlement directly it had happened. “Pouf,” just like that.

It could not be, and yet it was. The evidence lay in the certain and evil flatness along the upper part of the rear of the calf of her leg. Feel as she would with her instep, where should have been the neat wad of the margin of twenty-five hundred francs, tucked there into a folded handkerchief, was only flatness.

Pouf! It had all happened in less than it took Papatou to shout it.

It was gala night. One of those occasions, frequent during the season, when the villas and large hotels send down to the Casino brilliant contingents for dancing and dining and entertainment in the forepart of the evening, before the gaming begins. A prime minister was entertaining a dinner table of forty. A maharajah and his American bride had taken a table for one hundred.

It was the kind of evening when the milling color and movement made it possible to venture, even if she owned no club card, into the large salons, without the attendants, most of whom she knew and many of whom she dreaded, eying her out.

Usually on the gala nights which each season offered, she could ooze her way around the chemin de fer or baccarat tables of the grand salon, there to stand for hours, peering above the bare, jeweled shoulders of women, and the blackcloth backs of men, at the spectacle of the turning of a card, or the croupier’s passing of a “shoe,” which could point the faces of men and women, point their eyes and lips, and actually their ears.

She never, of course, ventured here anymore to place stakes. The
boule
tables reserved for the petty players and the minors who managed their way in by methods all their own, were her limit.

But to gate-crash her way in there to watch a California grower of citrus fruits lose twenty thousand francs as if it were so much carfare, or the jeweled blonde of a black Nicaraguan rake in thirty thousand with an arm banked solidly to the elbow in diamonds and rubies, was an excitement that never seemed to lose its edge.

That instant before the card flipped from the little box called “shoe,” faces did curious revealing things. The hinges of the jaws loosened, lines crawled out of secret places of the flesh, eyes became slits and slits became eyes. Souls stalked out. They did! At the flipping of the card you could see them flash, banshees among the erstwhile gravestones of the gambling faces, quick, lightning-quick, and then back into the tomb of the gambling-hearts. Then the faces began the pulling-down of the shades, of the eyelids, the straightening of the mouths, the scurrying back of the momentarily revealing wrinkles, the pinkening of the pallors.

There was that Heidelberger again! Shades of Nice, the baron with the shaved head and the cuts all over it and the monocle and the unmistakable air of a man whose heels would click together when he kissed a woman’s hand. He had slid into a chair just vacated directly in front of Ray on her tiptoes, peering; and almost immediately his luck began to be conspicuous, as it had been that night at Nice, after she had left too soon.

Well, here was opportunity doing the unprecedented. Here it was, knocking twice. The first time she had committed the sickening sin of conservatism at the wrong moment. Yes, here it was again. Heidelberg from the very start holding the deal, or leaning in on somebody else’s. Forty thousand francs in ten minutes! Eighty thousand in twenty! One hundred thousand in the half hour! Heidelberg, with no more than a glance at the system chart in the palm of his hand, winning twenty thousand on his twenty-thousand stake. Then three times in succession, nine, nine, nine! Eighty thousand! One hundred thousand in ten minutes! In all her experience, she had never seen it happen. This was the way banks were supposed to be broken in the more spectacular meadows of Monte Carlo, where roulette spun fortunes fastest of all. One hundred and ten thousand francs! One hundred and forty! The crowd, by who knows what subterranean telepathy, was leaving the other tables and pressing harder at her back, and the croupier, whom she knew as M. Topaze, had receded to three little downward slits, mounted on pallor. Two eyebrows and a tiny waxed mustache. One hundred and seventy—eighty—