Back STreet (57 page)

Otherwise, there was something pretty downright frightening about the dilemma as it lengthened. One of those vicious circles, in which a person can sometimes find himself. There was a way out, of course. If everyone who found himself in the vastness of a vicious circle remained there, the world would end. A way out, of course, but one could not go on selling trinkets indefinitely. There was a well-defined limit to the trinkets. The room at Papatou’s was stripped, by now, of its “Femme Lisant” and of the bisque cherub which had swung from the chandelier of her flat for over twenty years. It had brought a franc. Because of the nick in the nose, Anna had explained. It was a dear nick in the nose. Walter had done it once, swinging his cane.…

Sitting the interminable days through, when she scarcely ventured out, except with the Babe when she was sure that Marchand, whom she feared even muzzled, was chained, she thought a lot, irrelevantly, about the nick in the nose.

It had happened one evening when he had burst into the flat after a banquet to a visiting Belgian patriot and financier, waving his cane with enthusiasm over the success of the address she had so carefully edited for him. How like a boy! There had been chopped liver for him that night, a delicacy for which she had journeyed down to a Roumanian delicatessen on Delancey Street. He had eaten far too well, of course, and in spite of the fact that after the repast he had importuned her to never again permit his overindulgence, became offended when she did remonstrate at his second cup of coffee. Dear darling … digging his grave with his teeth.…

God, one simply must not sit there, hour after hour, reliving such moments as the nick in the cherub’s nose.

The maddening continuous foreign whine of voices from the courtyard! The din that was suddenly terribly alien. She wanted home these days, with a nostalgia that was twisting. With so much in the way of the strategic next move to think about, irrelevant pictures kept cluttering up concentration. A spring afternoon at the Fifty-ninth Street entrance to Central Park, with the first buds spangling bushes. Belmont Park, with her horse running to form, and sun drenching grandstand and faces that were familiar to her.
Walter at Cape May, on a moonlit strip of beach. The cinnamon-brown velvet sofa, after the table had been dragged away, his head, tired, against her.…

“Snap out of it” was a new one she had heard the American college boys use at the Casino. Snap out of it! Yes, but how? The thing to do was to bide one’s time and the good break would come, but the biding came high. Food. Francs going out and, except for the tiny enforced sales of the tiny objects, nothing coming in.

Something sweet did come in. A letter, written in the full power of restored eyesight.

“My dearest of dear Aunts: Just because I never write anymore does not mean that you are ever far out of my mind. You lead such a gay, wandering life, that you sometimes fail to supply us, naughty dear, with sufficient address. But now that it is Aix, indefinitely, as you put it, I hasten to tell you that I love you and owe you everything and am back at my work and have had two promotions and my eyes are splendid. And from what the doctors tell me, I have every reason to feel they are permanently so.

“One of these days, no matter how little you want it, or need it, I am going to treat myself to the great joy of slipping my first one-hundred-dollar check into a long envelope that will bear the homely return address of Newcastle, Indiana. These long envelopes will reach you from time to time as I feel able, dear Aunt, so be sure and keep me advised of any change of address. Not that a hundred of them could ever really repay you, but the rest you must take in the payment of love. We are all well, and don’t forget that if you ever need a new maid or a secretary, your loving niece is eager for a glimpse of Europe.”

There was no good letting go the impulse to laugh—it would have been a horselaugh—it might have been a bray—

A strange thing happened. There was an Englishwoman, a Mrs. Meserick, who lived in a pension on a street that backed up against Ray’s, appreciably more of a commodious hostelry, except that there were railroad tracks in front of it. Sometimes they sipped vermouth together at the sidewalk table of a little sawdust-strewn
buvette
they both frequented, and on one occasion Mrs. Meserick,
pressed, had borrowed a dozen francs. Mrs. Meserick was seventy, had eked out her living from the gaming tables of the cycle of spas for fifty years, and, on the countless occasions of street mendicants approaching them, was kind, if only with sous.

The day that Ray, pressed by the prospect of having to dispose of certain objects that were almost unbearably close to her, finally sought out, in really great travail, Mrs. Meserick in her lodgings, there was a group of gamins about the sidewalk and a gendarme at the entrance to the little room.

Mrs. Meserick had died in her sleep.

She tried, in a frantic and therefore extremely unconvincing fashion, to make it understood to the gendarme, in a roomful of seemingly irrelevant people, that the deceased had owed her a dozen francs and would have wanted that sum to be paid immediately out of what was left.…

It struck her, after she had been somewhat firmly shouldered by the gendarme down the stairs, how shockingly futile and even horrible had been her demand. Fancy walking into the apartment of a dead friend in America and requesting the payment of a petty debt. Oh, she needed to be at home—she needed to be back at home to get her bearings.…

The terrible fact of the matter was that by now she was faced with the crisis of selling possessions that were not possessions at all, except in the sense that hands and knees and heartbeats are possessions. There were the silver watch that Walter had bought that day at Geneva, his gold cuff links, the pin-seal wallet, and the pair of patent-leather shoes, with the arch-supports.

They were revenue; the cuff links alone, even allowing Anatole’s rascality, would pay August’s room rent. That was important. Even with the prospect, once the tide turned, of breaking up any day for the homeward sailing, the security of the roof was important. It kept off the sniffing suspicion of Papatou that all was not on even keel. It kept the infrequency of her comings and goings unremarkable, it kept the nose of any possible suspicion of not all well, sniffing elsewhere.

Once, when she had not ventured downstairs for five days
except, when Marchand was chained, to the courtyard with the Babe, Papatou had come knocking at her door to inquire in pantomime if all was well. After that, such lapses ceased to be lapses, and became matter-of-course with Madame l’Américaine.

Madame l’Américaine was biding her time and yet biding, when, with her footsteps seeming to echo in the hollow of her head, she turned her face toward Anatole with the little silver watch from Geneva in the palm of her hand.

Walter had bought her that and buckled it around her wrist. Almost his sole personal gift to her. They had even quarreled over it and that somehow was what made it easier to part with it first. His voice, though, that in the end had been forgiving, must be prisoner in it. Next to the personal things which he himself had worn, the cuff-buttons, the wallet, the shoes, it was her dearest link to the inexpressibly dear—for sale. The meaning of my life. The power of myself to hurt. The power of myself to be glad. The sweetness of my memories. For sale. Here is my silver watch. Locked into this silver watch is something that cannot die. Anatole, if you knew that, you would not cheat.

This was rank sentimentality, the mealy self-indulgence of trading on easy emotions.

Anatole, if he knew that, would not cheat! Anatole, if he knew that, would cheat her to her very eyeballs! The way to handle Anatole was to make him understand the futility of trying to put anything over, where the value of this watch was concerned.

“Anna, tell Anatole I expect seven hundred francs for this watch. Swiss movement. Good as new!” It brought four hundred.

Four hundred francs for the watch! It had cost eight. She knew because she had bought one precisely like it for Emma. Four hundred francs. She felt like banging, one after the other, the fat cheeks of Anna, as she handed over the paltry sum. But of course one did nothing of the sort. What she did was to buy veal,
petits pains
, sugar, of which the larder had been empty for a week, alcohol for the spirit-lamp, shoes, fresh malines for a shoulder-scarf, face-powder, Castile soap, giblets for the Babe, and, hurrying home, cross the palm of Papatou with the sum total of next month’s rent.

So much for that, except that it left her, as to francs in the pocket, precisely where she had started. Then it struck her that the thing to do was to wound an already open wound, which she did by carrying the next day to Anatole the gold cuff links and the wallet, for which he brought back to her precisely the amount of the watch.

The ridiculous fancy had her in its clutch, the sentimental fancy for which she flagellated herself, that while she had the shoes, the patent-leather ones with the faint cracks across each, where his weight had pressed and his foot had curled in the walking, it really was not so bad about the watch and the cuff links. (If only you could stop crying nights!) There were the shoes! They were wrapped each in a strip of canton flannel, in the drawer of a chest that was now about empty.

Thank God, they, the shoes, were too trivial to be negotiable. The thing to do now, what with another month’s lodging clear, was to make her tiny beginning. Five francs to bring in ten. Ten, twenty. And so on, by a process which Walter had once explained to her in terms of compound interest. Countless gambling fortunes had been started that way. At the
boule
tables, too, mind you.

There was the classic story of the Frenchman, M. Poiteau, baker in a patisserie at Rouen; sent to Aix through the largesse of his employer for a cruel rheumatic complaint; placing twenty francs on the
boule
table on the first of a month, and leaving Aix six weeks later with one hundred thousand francs.

On twenty thousand francs—on ten—she could buy security from this heritage of fear. Twenty thousand francs—when there were less than four hundred in the wad of her purse underneath the pillow.

Walter—if you had only realized—you could have spared me this.…

Around that long outer
boule
table were no few grandmas of the evening! Along about eleven o’clock, in finery that hung from the racks of their shoulders, they came, in ones, along the spokes of side streets that radiated toward the Casino. They smelled of frizzled hair and old dress shields and Chianti-spots on yokes and laps that had been pressed with a too-hot iron. They were ladies, for the most part, with loose skin hanging in sacs along the underparts of their upper arms, and strong isolated hairs growing out of their chins, and cheekbones on which the pleated flesh had been laid over with rouge that squatted lightly, in the same detached fashion of the henna-dye that refused any longer to align itself with the frizzed coiffures.

They stood out in the pattern of gallant ruin around the table, no more cruelly etched, however, than the waxed, burnsided old boys who rolled their eyes to make them appear naughty, and pinched at ladies’ legs underneath the tables, to conceal their impotence. Pretentious relics of better yesterdays, most of them, in machine-stitched toupees and shirtfronts time and time again chalked over.

A frieze of old valiants with porcelain smiles, trying to hide fear of paresis with the look of seeming to still be lascivious.

Do-I-look-like-that? No. Do-I-look-like-that? No. God, what if …

The youngsters, by contrast, were what heightened the effect
of crow and crone. Fellows actually scarcely beyond the period of their first long trousers; older brothers, themselves still surprised with the dawn of down along their jowls, who had been obliged to prove their majority in order to obtain entrance. American boys with allowances or incomes or spending money. Younger brothers. A seventeen-year-old dauphin to a long-since-overturned throne. A duke’s youngest son. The twenty-year-old twins of a South American copper king. Legend had it that it was not unknown for youth on a lark to put its small brothers into their first long trousers and gain them entry here. Youth, cutting its gaming and gambling-teeth at
la boule
. The buzzing at their shoulders of the scenting bevy of cocottes.

The South American twins, restive of the traffic in petty francs, and eager to graduate to the tables of man’s estate in the rooms adjoining, played night after night to the limit of the stakes permitted, and tossed their coins like feed to sparrows.

Occasionally, among the frieze of onlookers, Ray caught one or two of them; once a ten-franc piece, which she placed and lost. It was horrible, hovering, night after night, around those South American boys, and, occasionally, at the more conservative shoulder of the duke’s youngest son, or the American boys who kept up a running and extremely local patter of colloquialisms. Red-hot mama! Hotsy-totsy! Atta-baby!

There was one, the seventeen-year-old possessor of an entrance ticket that had been maneuvered, and heir to a rubber-heel fortune that would have bought the entire principality of his running mate, the Bulgarian prince with the Oxford accent, who had a habit of clicking his fingers and exclaiming, “Hot dog, snap out of it!” at whatever turn in the tide of the affairs of this strange company of men, women, and grandchildren.

He was a crazy-haired youth, with a birthmark strewn over one cheek, and hands that seemed to fly in all directions, as he raked in his winnings before the croupier should shovel them toward him. Sometimes, to the hilarity of the onlookers, the odd chip or the odd franc flew so wildly that it struck a bystander quite willy-nilly. One night a chip danced right down Ray’s low bodice and lodged there
against the bare flesh. She fished it out, and with it, won five francs, and with the five won ten, and with the ten lost ten.

After that, she hovered chiefly in the vicinity of the willy-nilly rubber-heel prince, placing her bets cagily over his shoulder, reaching for any chance flying foam from his chips.