Back STreet (59 page)

“Get me a doctor.” No one moved. They must have thought
that was a frog croaking, from the way the voice in her felt, and so she tried to lift it, quite idiotically, she thought. “Get me a doctor—someone—”

“Madame, eet is no use. Eet is best he should be killed
immédiatement
. He suffers. Eef you will go away I will see to it that mercifully he eez—”

How you hated him. God, how you could have gored the little English-speaking skinny, even as the Babe had been gored. “Go away—you—go away, all you strange greedy faces—leave me alone—I will take him up—I will cure him.”

“Madame, you are not kind. Hear how he suffers—”

He’s bleating. He’s bleating like a little lamb. My lamb.…

“One merciful hit over the head will put him in peace.…”

You thought you were going to faint this time, sure, but the warm feeling of the blood pressing through your corsets was what revived you.

“Babe, don’t moan. They want to kill you for it. Babe, upstairs alone—you can moan. Not here. See now, you gapers! It’s all right. Everything is all right. Warm water and rags and—why, there weren’t so many gapers anymore. The wolf-dog, damn him, God damn him, was being bathed in a corner, and someone must have fainted, because there was another little knot of folk. But it’s all right—everything is coming all right. Here, you—skinny—see, I’ve got his head back on. I’m holding it on. I’ll hold it on until the doctor comes—sh-h-h, my lamb, don’t bleat. That is what will make them want to kill you. That’s what makes them faint. Don’t cry, Baby. Old man—you—the doctor—What is that?”

“This, madame, eef you will be so kind—it is a club that with one blow will put your little dog out of his misery. Madame, you must, eef you will be so kind—eef you will go—we will do this act of mercy—I myself will even do it, eef—”

“Go away! Go away! Oh, God, there was that head slipping again back into the hallucination it gave of the two mouths. Babe, do not scream so! Babe, look at me! You want them to kill you? Is the wound too terrible for you to live? Must I? No. No. No.—You see, that was a lick he gave me with his tongue! My dog licked me
with his tongue. If anybody has to kill him after that, I do! Not you. Not strangers. If I do, he’ll know it’s all right. Not you! Babe, look at me. Do you understand? My darling. My black curly innocent, have no fear. No strange hand shall do it.… Give me that club! Babe—one for the money—two for the show—three to make ready, my darling, four for to—go—”

My, how many stairs—will I ever stop falling—

The shoes lay in the empty drawer, wrapped each in its canton flannel and with an expression to them as if they had features. The left one was more streaked with lines, like a human making a grimace of pain. “Ouch,” it seemed to say. That was practically true, because, when tired, it was characteristic of Walter to bear down on his right foot in order to relieve the chronic gouty twist that resided in his left.

The sending-along the shoes would ultimately have been the simple matter it deserved to be, except for that grimace. Of all the objects that one by one had gone the way of Anatole—the cufflinks, the watch, the wallet—the shoes continued to represent the peak of anguish. Perhaps because they were the last. With them would go the tie of every tangible thing that had been Walter’s. With them would go out of the house, out of the room, out of the days grown so tormentingly quiet, the last evidence of his almost breathing presence.

He would have been the first to laugh this off. An old pair of shoes. Don’t be ridiculous. You women—God-awful sentimentalists. There was undoubtedly that aspect. You were ridiculous, sitting there in the center of the silence, as it milled around, feeling the anguish of carrying those shoes to Anatole.

There was something funny and undignified and unpretty about shoes that had been worn. And these seemed to say, in the tone she had heard a hundred times over, when the wince came, “Ouch!”

It was hateful to sit there feeling ridiculous. For two days, now, she had held out against the tightening little knot that had ceased to be active hunger and lay in an area of chill against the pit of her stomach.

The thing to do, while waiting and gathering forces for the open-and-aboveboard presentation of her situation which was to be made to one of the Americans at the Europa or Astoria, was to realize on the shoes and tide over this inertia.

The death of the Babe had been the almost irretrievable setback. The days since had taught her the insanity of daring to let anything connected with that scene nest in her memory. Things were about to move along all right once more. Just a matter, now, of mustering up the strength to get past this supreme absurdity in her inability to sell the shoes. Plenty of Americans, indeed the average, once you had the strength back and the vitality to feel chic, would be glad to tide over a countryman. His throat had been ripped until it looked like a mouth, and above the two mouths were his eyes—stop it! Stop it! All this talk about the human mind being able to stand so much and no more, nonsense! I don’t intend to let mine go—what is it the American boys around the
boule
tables call it?—ga-ga! I don’t intend to go ga-ga. Not much.

What if one could sell one shoe and keep the other that was saying “Ouch”? There was comedy for you! Sell one shoe and keep the other that was saying “Ouch”! I can’t give them up. I can’t give them up. I can’t give them up in the morning. If you sang it like that, to the tune of “I can’t get them up, I can’t get them up, I can’t get them up in the morning”—there was a laugh in that.

It was not that she felt hungry; there was only the chilly knot. But one had to eat; all there was to it. For two days now, six meals in all, there had been only the milky water left over from boiled rice. Extraordinary to have thought to save that. Loathsome, as it went down, but undoubtedly nutritious. Or was starchy water bad for one? You dared not even think of it one way or another toward the third day, because of the feeling of the throat closing against it like a heavy door. Besides, it did not do to let that tinge of Chinese yellow creep into the eyeballs and against the skin.

Fool. Idiot. The shoes themselves, lying there in that drawer, in lieu of the good hot soup, the fromage, the
petits pains
, the sale would bring, must be crinkling with the laughter of ridicule.

At two o’clock of the fourth afternoon, because it seemed to her that what she had awakened out of, with her arms outstretched, and her head lying on the table into them, was more of a prolonged faint than a nap, she carried the shoes to Anatole who, two hours later, returned her six francs. Three francs each.

This was the first time in all her life that anything of such a nature had happened to her, and, please God, it would never happen again.

The affair with Anna and Anatole had made her nervous. Fancy their daring to jeer her out of the shop that way, when she protested at the six francs, and in the very face of the loiterers and drinkers at the tables in the
buvette
next door. That in itself was sufficiently shattering to cause to happen what did. That and those silly indigestible buns, with raisins poked in, that had caught her famished fancy as she passed the patisserie. The buns were heavy and made her feel sick, even as they went down, but now was not the time to be fastidious. The Americans to whom she intended appealing would be kinder if she looked a bit chic and well-nourished. Life was like that. The same way, you could hope for a handout of francs at the Casino, chiefly if you looked as if you did not need them.

Anyway, it was the combined nervousness and the indigestibility of the buns. At two o’clock, in the dead of night, she had awakened suddenly, and all on the instant realizing that the warm lump of the Babe was not at her feet, and that the drawer in the chest was now empty of the shoes, there had gone, curdling through the stilly decorum of Papatou’s, great spinning spirals of cries, one topping the other, thinner and higher, like mounting rope before it hurls out to become a lasso.

“Oh, my God,” she cried, sitting up in the dark and slapping
her hand with great force against her mouth, “this is terrible. Stop! Stop!” And still she could not, and still the cries kept mounting, and with them horror of the self who was creating this perfectly dreadful commotion.

It was unthinkable to cry out like that in the strange night of a strange country, and worse to keep on, even after there were steps in the corridor, and, worst of all, she could not stop.…

“The banging against the door will help me,” she kept moaning in her mind, as the cries kept mounting and the banging sounding. They were like the slaps, those bangs, which you administer to a strangling infant, and presently, as the banging continued, the yells did subside. They were the most terrifying and confusing sounds, these, emanating from herself, she had ever heard. Even after they had subsided, it was as if she sat huddled there in bed in the midst of a silence that had been terribly shattered. Lunatic-sounding and resounding noises lay strewn about the place in a silence that was almost more unbearable than the ripping sound the cries had made as they left her head.

“What have I done? Oh, you—out there—it’s all right. Everything is all right. Very well, I’ll open the door. You must forgive it, please. You see, I dream sometimes. Won’t you come in?” This was terrible. They were seeing her with her face all toothless, and the old brown wrapper flung on over her nightgown was really by now quite a sight. When once taffeta silk begins to split …

There was Papatou in a night-rig of striped underwear and a pointed cap that was enough to wring a laugh out of even her horror, and the half-dressed figure of the boy who had always worried her so on the Babe’s account, a couple of dim figures from rooms down the hallway, and, holding a lamp so that it showed her stocky and enormously muscular figure, which was attired in a one-piece chemise of unbleached muslin, Madame Papatou.

My, she was terrific. Thewed like a short-necked ox, muscles coiled in the calves of her legs and the uppers of her arms, sixty-five if a day, the color and texture of red soil, rain-washed.

“Excuse it, won’t you, please? I must have had a bad dream.
Mal rêve
.”

What were they saying to her—of her? The voice of Madame Papatou, filled with questioning grunts: “
Voilà madame, qu’est-ce qu’il y a? Êtes-vous malade? Rêvez-vous? Qu’est-ce qu’il y a avec vous à cette heure de la nuit?
”

Papatou, his old fat stomach bulging in his ridiculous underwear, and his eyes unnice, as they roved the torn places of her robe and gown. The dim eyes of the curious, hanging like faintly lit grapes in the background. Oh, my God, were they thinking her crazy? …

“I’m ever so sorry, Madame Papatou.
Je suis triste
. Dream.
Rêve. Je ne suis pas malade, comprenez-vous? Mon petit chien—je pleure pour mon petit chien
—my dog—I weep for him—”

They had wept with her, that day in the courtyard, this strange assorted mixture. Grief should be a great leavener. “Je
suis triste, mes amis
—sad—I am sad
—mon petit chien—mon pauvre petit chien
—my heart hurts while I sleep—and I cry out—
pardonnez-moi—
”

They were kind, these strange alien faces, behind which thoughts went on in a language not her own, and to whom she was as mysterious as they to her, Madame Papatou even remaining after the others, to knead with her terrific hands, in a vigorous massage along her body.

“
Bien, madame, n’est-ce pas?
Good.
N’est-ce pas?
Goo-od.”

“
Oui. Oui. Bien, madame
, but a little lighter—please—”

“
Bien, madame?
”

“Oh,
très
good,
madame
. But I—
je suis
—much better—ouch!”

“
Bien, n’est-ce pas?
”

“Yes. Yes.” If only she would stop kneading. Those terrific fingers working into the hollows of her neck, along her thighs, under the very vertebrae of her spine. “Ouch—please—”

“
Bien, n’est-ce pas?
”

“
Oui
. Oh, my God, not so hard—”

“
Bien, n’est-ce pas?
”

“
Oui
, but—”

“
Bien?
”

Of course, to have forgotten! What lack of diplomacy, when of all times her rent was beginning once more to be due in a week, it
was unwise to let the slightest duress show itself. There was a franc and ten centimes in her purse.

“Here, Madame Papatou,
merci bien
.”

“
Bien, madame. Merci. Bon soir.
” The terrific Papatou, placated, slipping the coins into the pocket of the chemise, taking up her lamp and going. “
Bien, Madame—maintenant vous restez bien.
”

This was no good. Nights like this took it out of one. There began a parade through the mind. Playing jacks on the Auths’ steps in Baymiller. A boy named Charley Schermer, who had once sprung upon her from Clagmeyer’s alley, as she passed it one day when she was scarcely more than eleven, and said unmentionable things to her. Adolph’s fat knee, which had jounced her up and down on it, detaining her with caresses, when she was eager to be off to play. Kurt’s nearsighted blue eyes, desiring her. The small old-fashioned rocker, in which her mother had loved to sew, and which Tagenhorst had spirited off to Youngstown. The low gleaming of Cincinnati, beheld through the two smokes of twilight and factory, from a spot on Walnut Hills called Ingleside. The hum of the hazard-wheel in a back room, Over-the-Rhine. Hamilton, Ohio, as you stepped off the C. H. and D. into a drab red station. Voices at night along the canal. Woodward High at noon, when boys awaited you at the corner. A drummer in Wielert’s asking you if you were innocent. The fatty look to Freda’s face, as it lied about the baby. The Stag Hotel, with fresh window boxes of bachelor’s buttons, as she had passed it one spring afternoon, wearing the last word in a piqué skirt, the new “rainy day” length. The barrel figure of Adolph, singing at Turnverein. Walter, the night he had come bearing the Babe in the hamper.…