Place in the City (11 page)

“Leave me alone.”

“Aw, honey, now what are you afraid of? I won't hurt you. You know that.”

“Get away.”

“You're sore because I'm drunk,” Danny pleaded. “It's not my fault. Timy says the smartest lawyer in town got a right to get drunk. Geesus, Timy's drunk himself.”

She whimpered again, moved an arm feebly. Tenderly, Danny drew part of a sheet over her, to cover her nakedness. He didn't think it right that his wife should lie in bed naked, with men walking in and out of the room.

“Turn over, baby,” he whispered. “I'm your husband.”

“No—”

“Turn over,” he said sternly. “I'm your husband, and what I say goes. Once and for all, what I say goes. See, I'm not drunk. Just listen to the way I talk. Listen to my ss. Ssssss—Baby, turn over.”

“What—what?”

“I'm your husband. You heard me.”

“He's dead—dead.”

“I'm dead? Just look at me.”

She turned over then, slowly, groaning, and looked at him. Then she screamed, and he remembered that his wife's name was Alice, that this wasn't Alice. The woman continued to scream.

“Get away!” she cried.

Throwing open the door, he ran across the hall toward Timy. Once he fell, but he was up again in an instant.

“You bastard,” he yelled, “where's my wife?”

Timy looked at him and grinned. “Easy, Danny,” he said.

“Your wife ain't here. What'd she be doin' here?”

“Where's my wife?”

They came from all over the hall.

“Take it easy, Danny.”

“Whadda yu want yu wife tonight fur?”

“Take a drink, Danny.”

“Sure.”

“Better take him home, Timy.”

“Sure—sure—sure—”

“You don' wanna cry, Danny. What th' hell yu cryin' about?”

W
HEN
Alice came home, her mother and father were waiting. As she entered the room, Meyer looked at her: first, she thought that he looked at her, and then she saw that he was looking through her, and then she wondered whether he saw her at all. Something had happened. She was deliriously happy, but she could not help noticing that Meyer was old. All in one evening, her father had become an old man, her mother too. Maybe they knew. Just for an instant it occurred to her that they knew, and then she realized how impossible it was, how quickly the entire thing had happened. They couldn't know.

“Where were you?” he mother asked her. Meyer saw nothing, but Bessie saw. Bessie saw that her cheeks were flushed, her eyes shining. The cold might flush her cheeks, but it would not make her eyes shine. Her little girl was happy; that, she knew. Happy. “Where were you, darling?” she repeated.

Then she noticed the band of gold. As Alice pulled off her gloves, unthinkingly, her eyes fell on it. Both looked at it, and then both looked at Meyer, who saw nothing.

Bessie felt a cold, dull pain bite into her heart. Instinctively, she knew everything. Now, everything seemed to her to be a thread, cut off in the middle. Her daughters were gone. True, Alice was one, but in the same way, the others would go. Thus, Apple Place claimed everything. It was over.

Ever so slightly, she shrugged her shoulders. You felt so much that after a while you felt nothing at all—nothing. It went, and then all that remained was a dull gnawing deep in your heart.

“You were with Danny,” Bessie said, stating a fact.

“Yes—I was with Danny.”

Meyer slowly woke to life. Here was something concrete; here was something he could lay his finger upon; here was something he could make into an issue.

“Alice!”

She dropped into a chair, shrugged her shoulders, and looked from one to the other. Now it would begin, but after all, what difference did it make? She was no longer theirs; she was Danny's. They wouldn't understand, ever. So she simply sat there, looking from one face to another, from her father's, drawn, contorting with rage, to her mother's dulled, knowing, understanding without understanding. Then she wanted to say:

“Mother—give me what you couldn't have.”

In that way, her mother understood without understanding. Only deep in her heart, Bessie felt the pain, knowing that things had come to an end.

“Alice!” Meyer roared again, pointing a trembling finger at her.

“Yes—?”

“Alice, where were you?”

“I was with Danny,” she said wearily. “I told you before that I was with Danny. What do you want me to say?”

“Have I ever told you not to go with that rotten goy? Are you my daughter, or are you a stranger? Do you listen to me—or is my voice something to laugh at?”

“I think I'm old enough—”

“Answer me one thing! Are you my daughter?”

“Meyer,” Bessie said.

“Don't give me Meyer now! All my life, I hear Meyer! Am I a slave? Answer me that! Am I a slave even in my own house? Good! Good! Then the whole world spits on me! My daughter spits on me! My wife spits on me! I'm not even as big as a cockroach!”

“Meyer, don't shout,” Bessie pleaded.

“No, no—maybe someone will hear me! Me, I'm not decent enough to be heard, even in my own house. But my daughter runs around with goyim.”

“Let her explain—let her explain,” his wife begged. “Should you yell at her like that, like she's a baby? Let her explain, Meyer.”

“Sure, sure, let her explain! Me—I shouldn't say a word, but let her explain. This Danny is like a glove for Timy's hand. I don't know? Maybe I don't know? Maybe I stand in the store and listen all day for nothing? Maybe when the pimps and the gamblers and the whores and the gangsters come in, I don't hear what they say? Maybe I am deaf and dumb and too stupid to know anything at all!”

“Meyer—nobody said you were stupid.”

“Then I should thank you, huh? Because you didn't say I was stupid. But about this Danny I shouldn't speak, when he's no better than a pimp!”

“That's not so,” Alice said quietly.

“No? No? I tell you one thing—that I would see a daughter of mine married to Shutzey before I would see her married to that Danny. At least Shutzey is a bummer out and out, but that Danny is slimy like a snake!”

“No! How can you say that?”

Bessie cried: “Meyer—!”

Now his face was glowing, red as a beet, and his breath came in long hard gasps. The blood-vessels, standing out from his neck and temples, throbbed like mad. Leaning forward in his chair, he clenched his hands on his knees.

“Yeah,” he whispered, “what I say, I mean. God gave me daughters to mock at me. What is Timy but a robber? What are any of them? What is this Danny—?”

“No—stop it!” Alice blurted out. “I won't hear any more about him. Stop it. You have no right to say anything about him. You don't understand.”

“I don't understand—”

Suddenly, Meyer's eyes fell on the ring. It took him long moments to grasp what the ring meant, and slowly, as he realized it, the blood drained from his face, leaving it as it had been before, white and old and tired. His eyes, fixed on the ring, were wide and incredulous. There was a ring that should mean something, but did the ring mean anything? Did the ring mean that his daughtter had gone ahead without him?

“Alice,” he said hoarsely. Then he pointed at the ring.

She looked at it, shaking her head.

“Alice—don't lie to me. You married him.”

She nodded.

He turned to his wife. Old, beaten, unable to realize what it all meant, he turned to his wife for confirmation. “Bessie,” he said, “look. Look.”

“Yeah.”

“Bessie, she married him.”

“I know.”

He looked down at his hands, looked at the palms, and then at the backs, pushed his hands away from him, and shook his head; his mouth was trembling. He tried to, say something, but he couldn't speak. Then, in a whisper, he managed to say:

“Alice—”

All the defiance was gone. How could you be defiant with two people who were all old and broken? How could you battle against them? Yet it was done, all done.

“I love him,” she told them, shaking her head wearily. “I married him, that's all. He's a good boy. I know he's a good boy.”

“Yeah.”

“You'd think I was a thief, the way you look at me.”

“No, it's all right, baby,” Bessie said.

“I'm sorry.”

“Yeah,” Meyer nodded. His head continued to nod, an old gray head with everything lifelike taken from it.

T
HE RENDEZVOUS
with life begins. The poet looks at the sky, when the clouds are breaking open to show tiny cold stars, and he smiles in a knowing way. Sometimes, men smile like that.

Finally it stopped snowing, and all over the ground, all over the city, the white blanket lay, cold and shining, broken here and there where people walked, but not broken too much, since the hour was late. The cold wind, coming down from the north and the west, swept the clouds out of the sky, left a black mantle, dotted all over with pin-points of light; and the cold, closing in from the silent cap of the planet, snapped and crackled.

But the breath of life was on John Edwards. He stamped the snow from his feet as he re-entered his room, laughed and smacked his hands together. The effort made him cough, and coughing he fell into a chair, but he still smiled at the little flecks of pink that stained the hand he held before his mouth. There was death in the bits of blood he coughed up out of his lungs, but he was beyond death, above it, too strong for it now. The consumption inside of him was something that would be fought and destroyed. That, he knew, and he smiled in calm certainty of himself.

“John Edwards,” he thought. “Everything springs from the words. I am John Edwards, who has done nothing. I am John Edwards with a life before him. Now everything is in my grasp, genius and love and beauty and fame. Peace, too. Contentment. Now I can laugh at the priest. What has he in his smug, muddled mind?—in his twisted conceptions of right and wrong? I've found it for myself; there's no right but beauty and no wrong but ugliness. The good is beautiful and the bad is ugly. All my life I've been ugly—smuggish and ugly and rotten. God—how the rottenness has eaten into me!”

Walking to the window, he looked out. A few feet from the house, there was a lamp post; underneath it, the snow glistened, white and unbroken, showing just a sheen of yellow from the light, turning a pure white further out in the gutter. On the other side of the street, the houses were dim, snow-clad objects, strange objects of fairy mystery in the faint light of the stars, making long, twisted and mysterious shadows. A figure moved across the street, slowly, as if loath to disturb the still beauty of the night, came into his line of vision and then passed out of it. And while he stared, his breath frosted on the window, made unusual and beautiful designs.

He went back to his chair and sat down, luxuriating in his every movement. “I'm happy,” he thought. The sense of life in him was like strong, strong drink. Deep into his body, he felt himself and gloried in himself; he thought that he could sense the blood moving in his veins, the pumping of his heart, the quivering of his stomach. Blood in his fingertips, and strength there, too.

While he sat there, above him the music master began to play. Very often he played like that, and far into the night; what he did, Edwards did not know, unless he dreamed over the things he might have been, which he was not. Now he would go on and play for hours; now, while he played, Anna would join Edwards. Life would come, like a stream of fire. Together, they would slip out into the snow and the night, vanish forever from the sight of Apple Place.

He began to pack the few things he wished to take with him, not much, a change of clothes and hardly more than that. Nothing he had written. What he had written was the product of sickness, of a sick mind. Whatever worth there was in it would only serve to remind him of what he had been, what he despised himself for having been.

Let it be there as a memory of the sick creature who had inhabited the cell. Let it lie and rot as he himself had rotted in the airless cellar room. All that was gone and behind him.

While he packed, he heard the door open. Turning to her, he saw that she was dressed to travel, in a close-fitting gray tweed suit and overshoes. Over one arm, she had a fur coat, and in the other hand she held a small valise. She put the valise down, threw her coat over a chair; then she crept close into Edwards' arms. He held her tight, kissed her, pressed his cold face to hers.

She was trembling, afraid. He knew that she would be afraid—until they were so far from the place that even the memory was broken and hard to gather.

Finally, she pulled away from him. “Finish packing,” she told him. “There's time. He'll sit at the piano like that for hours, now he's started. I'm really not afraid. I'm just a baby, I guess. Only—”

“It won't take but a moment.”

“It's cold outside. You'd better dress warm.”

“Don't worry, darling.”

“I love you.”

“I know.”

Hurriedly, he put his things together, glancing every so often at Anna. Indeed, it was difficult for him to keep his eyes from her. The mere fact that Anna was there and ready to go with him, alive and beautiful, was more than he could grasp.

“Beautiful,” he whispered. “God, how beautiful you are, my Anna.”

She started at that. He had never called her that before, but the music master had, almost always. She hardly ever smoked; now she asked Edwards for a cigarette. “I'm nervous,” she explained.

Holding the cigarette awkwardly, she blew out quick flurries of smoke. Edwards looked at her and laughed. Now he had finished packing, and he stood there, smiling and shaking his head.

“Darling Anna,” he murmured, “how I love you.” He wasn't afraid; he was calmer than he had been in weeks. She was his, and nothing the other man did after this would matter.