The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride

The Railway Police

The Last Trolley Ride

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About the Author

For Katherine Squire and George Mitchell

THIS TIME YESTERDAY MORNING
, I was sitting in one of the coaches of the Mayflower, the early New York to Boston train, on my way to take part in a panel at the monthly meeting of the Interagency Council of Supervisors, a professional organization to which I belong. Inside me, that tender, inverse psyche we all carry within us was as usual at once violently proud of its outer costume and at the same time making mock of it: silk suit sharp-creased for speechmaking, all underwear appropriate to legcrossing on platform, handbag by X, shoes by Y—all a perfect beige armor stopping just short of the creature-skin that no Florida can tan, inside which the little lady sits, quiet and not always sad, in her altogether, of that tint so much too nacreously fair.

And a hat—I am always extra careful about the hat. A person who wears a wig has to be. In bygone days—think of it, only a year or so ago—a person who had to wear a wig was still special, and buying a hat was for her, one might say, an affair of the double incognito, the purchase of a crown to place upon the crown that no one must know she already wore. Particularly if at the bottom of it all, beneath hat, wig, armor and skin, there was still caged but not coffined, ready to run if not rampant, the laughing tomboy of thirteen, putative cabinboy of fifteen, dockside loafer, bankrobber’s mascot and Fagin’s modern wonderboy in blue jeans and plimsolls with the tips of his fingers emeried; all shapes and types of tramp-Raffles riding the rods under the scurrying cries of the railway police—confidence makers and takers thumbing their young stowaway noses from soup kitchens to the sub-basements of all the Statler-Hiltons, freeloading and riding all the flowery, Bowery subcircuses of the world. All of them wearing caps, none of them grown past twenty, and none quite yet bald. My present profession makes it possible for me to observe quite selflessly that my imagination only took up its orthodox womanhood at the moment when the head which caged it had lost its last trace of hair.

The train was just getting into Providence, Rhode Island, due at 10:52, and on time. I know every curve and tockety of the Shore Line, having done all my later studies in Boston, with training trips from there to New York City, that even richer source for our stock-in-trade. It was wise of me to come East after Cooksley Normal; though the wig I bought on the way, in Chicago’s Loop, was not very good, it was better than the wrap-around turbans I had been wearing. And Boston, as everyone knows, is tops in social work—there being, further, no mystery as to why this profession should be mine. Even back in Cooksley, I had no trouble with psychological essences and timbres—after all, we had the same magazines as the rest of the country—and my education merely thrust me deeper back upon my own meanings.

For, very early during my practice days “in the field,” as the pretty word for it goes in the profession, I knew that, via my work, the sores and seams of my own romanticism were being kept in sight for me at the very time I needed this—for who can say to what imaginations a bald beauty (I am otherwise comely) might not at any time revert? This way, all the while I toured the underworld I loved, a dainty Dante in her own laurel wreath, I was being kept a lady, or being made into one. None of my supervisors then or now (for all who work with the poor must have comptrollers who help keep our heads clear and well-hatted) has ever had to remind me that my work was sublimating me, though they mayn’t have known in quite what terms.

And it is natural, therefore, that I have risen in it, though still well under thirty-nine. For I have never wholly deserted the field for deskwork, as most do as soon as possible, though I deserve no credit for having now and then a fierce need to carry slops and mealtickets to the midnight alleys, or to slog the mean streets in search of the company of those tucked jolly under the viaduct, around the fire made after the cop has made his last round, there to watch how, at dawn, the waterbugs streak like lizards from the Chinese restaurant, and at any hour men stride like catamounts, from plain doors.

There’s not much danger; this is the neighborhood of my “case-load,” where my hat, with its flowers of charity wired by law, probably affrights them, and I am more than likely to end up for a glass of tea with some old client, my one revolutionary gesture to sit, in all my niceties, on the bedbug couch she warns me away from, “Dun sit, dolling, Om afraid fom de boggles, dun sit dere.”

And I know very well that this is still the world of the poor who live in houses, not vagabondage, just as I know that the poor, at least in cities, are not maypole dancers, their bread not oaten but paper. But their world is still a netherworld ringing from beneath the rich pavements they walk on just as I do. Even the poor in houses are only one step away from the criminal, for they have so much to hide that they can never do it quite honestly. Clean as they might be, they are still gamy, haunted and ridden by barmecide illusion, and I fancied I had almost a right to their underworld by way of my little specialty; I could walk their underside a little way with them, wearing my wig.

The train ran slowly to a stop; the conductor calling out “Providence!” had already been through the train, opening doors. Fresh gushes of air came from them, uniting with the warm, sunny velvet coming in on me from the broad window, outside which houses, running like sixty the minute before, settled into the dull station-scene brilliant in the morning sun, ultimate stillness. The pause at Providence is approximately two minutes, forty seconds, when the train is running on schedule. I was sitting on the double seat just back of the washrooms, the one on the platform side, facing the door. Waiting to get off, there was the usual crowd, trim salesmen with their noses elongated by money-sniffing (the real money flies the air, of course), aunties in hats-on-a-visit, a ruck of the indefinable, middling personages who do crowd-service, starred with the one sweatered girl who is always going down the aisle, jiggle-breasted, to the Women’s. The air, once past the train-smell, came in pure and lively, the fresh vanilla perspiration of spring; it was March twenty-first, one day into spring.

And it was just then that I saw the young man hovering on the step, ready to jump off ahead of them all. He must just have come out of the washroom. I saw him from the inside of the coach, and only the back of him. He was tall, had a good head under a good crop of hair, and was dressed in a suit of which trousers even matched jacket; it needed a second glance to see, doubletake, that, yes, from top to toe, though I couldn’t see his shoes, he was one fatal thread away from the tidy civilization of the train. The head had been to the barber, but not the last time, the suit was tired from making do, and as he leaned, head bent, hands slouched in pockets, shoulder taking bearings from the wall the way a zoo animal does, I caught, though I was yards away, the whole posture and lion-soil of him—a vagrant, in unmistakable aquiline.

He must have been readying himself to make a running jump for it. For almost in that same moment, I saw through the window the bright, gold-rimmed bumpkin face and blue uniform of the railway police, who put out arms to receive him, and behind in the coach, the conductor’s cap, his pale face blotted in the crowd. They handed him over, uniform to uniform. He must have been in the washroom, ticketless. And if he had only permitted himself a hat perhaps or the cheapest cardboard dispatch case, just one patch of greasepaint to keep him on the right side of the line, he might have made it. Perhaps they telegraphed ahead from New London or wherever he had boarded; though it might seem a lot of trouble for just a ticket, it is by taking just such infinite pains that the upper parallel keeps itself from meeting the lower.

For through the window, I saw him led off, and there was that about him which made me sure the offense was no worse than this; he was walking straight and unalcoholic, not with the tension of the really hunted, with the experienced resignation of one who knew himself to be no more than a matter for the railway police. Head still a little bent, hands out of his pockets now and hanging down, he let himself be led along by this round pattycake of a man, winded too, from whom he could have darted like a whippet from its starter. I hadn’t had a look at his shoes, of course, and he may have been too hungry. But I caught the line of his jaw and cheeks, good ones too, but just a hairsbreadth, again just a hairsbreadth too unshaven, and something in me trolled out to him, “Oh la-la, that did it. You might still have made it—if you had shaved.”

In retrospect, I have the feeling he knew that as well as I did. Two days more of that beard, and he could have been a student growing one, even with that suit on him perhaps, but not—no never—not ticketless too. It takes keeping up, any posture of what you are not, takes a sense of fitness to the point of fashion, and the vagrant won’t bother with that sort of thing, not for that purpose, he’s too honest for it, or else he wants to be spotted; maybe it’s his very function in life to wander about thus exposed, so that others may find their signals in him. They led him toward the steps of a small, official-looking hut a short distance across the station yard, and just then it happened. One of his coattails flipped up, not jaunty, not especially sad either, it may even have been the wind that did it, not his hand, and I saw a piece of white shirt, fairly clean, and a belt going round a human axis. All I had caught was a two-minute-and-forty-second glimpse of his simple, hopeful domestic arrangements. And that was all I needed. I never even saw him go up the steps.

I took action at once—as is usually said of themselves by persons who have been hearkening for twenty years. Such action, boiled up out of meditation, is often absurd unless it goes straight to the heart of the matter, and I did not do that at once—I was not quite able. To unprepare oneself for such a journey is not easy, particularly when it is one that may occupy the rest of your life. I told myself—timidly, I agree—that my proper embarkation would be from that place where so much of the rest of me was, from all that other paraphernalia by which we extend our pet fantasies of ourselves without ever risking the depots of travel—from home.

Inside the washroom, meanwhile, I removed gloves, stockings and girdle, and thrust them under the sink, into the receptacle for used paper towels—a ridiculously minor performance to be sure, but in the light of the whole, it doesn’t matter now. As for baggage, it has always been my grief that I could never travel as executively light as even the ticket-world now can. I had, to be sure, my little modern portfolio of articles that thimbled or stretched or reversed themselves, of paquettes that exploded for one use, then melted away—but I also had my wig-box, the overnight one. Made for me, like the larger ones, by a theatrical supply house, it had just room enough for the wig I made use of to sleep in—ah, the comfort of mind, when I learned to do that!—plus a fresh one for morning, and of course it didn’t look like what it was.

Nowadays, markedly within this past, disturbing year, wig-boxes have become all too common; though they still keep mostly to the airlanes and the parlor cars, I look for them in the coaches and even the buses by the year’s end—if I myself am able to risk such vehicles at that time. Meanwhile, peeping into mine, I quickly disposed of the portfolio down the slot where the girdle had gone, then tried the sealed window, in vain. The kit itself would have to be abandoned either here or on the luggage-racks outside. Gazing into it, down at the wooden wig-blocks on which my other two rested, I concluded that the latter’s destiny would have to be linked with that of their eighteen sisters, this number being an accident of the calendar, seven for the week, plus certain other considerations. In place of these two, I now left my hat, for the Easter joy of some trainman’s wife in Canarsie or Brookline. Then, shouldering the kit, I looked at my image in the mirror.