1919 (34 page)

When she walked in on Dad and the boys at breakfast a sunny winter morning two days later, my, weren't they surprised; Dad tried to scold her, but Daughter could see that he was as pleased as she was. Anyway, she didn't care, it was so good to be home.

After Christmas she and Dad and the boys went for a week's hunting down near Corpus Christi and had the time of their lives and Daughter shot her first deer. When they got back to Dallas Daughter said she wasn't going back to be finished but that what she would like to do was go up to New York to stay with Ada Washburn, who was studying at Columbia, and to take courses where she'd really learn something. Ada was Joe Washburn's sister, an old maid but bright as a dollar and was working for her Ph.D in Education. It took a lot of arguing because Dad had set his heart on having Daughter go to a finishing school but she finally convinced him and was off again to New York.

She was reading
Les Misérables
all the way up on the train and looking out at the greyishbrownish winter landscape that didn't seem to have any life to it after she left the broad hills of Texas, pale green with winter wheat and alfalfa, feeling more and more excited and scared as hour by hour she got nearer New York. There was a stout motherly woman who'd lost her husband who got on the train at Little Rock and wouldn't stop talking about the dangers and pitfalls that beset a young woman's path in big cities. She kept such a strict watch on Daughter that she never got a chance to talk to the interesting looking young man with the intense black eyes who boarded the train at St. Louis and kept going over papers of some kind he had in a brown briefcase. She thought he looked a little like Joe Washburn. At last when they were crossing New Jersey and there got to be more and more factories and grimy industrial towns, Daughter's heart got to beating so fast she couldn't sit still but kept having to go out and stamp around in the cold raw air of the vestibule. The fat greyheaded conductor asked her with a teasing laugh if her beau was going to be down at the station to meet her, she seemed so anxious to get in. They were going through Newark then. Only one more stop. The sky was lead color over wet streets full of automobiles and a drizzly rain was pitting the patches of snow with grey. The train began to cross wide desolate saltmarshes, here and there broken by an uneven group of factory structures or a black river with steamboats on it. There didn't seem to be any people; it looked so cold over those marshes Daughter felt scared and lonely just looking at them and wished she was home. Then suddenly the train was in a tunnel, and the porter was piling all the bags in the front end of the car. She got into the fur coat Dad had bought her as a Christmas present and pulled her gloves on over her hands cold with excitement for fear that maybe Ada Washburn hadn't gotten her telegram or hadn't been able to come down to meet her.

But there she was on the platform in noseglasses and raincoat looking as oldmaidish as ever and a slightly younger girl with her who turned out to be from Waco and studying art. They had a long ride in a taxi up crowded streets full of slush with yellow and grey snowpiles along the sidewalks. “If you'd have been here a week ago, Anne Elizabeth, I declare you'd have seen a real blizzard.”

“I used to think snow was like on Christmas cards,” said Esther Wilson who was an interestinglooking girl with black eyes and a long face and a deep kind of tragicsounding voice. “But it was just an illusion like a lot of things.” “New York's no place for illusions,” said Ada sharply. “It all looks kinder like a illusion to me,” said Daughter, looking out of the window of the taxicab.

Ada and Esther had a lovely big apartment on University Heights where they had fixed up the dining room as a bedroom for Daughter. She didn't like New York but it was exciting; everything was grey and grimy and the people all seemed to be foreigners and nobody paid any attention to you except now and then a man tried to pick you up on the street or brushed up against you in the subway which was disgusting. She was signed up as a special student and went to lectures about Economics and English Literature and Art and talked a little occasionally with some boy who happened to be sitting next to her, but she was so much younger than anybody she met and she didn't seem to have the right line of talk to interest them. It was fun going to matinées with Ada sometimes or riding down all bundled up on top of the bus to go to the art-museum with Esther on Sunday afternoons, but they were both of them so staid and grown up and all the time getting shocked by things she said and did.

When Paul English called up and asked her to go to a matinée with him one Saturday, she was very thrilled. They'd written a few letters back and forth but they hadn't seen each other since Washington. She was all morning putting on first one dress and then the other, trying out different ways of doing her hair and was still taking a hot bath when he called for her so that Ada had to entertain him for the longest time. When she saw him all her thrill dribbled away, he looked so stiff and stuckup in his dress uniform. First thing she knew she was kidding him, and acting silly going downtown in the subway so that by the time they got to the Astor where he took her to lunch, he looked sore as a pup. She left him at the table and went to the ladies' room to see if she couldn't get her hair to look a little better than it did and got to talking with an elderly Jewish lady in diamonds who'd lost her pocketbook, and when she got back the lunch was standing cold on the table and Paul English was looking at his wristwatch uneasily. She didn't like the play and he tried to get fresh in the taxicab driving up Riverside Drive although it was still broad daylight, and she slapped his face. He said she was the meanest girl he'd ever met and she said she liked being mean and if he didn't like it he knew what he could do. Before that she'd made up her mind that she'd crossed him off her list.

She went in her room and cried and wouldn't take any supper. She felt real miserable having Paul English turn out a pill like that. It was lonely not having anybody to take her out and no chance of meeting anybody because she had to go everywhere with those old maids. She lay on her back on the floor looking at the furniture from underneath like when she'd been little and thinking of Joe Washburn. Ada came in and found her in the silliest position lying on the floor with her legs in the air; she jumped up and kissed her all over her face and hugged her and said she'd been a little idiot but it was all over now and was there anything to eat in the icebox.

When she met Edwin Vinal at one of Ada's Sunday evening parties that she didn't usually come out to on account of people sitting around so prim and talking so solemn and deep over their cocoa and cupcakes, it made everything different and she began to like New York. He was a scrawny kind of young fellow who was taking courses in sociology. He sat on a stiff chair with his cocoacup balanced uncomfortably in his hand and didn't seem to know where to put his legs. He didn't say anything all evening but just as he was going, he picked up something Ada said about values and began to talk a blue streak, quoting all the time from a man named Veblen. Daughter felt kind of attracted to him and asked who Veblen was, and he began to talk to her. She wasn't up on what he was talking about but it made her feel lively inside to have him talking right to her like that. He had light hair and black eyebrows and lashes around very pale grey eyes with little gold specks in them. She liked his awkward lanky way of moving around. Next evening he came to see her and brought her a volume of the
Theory of the Leisure Class
and asked her if she didn't want to go skating with him at the St. Nicholas rink. She went in her room to get ready and began to dawdle around powdering her face and looking at herself in the glass. “Hey, Anne, for gosh sakes, we haven't got all night,” he yelled through the door. She had never had iceskates on her feet before, but she knew how to rollerskate, so with Edwin holding her arm she was able to get around the big hall with its band playing and all the tiers of lights and faces around the balcony. She had more fun than she'd had any time since she left home.

Edwin Vinal had been a social worker and lived in a settlement house and now he had a scholarship at Columbia but he said the profs were too theoretical and never seemed to realize it was real people like you and me they were dealing with. Daughter had done churchwork and taken around baskets to poorwhite families at Christmas time and said she'd like to do some socialservicework right here in New York. As they were taking off their skates he asked her if she really meant it and she smiled up at him and said, “Hope I may die if I don't.”

So the next evening he took her downtown threequarters of an hour's ride in the subway and then a long stretch on a crosstown car to a settlement house on Grand Street where she had to wait while he gave an English lesson to a class of greasylooking young Lithuanians or Polaks or something like that. Then they walked around the streets and Edwin pointed out the conditions. It was like the Mexican part of San Antonio or Houston only there were all kinds of foreigners. None of them looked as if they ever bathed and the streets smelt of garbage. There was laundry hanging out everywhere and signs in all kinds of funny languages. Edwin showed her some in Russian and Yiddish, one in Armenian and two in Arabic. The streets were awful crowded and there were pushcarts along the curb and peddlers everywhere and funny smells of cooking coming out of restaurants, and outlandish phonograph music. Edwin pointed out two tiredlooking painted girls who he said were streetwalkers, drunks stumbling out of a saloon, a young man in a checked cap he said was a cadet drumming up trade for a disorderly house, some sallowfaced boys he said were gunmen and dope peddlers. It was a relief when they came up again out of the subway way uptown where a springy wind was blowing down the broad empty streets that smelt of the Hudson River. “Well, Anne, how did you like your little trip to the underworld?”

“Allright,” she said after a pause. “Another time I think I'll take a gun in my handbag. . . . But all those people, Edwin, how on earth can you make citizens out of them? We oughtn't to let all those foreigners come over and mess up our country.”

“You're entirely wrong,” Edwin snapped at her. “They'd all be decent if they had a chance. We'd be just like them if we hadn't been lucky enough to be born of decent families in small prosperous American towns.”

“Oh, how can you talk so silly, Edwin, they're not white people and they never will be. They's just like Mexicans or somethin', or niggers.” She caught herself up and swallowed the last word. The colored elevator boy was drowsing on a bench right behind her.

“If you're not the benightedest little heathen I ever saw,” said Edwin teasingly. “You're a Christian, aren't you, well, have you ever thought that Christ was a Jew?”

“Well, I'm fallin' down with sleep and can't argue with you but I know you're wrong.” She went into the elevator and the colored elevator boy got up yawning and stretching. The last she saw of Edwin in the rapidly decreasing patch of light between the floor of the elevator and the ceiling of the vestibule he was shaking his fist at her. She threw him a kiss without meaning to.

When she got in the apartment, Ada, who was reading in the livingroom, scolded her a little for being so late, but she pleaded that she was too tired and sleepy to be scolded. “What do you think of Edwin Vinal, Ada?” “Why, my dear, I think he's a splendid young fellow, a little restless maybe, but he'll settle down. . . . Why?”

“Oh, I dunno,” said Daughter, yawning, “Good night, Ada darlin'.”

She took a hot bath and put a lot of perfume on and went to bed, but she couldn't go to sleep. Her legs ached from the greasy pavements and she could feel the walls of the tenements sweating lust and filth and the smell of crowded bodies closing in on her, in spite of the perfume she still had the rank garbagy smell in her nose, and the dazzle of street lights and faces pricked her eyes. When she went to sleep she dreamed she had rouged her lips and was walking up and down, up and down with a gun in her handbag; Joe Washburn walked by and she kept catching at his arm to try to make him stop but he kept walking by without looking at her and so did Dad and they wouldn't look when a big Jew with a beard kept getting closer to her and he smelt horrid of the East Side and garlic and waterclosets and she tried to get the gun out of her bag to shoot him and he had his arms around her and was pulling her face close to his. She couldn't get the gun out of the handbag and behind the roaring clatter of the subway in her ears was Edwin Vinal's voice saying, “You're a Christian, aren't you? You're entirely wrong . . . a Christian, aren't you? Have you ever thought that Christ would have been just like them if he hadn't been lucky enough to have been born of decent people . . . a Christian, aren't you. . . .”

Ada, standing over her in a nightgown, woke her up, “What can be the matter, child?” “I was having a nightmare . . . isn't that silly?” said Daughter and sat boltupright in bed. “Did I yell bloody murder?” “I bet you children were out eating Welsh Rabbit, that's why you were so late,” said Ada, and went back to her room laughing.

That spring Daughter coached a girls' basketball team at a Y.W.C.A. in the Bronx, and got engaged to Edwin Vinal. She told him she didn't want to marry anybody for a couple of years yet, and he said he didn't care about carnal marriage but that the important thing was for them to plan a life of service together. Sunday evenings, when the weather got good, they would go and cook a steak together in Palisades Park and sit there looking through the trees at the lights coming on in the great toothed rockrim of the city and talk about what was good and evil and what real love was. Coming back they'd stand hand in hand in the bow of the ferry boat among the crowd of boyscouts and hikers and picnickers and look at the great sweep of lighted buildings fading away into the ruddy haze down the North River and talk about all the terrible conditions in the city. Edwin would kiss her on the forehead when he said Goodnight and she'd go up in the elevator feeling that the kiss was a dedication.