Manhattan Transfer (15 page)

‘Try and make him go…’ Aunt Emily had begun; she stopped with her mouth partly open. A head was stuck through the curtains
that hung in the wide doorway to the livingroom. It had a birdlike face, with a thin drooping nose, topped by a mass of straight black hair like an Indian’s. One of the redrimmed eyes winked quietly.

‘Hullo everybody!… How’s every lil thing? Mind if I butt in?’ His voice perked hoarsely as a tall skinny body followed the head through the curtains. Aunt Emily’s mouth arranged itself in a frosty smile. ‘Why Emily you must… er… excuse me; I felt an evening… er… round the family hearth… er… would be… er… er… beneficial. You understand, the refining influence of the home.’ He stood jiggling his head behind Uncle Jeff’s chair. ‘Well Jefferson ole boy, how’s the market?’ He brought a hand down on Uncle Jeff’s shoulder.

‘Oh all right. Want to sit down?’ he growled.

‘They tell me… if you’ll take a tip from an old timer… er… a retired broker… broker and broker every day… ha-ha… But they tell me that Interborough Rapid Transit’s worth trying a snifter of… Doan look at me crosseyed like that Emily. I’m going right away… Why howdedo Mr Wilkinson… Kids are looking well. Well I’ll be if that isn’t Lily Herf’s lil boy… Jimmy you dont remember your… er… cousin, Joe Harland do you? Nobody remembers Joe Harland… Except you Emily and you wish you could forget him… ha-ha… How’s your mother Jimmy?’

‘A little better thank you,’ Jimmy forced the words out through a tight throat.

‘Well when you go home you give her my love… she’ll understand. Lily and I have always been good friends even if I am the family skeleton… They dont like me, they wish I’d go away… I’ll tell you what boy, Lily’s the best of the lot. Isn’t she Emily, isn’t she the best of the lot of us?’

Aunt Emily cleared her throat. ‘Sure she is, the best looking, the cleverest, the realest… Jimmy your mother’s an emperess… Aways been too fine for all this. By gorry I’d like to drink her health.’

‘Joe you might moderate your voice a little;’ Aunt Emily clicked out the words like a typewriter.

‘Aw you all think I’m drunk… Remember this Jimmy’… he leaned across the table, stroked Jimmy’s face with his grainy whisky breath… ‘these things aren’t always a man’s fault… circumstances… er… circumstances.’ He upset a glass staggering to his
feet. ‘If Emily insists on looking at me crosseyed I’m goin out… But remember give Lily Herf Joe Harland’s love even if he has gone to the demnition bowbows.’ He lurched out through the curtains again.

‘Jeff I know he’ll upset the Sèvres vase… See that he gets out all right and get him a cab.’ James and Maisie burst into shrill giggles from behind their napkins. Uncle Jeff was purple.

‘I’ll be damned to hell if I put him in a cab. He’s not my cousin… He ought to be locked up. And next time you see him you can tell him this from me, Emily: if he ever comes here in that disgusting condition again I’ll throw him out.’

‘Jefferson dear, it’s no use getting angry… There’s no harm done. He’s gone.’

‘No harm done! Think of our children. Suppose there’d been a stranger here instead of Wilkinson. What would he have thought of our home?’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ croaked Mr Wilkinson, ‘accidents will happen in the best regulated families.’

‘Poor Joe’s such a sweet boy when he’s himself,’ said Aunt Emily. ‘And think that it looked for a while years ago as if Harland held the whole Curb Market in the palm of his hand. The papers called him the King of the Curb, dont you remember?’ ‘That was before the Lottie Smithers affair…’

‘Well suppose you children go and play in the other room while we have our coffee,’ chirped Aunt Emily. ‘Yes, they ought to have gone long ago.’

‘Can you play Five Hundred, Jimmy?’ asked Maisie.

‘No I cant.’

‘What do you think of that James, he cant play jacks and he cant play Five Hundred.’

‘Well they’re both girl’s games,’ said James loftily. ‘I wouldn’t play em either xept on account of you.’

‘Oh wouldn’t you, Mr Smarty.’

‘Let’s play animal grabs.’

‘But there aren’t enough of us for that. It’s no fun without a crowd.’

‘An last time you got the giggles so bad mother made us stop.’

‘Mother made us stop because you kicked little Billy Schmutz in the funnybone an made him cry.’

‘Spose we go down an look at the trains,’ put in Jimmy.

‘We’re not allowed to go down stairs after dark,’ said Maisie severely.

‘I’ll tell you what lets play stock exchange… I’ve got a million dollars in bonds to sell and Maisie can be the bulls an Jimmy can be the bears.’

‘All right, what do we do?’

‘Oh juss run round an yell mostly… I’m selling short.’

‘All right Mr Broker I’ll buy em all at five cents each.’

‘No you cant say that… You say ninetysix and a half or something like that.’

‘I’ll give you five million for them,’ cried Maisie waving the blotter of the writing desk.

‘But you fool, they’re only worth one million,’ shouted Jimmy.

Maisie stood still in her tracks. ‘Jimmy what did you say then?’ Jimmy felt shame flame up through him; he looked at his stubby shoes. ‘I said, you fool.’

‘Haven’t you ever been to Sunday School? Don’t you know that God says in the Bible that if you call anybody Thou fool you’ll be in danger of hellfire?’

Jimmy didn’t dare raise his eyes.

‘Well I’m not going to play any more,’ said Maisie drawing herself up. Jimmy somehow found himself out in the hall. He grabbed his hat and ran out the door and down the six flights of white stone stairs past the brass buttons and chocolate livery of the elevator boy, out through the hall that had pink marble pillars in to Seventysecond Street. It was dark and blowy, full of ponderous advancing shadows and chasing footsteps. At last he was climbing the familiar crimson stairs of the hotel. He hurried past his mother’s door. They’d ask him why he had come home so soon. He burst into his own room, shot the bolt, doublelocked the door and stood leaning against it panting.

‘Well are you married yet?’ was the first thing Congo asked when Emile opened the door to him. Emile was in his undershirt. The shoebox-shaped room was stuffy, lit and heated by a gas crown with a tin cap on it.

‘Where are you in from this time?’

‘Bizerta and Trondjeb… I’m an able seaman.’

‘That’s a rotten job, going to sea… I’ve saved two hundred dollars. I’m working at Delmonico’s.’

They sat down side by side on the unmade bed. Congo produced a package of gold tipped Egyptian Deities. ‘Four months’ pay’; he slapped his thigh. ‘Seen May Sweitzer?’ Emile shook his head. ‘I’ll have to find the little son of a gun… In those goddam Scandinavian ports they come out in boats, big fat blond women in bumboats…’

They were silent. The gas hummed. Congo let his breath out in a whistle. ‘Whee… C’est chic ça, Delmonico… Why haven’t you married her?’

‘She likes to have me hang around… I’d run the store better than she does.’

‘You’re too easy; got to use rough stuff with women to get anything outa them… Make her jealous.’

‘She’s got me going.’

‘Want to see some postalcards?’ Congo pulled a package, wrapped in newspaper out of his pocket. ‘Look these are Naples; everybody there wants to come to New York… That’s an Arab dancing girl. Nom d’une vache they got slippery bellybuttons…’

‘Say, I know what I’ll do,’ cried Emile suddenly dropping the cards on the bed. ‘I’ll make her jealous…’

‘Who?’

‘Ernestine… Madame Rigaud…’

‘Sure walk up an down Eighth Avenue with a girl a couple of times an I bet she’ll fall like a ton of bricks.’

The alarmclock went off on the chair beside the bed. Emile jumped up to stop it and began splashing water on his face in the washbasin.

‘Merde I got to go to work.’

‘I’ll go over to Hell’s Kitchen an see if I can find May.’

‘Don’t be a fool an spend all your money,’ said Emile who stood at the cracked mirror with his face screwed up, fastening the buttons in the front of a clean boiled shirt.

‘It’s a sure thing I’m tellin yer,’ said the man again and again, bringing his face close to Ed Thatcher’s face and rapping the desk with his flat hand.

‘Maybe it is Viler but I seen so many of em go under, honest I dont see how I can risk it.’

‘Man I’ve hocked the misses’s silver teaset and my diamond ring an the baby’s mug… It’s a sure sure thing… I wouldn’t let you in on it, xept you an me’s been pretty good friends an I owe you money an everythin… You’ll make twentyfive percent on your money by tomorrow noon… Then if you want to hold you can on a gamble, but if you sell three quarters and hold the rest two or three days on a chance you’re as safe as… as the Rock of Gibraltar.’

‘I know Viler, it certainly sounds good…’

‘Hell man you dont want to be in this damned office all your life, do you? Think of your little girl.’

‘I am, that’s the trouble.’

‘But Ed, Gibbons and Swandike had started buying already at three cents when the market closed this evening… Klein got wise an’ll be right there with bells on first thing in the morning. The market’ll go crazy on it…’

‘Unless the fellers doin the dirty work change their minds. I know that stuff through and through, Viler… Sounds like a topnotch proposition… But I’ve examined the books of too many bankrupts.’

Viler got to his feet and threw his cigar into the cuspidor. ‘Well do as you like, damn it all… I guess you must like commuting from Hackensack an working twelve hours a day…’

‘I believe in workin my way up, that’s all.’

‘What’s the use of a few thousands salted away when you’re old and cant get any satisfaction? Man I’m goin in with both feet.’

‘Go to it Viler… You tellem,’ muttered Thatcher as the other man stamped out slamming the office door.

The big office with its series of yellow desks and hooded typewriters was dark except for the tent of light in which Thatcher sat at a desk piled with ledgers. The three windows at the end were not curtained. Through them he could see the steep bulk of buildings scaled with lights and a plankshaped bit of inky sky. He was copying memoranda on a long sheet of legal cap.

Fan Tan Import and Export Company (statement of assets and liabilities up to and including February 29)… Branches New York, Shanghai, Hongkong and Straights Settlements…

Balance carried over $345,789.84
Real Estate $500,087.12
Profit and Loss $399,765.90

‘A bunch of goddam crooks,’ growled Thatcher out loud. ‘Not an item on the whole thing that aint faked. I dont believe they’ve got any branches in Hongkong or anywhere…’

He leaned back in his chair and stared out of the window. The buildings were going dark. He could just make out a star in the patch of sky. Ought to go out an eat, bum for the digestion to eat irregularly like I do. Suppose I’d taken a plunge on Viler’s red hot tip. Ellen, how do you like these American Beauty roses? They have stems eight feet long, and I want you to look over the itinerary of the trip abroad I’ve mapped out to finish your education. Yes it will be a shame to leave our fine new apartment looking out over Central Park… And downtown; The Fiduciary Accounting Institute, Edward C. Thatcher, President… Blobs of steam were drifting up across the patch of sky, hiding the star. Take a plunge, take a plunge… they’re all crooks and gamblers anyway… take a plunge and come up with your hands full, pockets full, bankaccount full, vaults full of money. If I only dared take the risk. Fool to waste your time fuming about it. Get back to the Fan Tan Import. Steam faintly ruddy with light reflected from the streets swarmed swiftly up across the patch of sky, twisting scattering.

Goods on hand in U. S. bonded warehouses… $325,666.00

Take a plunge and come up with three hundred and twentyfive thousand, six hundred and sixtysix dollars. Dollars swarming up like steam, twisting scattering against the stars. Millionaire Thatcher leaned out of the window of the bright patchouliscented room to look at the darkjutting city steaming with laughter, voices, tinkling and lights; behind him orchestras played among the azaleas, private wires click click clickclicked dollars from Singapore, Valparaiso, Mukden, Hongkong, Chicago. Susie leaned over him in a dress made of orchids, breathed in his ear.

Ed Thatcher got to his feet with clenched fists sniveling; You poor fool whats the use now she’s gone. I’d better go eat or Ellen’ll scold me.

Dusk gently smooths crispangled streets. Dark presses tight the steaming asphalt city, crushes the fretwork of windows and lettered signs and chimneys and watertanks and ventilators and fireescapes and moldings and patterns and corrugations and eyes and hands and neckties into blue chunks, into black enormous blocks. Under the rolling heavier heavier pressure windows blurt light. Night crushes bright milk out of arclights, squeezes the sullen blocks until they drip red, yellow, green into streets resounding with feet. All the asphalt oozes light. Light spurts from lettering on roofs, mills dizzily among wheels, stains rolling tons of sky.

A steamroller was clattering back and forth over the freshly tarred metaling of the road at the cemetery gate. A smell of scorched grease and steam and hot paint came from it. Jimmy Herf picked his way along the edge of the road; the stones were sharp against his feet through the worn soles of his shoes. He brushed past swarthy-necked workmen and walked on over the new road with a whiff of garlic and sweat from them in his nostrils. After a hundred yards he stopped over the gray suburban road, laced tight on both sides with telegraph poles and wires, over the gray paperbox houses and the gray jagged lots of monumentmakers, the sky was the color of a robin’s egg. Little worms of May were writhing in his blood. He yanked off his black necktie and put it in his pocket. A tune was grinding crazily through his head: