Manhattan Transfer (48 page)

Meanwhile a rumpus had started behind him in Child’s. He went back and looked through the window across the griddle where sizzled three abandoned buttercakes. The waiters were struggling to eject a tall man in a dress suit. The thickjawed friend of the Jewish girl who had thrown the biscuit was being held back by his friends. Then the bouncer elbowed his way through the crowd. He was a small broadshouldered man with deepset tired monkey eyes. Calmly and without enthusiasm he took hold of the tall man. In a flash he had him shooting through the door. Out on the pavement the tall man looked about him dazedly and tried to straighten his collar. At that moment a policewagon drove up jingling. Two policemen jumped out and quickly arrested three Italians who stood chatting quietly on the corner. Herf and the tall man in the dress suit looked at each other, almost spoke and walked off greatly sobered in opposite directions.

Seeping in red twilight out of the Gulf Stream fog, throbbing brassthroat that howls through the stiff-fingered streets, prying open glazed eyes of skyscrapers, splashing red lead on the girdered thighs of the five bridges, teasing caterwauling tugboats into heat under the toppling smoketrees of the harbor.

Spring puckering our mouths, spring giving us gooseflesh grows gigantic out of the droning of sirens, crashes with enormous scaring din through the halted traffic, between attentive frozen tiptoe blocks.

Mr Densch with the collar of his woolly ulster up round his ears and a big English cap pulled down far over his eyes, walked nervously back and forth on the damp boat deck of the
Volendam
. He looked out through a drizzly rain at the gray wharfhouses and the waterfront buildings etched against a sky of inconceivable bitterness. A ruined man, a ruined man, he kept whispering to himself. At last the ship’s whistle boomed out for the third time. Mr Densch, his fingers in his ears, stood screened by a lifeboat watching the rift of dirty water between the ship’s side and the wharf widen, widen. The deck trembled under his feet as the screws bit into the current. Gray like a photograph the buildings of Manhattan began sliding by. Below decks the band was playing
O Titin-e Titin-e
. Red ferryboats, carferries, tugs, sandscows, lumberschooners, tramp steamers drifted between him and the steaming towering city that gathered itself into a pyramid and began to sink mistily into the browngreen water of the bay.

Mr Densch went below to his stateroom. Mrs Densch in a cloche hat hung with a yellow veil was crying quietly with her head on a basket of fruit. ‘Dont Serena,’ he said huskily. ‘Dont… We like Marienbad… We need a rest. Our position isnt so hopeless. I’ll go and send Blackhead a radio… After all it’s his stubbornness and rashness that brought the firm to… to this. That man thinks he’s a king on earth… This’ll… this’ll get under his skin. If curses can kill I’ll be a dead man tomorrow.’ To his surprise he found the
gray drawn lines of his face cracking into a smile. Mrs Densch lifted her head and opened her mouth to speak to him, but the tears got the better of her. He looked at himself in the glass, squared his shoulders and adjusted his cap. ‘Well Serena,’ he said with a trace of jauntiness in his voice, ‘this is the end of my business career… I’ll go send that radio.’

Mother’s face swoops down and kisses him; his hands clutch her dress, and she has gone leaving him in the dark, leaving a frail lingering fragrance in the dark that makes him cry. Little Martin lies tossing within the iron bars of his crib. Outside dark, and beyond walls and outside again the horrible great dark of grownup people, rumbling, jiggling, creeping in chunks through the windows, putting fingers through the crack in the door. From outside above the roar of wheels comes a strangling wail clutching his throat. Pyramids of dark piled above him fall crumpling on top of him. He yells, gagging between yells. Nounou walks towards the crib along a saving gangplank of light ‘Dont you be scared… that aint nothin.’ Her black face grins at him, her black hand straightens the covers. ‘Just a fire engine passin… You wouldn’t be sceered of a fire engine.’

Ellen leaned back in the taxi and closed her eyes for a second. Not even the bath and the halfhour’s nap had washed out the fagging memory of the office, the smell of it, the chirruping of typewriters, the endlessly repeated phrases, faces, typewritten sheets. She felt very tired; she must have rings under her eyes. The taxi had stopped. There was a red light in the traffic tower ahead. Fifth Avenue was jammed to the curbs with taxis, limousines, motorbusses. She was late; she had left her watch at home. The minutes hung about her neck leaden as hours. She sat up on the edge of the seat, her fists so tightly clenched that she could feel through her gloves her sharp nails digging into the palms of her hands. At last the taxi jerked forward, there was a gust of exhausts and whir of motors, the clot of traffic began moving up Murray Hill. At a corner she caught sight of a clock. Quarter of eight. The traffic stopped again, the brakes of the taxi shrieked, she was thrown forward on the seat. She leaned back with her eyes closed, the blood throbbing in her temples. All her nerves were sharp steel jangled wires cutting into
her. ‘What does it matter?’ she kept asking herself. ‘He’ll wait. I’m in no hurry to see him. Let’s see, how many blocks?… Less than twenty, eighteen.’ It must have been to keep from going crazy people invented numbers. The multiplication table better than Coué as a cure for jangled nerves. Probably that’s what old Peter Stuyvesant thought, or whoever laid the city out in numbers. She was smiling to herself. The taxi had started moving again.

George Baldwin was walking back and forth in the lobby of the hotel, taking short puffs of a cigarette. Now and then he glanced at the clock. His whole body was screwed up taut like a high violin-string. He was hungry and full up with things he wanted to say; he hated waiting for people. When she walked in, cool and silky and smiling, he wanted to go up to her and hit her in the face.

‘George do you realize that it’s only because numbers are so cold and emotionless that we’re not all crazy?’ she said giving him a little pat on the arm.

‘Fortyfive minutes waiting is enough to drive anybody crazy, that’s all I know.’

‘I must explain it. It’s a system. I thought it all up coming up in the taxi… You go in and order anything you like. I’m going to the ladies’ room a minute… And please have me a Martini. I’m dead tonight, just dead.’

‘You poor little thing, of course I will… And dont be long please.’

His knees were weak under him, he felt like melting ice as he went into the gilt ponderously ornamented diningroom. Good lord Baldwin you’re acting like a hobbledehoy of seventeen… after all these years too. Never get anywhere that way… ‘Well Joseph what are you going to give us to eat tonight? I’m hungry… But first you can get Fred to make the best Martini cocktail he ever made in his life.’

‘Très bien monsieur,’ said the longnosed Roumanian waiter and handed him the menu with a flourish.

Ellen stayed a long time looking in the mirror, dabbing a little superfluous powder off her face, trying to make up her mind. She kept winding up a hypothetical dollself and setting it in various positions. Tiny gestures ensued, acted out on various model stages. Suddenly she turned away from the mirror with a shrug of her toowhite shoulders and hurried to the diningroom.

‘Oh George I’m starved, simply starved.’

‘So am I’ he said in a crackling voice. ‘And Elaine I’ve got news for you,’ he went on hurriedly as if he were afraid she’d interrupt him.

‘Cecily has consented to a divorce. We’re going to rush it through quietly in Paris this summer. Now what I want to know is, will you… ?’

She leaned over and patted his hand that grasped the edge of the table. ‘George lets eat our dinner first… We’ve got to be sensible. God knows we’ve messed things up enough in the past both of us… Let’s drink to the crime wave.’ The smooth infinitesimal foam of the cocktail was soothing in her tongue and throat, glowed gradually warmly through her. She looked at him laughing with sparkling eyes. He drank his at a gulp.

‘By gad Elaine,’ he said flaming up helplessly, ‘you’re the most wonderful thing in the world.’

Through dinner she felt a gradual icy coldness stealing through her like novocaine. She had made up her mind. It seemed as if she had set the photograph of herself in her own place, forever frozen into a single gesture. An invisible silk band of bitterness was tightening round her throat, strangling. Beyond the plates, the ivory pink lamp, the broken pieces of bread, his face above the blank shirtfront jerked and nodded; the flush grew on his cheeks; his nose caught the light now on one side, now on the other, his taut lips moved eloquently over his yellow teeth. Ellen felt herself sitting with her ankles crossed, rigid as a porcelain figure under her clothes, everything about her seemed to be growing hard and enameled, the air bluestreaked with cigarettesmoke, was turning to glass. His wooden face of a marionette waggled senselessly in front of her. She shuddered and hunched up her shoulders.

‘What’s the matter, Elaine?’ he burst out. She lied:

‘Nothing George… Somebody walked over my grave I guess.’

‘Couldnt I get you a wrap or something?’

She shook her head.

‘Well what about it?’ he said as they got up from the table.

‘What?’ she asked smiling. ‘After Paris?’

‘I guess I can stand it if you can George,’ she said quietly.

He was waiting for her, standing at the open door of a taxi. She saw him poised spry against the darkness in a tan felt hat and a
light tan overcoat, smiling like some celebrity in the rotogravure section of a Sunday paper. Mechanically she squeezed the hand that helped her into the cab.

‘Elaine,’ he said shakily, ‘life’s going to mean something to me now… God if you knew how empty life had been for so many years. I’ve been like a tin mechanical toy, all hollow inside.’

‘Let’s not talk about mechanical toys,’ she said in a strangled voice.

‘No let’s talk about our happiness,’ he shouted.

Inexorably his lips closed on to hers. Beyond the shaking glass window of the taxi, like someone drowning, she saw out of a corner of an eye whirling faces, streetlights, zooming nickleglinting wheels.

The old man in the checked cap sits on the brownstone stoop with his face in his hands. With the glare of Broadway in their backs there is a continual flickering of people past him towards the theaters down the street. The old man is sobbing through his fingers in a sour reek of gin. Once in a while he raises his head and shouts hoarsely, ‘I cant, dont you see I cant?’ The voice is inhuman like the splitting of a plank. Footsteps quicken. Middleaged people look the other way. Two girls giggle shrilly as they look at him. Streeturchins nudging each other peer in and out through the dark crowd. ‘Bum Hootch.’ ‘He’ll get his when the cop on the block comes by.’ ‘Prohibition liquor.’ The old man lifts his wet face out of his hands, staring out of sightless bloodyrimmed eyes. People back off, step on the feet of the people behind them. Like splintering wood the voice comes out of him. ‘Don’t you see I cant…? I cant… I cant.’

When Alice Sheffield dropped into the stream of women going through the doors of Lord & Taylor’s and felt the close smell of stuffs in her nostrils something went click in her head. First she went to the glovecounter. The girl was very young and had long curved black lashes and a pretty smile; they talked of permanent waves while Alice tried on gray kids, white kids with a little fringe like a gauntlet. Before she tried it on, the girl deftly powdered the inside of each glove out of a longnecked wooden shaker. Alice ordered six pairs.

‘Yes. Mrs Roy Sheffield… Yes I have a charge account, here’s my card… I’ll be having quite a lot of things sent.’ And to herself she said all the while: Ridiculous how I’ve been going round in rags all winter… When the bill comes Roy’ll have to find some way of paying it that’s all. Time he stopped mooning round anyway. I’ve paid enough bills for him in my time, God knows.’ Then she started looking at fleshcolored silk stockings. She left the store her head still in a whirl of long vistas of counters in a violet electric haze, of braided embroidery and tassles and nasturtiumtinted silks; she had ordered two summer dresses and an evening wrap.

At Maillard’s she met a tall blond Englishman with a coneshaped head and pointed wisps of towcolored mustaches under his long nose.

‘Oh Buck I’m having the grandest time. I’ve been going berserk in Lord & Taylor’s. Do you know that it must be a year and a half since I’ve bought any clothes?’

‘Poor old thing,’ he said as he motioned her to a table. ‘Tell me about it.’

She let herself flop into a chair suddenly whimpering, ‘Oh Buck I’m so tired of it all… I dont know how much longer I can stand it.’

‘Well you cant blame me… You know what I want you to do…’

‘Well suppose I did?’

‘It’d be topping, we’d hit it off like anything… But you must have a bit of beef tea or something. You need picking up.’ She giggled. ‘You old dear that’s just what I do need.’

‘Well how about making tracks for Calgary? I know a fellow there who’ll give me a job I think.’