The Man With the Golden Arm (13 page)

Stiffly, like a woman who has overslept, holding the banister with both hands, but still coming. ‘I knew all the time you could do it, honey!’ Violet cried down and Sophie went down in a heap, her fingers clawing piteously at the rail.
To hold herself there tensely, without a single cry, till Violet had hurried down and helped her all the way up.

‘Did you see me?’ Sophie asked like a child caught in mischief.

‘You were comin’ along somethin’ wonderful, Sissie,’ Violet assured her, ‘you were climbin’ as good as anybody – it shows you can do it if you just want.’

‘You saw what happened when I tried too hard, didn’t you?’

‘I shouldn’t ought to of hollered,’ Violet realized too late. ‘I’m sorry about slappin’ you, Sissie, it was just to keep you on the ground.’ She waited for Sophie to say she was sorry too.

‘Am I gettin’
awful
fat, Vi? Is that why he won’t help me upstairs no more? I just couldn’t
stand
his not lovin’ me like he used.’

‘Stop whimperin’,’ Violet scolded her, ‘of course he loves you like he used. He wouldn’t be takin’ care of you so good if he didn’t.’ Which was true enough, Violet knew: he loved her as little as ever and took just as small care of her as before.

When he did help her up the stairs she needed his arm to lean on across the floor and, once in the chair, needed to be wheeled and, being wheeled, needed to be comforted. Till there was no end, no end to her asking at all.

When he refused to wheel her it was as if a priest had suddenly refused to confess her. ‘Tell me what
I
done to
you
, you can’t even wheel me a little. You think I
want
to be laid up in a chair all my life? You remember me ever askin’ you, “Please smash me up?”’

Frankie would give in to her as he always gave in. As he gave in to Schwiefka in arguments over the take. As he gave in to Louie in arguments over the price of ‘God’s medicine.’ As he gave in to Zygmunt and Antek and Schwabatski. ‘There’s just one guy I don’t give in to in this world,’
Frankie considered, ‘the punk got to take what the others hand to me.’

And would hear an echo of Sparrow’s protest: ‘It’s just since you come back you’re givin’ me gas, Frankie. You never used to give me gas before.’

‘It’s what I got you around for,’ Frankie would remind him brutally. Thus even Sparrow had to feel the edge of those fragments of jealousy into which Sophie’s love, like her crockery, had been shattered.

Long, ugly fragments for Frankie and slenderer, more delicate ones for Violet and Violet’s iron health. ‘If I go downtown ’n see somethin’ I like I’ll buy for you too,’ Violet would try to assuage her.

‘You don’t have to buy me nuttin’,’ Sophie would scorn everyone. ‘Just buy that Frankie a set of drums. He’s gettin’ a job wit’ a big-name band one of these days – he ain’t said which day. Just don’t hold yer breath till then, that’s my advice to all you Division Street hustlers.’

For those nearest our hearts are the ones most likely to tread upon them. What she could not gain through love she sought to possess by mockery. He was too dear to her: into everything he did she must read some secret hatred of herself.

‘Whyn’t you come right out ’n say you wisht I’d got killed ’stead of crippled?’ she accused him without warning.

‘I didn’t say nothin’ like
that
, Zosh,’ he threshed about trying to clear himself. ‘All I said was I wish you’d just
try
to walk again.’

Yet she had planted the doubt in his mind. ‘Of course I don’t wish nothin’ like
that
,’ he would have to tell himself. With the pang of guilt in the very words.

Violet helped him. ‘I don’t think you
want
to get well,’ she told Sophie. Then would wait for Sophie to stop whimpering so she could make it all up to her for saying that by wheeling
her down the street to the Pulaski, chain the chair in the lobby, help her into a seat and call for her when the double feature was done.

‘I could die listenin’ to that Dick Haymes,’ Sophie would say while being wheeled home.

On days when the bill remained unchanged Violet would pop her hennaed head in the door and ask, ‘Zosh, you want to play checkerds?’

And all the while they were playing would keep up a stream of idle reminiscence calculated to keep Sophie’s mind off Frankie and all the trouble he’d brought her just like her father had warned her.

‘I’ve had trouble with my eyes lately,’ Vi would hint till Sophie would ask why she didn’t get glasses.

‘It’s not that kind of trouble. It’s from flirtin’, that kind of trouble. Me ’n my bedroom eyes.’

That was Violet’s idea of high humor and Sophie’s idea of nothing at all. ‘You ought to cut all that out, it just ain’t right,’ Sophie would scold her, ‘bein’ hooked to old Stash ’n flirtin’ around with Sparrow.’

It was true. Violet let the punk make hurried love to her on rainy afternoons – then rushed him out into the rain in time to have dinner on the stove by the time old Stash returned from work. When Stash wanted to know where she’d been all afternoon it was always ‘takin’ Zosh to the movies, Old Man.’

Only once had Old Husband taken the trouble to check with Sophie, and Sophie had been loyal enough to reply, ‘Vi was settin’ by me all afternoon by the Pulaski, we set t’rough two stinky shows. One was white gorillas ’n the other was Carmen Bolero – he had two orchesters ’n did they make
glad.
’

A girl like Violet, a warm one like that, to marry an old icicle like Stash Koskozka, whose need for her stopped when she’d finished warming up yesterday’s
pierogi
.

‘Still, if I’d hooked up with anyone but Old Man,’ Violet tried consoling herself, ‘I wouldn’t never have had the time to keep the punk out of jail. He couldn’t stay out of jail a week without me. With me watchin’ over him sometimes he stays out a whole month. Once he wasn’t in for six, I was certainly proud of him
that
time. Then he went ’n spoiled it all, gettin’ picked up twice the very next week – nothin’ serious of course. I keep him out of serious trouble.’

Stash’s curiosity seldom went beyond a vague wonder that she could consume so much Polish sausage; no matter how much of the stuff he hauled home there was usually no more than a single dry butt end around when he went to the icebox.

Yet, after the manner of simple hearts, Violet was confident that her secret was buried as deep as God’s toenails. Scarcely a living soul in the whole great gray frame hotel nor in the one long bar below knew, she was sure. Except, of course, Sparrow’s buddy Frankie and her own best friend Sophie and trusty old Antek the Owner and one or two of the Tug & Maul’s more reliable barflies. She could swear that scarcely anyone from the Safari knew a thing – and who cared what those swishes thought anyhow? Unless that long, lean, lanky, sidewinding Fomorowski had picked up a whisper. At any rate Stash never spent in either bar, so it made no difference at all. They were all good guys by Antek the Owner and wouldn’t want to make trouble for a girl.

Though what in the world any redhead stacked like Vi could see in a shapeless bag of bones like the punk was one of those things those same good guys marveled upon. If one asked, Violet always made the same reply ‘What does any Division Street woman see in any Division Street punk?’

The fact was that to the Tug & Maul boys the punk sometimes seemed something clean off Division Street, if not out of the world. The only routine work he’d ever
performed successfully was the window-peeping routine, conducted between 10
P.M
. and midnight of midsummer evenings, which he’d called his ‘scraunching route.’

The scraunching route had had seven stops, each timed for the most rewarding moment and requiring anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour of hanging from a limb, crouched on somebody’s porch or leaning, with a telephone directory underfoot, against a pane whose shade reached only to two inches of the sash.

‘I’ve seen a thing or two in my time,’ he still liked to boast, ‘that was how I found out the best place for wolfin’ ain’t the taverns. It ain’t in dance halls ’r on North Clark on Saturday night. It’s in the front row in Sunday school on Sunday mornin’. Oh yeh, I know a thing or two, I been around.’

The punk knew a thing or two all right. He knew almost everything except how to stay out of jail. For jail was the one place he’d been most around. He’d been around jails so much that, as Violet never wearied of promising him, ‘someday you’ll be in so long you’ll get to thinkin’ you’re the warden.’

It had been Violet who had first diverted him from the scraunching route. He had been boasting, to a small but select circle at the Tug & Maul, of what he’d seen the night before, when Violet, uninvited, had interrupted to observe that if she were his girl friend she’d be so ashamed she wouldn’t be able to hold up her head on a lighted street.

‘’Shamed ’cause a fellow like me is studyin’ to be a Pinkerton?’ He had feigned amazement. ‘Don’t you think I want to
make
somethin’ of myself? Don’t you think there’s big money in detectin’ things people ’r doin’ when they don’t know anybody’s lookin’? How you suppose Pinkies get trainin’ – in classrooms?’

‘I know you don’t get detective trainin’ doin’ a dry waltz
with yourself on somebody else’s fire escape,’ she assured him. ‘If I was your girl friend ’n caught you on
my
fire escape I’d testify up against you myself, so help me.’

‘If you was my girl friend,’ he whispered in his special inside-info whisper, ‘I wouldn’t be playin’ Pinkie wit’ myself.’

It had begun as simply as that. He’d given up his scraunching route for her. He’d given up almost everything that makes life worth while, it seemed. Everything but stealing dogs and telling lies and keeping one eye peeled for stray change along bar rails.

The bigger the lies he told her the tenderer Violet had felt toward him. The dizzier he appeared the more deeply he’d endeared himself to her warm round arms. ‘He’s not a Polak, he’s not a Hebe, he’s just nobody’s poor sparrow at all – who’s to take care of him if not me?’ She really wondered who.

‘I can’t stand a liar myself,’ Sophie answered that one virtuously.

‘Lies are just a poor man’s pennies,’ Violet told her. ‘Fact is, that’s just how he started out with me – tellin’ lies. I didn’t know him so good then, only from seein’ him by Antek’s ’r standin’ on the corner of Damen ’n Division in them same old baggy pants ’n perfesser’s glasses, holdin’ a dog on a leash ’n both lookin’ like they been in a battle. I didn’t know about his window peepin’ till he starts braggin’ by Antek that time. He was just so afraid he wasn’t good enough for me, that’s all his braggin’ was,’ Violet explained. ‘He didn’t think he was good enough for
any
body, he was tryin’ so hard to show he was
some
body. So it was up to me to show him he was somebody all by hisself – that’s the first thing a woman got to do for a man.’ N of course there’s no sense tryin’ to prove somethin’ like that standin’ up. The least a girl owes to herself is to be comfortable about it.’

‘It’s what they call syko-ology,’ Sophie informed her loftily.

‘That ain’t what
I
call it, Sissie. I just call it savin’ poor man’s pennies.’ Cause that’s all his big lies are, Zosh. Just a poor punk’s pennies.’

‘You leave me agasted,’ Sophie told her, knotting her babushka under chin with impatience in every fingertip, ‘I just don’t see how some of you Division Street women live, that’s
all.
’

‘Well,’ Violet reflected a long minute, ‘I guess it’s like Frankie says: some cats just swing like that, Zosh.’

It was Violet who’d gotten Sparrow right side up the time he was put on probation ‘just for settin’ in a corner drinkin’ a couple beers. Some fella come in pertendin’ like he’s drunk, buys me a couple cheap shots ’n says there’s guys followin’ him, they’re after his watch, would I hold it for him. I got such a honest puss. So I done the guy the favor ’n sure enough, one more shot ’n the bum starts to holler somebody copped his watch.

‘It all just goes to show you, don’t try to do too much for people or you’ll wind up in the short end of the funnel. It’s my one big weakness, helpin’ guys who can’t help theirselves.’

‘Yeh,’ Violet reminded him dryly, ‘I guess you thrun the pop bottle through Widow Wieczorek’s window that time just to let in a little air too. You know,’ she added before he could answer, ‘it ain’t that I love you so much, it’s more that I’m sorry for you because your mind is so weak.’

‘I see what you mean,’ Sparrow decided, ‘I’m the first person you ever met with a mind weaker than yours – is that it?’

‘Not en
tire
ly. What I
really
like about you is you’re so mercenary.’

‘And what I really like about you is that if you had a
hummingbird’s brains you’d fly backerds,’ the punk forgave her for everything she’d done for him.

She’d kept him out of trouble then until he’d slipped on the ice one January night and that had been the worst rap of all. The sidewalk was like the dance floor at Guyman’s Paradise, anyone could have fallen. And have one elbow go through a window. A jewelry-store window. In the dark a thing like that could happen to a Park District policeman.

Frankie had gotten Zygmunt to put in the fix, the charge had been changed to drunk and disorderly, and Sparrow had gotten two years probation. But it had cost Violet one hundred silver dollars of old Stash’s money. So the least the punk could do for her, he felt, was to stay out of further trouble.

The only time in those whole two years that the police had persecuted him was when he’d taken a short cut on his way to putting a potted geranium on his mother’s grave.

He had to take a short cut through an alley toward the florist’s when the squadrol slid up beside him. All they wanted to know, after he’d explained his business, was how he expected any florist to be open at 4
A.M
.

‘Why, that’s the oney time to buy geran’ums – right before sunup. You see,’ he explained easily, ‘it’s a night-bloomin’ geran’um I got to have, it’s what Mother always liked best.’

That might have stopped them if it hadn’t been for the bathtub on his back. Sure enough, they noticed it. Chicago cops are pretty sharp about bathtubs being carried through alleys piggyback at 4
A.M
. Though the punk himself didn’t see anything particularly out of the way. ‘A little clumsy for carryin’ geran’ums,’ he conceded to the aces, setting the tub down to light the butt of a dead cigar with a borrowed match, ‘but when I seen it layin’ there in the middle of the alley the first thing I tawt was somebody
better get that tub out of the way before Szalapski the Milkman’s horse breaks a leg over it in the dark. That’s Szalapski from Nort’western Dairy – not that Szalapski I Fix Fenders – it ain’t that the horse don’t know the stops by hisself it’s just that he don’t see so good no more – not like that good old Rumdum the Pedigreed Square-snapper – that’s my blood-type Polish Airedale, he don’t get along so good wit’ Owner’s deafy-dumb cat – say, you fellows want to buy a dog?’