The Man With the Golden Arm (15 page)

Whether Violet returned to tell her or not, Sophie could
usually tell what the neighbors were up to: kissing or drinking or counting their money. Sometimes there was an argument on the stairs between the Jailer and that one who had thumbtacked his nickname so proudly upon his door:
Mr &
Mrs
Drunky John.

‘You buy for booze and forget rent,’ the Jailer was scolding John right outside Sophie’s door and a kind of cold glee seized her, she wheeled softly to the keyhole to hear every single word.

‘See my wife.’

Sophie sniffled. Some wife. As if everyone didn’t know what that Molly Novotny was, hustling drinks and calling herself ‘a hostess.’ A hostess, mind you. ‘I knew her when she was fourteen ’n goin’ out with every Tom, Dick ’n Harry who’d ask her.’ It served her right now, Sophie felt, if all the girl got out of sharing a man’s bed was light mockery and heavy blows.

‘What Judge tell you last week,’ the Jailer demanded to know, ‘five or ten?’

‘Seventeen – but I don’t have to do ’em.’

That was where the Jailer had him. ‘If I sign complaint you do ’em.’

The Jailer was toughening up a bit, it sounded to Sophie.

Yet Drunkie John’s chief skill was in using the affection others felt for Molly to gain himself all manner of reprieves; reprieves of workhouse sentences, reprieves of rent, reprieves to go on drinking. Nothing ever really happened, John had learned, when the rent was overdue. The Jailer always turned softhearted when it came to the actual signing of a complaint. He was altogether too fond of Molly to send her man to the workhouse. All he had ever yet extracted from John was a promise to stop kicking her.

A promise seldom kept. Sophie had heard John telling Molly, coming past the door late at night, ‘I’m not layin’
you, sister – I’ll never lay you. Just let me get in those kicks.’ They had passed to the sound of her crying, ‘All I want from you is to be left alone.’

Once it had been Nifty Louie on the other side of the knob. Early morning, everyone from the first floor to the fourth up to do an honest day’s hustling and Louie doing the talking for everyone. ‘My business is everybody’s business – informin’ is a racket like everythin’ else. Anythin’ that pays ain’t nothin’ to be ashamed of, one racket’s as good as the next. A man who’s ashamed of his racket is a man who’s ashamed of his mother. The only thing a man got a right to be ashamed of these days is bein’ broke. Get yours, Piggy-O. I’m gettin’ mine. We’ll go to town together.’

And Piggy-O’s flat half-lisp, like the voice of a man being willingly chloroformed, ‘
They
ain’t gettin’ ahead of
me
. I’m goin’ to town too.’

Some mornings there were no voices but those of the air shaft, making kitchen sounds. To these Sophie listened, she heard a secret meaning there. A woman sorting knives and forks and spoons into separate drawers, tinkling the separate tenement seconds off. Then the beating of a heavy spoon, as the one task was done and a new one begun, into a platter or bowl. Homesick sounds that her mother once had made and now would make no more. Sounds out of a time of contentment that should have been her own; sounds that belonged to all women in the world save herself. A searing self-pity would seize her, that Sophie Majcinek of all women should be so punished. She would wheel away from the door and the air shaft’s many voices.

To sit by the window, flyspecked since summer, where only the iron traffic’s metallic cries could reach her heart.

Where only the carnival of the cars could please her eye. Blue, green and mud-splattered, Fourth of July red or funereal
black, truck and trailer, roadster and sedan, low-slung coupé or pompous hearse: all day the city’s varicolored traffic passed, paused, and rocked on again.

While the cry of a single record, always the same old cry, came to her down from the fourth floor rear where some old fool in pin curls fancied it was 1917 again.

There through the starless night or the thunderous noon, sunlight or rain or windless cold, she would sit till the tenement’s long shadows moved all the way down from the fourth floor rear, slid silently under her door and drifted across her lap. To tremble one moment at still finding her there and then lie comforted and still. While all the air hung wearily.

Long lonesome shadows of the December tenements that fled the neon carnival below to turn each night toward her for rest.

This was the shadow-gatherers’ hour: the hour for those all over the earth who had rest neither in sleep nor waking. Some gathered their shadows like memories; but she gathered hers like unborn children to her pale and secret eyes.

She knew when the shadows waited to come by the way the luminous crucifix glowed a bit. They moved toward her then for warmth, they had been feeling unwanted all day. Like everyone else in the world for whom things had gone wrong. They knew that here they would come alive, for here they were loved and wanted at last. She alone knew how lost all shadows felt: it made them the dearer to her own unwanted heart.

To the heart weighed down by its own uselessness. What good is any unwanted heart?

That was why they must never forsake her and always be faithful and forever be kind. Here in the amber evening’s light where all the air hung wearily.

‘You bad little kittens, you’ve lost your mittens,’ she would scold them like storybook children. For everyone needed someone and everyone had to pretend a bit to be somebody. There was a boy for every girl in the world, it said in the old song.

And would not touch the shadows for one moment for fear her sweet half dream be lost.

For she, like the luminous Christ, had also been betrayed. She too had bled, and bled each day, for another’s sin. Between herself and that tarnished crucifix a bond of blood and pain had grown. She had seen that it glowed out of love of everyone she herself wished to love and could not. How could she love who had never learned how?

Tonight, just as the wan winter-evening light fanned out into all the colors of the hustlers’ night, God tossed a handful of city rain across the green and red tavern legends like tossing a handful of red and green confetti. Overhead the wavering warning lamps of the El began casting a blood-colored light down the rails to guide the empty cars of evening down all the nameless tunnels of the night.

Beneath the dresser the hound she had wanted so badly, and so soon had come to despise, slept with his great snout in a saucer wherein the drying dregs of another day’s beer had left an unclean amber line. The last fly of autumn walked a lonely beat there, between the saucer’s brim and the hound’s nostrils: trapped, like the hound, in hustlers’ territory with one conviction to go.

In the room’s corners there remained fragments of the dish-breaking tournament of the night before. She remembered with something of pleasure; and something of sadness too. For it had been Frankie, on his knees, who’d cleaned up
that mess when he’d come back from work. She had wakened to see him crawling.

Crawling.
And hadn’t made a sound lest he get to his feet in shame. She had just let him think she hadn’t seen.

Then, when he’d climbed into bed with the floor quite clean, she’d laughed a little, softly, just to let him know she’d been awake and watching the whole time he’d been on his knees.

What was it the goof had said then? ‘
Please
don’t, Zosh.’ How was that for a husband? ‘
Please
don’t laugh at me, Zosh.’ A husband like
that.
‘It’s about time you done some crawlin’ around here,’ she’d told him and had turned heavily onto her side to dream he was trying to crawl up a fire escape in the rain and could not tell her why.

In a rain, a freezing rain. Yet would not tell her why. Had dreamed with a certain pleasure; yet with something of sadness too.

Now he was gone once more, to deal till morning where the south-western sky hung in cloudy amber folds, shielding a dull gray moon. A wind began parting them, like a curtain parting upon the opening act of a play staged just for her, to reveal a paper moon pasted stiffly – for as long as paste might hold – but one that did not weave with light as the real moon was supposed to do.

As the moon of her girlhood had woven all night: great copper strands through clouds of cloth upon the darkness’s measureless loom.

These nights the moon wove neither copper nor gold, even the clouds were pasted there. Moonlight that had once revealed so many stars now showed her only how the city was bound, from southeast to the unknown west, steel upon steel upon steel: how all its rails held the city too tightly to the thousand-girdered El.

Some nights she could scarcely breathe for seeing the flat
unerring line of cable and crosslight and lever, of signal tower and switch. For the endless humming of telephone wires murmuring insanely from street to street without ever saying a single word above a whisper that a really sensible person might understand.

For the city too was somehow crippled of late. The city too seemed a little insane. Crippled and caught and done for with everyone in it. No one else was really any better off than herself, she reflected with a child’s satisfaction, they had all been twisted about a bit whether they sat in a wheelchair or not. She could tell just by the way once familiar doorways had come to look menacing in the morning light, ready to be slammed in the face of anyone who knocked at all. Nobody was at home to anyone else any more.

‘They don’t even act like they know what they’re doin’ no more,’ she decided, watching a couple moving aimlessly together down the long street below. ‘’N that Frankie Majcinek is the worst of all.’

She heard the umbrella man with his bell, far away; and a hot-dog vendor’s cart near at hand. Saw how the moon followed the hot-dog cart like a cripple left to follow alone, leaning, one bitter moment, upon the crutch of the signal tower. It had always gone its own brave way; now it followed lamely after every fool below. It too was somehow broken. It too now played the fool.

She grew tense to see how the nameless people were bound, as they went, to the streets as the streets seemed bound to the night and the night to the nameless day. And all days to a nameless remorse.

No one moved easily, freely and unafraid any longer, all hurried worriedly to work and anxiously by night returned; waited despairingly for traffic lights to change, forever fearing that the green light might change too soon and, when that warning yellow flashed, stormed through to beat the deadly
red. Was there no time left for easy passages and casual pleasures down tree-lined boulevards? Her hours, that had begun so pleasantly, borne on a lake wind by morning and so certain then to blow off the lake every morning forever, now passed in a cold draft from a half-lit hall, rattling a loosened latch.

The wind, like the moon and Frankie Machine, all had turned secretly against her. One wind or another, one moon or the next, whether he returned by midnight or noon – all things recalled to her only that dead year’s final midnight when the chairs had been stacked and some fool had left a cracked crutch between a juke and a 7-Up sign.

‘It was mine ’n I didn’t even know it,’ she felt a ceaseless wonder now. And a bottomless sorrowing: ‘I shouldn’t ought to have laughed when I seen it.’

For since that night everyone had become afraid of closing time everywhere, of having the lights go out in the middle of the dance while the chimes of all the churches mourned: a requiem for everyone trapped beneath the copper-colored sky of noon or the night-lit ties of the El. Faintly through the flooring, two flights below, she heard the fans in the Tug & Maul begin thudding, slowly yet with a gathering vibration, then settle down to a steady hum no heavier than that of a sewing machine being pedaled between narrow walls. It told her the smoke was getting heavy and the laughter louder there.

So took to weaving her hands in a slow fantasy, like a drugged hula dancer, watching the fingers flow like separate things before her eyes and singing in a voice so thin and off-key that the hound beneath the dresser opened one boozy eye in pain.

After she had sung all the songs she knew her hands went on weaving half-forgotten fairy tales.

‘My name is Rumpelstiltskin,’ she told herself aloud, and laughed derisively at her own voice. ‘Who the hell is Rumpelstiltsky?’ Till some forgotten fairy of her mind replied, ‘You can weave gold where there is no gold.’

Sophie was always pleased to hear such words come to mind so easily, as if spoken by another: some happier, some might-have-been, some used-to-be or never-was Sophie. And listened to the glistening hum of the tracks, leveling dead away toward midnight after every El that passed; following faintly all the way to the Loop straight southeast into the metallic moonlight’s mocking glow.

Tonight the moon held to the leaning ladders of the rain as it rose. She moved her chair with it till she could see where the flickering warning lamps burned, along the El’s long boundaries, like vigil lamps guarding the constant boundaries of night. Could even see the passengers in the cars as the locals slowed toward the station.

All night, each night, waiting for Frankie in dry weather or wet, whether the moon held to the farther crosslights or to the near-at-hand signal tower, the vigil lights burned faithfully to guard a night gone false. They seemed so right, so dependable and true, in a world gone wrong, all wrong. It made her want to cry out for everyone locked in some tenement’s pit on any long and littered street.

Till darkness brought her sleep on a weary handcar, switching her onto a nowhere train that curved and descended, softly and endlessly, out upon the vast roundhouse of old El dreams.

She was a girl again sitting on Frankie’s doorstep watching the sluggish late-summer flies settling heavily against the screens. The last leaves of some sultry September hung stiffly, like leaves pressed between the pages of an old catechism.
Along the arc-lit parks and playgrounds the trees were still as shadows of trees down some picture-postcard street.