The Man With the Golden Arm (20 page)

A trolley yammered past like a dog pursuing a rabbit and pulled up with a startled little yelp.

And heard his step on the long dark stair at last coming up just one step ahead of the first metallic cries of morning.

Until the night of the Great Sandwich Battle old Stash had only once given Violet concrete grounds for divorce. That had been the night he’d gone on what she still referred to as his ‘tandem.’ She had never let him forget that sorry occasion.

It was bad enough that a man of his years should come wheeling in at 2
A.M
. of a summer night with his shirt ripped half off his back – but before she could rip the rest of it off him her breath was cut off by the spectacle of somebody’s grandmother in nothing but a suit of long underwear, the high-heeled shoes once called ‘baby dolls’ and one earring dangling like the final symbol of a misspent youth.

When Vi had recovered her breath all she could gasp was, ‘Lady, whoever you are, they’re lookin’ for you – but they ain’t gonna find you
here
’ – and rushed Grandma, drunk as a coot, down the hall and down the steps and out into
the street with one good strong shove to get her going in somebody else’s direction – then two steps at a time all the way back up to see what Old Husband was up to in that
unusual
condition.

A good thing she’d taken two at a time. He was tottering half out the window, trying to read the temperature on the thermometer nailed to the outside wall with his shoeless toes barely touching the floor. She hauled him back so hard he landed flat on his back in the middle of the bedroom floor, creaked over upon his side and went into a snoring sleep.

But who wants to sleep with a drunk beside the bed? She had rolled him, like a half-filled laundry bag, right under the springs. But he’d tossed and mumbled so restlessly there that at last she had hauled him out of it by the ankles, supported him down the hall with his head dangling like a Christmas rooster’s, into the broom closet. Putting a pillow under his head, she’d locked him in with a reproach he never heard. ‘Just to teach you a lesson, Old Man.’

After that the hall broom closet had been his punishment for almost any misdemeanor. The last stretch he’d spent in there had been for doing nothing worse than bringing home a loaf of day-old pumpernickel. She’d warned him that she wouldn’t eat day-old food but yet he fancied, after fifteen months of married life, that she rejoiced secretly in all his bargains. He had a sneaking senile conviction that she’d married him because he knew where all the best bargains were to be had for just a little wheedling and the wearing of a tattered sweater. ‘Makin’ poor mouth,’ Violet called it. And for this reason kept his bargain-store addresses a secret from her, for fear that when she found them out she would leave him. What other reason could she have had for marrying him? he had asked himself in the cold white light of day. Old Husband wasn’t just anybody’s fool. He was everybody’s in general and Violet’s in particular.

She had tried to cure the bargain-store habit by dumping all his day’s spoils into the container at the end of the hall. When he’d seen her do that he had retired to the closet voluntarily. Perched upon a bucket there, a frayed blanket clutched closely about him as the night wore on and the hall grew chill, he had worried most of all about whatever would the neighbors think.

Neighbors could think what they damned well pleased in Violet’s book. Every hour on the hour she’d sallied forth to denounce him through the closet keyhole. ‘
Doopa!
Come out! I got to slug you!’ Old Stash was too sly for that. He’d stayed where he was.

He never understood why such little things made her so hopping mad and it looked like he never would catch on this side of purgatory. Yet it was all for the best that he remain in the fog of cut-rate prices in which he wandered numbly between broom closet and icehouse and his own warm bed. For even though he did wise up there wasn’t a thing, at Old Husband’s age, to be done about it.

Sometimes she punished him by not letting him pull the date off the calendar for three or four days. Then, when he would hand her the Saturday night pay envelope, she’d reward him by letting him tear off all three days in a row – she would have to watch him to see that he didn’t go over into the coming week. Old Husband literally chortled with glee when he’d gotten all three off and in his hand, if those three had finished the month.

She had even caught him sneaking into the calendar at night to tear off a page while she slept. And once, in a panic of frustration, he had ruined an almost virginal calendar by ripping off sixteen weeks in a row; as though he could no longer wait for the endless weeks to pass. She had put him to bed with a fever, soothing him with a hot-water bag across his stomach.

It wasn’t simply bad luck that the bag had leaked a bit. It too had been bought secondhand.

On the night of the Great Sandwich Battle Stash gave her, she felt, even further cause for separate maintenance.

Although, if the sausage hadn’t slipped out of the sandwich, everything would have been fine and dandy, like sugar candy.

That was one accident that Violet couldn’t blame the punk for. It was one time it was truly all her fault, for bringing him upstairs when she knew Old Husband was likely to wake up.

Still, it’s not easy to blame Violet either. Maybe it was really Stash’s fault for going to bed too early.

Unless it was Stash’s boss’s fault for working the old man so hard he couldn’t stay awake after supper, just when Violet would start taking out the pin curls and getting ready to go places and see things.

‘I used to cry sometimes when I first married Stash,’ she confessed to Sophie, ‘I didn’t have no place to go. I used to shave him with a ’lectric razor then. He could shave hisself all right, but I liked the sound it makes. That’s the oney pleasure that old man ever give me.’

On the night of the Great Sandwich Battle she fixed him a glass of warm tomato juice with a raw egg floating in it – Widow Wieczorek had confided in her that it had worked wonders with the late Emil W. when he’d first started slipping. But Stash turned in half an hour earlier than usual; all it had done was to make him limper than ever.

‘Next time I’ll try goat’s milk,’ Violet planned wistfully, watching him shuffling off toward the bedroom with the left-hand flap of his winter underwear dangling. ‘If
that
don’t work I might as well be a widow too. Wonder if there’s such a thing as a pension for icehouse widows. Them big ice blocks could be dangerous, all sorts of things could happen.’

She just wasn’t tired a bit. She hadn’t done a thing all day except to wheel Sophie to the Pulaski, return to sweep Sophie’s flat and wash up yesterday’s dishes while Frankie snored on the bed, sluice the stairs for Schwabatski and sweep the water down four flights into the gutter, then clean up her own rooms and heat up some restaurant leftovers she’d decided were ripe enough for Old Husband’s supper. He’d hauled the mess half a mile the evening before and had weighed it before leaving for work to be sure she didn’t eat more than her share before he returned.

Vi didn’t mind heating the moldy stuff so much as long as she wasn’t expected to share it. ‘He don’t care what he scoffs up,’ she marveled nightly, ‘so long as it’s a big bargain is all that counts –’ n both sides of the sandwich to match. Don’t ask me why, he don’t like it when one side of the sandwich is bigger than the other.’

‘Is all dirty, too t’in,’ Stash described an uneven sandwich. It affronted some deep and childish hope still living within him that everything in the world – even sandwiches – be turned out without rough edges that might hurt little boys.

The same sort of hope, perhaps, which led him to stop at the same currency exchange regularly to change dirty dollars for nice new clean crisp ones. ‘Cott this opp!’ he would demand of the cashier, handing her a soiled ten-spot – when she had humored him and he was tucking away ten crisp new singles he would feel he’d driven the cleverest sort of bargain.

Even the weather must come out even for Old Husband. Hardly anything pleased him more than a nice even-numbered temperature, like 60 or 80 or 100. Just as the best days of the month seemed to him to be the 10th, the 20th and the 30th.

Yet now that it was time for him to go to bed, Violet was one wife who knew her duty. Stash sometimes couldn’t
get to sleep unless she was lying beside him. And you never could tell for sure, maybe that egg would have a delayed kick. But tonight he was drowsing by the time she had her skirt off and that’s enough to discourage the willingest of brides. Particularly since she was wearing, for the very first time, a pair of lacy black Suspants the punk had stolen for her from Nieboldt’s.

Who is supposed to appreciate a glamorous thing like that, a thing an actress might be wearing – skintight with garter tabs – if not a girl’s husband? She sat admiring her legs, pointing the tinted toenails delicately to emphasize the long slimness of her calves and the full womanly bow of her thighs.

Violet was a good girl at heart. But even a nun needs the appreciation of others. For the tinted toenails and the fancy garter tabs there was no man near to so much as say ‘Wow!’

She looked at her watch. Ten o’clock and right on the hour the old man began snoring up a row that made her wonder what in the world had been in that egg after all. From below, between snores, rose the pre-Christmas revelry of the Tug & Maul. She pulled the shade like lowering a curtain upon temptation, turned on the shaded bed light and read
Steve
Canyon
all the way through, she was that bored. Then just sat looking down at Stash’s toothless maw, open and drooling a little, comparing it with the square and virile set of Canyon’s jawbone. Even the punk had more jaw than old Stash – in some ways, she remembered with real warmth, the punk didn’t have to give an inch to Canyon. She turned out the bed light and lay for a while remembering past laughter and wondering what she’d been thinking of in marrying the old man anyhow. Because she’d wanted to take care of somebody – or for his fifty a week?

A bit of both, she compromised anxiously. Then making no particular effort to keep from waking him, crawled over
him, teasing the hairs sticking out of his nostrils with the nipple of her breast just for the hell of it, shoved her feet into slippers and tightened her winter coat modestly over her sheer nightdress.

‘Go to sleep, Stash,’ she told him gently, ‘have a good dream you’re winnin’ a turkey raffle.’ Locked the door behind her and stepped softly down the stairwell into the murmurous corridors of night guarded so constantly, as on all winter nights, by Prager beer signs and the great Milwaukee Avenue moon.

Prager beer signs down one side and High-Life down the other, all the way down Milwaukee to the streets where the dark people live, drinking cheaper beer.

And who should be sitting at the bar, goofy and gay as always, but Solly Saltskin.

‘“D.’ n D.” don’t mean “drunk ’n disorderly” in my case,’ he was explaining to Antek the Owner. ‘In my case it means “Damen ’n Division,”’cause that’s where I always wait when I want to get picked up.’

‘Just don’t get picked up for anythin’ worse’n D.’ n D.,’ Owner counseled him.

‘That’s where I got
them
,’ Sparrow whispered confidentially. ‘That Kvorka ain’t got the heart to pinch me for nuttin’ serious, he knows me too long. If he did Bednar’d fire him, Bednar likes me too.’

In fact all our most ignorant people were there and the juke played on and on.

Well, little Solly S. wasn’t any six foot three, but he knew how to treat a girl till she felt he must be five-ten at least. They had quite a few together, he’d taken the night off just
to show Schwiefka how much the joint needed him at the door and had been waiting here in the hope she might come downstairs for a small beer after Old Husband was safely tucked in the sack. They teased each other and drank till closing time, when Sparrow said he was ‘hungry enough to eat little ginny pigs.’

‘I’m so hungry if I can’t have a sandrich I got to have a pint,’ was just how the punk put it. ‘So now we’ll get a bottle ’n go by your house.’

‘Stash wouldn’t like,’ Vi explained sorrowfully, ordering that closing-time shot with which one defies all sorrowing.

‘It’ll be okay,’ Sparrow fixed everything, ‘we’ll give him half the bottle. Then we’ll turn on the radio ’n dance.’

‘Stash wouldn’t like.’

‘Why not – the radio broke?’

‘The radio’s all right.’ Violet was weakening so fast that when he hooked her arm and said, ‘Let’s go,’ she finished the shot that made everything seem just the way everything ought to have been long before this night.

Owner was putting the chairs up on the back bar and the lights in the big brass juke were running down like a rain-washed sunset. They steered each other outside and up the first flight to home in a weaving progress, each urging the other to walk more soberly.

‘Watch how
I
do it,’ Violet commanded, going up four cautious steps and coming down a reckless five. ‘Now
you
try.’

Sparrow made it fine, clear to the top of the first flight all by himself; and stood trying to focus his eyes behind the shell-rimmed glasses until she’d made it all the way too.

‘Poor old Stash,’ she giggled, ‘he works too hard.’ That set them both to tittering as if it had been the funniest thing they’d heard in a month.

‘You know what?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘Works too hard.’ This time it was even funnier, she had to hold the banister to keep from falling back downstairs.

As they wove past the second-floor desk Poor Peter Schwabatski looked upon them reverently from beneath half-lowered lids: he saw strange angels passing all night long. These two seemed holier, somehow, than any that yet had passed. The Jailer planted his horse-faced dimwit behind the desk each night in the hope he might be mistaken for a watchman; the boy passed the creaking midnight hours by planting paper daisies. Two of these grew out of a long crack in the desk to embroider the dusty old legend,
Quiet
or Out You Go Too
. To which no guest had as yet offered the slightest deference.