“Oh, him?” He almost shouted in relief. “Say, j’ou see me slam that bimbo? Say, I knocked him off like—like—Say, I’ll go back and break his neck, huh?”
“No, no,” replied Frankie quickly, “it’s all right. I was a fool to crybaby: I dont, mostly.” She sighed. “Gee, I better be going, I guess.”
“Say, I’m sorry I—I—”
“You never done nothing. You are not the first tried to pick me up. But I usually give ’em the air, right now. Gee, what do you know about us doing a fade-out right on the street, like this?”
“Why, if you aint mad at what I done and at what a fix I got you into, why, say, it means you’re my girl. Say—lemme be your fellow, wont you? I’ll be good to you, kid.” They looked at each other and a soft wind blew over flowers and through trees and the street was no longer blind and mean and filthy. Their lips touched, and a blond morning came on hills brave in a clean dawn.
2
They walked in a park backed by dark factories; before them was the water front with water lapping at piles, and two ferry boats like a pair of golden swans caught forever in a barren cycle of courtship, to no escape.
“Listen, baby,” said Johnny, “before I seen you it was like I was one of them ferry boats yonder, crossing and crossing a dark river or something by myself, a-crossing and a-crossing and never getting nowheres and not knowing it and thinking I was all the time. You know—being full of a lot of names of people and things busy with their own business, and thinking I was the berries all the time. And say, listen:
“When I seen you coming down the street it was like them two ferry boats would stop when they met instead of crossing each other, and they would turn and go off side by side together where they wasn’t nobody except them. Listen, baby: before I seen you I was a young tough like what old Ryan, the cop, says I was, not doing nothing and not worth nothing and not caring for nothing except old Johnny; but when I slammed that bum back there I done it for you and not for me, and it was like a wind had blew a lot of trash and stuff out of the street.
“And when I put my arm around you and you was holding to me and crying I knowed you was meant for me and that I wasn’t no longer the young tough like what old Ryan says I was; and when you kissed me it was like one morning a gang of us was beating our way back to town on a rattler and the bulls jumped us and trun us off and we walked in and I seen the day breaking acrost the water when it was kind of blue and dark at the same time, and the boats was still on the water and there was black trees acrost, and the sky was kind of yellow and gold and blue. And a wind come over the water, making funny little sucking noises. It was like when you are in a dark room or something, and all on a sudden somebody turns up the lights, and that’s all. When I seen your yellow hair and your grey eyes it was like that; it was like a wind had blew clean through me and there was birds singing somewheres. And then I knowed it was all up with me.”
“Oh, Johnny!” cried Frankie. They swung together, their mouths struck sharply and clung in the sweet friendly dark.
“Baby!”
3
“Say,” said Frankie’s mother, “who is this fellow you’ve took up with?” Frankie, staring across her mother’s shoulder into the mirror, cruelly examined the other’s face. Will I look like that when I am old? she asked herself, and something inside her replied no passionately. The older woman’s white flaccid hands fumbled in her dyed hair, then, in rising anger pulled it savagely down. “Well, cant you answer, or dont you think it’s none of my business? What does he do?”
“He—he—he’s got a job in a garage. He’s going to work up to a racing driver.” Why should she feel she must vindicate Johnny to her mother, Johnny, who stood on his own legs and be damned to them all?
“A job in a garage? and you, who’ve saw how hard life is on a woman, and haven’t no more sense than that! You, young and with a figure men like, throwing yourself away on a damn car jumper in dirty overalls!”
“Money aint everything.”
The other stared at Frankie, speechless. At last she said: “Money aint everything? Will you stand there and look at me and say that? You, that have saw how I have to live? Where would you be today, if it wasn’t for what I can make? Where would the clothes to your back be? Can your garage sweetheart buy you clothes? can he do for you what I’ve done? God knows I dont want you to go the way I’ve had to go, but if it’s in your blood and you got to do it, I’d rather see you on the street taking them as they come, than to see you tied down to some damn penny pinching clerk. God, how hard life is on us women.” She turned to the mirror and began anew on her hair, her sense of injury finding ease in voluble self pity. Frankie watched her reflection stonily.
“When your father died without leaving a red cent behind him, who stopped to help me? Some of them high brow dames rotten with money, that are always fretting over social conditions? One of them damn froze face parsons always talking about the wages of sin and raising the poor sinner? Not so’s you’d notice it! You’ll learn, like me, that men dont never help women like me for nothing; and whenever you have any dealings with ’em you got to look out for yourself, and you got to put up a good front to get ’em and to keep ’em. No man aint never yet helped a woman through pity. And another thing: getting a man aint the half of it. Any woman with sense at all can get one, its keeping him that makes the difference between me and them poor girls you see on the streets. And good or bad, there’s one thing any woman will do: she’ll try to take him away from you, whether she wants him herself or not.
“You can bet on it, there wont nobody help you any more than they did me. God knows, I wouldn’t have chose this life, promising your father like I did. But he has to go and drown himself trying to pull some strange woman out of the ocean. Women always could do what ever they like with your father: he never had sense enough to either let ’em alone or to get something for his trouble. But it aint that I couldn’t trust him: never a better man than him wore hair. But to have died that way, and so soon!” She faced her daughter again.
“Come here, honey.”
Frankie drew near reluctantly and the other put her arms about her. Frankie’s body, in spite of herself, grew taut with reluctance and the other went easily into tears. “My own daughter turns against me! After all I done and suffered for her, she turns against me! Oh God!”
Oh, dont be a fool was on the tip of Frankie’s tongue, but instead she awkwardly embraced her mother. “Hush, mamma, dont take on so: I never meant nothing like that, you know I didn’t. Hush, you’ll ruin your make-up you put on so careful.”
The other turned to the mirror again, making bird-like dabs at her face with a greasy rag. “God, I’m a sight when I cry! But, Frances, you’re so—so cold; I dont know what to make of you. I swear I want you to have more of a chance than I had, and when I see you making the same mistake I did, it—it—” tears were imminent again. Frankie leaned over and embraced her mother from behind.
“There, there. I aint going to do nothing I’ll regret, I promise. Come on, now, and finish dressing. You got an engagement at four, you know.”
The other raised her petulant puffy face again, and put her arms around Frankie once more. This time the daughter did not draw back. “You love mamma, dont you, honey?”
“Of course I do, mamma.” They kissed. “Come on, let me do your hair for you.”
Her mother sighed. “All right, you’re so much quicker than I am. Oh, Frankie, I wisht you was a baby again.” She turned back to the dressing table with her fears and her imminent problem and her stubborn womanish incomprehensions. Frankie’s fingers wrought nimbly in her mother’s hair, and the phone rang.
Frankie took down the receiver, a fat voice said Who is this, and she thought at once of black cigars.
“Who do you want?”
“Well, well,” jovially, “if it aint little Frances! How’s the girl, anyhow? Say, you cant guess what I’ve got in my pocket for a cute blond kid now, can you?”
“Who do
you want, please?” Frankie’s tone was icy. Her mother stood at her elbow, her eyes bright with suspicion. “Who is it?” asked the other. Frankie silently tendered the instrument and crossed to a window giving on an air shaft massed with wires and filled with the dusty sound of sparrows. Her mother’s voice came to her in snatches: “—yes—yes— Be down in a mo—huh? yes—sure— Be down in a moment, honey. G’bye.”
She rushed back to the mirror, and dabbed at her face again. “My God, wont I ever learn better than to cry before I’m going out? What a fright I am! Where’s my hat and gloves?” Frankie stood at her elbow with them. “How do I look, honey? Wisht you could go with us, such a nice drive, but still— Oh, God, oh, God, to grow old! I wont be good for much longer, hon; that’s why I’m so anxious about you. Christ, what a sight I am!”
Frankie reassured her, helping to adjust her various belongings.
“I’ll be back Monday,” her mother spoke from the door. “There’s money in the top drawer, if you need it, you know. Be a good girl.” She pecked Frankie on the cheek, then suddenly clasped her close.
“There, now, run along, or you’ll cry again.” Frankie released herself and pushed her mother from the room. “Good-bye, have a nice time.”
Her mother gone at last, Frankie raised the drawn shades and approaching the mirror she examined her reflection unsparingly, pulling the skin of her face, pinching her flesh until the bright healthy red came through.
4
Frankie lay in her bed gazing out of the window, across roof-tops, into the far dark sky. Throughout the world hundreds of girls lay like this, thinking of their lovers for a while, then of their babies. Once, Frankie used to lie thinking of Johnny, and being lonely for him at times, but now she hardly thought of him at all. Oh, she loved Johnny all right; but boys were such tactless blundering things, trying to synchronise the crude inescapable facts of life each with his own personal integrity. And you cant do this.
To tell the truth, Johnny kind of bothered her at times, going on about something that was done and that couldn’t be undone. Trying to kid her, as well as himself into the belief that he could stand up like a highwayman and bid destiny halt and deliver. Gee, at times Johnny was worse than a movie.
And her mother’s baffled rage had been terrible. Just as though I’d burned up a liberty bond, Frankie thought.
“And this is what you call doing something you wont regret,” the other had almost screamed at her. “But what about me? What am I to do when I am too old for men to like any longer? Is this the way you repay the things I’ve gave you, by giving me another mouth to feed?”
Frankie tried vainly to stem the torrent of the other’s anger: she would care for her mother in her turn.
“How? Can that fellow do it? Can he pay me the money I’ve spent on you?” But at last, even her mother’s anger wore away into tears, even recriminations began to pall in her tearful trotting in and out with ice cream and toast and the few things Frankie drove herself to eat.
“What will folks think,” her mother moaned, and Frankie replied tartly that people wouldn’t have to think at all and therefore they wouldn’t be always guessing, which was more than her mother could say. In fact, ever since the other had found out she had acted as though the whole thing were something Frankie could or should remedy. “Mother’s such an awful kid, but she has been sweet to me,” Frankie sighed, running her fingers lightly over her young belly, trying to imagine she could feel the baby already, staring out into the far dark sky.
She felt quite old, and very sick at the stomach; she kind of wished her mother was not such a fool. She’d kind of like to have someone she could—that she— You know how, when you’ve walked and walked until you’re about all in and you know you can walk further if you have to, but you dont see how; and then someone comes along and gives you a lift and dont try to talk to you at all but just takes you where you are going and then lets you out? Not God: she didn’t believe much in prayer. When she was five she had prayed for a doll that could open and close her eyes, and she hadn’t got it.
“Oh, hell,” she said, “if I just wasn’t so damn sick! That’s what gives me the willies so.” But the nausea would pass away after a while, everything would pass away after a while. By next year all this will be forgotten, she thought—unless I’ve gotten into this fix again. One thing I wont ever do. I wont ever want no more toast and tea.
Frankie lay thinking of all the other girls throughout the world, lying with babies in the dark. Like the center of the world, she thought; wondering how many centers the world had: whether the world was a round thing with peoples’ lives like fly-specks on it, or whether each person’s life was the center of a world and you couldn’t see anybody’s world except yours. How funny it must look to whoever made it! Unless he, too, was the center of a world and couldn’t see any other world except his. Or if he was a fly-speck on somebody else’s world.
But it was more comforting to believe that she was the center of the world. That the world was centered in her belly. And I will keep it so! she told herself fiercely. I dont need Johnny nor mother to help me, neither.
“Oh, God, oh, God,” her mother wailed, “what will become of us now? How can I hold up my head and meet my men friends with a daughter at home in the family way? What can I tell them?”
“Why must you tell them at all?” Frankie repeated wearily.
“And who’ll look after you? Who’ll give you a home? Do you think any man is going to take your brat, too?”
Frankie looked at her mother a steady moment. “Do you still think that I am waiting for some rich bird to fall for me? Do you still think that, knowing me like you ought?”
“Well, what are you going to do? Do you think marrying your fellow will help you and me? What has he got?”
Frankie turned her sick face to the wall. “I tell you again, I dont need any man to take care of me.”
“Then what in the name of God,” asked the other in tearful exasperation, “are you going to do? What did you do it for?”
Frankie looked at her mother again. “You old fool, I didn’t do it to make Johnny marry me nor to get anything from him. I dont need Johnny nor any other man to keep me, and I never will. And if you could say the same thing you wouldn’t be forever crying and pitying yourself for the things you’ve let life do to you.”
And, having reaffirmed her personal integrity it was as though, as Johnny once said, she had been in a dark room and someone had turned up the lights. Life seemed so plain and inescapable that she wondered why she had ever let things fret her; and she thought, strangely, of the father she scarcely remembered: of the way he’d raise his round yellow head and swing her, screaming with laughter, in his hard hands. And there recurred to her a childish vision of him, triumphant though dead, among green waves.
Her mother’s sobs from the other bed shuddered away into silence and dark and the measured respirations of sleep, and Frankie lay in the kindly dark, lightly stroking her young belly, staring out upon a dark world like hundreds of other girls, thinking of their lovers and their babies. She felt as impersonal as the earth itself: she was a strip of fecund seeded ground lying under the moon and wind and stars of the four seasons, lying beneath grey and sunny weather since before time was measured; and that now was sleeping away a dark winter waiting for her own spring with all the pain and passion of its inescapable ends to a beauty which shall not pass from the earth.
The Priest
His novitiate was almost completed. Tomorrow he would be confirmed, tomorrow he would achieve that complete mystical union with the Lord, which he had so passionately desired. In his studious youth he had been led to expect it daily; he had hoped to attain it through confession, through talk with those who seemed to have it; through living a purging and a self denial until the earthly fires which troubled him had burned themselves out with time. He passionately desired a surcease and an easing of the appetites and hunger of his blood and flesh, which he had been taught to believe were
harmful: he expected something like sleep, a condition to which he would attain in which those voices in his blood would be stilled. Or rather, chastened. Not to trouble him more, at least: an exalted plane wherein the voices would be lost, sounding fainter and fainter, soon to be but a meaningless echo among the canyons and majestic heights of the glory of God.
But he had not gotten it. After talk with a father in his seminary he could return to his dormitory in a spiritual ecstasy, an emotional state in which his body was but the signboard bearing a flaming message to shake the world. His doubts were then allayed; he had neither doubt nor thought. The end of life was clear: to suffer, to use his blood and bone and flesh as a means for attaining eternal glory—a thing magnificent and astounding, forgetting that history and not the age made Savonarolas and Thomas a Beckets. To be of the chosen despite the hungers and gnawings of flesh, to attain a spiritual union with Infinite, to die—how could physical pleasure toward which his blood cried, be compared with this?
But, once with his fellow candidates, how soon was this forgotten! Their points of view, their callousness, were enigma to him. How could one be of the world and not of the world at the same time? And the dreadful doubt that perhaps he was missing something, that perhaps after all life was only what one could make of his short three score and ten of time, might be true. Who knows? who could know? There was Cardinal Bembo living in Italy in an age like silver, like an imperishable flower, creating a cult of love beyond the flesh, purged of all torturings of flesh. And was not this but an excuse, a palliation for this terrible fearing and doubting? was not the life of that long dead, passionate man such a one as his own: a fabric of fear and doubt and a passionate grasping after something beautiful and fine? Even something beautiful and fine meant to him a Virgin not calm with sorrow and fixed like a watchful benediction in the western sky; but a creature young and slender and helpless and (somehow) hurt, who had been taken by life and toyed with and tortured—a little ivory creature reft of her first born and raising her arms vainly upon a dying evening. In other words, a woman, with all of woman’s passionate grasping for today, for the hour itself; knowing that tomorrow may never come and that today alone signifies, because today alone is hers. They have taken a child and made of her a symbol of man’s old sorrows, he thought; and I too am a child reft of his childhood.