The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride Page 4

  Though the vaults also have a powder room which might be recommended to wandering duchesses—chairs Louis Quinze, soap Roger & Gallet, and as far as I had ever known, never another customer—I had no intention of staging anywhere within these precincts my recognition scene with myself. But in this air, thick with the dead-storage promises of thousands of keys, I ought to be able at least to settle on the punctilio of my new life—was it allowable to carry money with me from the old, and what kind of portfolio? Tramps carried kerchiefs on sticks, or used to, sailors their duffel, and so forth—what would be classed as strictly O.K. and necessary for such a vagabond as I? Some of the strays I knew toted gear which was surprisingly personal, like the beggar who carried a bus conductor’s coin-gadget—that was it, let the personal be my law! But for the time being I must give myself a little leeway; it would be a shame if, through the overscrupulous zeal of novice or convert, for want of a fiver or a kerchief, I should end up in looney-bin or pokey, instead of where I should be, afloat upon the marts and purlieus, quietly on view.

  I sat there for some time, daintily ticking over my little etiquettes—and goodbyes. Say goodbye to R. and Gallet!—where I was going, and in what guise, I’d be lucky to get past the matron in a Howard Johnson’s. Say hello to the life of honest dirt, where hot baths are for kings or Salvationers, and every amenity except air has to be fought for. And say farewell to the romanticism of those who work among the poor with their hats on. Admit that the hardy maintenance of my birthright would entangle me in a thousand ruses and stratagems to which my present one was child’s play. Accept the fact that honesty requires the most artful dodging of all.

  In the tara-tara of that thought, bugled through these halls where everybody else was hiding something, I stood up and almost saluted, hand on curls—but managed to bring my hand down again, empty. Not yet. One more place to go—and one more little white lie wouldn’t hurt me. So, though my curls burnt my fingers, with that in mind I was able to leave the cell, go through the little ceremony of the key, and walk past my grandfathers the way I had walked in—having kept trust with the Guaranty Trust.

  As a reward, I suppose, I was allowed to catch the next cab immediately. But the minute I heard myself give my destination—the office of the attorney to whom I had already given so many powers of—I knew my own weakness. How often I had seen it in the profession!—how those who are merciless in self-criticism often feel enough absolved by it to stay right where they are. True, I had business with George, but after that there must be no more offside destinations. Cringing there in the cab, I came to grips with the one power I hadn’t delegated away and couldn’t, the one little estate of dull memories, cranky habit-grooves and old private nosepickings, that was locked in my brain forever and is the one which keeps most people from revolution—the power of home.

  Matter of fact, it was George who helped me on and away, merely by being who and how he was; in the years to come I shall remember him as we do the last person we saw on shore.

  In appearance, George is attractively speckled (with gray, of course)—a silver fox in pepper-and-salt suiting. One doesn’t shock George, at least verbally. As with most conservative lawyers, the bulk of his files records a steady round of those good little Czerny exercises which practice money. But George’s absorbent manner—that of a man who has gone through everything from divorce with mayhem (if only by proxy), to the problems of setting up trusts for the most secret illegitimates or monsters—is guaranteed to set the putatively criminal layman at his ease.

  Behind this limber crime-side manner, he conceals a personal family life of the most Euclidean convention. If I could have depended on this alone, I’d long since have told him my secret, thereby acquiring the comfort of a sounding board, and yes, perhaps a little legal flirtation across the already admirable image he has of me. But his vanity—which certainly would have been to reply that such as I weren’t at all new to his experience—until yesterday would have offended mine. The need to be unique dies hard with those who already are—and how to get out of that corner with sincerity will be my worry from now on.

  “Cruise, eh?” said George. “Archeological—you pay to dig? Or once round the Greek isles before the engine explodes? Or a schooner for suckers? I know you.

  And how I counted upon it! “Tramp,” I said. That’s all—I left the rest to him.

  “My dear girl.” In George’s eyes, I can always see how I look to him—a pleasant sensation, even yesterday. “Tramp steamers went out some years ago. They all have tile baths now. Any that would take on passengers.” He squinted at me, and I could see myself sitting on the axial line of his binoculars, a small client of charms just right for the afternoon tea-break, but not as tidy as usual. “You’re not thinking of doing a Birdsall?”

  “What’s that, George?”

  “She crewed it. Round the Horn, and the crew never knew she wasn’t a—until … Let’s see now, what year was that …?” He leaned back, intent on bringing in Birdsall in the happy, duckshoot way he always brought in all such citations.

  “Oh, no, no.” I lowered my lashes. “Not in this partic—not in my situation. I just want to—get away from it all for a while. And though there’s no reason for us … I mean, for people like me to be anonymous, I mean, incognito … I mean of course we already are. But it’d be kind of fun.”

  “Ah.” He twiddled with satisfaction. “Us.”

  I said nothing. George does not leer, and I did not blush. But from then on, our business went with dispatch.

  “I agree with you,” he said, in process of changing my will. “Ernest doesn’t need it. Not he.” His disapproval of my brother is based on what he believes to be E’s exhibitionism. In time, I shall wonder—and perhaps hear, from a distance—what he will think of mine. “But it does seem a shame that a girl like you can’t find a better beneficiary than the Seamen’s Institute.”

  “Oh, I could—” I said. “There’s a friend—but so rich already.”

  “Oho,” said George. “I mean—oh no. Not in that case.” He beamed at me, “Rich enough already, eh. Sure you don’t want to change your mind and let me book you on the United States Line. Get you a seat at the Captain’s table. And for, er—any companion, of course.”

  Just then, the secretary brought in the tea-things. George’s windows are high, located in a cozy circle of other enormous buildings nestling round their view. There was a freckle of sun still on the harbor, and from within, the sense of lucid well-being that comes to one, toward end of day, in business offices dedicated to some furnishment which has been running quietly and profitably for a long time.

  I envisioned myself at the Captain’s table, on my head—which I would hold a la marquise, with the creamy arrogance of those models who know themselves to be the impresario of some extraordinary fashion—perhaps the narrowest chaplet of gems, custom-fitted to be worn banded Indian-wise, across the forehead. For, wouldn’t I do better to strike a blow for my rights from the topmost purlieus of the upper parallel, instead of grinding away at my own moral behavior like some sidewalk artist, or from even farther below?

  On the Shore Line, for instance, on the west side of the tracks somewhere past the outskirts of Harlem on the way to Port Chester, a large sign always caught the eye, as it had mine only that morning: Madame Baldwina’s Bridal Salon, so help me God. Though it was probably merely the ornate fancy of a lady named Baldwin, its possibilities had always amused me, a railside salon of the imagination, never to be patronized except in the mystic flash of empathy as I passed it, but its clients all in my category, all, like me, crouched in the ultimate creature-skin. And now I saw myself, a sudden bride from that salon, rocketed out in the name of my patronne upon the clean, savory, hot-bath-and-massage world of fashion promotion: Madame Baldwina model photo’ed at the Fontana di Trevi, at the Colony and on a bicycle in San Luis Obispo, Miss Baldwina at the Opera, at a first-night, at a Fair. At the Captain’s table. Or taking tea with her lawyer.

  “What’s
so funny?” said George.

  “They run color ads of the fashionables, don’t they?” I said. “On the U.S. Line.”

  Just then, the secretary made one of the squashed noises given forth by the free and equal of the democracy, to remind us that they are. Celebrities—she’d often seen them lined up at the rail on sailing-days, or coming into port. She’d even seen my brother. And at her picture of him, the small, clean whirlwind of the morning bore me up again, high enough up—or low—to see that if I joined him, in the world of fact-exploitation where he waltzed with his image, I should merely be upholding the single standard of Myself.

  “No?” George said. “O.K., have it your way. At least you’ve cut that dreary job of yours. Why a girl like you … I never. Let those women I’ve seen you with—let them do it—spinsters who wear Femme. Why should a girl like you wear a hairshirt for the rest of the world?”

  Such references always give me pause. I raised my lashes, short ones tinted but not added to, as I must so often have done everywhere—in hope. “A girl like me, George?”

  He smiled at me. “A golden one. I always thought so.” George had a very Edwardian father—who often thinks for him. I smiled back at them both.

  At the door, he even patted my shoulder. “Give you any trouble,” he murmured, “just you run to papa.” I stood still as a totem, and let him do the waltzing and weaving. To deceive, as I knew so well, one often need merely stand still and let other people’s conventions do the lying. Otherwise, I couldn’t have got him to make all these arrangements so blithely—but it was for the last time.

  Perhaps he caught an ave atque vale echo; so many of the Edwardians were poets, or Latinists. “Listen,” he said, “it’s spring, so even a lawyer can say it. Gather your rosebuds, honey. You’re one of the few women I’d say it to. Go on and do it; live a little. Just don’t lose your head.”

  Do nuns, on their last novice afternoon, make puns? What could I do but kiss him and hope that this would help him to remember, when he came to judge my state of mind at the time, his own last words to me? And then I said goodbye to him and all the offices of well-being. And then I caught the last cab.

  Why is it that when we return home unexpectedly soon, doubling back on the lone prowler of last evening, the stumbler into clothes of the early morning, that we seem to smell the prowler just left, on whom we even seem to be prying? I stood on my own threshold, one of a life already repudiated, and already so nostalgically dear to me for its angel-pains of good or bad, that even to shut the door behind me was an act of dissolve. Then I went round the windows, letting in the last tender shoots of sun and air. The place was to live out its lease in dust covers, and if I hadn’t returned by then, my man of so many powers was to use one of them to pack it all off to the warehouse, where, as long as paid for, it might rust for my return under the best possible preservative conditions for sentiment, a little town of life in one room, among so many others of the same. (I had once paid a chance visit to the Manhattan Storage; like a tour of Pompeii, everything sooner or later is grist.) And on the new roads to come, if ever I needed a conundrum to put me to sleep, I could meditate on the odds of my returning to rescue it.

  So now, after my morning’s hard work at discarding goods, money and other irrelevancies, there was very little else to dispose of, except—the crux. I had kept cut flowers about, but had never had plants, or close friends I must board them with. The air here was only mildly impregnated with the damp, lily-pad affections of some of my co-workers, mostly those whom George had taped so shrewdly, plus a few livelier echoes-in-stereo of the married ones, women of such bursting mental health that they exhausted their families in the expression of it, and had to get away now and then with the girls.

  Going down the hall to the bathroom, I had my sharpest moment of—what? The hall is four feet wide, perhaps three times that in length. Nothing hangs there but a few dim lithos. To the right, almost brushing one’s arm and looming toward the eyeball as one passes, there is a high lacquer chest, dark and ungainly, put there because it will fit nowhere else. The light is poor. In short, it is a hallway, with no emotion of its own. One goes down it mindlessly, thinking of other things, or of the room at the end of it. Yet when I started down it yesterday I had to stop, whelmed, mourning exactly those unmarked moments. I could have wished for a bundle of them, an old cluster, to take with me. The power of home is in the unmarked moments. My shoulder, my soul, fitted this groove. Is this commonplace? Since I needs must follow the ordinary at a wallflower distance, I have no way of knowing.

  Then I went to the wig closet. I knew all about my feelings here, a half-lifetime of them having brought me where I was, so had my answers ready, and experienced no pang. I had come to make my adieux.

  The quality of the wig closet is intentness, less ordered than in a laboratory, not as cluttered as a beauty parlor is, but more desperate than in church. Its aims are smaller. Sometimes, when I entered and stood before that long line, I understood, for an ancient, frightened pause, the Old Testament’s fleshly fear of idols. There exist wigblocks whose smooth, oval headshapes have been vulgarized with bright cloth covers on which faces are even sewn, simpering masques with patchwork lips and sequined eyelids. Mine are all of the simple, natal wood, their only face that same planed abstraction of one, like the frontal of a casque, which serves them all equally for countenance. All have therefore the same blind, downward look which seems to know the service it performs. They are without obligation to be female. Nevertheless, they are demure, enough so that if one could attach to each block a body molded in its own spirit, I have often thought one might find oneself with a fair replica of the little lady who sits within the skin.

  As I faced them, eighteen in all, I remembered the two who had refused to be discarded, and taking them out of their box, set them beside the others. They were none of them in the state I liked them best. Suddenly, I whipped off all their wigs and cast these aside, in a pile. (My sentiment toward the wigs themselves is clear enough; close though we are, I have for them the same feelings I harbor toward women with hair.)

  Then they faced me, lyric abstracts of the human head, even almost the poem of it, but too much the appendage of human use ever to be sculpture, and being all alike, one sad step away from art. I suppose that is what most idols are. I stood there for quite a while saying what I thought was goodbye, long enough until I understood what I was really saying. Hello.

  Oh larks and gaiety!—for that’s what it can be, sometimes, when we finally desert everything we have, in order to greet everything there is. Did you never wonder how it feels to be one of those—the men who walk out of the door one morning natural as life but are never to be seen again, at least not in the proper places? Or perhaps one of those whose unlaid ghosts are still reported—the owners of puddles of clothes left on beaches, of the ownerless car, left for all to see, on a bridge? I often used to wonder how it felt to be one of those—the de-campers. And now I have a notion of how it must be, even for the wife-deserters, the fathers of five who tiptoe out and over a back fence of broken bottles—how it feels for all those who light out and start walking the underside of the pavement, upside down, like a child’s drawing of Chinamen on the lower rim of the world.

  Glee—that’s what it feels like. Half of it, of course, is for the stone rolled away from the neck-bone, but the other half is the glee of running. Queer then though, how they’ll still give each other little helping flips of the hand, or sit, though silent, in each other’s company—for the fire perhaps, but even on a warm day, as if each saw the same, funny, handmade grail in front of him. Or not really. For I never met a manjack among them who didn’t believe he was running toward the facts.

  Rough champagne, that, and the price is high—but it’s the drink we’re made for. On the fizz of it, I went round gathering up my portfolio, while the door to the wig closet, a silent choir loft looking down, remained open. I chose toilet articles, at first trying to stick strictly to a philosophy of need, bu
t that’s not to be had for the asking; in the modern world, what is need? I would be taught it.

  I took a plaid car-blanket of consoling Scotch warmth and color, and a change of inner and outer clothing—unfortunate that the lightest and warmest should be cashmere and other silky telltales—to supplement the sturdy undergarments, slacks and stout shoes I had already donned. (If the vagrant is often dressed too warmly for year-round weather, it’s because Aesop is a liar; it’s not the ant who knows most about winter.)

  To these I added a head-scarf (for colds) and then, thoughtfully, one of my old turbans from Cooksley. Even nudists must be practical, and I would in time have to get my living. Did I mean to beg, steal, or wash dishes?—here again it came to me that circumstances must be my moral instruction. (It’s so hard to remember that just because one is running toward the facts doesn’t necessarily mean that one has got them—or ever will.) And at the last minute I added a short veil of gauze.

  The veil was connected with a slight ambition of mine already burgeoning. For it’s entirely possible to be both honest and frivolous, a role that men deny exists, of course, since only women are perfect for it. It seems to me in no way odd that Paris, the goal of so many professions from eaters to lovers, should also be mine. Not that the underside of New York is to be despised; a vagrant who has got even as far as one of its boroughs has come very far. But from books I’ve read, Bohèmes I’ve listened to, there appeared to be no place for one of our sort quite like the banks of the Seine, or perhaps the barges. (After that, with the onset of age and maybe wisdom, perhaps Athens.) And though from now on I mightn’t look it, I knew myself to be very conventional really, if not at heart, as they say, then perhaps from the bottom, where the conventions are more normally located. So, for Paris in the spring, I carried gauze.