The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride Read online

  Then I shouldered my strap-bag. An Abercrombie pouch of fine leather and canvas, veteran of picnic weekends of yore, it made me look all too much like the poule de luxe of vagabonds, but time would soon darken us both, tanning us not with holiday but with the truths of exposure, like bright pennies in water. Then I turned to go.

  And then, it was my heart—which I have, oh I have—that rose in me, bubbled like a drain in which too much had been cast, but stood by for service as hearts do, imperfectly beating. The door to the wig closet was open—what use now, locks?—but I had intended to go straight past it. Had I? Had I forgotten what was hanging there? Have you?

  It hung in its own niche, well above the wigs, or did until yesterday—Knoller’s picture, Knoller’s Picasso. I have sometimes suspected it to be of rather too small a size for the general run of those of his works classified as of that period of his known as the “bone period,” but even if it shouldn’t really be a Picasso, neither the donor nor I had been bilked. Surely the blue behind the figures is his blue, the shore they sit on his pebble-crazed, wind-eaten shore, the canvas itself only a pause between two claps of wind. They are his figures, the two terrible bones with knobs for heads and an eye between them. Sad clasped, they sit against the blue, and how human is bone! Who, in their bleak sight, would call for hair, or even flesh, to cover it? But in their lower parts they are joined, as if to remember where flesh was quickest and bone may still be, in the parts where love is made. Sad clasped they sit, against the blue. I took off my last wig, and laid it before them.

  Though I might stand there until Christendom come again and all the bones did rise, I should never be as free, white and equal as they were. They were art and I was life, with a hey nonny nonny—I won’t say for which of us. Meanwhile, though I had already disposed of them by bequest—to Ernest—I found that I didn’t want him to have them after all, or not without me. Someday, they and I might present ourselves before him, for such a family reunion as is given to few stars of the cinema. In Californie, on my way to Paris, perhaps, on the odd beeline which is the zigzag one must expect of roads that were to be as open as mine. Meanwhile, I would take them along with me for my personal, the very psalm of my life, as sung by somebody else.

  I found they wouldn’t fit in the pouch as yet, someday perhaps, as needs wore out or were discarded. I wrapped them in a chamois—useful for windows, should I go out washing them—and put the picture in a Harvard book-bag, which it fitted exactly. Then I had a glass of water. Then I ate a chocolate. Then I went to the bathroom, came out again, shouldered both bags, and stood in front of the door. Scarved for the journey, but otherwise rather cold about the ears, my head hung down, a donkey awaiting its Giddy-ap and Gee. I stamped my foot at myself, but the door did not open. And finally, I was able to open it and then shut it behind me, first tossing the keys inside. So I abandoned the roost for the road, the long, sweet domestic life of “What-I-feel” for the sterner shake-a-leg of “What-I-am.” It was nothing like my young dreams of going for a cabinboy—though it might turn out to be the most masculine thing I’ve done yet.

  In the elevator, luckily self-service, I was nervy. All of me felt weak and exposed, like an invalid up on his pins again but not without a suspicion that there’d been more to the operation than supposed. I got past the doorman without difficulty.

  “Taxi, Miss?” he said, but of course I declined. Ever since a certain event in both our lives he had been particularly respectful; unless my scarf slipped, he would remain so.

  “Cheerio, Duggins,” I said. “And watch out for more armored cars.”

  It wasn’t until I boarded the subway that I realized those words had been my last address to the first-class-with-loungeseats world I was leaving. I decided they would do.

  It was just dusk when I got off in the neighborhood of my case-load, the locale I’d chosen to start out in. Honeymoons might be nothing more than unveiling, but all unveilings were not exactly—well, yes it was cowardly of me. But I couldn’t afford to start out on 42nd, a street under constant patrol for all the exhibitionists that were there already; yet in the subway, where the bashed-in people will tolerate anything, I would never be noticed at all. Later on, when I was really in practice, in that happy future when all would be ordinary again—at least for me—I planned to work my way uptown, even to hare off to the better country resorts, at weekends. Right now, I found myself not really conservative, but choosy. Which means timid. I suppose there’s no exactly right place to be reborn in, but I’ve not done so badly. This neighborhood is ruined, but lively. If the same is said of me, I shan’t be sorry.

  One way to start the ruination was to get rid of all the extra money I had by me, all in packets thin enough to be slipped under a door, but when totaled, rather a sum. The teller had been horrified; banks so disapprove of cash one would think they hadn’t got any. It’s credit, of course, that makes the planet whirl smartly; cash is for scum. I was scummed to the ears with it. It wasn’t that I still kept any special brief for the poor-in-houses as people; I had long since been aware that their mechanisms of kindness or the reverse were at best about the same as anybody else’s; nor was I even any longer romantical enough to expect any change in that area in those of the viaduct, though I preferred them. But the difference between rich and poor isn’t only cash or credit; it’s scope. To my professional knowledge, windfalls were scarce down here. These were my reasons; the facts were, that even in the most decently uncovered heads, the poor can still be a damn headache.

  I had a modest forty-five cases in my load—and they were all special, of course; that is, they were the ones I knew. As the evening darkened, and I toiled up one after the other of the tenement stairs as I had done so often before—one couldn’t trust the mailboxes, from which even government checks were regularly burgled—I carefully kept myself from any sly satisfactions of charity that I might have dragged with me from Tudor City, but couldn’t help being merry. I delivered to dark fanlights only, but had all their habits so closely by me that few return visits were needed. Now and then I stopped at a stall to have a slice of pizza or a knish or an ice, and almost every other one of the old hallways still had toilets—the whole evening was like an old household whose marvelously simple conveniences I was learning.

  In my envelopes were bills of small denomination, in sums ranging no higher than $250, the limit I had set in order not to have the matter noised about, or to alarm the receivers, to many of whom good fortune was never anonymous or gratuitous. On most, I had written something not instructional, just enough to show good intention, and that it was for them. And on each, I tried to hit a note median between their fantasies and their needs—“For Rosie’s piano”—she would never play it; “For Mannie’s funeral”—he had already had it; “For luck” to the gambler; “For the patent leathers”; “For the pimp”—since after all, wasn’t this what I was doing for myself?

  As I went up the stairs to leave the last envelope—for my old client whose politeness was always to warn me away from her own bedbugs, I felt relaxed and yet a-tingle, greased for the long birth-canal and ready to slide into the light. The fact was that my scarf, a Liberty tie-silk, ill-chosen to stay on a bare skull, must have slipped its knot sometime back—later I found it caught inside the lining of my Aquascutum. But I was by now too tired to notice anything but that the old woman’s door was dark, or to recall that her insomnia went without electricity except when visited. Her hearing too, was as sharp as the rats she kept at bay with her broom handle. I had no sooner stepped to the door, hand not yet in pouch, when the door opened. She knew me, almost at once, I think. But she was a resourceful woman. She didn’t want to.

  “A dybbuk, a dybbuk!” she shouted—which wasn’t likely to wake anybody in this house of Italians. Then she shut the door. But she was lonely. A minute later, it opened a crack. “If you are a dybbuk,” her voice said, “touch the mezuzah on the door above, it will rest you, then leave yet, hah? If you are the worker from the agency, come in.
”

  Her kindness to dybbuks melted me. I entered. She was ready for me, already moaning and ritually gnashing. “Oy, what an accident. What to happen, Oy.”

  “Not … an accident.” Confiding was new to me. “I—we—” I don’t know where I meant to begin.

  She opened her eyes. “Those Italienisches. A fight maybe?”

  I opened mine. Could she think they had scalped me? “No—no—”

  “So, ah-hah, I thought so. Those crooks,” she said. “You go to the priest,” she said. She hissed it. “Go to their priest; he’ll get it back for you before they sell it, such a beautiful wig.”

  I wept then, from shock.

  “Oy, dolling,” she said, rocking me. “All of them you have, so byudifful. Musta cost a fortune. Those crooks.”

  We were on the couch. I noticed she no longer bothered to warn me about the boggles. It’s no trick at all to come down in the world.

  That cheered me. I dried my tears. “Does everybody know? That I wear them?”

  “I don’t know wedder from everybody?” she said sulkily. “Me. My friend Mrs. Levin the beautician, she said it. And maybe we told Mrs. Yutzik in Hester Street, she’s an invalid.”

  “And the Italians,” I said. I thought it best to leave it at that.

  When I was ready to go, having found the scarf, she scuttled off, telling me to wait, and returned with something wrapped in newspaper. “Put on to go home,” she said. “And good riddance to it.” She struck her own brow. “Such connections it has, in the mind. Wait till donstairs, hah. To put.”

  It was a sheitel, the ugly wig worn after marriage and meant to be known as such, shiny red-brown and bumpy as their Friday bread. That reminded me. Down the block, yes, there the baker was already at his ovens, it must be half-past three. I missed having a watch, but the disciplines must begin; later I would be rewarded for its loss by a spryer time-sense, the total loss of One that comes to those without watches. For every so-called loss, I could look forward to other gains.

  I went in to buy rolls, and while the baker’s back was turned, dropped the sheitel lightly on a tray of the breads which would always tell me, newspaper-less though I might be, that it was indeed Friday. I did this in imitation of my friends under the viaduct, who saved as queerly as anybody who was not on the move, but when they threw something away, did so with an indefinable elegance. Then I retraced my steps to the old lady’s house—she would have to chance it on the mailbox—and dropped in my last delivery, whose inscription read: “For a couch.”

  On the way to the viaduct, I looked back at what was already yesterday. Yesterday is a village now, already a place so little on the move that I shall always be able to look back to see how all the life-stories have worked out, including mine. I moved on.

  The viaduct is a particularly coveted one, having at its opposite arch a public convenience, far enough away so that there is no smell, even downwind. Fires are not allowed by the city, of course, nor sleeping, but several niches in its fin-de-siècle architecture are excellent for either. The neighborhood, too, still a family one though on the fringe of the peculiarly livid hells of the Bowery, attracts a remarkably high class of loiterer, few winos, no hopheads, no feelies. Old men with Joaquin Miller beards still abound in the world; young ones “on the beat bit,” as they like to say, are setting up their new generation of the same (though I sometimes think it a shame to waste all that sincerity on such little experience); then there’s usually a scattering of Puerto Ricans who haven’t made it to Harlem yet or are making away from there, also now and then a crone or two (princesses-royal of the paper bag and always the least chummy), and here and there a tart. The Seamen’s Institute is nearby; though we see none of them here, it lends a churchly presence. Down the alley is the all-night Chinese restaurant. Altogether, in the gradation, not a bad setup for a novice.

  As far as I could see, no one was installed there yet, certainly no fire, though that might be due to time of year. Down here, the obscurities of night become doubly soft as one approaches the river, doubly tender, as if hiding only babes in cabbages. The cop’s last round was at four, but some of the nicer ones rarely made it—what they don’t see don’t hurtem. Doesn’t. (Hmm—why not?—don’t.) Out in front of the arch, some yards distant, there is a public bench, under a lamppost.

  I sat down on it, weary, not gay any more, but not sad either, perhaps in just that state of mind when the noumenon stops nagging and not-so-blind young phenomenon gets its chance. Or perhaps it was just that in the bad sections of New York the old lampposts are so beautiful. This one hung its long, graceful urn against a sky dark as the inside of a much larger urn that enclosed both of us. It swung itself a creaking inch or two; get born, sister; get born. The wind that blows my shore is a small one. I wished for the society of my kind—those under many hats in many places, or at home in their most private wigs a-sleeping. I wished for my brother. But my crusade is the smallest also, running to a company of one. So it was just here, that it began.

  Without scarf, I could feel how the light shone gladly on the forehead that keeps us from the apes they say—with the help of that even whiter, high naked oval above it—below which my eyes, without their false shadow, must be gleaming beyond their fair green share. I didn’t need a mirror to unveil in, or swear a resolve to, but arched my neck like a swan’s, shifted my scalp, reserved ear-wiggling for a less sacred moment, but let the breeze play like a sixth sense around them. When the time comes, it’s like grace or death, perhaps. When the time comes, it’s nothing much. Except that you don’t always hear the cop behind you.

  It was my first formal confrontation. I spoke first, as one always should to the establishment, and very distinctly. “Good evening, officer.”

  He gasped; he must have thought me a boy. It was rather a comfort that he didn’t gasp more than he did. The New York police have of course seen everything and twice around, including the man who regularly walks lower Fifth Avenue in tam, perfect Glenurquhart kilt—and lace panties—or the beggar who stands in full beard, a costume out of Parsifal and a smile like a sneer from a pulpit, in the West Fifties, on wild-weather Sundays. At the thought that I might be classed with these, I held my heritage the higher, if wanly. What could I say to him, except as it has been said by plumpers-for-the-fact eternally: Officer, it’s mine.

  He drew nearer; my uptown accent had stayed him, but he came on nevertheless. “Wotyer doing here … Miss?” Nearer, he looked puzzled; perhaps he had caught a resemblance. I decided to declare myself, thinking that this might settle it. One learns.

  “Don’t you know me, Officer?” Delicately I framed my hands over my brow, just enough to bring out the face.

  “Why, Miss—” he said. “Why, Miss—” Pity crept over his cheeks with its mild, coronary pink, and I knew I was lost. “Why, it’s the lady from the agency. Whatever are you doing here?”

  “Oh … just … taking the air. Lovely, isn’t it?” It was no use; he was already backing away from me.

  “Work done now, eh? You’ll be getting along home, eh. Not a place to hang around this late, even though we—” he gulped—“know you.”

  “Oh, after a while. It’s the first night of spring, you know.” That was a mistake.

  “Mmm,” he said. “Live far?”

  “Not very far,” I said. I was learning, but one last try. “Officer, would you oblige me in something?”

  “Why yes, of course, Miss.” Eager. “Get you a cab?”

  “No. Just take off your hat.”

  Without the hat, I could see that his hairline was well receded, almost gone. He was a middle-aged man, not bad-featured but heavy-headed, with small ears and a flaccid, white jowl; when that faded red line had finally left him, he was going to look, from the front at least, like a polar bear whose grandmother had come from County Kildare. Yet, if he took off his hat, no one would run him in for it.

  “Thank you,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “And you’re welcome, dear,” h
e said. “Fine evening, indeed now. You enjoy it, love.” He crooned it. “Stay right where you are.”

  When he came back from the call-box, of course I wasn’t there. Ruses and stratagems were all coming on as well as could be expected. But I was still an apprentice, on a warm evening. I had left behind my precious Aquascutum.

  From the side-window of the Chinese restaurant, where I ordered a pot of tea, I watched the officer come back and go away again. Under the lamppost, in the pool of light where I had first asserted my birthright, the bench was bare. Except for the loss of my raincoat, it seemed almost as if it had never happened. I was as used to this “except-for” brand of kismet as anybody else on the planet. But I found I had no desire to live by my losses only, no matter what graceful interpretations I might make of them. Oh, I had so much to learn, and at this hour, all of it stared at me at once. Is there a preferred style to be honest in? Was it quite the rough-and-ready to do a bunk on a cop by having tea?

  The restaurant, empty now, was just that sort of land’s-end in which people so often sit at the end of their own wits, or at the beginning of them. The tiled floor, of the pattern of beer parlors in the days of Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model, had had scratched on it all the intervening sorrows of grime; the walls had once been painted in landscape, in those peculiar Corot-forests of varnish and gravy-fleck down which one could never wander far. Yet, over even the dingiest of such Sing Wu’s, there hangs always a certain paper fantasy, something of fans and kites, and out there in the kitchen, moth-plaints of a language not cognate—not the worst kind to hear in the background when one is taking stock. I wasn’t out to be a heroine—I wasn’t serious enough for it, I just wanted to be ordinary. But I didn’t seem to be Freudian enough for that either, at least not to the police. From his croon I was sure he was a man who knew all about how to be. The ones who do, they’re always the enemy. Watch out for good will, sociological and psychological—all those of kind intention who would kill me for my own good, either by keeping me in my place or sending me back to it. Oh, up with the coattails and all that, of course, but it was a long way between signals, and already the second day of spring. And right now, at the hour before dawn, when the blood-sugar level is lowest, I needed to be told that taking something off could be as positive and worthy an act as putting something on—a policy our children aren’t bred to. I could make use of a fortune cookie that said it.