Manhattan Transfer (3 page)

‘Accountant. I hope before long to be a certified accountant.’

‘I am a printer and my name is Zucher - Marcus Antonius Zucher.’

‘Pleased to meet you Mr Zucher.’

They shook hands across the table between the bottles.

‘A certified accountant makes big money,’ said Mr Zucher.

‘Big money’s what I’ll have to have, for my little girl.’

‘Kids, they eat money,’ continued Mr Zucher, in a deep voice.

‘Wont you let me set you up to a bottle?’ said Thatcher, figuring up how much he had in his pocket. Poor Susie wouldn’t like me to be drinking in a saloon like this. But just this once, and I’m learning, learning about fatherhood.

‘The more the merrier,’ said Mr Zucher. ‘… But kids they eat money… Dont do nutten but eat and vear out clothes. Vonce I get my business on its feet… Ach! Now vot mit hypothecations and the difficult borrowing of money and vot mit vages going up und these here crazy tradeunion socialists and bomsters…’

‘Well here’s how, Mr Zucher.’ Mr Zucher squeezed the foam out of his mustache with the thumb and forefinger of each hand. ‘It ain’t ever day ve pring into the voirld a papy poy, Mr Thatcher.’

‘Or a baby girl, Mr Zucher.’

The barkeep wiped the spillings off the table when he brought the new bottles, and stood near listening, the rag dangling from his red hands.

‘And I have the hope in mein heart that ven my poy drinks to his poy, it vill be in champagne vine. Ach, that is how things go in this great city.’

‘I’d like my girl to be a quiet homey girl, not like these young women nowadays, all frills and furbelows and tight lacings. And I’ll have retired by that time and have a little place up the Hudson, work in the garden evenings… I know fellers downtown who have retired with three thousand a year. It’s saving that does it.’

‘Aint no good in savin,’ said the barkeep. ‘I saved for ten years and the savings bank went broke and left me nutten but a bankbook for my trouble. Get a close tip and take a chance, that’s the only system.’

‘That’s nothing but gambling,’ snapped Thatcher.

‘Well sir it’s a gamblin game,’ said the barkeep as he walked back to the bar swinging the two empty bottles.

‘A gamblin game. He aint so far out,’ said Mr Zucher, looking
down into his beer with a glassy meditative eye. ‘A man vat is ambeetious must take chances. Ambeetions is vat I came here from Frankfort mit at the age of tvelf years, und now that I haf a son to vork for… Ach, his name shall be Vilhelm after the mighty Kaiser.’

‘My little girl’s name will be Ellen after my mother.’ Ed Thatcher’s eyes filled with tears.

Mr Zucher got to his feet. ‘Vell goodpy Mr Thatcher. Happy to have met you. I must go hom to my little girls.’

Thatcher shook the chubby hand again, and thinking warm soft thoughts of motherhood and fatherhood and birthday cakes and Christmas watched through a sepia-tinged foamy haze Mr Zucher waddle out through the swinging doors. After a while he stretched out his arms. Well poor little Susie wouldn’t like me to be here… Everything for her and the bonny wee bairn.

‘Hey there yous how about settlin?’ bawled the barkeep after him when he reached the door.

‘Didn’t the other feller pay?’

‘Like hell he did.’

‘But he was t-t-treating me…’

The barkeep laughed as he covered the money with a red lipper. ‘I guess that bloat believes in savin.’

A small bearded bandylegged man in a derby walked up Allen Street, up the sunstriped tunnel hung with skyblue and smoked-salmon and mustardyellow quilts, littered with second hand gingerbread-colored furniture. He walked with his cold hands clasped over the tails of his frockcoat, picking his way among packing boxes and scuttling children. He kept gnawing his lips and clasping and unclasping his hands. He walked without hearing the yells of the children or the annihilating clatter of the L trains overhead or smelling the rancid sweet huddled smell of packed tenements.

At a yellowpainted drugstore at the corner of Canal, he stopped and stared abstractedly at a face on a green advertising card. It was a highbrowed cleanshaven distinguished face with arched eyebrows and a bushy neatly trimmed mustache, the face of a man who had money in the bank, poised prosperously above a crisp wing collar and an ample dark cravat. Under it in copybook writing was the signature King C. Gillette. Above his head hovered the motto
NO
Stropping No Honing.
The little bearded man pushed his derby back off his sweating brow and looked for a long time into the dollarproud eyes of King C. Gillette. Then he clenched his fists, threw back his shoulders and walked into the drugstore.

His wife and daughters were out. He heated up a pitcher of water on the gasburner. Then with the scissors he found on the mantel he clipped the long brown locks of his beard. Then he started shaving very carefully with the new nickelbright safety razor. He stood trembling running his fingers down his smooth white cheeks in front of the stained mirror. He was trimming his mustache when he heard a voice behind him. He turned towards them a face smooth as the face of King C. Gillette, a face with a dollarbland smile. The two little girls’ eyes were popping out of their heads. ‘Mommer… it’s popper,’ the biggest one yelled. His wife dropped like a laundrybag into the rocker and threw the apron over her head.

‘Oyoy! Oyoy!’ she moaned rocking back and forth.

‘Vat’s a matter? Dontye like it?’ He walked back and forth with the safety razor shining in his hand now and then gently fingering his smooth chin.

There were Babylon and Nineveh; they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble colums. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets flame like great candles round the Golden Horn… Steel, glass, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skyscrapers. Crammed on the narrow island the millionwindowed buildings will jut glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white cloudhead above a thunderstorm.

When the door of the room closed behind him, Ed Thatcher felt very lonely, full of prickly restlessness. If Susie were only here he’d tell her about the big money he was going to make and how he’d deposit ten dollars a week in the savings bank just for little Ellen; that would make five hundred and twenty dollars a year… Why in ten years without the interest that’d come to more than five thousand dollars. I must compute the compound interest on five hundred and twenty dollars at four per cent. He walked excitedly about the narrow room. The gas jet purred comfortably like a cat. His eyes fell on the headline on a
Journal
that lay on the floor by the coalscuttle where he had dropped it to run for the hack to take Susie to the hospital.

MORTON SIGNS THE GREATER NEW YORK BILL
COMPLETES THE ACT MAKING NEW YORK WORLD’S
SECOND METROPOLIS

Breathing deep he folded the paper and laid it on the table. The world’s second metropolis… And Dad wanted me to stay in his ole fool store in Onteora. Might have if it hadnt been for Susie… Gentlemen tonight that you do me the signal honor of offering me the junior partnership in your firm I want to present to you my little girl, my wife. I owe everything to her.

In the bow he made towards the grate his coat-tails flicked a piece of china off the console beside the bookcase. He made a little clicking noise with his tongue against his teeth as he stooped to pick it up. The head of the blue porcelain Dutch girl had broken off
from her body. ‘And poor Susie’s so fond of her knicknacks. I’d better go to bed.’

He pushed up the window and leaned out. An L train was rumbling past the end of the street. A whiff of coal smoke stung his nostrils. He hung out of the window a long while looking up and down the street. The world’s second metropolis. In the brick houses and the dingy lamplight and the voices of a group of boys kidding and quarreling on the steps of a house opposite, in the regular firm tread of a policeman, he felt a marching like soldiers, like a sidewheeler going up the Hudson under the Palisades, like an election parade, through long streets towards something tall white full of colonnades and stately. Metropolis.

The street was suddenly full of running. Somebody out of breath let out the word Fire.

‘Where at?’

The group of boys melted off the stoop across the way. Thatcher turned back into the room. It was stifling hot. He was all tingling to be out. I ought to go to bed. Down the street he heard the splattering hoofbeats and the frenzied bell of a fire engine. Just take a look. He ran down the stairs with his hat in his hand.

‘Which way is it?’

‘Down on the next block.’

‘It’s a tenement house.’

It was a narrowwindowed sixstory tenement. The hookandladder had just drawn up. Brown smoke, with here and there a little trail of sparks was pouring fast out of the lower windows. Three policemen were swinging their clubs as they packed the crowd back against the steps and railings of the houses opposite. In the empty space in the middle of the street the fire engine and the red hosewagon shone with bright brass. People watched silent staring at the upper windows where shadows moved and occasional light flickered. A thin pillar of flame began to flare above the house like a romancandle.

‘The airshaft,’ whispered a man in Thatcher’s ear. A gust of wind filled the street with smoke and a smell of burning rags. Thatcher felt suddenly sick. When the smoke cleared he saw people hanging in a kicking cluster, hanging by their hands from a windowledge. The other side firemen were helping women down a ladder. The flame in the center of the house flared brighter. Something
black had dropped from a window and lay on the pavement shrieking. The policemen were shoving the crowd back to the ends of the block. New fire engines were arriving.

‘Theyve got five alarms in,’ a man said. ‘What do you think of that? Everyone of ’em on the two top floors was trapped. It’s an incendiary done it. Some goddam firebug.’

A young man sat huddled on the curb beside the gas lamp. Thatcher found himself standing over him pushed by the crowd from behind.

‘He’s an Italian.’

‘His wife’s in that buildin.’

‘Cops wont let him get by.’ ‘His wife’s in a family way. He cant talk English to ask the cops.’

The man wore blue suspenders tied up with a piece of string in back. His back was heaving and now and then he left out a string of groaning words nobody understood.

Thatcher was working his way out of the crowd. At the corner a man was looking into the fire alarm box. As Thatcher brushed past him he caught a smell of coaloil from the man’s clothes. The man looked up into his face with a smile. He had tallowy sagging cheeks and bright popeyes. Thatcher’s hands and feet went suddenly cold. The firebug. The papers say they hang round like that to watch it. He walked home fast, ran up the stairs, and locked the room door behind him. The room was quiet and empty. He’d forgotten that Susie wouldnt be there waiting for him. He began to undress. He couldnt forget the smell of coaloil on the man’s clothes.

Mr Perry flicked at the burdock leaves with his cane. The real-estate agent was pleading in a singsong voice:

‘I dont mind telling you, Mr Perry, it’s an opportunity not to be missed. You know the old saying sir… opportunity knocks but once on a young man’s door. In six months I can virtually guarantee that these lots will have doubled in value. Now that we are a part of New York, the second city in the world, sir, dont forget that… Why the time will come, and I firmly believe that you and I will see it, when bridge after bridge spanning the East River have made Long Island and Manhattan one, when the Borough of Queens will be as much the heart and throbbing center of the great metropolis as is Astor Place today.’

‘I know, I know, but I’m looking for something dead safe. And besides I want to build. My wife hasnt been very well these last few years…’

‘But what could be safer than my proposition? Do you realize Mr Perry, that at considerable personal loss I’m letting you in on the ground floor of one of the greatest real-estate certainties of modern times. I’m putting at your disposal not only security, but ease, comfort, luxury. We are caught up Mr Perry on a great wave whether we will or no, a great wave of expansion and progress. A great deal is going to happen in the next few years. All these mechanical inventions – telephones, electricity, steel bridges, horseless vehicles – they are all leading somewhere. It’s up to us to be on the inside, in the forefront of progress… My God! I cant begin to tell you what it will mean…’ Poking amid the dry grass and the burdock leaves Mr Perry had moved something with his stick. He stooped and picked up a triangular skull with a pair of spiralfluted horns. ‘By gad!’ he said. ‘That must have been a fine ram.’

Drowsy from the smell of lather and bayrum and singed hair that weighed down the close air of the barbershop, Bud sat nodding, his hands dangling big and red between his knees. In his eardrums he could still feel through the snipping of scissors the pounding of his feet on the hungry road down from Nyack.

‘Next!’

‘Whassat?… All right I just want a shave an a haircut.’

The barber’s pudgy hands moved through his hair, the scissors whirred like a hornet behind his ears. His eyes kept closing; he jerked them open fighting sleep. He could see beyond the striped sheet littered with sandy hair the bobbing hammerhead of the colored boy shining his shoes.