Manhattan Transfer (9 page)

The baby was asleep, her little rubbery face tight closed, minute pink fists clenched on the coverlet.

‘She looks happy,’ he said with a forced titter.

‘Keep quiet cant you… Here take yer shoes off… There’s been enough trampin o men’s shoes up here… Georgy I wouldn’t do this, but I juss cant help…’

He fumbled for her in the dark. ‘You darling…’ Clumsy he brooded over her, breathing crazily deep.

‘Flatfoot you’re stringin us…’

‘I aint, honest I’d swear by me muder’s grave it’s de trutt… Latitude toityseven soutt by twelve west… You go dere an see… On dat island we made in de second officer’s boat when de
Elliot P. Simkins
foundered der was four males and fortyseven females includin women an children. Waren’t it me dat tole de reporter guy all about it an it came out in all de Sunday papers?’

‘But Flatfoot how the hell did they ever get you away from there?’

‘Dey carried me off on a stretcher or I’m a cockeyed Iyer. I’ll be a sonofabitch if I warnt founderin, goin down by de bows like de ole
Elliot P
.’

Heads tossed back on thick necks let out volleys of laughter, glasses were banged on the round ringmarked table, thighs resounded with slaps, elbows were poked into ribs.

‘An how many guys was in de boat?’

‘Six includin Mr Dorkins de second officer.’

‘Seven and four makes eleven… Jez… Four an three-elevenths broads per capita… Some island.’

‘When does the next ferry leave?’

‘Better have another drink on that… Hay Charlie fill ’em up.’

Emile pulled at Congo’s elbow. ‘Come outside a sec, J’ai que’-quechose à te dire.’ Congo’s eyes were wet, he staggered a little as he followed Emile into the outer bar. ‘O le p’tit mysterieux.’

‘Look here, I’ve got to go call on a lady friend.’

‘Oh that’s what’s eating you is it? I always said you was a wise guy Emile.’

‘Look, here’s my address on a piece of paper in case you forget it: 945 West 22nd. You can come and sleep there if you’re not too pickled, and dont you bring any friends or women or anything. I’m in right with the landlady and I dont want to spoil it… Tu comprends.’

‘But I wanted you to come on a swell party… Faut faire un peu la noce, nom de dieu!…’

‘I got to work in the morning.’

‘But I got eight months’ pay in my pocket…

‘Anyway come round tomorrow at about six. I’ll wait for you.’

‘Tu m’emmerdes tu sais avec tes manières;’ Congo aimed a jet of saliva at the spittoon in the corner of the bar and turned back frowning into the inside room.

‘Hay dere sit down Congo; Barney’s goin to sing de Bastard King of England.’

Emile jumped on a streetcar and rode uptown. At Eighteenth Street he got off and walked west to Eighth Avenue. Two doors from the corner was a small store. Over one window was C
ONFISERIE,
over the other D
ELICATESSEN.
In the middle of the glass door white enamel letters read Emile Rigaud, High Class Table Dainties. Emile went in. The bell jangled on the door. A dark stout woman with black hairs over the corners of her mouth was drowsing behind the counter. Emile took off his hat. ‘Bonsoir Madame Rigaud.’ She looked up with a start, then showed two dimples in a profound smile.

‘Tieng c’est comma ça qu’ong oublie ses ami-es,’ she said in a booming Bordelais voice. ‘Here’s a week that I say to myself, Monsieur Loustec is forgetting his friends.’

‘I never have any time any more.’

‘Lots of work, lots of money, heing?’ When she laughed her shoulders shook and the big breasts under the tight blue bodice.

Emile screwed up one eye. ‘Might be worse… But I’m sick of waiting… It’s so tiring; nobody regards a waiter.’

‘You are a man of ambition, Monsieur Loustec’.

‘Que voulez vous?’ He blushed, and said timidly ‘My name’s Emile.’

Mme. Rigaud rolled her eyes towards the ceiling. ‘That was my dead husband’s name. I’m used to that name.’ She sighed heavily.

‘And how’s business?’

‘Comma ci comma ça… Ham’s gone up again.’

‘It’s the Chicago ring’s doing that… A corner in pork, that’s the way to make money.’

Emile found Mme. Rigaud’s bulgy black eyes probing his. ‘I enjoyed your singing so last time… I’ve thought of it often…
Music does one good dont it?’ Mme. Rigaud’s dimples stretched and stretched as she smiled. ‘My poor husband had no ear… That gave me a great deal of pain.’

‘Couldn’t you sing me something this evening?’

‘If you want me to, Emile?… But there is nobody to wait on customers.’

‘I’ll run in when we hear the bell, if you will permit me.’

‘Very well… I’ve learned a new American song… C’est chic vous savez.’

Mme. Rigaud locked the till with a key from the bunch that hung at her belt and went through the glass door in the back of the shop. Emile followed with his hat in his hand.

‘Give me your hat Emile.’

‘Oh dont trouble yourself.’

The room beyond was a little parlor with yellow flowered wallpaper, old salmon pink portières and, under the gas-bracket from which hung a bunch of crystals, a piano with photographs on it. The pianostool creaked when Mme. Rigaud sat down. She ran her fingers over the keys. Emile sat carefully on the very edge of the chair beside the piano with his hat on his knees and pushed his face forward so that as she played she could see it out of the corner of her eye tilted up towards hers. Madame Rigaud began to sing:

Just a birrd in a geelded cage
A beauteeful sight to see
You’d tink se vas ’appee
And free from all care
Se’s not zo se seems to be…

The bell on the door of the shop jangled loud.

‘Permettez,’ cried Emile running out.

‘Half a pound o bolony sausage sliced,’ said a little girl with pigtails. Emile passed the knife across the palm of his hand and sliced the sausage carefully. He tiptoed back into the parlor and put the money on the edge of the piano. Madame Rigaud was still singing:

Tis sad ven you tink of a vasted life
For yout cannot mate vit age
Beautee vas soooold
For an old man’s gooold
Se’s a birrd in a geelded cage.

*

Bud stood on the corner of West Broadway and Franklin Street eating peanuts out of a bag. It was noon and his money was all gone. The Elevated thundered overhead. Dustmotes danced before his eyes in the girderstriped sunlight. Wondering which way to go he spelled out the names of the streets for the third time. A black shiny cab drawn by two black shinyrumped horses turned the corner sharp in front of him with a rasp on the cobblestones of red shiny wheels suddenly braked. There was a yellow leather trunk on the seat beside the driver. In the cab a man in a brown derby talked loud to a woman with a gray feather boa round her neck and gray ostrich plumes in her hat. The man jerked a revolver up to his mouth. The horses reared and plunged in the middle of a shoving crowd. Policemen elbowing through. They had the man out on the curbstone vomiting blood, head hanging limp over his checked vest. The woman stood tall and white beside him twisting her feather boa in her hands, the gray plumes in her hat nodding in the striped sunlight under the elevated.

‘His wife was taking him to Europe… The
Deutschland
sailing at twelve. I’d said goodby to him forever. He was sailing on the
Deutschland
at twelve. He’d said goodby to me forever.’

‘Git oute de way dere;’ a cop jabbed Bud in the stomach with his elbow. His knees trembled. He got to the edge of the crowd and walked away trembling. Mechanically he shelled a peanut and put it in his mouth. Better save the rest till evenin. He twisted the mouth of the bag and dropped it into his pocket.

Under the arclight that spluttered pink and green-edged violet the man in the checked suit passed two girls. The full-lipped oval face of the girl nearest to him; her eyes were like a knifethrust. He walked a few paces then turned and followed them fingering his new satin necktie. He made sure the horseshoe diamond pin was firm in its place. He passed them again. Her face was turned away. Maybe she was… No he couldn’t tell. Good luck he had fifty dollars on him. He sat on a bench and let them pass him. Wouldnt do to make a mistake and get arrested. They didnt notice him. He followed them down the path and out of the Park. His heart was pounding. I’d give a million dollars for… Pray pardon me, isn’t this Miss Anderson? The girls walked fast. In the crowd crossing Columbus Circle he lost sight of them. He hurried down Broadway
block after block. The full lips, the eyes like the thrust of a knife. He stared in girls’ faces right and left. Where could she have gone? He hurried on down Broadway.

Ellen was sitting beside her father on a bench at the Battery. She was looking at her new brown button shoes. A glint of sunlight caught on the toes and on each of the little round buttons when she swung her feet out from under the shadow of her dress.

‘Think how it’d be,’ Ed Thatcher was saying, ‘to go abroad on one of those liners. Imagine crossing the great Atlantic in seven days.’

‘But daddy what do people do all that time on a boat?’

‘I dunno… I suppose they walk round the deck and play cards and read and all that sort of thing. Then they have dances.’

‘Dances on a boat! I should think it’d be awful tippy.’ Ellen giggled.

‘On the big modern liners they do.’

‘Daddy why dont we go?’

‘Maybe we will some day if I can save up the money.’

‘Oh daddy do hurry up an save a lot of money. Alice Vaughan’s mother an father go to the White Mountains every summer, but next summer they’re going abroad.’

Ed Thatcher looked out across the bay that stretched in blue sparkling reaches into the brown haze towards the Narrows. The statue of Liberty stood up vague as a sleepwalker among the curling smoke of tugboats and the masts of schooners and the blunt lumbering masses of brickbarges and sandscows. Here and there the glary sun shone out white on a sail or on the superstructure of a steamer. Red ferryboats shuttled back and forth.

‘Daddy why arent we rich?’

‘There are lots of people poorer than us Ellie… You wouldn’t like your daddy any better if he were rich would you?’

‘Oh yes I would daddy.’

Thatcher laughed. ‘Well it might happen someday… How would you like the firm of Edward C. Thatcher and Co., Certified Accountants?’

Ellen jumped to her feet: ‘Oh look at that big boat… That’s the boat I want to go on.’

‘That there’s the
Harabic,
’ croaked a cockney voice beside them.

‘Oh is it really?’ said Thatcher.

‘Indeed it is, sir; as fahne a ship as syles the sea sir,’ explained eagerly a frayed creakyvoiced man who sat on the bench beside them. A cap with a broken patentleather visor was pulled down over a little peaked face that exuded a faded smell of whiskey. ‘Yes sir, the
Harabic
sir.’

‘Looks like a good big boat that does.’

‘One of the biggest afloat sir. I syled on er many’s the tahme and on the
Majestic
and the
Teutonic
too sir, fahne ships both, though a bit light’eaded in a sea as you might say. I’ve signed as steward on the Hinman and White Star lahnes these thirty years and now in me old age they’ve lyed me hoff.’

‘Oh well, we all have hard luck sometimes.’

‘And some of us as it hall the tahme sir… I’d be a appy man sir, if I could get back to the old country. This arent any plyce for an old man, it’s for the young and strong, this is.’ He drew a gout-twisted hand across the bay and pointed to the statue. ‘Look at er, she’s alookin towards Hengland she is.’

‘Daddy let’s go away. I dont like this man,’ whispered Ellen tremulously in her father’s ear.

‘All right we’ll go and take a look at the sealions… Good day.’

‘You couldn’t fahnd me the price of a cup of coffee, could you now, sir? I’m fair foundered.’ Thatcher put a dime in the grimy knobbed hand.

‘But daddy, mummy said never to let people speak to you in the street an to call a policeman if they did an to run away as fast as you could on account of those horrible kidnappers.’

‘No danger of their kidnapping me Ellie. That’s just for little girls.’

‘When I grow up will I be able to talk to people on the street like that?’

‘No deary you certainly will not.’

‘If I’d been a boy could I?’

‘I guess you could.’

In front of the Aquarium they stopped a minute to look down the bay. The liner with a tug puffing white smoke against either bow was abreast of them towering above the ferryboats and harborcraft. Gulls wheeled and screamed. The sun shone creamily on the upper decks and on the big yellow blackcapped funnel.
From the foremast a string of little flags fluttered jauntily against the slate sky.

‘And there are lots of people coming over from abroad on that boat arent there daddy?’

‘Look you can see… the decks are black with people.’

Walking across Fiftythird Street from the East River Bud Korpenning found himself standing beside a pile of coal on the sidewalk. On the other side of the pile of coal a gray-haired woman in a flounced lace shirtwaist with a big pink cameo poised on the curve of her high bosom was looking at his stubbly chin and at the wrists that hung raw below the frayed sleeves of his coat. Then he heard himself speak:

‘Dont spose I could take that load of coal in back for you ma’am?’ Bud shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

‘That’s just what you could do,’ the woman said in a cracked voice. ‘That wretched coal man left it this morning and said he’d be back to bring it in. I suppose he’s drunk like the rest of them. I wonder if I can trust you in the house.’

‘I’m from upstate ma’am,’ stammered Bud.

‘From where?’

‘From Cooperstown.’

‘Hum… I’m from Buffalo. This is certainly the city for everyone being from somewhere else… Well you’re probably a burglar’s accomplice, but I cant help it I’ve got to have that coal in… Come in my man, I’ll give you a shovel and a basket and if you dont drop any in the passage or on the kitchen floor, because the scrubwoman’s just left… naturally the coal had to come when the floor was clean… I’ll give you a dollar.’

When he carried in the first load she was hovering in the kitchen. His caving hungersniff stomach made him totter lightheadedly, but he was happy to be working instead of dragging his feet endlessly along pavements, across streets, dodging drays and carts and streetcars.