Бетти Смит - Maggie-Now

The girl was young, vital, healthy and had a normal sex urge although she'd never think of calling it that. She wanted to marry and lie in bed with her husband. She wanted to love and to be loved. She wanted children. She had her desperate moments when she wondered how she'd ever get to know any man whom she could marry.

No young men ever came to the house and she couldn't pick someone up off the street.

So she was all ready for Claude Bassett when he showed up.

CLAUDE BASSETT drifted into Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Nobody knew where he came from because he didn't say.

He was tall and good-looking but a little too thin. He had a closely clipped small mustache and he wore pants and coat that didn't match, which made him very conspicuous in a neighborhood where men wore pants, coat and vest all made of the same material. He smoked cigarettes, which made him suspect in a community where men smoked cigars or pipes or chewed tobacco.

His speech was precise English on the academic or even lit [17 ~1

eraryside. This was a strange affectation or was it a sort of defense? After: he warmed up to a person or began to feel at ease with someone, his English w as just as colloquial as the next man's.

He had what appeared to be another mannerism. When one spoke to him, he listened intently for a moment, then cocked his head sharply sidewise. I his gave the impression that he didn't want to miss one precious word of what the person was saying. It was very flattering especially to women. They felt that he hung on to every word they said.

As a matter of fact, he had a punctured eardrum which made him deaf in his left ear. Therefore, the habit of the sharp turn of his right car to the speaker, in order to enable him to hear better. He cocked his head more for women than for men because men spoke louder and he didn't have to strain to hear.

He would have been su rprised to know that he was under observation as he walked the streets. He thought he moved about unnoticed in that strange, teeming, yet quiet neighborhood with its old-law tenements and new walk-up apartment houses and slanted-roof houses dating back to pre-Revolutionary times wedged in between the larger buildings. He would have been surprised to know that lATilliamsburg, along with Greenpoint, Flushing and Maspeth, still retained the customs and way of thinking of the small town. And he vitas a newcomer in a small town.

Maggie-Now first saw kiln in Van Clees's store when she went to buy tobacco for her father. Claude Bassett had some placards under one arm and a burning cigarette in his other hand. He was talking earnestly to Van Clees in a very educated voice and Van Clees was answering with;l flat, uneducated "No." Claude gave Maggie-Now a quick appraising look when she walked in and then continued urging something on Van Clees.

Maggie-Now gathered that the young man was trying to rent Van Clees's store in the evenings for a week. She heard him mention "school." Van Clecs said "No," looking with distaste the while at the cigarette in the man's hand.

Ingratiatingly, the man asked something about a card in the window and it was "No" again. Maggie-Now felt sorry for the man. She wished she could tell him he'd get nothing from Van Clees while he held a cig,arette, the way Van Clees 1lated cigarette smokers.

~ 1–1 ~ Later, Maggie-Now saw his placard in a grocery-store window. It announced a free course in salesmanship.

"Earn twenty dollars a week in your spare time. Nothing to buy and etc. etc." Classes were to start the following Monday and the place where instructions would be given was written in ink at the bottom of the placard.

Schools were always cropping up in the neighborhood.

Someone was always setting one up in a parlor, a loft, a basement or a too-long-vacant store which could be rented for a song. Selfstyled teachers gave lessons in tatting, tattooing, singing, dancing, juggling everything.

There were lessons in marcel waving and in how to sit and stand and breathe; how to make hair grow, how to get rid of hair growth, how to develop your bust and how to grow mushrooms in the cellar.

So many teachers w ho knew these things and couldn't get rich by knowing them thought they could get rich by telling other people how to do them. Those who took lessons or courses dreamed of being headliners in vaudeville like those other Brooklyn boys, Van and Schenck, or a dancer like Irene Castle, or getting to be Miss Flatbush with a developed bust or being in a carnival to exhibit hair that grew in waves down to the ankles like the Seven Sutherland Sisters on the hair-tonic bottle.

No teacher became rich; no pupil's dream came true.

All that teacher or pupil garnered was a little gleam of hope for a while. None of the schools lasted long; a week or two or, at the most, a month. But they brr ught a little interest and excitement to the community.

Maggie-Now decided to attend the classes. One, she was interested in making twenty dollars a week in her spare time. Two, she was anxious to get out, be with other people; and, three (she didn't fool herself at all), she wanted to see more of Claude Bassett.

The school was an upstairs dentist's waiting room on Grand Street. The dentist didn't practice nights and the waiting room just stood there and the dentist thought he might make a dollar or two out of it.

The little room was crowded w hen Maggie-Now arrived.

[~7-'1 There were about a dozen women there and four men.

The women ranged in ages from eighteen to forty. The men were nearer middle age and one was quite old. There weren't enough seats. Five women sat on a wicker settee meant for three. The others were two to a chair. They sat slightly sidewise, turned a little away from each other.

They looked like Siamese twins joined at the hip. The men sat on the floor. They looked awkward and ill at ease.

The scent of Djer Kiss and Quelque Fleurs talcum powder and of Pussy Willow face pow der and of sachet powder that smelled like sweet, warm candy tilled the room. This scent was interlarded with the acrid medicinal smell belonging ho dentists' offices.

I'm the stilly flue, thought.~1ag~gie-N't>>v ruefully, without cologne on.

The women for the most Part wore cheap georgette waists, transparent enough for the camisole, beaded with pink or blue baby ribbon, to show through, or crepe de

(,hine waists and long, tight skirts with wide, cinching belts. They wore beads and pearl button earrings and dime-store hracclers which filled the air with jingle-jangle.

Their hair was arranged in the styles of the day: spit curls or dips or an iron marcel wave. The youngest girl, being the most daring, had a Dutch cut. She thought it made her look like Irene Castle. All seemed to have the same makeup faces powdered dead white with two coats on the nose, painfully plucked eyebrows and mouths painted to look like baby rosebuds.

Why, it's like a party, or a dance, decided Maggie-Now, the way everybody's so dressed zap. They didn't come here to learn anything, she thought derisively. They came to get a man! Listen to me, she chided herself. As if I didn't cone here for the same thing!

"Good evening," said C laude Bassett, who was sitting behind a small table on which were piled a dozen books.

I know her, he thought. I've known her for a lore; time.

Bitt W]~?o is she? He smiled at ~NIaggie-Now.

She smiled back. He's trying to place me she thought. He doesn't remember he saw me ifs the store.

"I'll fetch you a chair," he said to.~1aggie-Now.