Louis Vance - Joan Thursday - A Novel

About two o'clock in the afternoon she lunched meagrely on crackers-and-milk at another dairy establishment on Columbus Avenue – reducing her capital to sixty-one cents. Then, recrossing the park, she made her way back through the sweltering side-streets toward her late home. She arrived in time to see her father's burly figure lumbering heavily up the street. His gaze was to the sidewalk, his mind upon the poolrooms, his thick, pendulous lower lip quivered with incessant, inaudible repetition of race-track names and records. He would not have recognized Joan had he looked directly at her. And he didn't look.

She was safe, now, to make her final visit to the flat. Thursby could be counted on not to return before six o'clock. She hastened across the street and up the narrow, dark and noisome stairway…

Seated at the dining-table, over an array of dishes discoloured with the residue of the mid-day stew, her mother, seemingly more immaterial than ever, merely lifted shadowed and apathetic eyes to Joan's face as she entered. Edna, on the contrary, jumped up with a hushed cry of surprise not untouched by alarm.

"Joan!"

The girl assumed a confident swagger. It was borne in upon her, very suddenly, that she must prove a ready liar in answer to the storm of questions that was about to break.

"Hello, people!" she cried cheerfully. "How's everything?"

"Didn't the Old Man meet you on the stairs?" demanded Edna in a frightened breath.

"Nope: I waited till he'd turned the corner," Joan returned defiantly. "Anyway I ain't afraid of him. What'd he say, last night, after I was gone?"

Edna started to speak, stammered and fell still, turning a timid gaze to her mother.

"No more'n he said before you went out," said the latter listlessly. "He won't hear of your coming back – "

"A lot I care!" Joan retorted with a fling of her head. "All I'm after's my things. I've done enough for this family… Now I'm going to look out for Number One."

The mother made no response. She seemed no longer to see Joan, whose bosom swelled and palpitated with a suddenly-acquired sense of personal grievance.

"I've done enough!" she repeated mutinously.

Edna said in a tremulous voice: "I don't know what we'll do without you – "

"Do as I done!" Joan broke in hotly. "Go out and get a job and slave all day long so's your father won't have to support his family. Go on and try it: I 'm sick and tired of it!"

She turned and strode angrily into the front rooms. Edna followed, awed but inquisitive.

Pulling their bed out from the wall, Joan disentangled from the accumulation of odds and ends beneath it a small suit-case of matting, in which she began to pack her scanty store of belongings: all in embittered silence, ignoring her sister.

"Where'd you stay last night?" Edna ventured, at length.

"With a friend of mine," Joan answered brusquely.

"Who?" the other persisted.

Joan hesitated not one instant; the lie was required to save her face.

"Maizie Dean, if you got to know."

"Who's Maizie Dean? I never heard you speak of her – "

"Lizzie Fogarty, then," said Joan roughly. "She used to work with me at the stocking counter. Then she went on the stage. Now she's making big money."

"Is she going to get you a job?"

"Of course – foolish!"

"Where's she live?"

"Down in Forty-fifth Street, near Eighth Avenue."

"What's the number of the house?"

"What do you want to know for?"

"Ain't you going back there?"

Joan shut down the lid of the suit-case and began to strap it. "Yes," she said with a trace of reluctance.

"I might wanta write to you," insisted Edna. "Anything might happen and you not know – "

"Oh, well, then," Joan admitted, with an air of extreme ennui, "the number's Two-eighty-nine. Catch that? Don't forget."

"I won't."

"Besides," Joan added, lifting her voice for the benefit of the listener in the dining-room, "you don't need to be so much in a rush to think I ain't ever coming back to see you. You got no right to think that of me, after the way I've turned in my pay week in and week out, right straight along. I don't know what makes you think I've turned mean. I'm going to come and see you and ma every week, and as soon's I begin to make money you'll get your share, all right, all right!"

"Joan – " the younger girl whispered, drawing nearer.

"What?"

"They had a nawful row last night – ma and pa – after you went."

"I bet he done all the rowing!"

"He" – Edna's thin, pale cheeks coloured faintly with indignation – "he said rotten things to her – said it was because you took after her made you want to go on the stage."

"That's like him, the brute!" Joan commented between her teeth. "What'd she say?"

"Nothing. Then he lit into Butch, but Butch stood up to him and told him to shut his face or he'd knock his block off."

"And he did shut his face, didn't he?"

Edna nodded vigorously. "Yeh – but he rowed with ma for hours after they'd went to bed. I could hear him fussing and swearing. She never answered one word."

Reminiscences of like experiences of her own, long white nights through which she had lain sleepless, listening to the endless, indistinguishable monologue of recrimination and abuse in the adjoining bedroom, softened Joan's mood.

She returned to the dining-room.

Her mother's head had fallen forward on arms folded amidst the odious disorder of unclean dishes. Through a long minute Joan regarded with sombre eyes that unlovely and pitiful head, with its scant covering of greyish hair stretched taut from nape to temple and brow and twisted into a ragged knot at the back, with its hollowed temples and sunken cheeks, its thin and stringy neck emerging from the collar of a cheap and soiled Mother Hubbard. With new intentness, as if seeing them for the first time, she studied the dejected curve of those toil-bent shoulders, and the lean red forearms with their gnarled and scalded hands.

Dull emotions troubled the girl, pity and apprehension entering into her mood to war with selfishness and obstinacy.

This drudge that was her mother had once been a woman like herself, straight and strong and fashioned in clean, firm contours of wholesome flesh. To what was due this dreadful metamorphosis? To the stage? Or to Man? Or to both?.. Must she in the end become as her mother was, a battered derelict of womanhood, hopeless of salvage?

Slipping to her knees, she passed an arm across the thin, sharp shoulders of the woman.

"Ma …" she said gently.

The response was a whisper barely audible, her name breathed in a sigh: "Joan…"

Beneath her warm, strong arm there was the faintest perceptible movement of the shoulders.

"Listen to me, ma: I ain't going to forget you and Edna. I am going to work hard and take care of you."

The mother moved her head slightly, turning her face away from her daughter. Otherwise she was wholly unresponsive. Joan might have been talking to the deaf.

She divined suddenly something of the tragedy and despair of this inarticulate creature whose body had borne her, who had once been as her daughter was now. Before her mental vision unfolded a vast and sordid tapestry – a patchwork-thing made up of hints, innuendoes and snatches of half-remembered conversations, heretofore meaningless, of a thousand-and-one insignificant circumstances, individually valueless, assembling into an almost intelligible whole: picturing in dim, distorted perspective the history of her mother, drab, pitiful, appalling…

Abruptly, bending forward, Joan touched her lips to the sallow cheek.

"Good-bye," she said stiffly; "I got to go."

She rose. Her mother did not move. Edna stared wonderingly, as though a bystander at a scene of whose meaning she was ignorant. Joan took up her suit-case and went to the door.