John Passos - 1919

But there she was on the platform in noseglasses and raincoat looking as oldmaidish as ever and a slightly younger girl with her who turned out to be from Waco and studying art. They had a long ride in a taxi up crowded streets full of slush with yellow and grey snowpiles along the sidewalks. “If you’d have been here a week ago, Anne Elizabeth, I declare you’d have seen a real blizzard.”

“I used to think snow was like on Christmas cards,” said Esther Wilson who was an interestinglooking girl with black eyes and a long face and a deep kind of tragicsounding voice. “But it was just an illusion like a lot of things.” “New York’s no place for illusions,” said Ada sharply. “It all looks kinder like a illusion to me,” said Daughter, looking out of the window of the taxicab.

Ada and Esther had a lovely big apartment on University Heights where they had fixed up the dining room as a bedroom for Daughter. She didn’t like New York but it was exciting; everything was grey and grimy and the people all seemed to be foreigners and nobody paid any attention to you except now and then a man tried to pick you up on the street or brushed up against you in the subway which was disgusting. She was signed up as a special student and went to lectures about Economics and English Literature and Art and talked a little occasionally with some boy who happened to be sitting next to her, but she was so much younger than anybody she met and she didn’t seem to have the right line of talk to interest them. It was fun going to matinées with Ada sometimes or riding down all bundled up on top of the bus to go to the art-museum with Esther on Sunday afternoons, but they were both of them so staid and grown up and all the time getting shocked by things she said and did.

When Paul English called up and asked her to go to a matinée with him one Saturday, she was very thrilled. They’d written a few letters back and forth but they hadn’t seen each other since Washington. She was all morning putting on first one dress and then the other, trying out different ways of doing her hair and was still taking a hot bath when he called for her so that Ada had to entertain him for the longest time. When she saw him all her thrill dribbled away, he looked so stiff and stuckup in his dress uniform. First thing she knew she was kidding him, and acting silly going downtown in the subway so that by the time they got to the Astor where he took her to lunch, he looked sore as a pup. She left him at the table and went to the ladies’ room to see if she couldn’t get her hair to look a little better than it did and got to talking with an elderly Jewish lady in diamonds who’d lost her pocketbook, and when she got back the lunch was standing cold on the table and Paul English was looking at his wristwatch uneasily. She didn’t like the play and he tried to get fresh in the taxicab driving up Riverside Drive although it was still broad daylight, and she slapped his face. He said she was the meanest girl he’d ever met and she said she liked being mean and if he didn’t like it he knew what he could do. Before that she’d made up her mind that she’d crossed him off her list.

She went in her room and cried and wouldn’t take any supper. She felt real miserable having Paul English turn out a pill like that. It was lonely not having anybody to take her out and no chance of meeting anybody because she had to go everywhere with those old maids. She lay on her back on the floor looking at the furniture from underneath like when she’d been little and thinking of Joe Washburn. Ada came in and found her in the silliest position lying on the floor with her legs in the air; she jumped up and kissed her all over her face and hugged her and said she’d been a little idiot but it was all over now and was there anything to eat in the icebox.

When she met Edwin Vinal at one of Ada’s Sunday evening parties that she didn’t usually come out to on account of people sitting around so prim and talking so solemn and deep over their cocoa and cupcakes, it made everything different and she began to like New York. He was a scrawny kind of young fellow who was taking courses in sociology. He sat on a stiff chair with his cocoacup balanced uncomfortably in his hand and didn’t seem to know where to put his legs. He didn’t say anything all evening but just as he was going, he picked up something Ada said about values and began to talk a blue streak, quoting all the time from a man named Veblen. Daughter felt kind of attracted to him and asked who Veblen was, and he began to talk to her. She wasn’t up on what he was talking about but it made her feel lively inside to have him talking right to her like that. He had light hair and black eyebrows and lashes around very pale grey eyes with little gold specks in them. She liked his awkward lanky way of moving around. Next evening he came to see her and brought her a volume of the Theory of the Leisure Class and asked her if she didn’t want to go skating with him at the St. Nicholas rink. She went in her room to get ready and began to dawdle around powdering her face and looking at herself in the glass. “Hey, Anne, for gosh sakes, we haven’t got all night,” he yelled through the door. She had never had iceskates on her feet before, but she knew how to rollerskate, so with Edwin holding her arm she was able to get around the big hall with its band playing and all the tiers of lights and faces around the balcony. She had more fun than she’d had any time since she left home.

Edwin Vinal had been a social worker and lived in a settlement house and now he had a scholarship at Columbia but he said the profs were too theoretical and never seemed to realize it was real people like you and me they were dealing with. Daughter had done churchwork and taken around baskets to poorwhite families at Christmas time and said she’d like to do some socialservicework right here in New York. As they were taking off their skates he asked her if she really meant it and she smiled up at him and said, “Hope I may die if I don’t.”

So the next evening he took her downtown threequarters of an hour’s ride in the subway and then a long stretch on a crosstown car to a settlement house on Grand Street where she had to wait while he gave an English lesson to a class of greasylooking young Lithuanians or Polaks or something like that. Then they walked around the streets and Edwin pointed out the conditions. It was like the Mexican part of San Antonio or Houston only there were all kinds of foreigners. None of them looked as if they ever bathed and the streets smelt of garbage. There was laundry hanging out everywhere and signs in all kinds of funny languages. Edwin showed her some in Russian and Yiddish, one in Armenian and two in Arabic. The streets were awful crowded and there were pushcarts along the curb and peddlers everywhere and funny smells of cooking coming out of restaurants, and outlandish phonograph music. Edwin pointed out two tiredlooking painted girls who he said were streetwalkers, drunks stumbling out of a saloon, a young man in a checked cap he said was a cadet drumming up trade for a disorderly house, some sallowfaced boys he said were gunmen and dope peddlers. It was a relief when they came up again out of the subway way uptown where a springy wind was blowing down the broad empty streets that smelt of the Hudson River. “Well, Anne, how did you like your little trip to the underworld?”

“Allright,” she said after a pause. “Another time I think I’ll take a gun in my handbag…. But all those people, Edwin, how on earth can you make citizens out of them? We oughtn’t to let all those foreigners come over and mess up our country.”

“You’re entirely wrong,” Edwin snapped at her. “They’d all be decent if they had a chance. We’d be just like them if we hadn’t been lucky enough to be born of decent families in small prosperous American towns.”