John Passos - Manhattan transfer

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:

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:

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.’