John Passos - Manhattan transfer

They were silent. Oglethorpe was tapping on the table with his spoon. ‘Why heow deo you deo Mr Herf,’ he said with sudden unction. ‘Dont you remember how we met?’

‘By the way how’s everything up there Jojo?’

‘Just topping thanks. Cassahndrah’s beau has left her and there’s been the most appalling scandal about that Costello creature. It seems that she came home foxed the other night, to the ears my deah, and tried to take the taxi driver into her room with her, and the poor boy protesting all the time that all he wanted was his fare… It was appalling.’

Stan got stiffly to his feet and walked out.

The three of them sat without speaking. Jimmy tried to keep from fidgeting in his chair. He was about to get up, when something velvetsoft in her eyes stopped him.

‘Has Ruth got a job yet, Mr Herf?’ she asked.

‘No she hasnt.’

‘It’s the rottenest luck.’

‘Oh it’s a darn shame. I know she can act. The trouble is she has too much sense of humor to play up to managers and people.’

‘Oh the stage is a nasty dirty game, isn’t it Jojo?’

‘The nawstiest, my deah.’

Jimmy couldn’t keep his eyes off her; her small squarely shaped hands, her neck molded with a gold sheen between the great coil of coppery hair and the bright blue dress.

‘Well my deah…’ Oglethorpe got to his feet.

‘Jojo I’m going to sit here a little longer.’

Jimmy was staring at the thin triangles of patent leather that stuck out from Oglethorpe’s pink buff spats. Cant be feet in them. He stood up suddenly.

‘Now Mr Herf couldnt you keep me company for fifteen minutes? I’ve got to leave here at six and I forgot to bring a book and I cant walk in these shoes.’

Jimmy blushed and sat down again stammering: ‘Why of course I’d be delighted… Suppose we drink something.’

‘I’ll finish my tea, but why dont you have a gin fizz? I love to see people drink gin fizzes. It makes me feel that I’m in the tropics sitting in a jujube grove waiting for the riverboat to take us up some ridiculous melodramatic river all set about with fevertrees.’

‘Waiter I want a gin fizz please.’

Joe Harland had slumped down in his chair until his head rested on his arms. Between his grimestiff hands his eyes followed uneasily the lines in the marbletop table. The gutted lunchroom was silent under the sparse glower of two bulbs hanging over the counter where remained a few pies under a bellglass, and a man in a white coat nodding on a tall stool. Now and then the eyes in his gray doughy face flicked open and he grunted and looked about. At the last table over were the hunched shoulders of men asleep, faces crumpled like old newspapers pillowed on arms. Joe Harland sat up straight and yawned. A woman blobby under a raincoat with a face red and purplish streaked like rancid meat was asking for a cup of coffee at the counter. Carrying the mug carefully between her two hands she brought it over to the table and sat down opposite him. Joe Harland let his head down onto his arms again.

‘Hay yous how about a little soivice?’ The woman’s voice shrilled in Harland’s ears like the screech of chalk on a blackboard.

‘Well what d’ye want?’ snarled the man behind the counter. The woman started sobbing. ‘He asts me what I want… I aint used to bein talked to brutal.’

‘Well if there’s anythin you want you kin juss come an git it… Soivice at this toime o night!’

Harland could smell her whiskey breath as she sobbed. He raised his head and stared at her. She twisted her flabby mouth into a smile and bobbed her head towards him.

‘Mister I aint accustomed to bein treated brutal. If my husband was aloive he wouldn’t have the noive. Who’s the loikes o him to say what toime o night a lady ought to have soivice, the little shriveled up shrimp.’ She threw back her head and laughed so that her hat fell off backwards. ‘That’s what he is, a little shriveled up shrimp, insultin a lady with his toime o night.’

Some strands of gray hair with traces of henna at the tips had fallen down about her face. The man in the white coat walked over to the table.

‘Look here Mother McCree I’ll trow ye out o here if you raise any more distoirbance… What do you want?’

‘A nickel’s woirt o doughnuts,’ she sniveled with a sidelong leer at Harland.

Joe Harland shoved his face into the hollow of his arm again and tried to go to sleep. He heard the plate set down followed by her toothless nibbling and an occasional sucking noise when she drank the coffee. A new customer had come in and was talking across the counter in a low growling voice.

‘Mister, mister aint it terrible to want a drink?’ He raised his head again and found her eyes the blurred blue of watered milk looking into his. ‘What ye goin to do now darlin?’

‘God knows.’

‘Virgin an Saints it’d be noice to have a bed an a pretty lace shimmy and a noice feller loike you darlin… mister.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Oh mister if my poor husband was aloive, he wouldn’t let em treat me loike they do. I lost my husband on the General Slocum might ha been yesterday.’

‘He’s not so unlucky.’

‘But he doid in his sin without a priest, darlin. It’s terrible to die in yer sin…’

‘Oh hell I want to sleep.’

Her voice went on in a faint monotonous screech setting his teeth on edge. ‘The Saints has been agin me ever since I lost my husband on the General Slocum . I aint been an honest woman.’… She began to sob again. ‘The Virgin and Saints an Martyrs is agin me, everybody’s agin me… Oh wont somebody treat me noice.’

‘I want to sleep… Cant you shut up?’

She stooped and fumbled for her hat on the floor. She sat sobbing rubbing her swollen redgrimed knuckles into her eyes.

‘Oh mister dont ye want to treat me noice?’

Joe Harland got to his feet breathing hard. ‘Goddam you cant you shut up?’ His voice broke into a whine. ‘Isnt there anywhere you can get a little peace? There’s nowhere you can get any peace.’ He pulled his cap over his eyes, shoved his hands down into his pockets and shambled out of the lunchroom. Over Chatham Square the sky was brightening redviolet through the latticework of elevated tracks. The lights were two rows of bright brass knobs up the empty Bowery.

A policeman passed swinging his nightstick. Joe Harland felt the policeman’s eyes on him. He tried to walk fast and briskly as if he were going somewhere on business.

‘Well Miss Oglethorpe how do you like it?’

‘Like what?’

‘Oh you know… being a nine days’ wonder.’

‘Why I don’t know at all Mr Goldweiser.’

‘Women know everything but they wont let on.’

Ellen sits in a gown of nilegreen silk in a springy armchair at the end of a long room jingling with talk and twinkle of chandeliers and jewelry, dotted with the bright moving black of evening clothes and silveredged colors of women’s dresses. The curve of Harry Goldweiser’s nose merges directly into the curve of his bald forehead, his big rump bulges over the edges of a triangular gilt stool, his small brown eyes measure her face like antennae as he talks to her. A woman nearby smells of sandalwood. A woman with orange lips and chalk face under an orange turban passes talking to a man with a pointed beard. A hawkbeaked woman with crimson hair puts her hand on a man’s shoulder from behind. ‘Why how do you do, Miss Cruikshank; it’s surprising isn’t it how everybody in the world is always at the same place at the same time.’ Ellen sits in the armchair drowsily listening, coolness of powder on her face and arms, fatness of rouge on her lips, her body just bathed fresh as a violet under the silk dress, under the silk underclothes; she sits dreamily, drowsily listening. A sudden twinge of men’s voices knotting about her. She sits up cold white out of reach like a lighthouse. Men’s hands crawl like bugs on the unbreakable glass. Men’s looks blunder and flutter against it helpless as moths. But in deep pitblackness inside something clangs like a fire engine.