John Passos - Manhattan transfer

George Baldwin stood beside the breakfast table with a copy of the New York Times folded in his hand. ‘Now Cecily,’ he was saying ‘we must be sensible about these things.’

‘Cant you see that I’m trying to be sensible?’ she said in a jerking snivelly voice. He stood looking at her without sitting down rolling a corner of the paper between his finger and thumb. Mrs Baldwin was a tall woman with a mass of carefully curled chestnut hair piled on top of her head. She sat before the silver coffeeservice fingering the sugarbowl with mushroomwhite fingers that had very sharp pink nails.

‘George I cant stand it any more that’s all.’ She pressed her quaking lips hard together.

‘But my dear you exaggerate…’

‘How exaggerate?… It means our life has been a pack of lies.’

‘But Cecily we’re fond of each other.’

‘You married me for my social position, you know it… I was fool enough to fall in love with you. All right, It’s over.’

‘It’s not true. I really loved you. Dont you remember how terrible you thought it was you couldnt really love me?’

‘You brute to refer to that… Oh it’s horrible!’

The maid came in from the pantry with bacon and eggs on a tray. They sat silent looking at each other. The maid swished out of the room and closed the door. Mrs Baldwin put her forehead down on the edge of the table and began to cry. Baldwin sat staring at the headlines in the paper. ASSASSINATION OF ARCHDUKE WILL HAVE GRAVE CONSEQUENCES. AUSTRIAN ARMY MOBILIZED. He went over and put his hand on her crisp hair.

‘Poor old Cecily,’ he said.

‘Dont touch me.’

She ran out of the room with her handkerchief to her face. He sat down, helped himself to bacon and eggs and toast and began to eat; everything tasted like paper. He stopped eating to scribble a note on a scratchpad he kept in his breast pocket behind his handkerchief: See Collins vs. Arbuthnot, N.Y.S.C. Appel. Div.

The sound of a step in the hall outside caught his ear, the click of a latch. The elevator had just gone down. He ran four flights down the steps. Through the glass and wroughtiron doors of the vestibule downstairs he caught sight of her on the curb, standing tall and stiff, pulling on her gloves. He rushed out and took her by the hand just as a taxi drove up. Sweat beaded on his forehead and was prickly under his collar. He could see himself standing there with the napkin ridiculous in his hand and the colored doorman grinning and saying, ‘Good mornin, Mr Baldwin, looks like it going to be a fine day.’ Gripping her hand tight, he said in a low voice through his teeth:

‘Cecily there’s something I want to talk to you about. Wont you wait a minute and we’ll go downtown together?… Wait about five minutes please,’ he said to the taxidriver. We’ll be right down.’ Squeezing her wrist hard he walked back with her to the elevator. When they stood in the hall of their own apartment, she suddenly looked him straight in the face with dry blazing eyes.

‘Come in here Cecily’ he said gently. He closed their bedroom door and locked it. ‘Now lets talk this over quietly. Sit down dear.’ He put a chair behind her. She sat down suddenly stiffly like a marionette.

‘Now look here Cecily you have no right to talk the way you do about my friends. Mrs Oglethorpe is a friend of mine. We occasionally take tea together in some perfectly public place and that’s all. I would invite her up here but I’ve been afraid you would be rude to her… You cant go on giving away to your insane jealousy like this. I allow you complete liberty and trust you absolutely. I think I have the right to expect the same confidence from you… Cecily do be my sensible little girl again. You’ve been listening to what a lot of old hags fabricate out of whole cloth maliciously to make you miserable.’

‘She’s not the only one.’

‘Cecily I admit frankly there were times soon after we were married… when… But that’s all over years ago… And who’s fault was it?… Oh Cecily a woman like you cant understand the physical urgences of a man like me.’

‘Havent I done my best?’

‘My dear these things arent anybody’s fault… I dont blame you… If you’d really loved me then…’

‘What do you think I stay in this hell for except for you? Oh you’re such a brute.’ She sat dryeyed staring at her feet in their gray buckskin slippers, twisting and untwisting in her fingers the wet string of her handkerchief.

‘Look here Cecily a divorce would be very harmful to my situation downtown just at the moment, but if you really dont want to go on living with me I’ll see what I can arrange… But in any event you must have more confidence in me. You know I’m fond of you. And for God’s sake dont go to see anybody about it without consulting me. You dont want a scandal and headlines in the papers, do you?’

‘All right… leave me alone… I dont care about anything.’

‘All right… I’m pretty late. I’ll go on downtown in that taxi. You don’t want to come shopping or anything?’

She shook her head. He kissed her on the forehead, took his straw hat and stick in the hall and hurried out.

‘Oh I’m the most miserable woman,’ she groaned and got to her feet. Her head ached as if it were bound with hot wire. She went to the window and leaned out into the sunlight. Across Park Avenue the flameblue sky was barred with the red girder cage of a new building. Steam riveters rattled incessantly; now and then a donkey-engine whistled and there was a jingle of chains and a fresh girder soared crosswise in the air. Men in blue overalls moved about the scaffolding. Beyond to the northwest a shining head of clouds soared blooming compactly like a cauliflower. Oh if it would only rain. As the thought came to her there was a low growl of thunder above the din of building and of traffic. Oh if it would only rain.

Ellen had just hung a chintz curtain in the window to hide with its blotchy pattern of red and purple flowers the vista of desert backyards and brick flanks of downtown houses. In the middle of the bare room was a boxcouch cumbered with teacups, a copper chafingdish and percolator; the yellow hardwood floor was littered with snippings of chintz and curtainpins; books, dresses, bedlinen cascaded from a trunk in the corner; from a new mop in the fireplace exuded a smell of cedar oil. Ellen was leaning against the wall in a daffodilcolored kimono looking happily about the big shoebox-shaped room when the buzzer startled her. She pushed a rope of hair up off her forehead and pressed the button that worked the latch. There was a little knock on the door. A woman was standing in the dark of the hall.

‘Why Cassie I couldn’t make out who you were. Come in… What’s the matter?’

‘You are sure I’m not intwuding?’

‘Of course not.’ Ellen leaned to give her a little pecking kiss. Cassandra Wilkins was very pale and there was a nervous quiver about her eyelids. ‘You can give me some advice. I’m just getting my curtains up… Look do you think that purple goes all right with the gray wall? It looks kind of funny to me.’

‘I think it’s beautiful. What a beautiful woom. How happy you’re going to be here.’

‘Put that chafingdish down on the floor and sit down. I’ll make some tea. There’s a kind of bathroom kitchenette in the alcove there.’

‘You’re sure it wouldn’t be too much twouble?’

‘Of course not… But Cassie what’s the matter?’

‘Oh everything… I came down to tell you but I cant. I cant ever tell anybody.’

‘I’m so excited about this apartment. Imagine Cassie it’s the first place of my own I ever had in my life. Daddy wants me to live with him in Passaic, but I just felt I couldn’t.’