John Passos - Manhattan transfer

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do Mrs Culveteer, next Sunday if it’s not too hot I’ll go… I guess I’m getting too set in my ways.’

‘Oh a little change does us all good… Mrs Oglethorpe you have no idea how closely we follow your career, in the Sunday papers and all… I think it’s simply wonderful… As I was telling Mr Thatcher only yesterday it must take a lot of strength of character and deep Christian living to withstand the temptations of stage life nowadays. It’s inspiring to think of a young girl and wife coming so sweet and unspoiled through all that.’

Ellen kept looking at the floor so as not to catch her father’s eye. He was tapping with two fingers on the arm of his morrischair. Mrs Culveteer beamed from the middle of the davenport. She got to her feet. ‘Well I just must run along. We have a green girl in the kitchen and I’m sure dinner’s all ruined… Wont you drop in this afternoon… ? quite informally. I made some cookies and we’ll have some gingerale out just in case somebody turns up.’

‘I’m sure we’d be delighted Mrs Culveteer,’ said Thatcher getting stiffly to his feet. Mrs Culveteer in her bunchy dress waddled out the door.

‘Well Ellie suppose we go eat… She’s a very nice kindhearted woman. She’s always bringing me pots of jam and marmalade. She lives upstairs with her sister’s family. She’s the widow of a traveling man.’

‘That was quite a line about the temptations of stage life,’ said Ellen with a little laugh in her throat. ‘Come along or the place’ll be crowded. Avoid the rush is my motto.’

Said Thatcher in a peevish crackling voice, ‘Let’s not dawdle around.’

Ellen spread out her sunshade as they stepped out of the door flanked on either side by bells and letterboxes. A blast of gray heat beat in their faces. They passed the stationery store, the red A. and P., the corner drugstore from which a stale coolness of sodawater and icecream freezers drifted out under the green awning, crossed the street, where their feet sank into the sticky melting asphalt, and stopped at the Sagamore Cafeteria. It was twelve exactly by the clock in the window that had round its face in old English lettering, TIME TO EAT. Under it was a large rusty fern and a card announcing Chicken Dinner $1.25. Ellen lingered in the doorway looking up the quivering street. ‘Look daddy we’ll probably have a thunderstorm.’ A cumulus soared in unbelievable snowy contours in the slate sky. ‘Isnt that a fine cloud? Wouldnt it be fine if we had a riproaring thunderstorm?’

Ed Thatcher looked up, shook his head and went in through the swinging screen door. Ellen followed him. Inside it smelled of varnish and waitresses. They sat down at a table near the door under a droning electric fan.

‘How do you do Mr Thatcher? How you been all the week sir? How do you do miss?’ The bonyfaced peroxidehaired waitress hung over them amicably. What’ll it be today sir, roast Long Island duckling or roast Philadelphia milkfed capon?’

Such afternoons the buses are crowded into line like elephants in a circusparade. Morningside Heights to Washington Square, Penn Station to Grant’s Tomb. Parlorsnakes and flappers joggle hugging downtown uptown, hug joggling gray square after gray square, until they see the new moon giggling over Weehawken and feel the gusty wind of a dead Sunday blowing dust in their faces, dust of a typsy twilight.

They are walking up the Mall in Central Park.

‘Looks like he had a boil on his neck,’ says Ellen in front of the statue of Burns.

‘Ah,’ whispers Harry Goldweiser with a fat-throated sigh, ‘but he was a great poet.’

She is walking in her wide hat in her pale loose dress that the wind now and then presses against her legs and arms, silkily, swishily walking in the middle of great rosy and purple and pis-tachiogreen bubbles of twilight that swell out of the grass and trees and ponds, bulge against the tall houses sharp gray as dead teeth round the southern end of the park, melt into the indigo zenith. When he talks, forming sentences roundly with his thick lips, continually measuring her face with his brown eyes, she feels his words press against her body, nudge in the hollows where her dress clings; she can hardly breathe for fear of listening to him.

‘The Zinnia Girl’s going to be an absolute knockout, Elaine, I’m telling you and that part’s just written for you. I’d enjoy working with you again, honest… You’re so different, that’s what it is about you. All these girls round New York here are just the same, they’re monotonous. Of course you could sing swell if you wanted to… I’ve been crazy as a loon since I met you, and that’s a good six months now. I sit down to eat and the food dont have any taste… You cant understand how lonely a man gets when year after year he’s had to crush his feelings down into himself. When I was a young fellow I was different, but what are you to do? I had to make money and make my way in the world. And so I’ve gone on year after year. For the first time I’m glad I did it, that I shoved ahead and made big money, because now I can offer it all to you. Understand what I mean?… All those ideels and beautiful things pushed down into myself when I was making my way in a man’s world were like planting seed and you’re their flower.’

Now and then as they walk the back of his hand brushes against hers; she clenches her fist sullenly drawing it away from the hot determined pudginess of his hand.

The Mall is full of couples, families waiting for the music to begin. It smells of children and dress-shields and talcum powder. A balloonman passes them trailing red and yellow and pink balloons like a great inverted bunch of grapes behind him. ‘Oh buy me a balloon.’ The words are out of her mouth before she can stop them.

‘Hay you gimme one of each color… And how about one of those gold ones? No keep the change.’

Ellen put the strings of the balloons into the dirtsticky hands of three little monkeyfaced girls in red tams. Each balloon caught a crescent of violet glare from the arclight.

‘Aw you like children, Elaine, dont you? I like a woman to like children.’

Ellen sits numb at a table on the terrace of the Casino. A hot gust of foodsmell and the rhythm of a band playing He’s a Ragpicker swirls chokingly about her; now and then she butters a scrap of roll and puts it in her mouth. She feels very helpless, caught like a fly in his sticky trickling sentences.

‘There’s nobody else in New York could have got me to walk that far, I’ll tell you that… I walked too much in the old days, do you understand, used to sell papers when I was a kid and run errands for Schwartz’s Toystore… on my feet all day except when I was in nightschool. I thought I was going to be a lawyer, all us East Side fellers thought we were goin to be lawyers. Then I worked as an usher one summer at the Irving Place and got the theater bug… Not such a bad hunch it turned out to be, but it’s too uncertain. Now I dont care any more, only want to cover my losses. That’s the trouble with me. I’m thirtyfive an I dont care any more. Ten years ago I was still only a kind of clerk in old man Erlanger’s office, and now there’s lots of em whose shoes I used to shine in the old days’d be real glad of the opportunity to sweep my floors on West Forty-eighth… Tonight I can take you anywhere in New York, I dont care how expensive or how chic it is… an in the old days us kids used to think it was paradise if we had five plunks to take a couple of girls down to the Island… I bet all that was different with you Elaine… But what I want to do is get that old feelin back, understand?… Where shall we go?’

‘Why dont we go down to Coney Island then? I’ve never been?