John Passos - Manhattan transfer

‘I’d like to see you put me outa here, git me? I’d like to see you put me outa here.’

Harland got to his feet. ‘Well I’m going,’ he said. ‘Got to see if I can get that job.’

Mike was advancing across the kitchen with his fists clenched. Joey’s jaw set; he picked up a chair.

‘I’ll crown you with it.’

‘O saints and martyrs cant a woman have no peace in her own house?’ A small grayhaired woman ran screaming between them; she had lustrous black eyes set far apart in a face shrunken like a last year’s apple; she beat the air with worktwisted hands. ‘Shut yer traps both of ye, always cursing an fightin round the house like there warnt no God… Mike you go upstairs an lay down on your bed till yer sober.’

‘I was jus tellin him that,’ said Joey.

She turned on Harland, her voice like the screech of chalk on a blackboard. ‘An you git along outa here. I dont allow no drunken bums in my house. Git along outa here. I dont care who brought you.’

Harland looked at Joey with a little sour smile, shrugged his shoulders and went out. ‘Charwoman,’ he muttered as he stumbled with stiff aching legs along the dusty street of darkfaced brick houses.

The sultry afternoon sun was like a blow on his back. Voices in his ears of maids, charwomen, cooks, stenographers, secretaries: Yes sir, Mr Harland, Thank you sir Mr Harland. Oh sir thank you sir so much sir Mr Harland sir…

Red buzzing in her eyelids the sunlight wakes her, she sinks back into purpling cottonwool corridors of sleep, wakes again, turns over yawning, pulls her knees up to her chin to pull the drowsysweet cocoon tighter about her. A truck jangles shatteringly along the street, the sun lays hot stripes on her back. She yawns desperately and twists herself over and lies wide awake with her hands under her head staring at the ceiling. From far away through streets and housewalls the long moan of a steamboat whistle penetrates to her like a blunt sprout of crabgrass nudging through gravel. Ellen sits up shaking her head to get rid of a fly blundering about her face. The fly flashes and vanishes in the sunlight, but somewhere in her there lingers a droning pang, unaccountable, something left over from last night’s bitter thoughts. But she is happy and wide awake and it’s early. She gets up and wanders round the room in her nightgown.

Where the sun hits it the hardwood floor is warm to the soles of her feet. Sparrows chirp on the windowledge. From upstairs comes the sound of a sewingmachine. When she gets out of the bath her body feels smoothwhittled and tense; she rubs herself with a towel, telling off the hours of the long day ahead; take a walk through junky littered downtown streets to that pier on the East River where they pile the great beams of mahogany, breakfast all alone at the Lafayette, coffee and crescent rolls and sweet butter, go shopping at Lord & Taylor’s early before everything is stuffy and the salesgirls wilted, have lunch with… Then the pain that has been teasing all night wells up and bursts. ‘Stan, Stan for God’s sake,’ she says aloud. She sits before her mirror staring in the black of her own dilating pupils.

She dresses in a hurry and goes out, walks down Fifth Avenue and east along Eighth Street without looking to the right or left. The sun already hot simmers slatily on the pavements, on plate-glass, on dustmarbled enameled signs. Men’s and women’s faces as they pass her are rumpled and gray like pillows that have been too much slept on. After crossing Lafayette Street roaring with trucks and delivery wagons there is a taste of dust in her mouth, particles of grit crunch between her teeth. Further east she passes pushcarts; men are wiping off the marble counters of softdrink stands, a grindorgan fills the street with shiny jostling coils of the Blue Danube, acrid pungence spreads from a picklestand. In Tompkins Square yelling children mill about the soggy asphalt. At her feet a squirming heap of small boys, dirty torn shirts, slobbering mouths, punching, biting, scratching; a squalid smell like moldy bread comes from them. Ellen all of a sudden feels her knees weak under her. She turns and walks back the way she came.

The sun is heavy like his arm across her back, strokes her bare forearm the way his fingers stroke her, it’s his breath against her cheek.

‘Nothing but the five statutory questions,’ said Ellen to the rawboned man with big sagging eyes like oysters into whose long shirtfront she was talking.

‘And so the decree is granted?’ he asked solemnly.

‘Surely in an uncontested…’

‘Well I’m very sorry to hear it as an old family friend of both parties.’

‘Look here Dick, honestly I’m very fond of Jojo. I owe him a great deal… He’s a very fine person in many ways, but it absolutely had to be.’

‘You mean there is somebody else?’

She looked up at him with bright eyes and half nodded.

‘Oh but divorce is a very serious step my dear young lady.’

‘Oh not so serious as all that.’

They saw Harry Goldweiser coming towards them across the big walnut paneled room. She suddenly raised her voice. ‘They say that this battle of the Marne is going to end the war.’

Harry Goldweiser took her hand between his two pudgy-palmed hands and bowed over it. ‘It’s very charming of you Elaine to come and keep a lot of old midsummer bachelors from boring each other to death. Hello Snow old man, how’s things?’

‘Yes how is it we have the pleasure of still finding you here?’

‘Oh various things have held me… Anyway I hate summer resorts.’ ‘Nowhere prettier than Long Beach anyway… Why Bar Harbor, I wouldnt go to Bar Harbor if you gave me a million… a cool million.’

Mr Snow let out a gruff sniff. ‘Seems to me I’ve heard you been going into the realestate game down there, Goldweiser.’

‘I bought myself a cottage that’s all. It’s amazing you cant even buy yourself a cottage without every newsboy on Times Square knowing about it. Let’s go in and eat; my sister’ll be right here.’ A dumpy woman in a spangled dress came in after they had sat down to table in the big antlerhung diningroom; she was pigeonbreasted and had a sallow skin.

‘Oh Miss Oglethorpe I’m so glad to see you,’ she twittered in a little voice like a parrakeet’s. ‘I’ve often seen you and thought you were the loveliest thing… I did my best to get Harry to bring you up to see me.’

‘This is my sister Rachel,’ said Goldweiser to Ellen without getting up. ‘She keeps house for me.’

‘I wish you’d help me, Snow, to induce Miss Oglethorpe to take that part in The Zinnia Girl… Honest it was just written for you.’

‘But it’s such a small part…’

‘It’s not a lead exactly, but from the point of view of your reputation as a versatile and exquisite artist, it’s the best thing in the show.’

‘Will you have a little more fish, Miss Oglethorpe?’ piped Miss Goldweiser.

Mr Snow sniffed. ‘There’s no great acting any more: Booth, Jefferson, Mansfield… all gone. Nowadays it’s all advertising; actors and actresses are put on the market like patent medicines. Isn’t it the truth Elaine?… Advertising, advertising.’

‘But that isn’t what makes success… If you could do it with advertising every producer in New York’d be a millionaire,’ burst in Goldweiser. ‘It’s the mysterious occult force that grips the crowds on the street and makes them turn in at a particular theater that makes the receipts go up at a particular boxoffice, do you understand me? Advertising wont do it, good criticism wont do it, maybe it’s genius maybe it’s luck but if you can give the public what it wants at that time and at that place you have a hit. Now that’s what Elaine gave us in this last show… She established contact with the audience. It might have been the greatest play in the world acted by the greatest actors in the world and fallen a flat failure… And I dont know how you do it, nobody dont know how you do it… You go to bed one night with your house full of paper and you wake up the next morning with a howling success. The producer cant control it any more than the weather man can control the weather. Aint I tellin the truth?’