John Passos - Manhattan transfer

‘What wouldnt I give for a chance to get away from New York… Honestly if I was offered a job singing in a movie in Medicine Hat I think I’d take it.’

Ellen picks up her umbrella and the three women file down the stairs and out into the street. ‘Taxi,’ calls Ellen.

The passing car grinds to a stop. The red hawk face of the taxidriver craning into the light of the street lamp. ‘Go to Eugenie’s on Fortyeighth Street,’ says Ellen as the others climb in. Greenish lights and darks flicker past the lightbeaded windows.

She stood with her arm in the arm of Harry Goldweiser’s dinner jacket looking out over the parapet of the roofgarden. Below them the Park lay twinkling with occasional lights, streaked with nebular blur like a fallen sky. From behind them came gusts of a tango, inklings of voices, shuffle of feet on a dancefloor. Ellen felt a stiff castiron figure in her metalgreen evening dress.

‘Ah but Boirnhardt, Rachel, Duse, Mrs Siddons… No Elaine I’m tellin you, d’you understand? There’s no art like the stage that soars so high moldin the passions of men… If I could only do what I wanted we’d be the greatest people in the world. You’d be the greatest actress… I’d be the great producer, the unseen builder, d’you understand? But the public dont want art, the people of this country wont let you do anythin for em. All they want’s a detective melodrama or a rotten French farce with the kick left out or a lot of pretty girls and music. Well a showman’s business is to give the public what they want.’

‘I think that this city is full of people wanting inconceivable things… Look at it.’

‘It’s all right at night when you cant see it. There’s no artistic sense, no beautiful buildins, no old-time air, that’s what’s the matter with it.’

They stood a while without speaking. The orchestra began playing the waltz from The Lilac Domino. Suddenly Ellen turned to Goldweiser and said in a curt tone. ‘Can you understand a woman who wants to be a harlot, a common tart, sometimes?’

‘My dear young lady what a strange thing for a sweet lovely girl to suddenly come out and say.’

‘I suppose you’re shocked.’ She didnt hear his answer. She felt she was going to cry. She pressed her sharp nails into the palms of her hands, she held her breath until she had counted twenty. Then she said in a choking little girl’s voice, ‘Harry let’s go and dance a little.’

The sky above the cardboard buildings is a vault of beaten lead. It would be less raw if it would snow. Ellen finds a taxi on the corner of Seventh Avenue and lets herself sink back in the seat rubbing the numb gloved fingers of one hand against the palm of the other. ‘West Fiftyseventh, please.’ Out of a sick mask of fatigue she watches fruitstores, signs, buildings being built, trucks, girls, messengerboys, policemen through the jolting window. If I have my child, Stan’s child, it will grow up to jolt up Seventh Avenue under a sky of beaten lead that never snows watching fruitstores, signs, buildings being built, trucks, girls, messengerboys, policemen… She presses her knees together, sits up straight on the edge of the seat with her hands clasped over her slender belly. O God the rotten joke they’ve played on me, taking Stan away, burning him up, leaving me nothing but this growing in me that’s going to kill me. She’s whimpering into her numb hands. O God why wont it snow?

As she stands on the gray pavement fumbling in her purse for a bill, a dusteddy swirling scraps of paper along the gutter fills her mouth with grit. The elevatorman’s face is round ebony with ivory inlay. ‘Mrs Staunton Wells?’ ‘Yas ma’am eighth floor.’

The elevator hums as it soars. She stands looking at herself in the narrow mirror. Suddenly something recklessly gay goes through her. She rubs the dust off her face with a screwedup handkerchief, smiles at the elevatorman’s smile that’s wide as the full keyboard of a piano, and briskly rustles to the door of the apartment that a frilled maid opens. Inside it smells of tea and furs and flowers, women’s voices chirp to the clinking of cups like birds in an aviary. Glances flicker about her head as she goes into the room.

There was wine spilled on the tablecloth and bits of tomatosauce from the spaghetti. The restaurant was a steamy place with views of the Bay of Naples painted in soupy blues and greens on the walls. Ellen sat back in her chair from the round tableful of young men, watching the smoke from her cigarette crinkle spirally round the fat Chiantibottle in front of her. In her plate a slab of tricolor icecream melted forlornly. ‘But good God hasnt a man some rights? No, this industrial civilization forces us to seek a complete readjustment of government and social life…’

‘Doesnt he use long words?’ Ellen whispered to Herf who sat beside her.

‘He’s right all the same,’ he growled back at her… ‘The result has been to put more power in the hands of a few men than there has been in the history of the world since the horrible slave civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia…’

‘Hear hear.’

‘No but I’m serious… The only way of bucking the interests is for working people, the proletariat, producers and consumers, anything you want to call them, to form unions and finally get so well organized that they can take over the whole government.’

‘I think you’re entirely wrong, Martin, it’s the interests as you call em, these horrible capitalists, that have built up this country as we have it today.’

‘Well look at it for God’s sake… That’s what I’m saying. I wouldnt kennel a dog in it.’

‘I dont think so. I admire this country… It’s the only fatherland I’ve got… And I think that all these downtrodden masses really want to be downtrodden, they’re not fit for anything else… If they werent they’d be flourishing businessmen… Those that are any good are getting to be.’

‘But I don’t think a flourishing businessman is the highest ideal of human endeavor.’

‘A whole lot higher than a rotten fiddleheaded anarchist agitator… Those that arent crooks are crazy.’

‘Look here Mead, you’ve just insulted something that you dont understand, that you know nothing about… I cant allow you to do that… You should try to understand things before you go round insulting them.’

‘An insult to the intelligence that’s what it is all this socialistic drivel.’

Ellen tapped Herf on the sleeve. ‘Jimmy I’ve got to go home. Do you want to walk a little way with me?’

‘Martin, will you settle for us? We’ve got to go… Ellie you look terribly pale.’

‘It’s just a little hot in here… Whee, what a relief… I hate arguments anyway. I never can think of anything to say.’

‘That bunch does nothing but chew the rag night after night.’

Eighth Avenue was full of fog that caught at their throats. Lights bloomed dimly through it, faces loomed, glinted in silhouette and faded like a fish in a muddy aquarium.

‘Feel better Ellie?’

‘Lots.’

‘I’m awfully glad.’

‘Do you know you’re the only person around here who calls me Ellie. I like it… Everybody tries to make me seem so grown up since I’ve been on the stage.’

‘Stan used to.’

‘Maybe that’s why I like it,’ she said in a little trailing voice like a cry heard at night from far away along a beach.

Jimmy felt something clamping his throat. ‘Oh gosh things are rotten,’ he said. ‘God I wish I could blame it all on capitalism the way Martin does.’

‘It’s pleasant walking like this… I love a fog.’

They walked on without speaking. Wheels rumbled through the muffling fog underlaid with the groping distant lowing of sirens and steamboatwhistles on the river.