John Passos - Manhattan transfer

She woke with a start. Ellen was jumping round the room, her green tam falling off the back of her head, her coppery curls wild.

‘Oh mummy I want to be a little boy.’

‘Quieter dear. Mother’s not feeling a bit well.’

‘I want to be a little boy.’

‘Why Ed what have you done to the child? She’s all wrought up.’

‘We’re just excited, Susie. We’ve been to the most wonderful play. You’d have loved it, it’s so poetic and all that sort of thing. And Maude Adams was fine. Ellie loved every minute of it.’

‘It seems silly, as I said before, to take such a young child…’

‘Oh daddy I want to be a boy.’

‘I like my little girl the way she is. We’ll have to go again Susie and take you.’

‘Ed you know very well I wont be well enough.’ She sat bolt upright, her hair hanging a straight faded yellow down her back. ‘Oh, I wish I’d die… I wish I’d die, and not be a burden to you any more… You hate me both of you. If you didnt hate me you wouldnt leave me alone like this.’ She choked and put her face in her hands. ‘Oh I wish I’d die,’ she sobbed through her fingers.

‘Now Susie for Heaven’s sakes, it’s wicked to talk like that.’ He put his arm round her and sat on the bed beside her.

Crying quietly she dropped her head on his shoulder. Ellen stood staring at them out of round gray eyes. Then she started jumping up and down, chanting to herself, ‘Ellie’s goin to be a boy, Ellie’s goin to be a boy.’

With a long slow stride, limping a little from his blistered feet, Bud walked down Broadway, past empty lots where tin cans glittered among grass and sumach bushes and ragweed, between ranks of billboards and Bull Durham signs, past shanties and abandoned squatters’ shacks, past gulches heaped with wheelscarred rubbishpiles where dumpcarts were dumping ashes and clinkers, past knobs of gray outcrop where steamdrills continually tapped and nibbled, past excavations out of which wagons full of rock and clay toiled up plank roads to the street, until he was walking on new sidewalks along a row of yellow brick apartment houses, looking in the windows of grocery stores, Chinese laundries, lunchrooms, flower and vegetable shops, tailors’, delicatessens. Passing under a scaffolding in front of a new building, he caught the eye of an old man who sat on the edge of the sidewalk trimming oil lamps. Bud stood beside him, hitching up his pants; cleared his throat:

‘Say mister you couldnt tell a feller where a good place was to look for a job?’

‘Aint no good place to look for a job, young feller… There’s jobs all right… I’ll be sixty-five years old in a month and four days an I’ve worked since I was five I reckon, an I aint found a good job yet.’

‘Anything that’s a job’ll do me.’

‘Got a union card?’

‘I aint got nothin.’

‘Cant git no job in the buildin trades without a union card,’ said the old man. He rubbed the gray bristles of his chin with the back of his hand and leaned over the lamps again. Bud stood staring into the dustreeking girder forest of the new building until he found the eyes of a man in a derby hat fixed on him through the window of the watchman’s shelter. He shuffled his feet uneasily and walked on. If I could git more into the center of things…

At the next corner a crowd was collecting round a high-slung white automobile. Clouds of steam poured out of its rear end. A policeman was holding up a small boy by the armpits. From the car a redfaced man with white walrus whiskers was talking angrily.

‘I tell you officer he threw a stone… This sort of thing has got to stop. For an officer to countenance hoodlums and rowdies…’

A woman with her hair done up in a tight bunch on top of her head was screaming, shaking her fist at the man in the car, ‘Officer he near run me down he did, he near run me down.’

Bud edged up next to a young man in a butcher’s apron who had a baseball cap on backwards.

‘Wassa matter?’

‘Hell I dunno… One o them automoebile riots I guess. Aint you read the paper? I dont blame em do you? What right have those golblamed automoebiles got racin round the city knocking down wimen an children?’

‘Gosh do they do that?’

‘Sure they do.’

‘Say… er… kin you tell me about where’s a good place to find out about getting a job?’ The butcherboy threw back head and laughed.

‘Kerist I thought you was goin to ask for a handout… I guess you aint a Newyorker… I’ll tell you what to do. You keep right on down Broadway till you get to City Hall…’

‘Is that kinder the center of things?’

‘Sure it is… An then you go upstairs and ask the Mayor… Tell me there are some seats on the board of aldermen…’

‘Like hell they are,’ growled Bud and walked away fast.

‘Roll ye babies… roll ye lobsided sons o bitches.’

‘That’s it talk to em Slats.’

‘Come seven!’ Slats shot the bones out of his hand, brought the thumb along his sweaty fingers with a snap. ‘Aw hell.’

‘You’re some great crapshooter I’ll say, Slats.’

Dirty hands added each a nickel to the pile in the center of the circle of patched knees stuck forward. The five boys were sitting on their heels under a lamp on South Street.

‘Come on girlies we’re waitin for it… Roll ye little bastards, goddam ye, roll.’

‘Cheeze it fellers! There’s Big Leonard an his gang acomin down the block.’

‘I’d knock his block off for a…’

Four of them were already slouching off along the wharf, gradually scattering without looking back. The smallest boy with a chinless face shaped like a beak stayed behind quietly picking up the coins. Then he ran along the wall and vanished into the dark passageway between two houses. He flattened himself behind a chimney and waited. The confused voices of the gang broke into the passageway; then they had gone on down the street. The boy was counting the nickels in his hand. Ten. ‘Jez, that’s fifty cents… I’ll tell ’em Big Leonard scooped up the dough.’ His pockets had no bottoms, so he tied the nickels into one of his shirt tails.

A goblet for Rhine wine hobnobbed with a champagne glass at each place along the glittering white oval table. On eight glossy white plates eight canapés of caviar were like rounds of black beads on the lettuceleaves, flanked by sections of lemon, sprinkled with a sparse chopping of onion and white of egg. ‘Beaucoup de soing and dont you forget it,’ said the old waiter puckering up his knobbly forehead. He was a short waddling man with a few black strands of hair plastered tight across a domed skull

‘Awright.’ Emile nodded his head gravely. His collar was too tight for him. He was shaking a last bottle of champagne into the nickelbound bucket of ice on the serving-table.

‘Beaucoup de soing, sporca madonna… Thisa guy trows money about lika confetti, see… Gives tips, see. He’s a verra rich gentleman. He dont care how much he spend.’ Emile patted the crease of the tablecloth to flatten it. ‘Fais pas, como, ça… Your hand’s dirty, maybe leava mark.’

Resting first on one foot then on the other they stood waiting, their napkins under their arms. From the restaurant below among the buttery smells of food and the tinkle of knives and forks and plates, came the softly gyrating sound of a waltz.

When he saw the headwaiter bow outside the door Emile compressed his lips into a deferential smile. There was a long-toothed blond woman in a salmon operacloak swishing on the arm of a moonfaced man who carried his top hat ahead of him like a bumper; there was a little curlyhaired girl in blue who was showing her teeth and laughing, a stout woman in a tiara with a black velvet ribbon round her neck, a bottlenose, a long cigarcolored face… shirtfronts, hands straightening white ties, black gleams on top hats and patent leather shoes; there was a weazlish man with gold teeth who kept waving his arms spitting out greetings in a voice like a crow’s and wore a diamond the size of a nickel in his shirtfront. The redhaired cloakroom girl was collecting the wraps. The old waiter nudged Emile. ‘He’s de big boss,’ he said out of the corner of his mouth as he bowed. Emile flattened himself against the wall as they shuffled rustled into the room. A whiff of patchouli when he drew his breath made him go suddenly hot to the roots of his hair.