John Passos - Manhattan transfer

‘Hello Jimps,’ said Ellie coming towards him with a tray.

‘Why have I died and gone to heaven or something?’

‘No it’s Sunday morning… I thought you needed a little luxury… I made some corn muffins.’

‘Oh you’re marvelous Ellie… Wait a minute I must jump up and wash my teeth.’ He came back with his face washed, wearing his bathrobe. Her mouth winced under his kiss. ‘And it’s only eleven o’clock. I’ve gained an hour on my day off… Wont you have some coffee too?’

‘In a minute… Look here Jimps I’ve got something I want to talk about. Look dont you think we ought to get another place now that you’re working nights again all the time?’

‘You mean move?’

‘No. I was thinking if you could get another room to sleep in somewhere round, then nobody’d ever disturb you in the morning.’

‘But Ellie we’d never see each other… We hardly ever see each other as it is.’

‘It’s terrible… but what can we do when our officehours are so different?’

Martin’s crying came in a gust from the other room. Jimmy sat on the edge of the bed with the empty coffeecup on his knees looking at his bare feet. ‘Just as you like,’ he said dully. An impulse to grab her hands to crush her to him until he hurt her went up through him like a rocket and died. She picked up the coffeethings and swished away. His lips knew her lips, his arms knew the twining of her arms, he knew the deep woods of her hair, he loved her. He sat for a long time looking at his feet, lanky reddish feet with swollen blue veins, shoebound toes twisted by stairs and pavements. On each little toe there was a corn. He found his eyes filling with pitying tears. The baby had stopped crying. Jimmy went into the bathroom and started the water running in the tub.

‘It was that other feller you had Anna. He got you to thinkin you didnt give a damn… He made you a fatalist.’

‘What’s at?’

‘Somebody who thinks there’s no use strugglin, somebody who dont believe in human progress.’

‘Do you think Bouy was like that?’

‘He was a scab anyway… None o these Southerners are class-conscious… Didn’t he make you stop payin your union dues?’

‘I was sick o workin a sewin machine.’

‘But you could be a handworker, do fancy work and make good money. You’re not one o that kind, you’re one of us… I’ll get you back in good standin an you kin get a good job again… God I’d never have let you work in a dancehall the way he did. Anna it hurt me terrible to see a Jewish girl goin round with a feller like that.’

‘Well he’s gone an I aint got no job.’

‘Fellers like that are the greatest enemies of the workers… They dont think of nobody but themselves.’

They are walking slowly up Second Avenue through a foggy evening. He is a rustyhaired thinfaced young Jew with sunken cheeks and livid pale skin. He has the bandy legs of a garment worker. Anna’s shoes are too small for her. She has deep rings under her eyes. The fog is full of strolling groups talking Yiddish, overaccented East Side English, Russian. Warm rifts of light from delicatessen stores and softdrink stands mark off the glistening pavement.

‘If I didn’t feel so tired all the time,’ mutters Anna.

‘Let’s stop here an have a drink… You take a glass o buttermilk Anna, make ye feel good.’

‘I aint got the taste for it Elmer. I’ll take a chocolate soda.’

‘That’ll juss make ye feel sick, but go ahead if you wanter.’ She sat on the slender nickelbound stool. He stood beside her. She let herself lean back a little against him. ‘The trouble with the workers is’… He was talking in a low impersonal voice. ‘The trouble with the workers is we dont know nothin, we dont know how to eat, we dont know how to live, we dont know how to protect our rights… Jez Anna I want to make you think of things like that. Cant you see we’re in the middle of a battle just like in the war?’ With the long sticky spoon Anna was fishing bits of icecream out of the thick foamy liquid in her glass.

George Baldwin looked at himself in the mirror as he washed his hands in the little washroom behind his office. His hair that still grew densely down to a point on his forehead was almost white. There was a deep line at each corner of his mouth and across his chin. Under his bright gimleteyes the skin was sagging and granulated. When he had wiped his hands slowly and meticulously he took a little box of strychnine pills from the upper pocket of his vest, swallowed one, and feeling the anticipated stimulus tingle through him went back into his office. A longnecked officeboy was fidgeting beside his desk with a card in his hand.

‘A lady wants to speak to you sir.’

‘Has she an appointment? Ask Miss Ranke… Wait a minute. Show the lady right through into this office.’ The card read Nellie Linihan McNiel. She was expensively dressed with a lot of lace in the opening of her big fur coat. Round her neck she had a lorgnette on an amethyst chain.

‘Gus asked me to come to see you,’ she said as he motioned her into a chair beside the desk.

‘What can I do for you?’ His heart for some reason was pounding hard.

She looked at him a moment through her lorgnette. ‘George you stand it better than Gus does.’

‘What?’

‘Oh all this… I’m trying to get Gus to go away with me for a rest abroad… Marianbad or something like that… but he says he’s in too deep to pull up his stakes.’

‘I guess that’s true of all of us,’ said Baldwin with a cold smile.

They were silent a minute, then Nellie McNiel got to her feet. ‘Look here George, Gus is awfully cut up about this… You know he likes to stand by his friends and have his friends stand by him.’

‘Nobody can say that I havent stood by him… It’s simply this, I’m not a politician, and as, probably foolishly, I’ve allowed myself to be nominated for office, I have to run on a nonpartisan basis.’

‘George that’s only half the story and you know it.’

‘Tell him that I’ve always been and always shall be a good friend of his… He knows that perfectly well. In this particular campaign I have pledged myself to oppose certain elements with which Gus has let himself get involved.’

‘You’re a fine talker George Baldwin and you always were.’

Baldwin flushed. They stood stiff side by side at the office door. His hand lay still on the doorknob as if paralyzed. From the outer offices came the sound of typewriters and voices. From outside came the long continuous tapping of riveters at work on a new building.

‘I hope your family’s all well,’ he said at length with an effort.

‘Oh yes they are all well thanks… Goodby.’ She had gone.

Baldwin stood for a moment looking out of the window at the gray blackwindowed building opposite. Silly to let things agitate him so. Need of relaxation. He got his hat and coat from their hook behind the washroom door and went out. ‘Jonas,’ he said to a man with a round bald head shaped like a cantaloupe who sat poring over papers in the highceilinged library that was the central hall of the lawoffice, ‘bring everything up that’s on my desk… I’ll go over it uptown tonight.’

‘All right sir.’

When he got out on Broadway he felt like a small boy playing hooky. It was a sparkling winter afternoon with hurrying rifts of sun and cloud. He jumped into a taxi. Going uptown he lay back in the seat dozing. At Fortysecond Street he woke up. Everything was a confusion of bright intersecting planes of color, faces, legs, shop windows, trolleycars, automobiles. He sat up with his gloved hands on his knees, fizzling with excitement. Outside of Nevada’s apartmenthouse he paid the taxi. The driver was a negro and showed an ivory mouthful of teeth when he got a fiftycent tip. Neither elevator was there so Baldwin ran lightly up the stairs, half wondering at himself. He knocked on Nevada’s door. No answer. He knocked again. She opened it cautiously. He could see her curly towhead. He brushed into the room before she could stop him. All she had on was a kimono over a pink chemise.