John Passos - Manhattan transfer

‘I didnt say no such thing. I didnt even think it. All I thought was that you was a dead game sport and not a kewpie above the ears like most of ’em… Look if it’ll make ye feel better I’ll try an fix that shade.’

Lying on her side she watches his heavy body move against the milky light of the window. At last his teeth chattering he comes back to her. ‘I cant fix the goddam thing… Kerist it’s cold.’

‘Never mind Dick, come on to bed… It must be late. I got to be up there at eight.’

He pulls his watch from under the pillow. ‘It’s half after two… Hello kitten.’

On the ceiling she can see reflected the changing glare of the electric signs, white, red, green, then a jumble like a bubble bursting, then again white, green, red.

‘An he didn’t even invite me to the wedding… Honestly Florence I could have forgiven him if he’d invited me to the wedding,’ she said to the colored maid when she brought in the coffee. It was a Sunday morning. She was sitting up in bed with the papers spread over her lap. She was looking at a photograph in a rotogravure section labeled Mr and Mrs Jack Cunningham Hop Off for the First Lap of Their Honeymoon on his Sensational Seaplane Albatross VII. ‘He looks handsome dont he?’

‘He su’ is miss… But wasn’t there anything you could do to stop ’em, miss?’

‘Not a thing… You see he said he’d have me committed to an asylum if I tried… He knows perfectly well a Yucatan divorce isn’t legal.’

Florence sighed.

‘Menfolks su’ do dirt to us poor girls.’

‘Oh this wont last long. You can see by her face she’s a nasty selfish spoiled little girl… And I’m his real wife before God and man. Lord knows I tried to warn her. Whom God has joined let no man put asunder… that’s in the Bible isnt it?… Florence this coffee is simply terrible this morning. I cant drink it. You go right out and make me some fresh.’

Frowning and hunching her shoulders Florence went out the door with the tray.

Mrs Cunningham heaved a deep sigh and settled herself among the pillows. Outside churchbells were ringing. ‘Oh Jack you darling I love you just the same,’ she said to the picture. Then she kissed it. ‘Listen, deary the churchbells sounded like that the day we ran away from the High School Prom and got married in Milwaukee… It was a lovely Sunday morning.’ Then she stared in the face of the second Mrs Cunningham. ‘Oh you,’ she said and poked her finger through it.

When she got to her feet she found that the courtroom was very slowly sickeningly going round and round; the white fishfaced judge with noseglasses, faces, cops, uniformed attendants, gray windows, yellow desks, all going round and round in the sickening close smell, her lawyer with his white hawk nose, wiping his bald head, frowning, going round and round until she thought she would throw up. She couldn’t hear a word that was said, she kept blinking to get the blur out of her ears. She could feel Dutch behind her hunched up with his head in his hands. She didnt dare look back. Then after hours everything was sharp and clear, very far away. The judge was shouting at her, from the small end of a funnel his colorless lips moving in and out like the mouth of a fish.

‘… And now as a man and a citizen of this great city I want to say a few words to the defendants. Briefly this sort of thing has got to stop. The unalienable rights of human life and property the great men who founded this republic laid down in the constitootion have got to be reinstated. It is the dooty of every man in office and out of office to combat this wave of lawlessness by every means in his power. Therefore in spite of what those sentimental newspaper writers who corrupt the public mind and put into the head of weaklings and misfits of your sort the idea that you can buck the law of God and man, and private property, that you can wrench by force from peaceful citizens what they have earned by hard work and brains… and get away with it; in spite of what these journalistic hacks and quacks would call extentuating circumstances I am going to impose on you two highwaymen the maximum severity of the law. It is high time an example was made…’

The judge took a drink of water. Francie could see the little beads of sweat standing out from the pores of his nose.

‘It is high time an example was made,’ the judge shouted. ‘Not that I dont feel as a tender and loving father the misfortunes, the lack of education and ideels, the lack of a loving home and tender care of a mother that has led this young woman into a life of immorality and misery, led away by the temptations of cruel and voracious men and the excitement and wickedness of what has been too well named, the jazz age. Yet at the moment when these thoughts are about to temper with mercy the stern anger of the law, the importunate recollection rises of other young girls, perhaps hundreds of them at this moment in this great city about to fall into the clutches of a brutal and unscrupulous tempter like this man Robertson… for him and his ilk there is no punishment sufficiently severe… and I remember that mercy misplaced is often cruelty in the long run. All we can do is shed a tear for erring womanhood and breathe a prayer for the innocent babe that this unfortunate girl has brought into the world as the fruit of her shame…’

Francie felt a cold tingling that began at her fingertips and ran up her arms into the blurred whirling nausea of her body. ‘Twenty years,’ she could hear the whisper round the court, they all seemed licking their lips whispering softly ‘Twenty years.’ ‘I guess I’m going to faint,’ she said to herself as if to a friend. Everything went crashing black.

Propped with five pillows in the middle of his wide colonial mahogany bed with pineapples on the posts Phineas P. Blackhead his face purple as his silk dressing gown sat up and cursed. The big mahogany-finished bedroom hung with Javanese print cloth instead of wallpaper was empty except for a Hindu servant in a white jacket and turban who stood at the foot of the bed, with his hands at his sides, now and then bowing his head at a louder gust of cursing and saying ‘Yes, Sahib, yes, Sahib.’

‘By the living almighty Jingo you goddam yellow Babu bring me that whiskey, or I’ll get up and break every bone in your body, do you hear, Jesus God cant I be obeyed in my own house? When I say whiskey I mean rye not orange juice. Damnation. Here take it!’ He picked up a cutglass pitcher off the nighttable and slung it at the Hindu. Then he sank back on the pillows, saliva bubbling on his lips, choking for breath.

Silently the Hindu mopped up the thick Beluchistan rug and slunk out of the room with a pile of broken glass in his hand. Blackhead was breathing more easily, his eyes sank into their deep sockets and were lost in the folds of sagged green lids.

He seemed asleep when Gladys came in wearing a raincoat with a wet umbrella in her hand. She tiptoed to the window and stood looking out at the gray rainy street and the old tomblike brownstone houses opposite. For a splinter of a second she was a little girl come in her nightgown to have Sunday morning breakfast with daddy in his big bed.

He woke up with a start, looked about him with bloodshot eyes, the heavy muscles of his jowl tightening under the ghastly purplish . skin.

‘Well Gladys where’s that rye whiskey I ordered?’

‘Oh daddy you know what Dr Thom said.’

‘He said it’d kill me if I took another drink… Well I’m not dead yet am I? He’s a damned ass.’

‘Oh but you must take care of yourself and not get all excited.’ She kissed him and put a cool slim hand on his forehead.

‘Havent I got reason to get excited? If I had my hands on that dirty lilylivered bastard’s neck… We’d have pulled through if he hadnt lost his nerve. Serve me right for taking such a yellow sop into partnership… Twentyfive, thirty years of work all gone to hell in ten minutes… For twentyfive years my word’s been as good as a banknote. Best thing for me to do’s to follow the firm to Tophet, to hell with me. And by the living Jingo you, my own flesh, tell me not to drink… God almighty. Hay Bod… Bob… Where’s that goddam officeboy gone? Hay come here one of you sons of bitches, what do you think I pay you for?’