John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

With the insurance money Mrs. Williams did over the house and fixed up the two top floors to rent out as apartments. That was the chance Janey had been waiting for for so long to get a place of her own and she and Alice got a room in a house on Massachusetts Avenue near the Carnegie Library, with cooking privileges. So one Saturday afternoon she phoned from the drugstore for a taxicab and set out with her suitcase and trunk and a pile of framed pictures from her room on the seat beside her. The pictures were two color prints of Indians by Remington, a Gibson girl, a photograph of the battleship Connecticut in the harbor of Villefranche that Joe had sent her and an enlarged photograph of her father in uniform standing at the wheel of an imaginary ship against a stormy sky furnished by a photographer in Norfolk, Va. Then there were two unframed colorprints by Maxfield Parrish that she’d bought recently and a framed snapshot of Joe in baseball clothes. The little picture of Alec she’d wrapped among her things in her suitcase. The cab smelt musty and rumbled along the streets. It was a crisp autumn day, the gutters were full of dry leaves. Janey felt scared and excited as if she were starting out all alone on a journey.

That fall she read a great many newspapers and magazines and The Beloved Vagabond , by W. J. Locke. She began to hate the Germans that were destroying art and culture, civilization, Louvain. She waited for a letter from Jerry but a letter never came.

One afternoon she was coming out of the office a little late, who should be standing in the hall by the elevator but Joe. “Hello, Janey,” he said. “Gee, you look like a million dollars.” She was so glad to see him she could hardly speak, could only squeeze his arm tight. “I just got paid off… I thought I better come up here and see the folks before I spent all my jack… I’ll take you out and set you up to a big feed an’ a show if you want…” He was sunburned and his shoulders were broader than when he left. His big hands and knotty wrists stuck out of a newlooking blue suit that was too tight for him at the waist. The sleeves were too short too.

“Did you go to Georgetown?” she asked him.

“Yare.”

“Did you go up to the cemetery?”

“Mommer wanted me to go, but what’s the use?”

“Poor mother, she’s so sentimental about it…”

They walked along. Joe didn’t say anything. It was a hot day. Dust blew down the street.

Janey said: “Joe, dear, you must tell me all about your adventures… You must have been to some wonderful places. It’s thrilling having a brother in the navy.”

“Janey, pipe down about the navy, will yer?… I don’t want to hear about it. I deserted in B A, see, and shipped out east on a limey, on an English boat… That’s a dog’s life too, but anything’s better than the U.S.N.”

“But, Joe…”

“Ain’t nothin’ to worry about…”

“But, Joe, what happened?”

“You won’t say a word to a livin’ soul, will you, Janey? You see I got in a scrap with a petty officer tried to ride me too damn hard. I socked him in the jaw an’ kinda mauled him, see, an’ things looked pretty bad for me, so I made tracks for the tall timber…. That’s all.” “Oh, Joe, and I was hoping you’d get to be an officer.”

“A gob get to be an officer…? A fat chance.”

She took him to the Mabillion, where Jerry had taken her. At the door Joe peered in critically. “Is this the swellest joint you know, Janey? I got a hundred iron men in my pocket.” “Oh, this is dreadfully expensive… It’s a French restaurant. And you oughtn’t to spend all your money on me.” “Who the hell else do you want me to spend it on?” Joe sat down at a table and Janey went back to ’phone Alice that she wouldn’t be home till late. When she got back to the table, Joe was pulling some little packages wrapped in red and greenstriped tissuepaper out of his pockets. “Oh, what’s that?” “You open ’em, Janey… It’s yours.” She opened the packages. They were some lace collars and an embroidered tablecloth. “The lace is Irish and that other’s from Madeira… I had a Chinese vase for you too but some son of a bit… son of a gun snitched it on me.” “That was awful sweet of you to think of me… I appreciate it.” Joe fidgeted with his knife and fork. “We gotta git a move on, Janey, or we’ll be late for the show… I got tickets for ‘The Garden of Allah.’”

When they came out of the Belasco onto Lafayette Square that was cool and quiet with a rustle of wind in the trees Joe said, “Ain’t so much; I seen a real sandstorm onct,” and Janey felt bad about her brother being so rough and uneducated. The play made her feel like when she was little, full of uneasy yearn for foreign countries and a smell of incense and dark eyes and dukes in tailcoats tossing money away on the gaming tables of Monte Carlo, monks and the mysterious east. If Joe was only a little better educated he’d be able to really appreciate all the interesting ports he visited. He left her on the stoop of the house on Massachusetts Avenue. “Where are you going to stay, Joe?” she asked. “I guess I’ll shove along back to New York an’ pick up a berth…. Sailoring’s a pretty good graft with this war on.” “You mean tonight?” He nodded. “I wish I had a bed for you but I couldn’t very well on account of Alice.” “Naw, I doan want to hang round this dump… I jus’ came up to say hello.” “Well, goodnight, Joe, be sure and write.” “Goodnight, Janey, I sure will.” She watched him walk off down the street until he went out of sight in the shadows of the trees. It made her unhappy to see him go all alone down the shadowed street. It wasn’t quite the shambling walk of a sailor, but he looked like a working man all right. She sighed and went into the house. Alice was waiting up for her. She showed Alice the lace and they tried on the collars and agreed that it was very pretty and quite valuable.

Janey and Alice had a good time that winter. They took to smoking cigarettes and serving tea to their friends Sunday afternoons. They read novels by Arnold Bennett and thought of themselves as bachelor girls. They learned to play bridge and shortened their skirts. At Christmas Janey got a hundred dollar bonus and a raise to twenty a week from Dreyfus and Carroll. She began telling Alice that she was an old stickinthemud to stay on at Mrs. Robinson’s. For herself she began to have ambitions of a business career. She wasn’t afraid of men any more and kidded back and forth with young clerks in the elevator about things that would have made her blush the year before. When Johnny Edwards or Morris Byer took her out to the movies in the evening she didn’t mind having them put their arms around her, or having them kiss her once or twice while she was fumbling in her bag for her latchkey. She knew just how to catch a boy’s hand by the wrist and push it away without making any scene when he tried to get too intimate. When Alice used to talk warningly about men having just one idea, she’d laugh and say, “Oh, they’re not so smart.” She discovered that just a little peroxide in the water when she washed her hair made it blonder and took away that mousey look. Sometimes when she was getting ready to go out in the evening she’d put a speck of rouge on her little finger and rub it very carefully on her lips.

in the mouth of the Schuylkill Mr. Pierce came on board ninety-six years old and sound as a dollar He’d been officeboy in Mr. Pierce’s office about the time He’d enlisted and missed the battle of Antietam on account of having dysentery so bad and Mr. Pierce’s daughter Mrs. Black called Him Jack and smoked little brown cigarettes and we played Fra Diavolo on the phonograph and everybody was very jolly when Mr. Pierce tugged at his dundrearies and took a toddy and Mrs. Black lit cigarettes one after another and they talked about old days and about how His father had wanted Him to be a priest and His poor mother had had such trouble getting together enough to eat for that family of greedy boys and His father was a silent man and spoke mostly Portugee and when he didn’t like the way a dish was cooked that came on the table he’d pick it up and sling it out of the window and He wanted to go to sea and studied law at the University and in Mr. Pierce’s office and He sang