Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

‘Is that why she been livin’ off hard-boiled eggs ’n p’tato chips ever since?’ Sophie had wanted to know in her politest, most contemptuous tone.

‘That was it awright. She just kept comin’ by the p’tatochip bowl like Chester was still workin’ there.’

‘She ain’t come out yet.’

‘Oh yeh, she had to come out, her credit give out by Widow, she had to get on the wagon. She’s gettin’ on the wagon again one of these days.’

‘You think so? Wait till the first rainy day.’

‘Yeh,’ Frankie had conceded gloomily, ‘I think that’s what lots of people are waitin’ for: the first rainy day.’

She would grasp his throat in exasperation after he’d strung her along awhile like that, pretending to choke him and really wanting to hurt him. Only when she played that way her fingers would touch the short hairs on the back of his neck and weaken till the weakness spread back to her shoulders; while his own hands would grow so firm on the slope of her hips.

‘You’re my honey, I wouldn’t choke you really,’ she’d assure him weakly at last.

He had won every single one of those skirmishes though he’d been dead in the wrong every time. And each time she’d been so right, so terribly right. Till each defeat she suffered had aroused a secret need for the sort of vengeance that a certain sort of love requires.

For that had been the endless pity of it: she had loved the clown. She had loved him deep in that curtained corner of her mind where, unknown to herself, she had planned an ultimate reckoning.

It had been in that curtained corner, at last, that her mock pregnancy had been devised. Out of that false pregnancy their marriage had been forged.

Had it been because she had really wanted a baby so badly? Or had needed so to punish him? Her breasts had swollen, she had suffered morning sickness – and after five months had wound up the game by lying nine days with an icebag instead of a baby at her breast. Empty-breasted and empty-armed while other women nursed their young. And when he’d come to see her hadn’t reproached him once. It wasn’t necessary. She had read in his eyes the realization of what he’d done. ‘Don’t look sorry, Frankie – it wasn’t your fault,’ she’d told him. He had been too miserable to reply. He knew whose fault it had been all right.

That had been the first time she’d gotten underneath his indifference. The hook was in. She had never let go since. He had been sick with concern for her.

After that no one but her father had continued to remind her that Frankie really wasn’t good enough for her. ‘A bad child often lies in a good mother’s lap,’ was the way the old man had put it. And it was true that Frankie hadn’t even finished grammar school while she’d gone on to almost a full year of high. ‘A girl like you with a good Polish education,’ the old man had sought to shame her, ‘goin’ with a gambler – for shame, Zoshka. You tell him right out when he comes tonight he isn’t good enough for you with his dice and cards and pool shooting all day – what kind of a husband is that ?’

Yet all Frankie had done that night, when she’d told him, like a dutiful daughter, just what Papa had said, was to twiddle his thumb playfully in her ear till she’d protested, ‘Get out of my clean ear!’ and the dice and card playing were forgotten. Between such idle play and her thousand superstitions – ‘Always hand beer to me wit’ your right hand. A fallin’ picture means deat” – they had drifted at last, one windy Saturday morning, into marriage at Old St Stephen’s.

‘He told me he loved me that night,’ she still liked to recall. ‘I remember.’ Cause I asked him.’

‘You would of kicked me out of bed if I hadn’t said yes,’ Frankie Majcinek might have replied.

Because, right off, it hadn’t felt like holy wedlock at all. He’d celebrated his wedding night by taking over the drums in a three-piece band hired for the occasion and getting blind drunk to follow. Wedlock hadn’t changed a thing. His love-making was still maddeningly casual, a sort of routine which she couldn’t feel was anything more than he’d had with too many lilies of the valley. Once he’d even had the brass-bound nerve to ask her, ‘What’d you rather do – go to bed ’r listen to me keep time on the tubs to the radio?’

‘Neither,’ she’d told him. But had chalked up one more in her book of grudges all the same. For when he gave her pride the back of his hand she no longer protested openly. After their marriage her anger raged silently.

If only he would have hit her so that they would have been able to make it all up in bed later. ‘If Jesus Christ treated me like you do I’d drive in the nails myself,’ she told him in her mind as, in a passion of frustration, she watched him dealing, eternally dealing.

She could draw neither anger nor hate from him – until the accident that had left her in the wheelchair.

‘He nailed me to the wood that night,’ she told her friend Violet.

‘We all got a cross to bear,’ Violet assured her, ‘I got Stash ’n you got Frankie.’

‘Wrong both times,’ Sophie contradicted her flatly. ‘My cross is this chair. I’m settin’ on my cross. All you have to do is send yours to work ’n you’re back on the ground. I’m nailed to mine.’

‘Sometimes I think them nails is in your head, honey,’ Violet decided, ‘you’re drivin’ ’em in yourself.’

‘A lot you got to holler anyhow,’ Sophie evaded the accusation, ‘callin’ your meal ticket a cross – if you want to get rid of Stash all you have to do is go to work yourself.’

‘Don’t say “work”,’ Violet reproached Sophie softly as though she’d heard an obscene word, ‘it’s the nastiest word I know -’ n I know ’em all.’

So it was forever Frankie who drove in the nails and always her own palms, already bleeding, that must receive them. And all so matter-of-factly, like having some absent-minded carpenter about the house. Never once did he seem to see, even dimly, how inwardly she bled.

And you couldn’t get him to Mass with wild horses any more. She even gave him his choice of even-hour or odd-hour Mass. But it seemed, either way, he still didn’t have the time. He’d have to figure the Monday morning line instead.

‘I’ll make a man of him yet,’ she’d boasted to Violet shortly before the accident, ‘just like that Jane Wyman done that time with some goof battlin’ the bottle worse’n Frankie. When I’m through wit’ him he won’t want to look at another deck ’r the inside of a whisky bar.’

She hadn’t made much of a job of it, she had to admit now. The only thing that had kept him near her had been the accident. The blessed, cursed, wonderful-terrible God’s-own-accident that had truly married them at last. For where her love and the Church’s ritual had failed to bind, guilt had now drawn the irrevocable knot so fiercely that she felt he could never be free of her again. Every time he came in stewed to the gills, with Sparrow holding him up by the belt, he’d mumble the minute he saw her waiting in the chair, ‘I’m no good. Here. Hit me.’ He would offer her his chin to hit. To make up for everything.

‘The only time I get a decent word out of him is when he’s stewed,’ she complained to Violet, ‘if he has to get stewed to realize what he done to me, let him get stewed every night.’

‘That goes to show his heart is right when he’s sober,’ Violet assured her.

‘I lost my taste for the booze the night Zosh got banged up,’ Frankie told the punk like confiding news of a secret disease.

A secret disease: the disease of his crippled joy. All those things which had once lent him pleasure were being soiled by a slow and cancerous guilt: the image of her waiting, night after night, who had so loved to dance and be with dancing people. He heard her lost laughter in that of any girl on the street below. ‘She don’t even laugh like she used no more,’ he realized with a pang.