Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

In a rain, a freezing rain. Yet would not tell her why. Had dreamed with a certain pleasure; yet with something of sadness too.

Now he was gone once more, to deal till morning where the south-western sky hung in cloudy amber folds, shielding a dull gray moon. A wind began parting them, like a curtain parting upon the opening act of a play staged just for her, to reveal a paper moon pasted stiffly – for as long as paste might hold – but one that did not weave with light as the real moon was supposed to do.

As the moon of her girlhood had woven all night: great copper strands through clouds of cloth upon the darkness’s measureless loom.

These nights the moon wove neither copper nor gold, even the clouds were pasted there. Moonlight that had once revealed so many stars now showed her only how the city was bound, from southeast to the unknown west, steel upon steel upon steel: how all its rails held the city too tightly to the thousand-girdered El.

Some nights she could scarcely breathe for seeing the flat unerring line of cable and crosslight and lever, of signal tower and switch. For the endless humming of telephone wires murmuring insanely from street to street without ever saying a single word above a whisper that a really sensible person might understand.

For the city too was somehow crippled of late. The city too seemed a little insane. Crippled and caught and done for with everyone in it. No one else was really any better off than herself, she reflected with a child’s satisfaction, they had all been twisted about a bit whether they sat in a wheelchair or not. She could tell just by the way once familiar doorways had come to look menacing in the morning light, ready to be slammed in the face of anyone who knocked at all. Nobody was at home to anyone else any more.

‘They don’t even act like they know what they’re doin’ no more,’ she decided, watching a couple moving aimlessly together down the long street below. ‘’N that Frankie Majcinek is the worst of all.’

She heard the umbrella man with his bell, far away; and a hot-dog vendor’s cart near at hand. Saw how the moon followed the hot-dog cart like a cripple left to follow alone, leaning, one bitter moment, upon the crutch of the signal tower. It had always gone its own brave way; now it followed lamely after every fool below. It too was somehow broken. It too now played the fool.

She grew tense to see how the nameless people were bound, as they went, to the streets as the streets seemed bound to the night and the night to the nameless day. And all days to a nameless remorse.

No one moved easily, freely and unafraid any longer, all hurried worriedly to work and anxiously by night returned; waited despairingly for traffic lights to change, forever fearing that the green light might change too soon and, when that warning yellow flashed, stormed through to beat the deadly red. Was there no time left for easy passages and casual pleasures down tree-lined boulevards? Her hours, that had begun so pleasantly, borne on a lake wind by morning and so certain then to blow off the lake every morning forever, now passed in a cold draft from a half-lit hall, rattling a loosened latch.

The wind, like the moon and Frankie Machine, all had turned secretly against her. One wind or another, one moon or the next, whether he returned by midnight or noon – all things recalled to her only that dead year’s final midnight when the chairs had been stacked and some fool had left a cracked crutch between a juke and a 7-Up sign.

‘It was mine ’n I didn’t even know it,’ she felt a ceaseless wonder now. And a bottomless sorrowing: ‘I shouldn’t ought to have laughed when I seen it.’

For since that night everyone had become afraid of closing time everywhere, of having the lights go out in the middle of the dance while the chimes of all the churches mourned: a requiem for everyone trapped beneath the copper-colored sky of noon or the night-lit ties of the El. Faintly through the flooring, two flights below, she heard the fans in the Tug & Maul begin thudding, slowly yet with a gathering vibration, then settle down to a steady hum no heavier than that of a sewing machine being pedaled between narrow walls. It told her the smoke was getting heavy and the laughter louder there.

So took to weaving her hands in a slow fantasy, like a drugged hula dancer, watching the fingers flow like separate things before her eyes and singing in a voice so thin and off-key that the hound beneath the dresser opened one boozy eye in pain.

‘I’m no millionaire

But I’m not the type to care …’

After she had sung all the songs she knew her hands went on weaving half-forgotten fairy tales.

‘My name is Rumpelstiltskin,’ she told herself aloud, and laughed derisively at her own voice. ‘Who the hell is Rumpelstiltsky?’ Till some forgotten fairy of her mind replied, ‘You can weave gold where there is no gold.’

Sophie was always pleased to hear such words come to mind so easily, as if spoken by another: some happier, some might-have-been, some used-to-be or never-was Sophie. And listened to the glistening hum of the tracks, leveling dead away toward midnight after every El that passed; following faintly all the way to the Loop straight southeast into the metallic moonlight’s mocking glow.

Tonight the moon held to the leaning ladders of the rain as it rose. She moved her chair with it till she could see where the flickering warning lamps burned, along the El’s long boundaries, like vigil lamps guarding the constant boundaries of night. Could even see the passengers in the cars as the locals slowed toward the station.

All night, each night, waiting for Frankie in dry weather or wet, whether the moon held to the farther crosslights or to the near-at-hand signal tower, the vigil lights burned faithfully to guard a night gone false. They seemed so right, so dependable and true, in a world gone wrong, all wrong. It made her want to cry out for everyone locked in some tenement’s pit on any long and littered street.

Till darkness brought her sleep on a weary handcar, switching her onto a nowhere train that curved and descended, softly and endlessly, out upon the vast roundhouse of old El dreams.

She was a girl again sitting on Frankie’s doorstep watching the sluggish late-summer flies settling heavily against the screens. The last leaves of some sultry September hung stiffly, like leaves pressed between the pages of an old catechism. Along the arc-lit parks and playgrounds the trees were still as shadows of trees down some picture-postcard street.

She had come to borrow his roller skates and he was telling her, ‘You can only have one and you have to do what I do.’ Then rolling away on his single skate down the darkening boulevard the old terror that he was going away forever shook her and she had to follow – he was so far ahead, the night was so dark, the trees stood so stiffly and so tall while the arc lamps watched too steadily – yet somehow with light about him so that she could see every turn he made and did each one exactly as he’d said she must all the way up to that old leaf-covered porch of which he’d taught her to be afraid because no one lived there any more. She was careful to go through the broken latticework left leg first as he had done and down into the dangerous hide-out lit only by a single broken ray from the arc lamp’s eye across a leaf-strewn darkness where other lovers had lain. Here, where the earth held like a pang the odor of dry leaves, night dew, and faintly the scent of sometime lovers’ sweat, he had said, ‘Lie down, Zosh.’

The yellow arc lamp’s single eye found them out. To watch unwinking while the bells of Old St Stephen’s rang out a warning right overhead, shaking the picture-postcard trees till the brittle leaves fell stiffly down and flies fell off lattice, window and screen.