Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

A door slammed downstairs and the Jailer’s voice, heavy with sleep, called down irritably, ‘No rooms! Too early! Go by Wieczorek and sleep on pool table!’

But still no hand on the door below. No step on the long dark stair.

Nor ever yet had wondered why she dreamed, so often with the same deep dream, of a distant cousin, a girl of nineteen who had died in Sophie’s childhood. She saw Olga in a nun’s habit walking down a long white corridor. It was night, the whole great hospital was still: only the faint sweet smell of anesthetics and the sound of the nun’s slippered tread. Sophie saw the girl, all in white and immeasurably far away, as though looking through a minifying lens. The lens turned in her dreaming brain, a narrow dark door opened and her own face, like a face seen under water, the eyes wide and brimming with joy: ‘Olga! Honey! Look! I’m on my feet again!’ She was crying for happiness in that dark door and wakened with a sob breaking like a small bone in her throat.

Then the sense of loss that deepened as wakefulness widened, till the whole world seemed one great room wherein she had lost something long ago, something so dear, so dear. ‘Why should I worry?’ she asked herself suddenly, with a certain self-derision. ‘I got mine.’

That was, seemingly, true enough. She had got exactly what she had wanted more than anything else in the world. Frankie Majcinek. Had him forever and for keeps and all for her very own. For there was no other place in the world for him, since the accident, save this one small furnished room. So now it was time to feel her victory in her heart, sweeter than all the dances she had missed through that perverted victory.

Then why did it feel as though the all-night movies had all been emptied, why did it feel they must be showing broken reels to empty rows and that the all-night bakery fires had gone out: that the loaves would grow cold and mold slowly to dust in ten thousand rusting stoves?

Why did it feel so late, so late that she would never get there in time after all?

‘It’s just the way things would be if that Nifty Louie was God ’n Blind Pig was Jesus Christ,’ she decided feverishly, ‘it’s just about the way them two’d run things.’

A trolley yammered past like a dog pursuing a rabbit and pulled up with a startled little yelp.

And heard his step on the long dark stair at last coming up just one step ahead of the first metallic cries of morning.

Until the night of the Great Sandwich Battle old Stash had only once given Violet concrete grounds for divorce. That had been the night he’d gone on what she still referred to as his ‘tandem.’ She had never let him forget that sorry occasion.

It was bad enough that a man of his years should come wheeling in at 2 A.M. of a summer night with his shirt ripped half off his back – but before she could rip the rest of it off him her breath was cut off by the spectacle of somebody’s grandmother in nothing but a suit of long underwear, the high-heeled shoes once called ‘baby dolls’ and one earring dangling like the final symbol of a misspent youth.

When Vi had recovered her breath all she could gasp was, ‘Lady, whoever you are, they’re lookin’ for you – but they ain’t gonna find you here ’ – and rushed Grandma, drunk as a coot, down the hall and down the steps and out into the street with one good strong shove to get her going in somebody else’s direction – then two steps at a time all the way back up to see what Old Husband was up to in that unusual condition.

A good thing she’d taken two at a time. He was tottering half out the window, trying to read the temperature on the thermometer nailed to the outside wall with his shoeless toes barely touching the floor. She hauled him back so hard he landed flat on his back in the middle of the bedroom floor, creaked over upon his side and went into a snoring sleep.

But who wants to sleep with a drunk beside the bed? She had rolled him, like a half-filled laundry bag, right under the springs. But he’d tossed and mumbled so restlessly there that at last she had hauled him out of it by the ankles, supported him down the hall with his head dangling like a Christmas rooster’s, into the broom closet. Putting a pillow under his head, she’d locked him in with a reproach he never heard. ‘Just to teach you a lesson, Old Man.’

After that the hall broom closet had been his punishment for almost any misdemeanor. The last stretch he’d spent in there had been for doing nothing worse than bringing home a loaf of day-old pumpernickel. She’d warned him that she wouldn’t eat day-old food but yet he fancied, after fifteen months of married life, that she rejoiced secretly in all his bargains. He had a sneaking senile conviction that she’d married him because he knew where all the best bargains were to be had for just a little wheedling and the wearing of a tattered sweater. ‘Makin’ poor mouth,’ Violet called it. And for this reason kept his bargain-store addresses a secret from her, for fear that when she found them out she would leave him. What other reason could she have had for marrying him? he had asked himself in the cold white light of day. Old Husband wasn’t just anybody’s fool. He was everybody’s in general and Violet’s in particular.

She had tried to cure the bargain-store habit by dumping all his day’s spoils into the container at the end of the hall. When he’d seen her do that he had retired to the closet voluntarily. Perched upon a bucket there, a frayed blanket clutched closely about him as the night wore on and the hall grew chill, he had worried most of all about whatever would the neighbors think.

Neighbors could think what they damned well pleased in Violet’s book. Every hour on the hour she’d sallied forth to denounce him through the closet keyhole. ‘ Doopa! Come out! I got to slug you!’ Old Stash was too sly for that. He’d stayed where he was.

He never understood why such little things made her so hopping mad and it looked like he never would catch on this side of purgatory. Yet it was all for the best that he remain in the fog of cut-rate prices in which he wandered numbly between broom closet and icehouse and his own warm bed. For even though he did wise up there wasn’t a thing, at Old Husband’s age, to be done about it.

Sometimes she punished him by not letting him pull the date off the calendar for three or four days. Then, when he would hand her the Saturday night pay envelope, she’d reward him by letting him tear off all three days in a row – she would have to watch him to see that he didn’t go over into the coming week. Old Husband literally chortled with glee when he’d gotten all three off and in his hand, if those three had finished the month.

She had even caught him sneaking into the calendar at night to tear off a page while she slept. And once, in a panic of frustration, he had ruined an almost virginal calendar by ripping off sixteen weeks in a row; as though he could no longer wait for the endless weeks to pass. She had put him to bed with a fever, soothing him with a hot-water bag across his stomach.

It wasn’t simply bad luck that the bag had leaked a bit. It too had been bought secondhand.

On the night of the Great Sandwich Battle Stash gave her, she felt, even further cause for separate maintenance.

Although, if the sausage hadn’t slipped out of the sandwich, everything would have been fine and dandy, like sugar candy.

That was one accident that Violet couldn’t blame the punk for. It was one time it was truly all her fault, for bringing him upstairs when she knew Old Husband was likely to wake up.

Still, it’s not easy to blame Violet either. Maybe it was really Stash’s fault for going to bed too early.

Unless it was Stash’s boss’s fault for working the old man so hard he couldn’t stay awake after supper, just when Violet would start taking out the pin curls and getting ready to go places and see things.