Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

‘I used to cry sometimes when I first married Stash,’ she confessed to Sophie, ‘I didn’t have no place to go. I used to shave him with a ’lectric razor then. He could shave hisself all right, but I liked the sound it makes. That’s the oney pleasure that old man ever give me.’

On the night of the Great Sandwich Battle she fixed him a glass of warm tomato juice with a raw egg floating in it – Widow Wieczorek had confided in her that it had worked wonders with the late Emil W. when he’d first started slipping. But Stash turned in half an hour earlier than usual; all it had done was to make him limper than ever.

‘Next time I’ll try goat’s milk,’ Violet planned wistfully, watching him shuffling off toward the bedroom with the left-hand flap of his winter underwear dangling. ‘If that don’t work I might as well be a widow too. Wonder if there’s such a thing as a pension for icehouse widows. Them big ice blocks could be dangerous, all sorts of things could happen.’

She just wasn’t tired a bit. She hadn’t done a thing all day except to wheel Sophie to the Pulaski, return to sweep Sophie’s flat and wash up yesterday’s dishes while Frankie snored on the bed, sluice the stairs for Schwabatski and sweep the water down four flights into the gutter, then clean up her own rooms and heat up some restaurant leftovers she’d decided were ripe enough for Old Husband’s supper. He’d hauled the mess half a mile the evening before and had weighed it before leaving for work to be sure she didn’t eat more than her share before he returned.

Vi didn’t mind heating the moldy stuff so much as long as she wasn’t expected to share it. ‘He don’t care what he scoffs up,’ she marveled nightly, ‘so long as it’s a big bargain is all that counts -’ n both sides of the sandwich to match. Don’t ask me why, he don’t like it when one side of the sandwich is bigger than the other.’

‘Is all dirty, too t’in,’ Stash described an uneven sandwich. It affronted some deep and childish hope still living within him that everything in the world – even sandwiches – be turned out without rough edges that might hurt little boys.

The same sort of hope, perhaps, which led him to stop at the same currency exchange regularly to change dirty dollars for nice new clean crisp ones. ‘Cott this opp!’ he would demand of the cashier, handing her a soiled ten-spot – when she had humored him and he was tucking away ten crisp new singles he would feel he’d driven the cleverest sort of bargain.

Even the weather must come out even for Old Husband. Hardly anything pleased him more than a nice even-numbered temperature, like 60 or 80 or 100. Just as the best days of the month seemed to him to be the 10th, the 20th and the 30th.

Yet now that it was time for him to go to bed, Violet was one wife who knew her duty. Stash sometimes couldn’t get to sleep unless she was lying beside him. And you never could tell for sure, maybe that egg would have a delayed kick. But tonight he was drowsing by the time she had her skirt off and that’s enough to discourage the willingest of brides. Particularly since she was wearing, for the very first time, a pair of lacy black Suspants the punk had stolen for her from Nieboldt’s.

Who is supposed to appreciate a glamorous thing like that, a thing an actress might be wearing – skintight with garter tabs – if not a girl’s husband? She sat admiring her legs, pointing the tinted toenails delicately to emphasize the long slimness of her calves and the full womanly bow of her thighs.

Violet was a good girl at heart. But even a nun needs the appreciation of others. For the tinted toenails and the fancy garter tabs there was no man near to so much as say ‘Wow!’

She looked at her watch. Ten o’clock and right on the hour the old man began snoring up a row that made her wonder what in the world had been in that egg after all. From below, between snores, rose the pre-Christmas revelry of the Tug & Maul. She pulled the shade like lowering a curtain upon temptation, turned on the shaded bed light and read Steve Canyon all the way through, she was that bored. Then just sat looking down at Stash’s toothless maw, open and drooling a little, comparing it with the square and virile set of Canyon’s jawbone. Even the punk had more jaw than old Stash – in some ways, she remembered with real warmth, the punk didn’t have to give an inch to Canyon. She turned out the bed light and lay for a while remembering past laughter and wondering what she’d been thinking of in marrying the old man anyhow. Because she’d wanted to take care of somebody – or for his fifty a week?

A bit of both, she compromised anxiously. Then making no particular effort to keep from waking him, crawled over him, teasing the hairs sticking out of his nostrils with the nipple of her breast just for the hell of it, shoved her feet into slippers and tightened her winter coat modestly over her sheer nightdress.

‘Go to sleep, Stash,’ she told him gently, ‘have a good dream you’re winnin’ a turkey raffle.’ Locked the door behind her and stepped softly down the stairwell into the murmurous corridors of night guarded so constantly, as on all winter nights, by Prager beer signs and the great Milwaukee Avenue moon.

Prager beer signs down one side and High-Life down the other, all the way down Milwaukee to the streets where the dark people live, drinking cheaper beer.

And who should be sitting at the bar, goofy and gay as always, but Solly Saltskin.

‘“D.’ n D.” don’t mean “drunk ’n disorderly” in my case,’ he was explaining to Antek the Owner. ‘In my case it means “Damen ’n Division,”’cause that’s where I always wait when I want to get picked up.’

‘Just don’t get picked up for anythin’ worse’n D.’ n D.,’ Owner counseled him.

‘That’s where I got them ,’ Sparrow whispered confidentially. ‘That Kvorka ain’t got the heart to pinch me for nuttin’ serious, he knows me too long. If he did Bednar’d fire him, Bednar likes me too.’

In fact all our most ignorant people were there and the juke played on and on.

‘Oh, my man he’s six foot three,

He knows just what to do for me.’

Well, little Solly S. wasn’t any six foot three, but he knew how to treat a girl till she felt he must be five-ten at least. They had quite a few together, he’d taken the night off just to show Schwiefka how much the joint needed him at the door and had been waiting here in the hope she might come downstairs for a small beer after Old Husband was safely tucked in the sack. They teased each other and drank till closing time, when Sparrow said he was ‘hungry enough to eat little ginny pigs.’

‘I’m so hungry if I can’t have a sandrich I got to have a pint,’ was just how the punk put it. ‘So now we’ll get a bottle ’n go by your house.’

‘Stash wouldn’t like,’ Vi explained sorrowfully, ordering that closing-time shot with which one defies all sorrowing.

‘It’ll be okay,’ Sparrow fixed everything, ‘we’ll give him half the bottle. Then we’ll turn on the radio ’n dance.’

‘Stash wouldn’t like.’

‘Why not – the radio broke?’

‘The radio’s all right.’ Violet was weakening so fast that when he hooked her arm and said, ‘Let’s go,’ she finished the shot that made everything seem just the way everything ought to have been long before this night.

Owner was putting the chairs up on the back bar and the lights in the big brass juke were running down like a rain-washed sunset. They steered each other outside and up the first flight to home in a weaving progress, each urging the other to walk more soberly.

‘Watch how I do it,’ Violet commanded, going up four cautious steps and coming down a reckless five. ‘Now you try.’