Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm

‘I’ll tie her up,’ Molly announced, and when she returned to her guests: ‘I left her a saucer of milk. She isn’t old enough for beer.’

‘If she hangs around this one she won’t drink nothin’ else,’ Frankie bragged when Molly came to sit beside him on the chair’s broad arm. To study him with her direct child’s gaze.

‘You didn’t come back,’ she reminded him. ‘You went ’n got fixed again ’n was too ashamed to come back.’

Her directness shook him, he hadn’t had time to lie.

‘It was the last one, Molly-O.’

She’d been planning for three days to give him the sharpest dressing down she’d ever given anyone. Yet now that he was here, with the tired look under his eyes, all she could think of was, ‘I threw myself away on a man worth nothing at all. I can’t lose now by going along with one that’s worth something.’ And took his head to her breast.

‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ he told her without raising his head from the clean milk-and-fur odor of her. ‘All I hear up there is how I smashed her up a-purpose. If just she didn’t think that. ’

‘She’s got you thinkin’ you done it a-purpose, is that it?’

‘All I know is she got me stonin’ myself. How does a guy know what he was really thinkin’ when he was stewed?’

‘You can’t take what she says now like it’s somethin’ real, Frankie – Sophie ain’t been right in the head since the accident, everybody knows that.’

‘But it was me made her wrong in the head then,’ n everythin’ I do since makes it worse for her, I don’t know why. What if one of them pin-curl biddies upstairs seen me come in here?’

Molly lifted his chin until his eyes were forced to meet her own. He read an ancient anger there. ‘I ain’t forgot the time I was just a kid ’n she cracked me in front of everybody -’ n you backed off ’n let me go bawlin’ home by myself. You was that scared of her even then.’ Cause you didn’t want to go home with her that night. You wanted to go home with me. It was how I wanted it too – things would have been better for me since then if you’d done like you felt instead of like other people told you you got to.’

He pressed her hands to his shoulders and turned his eyes away; but she brought him back.

‘You know why Zosh slapped me that night?’ Cause she was wrong in the head awready, that was why. She was evenin’ up on you way back then. You wouldn’t fall in love with her the way she wanted you to, the way she was in love, she had to get even with you for that. She never got another chance till the accident. That was her one big chance ’n she took it without even carin’ what she was doin’ to herself. It’s all she ever tried to do for you was to get even.’ N you’re lettin’ her do it every time you knock on that Fomorowski’s door or sneak up to see Blind Pig. You know it in your heart ’n you’re backin’ down from admittin’ it to yourself just like you backed down that other night.’

Rumdum, jealous of Molly’s arms about Frankie, padded up and put his head on Frankie’s knee and Frankie caressed the big ugly muzzle absent-mindedly.

Molly wouldn’t let him go.

‘If you want that girl to get well you ain’t going to do it by gettin’ as sick in the head as she is. It’s what you’re doin’ every single time you pay off Louie to use that dirty hypo on you-’

‘It ain’t just that, Molly, it’s that lead I got in my gut, it still hurts sometimes.’

She shoved him away from her. ‘Don’t give me that Purple Heart romance. It’s nothin’ of the kind ’n you know it. If things were right with you you wouldn’t be runnin’ to Louie because you got a pain in the belly. You’re runnin’ over there because you get to thinkin’ the whole thing is all your fault, that you smashed her up on purpose. She’s got you lyin’ to yourself , Frankie. You got to believe that that girl was wrong before the accident and the accident was just somethin’ that could have happened to anybody who’d had one too many.

‘It happens every day, there wasn’t anythin’ special about yours – you think your accident was like made in heaven? Can that bull. It was made right down at the Tug & Maul at the bottom of a whisky glass ’n you better start pickin’ up the pieces ’n start livin’ again with what’s left over. If she don’t want to put the pieces together for herself you got to do it for yourself.’

Her hand, with its wrist as thin as a child’s, lay firmly upon his own.

‘Things have sure went to hell on a handcar since the accident,’ he acknowledged.

‘Were they ever the way they should be between you ’n Zosh? Before the accident, Frankie. That’s somethin’ I got to know.’

He shook his head. No. It never had been. It hadn’t ever been right. ‘She never trusted me.’ He’d brought it out at last, avoiding Molly’s eyes.

‘Look at me. You think I can?’

It had been a long time since Frankie had looked at anyone steadily. How could he expect anyone to trust him who could not trust himself?

‘I always trusted you, Frankie, from way back. I trust you now.’

‘I trust you too, Molly-O,’ he said mechanically, and she let his eyes go at last. She unbuttoned his field jacket, he looked so warm, and tripped the knot of the little blue jazzbow about his throat like tripping the knot which held his innards so tightly of late. He felt the knot within loosen with the realization that he could talk straight to somebody at last.

For how does any man keep straight with himself if he has no one with whom to be straight? He had never fully trusted Sparrow, the punk thought too fast for him. In their world of petty cheats, phony braggarts, double clockers, elbow sneaks, small-time chiselers, touts and stooges and gladhand-shakers, one had always to be on guard. He had been on his guard since the day he’d been chiseled out of two steel aggies back of the Mc Andrew School, when he was nine. He had been on guard with everyone since and with Sophie most of all. He had a blurred, reasonless conviction now that, somehow, it had been she who had stolen his two steel aggies, never to be replaced.

She’d never given his aggies back. He lost them anew to her every day. Well, let her keep them then, let her keep everything. Let it be as she said, all his fault, and let him go at last. He felt an almost animal-like yearning to let his guard down and take all the blows there were in the world till there were no blows left: to sink under them in utter weariness into sleep and wake up being the real Frankie Majcinek. The Frankie who was straight with himself as he was with the world. The Frankie he had never been.

To sleep a bit in this small room and waken to see the curtain flutter and feel a trust of all things near. To sleep so long, on this small woman’s olive breast, feeling her trust of him binding him like her arms, that he would waken to become what Molly once had glimpsed in him. What she knew he yet might be.

He had never been trusted. He had never trusted himself. The thought of being trusted hit him like a double shot on an empty stomach. He wasn’t ready for anyone’s trust. He had been too long trained in wariness to drop his guard that low. That low, and that fast.

Wary of all straight answers. On all the backstreets of home he had learned how a straight answer could land a man in the lockup while the boy with the quickest lie stayed on the street. Yet – if there were just one person to whom one’s answers were always straight, just that might make the whole twisted world come straight – he looked up to see Molly reading him like reading yesterday’s race results.

‘All we done, from the first time we went roller skatin’ together, was fight,’ he told her. ‘We battled all the time we went steady, we battled the weddin’ night till 4 A.M., we started in again when we woke up ’n kept it up till I went in the army ’n started all over the day I got discharged. We kept it up till the night of the accident ’n we ain’t quit yet.’