William Kennedy - Ironweed

She went into the store and looked at, and touched, the instruments. She looked at the rack of new song sheets: “The Flat Foot Floogie,” “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.” She walked to the counter and asked the young man with the slick brown hair: “Do you have Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony?” She paused. “And might I see that Schubert album in your window?”

“We do, and you may,” said the man, and he found them and handed them to her and pointed her to the booth where she could listen to the music in private.

She played the Schubert first, John McCormack inquiring: Who is Silvia? What is she? That all our swains commend her?… Is she as kind as she is fair? And then, though she absolutely loved McCormack, adored Schubert, she put them both aside for the fourth movement of the Choral Symphony.

Joy, thou spark from flame immortal ,

Daughter of Elysium!

The words tumbled at Helen in the German and she converted them to her own joyful tongue.

He that’s won a noble woman ,

Let him join our jubilee!

Oh the rapture she felt. She grew dizzy at the sounds: the oboes, the bassoons, the voices, the grand march of the fugal theme. Scherzo. Molto vivace.

Helen swooned.

A young woman customer saw her fall and was at her side almost instantly. Helen came to with her head in the young woman’s lap, the young clerk fanning her with a green record jacket. Beethoven, once green, green as a glade. The needle scratched in the record’s end groove. The music had stopped, but not in Helen’s brain, It rang out still, the first rays of the rising sun in May.

“How you feeling, ma’am,” the clerk asked.

Helen smiled, hearing flutes and violas.

“I think I’m all right. Will you help me up?”

“Rest a minute,” the girl said. “Get your bearings first. Would you like a doctor?”

“No, no thank you. I know what it is. I’ll be all right in a minute or two.”

But she knew now that she would have to get the room and get it immediately. She did not want to collapse crossing the street. She needed a place of her own, warm and dry, and with her belongings near her. The clerk and the young woman customer helped her to her feet and stood by as she settled herself again on the bench of the listening booth. When the young people were reassured that Helen was fully alert and probably not going to collapse again, they left her. And that’s when she slipped the record of the fourth movement inside her coat, under her blouse, and let it rest on the slope of her tumor her doctor said was benign. But how could anything so big be benign? She pulled her coat around her as tightly as she could without cracking the record, said her thank yous to both her benefactors, and walked slowly out of the store.

Her bag was at Palombo’s Hotel and she headed for there: all the way past Madison Avenue. Would she make it to the hotel without a collapse? Well, she did. She was exhausted but she found crippled old Donovan in his rickety rocker, and his spittoon at his feet, on the landing between the first and second floors, all there was of a lobby in this establishment. She said she wanted to redeem her bag and rent a room, the same room she and Francis always took whenever it was empty. And it was empty.

Six dollars to redeem the bag, old Donovan told her, and a dollar and a half for one night, or two-fifty for two nights running. Just one, Helen said, but then she thought: What if I don’t die tonight? I will need it tomorrow too. And so she took the bargain rate, which left her with three dollars and thirty-five cents.

Old Donovan gave her the key to the second-floor room and went to the cellar for her suitcase.

“Ain’t seen ya much.” Donovan said when he brought the bag to her room.

“We’ve been busy.” Helen said. “Francis got a job.”

“A job? Ya don’t say.”

“We’re all quite organized now, you might describe it. It’s just possible that we’ll rent an apartment up on Hamilton Street.”

“You’re back in the chips. Mighty good. Francis comin’ in tonight?”

“He might be, and he might not be,” said Helen. “It all depends on his work, and how busy he might or might not be.”

“I get it,” said Donovan.

She opened the suitcase and found the kimono and put it on. She went then to wash herself, but before she could wash she vomited; sat on the floor in front of the toilet bowl and vomited until there was nothing left to come up: and then she retched dryly for five minutes. finally taking sips of water so there would be something to bring up. And Francis thought she was just being contrary, refusing Jack’s cheese sandwich.

Finally it passed, and she rinsed her mouth and her stinging eyes and did, oh yes. did wash herself, and then padded back along the threadbare carpet to her room, where she sat in the chair at the foot of the bed, staring at the swan and remembering nights in this room with Francis.

Clara, that cheap whore, rolled that nice young man in the brown suit and then came in here to hide. If you’re gonna sleep with a man, sleep with him, Francis said. Be a goddamn woman. If you’re gonna roll a man, roll him. But don’t sleep with him and then roll him. Francis had such nice morals. Oh Clara, why in heaven’s name do you come in here with your trouble? Haven’t we got trouble enough of our own without you? All Clara got was fourteen dollars. But that is a lot.

Helen propped her Beethoven record against the pillow in the center of the bed and studied its perfection. Then she rummaged in the suitcase to see and touch all that was in it: another pair of bloomers, her rhinestone butterfly, her blue skirt with the rip in it, Francis’s safety razor and his penknife, his old baseball clippings, his red shirt, and his left brown shoe, the right one lost; but one shoe’s better than none, ain’t it? was Francis’s reasoning. Sandra lost a shoe but Francis found it for her. Francis was very thoughtful. Very everything. Very Catholic, though he pretended not to be. That was why Francis and Helen could never marry.

Wasn’t it nice the way Helen and Francis put their religion in the way of marriage?

Wasn’t that an excellent idea?

For really, Helen wanted to fly free in the same way Francis did. After Arthur she knew she would always want to be free, even if she had to suffer for it.

Arthur, Arthur, Helen no longer blames you for anything. She knows you were a man of frail allegiance in a way that Francis never was; knows too that she allowed you to hurt her.

Helen remembers Arthur’s face and how relieved it was, how it smiled and wished her luck the day she said she was leaving to take a job playing piano for silent films and vaudeville acts. Moving along in the world willfully, that’s what Helen was doing then (and now). A will to grace, if you would like to call it that, however elusive that grace has proven to be…

Was this willfulness a little deceit Helen was playing on herself?

Was she moving, instead, in response to impulses out of that deep center?

Why was it, really, that things never seemed to work out?

Why was Helen’s life always turning into some back alley, like a wandering old cat?

What is Helen?

Who is Silvia, please?

Please?

Helen stands up and holds the brass. Helen’s feet are like fine brass. She is not unpolished like the brass of this bed. Helen is the very polished person who is standing at the end of the end bed in the end room of the end hotel of the end city of the end.

And when a person like Helen comes to an ending of something, she grows nostalgic and sentimental. She has always appreciated the fine things in life: music, kind words, gentility, flowers, sunshine, and good men. People would feel sad if they knew what Helen’s life might have been like had it gone in another direction than the one that brought her to this room.