Between forenoon and evening her chicks descended the stairwell like separate blessings, one by one.
Hallie came down first, with a cup of tea steaming in her hand and the brindle cat limping at her side. It was a cat that took offense at nothing simply to have some sort of life. It walked beside her down the stone, but when it felt dew beneath its paws it drew back. Then Hallie would point her foot, the cat would leap, hobble and claw its way clear to her shoulder. Then they went together to say good morning to the jonquils growing between the cobbles. Though between the cobbles of Hallie’s heart no jonquil would grow again.
A heart like a lonesome gravestone, winter weeds covered it now. Below the weeds the child lay buried who had been but three when he’d died. One who had surprised his mother that sad and sudden fall by asking ‘Mother, are my mittens ready for winter? Are my earlaps ready? Will my coat be warm?’
His last Christmas he had put a hand behind a glowing ornament, passing it about his face, dreamily taking up the heat until she had made him stop.
Now nine shuttered Christmases later she walked powdered, Maybellined and gowned in the mascaraed evening light and something swollen in a mushroom’s shape, boredom like a living growth, bore down on her heart and brain.
Morning was not the hardest time, for the lame cat needed her, and the other women were not yet about to smile a little to themselves when they talked to her: ‘How you doin’, philosopher?’ they would ask, though she could not recall who, nor why, anyone had first called her that. But she had once been a country schoolteacher, so it must have something to do with that.
‘I got no philosophy but I topped you last night,’ Frenchy especially liked to tease her.
So she and the cat went visiting jonquils, and had a bit of fur-to-ear chatter in the ancestral understanding of woman and cat. Sometimes she read, in the quiet forenoon, out of books she still loved. But when the morning was past and the cat lay stretched on the window ledge through the sweltering afternoon, then she was left alone in this strange house, and ennui came down like a foe on her mind and she shaded her eyes with her hand.
To hope she might spend her yet unspent hours bedside to bed in some common ward, under some final quarantine, some ward where go all those whose lives are untouchable, from streets for whom nobody prays. Where it is one where evening falls and one the sad return of day.
Till the violet evening had mercy at last. Then she stood in the portiere and chose what guests she would.
The other women regarded her with a strange mixture of admiration and pity. They felt she held herself apart because she had once taught school – yet at other times they perceived she was somehow defenseless against all of them. Then it was that, hearing the low grinding of metal on stone, they looked the other way to spare her, while Finnerty held the big doors wide.
They did not look, yet sensed as if the lights had gone up a bit, that at the sound of little wheels, life was beginning again in Hallie.
Her lover was the legless man.
‘I’m a philosopher, too,’ Reba challenged Hallie – ‘because I got my own goddamn philosophy. For instance. You take a woman married to a good man and she cheats on him. Their baby is born dead. Well she had it coming to her, didn’t she? Everyone gets what’s coming to them, that’s my philosophy. I picked it up working for loryers. They said they never heard anything like it.’
‘I can believe that,’ Hallie was inclined to agree with loryers.
‘I had to run down two flights and up one across the street to get a coke,’ Reba recalled, ‘because across the street is a whorehouse with a coke machine. Why wear myself out running stairways? A job is a job. One with cokes is better. That’s my philosophy too.’
‘Say you don’t go for cokes, you’re on hard liquor. Okay, be a B-broad and get drunk every night. Say you’re a heavy eater, a regular fat glutton, get a job as a waitress ’n stuff yourself. Say you’re rapping doors with a box of silk stockings under your arm and you start freezing. So what? Get a job as a dance-hostess and work up a sweat.
‘I got half my choppers out and no ovalries. So what? I can still be a practical nurse, can’t I? My people come from that part of Europe where they say “fis” for “fish.” I don’t know where it’s at exactly but when my mother sent me to the store she’d always say “Honey, bring back a nice piece fis.” Hey! How’d you like all the cigarettes you could smoke? Just go down to American Tobacco and give my name, they’ll give you all you can haul in one trip.’
‘Baby, I don’t know what you’re on,’ Five marveled, ‘but I never heard nothing like it neither.’
Reba read all the papers, and always shook her head when she’d finished one. Someone in South Carolina had received two boxes of poisoned candy by mail, signed merely ‘B’rer Rabbit, R.F.D.’ Now what did anyone hope to get out of poisoning somebody else by mail? ‘If you got a grudge like that hire somebody to bust his damn legs, don’t go sneaking around signing yourself a damn rabbit.’
Postal delivery poisoners were among the few who fell out of the range of her sympathy. It troubled her to read that a tenant farmer had drowned his three daughters in a well because ‘Jesus says we got to go.’ ‘If Jesus said that why don’t he jump in the well hisself and let Jesus decide for the babies?’ Nor was she satisfied with the explanation of the brakeman who killed his wife with a hammer. ‘Grace aint fitten to raise a dog. This is the only way I know to make a lady of her.’
‘I don’t know what people are coming to, they act like a bunch of damned pistols,’ was Reba’s reaction. When she read of a widow woman who fell and broke her leg on a downtown street and someone stole forty-eight dollars out of her purse while she lay helpless, Reba was helpless too. ‘That’s too much’ was all she had to say for that day, and threw the paper away.
One evening an actor stumbled in. ‘I’ve had too much to drink,’ he told the women as though otherwise they’d never catch on.
‘Sweetie, I seen your picture in the paper but why don’t you just go home?’ Reba asked. The next morning the actor had his picture in the paper again, having been picked up for drunk and disorderly down the street. ‘I had too much to drink’ he had repeated his explanation to reporters once more. Reba’s patience gave out.
‘“I had too much to drink.” “I had too much to drink.” What did I tell him when he was here? “Sweetie, you’ve had too much to drink” is just what I told him. Honest to God, when a man knows he’s had too much and goes on drinking more all the same, that’s just too much. I refuse to adjust to peasants of a environment like this, that’s all.’
The excuse of the dunce who drowned his infant daughter because his wife had run off with another man didn’t get him off the hook with Reba. ‘Something snapped in my head’ he had told the police, ‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’
‘“I had too much to drink,”’ she mocked all erring mankind. ‘“Something snapped in my head,” “I didn’t know what I was doing” – of all the bum excuses. Give me animals, at least they know what they’re doing.’
Especially elephants. Elephants always knew what they were doing.
‘Do you know about elephants, how they come on?’ she asked anxiously of some sport adjusting a black wool tie in a cracked mirror while she was preoccupied with the ritual of the douche, shaking the bottle madly to make it foam.