Fog and rain had gone, abolished by a high wind, and, in place of that imagined swamp where death waited in the thickened water, his lizard jaws open, there was a clean path of street and thrashing trees. Through the clouds the wind had sunk a hole in which a few stars dipped. I ran to the corner, jumping over puddles. A streetcar was in sight, crashing forward, rocking on its trucks from side to side and nicking sparks from the waving cable. I caught it while it was in motion and stood on the platform, panting; the conductor was saying that it was bad business to flip a car in the wet, you wanted to be careful about such tricks. We were swept off with quaking windows, blinking through floods of air, the noise of the gong drowning under the horn of the wind.
"Reg'lar gale," said the conductor, gripping the hand rail.
A young soldier and a girl got on, both drunk; an elderly woman with a pointed, wolfish face; a seedy policeman, who stood with his hands buried in his pockets so that he seemed to be holding his belly, his chin lowered on the flaps of his collar; a woman in a short skirt and fur chubby, her stockings wrinkling over her knees, her eyes watering, and her teeth set.
"You'd think," said the conductor pityingly as she worked her way through the car, "that a woman like that, who ain't no youngster, would stay home close to the steam on a night like this, instead of knockin' around on late cars. Unless," he added to the policeman and me, 105 "she's out on business," and showed his yellow teeth in a smile.
"D'ch'ster next. D'ch'ster!"
I jumped off and straggled homeward against the wind, stopping for a while under the corner awning to catch my breath. The clouds were sheared back from a mass of stars chattering in the hemispheric blackness-the universe, this windy midnight, out on its eternal business.
I found Iva waiting up for me. She did not ask where I had been, taking it for granted, I suppose, that I had followed my custom after quarrels, of walking along the lake shore. In the morning we had a short talk and were reconciled.
January 13
A DARK, burdensome day. I stormed up from sleep this morning, not knowing what to do first-whether to reach for my slippers or begin immediately to dress, turn on the radio for the news, comb my hair, prepare to shave. I fell back into bed and spent an hour or so collecting myself, watching the dark beams from the slats of the blind wheeling on the upper wall. Then I rose. There were low clouds; the windows streamed. The surrounding roofs mgreen, raw red blackened brass-shone like potlids in a darkened kitchen.
At eleven I had a haircut. I went as far as Sixty-third Street for lunch and ate at a white counter amid smells of frying fish, looking out on the iron piers in the street and the huge paving bricks like the plates of the boiler-room floor in a huge liner. Above the restaurant, on the other corner, a hamburger with arms and legs balanced on a fiery wire, leaned toward a jar of mustard. I wiped up the sweet sediment in my cup with a piece of bread and went out to walk through large melting flakes. I wandered through a ten-cent store, examining the comic valentines, thought of buying envelopes, and bought instead a bag of chocolate creams. I ate them hungrily. Next, I was drawn into a shooting gallery. I paid for twenty shots and fired less than half, hitting none of the targets. Back in the street, I warmed myself at a salamander flaming in an oil drum near a newsstand with its wall of magazines erected under the shelter of the El. Scenes of love and horror.
Afterward, I went into a Christian Science reading room and picked up the Monitor. I did not read it. I sat holding it, trying to think of the name of the company whose gas stoves used to be advertised on the front page of the Manchester Guardian.
A little later I was in the street again, in front of Coulon's gymnasium, looking at photographs of boxers. "Young Salemi, now with the Rangers in the South Pacific. What beautiful shoulders!
I started back, choosing unfamiliar streets.
They turned out to be no different from the ones I knew. Two men were sawing a tree. A dog sprang from behind a fence without warning, yapping. I hate such dogs. A man in a mackinaw and red boots stood in the center of a lot, throwing boxes into a fire. At the high window of a stone house, a child, a blond boy, was playing king in a paper crown. He wore a blanket over his shoulders and, for a scepter, he held a thin green stick in his thin fingers. Catching sight of me, he suddenly converted his scepter into a rifle. He drew a bead on me and fired, his lips moving as he said, "Bang!"
He smiled when I took off my hat and pointed in dismay to an imaginary hole.
The book arrived in the noon mail. I will find it tonight. I hope that will be the last deception imposed on me.
January 14
I Ma" Sam Pearson, Ira's cousin, on Fifty-seventh Street today. He said, "Well, I didn't expect to see you, are you still among us?"
He knew I was.
I said, glumly, "I'm not in Alaska."
"What are you doing with yourself?"
"Nothing."
He smiled, allowing me my joke. "Who was it that told me you were taking a course in a trade school… @8@? A: "That's just a rumor."
Q: "What are you doing, then?"
A: "Just living off Iva."
Again he smiled, but he was no longer sure of himself. Q: "I heard you were studying, or something."
A: "No, I just sit at home all day and do nothing." Q: "Nothing?"
A: "Absolutely nothing."
Q: "Oh, well, I suppose we'll all be going soon, won't we?" (sam has three half-grown children).
A: "If the man power shortage becomes any more acute."
It's time I was uncivil to Sam. He has always, by his questions, exercised a social or family tyranny over me, checking on my suitability for Iva. No doubt he will report this to the Almstadts.
Look oddut for yourself, and the world will be best served.
Yesterday I had a talk with Mr. Fanzel, the tailor, an Alsatian gentleman. Last spring he bought some Lille thread, about two hundred spools, at a bargain. He paid twenty-five cents a spool; today the price is seventy-five cents. He does not intend to sell any of it. The increase goes into the garments he sews, and he is busier now than he was in his best year, 1928.
One of his customers has just ordered six new suits and two sport jackets. "Pretty soon I maybe won't have material. I got to look ahead. So I make higher the price," says Mr. Fanzel. Which is his kind of wisdom, business wisdom. If everybody takes care of number one, the general welfare is assured. A year ago Mr. Fanzel sewed a button to my coat gratis; this year he charged fifteen cents.
Perhaps he used precious Lille thread, or perhaps the value of his time has increased, now that he has so many customers. Mr. Franzel is frightened. He makes an outward show of confidence and of riding the wave but in many ways manifests his terror. The tenants of his building who were on relief four years ago now have become highly paid defense workers, and one of them, to his consternation, last week came down and ordered a suit costing eighty dollars. Heretofore Mr. Fanzel's customers have been the rich of the Kenwood district. He could not stop talking about his tenant whom he was once on the verge of evicting, and who now earns a hundred and ten dollars a week. Mr. Fanzel is master only of his scissors and needles, not of the greater fate that makes such changes, and, in his fear, with wars and transformed tenants and, it may be, even the shadow of 109 Jeff Forman's falling plane crossing his security, he resolves to protect himself by charging eighty dollars for suits worth forty and fifteen cents for a btttton he formerly sewed out of kindness.