“Don’t fight him,” Francis said. “He’s givin’ me some socks.”
“We gonna get them jugs?” Rudy asked Francis. “Go somewheres and get a flop?”
“Jugs?” said Helen.
“That’s what I said this mornin’,” Francis said. “No, no jugs.”
“With six dollars we could get a room and get our suitcase back,” Helen said.
“I can’t spend all six,” Francis said. “I gotta give some to the lawyer. I figure I’ll give him a deuce. After all, he got me the job and I owe him fifty.”
“Where do you plan to sleep?” Helen asked.
“Where’d you sleep last night?”
“I found a place.”
“Finny’s car?”
“No, not Finny’s car. I won’t stay there anymore, you know that. I will absolutely not stay in that car another night.”
“Then where’d you go?”
“Where did you sleep?”
“I slept in the weeds,” Francis said.
“Well I found a bed.”
“Where, goddamn it, where?”
“Up at Jack’s.”
“I thought you didn’t like Jack anymore, or Clara either.”
“They’re not my favorite people, but they gave me a bed when I needed one.”
“Somethin’ to be said for that,” Francis said.
Pee Wee came over with a second cup of coffee and sat across from Helen. Pee Wee was bald and fat and chewed cigars all day long without lighting them. He had cut hair in his younger days, but when his wife cleaned out their bank account, poisoned Pee Wee’s dog, and ran away with the barber whom Pee Wee, by dint of hard work and superior tonsorial talent, had put of of business, Pee Wee started drinking and wound up on the bum. Yet he carried his comb and scissors everywhere to prove his talent was not just a bum’s fantasy, and gave haircuts to other bums for fifteen cents, sometimes a nickel. He still gave haircuts, free now, at the mission.
When Francis came back to Albany in 1935, he met Pee Wee for the first time and they stayed drunk together for a month. When Francis turned up in Albany only weeks back to register for the Democrats at five dollars a shot, he met Pee Wee again. Francis registered to vote twenty-one times before the state troopers caught up with him and made him an Albany political celebrity. The pols had paid him fifty by then and still owed him fifty-five more that he’d probably never see. Pee Wee was off the juice when Francis met him the second time, and was full of energy, running the mission for Chester. Pee Wee was peaceful now, no longer the singing gin-drinker he used to be. Francis still felt good things about him, but now thought of him as an emotional cripple, dry, yeah, but at what cost?
“You see who’s playin’ over at The Gilded Cage?” Pee Wee asked Francis.
“I don’t read the papers.”
“Oscar Reo.”
“You mean our Oscar?”
“The same.”
“What’s he doin’?”
“Singin’ bartender. How’s that for a comedown?”
“Oscar Reo who used to be on the radio?” Helen asked.
“That’s the fella,” said Pee Wee. “He blew the big time on booze, but he dried out and tends bar now. At least he’s livin’, even if it ain’t what it was.”
“Pee Wee and me pitched a drunk with him in New York. Two, three days, wasn’t it, Pee?”
“Mighta been a week,” Pee Wee said. “None of us was up to keepin’ track. But he sang a million tunes and played piano everyplace they had one. Most musical drunk I ever see.”
“I used to sing his songs,” Helen said. “‘Hindustan Lover’ and ‘Georgie Is My Apple Pie’ and another one, a grand ballad, ‘Under the Peach Trees with You.’ He wrote wonderful, happy songs and I sang them all when I was singing.”
“I didn’t know you sang,” Pee Wee said.
“Well I most certainly sang, and played piano very well too. I was getting a classical education in music until my father died. I was at Vassar.”
“Albert Einstein went to Vassar,” Rudy said.
“You goofy bastard,” said Francis.
“Went there to make a speech. I read it in the papers.”
“He could have,” Helen said. “Everybody speaks at Vassar. It just happens to be one of the three best schools in the world.”
“We oughta go over and see old Oscar,” Francis said.
“Not me,” said Pee Wee.
“No,” said Helen.
“What no?” Francis said. “You afraid we’d all get drunked up if we stopped in to say hello?”
“I’m not afraid of that.”
“Then let’s go see him. He’s all right, Oscar.”
“Think he’ll remember you?” Pee Wee said.
“Maybe. I remember him.”
“So do I.”
“Then let’s go.”
“I wouldn’t drink anything,” Pee Wee said. “I ain’t been in a bar in two years.”
“They got ginger ale. You allowed to drink ginger ale?”
“I hope it’s not expensive,” Helen said.
“Just what you drink,” Pee Wee said. “About usual.”
“Is it snooty?”
“It’s a joint, old-timey, but it pulls in the slummers. That’s half the trade.”
Reverend Chester stepped lively across the room and thrust at Francis a pair of gray woolen socks, his mouth a crescent of pleasure and his great chest heaving with beneficence.
“Try these for size,” he said.
“I thank ya for ‘em,” said Francis.
“They’re good and warm.”
“Just what I need. Nothin’ left of mine.”
“It’s fine that you’re off the drink. You’ve got a strong look about you today.”
“Just a false face for Halloween.”
“Don’t run yourself down. Have faith.”
The door to the mission opened and a slim young man in bifocals and a blue topcoat two sizes small for him, his carroty hair a field of cowlicks, stood in its frame. He held the doorknob with one hand and stood directly under the inside ceiling light, casting no shadow.
“Shut the door,” Pee Wee yelled, and the young man stepped in and shut it. He stood looking at all in the mission, his face a cracked plate, his eyes panicked and rabbity.
“That’s it for him,” Pee Wee said.
The preacher strode to the door and stood inches from the young man, studying him, sniffing him.
“You’re drunk,” the preacher said.
“I only had a couple.”
“Oh no. You’re in the beyond.”
“Honest,” said the young man. “Two bottles of beer.”
“Where did you get the money for beer?”
“A fella paid me what he owed me.”
“You panhandled it.”
“No.”
“You’re a bum.”
“I just had a drink, Reverend.”
“Get your things together. I told you I wouldn’t put up with this a third time. Arthur, get his bags.”
Pee Wee stood up from the table and climbed the stairs to the rooms where the resident handful lived while they sorted out their lives. The preacher had invited Francis to stay if he could get the hooch out of his system. He would then have a clean bed, clean clothes, three squares, and a warm room with Jesus in it for as long as it took him to answer the question: What next? Pee Wee held the house record: eight months in the joint, and managing it after three, such was his zeal for abstention. No booze, no smoking upstairs (for drunks are fire hazards), carry your share of the work load, and then rise you must, rise you will, into the brilliant embrace of the just God. The kitchen volunteers stopped their work and came forward with solemnized pity to watch the eviction of one of their promising young men. Pee Wee came down with a suitcase and set it by the door.
“Give us a cigarette, Pee,” the young man said.
“Don’t have any.”
“Well roll one.”
“I said I don’t have any tobacco.”
“Oh.”
“You’ll have to leave now, Little Red,” the preacher said.
Helen stood up and came over to Little Red and put a cigarette in his hand. He took it and said nothing. Helen struck a match and lit it for him, then sat back down.
“I don’t have anyplace to go,” Little Red said, blowing smoke past the preacher.
“You should have thought of that before you started drinking. You are a contumacious young man.”