Ellen was sitting beside her father on a bench at the Battery. She was looking at her new brown button shoes. A glint of sunlight caught on the toes and on each of the little round buttons when she swung her feet out from under the shadow of her dress.
‘Think how it’d be,’ Ed Thatcher was saying, ‘to go abroad on one of those liners. Imagine crossing the great Atlantic in seven days.’
‘But daddy what do people do all that time on a boat?’
‘I dunno… I suppose they walk round the deck and play cards and read and all that sort of thing. Then they have dances.’
‘Dances on a boat! I should think it’d be awful tippy.’ Ellen giggled.
‘On the big modern liners they do.’
‘Daddy why dont we go?’
‘Maybe we will some day if I can save up the money.’
‘Oh daddy do hurry up an save a lot of money. Alice Vaughan’s mother an father go to the White Mountains every summer, but next summer they’re going abroad.’
Ed Thatcher looked out across the bay that stretched in blue sparkling reaches into the brown haze towards the Narrows. The statue of Liberty stood up vague as a sleepwalker among the curling smoke of tugboats and the masts of schooners and the blunt lumbering masses of brickbarges and sandscows. Here and there the glary sun shone out white on a sail or on the superstructure of a steamer. Red ferryboats shuttled back and forth.
‘Daddy why arent we rich?’
‘There are lots of people poorer than us Ellie… You wouldn’t like your daddy any better if he were rich would you?’
‘Oh yes I would daddy.’
Thatcher laughed. ‘Well it might happen someday… How would you like the firm of Edward C. Thatcher and Co., Certified Accountants?’
Ellen jumped to her feet: ‘Oh look at that big boat… That’s the boat I want to go on.’
‘That there’s the Harabic,’ croaked a cockney voice beside them.
‘Oh is it really?’ said Thatcher.
‘Indeed it is, sir; as fahne a ship as syles the sea sir,’ explained eagerly a frayed creakyvoiced man who sat on the bench beside them. A cap with a broken patentleather visor was pulled down over a little peaked face that exuded a faded smell of whiskey. ‘Yes sir, the Harabic sir.’
‘Looks like a good big boat that does.’
‘One of the biggest afloat sir. I syled on er many’s the tahme and on the Majestic and the Teutonic too sir, fahne ships both, though a bit light’eaded in a sea as you might say. I’ve signed as steward on the Hinman and White Star lahnes these thirty years and now in me old age they’ve lyed me hoff.’
‘Oh well, we all have hard luck sometimes.’
‘And some of us as it hall the tahme sir… I’d be a appy man sir, if I could get back to the old country. This arent any plyce for an old man, it’s for the young and strong, this is.’ He drew a gout-twisted hand across the bay and pointed to the statue. ‘Look at er, she’s alookin towards Hengland she is.’
‘Daddy let’s go away. I dont like this man,’ whispered Ellen tremulously in her father’s ear.
‘All right we’ll go and take a look at the sealions… Good day.’
‘You couldn’t fahnd me the price of a cup of coffee, could you now, sir? I’m fair foundered.’ Thatcher put a dime in the grimy knobbed hand.
‘But daddy, mummy said never to let people speak to you in the street an to call a policeman if they did an to run away as fast as you could on account of those horrible kidnappers.’
‘No danger of their kidnapping me Ellie. That’s just for little girls.’
‘When I grow up will I be able to talk to people on the street like that?’
‘No deary you certainly will not.’
‘If I’d been a boy could I?’
‘I guess you could.’
In front of the Aquarium they stopped a minute to look down the bay. The liner with a tug puffing white smoke against either bow was abreast of them towering above the ferryboats and harborcraft. Gulls wheeled and screamed. The sun shone creamily on the upper decks and on the big yellow blackcapped funnel. From the foremast a string of little flags fluttered jauntily against the slate sky.
‘And there are lots of people coming over from abroad on that boat arent there daddy?’
‘Look you can see… the decks are black with people.’
Walking across Fiftythird Street from the East River Bud Korpenning found himself standing beside a pile of coal on the sidewalk. On the other side of the pile of coal a gray-haired woman in a flounced lace shirtwaist with a big pink cameo poised on the curve of her high bosom was looking at his stubbly chin and at the wrists that hung raw below the frayed sleeves of his coat. Then he heard himself speak:
‘Dont spose I could take that load of coal in back for you ma’am?’ Bud shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
‘That’s just what you could do,’ the woman said in a cracked voice. ‘That wretched coal man left it this morning and said he’d be back to bring it in. I suppose he’s drunk like the rest of them. I wonder if I can trust you in the house.’
‘I’m from upstate ma’am,’ stammered Bud.
‘From where?’
‘From Cooperstown.’
‘Hum… I’m from Buffalo. This is certainly the city for everyone being from somewhere else… Well you’re probably a burglar’s accomplice, but I cant help it I’ve got to have that coal in… Come in my man, I’ll give you a shovel and a basket and if you dont drop any in the passage or on the kitchen floor, because the scrubwoman’s just left… naturally the coal had to come when the floor was clean… I’ll give you a dollar.’
When he carried in the first load she was hovering in the kitchen. His caving hungersniff stomach made him totter lightheadedly, but he was happy to be working instead of dragging his feet endlessly along pavements, across streets, dodging drays and carts and streetcars.
‘How is it you haven’t got a regular job my man,’ she asked as he came back breathless with the empty basket.
‘I reckon it’s as I aint caught on to city ways yet. I was born an raised on a farm.’
‘And what did you want to come to this horrible city for?’
‘Couldn’t stay on the farm no more.’
‘It’s terrible what’s going to become of this country if all the fine strong young men leave the farms and come into the cities.’
‘Thought I could git a work as a longshoreman, ma’am, but they’re layin’ men off down on the wharves. Mebbe I kin go to sea as a sailor but nobody wants a green hand… I aint et for two days now.’
‘How terrible… Why you poor man couldn’t you have gone to some mission or something?’
When Bud had brought the last load in he found a plate of cold stew on the corner of the kitchen table, half a loaf of stale bread and a glass of milk that was a little sour. He ate quickly barely chewing and put the last of the stale bread in his pocket.
‘Well did you enjoy your little lunch?’
‘Thankye ma’am.’ He nodded with his mouth full.
‘Well you can go now and thank you very much.’ She put a quarter into his hand. Bud blinked at the quarter in the palm of his hand.
‘But ma’am you said you’d give me a dollar.’
‘I never said any such thing. The idea… I’ll call my husband if you dont get out of here immediately. In fact I’ve a great mind to notify the police as it is…’
Without a word Bud pocketed the quarter and shuffled out.
‘Such ingratitude,’ he heard the woman snort as he closed the door behind him.
A cramp was tying knots in his stomach. He turned east again and walked the long blocks to the river with his fists pressed tight in under his ribs. At any moment he expected to throw up. If I lose it it wont do me no good. When he got to the end of the street he lay down on the gray rubbish slide beside the wharf. A smell of hops seeped gruelly and sweet out of the humming brewery behind him. The light of the sunset flamed in the windows of factories on the Long Island side, flashed in the portholes of tugs, lay in swaths of curling yellow and orange over the swift browngreen water, glowed on the curved sails of a schooner that was slowly bucking the tide up into Hell Gate. Inside him the pain was less. Something flamed and glowed like the sunset seeping through his body. He sat up. Thank Gawd I aint agoin to lose it.