Stiffly, like a woman who has overslept, holding the banister with both hands, but still coming. ‘I knew all the time you could do it, honey!’ Violet cried down and Sophie went down in a heap, her fingers clawing piteously at the rail. To hold herself there tensely, without a single cry, till Violet had hurried down and helped her all the way up.
‘Did you see me?’ Sophie asked like a child caught in mischief.
‘You were comin’ along somethin’ wonderful, Sissie,’ Violet assured her, ‘you were climbin’ as good as anybody – it shows you can do it if you just want.’
‘You saw what happened when I tried too hard, didn’t you?’
‘I shouldn’t ought to of hollered,’ Violet realized too late. ‘I’m sorry about slappin’ you, Sissie, it was just to keep you on the ground.’ She waited for Sophie to say she was sorry too.
‘Am I gettin’ awful fat, Vi? Is that why he won’t help me upstairs no more? I just couldn’t stand his not lovin’ me like he used.’
‘Stop whimperin’,’ Violet scolded her, ‘of course he loves you like he used. He wouldn’t be takin’ care of you so good if he didn’t.’ Which was true enough, Violet knew: he loved her as little as ever and took just as small care of her as before.
When he did help her up the stairs she needed his arm to lean on across the floor and, once in the chair, needed to be wheeled and, being wheeled, needed to be comforted. Till there was no end, no end to her asking at all.
When he refused to wheel her it was as if a priest had suddenly refused to confess her. ‘Tell me what I done to you, you can’t even wheel me a little. You think I want to be laid up in a chair all my life? You remember me ever askin’ you, “Please smash me up?”’
Frankie would give in to her as he always gave in. As he gave in to Schwiefka in arguments over the take. As he gave in to Louie in arguments over the price of ‘God’s medicine.’ As he gave in to Zygmunt and Antek and Schwabatski. ‘There’s just one guy I don’t give in to in this world,’ Frankie considered, ‘the punk got to take what the others hand to me.’
And would hear an echo of Sparrow’s protest: ‘It’s just since you come back you’re givin’ me gas, Frankie. You never used to give me gas before.’
‘It’s what I got you around for,’ Frankie would remind him brutally. Thus even Sparrow had to feel the edge of those fragments of jealousy into which Sophie’s love, like her crockery, had been shattered.
Long, ugly fragments for Frankie and slenderer, more delicate ones for Violet and Violet’s iron health. ‘If I go downtown ’n see somethin’ I like I’ll buy for you too,’ Violet would try to assuage her.
‘You don’t have to buy me nuttin’,’ Sophie would scorn everyone. ‘Just buy that Frankie a set of drums. He’s gettin’ a job wit’ a big-name band one of these days – he ain’t said which day. Just don’t hold yer breath till then, that’s my advice to all you Division Street hustlers.’
For those nearest our hearts are the ones most likely to tread upon them. What she could not gain through love she sought to possess by mockery. He was too dear to her: into everything he did she must read some secret hatred of herself.
‘Whyn’t you come right out ’n say you wisht I’d got killed ’stead of crippled?’ she accused him without warning.
‘I didn’t say nothin’ like that, Zosh,’ he threshed about trying to clear himself. ‘All I said was I wish you’d just try to walk again.’
Yet she had planted the doubt in his mind. ‘Of course I don’t wish nothin’ like that,’ he would have to tell himself. With the pang of guilt in the very words.
Violet helped him. ‘I don’t think you want to get well,’ she told Sophie. Then would wait for Sophie to stop whimpering so she could make it all up to her for saying that by wheeling her down the street to the Pulaski, chain the chair in the lobby, help her into a seat and call for her when the double feature was done.
‘I could die listenin’ to that Dick Haymes,’ Sophie would say while being wheeled home.
On days when the bill remained unchanged Violet would pop her hennaed head in the door and ask, ‘Zosh, you want to play checkerds?’
And all the while they were playing would keep up a stream of idle reminiscence calculated to keep Sophie’s mind off Frankie and all the trouble he’d brought her just like her father had warned her.
‘I’ve had trouble with my eyes lately,’ Vi would hint till Sophie would ask why she didn’t get glasses.
‘It’s not that kind of trouble. It’s from flirtin’, that kind of trouble. Me ’n my bedroom eyes.’
That was Violet’s idea of high humor and Sophie’s idea of nothing at all. ‘You ought to cut all that out, it just ain’t right,’ Sophie would scold her, ‘bein’ hooked to old Stash ’n flirtin’ around with Sparrow.’
It was true. Violet let the punk make hurried love to her on rainy afternoons – then rushed him out into the rain in time to have dinner on the stove by the time old Stash returned from work. When Stash wanted to know where she’d been all afternoon it was always ‘takin’ Zosh to the movies, Old Man.’
Only once had Old Husband taken the trouble to check with Sophie, and Sophie had been loyal enough to reply, ‘Vi was settin’ by me all afternoon by the Pulaski, we set t’rough two stinky shows. One was white gorillas ’n the other was Carmen Bolero – he had two orchesters ’n did they make glad.’
A girl like Violet, a warm one like that, to marry an old icicle like Stash Koskozka, whose need for her stopped when she’d finished warming up yesterday’s pierogi.
‘Still, if I’d hooked up with anyone but Old Man,’ Violet tried consoling herself, ‘I wouldn’t never have had the time to keep the punk out of jail. He couldn’t stay out of jail a week without me. With me watchin’ over him sometimes he stays out a whole month. Once he wasn’t in for six, I was certainly proud of him that time. Then he went ’n spoiled it all, gettin’ picked up twice the very next week – nothin’ serious of course. I keep him out of serious trouble.’
Stash’s curiosity seldom went beyond a vague wonder that she could consume so much Polish sausage; no matter how much of the stuff he hauled home there was usually no more than a single dry butt end around when he went to the icebox.
Yet, after the manner of simple hearts, Violet was confident that her secret was buried as deep as God’s toenails. Scarcely a living soul in the whole great gray frame hotel nor in the one long bar below knew, she was sure. Except, of course, Sparrow’s buddy Frankie and her own best friend Sophie and trusty old Antek the Owner and one or two of the Tug & Maul’s more reliable barflies. She could swear that scarcely anyone from the Safari knew a thing – and who cared what those swishes thought anyhow? Unless that long, lean, lanky, sidewinding Fomorowski had picked up a whisper. At any rate Stash never spent in either bar, so it made no difference at all. They were all good guys by Antek the Owner and wouldn’t want to make trouble for a girl.
Though what in the world any redhead stacked like Vi could see in a shapeless bag of bones like the punk was one of those things those same good guys marveled upon. If one asked, Violet always made the same reply ‘What does any Division Street woman see in any Division Street punk?’
The fact was that to the Tug & Maul boys the punk sometimes seemed something clean off Division Street, if not out of the world. The only routine work he’d ever performed successfully was the window-peeping routine, conducted between 10 P.M. and midnight of midsummer evenings, which he’d called his ‘scraunching route.’