That was where the Jailer had him. ‘If I sign complaint you do ’em.’
The Jailer was toughening up a bit, it sounded to Sophie.
Yet Drunkie John’s chief skill was in using the affection others felt for Molly to gain himself all manner of reprieves; reprieves of workhouse sentences, reprieves of rent, reprieves to go on drinking. Nothing ever really happened, John had learned, when the rent was overdue. The Jailer always turned softhearted when it came to the actual signing of a complaint. He was altogether too fond of Molly to send her man to the workhouse. All he had ever yet extracted from John was a promise to stop kicking her.
A promise seldom kept. Sophie had heard John telling Molly, coming past the door late at night, ‘I’m not layin’ you, sister – I’ll never lay you. Just let me get in those kicks.’ They had passed to the sound of her crying, ‘All I want from you is to be left alone.’
Once it had been Nifty Louie on the other side of the knob. Early morning, everyone from the first floor to the fourth up to do an honest day’s hustling and Louie doing the talking for everyone. ‘My business is everybody’s business – informin’ is a racket like everythin’ else. Anythin’ that pays ain’t nothin’ to be ashamed of, one racket’s as good as the next. A man who’s ashamed of his racket is a man who’s ashamed of his mother. The only thing a man got a right to be ashamed of these days is bein’ broke. Get yours, Piggy-O. I’m gettin’ mine. We’ll go to town together.’
And Piggy-O’s flat half-lisp, like the voice of a man being willingly chloroformed, ‘They ain’t gettin’ ahead of me. I’m goin’ to town too.’
Some mornings there were no voices but those of the air shaft, making kitchen sounds. To these Sophie listened, she heard a secret meaning there. A woman sorting knives and forks and spoons into separate drawers, tinkling the separate tenement seconds off. Then the beating of a heavy spoon, as the one task was done and a new one begun, into a platter or bowl. Homesick sounds that her mother once had made and now would make no more. Sounds out of a time of contentment that should have been her own; sounds that belonged to all women in the world save herself. A searing self-pity would seize her, that Sophie Majcinek of all women should be so punished. She would wheel away from the door and the air shaft’s many voices.
To sit by the window, flyspecked since summer, where only the iron traffic’s metallic cries could reach her heart.
Where only the carnival of the cars could please her eye. Blue, green and mud-splattered, Fourth of July red or funereal black, truck and trailer, roadster and sedan, low-slung coupé or pompous hearse: all day the city’s varicolored traffic passed, paused, and rocked on again.
While the cry of a single record, always the same old cry, came to her down from the fourth floor rear where some old fool in pin curls fancied it was 1917 again.
‘It all seems wrong somehow
That you’re nobody’s baby now…’
There through the starless night or the thunderous noon, sunlight or rain or windless cold, she would sit till the tenement’s long shadows moved all the way down from the fourth floor rear, slid silently under her door and drifted across her lap. To tremble one moment at still finding her there and then lie comforted and still. While all the air hung wearily.
Long lonesome shadows of the December tenements that fled the neon carnival below to turn each night toward her for rest.
This was the shadow-gatherers’ hour: the hour for those all over the earth who had rest neither in sleep nor waking. Some gathered their shadows like memories; but she gathered hers like unborn children to her pale and secret eyes.
She knew when the shadows waited to come by the way the luminous crucifix glowed a bit. They moved toward her then for warmth, they had been feeling unwanted all day. Like everyone else in the world for whom things had gone wrong. They knew that here they would come alive, for here they were loved and wanted at last. She alone knew how lost all shadows felt: it made them the dearer to her own unwanted heart.
To the heart weighed down by its own uselessness. What good is any unwanted heart?
That was why they must never forsake her and always be faithful and forever be kind. Here in the amber evening’s light where all the air hung wearily.
‘You bad little kittens, you’ve lost your mittens,’ she would scold them like storybook children. For everyone needed someone and everyone had to pretend a bit to be somebody. There was a boy for every girl in the world, it said in the old song.
And would not touch the shadows for one moment for fear her sweet half dream be lost.
For she, like the luminous Christ, had also been betrayed. She too had bled, and bled each day, for another’s sin. Between herself and that tarnished crucifix a bond of blood and pain had grown. She had seen that it glowed out of love of everyone she herself wished to love and could not. How could she love who had never learned how?
Tonight, just as the wan winter-evening light fanned out into all the colors of the hustlers’ night, God tossed a handful of city rain across the green and red tavern legends like tossing a handful of red and green confetti. Overhead the wavering warning lamps of the El began casting a blood-colored light down the rails to guide the empty cars of evening down all the nameless tunnels of the night.
Beneath the dresser the hound she had wanted so badly, and so soon had come to despise, slept with his great snout in a saucer wherein the drying dregs of another day’s beer had left an unclean amber line. The last fly of autumn walked a lonely beat there, between the saucer’s brim and the hound’s nostrils: trapped, like the hound, in hustlers’ territory with one conviction to go.
In the room’s corners there remained fragments of the dish-breaking tournament of the night before. She remembered with something of pleasure; and something of sadness too. For it had been Frankie, on his knees, who’d cleaned up that mess when he’d come back from work. She had wakened to see him crawling.
Crawling. And hadn’t made a sound lest he get to his feet in shame. She had just let him think she hadn’t seen.
Then, when he’d climbed into bed with the floor quite clean, she’d laughed a little, softly, just to let him know she’d been awake and watching the whole time he’d been on his knees.
What was it the goof had said then? ‘Please don’t, Zosh.’ How was that for a husband? ‘Please don’t laugh at me, Zosh.’ A husband like that. ‘It’s about time you done some crawlin’ around here,’ she’d told him and had turned heavily onto her side to dream he was trying to crawl up a fire escape in the rain and could not tell her why.
In a rain, a freezing rain. Yet would not tell her why. Had dreamed with a certain pleasure; yet with something of sadness too.
Now he was gone once more, to deal till morning where the south-western sky hung in cloudy amber folds, shielding a dull gray moon. A wind began parting them, like a curtain parting upon the opening act of a play staged just for her, to reveal a paper moon pasted stiffly – for as long as paste might hold – but one that did not weave with light as the real moon was supposed to do.
As the moon of her girlhood had woven all night: great copper strands through clouds of cloth upon the darkness’s measureless loom.
These nights the moon wove neither copper nor gold, even the clouds were pasted there. Moonlight that had once revealed so many stars now showed her only how the city was bound, from southeast to the unknown west, steel upon steel upon steeclass="underline" how all its rails held the city too tightly to the thousand-girdered El.
Some nights she could scarcely breathe for seeing the flat unerring line of cable and crosslight and lever, of signal tower and switch. For the endless humming of telephone wires murmuring insanely from street to street without ever saying a single word above a whisper that a really sensible person might understand.