‘Sure. I could get a Number Two shovel ’n get on a blast-furnace shift in Indiana Harbor ’n come home nights in the same shape as Stash is now ’n be snorin’ here on the front-room couch while you’re-’ He stopped himself.
‘Go ahead – finish what you started to say.’ Her eyes had darkened dangerously. ‘I s’ppose I’m in heat every time I see a pair of pants hangin’ on the line? All I think about, I guess, is that velvet-lined meat grinder?’
‘That about sizes it up,’ Sparrow thought discreetly. But all he said aloud was, ‘All I meant was if I had a full-time job I couldn’t do my fam’ly duty so good.’
‘You’re not breakin’ no records as it is,’ she assured him, ‘’n anyhow I’m not tellin’ you to start swingin’ no shovel. You could be a Western Union messenger ’n drop in to see me between messages.’
‘I’d never get back to the office on time,’ he predicted, ‘I’d be fallin’ off the bike. Why don’t you go by Western Union yourself?’ And added silently, ‘Then I could rest up between messages.’
‘Fat chance I got of goin’ to work,’ Violet complained as might anyone unjustly deprived of the inalienable right to work for a living. ‘Who’d take care of Zosh ’n that oversize fart hound you palmed off on Frankie? If I didn’t get down there ’n sweep the floor the bottles’d be overflowin’, they’d be up to the sink.’
‘So long as they don’t go no higher,’ Sparrow philosophized, ‘if they did they’d get in the way of the dishes.’
‘Frankie’s got her so spoiled she won’t even put the dishes on the sink, she waits for me to pick them up now, just like she’s tryin’ to see how much I can take off her. I’m glad they only got one room ’cause she eats all over the place. I find dishes in the drawer, they must of been there since Frankie was in the army.’
‘It don’t look like you’ll have time to be cleanin’ up down there any more,’ Sparrow reminded her, ‘the way Old Man is actin’ you’ll have to start in up here first.’
‘He’ll come to his senses when I won’t let him tear the days off the calendar ’r read the temper’ture.’
‘How you gonna stop him?’
‘I’ll put the calendar up where he can’t reach it ’n lock the window so he can’t lean out. He can’t open it by hisself, the lock gets stuck. He has to holler for me to come unlock it.’
‘Don’t let him lean out too far.’
‘That’s what scares me, he leans out too damned far.’
‘Hold his legs.’
‘That’s the part that scares me, it’s when I’m holdin’ his legs. What if I let go?’
‘You won’t let go.’
‘I know I won’t.’
‘But you might forget to lock the window – well, I’m glad tearin’ days off the calendar is all he wants to tear off.’ Sparrow spoke with an uneasy gratitude. He wasn’t as certain, as he once had been, that Violet was an unmixed blessing.
‘Hurry up, honey,’ she panted in his ear, ‘we got to get dressed pretty soon ’n get down to the hall. I got to get Old Man dressed ’n shaved ’n clean socks on him. After all, the New Year’s party is for him.’
‘This one ain’t,’ Sparrow commanded her, ‘quit quackin’ ’n get to work.’
That was as far as Violet and the punk ever did get in resolving the problem of having a husband in the home. Had it not been for chance and an icy pane, old Stash might in time have driven them both to carrying messages for Western Union.
The first guest to arrive at the New Year’s Eve ball was Umbrella Man and as soon as he came in it was apparent that the occasion had been misunderstood. He carried a rebuilt umbrella ‘for bride-lady’ under his arm, his pants were pressed and no one could convince him that it was just a coming-out party for Old Husband because Old Husband had just come out.
Then Meter Reader the Baseball Coach came bringing a third baseman’s mitt with the signature of Stanley Hack autographed into the leather for Sparrow; and a book on how to throw your voice for Violet. He pretended never to have heard of anyone called Old Husband at all and had just dropped in to kiss the bride. So all he’d do when they tried to explain things to him was to say, ‘Don’t thank me, thank my boys.’
So they guessed somebody had been going around saying Violet had finally divorced Old Husband at last and was getting hitched to the punk. Which, with all the presents the rumor had brought in, didn’t do any particular harm. So everyone had a long pull of wiśniowa on it while Stash went about showing his clean socks to everyone and pointing with pride toward Violet, to show it was Mrs Him had given them to him.
Then Antek the Owner arrived with a bruised cheek. He’d been drinking his own whisky all day, till Mrs Owner had locked him out in order to have something left for Monday’s customers. Owner was on the verge of tears. ‘Married fourteen years ’n never a harsh word – now she bats me with the mattress board ’n locks me out of my own home. I got no home no more, fellas. I got nothin’, it’s all in her name. Owner’s out in the cold world all alone, can’t even get in to see his own little girl – isn’t that a shame, fellas?’
He didn’t draw a tear. Everyone knew he got maudlin as regularly as he had a good week and was locked out till he sobered up. Locking him out, after a good week, was the only thing that sobered him. He had a crying need for pity and could never understand why no one sympathized with a man robbed, overnight, of wife, home, family, honor and his lifetime savings.
When Owner wanted to cry, he cried, and anything at all did for an excuse. What really mattered with Owner wasn’t on the tongue but in the heart; since he had no words for his heart, he wept.
‘I’m not cryin’ for my own trouble,’ he confided in Frankie, leaning so heavily across the wheelchair’s arm that Frankie had to brace it with his foot to keep it from being rolled backward, ‘I’m cryin’ for everybody’s.’ He took off his glasses to cry the better for everyone; for the lenses were so splashed with tears they were indistinguishable from the beads of sweat about his round bald brow.
‘You’re cryin’ from the skull now, Owner,’ Frankie informed him. ‘When it starts comin’ out of your ears it’s time to use the handkerchief.’ And assured Sophie from where he stood behind her, ‘He’ll be back behind his bar Monday morning.’
They wandered in from all over the ward, the invited and the uninvited, the wary and the seeking, the strayed, the frayed, the happy and the hapless, the lost, the luckless, the lucky and the doomed. Some, on the assumption that if anyone were getting out of jail it must be the punk again, to congratulate Sparrow; only to find all the more reason for celebration when they learned that, just for this once, it wasn’t the punk at all.
Everyone got congratulated for something or other whether he deserved it or not. Everyone but Old Man, who couldn’t even get congratulated on his new socks. So he tried going about announcing ‘Stash boss by howz’ while clutching a week’s worth of calendar dates; and still no one paid him any mind.
And some came just to celebrate the season with Frankie Machine.
Yes, and one blind peddler so drunk he merely sat in a corner and called out, from time to time, that he, alone of all good hustlers, had come to mourn a hustler.
To mourn for Fomorowski, Blind Pig defied them all.
While the whole long hall rejoiced.
And Violet, finding pity at the bottom of a whisky glass, began making every stewbum, who came up to kiss her, shake hands with Old Husband first and admire his socks. Till the old man, clutching his calendar dates like so many retrieved hours, felt the party must really be for him after all.
Meter Reader kept running back and forth in the center of the floor scooping up an imaginary grounder he’d missed in some long-gone summer’s double header. For Meter Reader didn’t know a meter from an egg beater: it was only that long ago he had come into a meter reader’s cap. It had lost the insignia above the peak, but still served when he coached the Endless Belt & Leather Invincibles. He was still trying to explain Endless Belt’s 19-1 loss to Lefkowicz Fast Freight and the boys were egging him on.