threatened him, getting angry with him at last. ‘You’re goin’ to cop a plea ’n get paroled to me – if I ain’t gonna be your wife I’ll just be your dirty guardian.’ Abruptly her anger turned to tears and he’d never seen her cry before. ‘Then I can arrest you myself when you get out of line – I’ll arrest you every night just to keep the aces from doin’ it.’
‘I’ll have to look up the law on that,’ he dismissed her. ‘I don’t think they got me yet.’
They hadn’t. The two analysts who questioned him at Central Police turned in reports at such variance that Zygmunt was able to put in the fix with almost no trouble at all.
Violet had to pay Zygmunt off in installments, out of Stash’s hoarded checks. Every time she’d get the Prospector paid off she’d have to start chiseling on Old Husband again. It made her pretty mad at Old Husband sometimes.
Just the way he kept hanging on, month after month, was enough to wear away any woman’s patience. ‘I wouldn’t mind his hangin’ on to me if it
Old Husband, it seemed, had added one more trick to the repertoire of his senility. When he brought home his bargains of late he locked them up in the broom closet for fear Vi might throw them in the garbage can as she had so often threatened. He was getting so he locked up everything. He had a lock put on the pantry, leaving what he judged was just enough food for one healthy woman on the kitchen table before he left for work. Vi was embarrassed, when she went to get the punk a slab of Polish sausage, to find herself literally locked out of her own home while remaining inside it. She took a hammer to the lock and tossed the punk the entire sausage, not even salvaging the butt end for Stash. For two nights thereafter Stash slept, bargains and all, in the broom closet.
Strangely, he hadn’t seemed to mind it there particularly. If it hadn’t been for the Jailer’s protest, because of the difficulty the situation gave him in getting to his mops and buckets, it might have developed into a permanent arrangement. As it was the Jailer drove the old man, in his long underwear and holding his pants in his hand, back to his proper home. ‘And keep door closed,’ was Jailer’s final word. It had become an obsession to Schwabatski: before a tenant could step through his own doorway Jailer was telling him to close the door behind him.
Violet reported to Sophie, with a certain hopelessness, ‘He
Sometimes, watching unsmiling while Stash beat his gums around the evening pumpernickel, she would urge him to eat a bit faster; without adding that Sparrow waited for her in the bar below. The old man would pay no attention at all, his battle was with the dark and bitter bread as he sopped it about a beef stew that wasn’t any fresher. For the address where the latter delicacy was available was a secret locked, as he’d locked the pantry door upon her, deep within the darkest recesses of his day-old, half-price soul.
His secondhand, rabbitty, battered, bruised and terribly defenseless soul.
‘All bein’ married to Old Man means is lettin’ him tear the date off the calendar every night ’n lettin’ him read the thermometer every morning,’ Violet explained to Sophie, ‘he gets a kick out of little things like that – it’s like a thrill to him, sort of, to tell me what the temper’ture is outside. I got to pertend I didn’t have no idea it was that hot ’r that cold. I’ll tell you what, he leans out that window so far some mornings, just so’s he can surprise me, it scares me. Then I got to pertend I’m sleepin’ so’s he can wake me up ’n tell. He don’t mean a bit of harm, that good old man. Just trusts me all down the line like a baby. In a way it is like takin’ care of a baby.’ Cause he don’t come on wit’ no lies like that conniving punk.’ Violet sighed reminiscently. ‘
Up the stairwell they heard Blind Pig come tapping, tapping. Pausing only to touch the latch of the dealer’s narrow door as though accidentally and then pass on and up two flights: tapping, tapping. All the way up to a curtainless, lightless, windowless corner where he sat in the endless dark with his cane between his knees and said softly over and over: ‘I’ll take all I can get.’
‘He does that a-purpose to let us know he’s upstairs,’ Sophie told Violet of the light tap on the latch. ‘What the hell does he think Frankie’d want to see
A cold wind followed the blind man up the stairs and Violet folded the blanket snugly about Sophie’s legs. ‘That crummy deadpicker left the downstairs door open again,’ she sympathized with Sophie as though the door had been left wide just to make Sophie shiver a bit. ‘Now I got to go see what’s goin’ on upstairs, what the people ’r up to.’
Whether Violet returned to tell her or not, Sophie could usually tell what the neighbors were up to: kissing or drinking or counting their money. Sometimes there was an argument on the stairs between the Jailer and that one who had thumbtacked his nickname so proudly upon his door:
‘You buy for booze and forget rent,’ the Jailer was scolding John right outside Sophie’s door and a kind of cold glee seized her, she wheeled softly to the keyhole to hear every single word.
‘See my wife.’
Sophie sniffled. Some wife. As if everyone didn’t know what that Molly Novotny was, hustling drinks and calling herself ‘a hostess.’ A hostess, mind you. ‘I knew her when she was fourteen ’n goin’ out with every Tom, Dick ’n Harry who’d ask her.’ It served her right now, Sophie felt, if all the girl got out of sharing a man’s bed was light mockery and heavy blows.
‘What Judge tell you last week,’ the Jailer demanded to know, ‘five or ten?’
‘Seventeen – but I don’t have to do ’em.’
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, ‘
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 coupe 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.
There through the starless night or the thunderous noon, sunlight or rain or windless cold, she would sit till the
