she found them out she would leave him. What other reason could she have had for marrying him? he had asked himself in the cold white light of day. Old Husband wasn’t just anybody’s fool. He was everybody’s in general and Violet’s in particular.
She had tried to cure the bargain-store habit by dumping all his day’s spoils into the container at the end of the hall. When he’d seen her do that he had retired to the closet voluntarily. Perched upon a bucket there, a frayed blanket clutched closely about him as the night wore on and the hall grew chill, he had worried most of all about whatever would the neighbors think.
Neighbors could think what they damned well pleased in Violet’s book. Every hour on the hour she’d sallied forth to denounce him through the closet keyhole. ‘
He never understood why such little things made her so hopping mad and it looked like he never would catch on this side of purgatory. Yet it was all for the best that he remain in the fog of cut-rate prices in which he wandered numbly between broom closet and icehouse and his own warm bed. For even though he did wise up there wasn’t a thing, at Old Husband’s age, to be done about it.
Sometimes she punished him by not letting him pull the date off the calendar for three or four days. Then, when he would hand her the Saturday night pay envelope, she’d reward him by letting him tear off all three days in a row – she would have to watch him to see that he didn’t go over into the coming week. Old Husband literally chortled with glee when he’d gotten all three off and in his hand, if those three had finished the month.
She had even caught him sneaking into the calendar at night to tear off a page while she slept. And once, in a panic of frustration, he had ruined an almost virginal calendar by ripping off sixteen weeks in a row; as though he could no longer wait for the endless weeks to pass. She had put him to bed with a fever, soothing him with a hot- water bag across his stomach.
It wasn’t simply bad luck that the bag had leaked a bit. It too had been bought secondhand.
On the night of the Great Sandwich Battle Stash gave her, she felt, even further cause for separate maintenance.
Although, if the sausage hadn’t slipped out of the sandwich, everything would have been fine and dandy, like sugar candy.
That was one accident that Violet couldn’t blame the punk for. It was one time it was truly all her fault, for bringing him upstairs when she knew Old Husband was likely to wake up.
Still, it’s not easy to blame Violet either. Maybe it was really Stash’s fault for going to bed too early.
Unless it was Stash’s boss’s fault for working the old man so hard he couldn’t stay awake after supper, just when Violet would start taking out the pin curls and getting ready to go places and see things.
‘I used to cry sometimes when I first married Stash,’ she confessed to Sophie, ‘I didn’t have no place to go. I used to shave him with a ’lectric razor then. He could shave hisself all right, but I liked the sound it makes. That’s the oney pleasure that old man ever give me.’
On the night of the Great Sandwich Battle she fixed him a glass of warm tomato juice with a raw egg floating in it – Widow Wieczorek had confided in her that it had worked wonders with the late Emil W. when he’d first started slipping. But Stash turned in half an hour earlier than usual; all it had done was to make him limper than ever.
‘Next time I’ll try goat’s milk,’ Violet planned wistfully, watching him shuffling off toward the bedroom with the left-hand flap of his winter underwear dangling. ‘If
She just wasn’t tired a bit. She hadn’t done a thing all day except to wheel Sophie to the Pulaski, return to sweep Sophie’s flat and wash up yesterday’s dishes while Frankie snored on the bed, sluice the stairs for Schwabatski and sweep the water down four flights into the gutter, then clean up her own rooms and heat up some restaurant leftovers she’d decided were ripe enough for Old Husband’s supper. He’d hauled the mess half a mile the evening before and had weighed it before leaving for work to be sure she didn’t eat more than her share before he returned.
Vi didn’t mind heating the moldy stuff so much as long as she wasn’t expected to share it. ‘He don’t care what he scoffs up,’ she marveled nightly, ‘so long as it’s a big bargain is all that counts -’ n both sides of the sandwich to match. Don’t ask me why, he don’t like it when one side of the sandwich is bigger than the other.’
‘Is all dirty, too t’in,’ Stash described an uneven sandwich. It affronted some deep and childish hope still living within him that everything in the world – even sandwiches – be turned out without rough edges that might hurt little boys.
The same sort of hope, perhaps, which led him to stop at the same currency exchange regularly to change dirty dollars for nice new clean crisp ones. ‘Cott this opp!’ he would demand of the cashier, handing her a soiled ten-spot – when she had humored him and he was tucking away ten crisp new singles he would feel he’d driven the cleverest sort of bargain.
Even the weather must come out even for Old Husband. Hardly anything pleased him more than a nice even- numbered temperature, like 60 or 80 or 100. Just as the best days of the month seemed to him to be the 10th, the 20th and the 30th.
Yet now that it was time for him to go to bed, Violet was one wife who knew her duty. Stash sometimes couldn’t get to sleep unless she was lying beside him. And you never could tell for sure, maybe that egg would have a delayed kick. But tonight he was drowsing by the time she had her skirt off and that’s enough to discourage the willingest of brides. Particularly since she was wearing, for the very first time, a pair of lacy black Suspants the punk had stolen for her from Nieboldt’s.
Who is supposed to appreciate a glamorous thing like that, a thing an actress might be wearing – skintight with garter tabs – if not a girl’s husband? She sat admiring her legs, pointing the tinted toenails delicately to emphasize the long slimness of her calves and the full womanly bow of her thighs.
Violet was a good girl at heart. But even a nun needs the appreciation of others. For the tinted toenails and the fancy garter tabs there was no man near to so much as say ‘Wow!’
She looked at her watch. Ten o’clock and right on the hour the old man began snoring up a row that made her wonder what in the world had been in that egg after all. From below, between snores, rose the pre-Christmas revelry of the Tug & Maul. She pulled the shade like lowering a curtain upon temptation, turned on the shaded bed light and read
A bit of both, she compromised anxiously. Then making no particular effort to keep from waking him, crawled over him, teasing the hairs sticking out of his nostrils with the nipple of her breast just for the hell of it, shoved her feet into slippers and tightened her winter coat modestly over her sheer nightdress.
‘Go to sleep, Stash,’ she told him gently, ‘have a good dream you’re winnin’ a turkey raffle.’ Locked the door behind her and stepped softly down the stairwell into the murmurous corridors of night guarded so constantly, as on all winter nights, by Prager beer signs and the great Milwaukee Avenue moon.
Prager beer signs down one side and High-Life down the other, all the way down Milwaukee to the streets where the dark people live, drinking cheaper beer.
And who should be sitting at the bar, goofy and gay as always, but Solly Saltskin.
‘“D.’ n D.” don’t mean “drunk ’n disorderly” in my case,’ he was explaining to Antek the Owner. ‘In my case it means “Damen ’n Division,”’cause that’s where I always wait when I want to get picked up.’
‘Just don’t get picked up for anythin’ worse’n D.’ n D.,’ Owner counseled him.
‘That’s where I got
In fact all our most ignorant people were there and the juke played on and on.
Well, little Solly S. wasn’t any six foot three, but he knew how to treat a girl till she felt he must be five-ten at
