“He su’ is miss. … But wasn’t there anything you could do to stop ’em, miss?”
“Not a thing. … You see he said he’d have me committed to an asylum if I tried. … He knows perfectly well a Yucatan divorce isn’t legal.”
Florence sighed.
“Menfolks su’ do dirt to us poor girls.”
“Oh this wont last long. You can see by her face she’s a nasty selfish spoiled little girl. … And I’m his real wife before God and man. Lord knows I tried to warn her. Whom God has joined let no man put asunder … that’s in the Bible isnt it? … Florence this coffee is simply terrible this morning. I cant drink it. You go right out and make me some fresh.”
Frowning and hunching her shoulders Florence went out the door with the tray.
Mrs. Cunningham heaved a deep sigh and settled herself among the pillows. Outside churchbells were ringing. “Oh Jack you darling I love you just the same,” she said to the picture. Then she kissed it. “Listen, deary the churchbells sounded like that the day we ran away from the High School Prom and got married in Milwaukee. … It was a lovely Sunday morning.” Then she stared in the face of the second Mrs. Cunningham. “Oh you,” she said and poked her finger through it.
When she got to her feet she found that the courtroom was very slowly sickeningly going round and round; the white fishfaced judge with noseglasses, faces, cops, uniformed attendants, gray windows, yellow desks, all going round and round in the sickening close smell, her lawyer with his white hawk nose, wiping his bald head, frowning, going round and round until she thought she would throw up. She couldn’t hear a word that was said, she kept blinking to get the blur out of her ears. She could feel Dutch behind her hunched up with his head in his hands. She didnt dare look back. Then after hours everything was sharp and clear, very far away. The judge was shouting at her, from the small end of a funnel his colorless lips moving in and out like the mouth of a fish.
“… And now as a man and a citizen of this great city I want to say a few words to the defendants. Briefly this sort of thing has got to stop. The unalienable rights of human life and property the great men who founded this republic laid down in the constitootion have got to be reinstated. It is the dooty of every man in office and out of office to combat this wave of lawlessness by every means in his power. Therefore in spite of what those sentimental newspaper writers who corrupt the public mind and put into the head of weaklings and misfits of your sort the idea that you can buck the law of God and man, and private property, that you can wrench by force from peaceful citizens what they have earned by hard work and brains … and get away with it; in spite of what these journalistic hacks and quacks would call extentuating circumstances I am going to impose on you two highwaymen the maximum severity of the law. It is high time an example was made. …”
The judge took a drink of water. Francie could see the little beads of sweat standing out from the pores of his nose.
“It is high time an example was made,” the judge shouted. “Not that I dont feel as a tender and loving father the misfortunes, the lack of education and ideels, the lack of a loving home and tender care of a mother that has led this young woman into a life of immorality and misery, led away by the temptations of cruel and voracious men and the excitement and wickedness of what has been too well named, the jazz age. Yet at the moment when these thoughts are about to temper with mercy the stern anger of the law, the importunate recollection rises of other young girls, perhaps hundreds of them at this moment in this great city about to fall into the clutches of a brutal and unscrupulous tempter like this man Robertson … for him and his ilk there is no punishment sufficiently severe … and I remember that mercy misplaced is often cruelty in the long run. All we can do is shed a tear for erring womanhood and breathe a prayer for the innocent babe that this unfortunate girl has brought into the world as the fruit of her shame. …”
Francie felt a cold tingling that began at her fingertips and ran up her arms into the blurred whirling nausea of her body. “Twenty years,” she could hear the whisper round the court, they all seemed licking their lips whispering softly “Twenty years.” “I guess I’m going to faint,” she said to herself as if to a friend. Everything went crashing black.
Propped with five pillows in the middle of his wide colonial mahogany bed with pineapples on the posts Phineas P. Blackhead his face purple as his silk dressing gown sat up and cursed. The big mahogany-finished bedroom hung with Javanese print cloth instead of wallpaper was empty except for a Hindu servant in a white jacket and turban who stood at the foot of the bed, with his hands at his sides, now and then bowing his head at a louder gust of cursing and saying “Yes, Sahib, yes, Sahib.”
“By the living almighty Jingo you goddam yellow Babu bring me that whiskey, or I’ll get up and break every bone in your body, do you hear, Jesus God cant I be obeyed in my own house? When I say whiskey I mean rye not orange juice. Damnation. Here take it!” He picked up a cutglass pitcher off the nighttable and slung it at
