Star-Dust Part 32

At nine o'clock the following morning, a Sunday that wrapped the city windily in the first cold gray of autumn, without having undressed the night through, she ventured as far as Times Square for a newspaper, the dark halls of the house and the rows of closed doors suddenly sinister.

The wind caught at her flimsy skirts, blowing them forward, and she was forced to clutch the wide brim of her hat. Summer was gone.

But more than that, it seemed to Lilly that a black gauze lay across her eyes, the very complexion of the streets had darkened, the hurried wind-blown clouds stamping the whole aspect of things with turbulence.

She could not keep the run out of her steps, and her palms were full of the half moons impressed there by her finger nails. The city, as joyous as Chloe, had suddenly turned a frightening grimace upon her.

She bought a Sunday paper, letting the prankish gale around Times Square scurry the bulk of it through the streets while she stood in the shelter of the news stand, unfolding the Furnished Room section. Wind puffed the sheets up into her face, and finally she crossed to a white-tiled lunch room, ordering coffee and rolls more for the temporary shelter than for appet.i.te. Scanning column after column, occasionally she poked a toothpick through the page, and once tore out a little segment, dropping it into her hand bag. It read:

Neatly Furnished Room near Columbia University and Kroeg School of Music. Three dollars and a half a week and breakfasts if desired. Ideal for refined young lady. Inquire at 9000 Amsterdam Avenue.

She paid her check, inquired direction of the cashier, and, hurrying out, boarded a north-bound Amsterdam Avenue car, riding for half an hour through streets lined in petty shops and presenting the peculiar swept look of Sunday.

She had cooled to apathy, a drowsiness descending that made her reluctant to leave the car; could have ridden on and on in this eased and half-narcotized state, but people had a habit of remembering her. A truckman had followed her only the day before through half a block of snarled traffic to see that she turned properly to the right. New York, mad as a March hare, was eager to direct her. The conductor now walked up the aisle of car to tap her on the shoulder.

"Your corner, miss."

Nine thousand Amsterdam Avenue was a drug store sidled in between a bakeshop that six days a week poured forth sweet hot breath, and an undertaking establishment with a white-satin infant's coffin _de luxe_ tilted in the window. The sight of it caught Lilly like a pain. That peculiar power of an obsessed mind to see in everything its own state reflected had set in. Queer that this infant's coffin should tilt at her. A bouncing youngster leaned out of its perambulator to dance its arms.

She hurried into the drug store. Isaac Neuga.s.s, Chemist.

It was the older-style pharmacy, with a gilt mortar and pestle for a sign; and as she entered, a bell attached by a pulley rang somewhere in a thin, tattling voice. The soda fountain, fountain pen, the picture postcard, the umbrella, and the face-powder demonstrator had not yet invaded here. Isaac Neuga.s.s, Chemist--was just that. His walls were lined in labeled jars of panacea. The pungency of valerianate of ammonia smote the entrant. He pummeled his own pills, percolated his own paregoric, prescribed for neighborhood miseries from an invariable bottle that was slow, sluggish, and malodorous in the pouring, anointed the neighborhood bruises, and extracted, always gratis, neighborhood cinders from neighborhood eyes.

A Madison Avenue physician, erstwhile of Amsterdam Avenue, and more recently of two honorary degrees, his own private hospital, two outer waiting rooms, three a.s.sistants, and four-figure operations, still diverted quite a runnel of his clientele to the impeccable pharmaceutics of the little Amsterdam Avenue shop, so that the motor car and the carriage not infrequently sidled up to its curb.

At Lilly's entrance, Isaac Neuga.s.s came shuffling around the ground-gla.s.s prescription part.i.tion, his hands at their perpetual dry washing of each other. There was something of a dressed-up wishbone about him, in the way his clothing scarcely suggested the thin body within them. They had scarcely a point of contact, even with his angles.

He was a mere inner tubing to what he wore. A skull cap hid his baldness, a fringe of gray below it suggesting what was not beneath it.

His little eyes were like steel, humorously glinting gimlets in the process of boring, the old face wrinkling up around them as pliantly as a dough eraser. In fact, when he laughed his little chin with the tip of beard did curl up like one of those rubber-toy faces where chin kicks brow.

"Well," he said, with a great dip of nose down into his smile, "whad can I do for you?" He reminded Lilly of a great auk, something alcidine in the thin cheeks with the mouth cutting so widely toward the ears.

She had not realized it, but suddenly the terrible, the impersonal detachment of the past weeks smote her. There had been voiceless days and days when the sound of herself asking direction or ordering from a bill of fare had an element of surprise in it, and the toneless voice of public service was the only one directed to her: "Step lively." "Two blocks east." "Don't mention it." "No more rice pudding left, ma'am."

When Isaac Neuga.s.s said, "Well, whad can I do for you?" something within her thawed so that she could have cried.

"I'm looking for this furnished room," she said, and held out the slip toward him.

"You wand my wife," he said, waving her the direction. "Go right outside to the next stoop and ring the bell over Neuga.s.s."

"Oh, thank you!" she said, suiting her action to his word.

"It's a nize room. I could wish it to an early bird to catch it."

"That's what I want, a nice, quiet room."

"Then you got it," he cried. "It's a room for a needle," his thumb and forefinger indicating an infinitesibly fine point.

"A needle?"

"So it could hear itself fall."

In his own way Mr. Neuga.s.s was a jokester, insisting upon the laugh, sitting back upon his figurative haunches, waiting.

"Then it is just what I want," said Lilly, giving him his smile, "only I hope it isn't too--"

He took to waggling his head, his little kindly eyes illuminated with a sunburst of wrinkles and his voice a festooned chant of rising and falling inflections.

"Sa-y, if you can't pay three-fifty, she'll make it three. You doan'

need to tell her I told you, but for such a young lady like you, sa-y, the brice in the newspaper doan' always got to be the brice in the hand, ain't it?"

She laughed, the irises that had crowded out the gray in her eyes suddenly smaller and back to normal.

In the little entrance adjoining, with its line-up of door bells, she pressed the b.u.t.ton as directed. A clicking answered her ring, and she had to learn from a child who entered with a dangling pail of milk, that she was to speak upward through a tube above the bell.

"About the room?" Yes, she was to come up.

She climbed two flights of dark, clean-smelling stairs, and Mrs.

Neuga.s.s herself opened the door.

Mary, Rispah, Cornelia, Monica, Martha Washington, Mrs. Whistler, Margaret Ogilvy, and Mrs. Neuga.s.s, blessed be their tribe, must all have had about the same look about the eyes. Masha Neuga.s.s was sixty, and looked it. A blue-gingham ap.r.o.n held her in at the waist so that she bulged softly and fatly above and below it.

Thirty minutes and one hundred years removed from Millionaires' Row, the apartment was just another of those paradoxes which the city can shake from its spangled sleeve. Built like a coach, each room opening off a strip of hallway, it was a scoured chromo of Victoria's age of horrors.

The brilliantly flower-splashed wall paper and carpeting. A front room that smelled and p.r.i.c.ked of horsehair. The little patch of dining room brightened by a red tablecloth, two canaries, and a window-sill array of turnips sprouting in bottles. The rush of bead portieres as you walked through them. Ha.s.socks. A freshly washed-and-ironed ribbon bow on a chair back. Pillow shams. Nottingham-lace curtains with sham drapes woven into them. A pair of bisque pugs.

The room to let was the size of a freight elevator and crammed with a fine old walnut bed when there was scarcely room for a cot. Also an overflow of curlicue divan, and a washstand. It was clean to coolness, as if the very air were washed, but, entering it, Mrs. Neuga.s.s flecked an imaginary dust particle from the divan with her ap.r.o.n, then wrapping it m.u.f.f fashion about her hands.

"It ain't big, but it's gumfortable."

"Indeed it is!" said Lilly, sniffing in appreciatively.

"We doan' got to rent this room, miss. It's our first time. My husband, if he had his way, wouldn't. But I say it's a shame for the waste, since our youngest daughter ain't in it no more...."

"It's lovely."

"You see out there between those two chimneys? That's Columbia University. You're from the college? Yes? We brefer it should be a student."

"I--I'm a high-school graduate, but not exactly a college student. I mean--I'm a music student. Voice."

"You doan' tell me! Now ain't that a coinstidance! For why you think I should have this room empty if not my own baby daughter is in Europe with her voice! For three years already, with her gone, miss, and my husband's daughter down to her bookkeeping all day, as I tell him, it's like my heart will burst from the silence."

"There is something I had better explain--"

"I want a young girl in the house again, I tell him."

Standing there, the words pressing for utterance against her very teeth, Lilly swallowed them back again.

"I see," she said, smiling her misery. "Then I'm afraid--I--"

"We're used to a young girl. You read maybe of our daughter only in last Sunday's papers. Millie du Ga.s.s, with the Milan Opera?"

Lilly had. "Millie du Ga.s.s--your daughter!"