Star-Dust Part 44

"Do these inst.i.tutions merely function as machines? Is no provision made for the exception? Rent me a room for me and my baby. I will pay you in advance. See, I have five five-dollar bills in my purse. I must have a place to sleep and I won't leave here unless you forcibly eject me. I must have my luggage; it is still at the hospital."

"How is it they did not help you there to make further provision for--"

"I didn't explain. It seemed inconceivable that I could not find immediately lodgings."

"I see," said Lilly's interrogator, with the air of seeing not at all.

"Your case does not come under our kind of jurisdiction. Our girls are unfortunate mothers who are cared for here until such time as arrangements can be made to place the child. But no girl is ent.i.tled to our nursery and infirmary service for more than four consecutive weeks, and then, as I said, only in the event of unfortunate motherhood."

"Can only the unmarried mother be unfortunate?"

"I hardly care to discuss with you the wisdom of our policies."

"But you must," cried Lilly, now thoroughly beside herself. "What about the girl who would rather fight out her own destiny than live through the miserable and immoral--yes, immoral--process of a marriage that she realizes has been a mistake? Is there no provision for the woman who hasn't a man-made grievance against society? Who simply wants her one-hundred-per-cent-right to live? Women are coming to demand it more and more, that right! I venture to say that ten years from now they will be voting themselves that right. Now we're like a lot of half-hatched chickens pecking through the sh.e.l.l. I've pecked through! My daughter may live to see them all pecked through."

"Really, I can't see--"

"To-day a woman on her own with a child has only one meaning. I've been treated like a leper. Suppose, for argument, my child hadn't had a legitimate father. All the more reason a hand should have been held out to us. But I'm not asking anything. A night's lodging, madam, for which I can pay. Here it is in advance. I'm not going to leave!"

The child was whimpering now l.u.s.tily and wanting to lift its little body from the long confinement of wrappings. There were tears and anger and a brilliant sort of challenge in Lilly's voice and in her glance that seemed to dart and glance off the starchy shirt waist of the figure behind the desk. She sat clicking her pencil against her teeth, eyes averted, as if to galvanize herself against a personality that dared to intrude itself through a "case."

She openly regarded her work, this Miss Let.i.tia Scullen, who was one day to lay down her life valiantly enough at the altar of typhus in war-stricken Rumania, as an exact science. Indigency, like typhus, was a pandemic which must ultimately respond to an ant.i.toxin. It was as if her forty-seven charges were sick, and she reading the blood test of indigency, prescribing in toto.

"If you are what you say you are, then you are not ent.i.tled to the benefits of this home. Our girls here receive absolutely collective treatment along lines worked out for their general needs. Your case is an isolated one. You are not in need."

"But please, please, please, is there no need except that covered by vice? Can you not conceive of a plight being all the worse because there is no provision for it?"

"It is unthinkable that a woman like you, of evident refinement and education, should find herself in the predicament you describe."

"Then thank G.o.d for being a rebel, if it will make you ponder on what is new, untried, and not according to formula. There are only two kinds of women you social workers recognize. The sheltered ones and the unfortunates. What about the woman who is neither, but merely out on her own? I try to meet life as an individual and not as a woman. What happens? Doors slam in my face. I can't buy a night's lodging for the child in my arms. It sounds like a thirty-cent melodrama. And now you, whose life study is life--I tell you I won't be turned off. You must take me in."

"It's very irregular."

"I'll pay."

"We don't accept paying inmates. You may make the inst.i.tution a present if you so desire. I'll put you up in the infirmary--it happens to be empty; and you may have the use of the nursery equipment adjoining, and there is a practical nurse in the house. Understand that this is entirely outside the regulations of the inst.i.tution and I must ask you to make different arrangements as soon as possible."

"Thank you," said Lilly, ashamed to be grateful and the tears pressing against her eyeb.a.l.l.s. "Oh, my dear, thank you! Thank you!"

And so it came about that in a room of five white cots and three barred windows, with the aid of a practical nurse and a tiny gas stove on a tin mat, Lilly prepared her daughter for the night.

In her bag, lugged over from the hospital by one of the uniformed girls, was the little layout, parting gift of the inst.i.tution, including a machine-st.i.tched flannelet nightdress that Lilly could have wept over as she fastened the thick b.u.t.ton at the throat.

Still, with the chapped-faced nurse moving about the bare, ugly room on her everlasting mission of efficiency, diluting the formula to just the proportion required, rubbing the little bud of a body with coa.r.s.e cornstarch, the sense of ownership did not descend upon Lilly.

She wanted to feel this new estate of hers. In all the three and a half weeks there had never been a moment of privacy, to give reality to this pink-and-blue-and-yellow bloom that had somehow flowered from the tree of her being.

She wanted the quiet to reconcile this new, this terrible, this throat-throbbing sweetness with the Medean fury which had flung her, a shuddering, choking ma.s.s upon that rooming-house floor. She wanted to feel again and again the quick, ecstatic brash that could race in a wave over her when she held this warm rose of life to her breast.

At just before nine there was a wordless round of inspection from the white starched shirt waist surmounted with the spectacles and the black-ribbon guard, a final look-in from the nurse whose face was Swedishly blond and pink from chapping, a bottle of milk placed in the small refrigerator, and the little bundle on the pillow covered with an extra thickness of murky blanket.

At nine o'clock the lights went out just as Lilly had slid into her own gown. She tiptoed to the door, barefooted, locking it and thereby violating a rule of the inst.i.tution. There must have been a moon somewhere behind housetops, because through the three shadeless windows a sort of gleam whitely powdered the silence.

She was suddenly full of fear there in the darkness and the aloneness, and ran over to the cot for the miracle of that soft body to her flesh.

She lifted it from the nest of coa.r.s.e pillow, even in sleep the tendril of a little finger closing about hers.

There were crisscross shadows on the floor, cast there by the iron bars at the windows. Her child lay asleep in an inst.i.tutional garb of charity. The father of that child, ignorant of its very existence, was at that moment, and at a distance of one thousand miles, adjusting a new rubber stopper to the bathtub in the home he shared with his parents-in-law.

On one of the empty cots the rather silly silhouette of Lilly's hat, its buckram rim sadly broken, persisted through the gloom. Her shoes, in a little att.i.tude of waiting beside a chair, lopped slightly of a tipsiness induced by run-over heels. In the jumble of changing hands the black valise of her underwear, handkerchiefs, and baby garments had disappeared, so her little washed-out chemise, quite dainty, hung drying over a table edge.

Outside the Home for Indigent Girls a city that took absolutely no reckoning of Lilly wove its pattern toward another to-morrow.

She was alone with the first realization of her child, in a moment that might have shaped itself to crush her. She felt a throbbing that seemed to make a rush for her throat. She sat down on the bed, leaning over until her body formed a sort of cave about the child. She had a sense of the power to strangle both their lives out there in that strange darkness. An old fear leaned out at her.

"Am I mad?"

More and more the sense of wanting to strangle flowed over her.

"Here--to-night--now!"

A cry leaped up under her pressure, startled, and with a stab of pain in it.

She swooped the little squirming burden up under her chin; she buried her head into the warm froth of curls, the light wind of her laughter suddenly sweeping the room.

"Mother's darling! Twiddle-de-darling. Moonlit flake! Beautifulest.

Zoeist flower in the world. Mine alone! Alone mine! Oodle-de-dums.

To-morrow! To-morrow!"

There followed for Lilly a week of scars, each exactly as deep as the day was long.

First, the heartbreaking business of giving over her child to the chappy-faced nurse and a rear room of nursery hung in the odors of formaldehyde and lined up into a ward of white iron cribs, each screened in with a clothes horse of little flannel garments of a thickness that wrung Lilly's heart.

There were now two additional occupants--a poor, top-heavy infant with a fourteen-year-old mother, father unknown, and the teething baby of one of the blue-uniformed inmates whose routine allowed her periods of the day to nurstle her child.

That was the wrench that began each day. To abandon the pink-and-white bloom that slept all night without crying in the cove of her arm, to the grayness of a nursery that should have been pink and white and sweetly fragrant with powders and puffs and the rosy kind of tufted coverlets with scent between them that her mother had once sewn over with bowknots for the Kemble baby.

She was guilty of extravagances that ate menacingly into the four remaining five-dollar bills. Against the protests of the practical nurse she promptly discarded the long muslin swaddling dress, whose superfluous length wound around the little feet, purchasing three short and sheer ones, also a doll-size toilet set painted in little clumps of forget-me-nots. The hair brush had a thick, soft nap which would spin out her child's curls into a cloud of gold. They really were the color, these curls, of a jar of strained honey seen through sunlight. It was as if she could never tire of feeling them wind to her finger.

The nurse she kept placated with tips in outlandish proportion to her funds, and often a memory of that dip of lip curving terrifyingly across her consciousness would scurry homeward to this gray-and-black abode of theirs, which only contained them on a tolerance that day after day seared deeply into her being.

Slowly but surely her none too immaculately shod feet ceased their pilgrimages to the agencies. She did apply one sultry morning in answer to an advertis.e.m.e.nt for a "refined indoor entertainer, city work," only to find the usual fee exhortation thinly backed by promises. For the most part she marked off at her breakfast table in the adjoining Swedish lunch room, under the newspaper heading, "Help Wanted, Female," the demands for stenographers, companions, hat models, and, on one occasion, for a cashier's vacancy in a Madison Avenue florist's.

A persistent streak of circ.u.mstances seemed to prohibit her success.

Upon three occasions it happened that she waited all morning in a line, only to see the applicant directly in front of her chosen for the position. At the florist's shop, bond was required. A lawyer in the Flatiron Building asked her to type a specimen letter for him, and laid heavy lips on the curl at the nape of her neck as she bent to his dictation. R.L. Ginsburg, of the Ginsburg-Flatow Millinery Company, engaged her services, and kissed her squarely on the lips to seal the bargain.

The straight line of those lips had undeniably softened. She walked about with them usually moist and slightly open, and the arch of her brows very high. She had softened ineffably, like a ripened fruit; was more liable to the backward glance of the pa.s.ser-by.