The Vertical City Part 46

III

Venture back, will you, to the ice and red of that Russian dawn when on the snow the footsteps that led toward the horizon were the color of blood, and one woman, who could not keep her eyes ahead, moaned as she fled, prayed, and even screamed to return to her dead in the bullet-riddled horse trough.

Toward the noon of that day, a gray one that smelled charred, a fugitive group from a distant village that was still burning faltered, as it too fled toward the horizon, in the blackened village of Vodna, because a litter had to be fashioned for an old man whose feet were frozen, and a mother, whose baby had perished at her breast, would bury her dead.

Huddled beside the horse trough, over a poor fire she had kindled of charred wood, Hanscha, the midwife (Hanscha, the drunk, they called her, fascinatedly, in the Pale of generations of sober women), spied Mosher's flung coat and reached for it eagerly, with an eye to tearing it into strips to wrap her tortured feet.

A child stirred as she s.n.a.t.c.hed it, wailing lightly, and the instinct of her calling, the predominant motive, Hanscha with her fumy breath warmed it closer to life and trod the one hundred and eight miles to the port with it strapped to her back like a pack.

Thus it was that Schmulka, the red twin, came to America and for the first fourteen years of his life slept on a sour pallet in a sour tenement he shared with Hanscha, who with filthy hands brought children into the filthy slums.

Jason, she called him, because that was the name of the ship that carried them over. A rolling tub that had been horrible with the cries of cattle and seasickness.

At fourteen he was fierce and rebellious and down on the Juvenile Court records for truancy, petty trafficking in burned-out opium, vandalism, and gang vagrancy.

In Hanscha's sober hours he was her despair, and she could be horrible in her anger, once the court reprimanding her and threatening to take Jason from her because of welts found on his back.

It was in her cups that she was proud of him, and so it behooved Jason to drink her down to her pallet, which he could, easily.

He was handsome. His red hair had darkened to the same bronze of the samovar and he was straight as the drop of an apple from the branch. He was reckless. Could turn a pretty penny easily, even dangerously, and spend it with a flip for a pushcart bauble.

Once he brought home a plaster-of-Paris Venus--the Melos one with the beautiful arch to her torso of a bow that instant after the arrow has flown. Hanscha cuffed him for the expenditure, but secretly her old heart, which since childhood had subjected her to strange, rather epileptical, sinking spells, and had induced the drinking, warmed her with pride in his choice.

Hanscha, with her veiny nose and the dreadful single hair growing out of a mole on her chin, was not without her erudition. She had read for the midwifery, and back in the old days could recite the bones in the body.

She let the boy read nights, sometimes even to dropping another coin into the gas meter. Some of the books were the lewd penny ones of the Bowery bookstands, old medical treatises, too, purchased three for a quarter and none too nice reading for the growing boy. But there he had also found a _Les Miserables_ and _The Confessions of St. Augustine_, which last, if he had known it, was a rare edition, but destined for the ash pit.

Once he read Hanscha a bit of poetry out of a furiously stained old volume of verse, so fragrantly beautiful, to him, this bit, that it wound around him like incense, the perfume of it going deeply and stinging his eyes to tears:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting!

The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar.

Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From G.o.d, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy.

Shades of the prison house begin to close Upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows He sees it in his joy; The youth who daily farther, from the East Must travel, still is Nature's priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.

But Hanscha was drunk and threw some coffee-sopped bread at him, and so his foray into poetry ended in the slops of disgust.

A Miss Manners, a society social worker who taught poverty sweet forbearance every Tuesday from four until six, wore a forty-eight-diamond bar pin on her under bodice (on Tuesday from four until six), and whose gray-suede slippers were ever so slightly blackened from the tripping trip from front door to motor and back, took him up, as the saying is, and for two weeks Jason disported himself on the shorn lawns of the Manners summer place at Great Neck, where the surf creamed at the edge of the terrace and the smell of the sea set something beating against his spirit as if it had a thousand imprisoned wings.

There he developed quite a flair for the law books in Judge Manners's laddered library. Miss Manners found him there, reading, on stomach and elbows, his heels waving in the air.

Judge Manners talked with him and discovered a legal turn of mind, and there followed some veranda talk of educating and removing him from his environment. But that very afternoon Jason did a horrid thing. It was no more than he had seen about him all his life. Not as much. He kissed the little pig-tailed daughter of the laundress and pursued her as she ran shrieking to her mother's ap.r.o.n. That was all, but his defiant head and the laundress's chance knowledge of his Juvenile Court record did for him.

At six o'clock that evening, with a five-dollar bill of which he made a spitball for the judge's departing figure down the station platform, he was shipped back to Hanscha. Secretly he was relieved. Life was easier in the tenement under the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge. The piece of its arch which he could see from his window was even beautiful, a curve of a stone into some beyond.

That night he fitted down into the mold his body had worn on the pallet, sighing out satisfaction.

Environment had won him back.

On the other hand, in one of those red star-spangled pa.s.sions of rebellion against his fetid days, he blindly cut Hanscha with the edge of a book which struck against her brow as he hurled it. She had been drunk and had asked of him, at sixteen, because of the handsomeness that women would easily love in him, to cadet the neighborhood of Grand Street, using her tenement as his refuge of vice and herself as sharer of spoils.

The corner of the book cut deeply and pride in her terror of him came out redly in her bloodshot eyes.

In the short half term of his high-school training he had already forged ahead of his cla.s.s when he attained the maturity of working papers. He was plunging eagerly--brilliantly, in fact--into a rapid translation of the _Iliad_, fired from the very first line by the epic of the hexametered anger of Achilles, and stubbornly he held out against the working papers.

But to Hanscha they came with the inevitability of a summons rather than an alternative, and so for a year or two he brought home rather precocious wages from his speed in a canning factory. Then he stoked his way to Sydney and back, returning fiery with new and terrible oaths.

One night Hanscha died. He found her crumpled up in the huddle of her skirts as if she had dropped in her tracks, which she had, in one of the epileptic heart strictures.

It was hardly a grief to him. He had seen red with pa.s.sion at her atrociousness too often, and, somehow, everything that she stood for had been part of the ache in him.

Yet it is doubtful if, released of her, he found better pasture. Bigger pastures, it is true, in what might be called an upper stratum of the lower East Side, although at no time was he ever to become party to any of its underground system of crime.

Inevitably, the challenge of his personality cleared the way for him. At nineteen he had won and lost the small fortune of thirty-three hundred dollars at a third-cla.s.s gambling resort where he came in time to be croupier.

He dressed flashily, wore soft collars, was constantly swapping sporty scarfpins for sportier ones, and was inevitably the center, seldom part, of a group.

Then one evening at Cooper Union, which stands at the head of the Bowery, he enrolled for an evening course in law, but never entered the place again.

Because the next night, in a Fourteenth Street cabaret with adjacent gambling rooms, he met one who called herself Winnie Ross, the beginning of a heart-sickening end.

There is so little about her to relate. She was the color of cloyed honey when the sugar granules begin to show through. Pale, pimply in a fashion the powder could cover up, the sag of her facial muscles showed plainly through, as if weary of doling out to the years their hush money, and she was quite obviously down at the heels. Literally so, because when she took them off, her shoes lopped to the sides and could not stand for tipsiness.

She was Jason's first woman. She exhaled a perfume, cheap, tickling, chewed some advertised tablets that scented her kisses, and her throat, when she threw up her head, had an arch and flex to it that were mysteriously graceful.

Life had been swift and sheer with Winnie. She was very tired and, paradoxically enough, it gave her one of her last remaining charms. Her eyelids were freighted with weariness, were waxy white of it, and they could flutter to her cheeks, like white b.u.t.terflies against white, and lay shadows there that maddened Jason.

She called him Red, although all that remained now were the lights through his browning hair, almost like the flashings of a lantern down a railroad track.

She p.r.o.nounced it with a slight trilling of the R, and if it was left in her of half a hundred loves to stir on this swift descent of her life line, she did over Jason. Partly because he was his winged-Hermes self, and partly because--because--it was difficult for her rather f.a.gged brain to rummage back.

Thus the rest may be told:

Entering her rooms one morning, a pair of furiously garish ones over a musical-instrument store on the Bowery, he threw himself full length on the red-cotton divan, arms locked under his always angry-looking head, and watching her, through low lids, trail about the room at the business of preparing him a surlily demanded cup of coffee. Her none too immaculate pink robe trailed a cotton-lace tail irritatingly about her heels, which slip-slopped as she walked, her stockings, without benefit of support, twisting about her ankles.

She was barometer for his moods, which were elemental, and had learned to tremble with a queer exaltation of fear before them.

"My Red-boy blue to-day," she said, stooping as she pa.s.sed and wanting to kiss him.

He let his lids drop and would have none of her. They were curiously blue, she thought, as if of unutterable fatigue, and then quickly appraised that his luck was still letting him in for the walloping now of two weeks' duration. His diamond-and-opal scarfpin was gone, and the gold cuff links replaced with mother-of-pearl.

She could be violently bitter about money, and when the flame of his personality was not there to be reckoned with, ten times a day she ejected him, with a venom that was a psychosis, out of her further toleration. Not so far gone was Winnie but that she could count on the twist of her body and the arch of her throat as revenue getters.

At first Jason had been lavish, almost with a smack of some of the old days she had known, spending with the easy prodigality of the gambler in luck. There was a near-seal coat from him in her cupboard of near-silks, and the flimsy wooden walls of her rooms had been freshly papered in roses.

Then his luck had turned, and to top his spa.r.s.eness with her this new sullenness which she feared and yet which could be so delicious to her--reminiscently delicious.

She gave him coffee, and he drank it like medicine out of a thick-lipped cup painted in roses.