Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

"Oh, Getaway!" she said, with her hand on the flutter of her throat and closing her eyes as if to imprison the vision against her lids. "A pure white one with lots of fire dancing around it." And little Marylin, who didn't want to want it, actually kissed the bare dot on her left ring finger where she could feel the burn of it, and there in the crowded street, where he knew he was surest of his privacy with her, he stole a kiss off that selfsame finger, too.

"I'll make their eyes hang out on their cheeks like grapes when they see you coming along, Marylin."

"I love them because they're so clear--and clean! Mountain water that's been filtered through pebbles."

"Pebbles is right! I'm going to dike you out in one as big as a pebble. And poils! Sa-y, they're what cost the spondulicks. A guy showed me a string of little ones no bigger than pimples. Know what? That little string could knock the three spots out of a thousand-dollar bond--I mean bill!"

It was then that something flashed out of Marylin's face. A shade might have been lowered; a candle blown out.

"Getaway," she said, with a quick little dig of fingers into his forearm, "you're up to something!"

"Snuff, I said."

"What did you mean by that word, 'bond'?"

"Who built a high fence around the word 'bond'?"

"Bonds! All that stuff in the newspapers about those messengers disappearing out of Wall Street with--bonds! Getaway, are you mixed up in that? Getaway!"

"Well, well! I like that! I had you doped out for fair and warmer to-day. The weather prophet didn't predict no brainstorm."

"That's not answering."

"Well, whadda you know! Miss Sherlock Holmes finds a corkscrew in the wine cellar and is sore because it's crooked!"

"Getaway--answer."

"Whadda you want me to answer, Fairylin? That I'm the master mind behind the--"

"It worries me so! You up in Monkey's room so much lately. You think I don't know it? I do! All the comings and goings up there. Muggs Towers sneaking up to Monkey's room in that messenger boy's suit he keeps wearing all the time now. He's no more messenger boy than I am. Getaway, tell me, you and Muggs up in Monkey's room so often? Footsteps up there! Yours!"

"Gawalmighty! Now it's my footsteps!"

"I know them! Up in Monkey's room, right over mine. I know how you sneak up there evenings after you leave me. It don't look nice your going into the same house where I live, Getaway, even if it isn't to see me. It don't look right from the outside!"

"Nobody can ever say I wanted to harm a hair of your little head. I even look the other way when I pass your door. That's the kind of a modest violet I am."

"It's not that, but the looks. That's the reason, I'll bet, if the truth's known, why Monkey squirmed himself into that room over mine--to hide your comings and goings as if they was to see me."

"Nothing of the kind!"

"Everything--up there--worries me so! Monkey's room right over mine. My ceiling so full of soft footsteps that frighten me. I know your footsteps, Getaway, just as well as anything. The ball-of-your-foot--squeak! The-ball-of-your-foot--squeak!"

"Well, that's a good one! The-ball-of-me-foot--squeak!"

"Everybody tiptoeing! Muggs! Somebody's stocking feet! Monkey's. Steps that aren't honest. All on my ceiling. Monkey never ought to have rented a room in a respectable house like Mrs. Granady's. Nobody but genteel young fellows holding down genteel jobs ever had that room before. Monkey passing himself off as Mr. James Pollard, or whatever it is he calls himself, just for the cover of a respectable house--or of me, for all I know. You could have knocked me down with a feather the first time I met him in the hall. If I did right I'd squeal."

"You would, like hell."

"Of course I wouldn't, but with Mrs. Granady trying to run a respectable house, only the right kind of young fellows and girls rooming there, it's not fair. Monkey getting his nose into a house like that and hatching God knows what! Getaway, what do you keep doing up in that room--all hours--you and all the pussyfooters?"

"That's the thanks a fellow gets for letting a straight word like 'marry' slip between his teeth; that's the thanks a fellow gets for honest-to-God intentions of trying to get his girl out of a shirt factory and dike her out in--"

"But, Getaway, if I was only sure it's all straight!"

"Well, if that's all you think of me--"

"All your big-gun talk about the ring. Of course I--I'd like it. How could a girl help liking it? But only if it's on the level. Getaway--you see, I hate to act suspicious all the time, but all your new silk shirts and now the new checked suit and all. It don't match up with your twenty-dollar job in the Wall Street haberdashery."

Then Getaway threw out one of his feints of mock surprise. "Didn't I tell you, Fairylin? Well, whadda you know about that? I didn't tell her, and me thinking I did."

"What, Getaway, what?"

"Why, I'm not working there any more. Why, Gawalmighty couldn't have pleased that old screwdriver. He was so tight the dimes in his pocket used to mildew from laying. He got sore as a pup at me one day just because I--"

"Getaway, you never told me you lost that job that I got for you out of the newspaper!"

"I didn't lose it, Marylin. I heard it when it fell. Jobs is like vaccination, they take or they don't."

"They never take with you, Getaway."

"Don't you believe it. I'm on one now--"

"A job?"

"Aw, not the way you mean. Me and a guy got a business proposition on. If it goes through, I'll buy you a marriage license engraved on solid gold."

"What is it, then, the proposition?"

"Can't you trust me, Marylin, for a day or two, until it goes through? Sometimes just talking about it is enough to put the jinx on a good thing."

"You mean--"

"I mean I'm going to have money in my pockets."

"What kind of money?"

"Real money."

"_Honest_ money?"

"Honest-to-God money. And I'm going to dike you out. That's my idea. Pink! That's the color for you. A pink sash and slippers, and one of them hats that show your yellow hair right through it, and a lace umbrella and--"

"And streamers on the hat! I've always been just crazy for streamers on a hat."

"Red-white-and-blue ones!"

"No, just pink. Wide ones to dangle it like a basket."

"And slippers with real diamond buckles."

"What do you mean, Getaway? How can you give me real diamond shoe buckles--"

"There you go again. Didn't you promise to trust me and my new business proposition?"

"I do, only you've had so many--"

"You do--_only!_ Yah, you do, only you don't!"

"I--You see--Getaway--I know how desperate you can be--when you're cornered. I'll never forget how you--you nearly killed a cop--once! Oh, Getaway, when I think back, that time you got into such trouble with--"

"Leave it to a woman, by Jove! to spoil a fellow's good name, if she has to rub her fingers in old soot to do it."

"I--I guess it is from seeing so much around me all the time that it's in me so to suspect."

"Oh, it's in you all right. Gawalmighty knows that!"

"You see, it's because I've seen so much all my life. That's why it's been so grand these last years since I'm alone and--and away from it. Nothing to fear. My own little room and my own little job and me not getting heart failure every time I recognize a plain-clothes man on the beat or hear a night stick on the sidewalk jerk me out of my sleep. Getaway, don't do anything bad. You had one narrow escape. You're finger-printed. Headquarters wouldn't give you the benefit of a doubt if there was one. Don't--Getaway!"

"Yah, stay straight and you'll stay lonesome."

"Money wouldn't make no difference with me, anyway, if everything else wasn't all right. Nothing can be pink to me even if it is pink, unless it's honest. That's why I hold back, Getaway--there's things in you I--can't trust."

"Yah, fine chance of you holding back if I was to come rolling up to your door in a six-cylinder--"

"I tell you, no! If I was that way I wouldn't be holding down the same old job at the factory. I know plenty of boys who turn over easy money. Too easy--"

"Then marry me, Marylin, and you'll wear diamonds. In a couple of days, when this goes through, this deal with the fellows--oh, _honest_ deal, if that's what you're opening your mouth to ask--I can stand up beside you with money in my pockets. Twenty bucks to the pastor, just like that! Then you can pick out another job and I'll hold it down for you. Bet your life I will--Oh--here, Marylin--this way--quick!"

"Getaway, why did you turn down this street so all of a sudden? This isn't my way home."

"It's only a block out of the way. Come on! Don't stand gassing."

"You-thought-that-fellow-on-the-corner-of-Dock-Street-might-be-a-plain -clothes-man!"

"What if I did? Want me to go up and kiss him?"

"Why-should-you-care, Getaway?"

"Don't."

"But--"

"Don't believe in hugging the law, though. It's enough when it hugs you."

"I want to go home, Getaway."

"Come on. I'll buy some supper. Steak and French frieds and some French pastry with a cherry on top for your little sweet tooth. That's the kind of a regular guy I am."

"No. I want to go home."

"All right, all right! I'm taking you there, ain't I?"

"Straight."

"Oh, you'll go straight, if you can't go that way anywhere but home."

They trotted the little detour in silence, the corners of her mouth wilting, he would have declared, had he the words, like a field flower in the hands of a picnicker. Marylin could droop that way, so suddenly and so whitely that almost a second could blight her.

"Now you're mad, ain't you?" he said, ashamed to be so quickly conciliatory and trying to make his voice grate.

"No, Getaway--not mad--only I guess--sad."

She stopped before her rooming house. It was as long and as lean and as brown as a witch, and, to the more fanciful, something even of the riding of a broom in the straddle of the doorway, with an empty flagpole jutting from it. And then there was the cat, too--not a black one with gold eyes, just one of the city's myriad of mackerel ones, with chewed ear and a skillful crouch for the leap from ash to garbage can.

"I'm going in now, Getaway."

"Gowann! Get into your blue dress and I'll blow you to supper."

"Not to-night."

"Mad?"

"No. I said only--"

"Sad?"

"No--tired--I guess."

"Please, Marylin."

"No. Some other time."

"When? To-morrow? It's Saturday! Coney?"

"Oh!"

He thought he detected the flash of a dimple. He did. Remember, she was very young and, being fanciful enough to find the witch in the face of her rooming house, the waves at Coney Island, peanut cluttered as they were apt to be, told her things. Silly, unrepeatable things. Nonsense things. Little secret goosefleshing things. Prettinesses. And then the shoot the chutes! That ecstatic leap of heart to lips and the feeling of folly down at the very pit of her. Marylin did like the shoot the chutes!

"All right, Getaway--to-morrow--Coney!"

He did not conceal his surge of pleasure, grasping her small hand in both his. "Good girlie!"

"Good night, Getaway," she said, but with the inflection of something left unsaid.

He felt the unfinished intonation, like a rocket that had never dropped its stick, and started up the steps after her.

"What is it, Marylin?"

"Nothing," she said and ran in.

The window in her little rear room with the zigzag of fire escape across it was already full of dusk. She took off her hat, a black straw with a little pink-cotton rose on it, and, rubbing her brow where it had left a red rut, sat down beside the window. There were smells there from a city bouquet of frying foods; from a pool of old water near a drain pipe; from the rear of a butcher shop. Slops. Noises, too. Babies, traffic, whistles, oaths, barterings, women, strife, life. On her very own ceiling the whisper of footsteps--of restless comings and goings--stealthy comings and goings--and then after an hour, suddenly and ever so softly, the ball-of-a-foot--squeak! The-ball-of-a-foot--squeak!

Marylin knew that step.

And yet she sat, quiet. A star had come out. Looking up at the napkin of sky let in through the walls of the vertical city, Marylin had learned to greet it almost every clear evening. It did something for her. It was a little voice. A little kiss. A little upside down pool of light without a spill. A little of herself up there in that beyond--that little napkin of beyond that her eyes had the lift to see.

* * * * *

Who are you, whose neck has never ached from nine hours a day, six days a week, of bending over the blue-denim pleat that goes down the front of men's shirts, to quiver a supersensitive, supercilious, and superior nose over what, I grant you, may appear on the surface to be the omelet of vulgarities fried up for you on the gladdest, maddest strip of carnival in the world?

But it is simpler to take on the cold glaze of sophistication than to remain simple. When the eyelids become weary, it is as if little red dancing shoes were being wrapped away forever, or a very tight heartstring had suddenly sagged, and when plucked at could no longer plong.

To Marylin, whose neck very often ached clear down into her shoulder blade and up into a bandeau around her brow, and to whom city walls were sometimes like slaps confronting her whichever way she turned, her enjoyment of Coney Island was as uncomplex as A B C. Untortured by any awarenesses of relative values, too simple to strive to keep simple, unself-conscious, and with a hungry heart, she was not a spectator, half ashamed of being amused. She _was_ Coney Island! Her heart a shoot the chutes for sheer swoops of joy, her eyes full of confetti points, the surf creaming no higher than her vitality.

And it was so the evening following, as she came dancing down the kicked-up sand of the beach, in a little bright-blue frock, mercerized silk, if you please, with very brief sleeves that ended right up in the jolliest part of her arm, with a half moon of vaccination winking out roguishly beneath a finish of ribbon bow, and a white-canvas sport hat with a jockey rosette to cap the little climax of her, and by no means least, a metal coin purse, with springy insides designed to hold exactly fifty cents in nickels.

Once on the sand, which ran away, tickling each step she took, her spirits, it must be admitted, went just a little crazily off. The window, you see, where Marylin sewed her buttonholes six days the week, faced a brick wall that peeled with an old scrofula of white paint. Coney Island faced a world of sky. So that when she pinched Getaway's nose in between the lips of her coin purse and he, turning a double somersault right in his checked suit, landed seated in a sprawl of mock daze, off she went into peals of laughter only too ready to be released.

He bought her a wooden whirring machine, an instrument of noise that, because it was not utilitarian, became a toy of delicious sound.

They rode imitation ocean waves at five cents a voyage, their only _mal de mer_, regret when it was over. He bought her salt-water taffy, and when the little red cave of her mouth became too ludicrously full of the pully stuff he tried to kiss its state of candy paralysis, and instantly she became sober and would have no more of his nonsense.

"Getaway," she cried, snapping fingers of inspiration, "let's go in bathing!"

"I'll say we will!"

No sooner said than done. In rented bathing suits, unfastidious, if you will, but, pshaw! with the ocean for wash day, who minded! Hers a little blue wrinkly one that hit her far too far, below the knees, but her head flowered up in a polka-dotted turban, that well enough she knew bound her up prettily, and her arms were so round with that indescribable softiness of youth! Getaway, whose eyes could focus a bit when he looked at them, set up a leggy dance at sight of her. He shocked her a bit in his cheap cotton trunks--woman's very old shock to the knobby knees and hairy arms of the beach. But they immediately ran, hand in hand, down the sand and fizz! into the grin of a breaker.

Marylin with her face wet and a fringe of hair, like a streak of seaweed, down her cheek! Getaway, shivery and knobbier than ever, pushing great palms of water at her and she back at him, only less skillfully her five fingers spread and inefficient. Once in the water, he caught and held her close, and yet, for the wonder of it, almost reverentially close, as if what he would claim for himself he must keep intact.

"Marry me, Marylin," he said, with all the hubbub of the ocean about them.

She reached for some foam that hissed out before she could touch it.

"That's you," he said. "Now you are there, and now you aren't."

"I wish," she said--"oh, Getaway, there's so much I wish!"

"What do you wish?"

She looked off toward the immensity of sea and sky. "I--Oh, I don't know! Being here makes me wish--Something as beautiful as out there is what I wish."

"Out where?"

"There."

"I don't see--"

"You--wouldn't."

And then, because neither of them could swim, he began chasing her through shallow water, and in the kicked-up spray of their own merriment they emerged finally, dripping and slinky, the hairs of his forearms lashed flat, and a little drip of salt water running off the tip of her chin.

Until long after the sun went down they lay drying on the sand, her hair spread in a lovely amber flare, and, stretched full length on his stomach beside her, he built a little grave of sand for her feet. And the crowd thinned, and even before the sun dipped a faint young moon, almost as if wearing a veil, came up against the blue. They were quiet now with pleasant fatigue, and, propped up on his elbows, he spilled little rills of sand from one fist into the other.

"Gee! you're pretty, Marylin!"

"Are I, Getaway?"

"You know you are. You wasn't born with one eye shut and the other blind."

"Honest, I don't know. Sometimes I look in the mirror and hope so."

"You've had enough fellows tell you so."

"Yes, but--but not the kind of fellows that mean by pretty what _I_ mean by pretty."

"Well, this here guy means what you mean by pretty."

"What do you mean by pretty, Getaway?"

"Pep. Peaches. Cream. Teeth. Yellow hair. Arms. Le--those little holes in your cheeks. Dimples. What do I mean by pretty? I mean you by pretty. Ain't that what you want me to mean by pretty?"

"Yes--and no--"

"Well, what the--"

"It's all right, Getaway. It's fine to be pretty, but--not enough--somehow. I--I can't explain it to you--to anybody. I guess pretty isn't the word. It's beauty I mean."

"All right, then, anything your little heart desires--beauty."

"The ocean beauty out there, I mean. Something that makes you hurt and want to hurt more and more. Beauty, Getaway. It's something you understand or something you don't. It can't be talked. It sounds silly."

"Well, then, whistle it!"

"It has to be _felt_."

"Peel me," he said, laying her arm to his bare bicep. "Some little gladiator, eh? Knock the stuffings out of any guy that tried to take you away from me."

She turned her head on its flare of drying hair away from him. The beach was all but quiet and the haze of the end of day in the air, almost in her eyes, too.

"Oh, Getaway!" she said, on a sigh, and again, "Getaway!"

His reserve with her, at which he himself was the first to marvel, went down a little then and he seized her bare arm, kissing it, almost sinking his teeth. The curve of her chin down into her throat, as she turned her head, had maddened him.

"Quit," she said.

"Never you mind. You'll wear diamonds," he said, in his sole phraseology of promise. "Will you get sore if I ask you something, Fairylin?"

"What?"

"Want one now?"

"Want what?"

"A diamond."

"No," she said. "When I'm out here I quit wanting things like that."

"Fine chance a fellow has to warm up to you!"

"Getaway!"

"What?"

"What did you do last night, after you walked home with me?"

"When?"

"You know when."

"Why, bless your heart, I went home, Fairylin!"

"Please, Getaway--"

"Home, Fairy."

"You were up in Monkey's room last night about eleven. Now think, Getaway!"

"Aw now--"

"You were."

"Aw now--"

"Nobody can fool me on your step. You tiptoed for all you were worth, but I knew it! The-ball-of your-foot--squeak! The-ball-of-your foot--squeak!"

"Sure enough, now you mention it, maybe for a minute around eleven, but only for a minute--"

"Please, Getaway, don't lie. It was for nearly all night. Comings and goings on my ceiling until I couldn't sleep, not because they were so noisy, but because they were so soft. Like ugly whispers. Is Monkey the friend you got the deal on with, Getaway?"

"We just sat up there talking old times--"

"And Muggs, about eleven o'clock, sneaking up through the halls, dressed like the messenger boy again. I saw him when I peeked out of the door to see who it was tiptoeing. Getaway, for God's sake--"

He closed over her wrist then, his face extremely pointed. It was a bony face, so narrow that the eyes and the cheek bones had to be pitched close, and his black hair, usually so shiny, was down in a bang now, because it was damp, and to Marylin there was something sinister in that dip of bang which frightened her.

"What you don't know don't hurt you. You hear that? Didn't I tell you that after a few days this business deal--_business_, get that?--will be over. Then I'm going to hold down any old job your heart desires. But first I'm going to have money in my pockets! That's the only way to make this old world sit up and take notice. Spondulicks! Then I'm going to carry you off and get spliced. See? Real money. Diamonds. If you weren't so touchy, maybe you'd have diamonds sooner than you think. Want one now?"

"Getaway, I know you're up to something. You and Monkey and Muggs are tied up with those Wall Street bond getaways."

"For the luvagod, cut that talk here! First thing I know you'll have me in a brainstorm too."

"Those fake messenger boys that get themselves hired and, instead of delivering the bonds from one office to another--disappear with them. Muggs isn't wearing that messenger's uniform for nothing. You and Monkey are working with him under cover on something. You can't pass a cop any more without tightening up. I can feel it when I have your arm. You've got that old over-your-shoulder look to you, Getaway. My father--had it. My--mother--too. Getaway!"

"By gad! you can't beat a woman!"

"You don't deny it."

"I do!"

"Oh, Getaway, I'm glad then, glad!"

"Over-the-shoulder look. Why, if I'd meet a plain-clothes this minute I'd go up and kiss him--with my teeth in his ear. That's how much I got to be afraid of."

"Oh, Getaway, I'm so glad!"

"Well, then, lay off--"

"Getaway, you jumped then! Like somebody had hit you, and it was only a kid popping a paper bag."

"You get on my nerves. You'd make a cat nervous, with your suspecting! The more a fellow tries to do for a girl like you the less--Look here now, you got to get the hell out of my business."

She did not reply, but lay to the accompaniment of his violent nervousness and pinchings into the sand, with her face still away from him, while the dusk deepened and the ocean quieted.

After a while: "Now, Marylin, don't be sore. I may be a rotten egg some ways, but when it comes to you, I'm there."

"I'm not sore, Getaway," she said, with her voice still away from him. "Only I--Let's not talk for a minute. It's so quiet out here--so full of rest."

He sat, plainly troubled, leaning back on the palms of his hands and dredging his toes into the sand. In the violet light the tender line of her chin to her throat still teased him.

Down farther along the now deserted beach a youth in a bathing suit was playing a harmonica, his knees hunched under his chin, his mouth and hand sliding at cross purposes along the harp. That was the silhouette of him against a clean sky, almost Panlike, as if his feet might be cloven.

What he played, if it had any key at all, was rather in the mood of Chopin's Nocturne in D flat major. A little sigh for the death of a day, a sob for the beauty of that death, and a hope and ecstasy for the new day yet unborn--all of that on a little throbbing mouth organ.

"Getaway," cried Marylin, and sat up, spilling sand, "that's it! That's what I meant a while ago. Hear? It can't be talked. That's it on the mouth organ!"

"It?"

"It! Yes, like I said. Somebody has to feel it inside of him, just like I do, before he can understand. Can't you feel it? Please! Listen."

"Aw, that's an old jew's-harp. I'll buy you one. How's that?"

"All right, I guess," she said, starting off suddenly toward the bathhouse.

He was relieved that she had thrown off the silence.

"Ain't mad any more, are you, Marylin?"

"No, Getaway--not mad."

"Mustn't get fussy that way with me, Marylin. It scares me off. I've had something to show you all day, but you keep scaring me off."

"What is it?" she said, tiptoe.

His mouth drew up to an oblique. "You know."

"No, I don't."

"Maybe I'll tell you and maybe I won't," he cried, scooping up a handful of sand and spraying her. "What'll you give me if I tell?"

"Why--nothing."

"Want to know?"

But at the narrowing something in his eyes she sidestepped him, stooping down at the door of her bathhouse for a last scoop of sand at him.

"No," she cried, her hair blown like spray and the same breeze carrying her laughter, guiltless of mood, out to sea.

On the way home, though, for the merest second, there recurred the puzzling quirk in her thoughtlessness.

In the crush of the electric train, packed tightly into the heart of the most yammering and petulant crowd in the world--home-going pleasure seekers--a youth rose to give her his seat. A big, beach-tanned fellow with a cowlick of hair, when he tipped her his hat, standing up off his right brow like a little apostrophe to him, and blue eyes so very wide apart, and so clear, that they ran back into his head like aisles with little lakes shining at the ends of them.

"Thank you," said Marylin, the infinitesimal second while his hat and cowlick lifted, her own gaze seeming to run down those avenues of his eyes for a look into the pools at the back.

"That was it, too, Getaway! The thing that fellow looked--that I couldn't say. He said it--with his eyes."

"Who?"

"That fellow who gave me this seat."

"I'll break his face if he goo-goos you," said Getaway, who by this time had a headache and whose feet had fitted reluctantly back into patent leather.

But inexplicably, even to herself, that night, in the shadow of the stoop of her witch of a rooming house, she let him kiss her lips. His first of her--her first to any man. It may have been that suddenly she was so extremely tired--tired of the lay of the week ahead, suggested by the smells and the noises and the consciousness of that front box pleat.

The little surrender, even though she drew back immediately, was wine to him and as truly an intoxicant.

"Marylin," he cried, wild for her lips again, "I can't be held off much longer. I'm straight with you, but I'm human, too."

"Don't, Getaway, not here! To-morrow--maybe."

"I'm crazy for you!"

"Go home now, Getaway."

"Yes--but just one more--"

"Promise me you'll go straight home from here--to bed."

"I promise. Marylin, one more. One little more. Your lips--"

"No, no--not now. Go--"

Suddenly, by a quirk in the dark, there was a flash of something down Marylin's bare third finger, so hurriedly and so rashly that it scraped the flesh.

"That's for you! I've been afraid all day. Touchy! Didn't I tell you? Diamonds! Now will you kiss me? Now will you?"

In the shadow of where she stood, looking down, it was as if she gazed into a pool of fire that was reaching in flame clear up about her head, and everywhere in the conflagration Getaway's triumphant "Now will you! Now will you!"

"Getaway," she cried, flecking her hand as if it burned, "where did you get this?"

"It's for you, Fairylin, and more like it coming. It weighs a carat and a half. That stone's worth more than a sealskin jacket. You're going to have one of those, too. Real seal! Now are you sore at me any more? Now you've a swell kick coming, haven't you? Now! Now!"

"Getaway," she cried behind her lit hand, because her palm was to her mouth and above it her eyes showing the terror in their whites, "where did you get this?"

"There!" he said, and kissed her hotly and squarely on the lips.

Somehow, with the ring off her finger and in a little pool of its light as it lay at his feet, where he stood dazed on the sidewalk, Marylin was up the stoop, through the door, up two flights, and through her own door, slamming it, locking it, and into her room, rubbing and half crying over her left third finger where the flash had been.

She was frightened, because for all of an hour she sat on the end of the cot in her little room trembling and with her palms pressed into her eyes so tightly that the darkness spun. There was quick connection in Marylin between what was emotional and what was merely sensory. She knew, from the sickness at the very pit of her, how sick were her heart and her soul--and how afraid.

She undressed in the dark--a pale darkness relieved by a lighted window across the areaway. The blue mercerized dress she slid over a hanger, covering it with one of her cotton nightgowns and putting it into careful place behind the cretonne curtain that served her as clothes closet. Her petticoat, white, with a rill of lace, she folded away. And then, in her bare feet and a pink-cotton nightgown with a blue bird machine-stitched on the yoke, stood cocked to the hurry of indistinct footsteps across her ceiling, and in the narrow slit of hallway outside her door, where the stairs led up still another flight, the-ball-of-a-foot--squeak! The sharp crack of a voice. Running.

"Getaway!" cried Marylin's heart, almost suffocating her with a dreadful spasm of intuition.

It was all so quick. In the flash of her flung-open door, as her head in its amber cloud leaned out, Getaway, bending almost double over the upper banister, his lips in his narrow face back to show a white terribleness of strain that lingered in the memory, hurled out an arm suddenly toward two men mounting the steps of the flight below him.

There was a shot then, and on the lower flight one of the men, with an immediate red mouth opening slowly in his neck, slid downstairs backward, face up.

Suddenly, from a crouching position beside her door, the second figure shot forward now, with ready and perfect aim at the already-beginning-to-be-nerveless figure of Getaway hanging over the banister with the smoking pistol.

By the reaching out of her right hand Marylin could have deflected that perfect aim. In fact, her arm sprang toward just that reflex act, then stayed itself with the jerk of one solid body avoiding collision with another.

So much quicker than it takes in the telling there marched across Marylin's sickened eyes this frieze: Her father trailing dead from the underslinging of a freight car. That moment when a uniform had stepped in from the fire escape across the bolt of Brussels lace; her mother's scream, like a plunge into the heart of a rapier. Uniforms--contemplating. On street corners. Opposite houses. Those four fingers peeping over each of her father's shoulders in the courtroom. Getaway! His foxlike face leaner. Meaner. Black mask. Electric chair. Volts. Ugh--volts! God--you know--best--help--

When the shot came that sent Getaway pitching forward down the third-floor flight she was on her own room floor in a long and merciful faint. Marylin had not reached out.

* * * * *

Time passed. Whole rows of days of buttonholes down pleats that were often groped at through tears. Heavy tears like magnifying glasses. And then, with that gorgeous and unassailable resiliency of youth, lighter tears. Fewer tears. Few tears. No tears.

Under the cretonne curtain, though, the blue mercerized frock hung unworn, and in its dark drawer remained the petticoat with its rill of lace. But one night, with a little catch in her throat (it was the last of her sobs), she took out the sport hat, and for no definite reason began to turn the jockey rosette to the side where the sun had not faded it.

These were quiet evenings in her small room. All the ceiling agitation had long ago ceased since the shame of the raided room above, and Muggs, in his absurd messenger's suit, and Monkey marching down the three flights to the clanking of steel at the wrists.

There were new footsteps now. Steps that she had also learned to know, but pleasantly. They marched out so regularly of mornings, invariably just as she was about to hook her skirtband or pull on her stockings. They came home so patly again at seven, about as she sat herself down to a bit of sewing or washing-out. They went to bed so pleasantly. Thud, on the floor, and then, after the expectant interval of unlacing, thud again. They were companionable, those footsteps, almost like reverential marching on the grave of her heart.

Marylin reversed the rosette, and as the light began to go sat down beside her window, idly, looking up. There was the star point in her patch of sky, eating its way right through the purple like a diamond, and her ache over it was so tangible that it seemed to her she could almost lift the hurt out of her heart, as if it were a little imprisoned bird. And as it grew darker there came two stars, and three, and nine, and finally the sixty hundred.

Then from the zig of the fire escape above, before it twisted down into the zag of hers, there came to Marylin, through the medley of city silences and the tears in her heart, this melody, on a jew's-harp:

If it had any key at all, it was in the mood of Chopin's Nocturne in D flat major. A little sigh for the death of a day, a sob for the beauty of that death, and the throb of an ecstasy for the new day not yet born.

Looking up against the sheer wall of the vertical city, on the ledge of fire escape above hers, and in the yellow patch of light thrown out from the room behind, a youth, with his knees hunched up under his chin, and his mouth and hand moving at cross purposes, was playing the harmonica.

Wide apart were his eyes, and blue, so that while she gazed up, smiling, as he gazed down, smiling, it was almost as if she ran up the fire escape through the long clear lanes of those eyes, for a dip into the little twin lakes at the back of them.

And--why, didn't you know?--there was a lift of cowlick to the right side of his front hair, as he sat there playing in the twilight, that was exactly the shape of an apostrophe!

THE SMUDGE

In the bleak little graveyard of Hattie Bertch's dead hopes, dead loves, and dead ecstasies, more than one headstone had long since begun to sag and the wreaths of bleeding heart to shrivel.

That was good, because the grave that is kept bubbly with tears is a tender, quivering thing, almost like an amputated bit of self that still aches with threads of life.

Even over the mound of her dead ambitions, which grave she had dug with the fingers of her heart, Hattie could walk now with unsensitive feet. It had become dry clay with cracks in it like sardonic smiles.

Smiles. That was the dreadful part, because the laugh where there have been tears is not a nice laugh, and Hattie could sit among the headstones of her dead dreams now and laugh. But not horridly. Just drearily.

There was one grave, Heart's Desire, that was still a little moist. But it, too, of late years, had begun to sink in, like an old mouth with receding gums, as if the very teeth of a smiling dream had rotted. They had.

Hattie, whose heart's desire had once been to play Juliet, played maids now. Buxom negro ones, with pale palms, white eyes, and the beat of kettledrums somewhere close to the cuticle of the balls of her feet.

She was irrevocably down on managers' and agents' lists as "comedy black." Countless the premiers she had opened to the fleck of a duster! Hattie came high, as maids go. One hundred and fifty dollars a week and no road engagements. She dressed alone. Her part in "Love Me Long" had been especially written in for the sake of the peculiar kind of comedy relief she could bring to it. A light roar of recognition swept the audience at her entrance. Once in a while, a handclap. So Hattie, whose heart's desire had once been to play Juliet, played maids now. Buxomly.

And this same Hattie, whose heart's desire had once been to kiss Love, but whose lips were still a little twisted with the taste of clay, could kiss only Love's offspring now. But not bitterly. Thanksgivingly.

Love's offspring was Marcia. Sixteen and the color and odor of an ivory fan that has lain in frangipani. And Hattie could sometimes poke her tongue into her cheek over this bit of whimsy:

It was her well-paid effort in the burnt cork that made possible, for instance, the frill of real lace that lay to the low little neck of Marcia's first party dress, as if blown there in sea spume.

Out of the profits of Hattie's justly famous Brown Cold Cream--Guaranteed Color-fast--Mulatto, Medium, Chocolate, had come Marcia's ermine muff and tippet; the enamel toilet set; the Steinway grand piano; the yearly and by no means light tuition toll at Miss Harperly's Select Day School for Girls.

You get the whimsy of it? For everything fair that was Marcia, Hattie had brownly paid for. Liltingly, and with the rill of the song of thanksgiving in her heart.

That was how Hattie moved through her time. Hugging this melody of Marcia. Through the knife-edged nervous evenings in the theater. Bawlings. Purple lips with loose muscles crawling under the rouge. Fetidness of scent on stale bodies. Round faces that could hook into the look of vultures when the smell of success became as the smell of red meat. All the petty soiled vanities, like the disordered boudoir of a cocotte. The perpetual stink of perfume. Powder on the air and caking the breathing. Open dressing-room doors that should have been closed. The smelling geometry of the make-up box. Curls. Corsets. Cosmetics. Men in undershirts, grease-painting. "Gawdalmighty, Tottie, them's my teddy bears you're puttin' on." Raw nerves. Raw emotions. Ego, the actor's overtone, abroad everywhere and full of strut. "Overture!" The wait in the wings. Dizziness at the pit of the stomach. Audiences with lean jaws etched into darkness. Jaws that can smile or crack your bones and eat you. Faces swimming in the stage ozone and wolfish for cue. The purple lips--

Almost like a frieze stuck on to the border of each day was Hattie's life in the theater. Passementerie.

That was how Hattie treated it. Especially during those placid years of the phenomenal New York run of "Love Me Long." The outer edge of her reality. The heart of her reality? Why, the heart of it was the long morning hours in her own fragrant kitchen over doughnuts boiled in oil and snowed under in powdered sugar! Cookies that bit with a snap. Filet of sole boned with fingers deft at it and served with a merest fluff of tartar sauce. Marcia ate like that. Preciously. Pecksniffily. An egg at breakfast a gag to the sensibilities! So Hattie ate hers in the kitchen, standing, and tucked the shell out of sight, wrapped in a lettuce leaf. Beefsteak, for instance, sickened Marcia, because there was blood in the ooze of its juices. But Hattie had a sly way of camouflage. Filet mignon (so strengthening, you see) crushed under a little millinery of mushrooms and served under glass. Then when Marcia's neat little row of neat little teeth bit in and the munch began behind clean and careful lips, Hattie's heart, a regular old bandit for cunning, beat hoppity, skippity, jump!

Those were her realities. Home. The new sandwich cutters. Heart shape. Diamond shape. Spade. The strip of hall carpet newly discovered to scour like new with brush and soap and warm water. Epstein's meat market throws in free suet. The lamp with the opal-silk shade for Marcia's piano. White oilcloth is cleaner than shelf paper. Dotted Swiss curtains, the ones in Marcia's room looped back with pink bows. Old sashes, pressed out and fringed at the edges.

And if you think that Hattie's six rooms and bath and sunny, full-sized kitchen, on Morningside Heights, were trumped-up ones of the press agent for the Sunday Supplement, look in.

Any afternoon. Tuesday, say, and Marcia just home from school. On Tuesday afternoon of every other week Hattie made her cream, in a large copper pot that hung under the sink. Six dozen half-pint jars waiting to be filled with Brown Cold Cream. One hundred and forty-four jars a month. Guaranteed Color-fast. Mulatto, Medium, Chocolate. Labeled. Sealed. Sold. And demand exceeding the supply. An ingratiating, expert cream, known the black-faced world over. It slid into the skin, not sootily, but illuminating it to winking, African copper. For instance, Hattie's make-up cream for Linda in "Love Me Long" was labeled "Chocolate." But it worked in even a truer brown, as if it had come out of the pigment instead of gone into the pores.

Four hours of stirring it took, adding with exact minutiae the mysteriously proper proportions of spermacetti, oil of sweet almonds, white wax--But never mind. Hattie's dark secret was her own.

Fourteen years of her black art as Broadway's maid _de luxe_ had been her laboratory. It was almost her boast now--remember the sunken headstones--that she had handled spotlessly every fair young star of the theaters' last ten years.

It was as mysterious as pigment, her cream, and as true, and netted her, with occasional extra batches, an average of two hundred dollars a month. She enjoyed making it. Singing as she stirred or rather stirring as she sang, the plenitude of her figure enveloped in a blue-and-white bungalow apron with rickrack trimming.

Often Marcia, home from day school, watched. Propped up in the window frame with her pet cat, a Persian, with eyes like swimming pools with painted green bottoms, seated in a perfect circle in her quiet lap, for all the world in the attitude of a sardel except for the toothpick through.

Sometimes it almost seemed as if Marcia did the purring. She could sit like that, motionless, her very stare seeming to sleep. To Hattie that stare was beautiful, and in a way it was. As if two blue little suns were having their high noon.

Sometimes Marcia offered to help, because toward the end, Hattie's back could ache at this process, terribly, the pain knotting itself into her face when the rotary movement of her stirring arm began to yank at her nerves.

"Momie, I'll stir for a while."

Marcia's voice was day-schooled. As clipped, as boxed, and as precise as a hedge. Neat, too, as neat as the way her clear lips met, and her teeth, which had a little mannerism of coming down after each word, biting them off like threads. They were appealing teeth that had never grown big or square. Very young corn. To Hattie there was something about them that reminded her of a tiny set of Marcia's doll dishes that she had saved. Little innocences.

"I don't mind stirring, dear. I'm not tired."

"But your face is all twisted."

Hattie's twisted face could induce in Marcia the same gagged pallor that the egg in the morning or the red in the beefsteak juices brought there.

"Go in and play the piano awhile, Marcy, I'll be finished soon."

"Sh-h-h! No. Pussy-kitty's asleep."

As the cream grew heavier and its swirl in the pot slower, Hattie could keep the twist out of her face only by biting her tongue. She did, and a little arch of sweat came out in a mustache.

The brown mud of the cream began to fluff. Hattie rubbed a fleck of it into her freckled forearm. Yes, Hattie's arm was freckled, and so was the bridge of her nose, in a little saddle. Once there had been a prettiness to the freckles because they whitened the skin they sprinkled and were little stars to the moon reddiness of Hattie's hair. But the red of the moon had set coldly in Hattie's hair now, and the stars were just freckles, and there was the dreaded ridge of flesh showing above the ridge of her corsets, and when she leaned forward to stir her cheeks hung forward like a spaniel's, not of fat, but heaviness. Hattie's arms and thighs were granite to the touch and to the scales. Kindly freckled granite. She weighed almost twice what she looked. Marcia, whose hips were like lyres, hated the ridge above the corset line and massaged it. Mab smacking the Himalayas.

After a while, there in the window frame, Marcia closed her eyes. There was still the illusion of a purr about her. Probably because, as her kitten warmed in its circle, its coziness began to whir mountingly. The September afternoon was full of drone. The roofs of the city from Hattie's kitchen window, which overlooked Morningside Heights, lay flat as slaps. Tranced, indoor quiet. Presently Hattie began to tiptoe. The seventy-two jars were untopped now, in a row on a board over the built-in washtub. Seventy-two yawning for content. Squnch! Her enormous spoon into the copper kettle and flop, gurgle, gooze, softly into the jars. One--two--three--At the sixty-eighth, Marcia, without stirring or lifting her lids, spoke into the sucky silence.

"Momie?"

"Yes, Marcy."

"You'll be glad."

Hattie, pausing at the sixty-eighth, "Why, dear?"

"I came home in Nonie Grosbeck's automobile. I'm invited to a dinner dance October the seventeenth. At their house in Gramercy Park."

The words must have gone to Hattie's knees, because, dropping a spat of mulatto cold cream on the linoleum, she sat down weakly on the kitchen chair that she had painted blue and white to match the china cereal set on the shelf above it.

"Marcy!"

"And she likes me better than any girl in school, momie, and I'm to be her chum from to-day on, and not another girl in school is invited except Edwina Nelson, because her father's on nearly all the same boards of directors with Mr. Grosbeck, and--"

"Marcia! Marcia! and you came home from school just as if nothing had happened! Child, sometimes I think you're made of ice."

"Why, I'm glad, momie."

But that's what there were, little ice glints of congealed satisfaction in Marcia's eyes.

"Glad," said Hattie, the word full of tears. "Why, honey, you don't realize it, but this is the beginning! This is the meaning of my struggle to get you into Miss Harperly's school. It wasn't easy. I've never told you the--strings I had to pull. Conservative people, you see. That's what the Grosbecks are, too. Home people. The kind who can afford to wear dowdy hats and who have lived in the same house for thirty years."

"Nome's mother was born in the house they live in."

"Substantial people, who half-sole their shoes and endow colleges. Taxpayers. Policyholders. Church members. Oh, Marcia, those are the safe people!"

"There's a Grosbeck memorial window in the Rock Church."

"I used to be so afraid for you, Marcy. Afraid you would take to the make-believe folks. The play people. The theater. I used to fear for you! The Pullman car. The furnished room. That going to the hotel room, alone, nights after the show. You laugh at me sometimes for just throwing a veil over my face and coming home black-face. It's because I'm too tired, Marcy. Too lonesome for home. On the road I always used to think of all the families in the audience. The husbands and wives. Brides and grooms. Sweethearts. After the performance they all went to homes. To brownstone fronts like the Grosbecks'. To cottages. To flats. With a snack to eat in the refrigerator or laid out on the dining-room table. Lamps burning and waiting. Nighties laid out and bedcovers turned back. And then--me. Second-rate hotels. That walk through the dark downtown streets. Passing men who address you through closed lips. The dingy lobby. There's no applause lasts long enough, Marcia, to reach over that moment when you unlock your hotel room and the smell of disinfectant and unturned mattress comes out to you."

"Ugh!"

"Oh, keep to the safe people, Marcia! The unexciting people, maybe, but the safe home-building ones with old ideals and old hearthstones."

"Nonie says they have one in their library that comes from Italy."

"Hitch your ideal to a hearthstone like that, Marcia."

"Nonie goes to riding academy."

"So shall you."

"It's six dollars an hour."

"I don't care."

"Her father's retired except for being director in banks. And, momie--they don't mind, dear--about us. Nonie knows that my--father is--is separated and never lived at home with us. She's broad-minded. She says just so there's no scandal, a divorce, or anything like that. She said it's vulgar to cultivate only rich friends. She says she'd go with me even if she's forbidden to."

"Why, Marcy darling, why should she be forbidden?"

"Oh, Nonie's broadminded. She says if two people are unsuited they should separate, quietly, like you and my father. She knows we're one of the first old Southern families on my father's side. I--I'm not trying to make you talk about it, dear, but--but we are--aren't we?"

"Yes, Marcy."

"He--he was just--irresponsible. That's not being--not nice people, is it?"

"No, Marcy."

"Nonie's not forbidden. She just meant in case, momie. You see, with some old families like hers--the stage--but Nonie says her father couldn't even say anything to that if he wanted to. His own sister went on the stage once, and they had to hush it up in the papers."

"Did you explain to her, Marcy, that stage life at its best can be full of fine ideals and truth? Did you make her see how regular your own little life has been? How little you know about--my work? How away I've kept you? How I won't even play out-of-town engagements so we can always be together in our little home? You must explain all those things to your friends at Miss Harperly's. It helps--with steady people."

"I have, momie, and she's going to bring me home every afternoon in their automobile after we've called for her brother Archie at Columbia Law School."

"Marcy! the Grosbeck automobile bringing you home every day!"

"And it's going to call for me the night of the party. Nonie's getting a lemon taffeta."

"I'll get you ivory, with a bit of real lace!"

"Oh, momie, momie, I can scarcely wait!"

"What did she say, Marcy, when she asked--invited you?"

"She?"

"Nonie."

"Why--she--didn't invite me, momie."

"But you just said--"

"It was her brother Archie invited me. We called for him at Columbia Law School, you see. It was he invited me. Of course Nonie wants me and said 'Yes' right after him--but it's he--who wants Nonie and me to be chums. I--He--I thought--I--told--you--momie."