It is a good life, then, about the best life they could have hoped for, but good must not be mistaken for easy, since it is the lot of shoes to work hard, even under the most positive circumstances, particularly in a place like New York, where a sole can go for months without stepping on a single tuft of grass or the tiniest patch of soft ground, where the extremes of hot and cold can cause havoc to the long-term health of leathery things, not to mention the damage wrought by downpours and snowfalls, of inadvertent missteps into puddles and drifts, of repeated dousings and drenchings, all the indignities that are visited upon them when the weather turns wet and foul, many of which could be avoided if their conscientious master were even more conscientious, but Quine is not a man who believes in rubbers or galoshes, and even in the heaviest blizzards he has no truck with snow boots, preferring at all times the company of his beleaguered brogans, who are both honored by his trust in them and vexed by his thoughtlessness.
Pounding the pavement: day in and day out, that is what Quine does, and therefore that is what Hank and Frank do as well. If there is any consolation in having their heels and soles worn down by the steady, abrasive interactions of leather and asphalt, it is that the two of them are in it together, brothers sharing their fate as one. Like most brothers, however, they have their moments of discord and petulance, their feuds and hot-tempered outbursts, for even if they are attached to one man’s body, they themselves are two, and each one’s relationship to that body is slightly different, since Quine’s left foot and right foot are not always doing the same thing at the same time. Sitting in chairs, for example. As a left-handed person, he tends to cross his left leg over his right leg far more often than his right leg over his left, and few sensations are more enjoyable than feeling yourself being lifted into the air, of quitting the ground for a while and having your sole bared to the world, and because Hank is the left shoe and consequently is able to enjoy this experience more often than Frank, Frank harbors a certain resentment toward Hank, which he mostly struggles to suppress, but sometimes the liftoff puts Hank in such buoyant spirits that he can’t stop himself from rubbing it in, laughing from his high perch as he dangles to the right of the master’s right knee and calling out to Frank, How’s the weather down there, Frankie boy?, at which point Frank will inevitably lose his composure, telling Hank to butt out and mind his own business. At the same time, Frank often pities Hank for being the left shoe of a left-handed man, since Quine generally takes his first step with his left foot, and whenever they pause for a red light on rainy or snowy days, the first step across the street is always the most perilous one, the often catastrophic fording of the gutter, and how many times has Hank been dunked in puddles and immersed in soaking mounds of slush when he himself has remained dry? Too many times to count. Frank rarely laughs in the face of his brother’s humiliations and near drownings, but sometimes, when he is in a particularly sour mood, he just can’t help himself.
Still and all, in spite of their occasional spats and misunderstandings, they have become the best of friends, and whenever they look at the brogans worn by their master’s partner, a pair of grizzle-guts named Ed and Fred (all shoe couples in Ferguson’s story have rhyming names), Hank and Frank know how blessed they are to have fallen in with an upstanding sort like Abner Quine rather than the slovenly thug he works with, Walter Benton, who seems happiest with his job when he’s punching out suspects in the interrogation room or kicking them in the back with his shoes. Ed and Fred have done this dirty work for him often enough over the years to have been brutalized by it, and they have turned into an ornery pair of low-life cruds, so cynical and disgusted with the world that they haven’t talked to each other for close to a year — not because they don’t get along anymore but simply because they can’t be bothered. On top of that, Ed and Fred are beginning to fall apart, for Benton is a neglectful master as well as a stupid one, and he has allowed the heels of his shoes to wear down without replacing them, has done nothing about the hole developing in Ed’s underbottom or the cracked leather skin in the toe crease of Fred’s upper, and not once in all the time that Hank and Frank have known those ratty buggers (Hank’s phrase for them) have they ever been polished. By contrast, Hank and Frank are polished twice a week, and in the two years they have been serving their master they have each been given four new heels and two new soles. They still feel young, whereas Ed and Fred, who went on the job only six months before they did, are old, so old now they’re just about finished and ready to be junked.
Because they are work shoes, they rarely get to accompany their master when he steps out with the ladies. The pursuit of love requires something less homely and down to earth than brogans, so Hank and Frank are cast aside in favor of Abner Q.’s triple-eyeletted dress shoes or his black alligator slip-ons, which always fills them with disappointment, not only because they dread being left alone in the dark but because they have been with Quine on several of his amorous excursions (when he was too pressed to go home after work and change), and they know how much fun those outings can be, especially when the master spends the night in a woman’s bed, which means that Hank and Frank get to spend the night on the floor beside the bed, and because it is the woman’s apartment, the woman’s shoes are there as well, most often right next to them, and how raucous and jolly it was the first time, when they chatted and laughed and sang songs with Flora and Nora, an adorable pair of red satin high heels, and all the other times since then in a different woman’s apartment, a big blonde the master calls either Alice or Darling, cavorting in her place on Greenwich Street with a pair of black pumps named Leah and Mia and a pair of penny loafers named Molly and Dolly, and how those girls carried on and giggled when they saw the master take off his clothes and strip down to the altogether, and how they gawked when they saw the ample breasts of their mistress bouncing up and down in the throes of love. Such splendid times they were, so scintillating when compared to the drab world of sweaty criminals and judges in black robes, and all the more precious to Hank and Frank for having been so few.
Months go by, and it becomes more and more apparent to them that Alice is the One. Not only has the master stopped seeing other women, but most of his spare time is now spent with her, his beloved Darling, who has rapidly acquired several other names as well, among them Angel, Sweetheart, Gorgeous, and Monkey Face, signs of an ever-increasing intimacy that leads to the inevitable moment in late May when, sitting on a bench in Central Park with Alice, Quine at last pops the big question. Because it is a workday, Hank and Frank are there to witness the proposal, and they are more than encouraged by Alice’s tender response, I’ll do everything to make you happy, my love, which seems to suggest they will be happy, too, as happy with the new arrangement as they have been with the old.