Now. Up. I'll go first." She puffed out her instructions. "Lord, they should make these contraptions of wood." We struggled up with it and carried it into the room where the old woman lay, her white hair arranged in a fringe that nearly met her brow.
Kitty wore hers that way. Mrs. Kiefer's cheeks were collapsed and her face was moist. It reminded me of a loaf, before the baker puts it in the oven, smeared with white of egg. I went into the hall quickly.
"Thanks," Mrs. Bartlett whispered loudly from the dark square inlet of the lower hall.
"Thanks loads." And her teeth shone up at me good-naturedly.
MormIN'C began dull and numb, then brightened miraculously. I tramped the neighborhood. It was warm in @eaancearnest at one o'clock, with a tide of summer odors from the stockyards and the sewers (odors so old in the city-bred memory they are no longer repugnant).
In the upper light there were small fair heads of cloud turning. The streets, in contrast, looked burnt out; the chimneys pointed heavenward in openmouthed exhaus. tion. The turf, intersected by sidewalk, was bedraggled with the whole winter's deposit of deadwood, match cards, cigarettes, dogmire, rubble. The grass behind the palings and wrought-iron frills was still yellow, although in many places the sun had already succeeded in shaking it into livelier green. And the houses, their doors and windows open, drawing in the freshness, were like old drunkards or Consumptives taking a cure.
Indeed, the atmosphere of the houses, the brick and plaster and wood, the asphalt, the pipes and gratings and hydrants outside, and the in-teriors-comcurtains and bedding, furniture, striped wall. paperand horny ceilings, the ravaged throats of entry halls and the smeary blind eyes of windows-comth atmosphere, I say, was one of an impossible hope, the hope of an ira. possible rejuvenation.
Nevertheless, a few large birds, robins and grackles, appeared in the trees, and some of the trees themselves were beginning to bud. The large rough cases cracked at the tip, showing sticky green within, and one tree was erupt. ing in crude red along its higher branches. I even saw in a ibrick passageway an untimely butterfly, out of place both in the season and the heart of the city, and somehow alien to the whole condition of the century.
And there were children, on skates and bicycles, or scouting along the curbs for salvage, playing ball or hop. ping after bits of glass in chalk squares. There was a showingof ice-cream cones, despite the inroads of rationing, and a sprinkling of spring articles, though infants still wore wool leggings and the elderly were fully buttoned and somberly hatted. Sound was magnified and vision en. larged, red was rough and bloody, yellow dear but thin, blue increasingly warm. All but the sun's own yellow that ripped up the middle of each street, making two of every. thing that stood-object and shadow.
The room, when I returned to it, was as full of this yellow as an egg is of yolk. In honor of the transformation in the weather, I decided to dean up for supper and, as I stood changing my shirt in the unaccustomed brilliance. of the mirror, I observed new folds near my mouth and, around my eyes and the root of my nose, marks that had not been there a year before. It is not pleasant to find such changes. But, tying my tie, I shrugged them off as, inevitable, the price of experience, an outlay that had better be made ungrudgingly, since it was bound in any case. to be collected.
March 26
W. ri. SD been short of funds for several days. Iva re. ceived her check on Thursday but, instead of cashing it, brought it home and left it in my bureau drawer with instructionsto take it to the bank. The reason she gave for not taking it to the currency exchange downtown, as usual, was that this week she was working evenings in the reference room and did not want to risk carrying such a sum home. She had heard rumors of holdups.
But I refused to go to the near-by bank with it.
I had had several experiences there with Ira's checks. I had been turned down twice last fall; once because I had insuticient identification and, again, when the vice president, looking from my cards to me and from me to my cards, once more said, "How do I know you're this person?"
I replied, "You can take my word for it."
He did not smile; I did not rate a smile. But the indications were that under different circumstanceswsay, if I had been clean-shaven and my shirt had not been frayed, or if bits of torn lining had not shown from my coat sleeve-my words would have evoked one. lie sat back seriously and considered the check. He was a plump man, about thirty years old. Mr. Frink stood in brass letters on the wooden block at his finger tips; his clean sandy hair was already fading back in two broad freckled arches. He would be bald within a few years, his bare head spotted with those blackish freckles.
"That's a city check, Mr '@.8.Certainly there isn't much risk in accepting a city check."
"If you know who the endorser is," said Mr.
Frink, unclasping his pen and shuffling professionally through my cards with one hand. "Now, where do you work, Joseph?"
In such cases I generally answer that I am working at Inter-American; it is an impressive reference and not a wholly false one; Mr. Mallender would stand behind me, I am sure. But because he addressed me by my first name, as though I were an immigrant or a young boy or a Negro, I said-com. missing diplomacy without a second thought-"I'm not working anywhere now. I'm waiting for my draft call."
Of course, that finished my prospects. He immediately @? said, reassembling his pen, that the bank did not make a practice of cashing the checks of nondepositors. He was sorry.
I gathered up my cards.
"Here, you'll notice that I have a surname, Frink," I said, holding one of the cards up. "I realize it's difficult to deal with the public efficiently and stilI politely. All the same, people don't like to be treated like suspicious charactersand patronized at the same time." I made an effort to control myself as I said this, but when I ended I saw that several bystanders were looking at me. Frink seemed more alarmed by my tone than by my words. I am not sure he understood them, but he faced me as if to show that in him I menaced a courageous man. It was a foolish incident. A year ago I would have accepted his explanation politely and have moved away.
Too late, I stuffed the check into my pocket and, without another glance at Frink, I walked off.
Natural/y, when I came to explain my reasons for not going back to the bank I could not tell Iva all of the story. I said merely that I had been turned down twice and did not want it to happen a third time.
"Oh, now, Joseph, why should there be any trouble about it? I've cashed hundreds of checks."
"But they turned me down. And it's as embarrassing as anything can be."
"I'll give you my identification disk. All you have to do is show it."
"I won't do it," I said.
"Then go somewhere else. Go to the currency exchange, the one near Lake-Park Avenue."
"Before they do business with you there, they make you fill out a long, long form. They want to know everything… where you're employed. If I say I'm not working, they'll laugh me out of the place. "What?
Not working? Anybody can get a job these days."
No, I won't go. Why ton't you cash it downtown?"
"I'm not going to carry all that money late at night. It's out of the question. If I'm held up, we'll have to borrow from your father or mine, or from Amos."
"Have you ever been held up?"
"You know I haven't been."
"Then why have you suddenly begun to worry about t?"
"You read two papers a day, from front to back.