When Mary looked back on the best days with Alfred, leaving out the early days, when they were both so young and had nothing in the world to do but spend their days off taking walks or sipping coffee, the time that Alfred spent as a toy vendor was the happiest in their entire history. Mary remembered visiting him on his corner, the way he was with the children who approached him, drawing them in with his promise of shining train cars and paper birds. Even the ones who showed up with only a penny could buy a sweet. It was a good time, and it lasted longer than Mary expected. One whole year: October 1904 to October 1905. And then, about the time the weather turned cold, he began arriving home in a quiet mood. He pushed his food around his plate. Where once he would say that it was a great life, he took to saying it was a good enough life, for the time being.
“Maybe you want your own store?” Mary suggested. It was not impossible. With a few more years of saving, the right rent, and the right location, maybe it could happen. 1905 had been a very good year for Mary. She’d worked continuously, and on her days off she’d taken side jobs cooking for Ladies’ Luncheons.
But Alfred was shocked at the suggestion. “My own store? What I want is fewer toys in my life, Mary, not more. These kids”—he put his head in his hands—“you wouldn’t believe the noise they make. I caught one putting a handful of sweets in his pocket without paying, and when I made him turn his pockets inside out he said he had paid when I know very well he hadn’t. I would’ve thrashed the kid if his father hadn’t been standing right there, grinning, probably telling the boy what to do. They’re worse than the flies.”
He began sleeping late, opening his cart at noon, leaving at two. On the same short block as Alfred’s cart were twenty-four others, all packed in tightly against one another. Most were food peddlers, and Alfred claimed that under their carts was a year’s worth of garbage. Mary didn’t see why this was so upsetting to him all of a sudden, when it had been like that all along. Unlike other neighborhoods, where the garbage piles were removed regularly by the Department of Sanitation, the rubbish on the Lower East Side was packed four or five inches deep all along the block, and there was no skirting it. Each day’s new garbage got trampled underfoot by the crowds, and when the city sweepers came with their wispy brooms on Tuesday mornings it was like using a teaspoon to empty beaches of sand.
“But it’s getting to winter now. Winter always smells better than summer.”
Alfred could not be convinced.
When the first snowfall came he didn’t bother going to his cart at all, and instead checked with the Department of Street Cleaning to see if they needed an extra man on their snow-removal crew. The DSC took him on, gave him a crisp white uniform with matching hat, and out he went to pick up his cart, broom, and shovel with all the other white wings. Colonel Waring, New York City’s latest street-cleaning commissioner, referred to the white wings as his army, and Mary supposed it was an army of sorts, an army fighting against the enemy garbage, which was as powerful and intimidating as any foreign invader. But in February 1906, after a record-breaking snowfall, and after the DSC had to go upstate to Otisville to draft seventy-five additional men from the sanatorium to help clear the snow, they told Alfred to turn in his uniform.
“What did you do?” Mary asked when she found out. It was a habit she couldn’t seem to shake, asking questions she’d never get answers to. “They’re desperate for men. They’re advertising everywhere. And in the middle of that they let you go?”
When she could see he wasn’t going to answer, she followed him down the stairs to the street, stuck to him as he rounded corner after corner, trying to shake her. Finally, he turned around.
“Will you let it go, Mary?”
“No. I don’t understand. You have to tell me.”
“It’s — I don’t know. It’s not a real goddamn army, but they seem to think it is. It’s freezing outside. Every man’s gloves are soaked through by lunch. So I had to keep warm.”
And Mary knew exactly what had happened. He’d gone to work with his flask, kept it in his pocket or his boot, and had sipped himself to warmth while he was working. And one day, he’d sipped too much.
After that he stopped trying to get work altogether and instead went out early in the morning to sit in Nation’s Pub all day long. Mary let it go for a few weeks, reminding herself that men were like cats that needed to lick their wounds for a good long time before going to battle again. And then she stopped letting it go. When he got up and dressed she asked him a dozen times where he was headed and when he finally told her what she already knew, she couldn’t stop herself from flying down the stairs of the building after him, telling him that he’d better wake up, pay attention, life was not something to be frittered away on a barstool, and if he wanted a woman who would mollycoddle such a man he’d better look elsewhere. Alfred had always been a drinker. Since the very first day. But he’d been a drinker like all men were drinkers, a constant slow-paced drinker who walked the ledge easily, and in fact got through the day with more work behind him with the help of a little nip now and again. There was a time when no one could shovel coal like Alfred. No one could lead a pack of horses. No one could lift a piano. And what harm if during a job the men passed a flask and had a laugh and kept going, shoulder to the wheel? But what Alfred had done was work his way to the limit of the ledge to peek at what was below. He edged and edged and finally, inevitably, he tumbled forward.
The moments he came out of it were brief, and slipped by Mary like a breeze on a humid afternoon. One day, he was sound enough to fix the plaster by their window, and even repainted the whole wall. Another time, after Mary mentioned only once that they needed a new mattress, he went out and got one and carried it up six flights on his back. He put it on the bed, made up the sheets, and carried the old mattress down to the curb before Mary came home. “Surprise!” he said, after encouraging her to go lie down and rest after such a long day. She didn’t check her emergency envelope in the closet. She didn’t care. He’d heard her, and acted, and she would not ask a single question and ruin it. Another time, after not coming home for twenty-four hours, he arrived sober, and shaven, and told Mary he was going to take her out for a steak dinner. They’d go to Dolan’s, and after, they’d walk down to Germantown and go to a beer hall. Instead of asking him where he’d been, she suggested they skip Dolan’s and bring their dinner with them to the beer hall so he’d have more time there, more time for him to speak German with his countrymen, and more time for Mary to listen to that choked language coming out of him. He never spoke German at home. He’d never taught her a single word, and sometimes she wondered if that was the key, if that was the thing that hung between them, and if she were only able to understand him in his first language, she’d be able to understand him completely, and they’d be happy, and everything would make sense.
And then he disappeared again for a few days. Twice, Mary spotted him rounding corners in their neighborhood, and worse, heard him mentioned by the neighbors. “When I talked to Alfred yesterday,” one or another of them would say — and Mary would not be able to hear the rest over the blood that rushed to her head. “I can’t live like this,” she said when he came home next, but he just smiled, and hugged her, and told her he missed her, and pulled her toward him until they were hip to hip, and how did he smell so clean when he’d been on a bender? Where did he go wash himself before coming home? More and more she found herself unable to get past that wall of questions. She couldn’t kick sand over that inferno of fury that had started inside her with just one piece of kindling, and then grown with another, then another. When he pulled her toward their bed, she could no longer force her mind to think only of the warm cave of his body, even though she knew things were always better when she did put everything else aside and let him lift her and move her, let him be the Alfred she loved most.