Ninth Avenue

·NINTH· AVENUE
By MAXWELL BODENHEIM
New York BONI & LIVERIGHT 1926
COPYRIGHT 1926 :: BY BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
NINTH AVENUE
When the light of morning touches the buildings and pavements of a city, it always seems to borrow their hardness and to lose in some degree its quality of flowing detachment. The Sunday morning that fell upon Ninth Avenue, New York City, gave you a sense of invisible stiffness in its very air. The buildings, with their smudged, flat fronts and tops, presented the impression of huge warehouses stretching down both sides of the street—the appearance of holding commodities rather than human beings. Most of them were five or six stories in height, and their curtained, oblong windows and the bright, tawdry shops at their base had an oddly lifeless aspect, in spite of the sounds and animations which occurred within and around them. The iron elevated-railroad structure that extended down the street, with all of its roar and rush of trains, could not destroy the spirit of silent inertia that lurked within the scene.
Blanche Palmer stood in front of a bureau, in one of the apartments that lined the street, and combed her dark red, bobbed hair, as though it were a sacred and perilous performance. She was only partially dressed, and the mild light that came in through a rear window from the courtyard brought an extra vividness to her semiplump arms, abruptly rounded shoulders and moderately swelling bosom. Their freshness stood out, a little forlorn and challenging, in the disordered room with its half drab and half gaudy arrangements. The brass bed, the magazine-posters of pretty women against the pink-flowered wallpaper, the red plush chair with the most infinitely smug of shapes, the white chintz, half-dirty curtain and dark green shade at the window—all of them seemed to be meanly contending against the youth and life of her body.
She was fairly tall, with most of the weight of her body centered below her waist and with an incongruously small torso, but this effect was not as clumsy as it might have been, since it was relieved by a bold approach to symmetry. Something of a child and an amazon met in her body. Her face was not pretty if you examined each of its features separately—the overwide lips, the nose tilting out too suddenly at the tip, and the overstraight, shaved eyebrows—but the whole of it had a piquant and enticing irregularity, and it was redeemed by her large, deeply set, bluish-gray eyes and the fine smoothness of her cream-white skin.