As he hit the street he felt better, remembering the way she’d winced. It wasn’t much, but it was something. It offered a little satisfaction. But all at once she faded from his mind and everything faded except the things in front of his eyes, the rutted street and the gutter and the sagging doorsteps of decaying houses.
It struck him full force, the unavoidable knowledge that he was riding through life on a fourth-class ticket.
He stared at the splintered front doors and unwashed windows and the endless obscene phrases inscribed with chalk on the tenement walls. For a moment he stopped and looked at the ageless two-word phrase, printed in yellow chalk by some nameless expert who’d put it there in precise Gothic lettering. It was Vernon Street’s favorite message to the world. And now, in Gothic print, its harsh and ugly meaning was tempered with a strange solemnity. He stood there and read it aloud.
The sound was somehow soothing. He managed to smile at himself. Then he shrugged, and turned away from the chalked wall, and went on walking down Vernon Street.
3
He walked slowly, not with weariness, but only because he didn’t feel quite ready to go home and he wanted the walk to last as long as possible. From a small pocket in his work pants he took out a nickel-plated watch and the dial showed twenty past one. He wondered why he wasn’t sleepy. On the docks today he’d put in three hours’ overtime and he’d been up since five in the morning. He knew he should have been in bed long ago. He couldn’t understand why he wasn’t tired.
He moved past the vacant lots on Fourth Street and walked parallel to a row of wooden shacks where the colored people lived. One of the shacks contained a still that manufactured corn whisky. The bootlegger’s neighbors were elderly churchgoing people who continually reported the bootlegger to the authorities, and were unable to understand why the bootlegger was never arrested. The bootlegger could have told them that he always handed his payoffs to the law when his neighbors were in church. It simplified matters all round.
Bordering the wooden shacks there was an alley, then another vacant lot, then a couple of two-storied brick tenements filled with Armenians, Ukrainians, Norwegians, Portuguese, and various mixed breeds. They all got along fairly well except on week ends, when there was a lot of drinking, and then the only thing that could stop the commotion was the arrival of the Riot Squad.
Passing the tenements, he crossed another alley and arrived at the three-storied wooden house that was almost two hundred years old. It was owned by his father and it had been handed down through four generations of Kerrigans.
He stood there on the pavement and looked at the house and saw the loose slats and the broken shutters and the caved-in doorsteps. There was only a little paint clinging to the wooden walls and it was chipped and had long ago lost its color, so that the house was a drab, unadorned gray, a splintered and unsightly piece of run-down real estate, just like any other dump on Vernon Street.