CHAPTER III
In the twenties, years slip by with the flimsy rapidity of soap-bubbles blown from the breath of time, unless the person experiencing them has found an unusually cloistered or passionless existence. As Blanche sat in the Beauty Parlor where she worked as a hair-curler, she remembered that she was twenty-two and that her birthday was only twenty-four hours distant.
The year which had elapsed since her brother’s expulsion as a prize-fighter seemed to be little more than a crowded and instructive month. As she sat in the Parlor, during an afternoon’s pause between patrons, she said to herself: “Gee, here I am, already twenty-two! I’ll be ’n old dame before I know it. It’s enough to give you the jimjams, it is.” Something that was not wisdom but rather an engrossed search for wisdom rested on the smooth plumpness of her face. Again, a light within her eyes came near to the quality of self-possessed skepticism and shifted against the survival of former hesitations and faiths. Life to her was no longer a conforming welter of sexual advances and retreats, with moments of self-disapproval bearing the indistinct desire “to get somewhere”—thoughts and emotions had snapped within her; problems were assuming a more unmistakable shape; the people in life were displaying to her more indisputable virtues and faults; and a spirit of revolt was simply waiting for some proper climax. Her past year of argument and contact with Rosenberg had given her a more assured tongue and a more informed head. The books that he had supplied her with had now crystallized to specific inducements—tales about men and women whose lives were brave, or distressed, pursuits of truth, and an ever keener knowledge of each other, and a sexual freedom that was not merely the dodging of lust to an eventual marriage ceremony, and a dislike for the shams and kowtowings of other men and women. Frequently, she invited the scoffing of her family by remaining at home and reading some novel until well after midnight, with her eyes never leaving the pages. Her sister and brothers, and her parents, felt that she was getting “queer in the dome,” wasting her time like that when she might have been picking up some fellow with serious intentions, or enjoying herself, and though she still went out with men three or four nights of every week, the family were beginning to fear that she was not a “regular” girl and that silly, unwomanly ideas had gotten into her head. In their opinion twenty-two was the age at which a woman should either be married or be moving toward that end, and they couldn’t understand her apathy in this matter. They cast most of the blame on Rosenberg—that dopey mut that she was always afraid to bring around had evidently turned her against her family and filled her with junk from the foolish books he loaned her.
Even her mother had begged her to stop going with him and had complained: “It’s you that’s not me own sweet girl any more. You oughta stop traipsin’ around with that Jew boy, you oughta. He won’t never marry you, and it’s I that wouldn’t let you, anyways. He’s got no money and he’s not right in his head, he’s not!”
Harry had threatened to “beat up” Rosenberg, if he ever saw him, and her father had railed at her, but she had seemed to look upon their objections as a huge joke, which had angered them all the more but left them powerless to do anything except to lock her in her room at night—an expedient that could hardly be tried on a twenty-two-year-old daughter who earned her own living and could leave the family roof whenever she pleased.
On her own part, Blanche had treated their railings with a perverse resentment. “I’ll go on seeing him just to spite them—who’re they to boss me around,” she had said to herself. In reality, she had lost much of her old respect for Rosenberg’s mind and verbal talents, and she was beginning to see flaws in his make-up.
“He never does anything but talk—he’s a wonder there,” she had said to herself once. “He takes it all out in wind. I’ll bet you he’ll be working in that library for the rest of his life, ’r in some other place just like it. ’N’ again, he always says he’s going to write big things, but I never see him doing it. I’d like to meet a fellow that’s doing something—making a name for himself. Gee, ’f I could ever run across one of those nov’lists, for instance. That man, Ronald Urban, who wrote Through The Fields—wouldn’t it be all to the mustard to talk to him! He could tell me all kinds of things I’ve never dreamt of.”
Still, she continued to see Rosenberg because he was the best prospect at hand, and because she pitied his longings for her, and to show her family that she could not be intimidated.
Harry was still barred from the ring, and the family had lapsed back to its old tilts with poverty. Both Blanche and Philip had to give part of their earnings toward the maintenance of the apartment, as well as Mabel, who had gone to work as a dress-model for a wholesale cloak-and-suit firm. She pronounced it “cluck ’n soot,” and affected a great disdain for her environs and her Jewish employers, but she was not at all averse to dining and dancing with some of the more prosperous buyers who frequented her place. Harry had become more of a wastrel, and did little except loaf around during the day, with an occasional bootlegging venture and sojourns with women, while the father loitered about poolrooms and complained of his son’s persecution, or sat in poker and pinochle games.
As Blanche lolled in the Beauty Parlor, tinkering with her nails, the image of Joe Campbell was in her head. He had ignored her for six months and then had bobbed up again on the previous day, and she had an engagement with him for the coming night. “It’s no use—I can’t get you out of my head,” he had told her over the telephone. “I stopped seeing you because I thought you were playing me for a sucker, but go right ahead, girlie, I’ll bite again. You’re deuces wild and the sky for a limit with me!” “You didn’t get hoarse telling me that for the last few months,” she had replied, amused and a little flattered. “Sure not, I was trying to forget you,” he had responded. “It can’t be done, little girl. Come on now, let daddy act like a millionaire to-night—he’s good that way.”