“I hope to croak if I am!”
“Oh, boy, watch me put thirty dollars on that fight,” cried Philip, who had been sitting beside his father and listening avidly.
“Well, go slow, go slow,” advised his father. “I know Harry wouldn’t give us a bum stir, but them agreements ’r’ often bungled up ’r double-crossed at the last minnit.”
The men began a discussion of prize-fighting conditions in general, with much vehemence and a comical contrast of naive and foxy opinions, and the two girls brought out manicure-sets of flashy celluloid, and fiddled with their nails. Something that was not depression but unobtrusively akin to it, stirred inside of Blanche. She had felt it at times before and had never been able to fathom it beyond her sense that life was too underhanded, and that she didn’t like this aspect of it. As she listened to the men, with their endless recitals of frauds and machinations, the little weight moved within her breast. Fake, fake, fake—that was all you ever heard. Wasn’t there anything honest and good in the world? It sure didn’t look like there was, most of the time. Oh, well, why bother so much about it? You could never get along in this world unless you “belonged”—unless you were like the things around you.
She started to think of Louis Rosenberg, the man with whom she had an engagement for the coming night. She didn’t love him, sure not, but he wasn’t a bad fellow at that. He seemed to be an honest boy, and sometimes he talked about big, fancy things, like why people hated each other so much, and why the world wasn’t better than it was, and he used a word now and then that he called art—something that made people write books and do paintings and statuary, and get wild over nothing that any one else could see. He certainly was different from most men all right. He kissed her sometimes, but he never tried to “get fresh” (getting fresh, to Blanche, was the placing of a man’s hands upon any covered part of her body except the arms). Maybe that was why she didn’t love him. He was too darn good, and a girl wanted a fellow to “try something” now and then, if he was slow about it and didn’t act as though he expected her to fall for him (respond to him) immediately. Then, when he did try it, she could tell just how much she cared for him, and she repulsed him, or accepted him to some extent, according to how nervous and glad he made her feel. Well, anyway, there were always enough men who tried to make advances to her, and Rosenberg was something of a relief.
She met him that night on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, where the theater lights clustered like bits of a soul burning in oil, and an endless, crawling stream of automobiles and taxicabs hid the pavement, and where the tall, rectangular buildings and the suavely gaudy shops seemed to be the only unexcited and unsensual objects of the scene. Rosenberg scarcely ever called for her at the apartment, and when he did he waited outside on the stoop, because Blanche felt that she would be “mortified to death” if her father and her brothers should choose to act unfriendly toward him, and she didn’t want to run the risk of such an occurrence. She was wearing a very thin, short-sleeved, georgette dress that extended only two inches below her knees and was of dull white with a dark red flower-pattern, and semi-transparent, flesh-colored stockings, and brown shoes with high heels, and a black felt hat shaped like an upside-down cup, with a red bow at the side. Like many girls in her environment, she dressed with a combination of unconscious artistry and cheap, over-flashy display.
Rosenberg was a youth of twenty-three, who worked at the receiving desk in one of the Public Library branches, and was beginning to think a bit too much for his happiness, prodded by the “higher literature” that he was reading for the first time. Previous to his Library job he had worked as a shoe salesman and had given it up because he had failed to see that he was “getting anywhere” and because he wanted to do something out of the ordinary but didn’t know quite what it should be. He lived with a family of brothers and sisters, and they, together with his parents, regarded him as a pleasant “schlemiel,” who was always talking about things but never accomplishing anything, though they were willing to let him alone as long as he worked and supported himself. He had met Blanche at the cafeteria where she worked as a cashier on weekdays, through the expedient of opening a gradual conversation with her as he paid his check each noon. Finally he had grown bold enough to ask if he could “take her out” and she had assented because she had liked the diffident style in which his request was worded.
He was tall and narrow-shouldered, but he was wiry and his arms were not unmuscular. His light brown face, with its hooked nose, dark, large-lidded eyes, and thin mouth, often had the look of a puzzled dreamer, bowing to practical barriers but still trying, half-heartedly, to peer beyond them. In his attire he wavered between negligence and neatness, his tastes running to dark suits and loose collars and brightly striped shirts, and his leading vanity was his wavy black hair, which he often combed for ten minutes at a stretch.
Since the hour was only eight o’clock—still too early for them to visit the lower Broadway dance-hall which they frequented—Blanche and Rosenberg walked over to Bryant Park and sat on one of the wooden-iron benches along the cement walk and looking out on the orderly, clipped levels of grass. The late spring night, with its warm air that had the barest threat of coolness in it, and its cloudless sky dotted with stars and a moon at which you could glance now and then with the feeling that they were pretty and a bit mystifying, and the more immediate lights around you, with their warm, come-on-and-see-what’s-under-me winks, and all the sounds of pleasure-seeking traffic—these things brought Blanche a light-hearted, knowing mood. She was a girl, young and rather handsome, and there was nothing that she couldn’t make men do if she had only cared enough about it.
“Tell you what we’ll do, Lou, we’ll take that ferry ride over to Staten Island,” she said. “I love to get out on the water when it’s night.”