Stunned by poverty—how hard it was to write during those early years. Belly gnawing, I kept at it: I lay down, I got up, sat at the big table. Storms hunkered over the roof tops, the sun licked at the roofs, snow bundled them, and I was cold, cold. Smoke puffed from chimneys, bent in the icy mornings like hearse plumes. Chimneys—I never wanted to count them; broken, dying chimneys, strewed the city below me. One brick stack leaned far over, yet belched smoke.
Pimps lived on one side of me, prostitutes on the other; I could not move without paying my rent. My place was never warm: my hands cracked because of the cold. I kept my legs wound in rags, coughing.
Because of pleurisy I had to sell all of my books: Mary sold them for me, one by one, maybe two or three at a time. How old was Mary? Twenty? I was about twenty-five. It would take another twenty-five years to dim her memory: the stalk of her body, her restless, weightless feet. She bent a little to the left, as if injured, the arms also restless, the eyes inward. Did she ever laugh? Her smile always seemed something pushed into being, only a little jolt got it there.
She sold my books and bought my food and fed me, the hell of pleurisy riding me: tears in my eyes I attempted to eat: tears of many kinds crushed me. The roofs, the cold, the sorrow, how they come back to me! The anguish in my side went on for weeks but Mary never failed or complained: she fucked men at night and succored me during the day: sometimes she slept on the floor beside my bed or lay across the foot of the bed, a blanket around her. Her black hair might unpin itself and lie about her.
“Let’s keep a bird, when it’s Spring,” I suggested.
“How can you feed it, w-w-w-without money?” she asked.
“My father is sending money.”
“When? Soon?”
“Has someone written to him? You must see to it, Mary. Make someone write.”
“I think s-s-s-so. I’ll try again, ton-n-n-night.”