She didn’t want to take joy away from anybody who actually had it, she reflected, as she went over to the coarse-lace hotel curtains, parted them, stared down on the truck-filled street, and murmured, “No, I can’t ever forget.”
Part III
MAN AND WOMAN
CHAPTER XVI
FOR two years Una Golden Schwirtz moved amid the blank procession of phantoms who haunt cheap family hotels, the apparitions of the corridors, to whom there is no home, nor purpose, nor permanence. Mere lodgers for the night, though for score on score of tasteless years they use the same alien hotel room as a place in which to take naps and store their trunks and comb their hair and sit waiting—for nothing. The men are mysterious. They are away for hours or months, or they sit in the smoking-room, glancing up expectant of fortunes that never come. But the men do have friends; they are permitted familiarities by the bartender in the café. It is the women and children who are most dehumanized. The children play in the corridors; they become bold and sophisticated; they expect attention from strangers. At fourteen the girls have long dresses and mature admirers, and the boys ape the manners of their shallow elders and discuss brands of cigarettes. The women sit and rock, empty-hearted and barren of hands. When they try to make individual homes out of their fixed molds of rooms—the hard walls, the brass bedsteads, the inevitable bureaus, the small rockers, and the transoms that always let in too much light from the hall at night—then they are only the more pathetic. For the small pictures of pulpy babies photographed as cupids, the tin souvenirs and the pseudo-Turkish scarves draped over trunks rob the rooms of the simplicity which is their only merit.
For two years—two years snatched out of her life and traded for somnambulatory peace, Una lived this spectral life of one room in a family hotel on a side street near Sixth Avenue. The only other dwelling-places she saw were the flats of friends of her husband.
He often said, with a sound of pride: “We don’t care a darn for all these would-be social climbers. The wife and I lead a regular Bohemian life. We know a swell little bunch of live ones, and we have some pretty nifty parties, lemme tell you, with plenty poker and hard liquor. And one-two of the bunch have got their own cars—I tell you they make a whole lot more coin than a lot of these society-column guys, even if they don’t throw on the agony; and we all pile in and go up to some road-house, and sing, and play the piano, and have a real time.”
Conceive Una—if through the fumes of cheap cigarettes you can make out the low lights of her fading hair—sitting there, trying patiently to play a “good, canny fist of poker”—which, as her husband often and irritably assured her, she would never learn to do. He didn’t, he said, mind her losing his “good, hard-earned money,” but he “hated to see Eddie Schwirtz’s own wife more of a boob than Mrs. Jock Sanderson, who’s a regular guy; plays poker like a man.”
Mrs. Sanderson was a black-haired, big-bosomed woman with a face as hard and smooth and expressionless as a dinner-plate, with cackling laughter and a tendency to say, “Oh, hell, boys!” apropos of nothing. She was a “good sport” and a “good mixer,” Mr. Schwirtz averred; and more and more, as the satisfaction of having for his new married mistress a “refined lady” grew dull, he adjured the refined lady to imitate Mrs. Sanderson.