Place in the City Read online

  “C’mon, kid,” Benny told him, “run along.”

  But Peter noticed the byplay between the men and the woman. It was all common enough to him, and without any complicated reasoning, he was assured that it would take up all of their time. What they were saying interested him not at all—if he heard it. It was enough that they were taken up with it.

  He raised the board that covered the keys, touched them apprehensively, and then ran his fingers into a scale.

  “Now ain’t that a card,” the girl said. “Lookit the little mick playin’.”

  A SONG of spring,” O’Lacy thought, hearing the thin tinkle of the music. For a cop, for one who had pounded pavements many years, O’Lacy had a curious turn of mind and words; or perhaps it was a memory of a green land, where seasons were a bigger clock than here.

  Walking down the street, he stopped at the tree. The place had only one tree, but that was more than most streets in the city had. O’Lacy looked at the buds; reaching up, he pinched one off, and ground it between his fingers. And he smiled, satisfied, at the green juice that oozed between his thumb and forefinger. Life ran out and onto him; life was in the air. All day long, the wind had blown from the south and the west, fair weather and spring on the wind; now it shifted to the north, and the air was biting, but spring on the wind anyhow.

  Satisfied, immensely satisfied, O’Lacy swung his stick. When he came to the moving van, he was not even angry with the girl; he only said:

  “Now move along, Annie. I’ll have none of that on my beat.”

  “It’s a free country, ain’t it?” she demanded.

  “Come on—an’ none of your talk.”

  “Awright—but one of these days Shutzey’ll fix you, yu flatfoot!”

  “Yeah?”

  “G’wan an’ scram, sister,” Benny told her.

  Monk sighed, and said to Peter: “C’mon, Padrooski, we gotta load the music-box.”

  They began to haul the piano up the ramp, while Peter and the officer watched. O’Lacy felt rested and calm; he wanted to stand there for a while and talk to the men. It seemed to him a sign that now, with the coming of spring, they should take away the piano and the rest of the things.

  “He was an evil man,” O’Lacy said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Who wus?”

  “The music teacher who used that piano. He killed his wife.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I saw her when she wus dead,” Peter nodded. “I saw her layin’ in Swirsky’s funeral parlor. She looked just like real.”

  “A lesson in evil,” O’Lacy said.

  “That ain’t nothin’ fur a kid tu see,” Monk remarked.

  “Ain’t yu got no place tu go, kid?” Benny demanded. He wanted to hear more about the music master who had killed his wife.

  “He shot her in front of this house,” O’Lacy told them.

  “Yeah?”

  Now the piano was in the truck. They threw in the planks that had formed the ramp and twisted rope across the back of the truck. Peter wanted to hear more talk about the murder; O’Lacy wanted to moralize. But the men were in a hurry, and in a few moments the truck pulled away, leaving behind it the empty shell of the house.

  “Now, run along,” O’Lacy said to the boy.

  FROM behind the curtained window of Shutzey’s house, Mary White watched Peter go down the street—to where Sasha was waiting for him. Sasha was all in white, crisp, clean white, with a skirt that stood out almost at right angles from her slim thighs. Two braids of reddish-brown hair were down her back to her waist. When she moved—and all her movements were quick and birdlike—the braids serried the starched white of her dress, of the sweater that was drawn tightly over her chest. You see, white was a symbol to Mary, even connected in some mysterious—she thought that—manner with her name.

  Sasha was pure; Peter was pure. Purity was like cold, clean snow in the winter, or like the breeze that blows from the south in the spring-time.

  Standing by the window, she watched them. The sun was as low now as it could be in Apple Place, without losing itself behind the houses that blocked one end of the cul-de-sac, and the shadows it made were long and slanting, and the things it lit up were warm and ruddy. Sasha with the sun in her hair, and Peter explaining to her about the piano.

  “Do yu know what dey do tu him?” Peter demanded.

  It didn’t matter to Sasha what Peter said, so long as he was saying it. She regarded him with a wide mouth and wider eyes. Simply, there was nobody in the world like Peter.

  “What?”

  “Killim,” Peter told her. He nodded his head, and Sasha wondered whether she should cry.

  “Oh—I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Naw—dey gotta. He shod ’is wife, an’ dey gotta killim.”

  “Why?”

  “Yer a dope,” Peter decided.

  “Yeah—I’m sorry.”

  “Yu don’ know nothin’.”

  “Yeah.”

  She sat down on the stoop with her head bowed. There was no denying what Peter said, because everything he said was right and absolute. She would as soon think of denying God. Things might come and go; it oppressed her terribly to realize that she would never really be worthy of Peter.

  Behind the curtains, across the street, Mary White thought only of purity. It had become an obsession with her, just as Shutzey had. She wanted to kill Shutzey; above all other things, she wanted to see Shutzey dead, not dead the way most people die, but all broken and smashed. She thought a lot of death, of how it solved things, of Claus’s wife in the arms of the poet. Sometimes it came like a silent stranger, and again like a beast. For a beast it would come like a beast.

  “Watchin’ yer kids,” said Minnie the storage vault.

  Whirling around, Mary glared for a moment, then crossed the room and threw herself into a chair. Lighting a cigarette, Minnie let it dangle from her lips, polishing her crimson nails against her bosom. Sometimes now, she Was afraid of Mary.

  “Come outuv it,” she said.

  “Mind your own business.”

  “Sure yu love yer kids. But what yu goin’ tu feed ’em if Shutzey throws yu outta here? Yu ain’t no good no more.”

  “Shutzey won’t dare—”

  “Yu got him scared, huh?”

  “He won’t throw me out?”

  “How do I know? Why don’t yu snap outta yu hop. He don’t work yu too hard, an’ neither do I. So when a guy pays his buck-fifty, whadyu think he wants—a doormat?”

  “I know—”

  “Sure yer proud—so what?”

  “I ain’t proud. Not any more.”

  “If I give yu a guy a little later, make it lively fur him. I’ll let yu off early—but make it lively.” Her voice softened; when she wanted to, she could almost look motherly. “It ain’t no cinch,” she said.

  THE HOUSE was stripped bare. As night fell, the wind blowing colder and colder, the house became gaunt and hollow as a ghost. Really, there was no place on the street for an empty house, and nobody would live there until the legend was much older. So the place was empty, and in the music room of the teacher, the wallpaper curled away from the plaster. Dust settled.

  He thought of the room often, sitting in his cell, and his fingers ached for the piano. Far from the street, he thought of Anna, too, but more than Anna, he wanted a piano. It was a need for him, an actual and terrible hunger; his finger-nails plucked continually at his trousers.

  First, as the days went by, it hadn’t been hard. When the commission came to examine him, his mind was full of doubts; but he answered all the questions they asked him, and he looked at them very steadily.

  The man from Columbia College shook his head sadly. He was always a little sad when a man was found sane, since then he would have to die. And Claus, watching the gray beard nod, was terribly proud.

  “I knew I was sane,” Claus said.

  They all nodded, and then they went away.

  “Tough luck, buddy,” the man a
cross the corridor called. He had shot a cop, and he only had three days left. After the commission, Claus still, had eighteen days.

  The man across the corridor said: “Maybe it ain’t no better tu spend yu time pluckin’ the walls uf a loony-bin. Me—I’ll get so stinkin’ drunk I won’t know nothin’. So whatuhell’s the difference, Dutch?”

  “Yeah,” Claus said.

  “Yu gotta die sometime.”

  “Yeah.”

  But eighteen days were left. On the morning of the third day, he saw the man across the corridor go out, only he wasn’t drunk.

  “Whotuhell wants you, yu sonovabitch?” he said to the priest. Then he stared at Claus; then he walked away very slowly, and Claus went back to his bed, where he seated himself, putting his face in his hands. As much as he had hurt Anna, Anna would not have wanted him to die this way.

  Eighteen days were fifteen, and then ten, and then day after day went by, some slow, some quick. Sometimes, at night, Anna came to him in his cell, and then Claus smiled to himself, because the men had said that he was sane. When Anna came, he would talk to her, until all along the corridor men were up and screaming:

  “Yu Dutch bastard, shut yer hole!”

  “Shut up!”

  “Go tu hell, yu heinie louse!”

  “Guard!”

  “Close up that loony bastard!”

  If he woke the Negro, fourth cell down, he thought, the colored man would chant, very softly:

  “Swing low—sweet chariot—”

  He liked that while he was talking to Anna, while he was saying to her: “If they let you judge, would you want me dead? I’m not afraid—but would you want me dead?”

  She never answered him, and because deep down in his heart he realized that she was not there, perhaps he was not entirely mad.

  “Anna,” he would say, “because I loved you—don’t you understand that? Him, I hated, but I didn’t kill him. Wouldn’t I have killed him? Only, I loved you, my Anna. My God, how I loved you!”

  “Tu hell wid yer Anna!”

  “In a den of beasts, my Anna, and then they will take me away and destroy me. I would have been great—”

  Then, day by day, the time came closer. Sometimes, he was afraid, but not on the last day. By his reckoning, it was spring. From four in the afternoon to half past ten was six and a half hours; but time enough, he knew, if he had a piano, to let his fingers tell how a man had died. Outside, it was spring; his fingers would tell that, too.

  He made a thing he would never play, a song no man would ever hear; and because he thought it was great, it began to be more terrible that he should die without playing it than that he should die at all. From Apple Place to the death house, all around two woefully lonely chords that a boy had struck on his piano.

  Night crept into the corridor before there was night anywhere outside it. The man in the next cell, who would die with him, was cursing softly when the turnkey opened the door of Claus’ cell.

  “Not now?” Claus said.

  “No—not until ten-thirty. But ye can have what ye want tu eat. Anything ye want. I’ll take yer order.”

  “I’m not—very hungry,” Claus said.

  “Better eat. It’s a royal meal, if ye want it.”

  “Gefullter gansehals—maybe.”

  He shook his head regretfully. “Not any uf them furren dishes. A steak?”

  “All right—a steak. But not onions. Onions make me feel sick after.”

  Then Claus began to laugh. He laughed until his laughing turned to tears, and then he lay full length on the bed, trying to think of what he would have played, if he had a piano.

  Then, from the next cell: “Hey, Dutch! Dutch!”

  “Yeah?”

  “Ain’ it funny as hell the way they wanna feed yu?”

  NOPPIE fought Peter regularly. Sometimes he brought his gang with him, and sometimes he came alone. But he always came to fight. He walked low and close to the ground, and he was broad and heavy, a small beast made for battle; he came from four blocks down, a ginny street. He came because Peter had once invaded it with a mick gang, and he remembered Peter.

  Sasha saw him coming now—Sasha whose world was Peter. Sasha was an illogical person. Peter couldn’t hold his own in a fight, but that reflected upon fighting, not upon Peter.

  “Run!” she cried. She was up on the stoop already, but waiting for Peter. How could she take shelter without him?

  “Watsamatter?” Then he saw Noppie, and all in an instant he recalled the numberless times Noppie had beaten him. For all that it had become an accepted thing to be beaten by Noppie, the memory of pain remained. It was by no means pleasant.

  Two courses of action appeared instantly. He could join Sasha and get himself out of the way, behind the door of their apartment, or he could be beaten by Noppie. In fact, there was only one course, since it was entirely senseless to be beaten by Noppie. The Sasha destroyed everything.

  “I know yu ain’ afraid, Pede,” she said.

  So he turned around and waited for Noppie—because it had suddenly come to him that Sasha was the thing that mattered most in the world, not Noppie and not being beaten. He waited for Noppie, considering how terrible and splendid was his love for Sasha, taking her into his small heart the way he sometimes soaked up sunshine, luxuriating in it.

  “C’mon, yu ginny,” he muttered, trembling.

  “Mudderwhore,” Noppie answered, and then he waded joyfully in. It never took overlong to finish Peter.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” Peter muttered. Even while he was fighting he continued to mutter, since it took his mind off the sting of the blows.

  From the stoop, Sasha screamed: “Yu dirty ginny!” Then she ran into the darkness of the hall, to hide herself and weep, so that she would not have to bear the terrible pain of seeing Peter beaten. Then it only took moments for Noppie to finish. When Peter lay against the stoop, whimpering with pain, Noppie stopped kicking him.

  “Yu mudder’s a whore—so yu ain’ wort shid,” he told Peter, as to explain his terminating the battle.

  Peter roused himself; lifting himself out of his agony, he sat up. “Yer a liar,” he said feebly.

  Noppie kicked him.

  “Yer a liar!”

  “G’wan—my brudder screweder,” Noppie laughed.

  “Yu dirty liar.”

  Noppie kicked him once more; then walked away.

  Peter sat there with his head in his hands. How dark it had suddenly become outside, and how much colder! Even through his hurt he could feel the silken caress of the wind against his cheek. Good. But how could anything be good?

  Sasha crept out of the hall. She went down the steps, and crouched by Peter, her arm about him.

  “Poor Pede,” she said.

  “Lemme alone.”

  “I’m sorry fur yu, Pede.”

  “Lemme alone.”

  “Ain’t yu comin’ upstairs?”

  “Geesus, lemme alone, will yu?”

  “Awright.”

  There was a moment or so of silence; then Peter said defiantly: “Yeah!”

  Night fell, and he sat there with Sasha. All his life would now be marked as before this time and after it. He knew it; indeed, it seemed to him that he now knew numberless things he had never known before, for instance, that he loved Sasha. He was glad for her hand squeezing his arm.

  “Come upstairs,” Sasha said.

  “Awright.”

  They went up step by step, holding tight to one another, both afraid of the dark walls that lined the staircase, both thinking that they would never let go of this hold.

  Peter lit the gas.

  “Turn it higher,” Sasha told him, shrinking back from the shadows that danced about the room. He was standing on a chair, reaching up for the jet, when his mother came into the room.

  Mary White stopped and watched him; he didn’t know, because she had come in without any noise. Sasha was watching him too. Mary thought, “When all is said, there is nothing in life but th
e love of a woman for a man.” Just standing there, looking at the two of them under the light, she was as happy as it would ever be possible for her to be.

  “Peter,” she whispered.

  The children started, and Peter leaped off his chair. He came toward her, and then he stopped. He stood looking at her, and Sasha, watching him, knew that he. was trying not to cry.

  “Peter,” Mary said, afraid suddenly.

  He turned around sullenly. “Lemme alone,” he muttered.

  She went over to him, came down on her knees, and put her arms around him, shaking her head from side to side. “Pede, Pede,” she crooned. “Who hurt you?”

  “Nobody—”

  “Tell me, Pede.”

  “Lemme alone.”

  Then, turning his face to her, she saw his eyes. “He knows,” she thought. “My God, he’s only a baby—but he knows already. Peter—what have I done to you?”

  “Pede,” she said, very softly. “Won’t you kiss me, Pede?”

  Then he hugged her, leaving himself go on her broad and wonderful breast. He would forget; he knew that he had to forget. But all the rest of his life would be from now, not from before it.

  THE WIND blows—and night falls over the Place. The city pauses before the brief spurt that precedes sleep. And lights come, and a person on a tall roof sees glittering necklaces all over the city.

  O’Lacy walks through the Place, a tall, bent figure, law in a place where the good and the bad mingle, yet hold apart eternally—good and bad to O’Lacy, for he knows.

  Here is the pause—when only the aftermath of the legend is taking place. You know that the music master will die. He dies tonight. O’Lacy knows that, and he mulls over it as he walks along the street. Undoubtedly, such things are just. One takes a life, and in return one’s life is taken. That law, O’Lacy considers, is as eternal and unchanging as the day and the night. It holds things together.

  He stops by the plane tree. The plane tree is the one thing in Apple Place that gives O’Lacy real pleasure. Especially at night, when the leaves are only faintly lit by the light of the street lamp. All through the spring and all through the summer he will watch it bud and grow.