Читать книгу Tawny - Donald Henderson Clarke - Страница 3

I

Gramma and Aunt Mary were singing:

“The band played Annie Laurie and the horses wore high hats....”

They were in the double brass bed, and Tawny was lying on a feather bed supported by an ironing board placed upon three kitchen chairs as close to them as possible. Tawny loved to hear Gramma and Aunt Mary sing after they all were in bed. She was thinking that the horses they mentioned were the horses that dragged the street car across town in Twenty-third Street, where she used to live.

These horses wore big, floppy straw hats and their twitching ears stuck out, through holes provided. Tawny loved horses, and she thought of the beautiful ones around in the horse market of Fiss, Doer and Carroll in Twenty-second Street at Second Avenue. There, horses of all sizes and colors were paraded in the street at auctions. The horse market was a fascinating place with a wooden front painted a light blue on which the firm name was printed in big white letters.

Gramma was singing alone now. She sang:

Dan and his girl got married—Oh

Through love, you know, and so and so.

And all the boys from there below

Assembled at the spree.

There was Mike and John and Mary Ann

And Pat McCann and me.

We had a row that very night,

Put the ladies in a fright.

There was murder, right and tight—

And hurroo, boys, here we are again; here we are again; here we are again.

Tawny shivered with sheer pleasure. She loved the rollicking, stirring tune of the old Irish song, and she thought this must have been quite an exciting party that Gramma sang about—something like the party at the Clancys upstairs a month back when the police came with swinging hickory sticks, and an ambulance arrived with a clanging bell, and a patrol wagon. They carried a man on a stretcher to the ambulance. He was all bandaged up and he breathed very loud, although unconscious. And the policemen took two men away in the patrol wagon, and a big throng had collected in Twenty-third Street around the Elevated station. A woman kept up a monotonous shrieking upstairs. Tawny wondered if that had been murder right and tight.

She shivered again with delicious fear. She knew where there had been a murder—right in the same apartment house in which she now lived in Bradhurst Avenue, Washington Heights. A man had murdered a girl and cut up the body and thrown the pieces in the river. But the pieces had been found and the man had been electrocuted in Sing Sing. And all the little girls in the neighborhood knew what might happen to them if they spoke to strange men.

Mr. Stong, the janitor of the Bradhurst Avenue apartment, was a little man with straggly gray whiskers, bent shoulders and close-set bloodshot dark eyes. He was accustomed to lurk in dark corners in the halls and jump out suddenly at Tawny and other little girls who lived there. He’d say:

“If I get you down cellar, I’ll cut you up.”

“If I get you down cellar, I’ll sit you on a lighted candle.”

Life was exciting and exquisitely terrifying, either uptown in Bradhurst Avenue where Tawny lived with her father and mother, or down here in East Twenty-third Street where she visited Gramma, her mother’s mother, week-ends, and where even now in bed she was conscious of the sweetish-sickish smell of the Gas House over in Avenue A between Twenty-first and Twenty-second Street.

Far from disliking this odor, Tawny loved it. It made her think of the beautiful effects when the stacks of the Gas House flared, lighting the sky and illuminating the entire neighborhood. There was nothing quite so lovely as the Gas House.

Lying on her ironing-board bed she couldn’t see those flares from the Gas House. The windows in the three bedrooms of Gramma’s six-room railroad apartment all opened into the long hall which extended from the front door back to the kitchen. The only windows giving a glimpse of the outer world were those in the parlor in front, which offered a splendid view of the Twenty-third Street station of the Second Avenue El, that at this point swings around from First Avenue, through Twenty-third Street, into Second Avenue, and the kitchen windows in back, which looked out upon the backyard. But if Tawny couldn’t see the flares, which were most beautiful observed from the recreation pier at the foot of Twenty-third Street, she could imagine them. She was pretty happy lying there drowsily listening to Gramma sing and breathing the aroma of the Gas House.

Gramma’s flat was on the second floor and nowhere near as elegant as the five-room apartment in which Tawny lived with her father and mother uptown. The parlor seldom was used, except when there were callers or when Tawny leaned out the window watching the elevated trains pull into the stations and enjoying the embarking and debarking of passengers.

The most interesting passengers were the immigrants in their outlandish costumes and their dazed or excited expressions, toting bags, boxes and even small trunks, with perhaps a bird in a cage now and then. A great many immigrants got off at the Twenty-third Street station of the Second Avenue El in those days, and they added mightily to one’s enjoyment of life.

Tawny’s Uncle Dan, her mother’s brother, occupied the bedroom next to the parlor. Uncle Dan was a bartender in Forger’s Saloon on Third Avenue near Twenty-third. He had dark hair with reddish glints, which he slicked down in neat scallops over his forehead, bold dark eyes, always bloodshot, fiery red cheeks, what has been termed a walrus moustache, and a paving block chin. He was six feet, with big shoulders and a bull neck, and the beginning of a paunch. His great, hairy hands were hard and rough and reddened from sozzling all day in beer and the water tank in which the big schooners were rinsed. He drank flats—that is, whisky glasses—of beer all day long with customers, and before he went to bed absorbed a quart of Old Bushmills. The quart of Old Bushmills made him sleep as soundly as if he had taken hypnotics. No one, except Uncle Dan, knew about this quart of Old Bushmills. And such was the iron of his great body, and its lack of nerves, that he arose in the morning and dressed in checked suit, with a yellow diamond in his black cravat, with hands as steady as if he had drunk nothing but water. They were mighty hands, with mighty fingers, attached to mighty arms. No one, not even the giants of the beer trucks drawn by their great Percherons, could put Uncle Dan’s arm down or crush beer bottle caps between thumb and fingers as easily as he.

Cousin Joe had the bedroom between Uncle Dan’s and Gramma’s. Cousin Joe was five feet ten, with dark blond hair and blue eyes, and was very serious about life and work and the future, as only a serious youth may be. He was twenty and worked as telephone clerk for Harder & Harder, stock brokers, in Wall Street. He always wore blue suits with black four-in-hand ties and black shoes, well polished. He manicured his own nails and was a teetotaler, being a member of the St. Jerome Society.

Cousin Joe never had very much to say around the house, but he was amiable and pleasant and gave nickels to Tawny now and then. He was always reading and went to night school. Gramma said:

“Always got your nose stuck in a book. No good’ll ever come of it.”

There was no dining room. The family ate in the kitchen which looked out upon the bare backyard where there was a privy. It wasn’t always necessary to use this privy because between the kitchen and the kitchen of the adjoining apartment was a toilet, with doors opening into both kitchens and keys by which to insure the proper privacy. Slops always were emptied in the privy.

There was no bathtub and no hot water, but there was running cold water in the sink and a coal range, and the kitchen was large and bright, a most happy room to Tawny. It was here that Uncle Dan and Cousin Joe and Gramma and Aunt Mary, who never had married and never would marry, took their Saturday night baths in a washtub, the water being heated on the coal range.

Gramma was obsessed with the idea that a Saturday night bath was a prime necessity of life. But she never had any use for bathtubs. In fact, when Tawny’s father showed her the nice porcelain tub in the tiled bathroom in his flat uptown, Gramma said:

“I’d never get into wan of thim. If I ever got in I’d never get out.”

No one pretended to understand the processes of Gramma’s reasoning, but knowing Gramma, no one argued with her. And she never got into a bathtub until the day she died.

Tawny thought her father was the handsomest man and her mother the most beautiful woman in the world. Charles David Simon Bohun was six feet in his stockings and straight as an officer and gentleman physically. There was a difference of opinion about his morals. He had black, wavy hair, and dark gray eyes, with thick black brows and lashes, and a long, lean, handsome, reckless, clean-shaven face. A devilish spark burned deep in his eyes and a hint of devilish swagger was in his gait.

Many women felt their hearts jump the instant they saw Dave Bohun. And that had been the case with Birdy McKinley, Tawny’s mother, then in the chorus at Weber & Field’s Music Hall. However, in this instance, Dave Bohun’s heart had turned over also, and the two turning hearts had rolled a pair of irresponsibles into the Little Church Around the Corner one afternoon after champagne in J. B. Martin’s and made them one in the eyes of all others except Gramma, who said that no marriage was binding unless it took place in the Catholic Church.

Tawny’s mother had the same effect on men that Dave Bohun had on women, only perhaps a little more so. Birdy was no modern bean pole upon which to hang a frock. She was a female of the species with curves which had to be fitted. She was five feet five and weighed between one hundred and thirty and one hundred and thirty-five pounds.

“And sure,” Gramma said, “Dan can shpan Birdy’s waist with his hands.”

But it wasn’t Birdy’s undulating shape, nor her honey-colored hair, nor her big almond-shaped brown eyes, nor her naturally glowing cheeks, nor her slightly tip-tilted and adorable nose, nor her dimpled chin that were altogether responsible for her attractiveness. It was the intense femininity of her, and the high spirit of her. She radiated health and personality.

Birdy drank a great deal of anything that was handy—beer, whisky, gin or champagne. And when she had drank a bit more than a sufficiency she was more likely than not to start a riot in a restaurant, on the street, in a hansom or in the Bradhurst Avenue flat.

She had a knack for throwing objects like water glasses, perfume bottles, hair brushes and even mirrors. But Birdy always was careful never to make a bull’s-eye. She hurled her ammunition in the general direction of the human target, but never directly at him. Dave understood this, and so did Birdy’s other men friends and proprietors of restaurants and head waiters and captains and waiters.

Birdy wouldn’t have stepped on a worm if she could have helped it. She wasn’t out to hurt any living thing. She merely was obsessed with the idea of putting on a good show and proving that she was a young woman of temperament who was not to be trifled with and who was to be given a great deal of attention. She was kind hearted but she had to be the center of attraction.

The blend of Dave and Birdy had given Tawny hair and eyes which weren’t yellow and weren’t brown, and a skin which wasn’t dark and yet wasn’t dazzling white like her mother’s, although its texture was as soft and perfect. When she was three her father said she reminded him most of a little lion cub.

“She’s tawny like a lion,” he said.

“Tawny’s a nice name for her,” Birdy said. “Give mama a kiss, Tawny.”

And that’s how it happened that no one called Tawny by her real name, which was Miriam Louise.

Dave Bohun had a large amount of heavy old silver marked with crests in the Bradhurst Avenue apartment, and brilliant uniforms and swords, only remaining souvenirs of the days when he had been an officer—and a gentleman who played cards without the wherewithal to pay his losses.

When she was a little girl Tawny wasn’t overly impressed by the silver, but she was overwhelmed with delight by the uniforms which her father donned, ostensibly for her benefit, but to no little degree for his own, in the privacy of the apartment. She shrieked with pleasure to see her handsome father in his glittering regimentals, and even at the age of five she was trying to fence with him, clashing one shining sword against another while Birdy cried:

“You’re crazy, Dave. Someone’ll get hurt. Those swords are sharp.”

But no one ever did get hurt. Tawny and her father only had fun. And part of the fun was when Tawny played she was the queen, and her father kneeled in front of her sitting on her throne in the living room, and she knighted him for his valiance in the wars. Dave had enough medals and decorations for real valiance in real wars to warrant knighthood, maybe, but those cards and the little ball which hops around a whirling wheel and galloping horses had put an end to all such ideas except in make-believe.

Dave dressed, more often than not for Sunday, in shining silk top hat, frock coat and striped trousers. Tawny loved to go to church with her father. She wore green a great deal, which harmonized with her coloring, making her a green and golden little girl. If she wore a green frock, her hair ribbons were green and her sash was green and she carried a tiny green parasol to match. And she swayed her hips a little as her mother, who was a perfect example, did and was proud because her father was the handsomest man in the world and all the other ladies looked at him.

Dave called for Tawny Sunday afternoon in June. They boarded one of those Twenty-third Street cross-town horse cars, and sat close together on the hard seat, upholstered in carpet cloth, while the horses clopped along over the pavement. A nice old lady in a black bonnet and a black bombazine dress said to Tawny:

“You are a sweet little girl.”

“I am not a little girl any more,” Tawny replied. “I reached Gramma’s toilet bell today.”

That’s what she called the chain which flushed the toilet—a bell.

The old lady in the black bombazine dress stiffened up very straight, grasping her black reticule in black-gloved hands, her corsets creaking a little. Dave Bohun, polished ebony stick slanted gracefully against the slatted floor between his slender polished shoes, smiled ever so slightly and squeezed Tawny’s hand in his.

They both, each in his way, thought life was mighty joyful.

When they entered their five-room flat on the fourth floor of the six-story apartment house in Bradhurst Avenue, Birdy wasn’t there to greet them. But there was a note for Dave on the yellow silk-covered pin cushion in the matrimonial bed chamber. It read:

“Dear Dave:

I have gone to Philadelphia with The Lancers. It is no use to come after me. Goodbye.

Birdy.”

“Your mother has gone away for a while,” Dave told Tawny. “I guess we’ll have to invite Gramma to come up here and live with us.”

Tawny stared at her father. She felt awfully empty because her mother had gone away and she wanted to cry, but first she had to get the cue from her father. He smiled down at her and said:

“Anyway, first we’ll go out to a restaurant and have dinner and a nice party. That’ll be fun, won’t it?”

Tawny nodded, a trifle uncertainly, her eyes still big and wondering, slightly moist with unshed tears. But she smiled hesitantly, and replied:

“Yes, sir. That’ll be fun.”

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