Читать книгу Tawny - Donald Henderson Clarke - Страница 4

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Gramma came next day to live with Tawny and her father. First thing she said was:

“There’s such a thing as bein’ too polite. It’s affected for you to be always sayin’ sir and ma’am and please and thank you and if you don’t mind. You father’s puttin’ too many highfalutin idears in your head. You’re just common folks like everybody no matter how thick you spread the butter.”

Gramma repeated the objectionable politeness in a mincing manner and with a sarcastic intonation, but although Tawny loved Gramma a lot, she loved her father more, and she continued to be polite—except to Gramma.

When the first Saturday night came around Gramma put water on to heat on the gas range in the kitchen. She didn’t like gas, which was a new-fangled notion, and missed her good coal range, but what could she do?

“Aren’t you going to take your bath in the tub, Gramma?” Tawny asked.

“Most certainly not,” Gramma replied with dignity.

“But there’s hot water in the faucet, Gramma.”

“Sure, and I never thought of that now. Tawny, will you be after fillin’ the tub for me in the kitchen?”

So Tawny filled the washtub resting on the brown linoleum of the kitchen and Gramma took her Saturday-night bath just as she always had.

Tawny bathed daily in the tub, as was the habit of her father and mother. But Gramma said:

“You can overdo this washin’ yourself. Too much washin’ is liable to bring on a decline. Once a week, of a Saturday night, is enough for annywan.”

Gramma also said the night air was bad for humans, and argued to keep the windows closed in the bedroom which Tawny now shared with her father. Gramma said:

“Sure, there’s consumption in the night air. I’ve been healthy all me life, and all me folks before me, and never a windy was open at night.”

Gramma also considered that the moon shining on a sleeping person’s face engendered insanity. Dave said:

“The only superstition I’ve got is that it’s bad luck to be run over by a red train. You’d better adopt the same one, Tawny.”

This puzzled Tawny. She asked:

“What is superstition?”

“It’s being silly enough to think seeing a black cat or walking under a ladder or breaking a mirror brings bad luck, or that sleeping with the moon shining in your face makes you crazy.”

“Oh,” Tawny said. “But if anybody was run over by a red train they’d be killed, wouldn’t they?”

“That’s the point,” Dave explained.

“But it wouldn’t matter what color the train was.”

“That’s another point,” Dave said. “But just you don’t be afraid of anything except a red train, and you’ll be all right.”

Tawny never forgot that.

The Bradhurst Avenue apartment house was considered quite refined and high-class for the period and neighborhood. It was constructed of red brick, was six stories with basement, and there were six apartments on each floor.

In front was a marble stoop reached by three marble steps. Another marble step led to the front vestibule, also of marble. This grandeur was heightened by an intricately wrought iron railing.

On either side of the vestibule were rows of black buttons, eighteen on a side, and one for the janitor. The door from the vestibule into the hall always was locked. One pressed the proper button in the vestibule which rang a buzzer in an apartment. Pressure on a button there unlocked the door with a click.

It was a so-called walk-up apartment. There was a dumb-waiter for the delivery of groceries and supplies, but no passenger elevator. Tenants and visitors reached their destinations by ascending flights of twisting marble stairs along which ran a wooden handrail with an ornamental iron railing on top in harmony with the iron railing outside.

No children were allowed to play on the front steps of this apartment house. Mr. Stong, the janitor, or Mrs. Stong, his wife who did washing and ironing for many of the tenants, saw to this. It was high-class.

But Tawny and the other children never suffered the slightest regret because of this ruling. Adjoining the apartment house and separated from it only by a narrow area was a two-story frame house, a relic of the days when all this had been farming country, and that not so long past either. The most important architectural feature of this house, so far as Tawny and her friends were concerned, was a wide wooden porch, attained by climbing a flight of more or less dilapidated wood steps. This porch and the steps made a famous playground.

The house itself had a peaked roof in front and a flat roof, reached through a skylight, in the rear. Tawny had a full and interesting view of this roof from the fire escape outside her bedroom window and even from the window. Joseph Cella and his wife, Rosa, who lived in the house, dried out tomato paste in trays on the flat part of the roof in the summer and Tawny thought it was an interesting but strange and outlandish custom. But what could you expect of Eyetalians in the first place? And, in the second place, Mr. and Mrs. Cella, if victims of odd habits so far as tomato paste was concerned, were the most kind-hearted persons in the neighborhood. They not only allowed the children to overrun their front steps and porch, but also occasionally gave them thick, crusty buttered bread, salami, and little glasses of wine.

Mrs. Cella, who had blue-black hair and a thick black line of eyebrows right across her face, a Roman nose and a chin like the wooden Indian’s outside of Morris’s Cigar Store over on Eighth Avenue, said:

“A leetle wine is good for the bambinos.”

Mr. Cella, who had gray hair and wore red flannel shirts crossed by suspenders in summer time, and a thick blue sweater in winter time, grinned and nodded and said:

“Si! Si!”

Mr. Cella always seemed to agree with everything his wife said and be quite happy about it, but there was a funny look sometimes in his eyes when he was watching the children play or eat, and Tawny wondered, vaguely, if he was going to cry.

Tawny drank the wine at first out of politeness, but it created a pleasant warmth in her stomach and she grew to like it very much.

A grand adventure for Tawny was going shopping over on Eighth Avenue, where were the stores and the elevated. On each of the four corners at One Hundred and Forty-fifth Street was a saloon with swing doors in front and family entrances. Tawny never passed the saloons without thinking of the Dawsons who occupied the adjoining apartment. She heard the sound of blows coming through the partition, and Mrs. Dawson wailing:

“Oh, Timmie! Don’t beat me.”

Then would come the sound of a fist striking soft flesh, the thump of a body hitting the floor and the sad symphony of a woman’s low sobbing. Gramma would say:

“Her man is drunk again.”

This did not depress Tawny. It excited her. It was just one more detail of life which sent an extra thrill through her nerves. It made her hate men, except her father and her Uncle Dan and Cousin Joe.

Those four saloons on the corner stood for places where husbands got drunk so they could go home and beat their wives. She also wondered if in those places you could get nice wine such as the Cellas had, but she supposed all they sold was beer and whisky.

Tawny’s most common errand over in Eighth Avenue was to buy a quart and a pint of milk at the Sheffield Farms Dairy. Gramma gave her a dime and the family milk can. Milk was six cents a quart and the cent in change was Tawny’s to spend. She spent long, delightful minutes in Horvath’s Store, deciding whether to spend the cent on all-day suckers, strips of licorice or gum.

Tawny went to school when she was six years old in the Primary Department, Public School No. 5, One Hundred and Fortieth Street and Edgecombe Avenue. This was a white school then but it is colored now.

At that time a few Negroes lived in the neighborhood of One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street and Lenox Avenue but were seldom seen by Tawny and her friends, except as natural curiosities in the distance.

This school was a mixed school, boys and girls, and comprised the first four primary grades, which were subdivided into 1A the first half-year, 1B the second half-year, 2A the first half of the second year, and so on.

Tawny was a brilliant student and loved her teachers and her work from the first. It was seldom that she was not at the head of her classes.

The city at this time was building Colonial Park, which runs from One Hundred and Forty-fifth Street to One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street and from Bradhurst Avenue on the flat lands there to the rocky cliffs above which, and along which, runs Edgecombe Avenue.

Contractors had turned this area into a sea of mud with streams of water from hoses attached to hydrants, and all the young fry of the neighborhood went there daily to play after school. Tawny was wearing a freshly washed and ironed ensemble of yellow—hair ribbons, frock with waistline about at mid-thigh and sash to match. Harry Frank, sixteen, one of the backward boys then in Grade 4B, grabbed Tawny by the wrists and said:

“Say—”

And he said a word which Tawny had been told by Gramma was a dirty word. Tawny said:

“I won’t. I won’t.”

“I’ll kill you if you don’t,” he promised, twisting her wrists.

She screamed and kicked at his shins. Under the violence of her attack he released her but promptly picked up a rock.

“Say it, or I’ll hit you with this rock,” he yelled.

Tawny turned and ran, breathing hard, but not sobbing. She was tall for her age and long-legged and could run like a young antelope. Harry threw the rock. It struck a puddle of mud beside her, and splashed her with mud and water, quite ruining the lovely yellow ensemble. Even the hair ribbons were dirty.

When Tawny arrived home, out of breath, Gramma asked grimly:

“How did you get yourself all dirrty?”

“A boy tried to make me say a bad word and I wouldn’t, and he said he’d kill me, and he threw a rock at me, and the mud went all over me.”

“It’s no excuse for playin’ in a mudhole,” Gramma said, getting out the switch. “Come here and I’ll learn you—me stayin’ up till all hours, washin’ and ironin’ and sweatin’ to keep you lookin’ nice.”

Swish. Tchk! Swish. Tchk! The switch swished and bit, swished and bit into tender flesh. Tears gathered in Tawny’s amber eyes, but she didn’t cry. She was too proud and too indignant to cry. Here she had protected her virtue at the risk of her life, and what had she got as a reward—ruined clothes, a ruined afternoon and a whipping.

Tawny never forgot that occasion nor the pretty starched yellow dress which was made of muslin, nor Harry Frank, nor the reward for virtue. It was one of the highlights, one of the unforgettable events of her early years, and one which influenced her life. She not only never used a profane or so-called obscene word herself, but she suffered a curious crawling sensation when she heard such words used by others, or saw such words written or printed.

While Tawny was going to school and running errands for Gramma over to Eighth Avenue, she was living a full and romantic life, adventurous and exciting. She played “Ring Around the Rosy,” “Potsie,” “Cops and Robbers,” “Cowboys and Indians,” played house with dishes and dolls, skipped rope and roller skated.

She had a doubly interesting time because of her week-ends in the Gas House district, where Aunt Mary, Uncle Dan and Cousin Joe still lived in the old railroad flat. Few automobiles were abroad in those days, and roller skating was comparatively good and fairly safe in all of the avenues, but it was best in St. Nicholas, which usually was thronged with happy skaters on all pleasant afternoons. But Tawny enjoyed her most romantic moments near the Gas House.

The recreation pier at the foot of East Twenty-third Street, where the Gas House still turns the sky red and redly illuminates the night scene, was above the regular pier where the boats land and reached by stairs. Piles of gravel lay near the pier and all the children liked to play in these.

But it was on Sundays and holidays that the pier was at its gayest, brightest best. Then brass bands played and the benches were thronged with men and women in unaccustomed Sunday go-to-church clothes, and the boys with baskets with pretzels impaled on sticks and chips in bags called their wares more briskly, and the sun shone more brightly during the day, and the Gas House burst into eruption more redly during the night, and stained, untidy waters of the East River took on a new sparkle. It was lovely out on the pier, particularly when Dave in his silk hat and striped trousers, stick held gracefully in gloved hands, was there with Tawny.

Dave might be the only man dressed like a dude from Fifth Avenue, but none of the rough young men of the neighborhood cast any slurring remarks at him. The rough young men might, at first glance, open their mouths, but after a second glance the words never came. It was a neighborhood which recognized the quality of a man without investigation. And Dave, somehow, was the sort one didn’t call names, even if one happened to be a little rough and tough and rather hard and brought up in the best Gas House tradition.

While her father watched with his gray eyes under thick lashes, Tawny and her friends walked around and around the pier between the benches and the rail in time to the music of the band. And between selections they hung blissfully over the rail, looking up and down the river at the tugs and ferryboats and yachts and Sound steamers. And there was a battleship now and then. It was a marvelous spot, the pier, and one never to be forgotten. And every time you breathed, you breathed in the sweet-sick aroma of the Gas House, also hauntingly unforgettable.

One night in August Tawny was walking back to the Twenty-third Street flat with Gramma when a man dashed from a doorway and ran fast south down First Avenue. An instant later, a second man popped from the doorway and pointed a shotgun after the fugitive. Wham! A burst of orange flame sprang from the muzzle and a roar of exploding powder echoed under the El. Wham! There was a second burst of flame and a second roar as the second barrel discharged. Tawny could hear the shot whine.

Gramma clutched her hand tightly and said:

“The murderin’ spalpeens! Don’t be afeard, Tawny.”

“I’m not afraid,” Tawny replied, “but I’m glad he got away. He did get away, didn’t he, Gramma?”

Gramma laughed. She said:

“That wan was runnin’ fast enough to be in China by now. And I guess them little bullets in thim shot-guns wouldn’t do much more than sting at such a distance.”

Tawny was not unaccustomed to shooting. There had been a beautiful row over in Second Avenue at Eighteenth Street, fought first with bricks and then with revolvers, with three dead young men lying in the street as proof the combatants were serious minded.

It all helped to make life stirring and complete. Even visiting the privy in the backyard was a novelty and far from a hardship. These matters depended upon the point of view, and from where Tawny observed they all appeared in exaggeratedly exciting lines and colors.

Just so, the fact that the windows in the railroad flat didn’t open upon the out-of-doors, but upon the hallway, instead of displeasing Tawny because of the attendant lack of sunshine and fresh air and view, secretly delighted her because of the novelty. And if the flat smelled of the Gas House and Uncle Dan’s rank pipe and of corned beef and cabbage and must, it was all as natural as rain to her as she lay on the improvised bed of feather tick on ironing board on three kitchen chairs and listened to Gramma and Aunt Mary sing. Life wasn’t merely pleasant. It was swell. Even sadness was swell.

Only another night to roam,

Only another day to stray,

Then safe at last, the darkness past,

Safe in my father’s home.

Gramma and Aunt Mary dolorously sang this sad tale of the sailor boy, who expected to be safe in his father’s home, but wound up, through a grand storm with thunder and lightning in which the ship sank, by being safe in his Father’s (With a capital “F”) home, instead of his father’s (with a lower case “f”) home. Very sad it was, making Tawny feel weepy. But it was a sweet sadness and most enjoyable.

Tawny was nine years old when she was in Grade 4B, a class in which were backward boys and girls as old as sixteen, as well as normal youngsters. The seating arrangement in this room went according to the heights of the pupils. The short ones sat in front and the tallest ones in the rear seats. This system placed Tawny, who was tall for her age, in the next to last row, among the not-so-brights. And she wasn’t happy about it. She was less happy when Gramma said one night:

“What’re you scratchin’ your head for? Lemme look.”

After a look at Tawny’s head, Gramma said:

“Lice, as I live. Here! Run down to the drugstore and get a bottle of Tincture of Larkspur.”

Gramma soaked a towel with the tincture and wrapped it around Tawny’s head. Then she soaked a rag in kerosene, and Tawny said:

“Ouch! You’re pulling my hair.”

“I’m cleaning out the nits,” Gramma said. “Be still.”

Next day, in school, Tawny said to sixteen-year-old and fat and stupid Annie Pettus, who sat in the back row right behind her:

“I got lice from you, you dirty thing.”

“Wait till I get you outside,” Annie replied. “I’ll fix you.”

“I’ll be there,” Tawny said.

Tawny felt no fear of the results, perhaps because Annie was so dull. After school, the boys and girls gathered around and Annie scratched at Tawny. Tawny gave a big push and Annie fell down on the sidewalk and Tawny gathered Annie’s brown braids in her hands and banged Annie’s head on the sidewalk while Annie howled and the boys cheered.

“That’ll teach you to give me lice,” Tawny panted.

Beatrice Faurot said:

“Let her up. She’s had enough.”

Tawny arose, and Annie ran crying home. This made Tawny a great heroine. She was the smartest girl in the class, and now she had met and conquered physically the biggest girl in the class. Benny Field, Jimmy Ostrander and Ernest Locke argued for the privilege of toting Tawny’s books to school next morning. Tawny had no favorites at this age so they took turns, Benny carrying them the first day. Tawny loved the limelight and the attention, but not the individuals.

One day in June of this same year, Tawny arose and looked out the window past the fire escape where she liked to sit and send soap bubbles floating out over the Cellas’ roof, and saw the warm sun shining. She decided it was too lovely a day to go to school, so after breakfast, instead of heading toward school, she set a course for the Speedway, where the Harlem River runs quietly between grassy banks on the East and grass and trees grow against rocky cliffs on the West.

Pot-bellied, bright-eyed robins were hauling reluctant worms from the emerald sod. Other birds were singing in the trees. The sun sparkled on the river. The fleeciest clouds imaginable sailed like gossamer across the infinite vault of the sky. It was a day of days.

Tawny wandered happily until she came to an abandoned viaduct, a favorite spot because it provided a long, smooth marble grade down which Tawny and many other girls and boys had slid many times and worn out many pairs of pants. She began to slide down the marble balustrade.

A man happened along on foot. He was an old man, according to Tawny’s view. He must have been thirty. He wore a gray felt hat, turned down in front, a blue suit not too well pressed and black shoes not overly well cared for. He had brown hair and blue eyes and a pasty complexion, a little bloated. He failed to impress Tawny favorably. He asked in a husky voice:

“What’re you doing, little girl?”

“I dunno,” Tawny replied, embarrassed.

“Having a good time?”

“I guess so.”

“Isn’t it lonesome, being all alone?”

“I dunno.”

“What’s your name?”

“Miriam Louise Bohun, but everybody calls me Tawny.”

“Tawny! That’s a nice name.”

“It’s because I was the color of a lion, my father said, when I was little. My father is Charles David Bohun.”

And Tawny told where she lived, and the man said:

“Oh, yes. I know your father. We are friends. I guess he wouldn’t like to know you are playing hooky, would he?”

“I guess he wouldn’t.”

“Come on and I’ll buy you some ice cream. I won’t tell your father if you’re nice.”

They walked together to the top of the Speedway, up the hill, and Tawny ate ice cream. Then they walked back down the hill again and went into the woods and sat on the grass. The man glanced quickly up and down the Speedway and tried to pull Tawny to him. Frightened, she pulled away. He said:

“Don’t be afraid, Tawny. I was just going to play with you. I’d like to hug you, you’re such a pretty little girl.”

“I don’t want to.”

The man argued and Tawny protested. The man said:

“I’ll give you fifty cents if you’ll go into the woods with me.”

He held out a fifty-cent piece. Fifty cents was a huge sum to Tawny. She took it and said:

“Thank you, sir.”

“That’s all right,” the man replied. “Now we’ll go in the woods and play.”

“But I have to go into the woods first alone,” Tawny asserted.

“I’ll go with you.”

“You can’t go with me right now,” Tawny insisted. “Don’t you understand. I must go alone for a little.”

“Oh!”

Tawny walked into the shelter of the trees, frightened by the man but pleased with her smartness and the fifty-cent piece clenched in her sweaty palm. Once among the trees, she took to her heels. She never looked back until she burst into the vestibule of the apartment house and pushed the button.

She saw the man two days later, but dodged him. She wondered if he did know her father and, if he told her father about the playing hooky and the fifty cents, what her father would do about it. Her father never had punished her, but Tawny was more afraid of her father who never had whipped her than she was of her Gramma who often used the switch. Dave Bohun was that kind of man, and besides, the unknown is much more terrible than the known.

Tawny felt a shivery sense of guilt and terror, not unmixed with pride, as she gradually spent the fifty cents and worried about the strange man. She had deposited the money in Bogue’s Candy Shop, bought candy against her account. She saw him two or three times before he disappeared for good. But it was weeks before Tawny ceased being as watchful as an Indian Scout on the warpath.

Only one real grain of grit marred the smooth ointment of Tawny’s life. This was the unexplained absence of her mother. For much as she loved and admired her father, her mother was the most perfect of all God’s creatures and was adored with a passion difficult to describe. When Tawny asked Dave where her mother was, he merely said:

“She is still on the stage, Tawny.”

“When am I going to see her?”

“I don’t know, baby.”

“But I am going to see her.”

“Of course you are.”

Gramma gave her more encouragement. She said:

“Your mother will be home soon. Don’t cry, Tawny. She always was crazy about the stage and dancing and music and parties.”

Then, one day in November, when Tawny was in Grade 5B, she came out of school to see at the curb a yellow touring car, of a most dashing and striking pattern, shining with brass gadgets, around which a throng of admiring children were standing.

“Oh!”

“Ah!”

“What kind is it, miss? Hunh?”

“Gee. Lookit the auto.”

“Ain’t it a peach?”

“I bet it cost five thousand dollars.”

“It’s a Lozier. I seen one once before.”

In the car, at the wheel, was Birdy, a small green turban on her honey hair, a voluptuous mink cloak concealing her curves. She called:

“Tawny.”

Tawny was staggered with the shock and stirred with mixed emotions of love for her mother and an enormous pride in the lovely automobile and the magnificent fur coat. No other kids’ mothers had any such possessions. And no other kids’ mothers were half so beautiful; not even a quarter so beautiful. And no other kid’s mother was an actress.

Tawny rode away from the school with her mother in a haze of pride and glory and love.