Ain't Angie Awful!/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE GRAFOLION COMPANY
FOR a young girl, life in New York is hard; so hard as to he practically indigestible. There were times when Angela Bish didn’t know where her next kiss would come from. Other girls fell in love, married, were beaten and divorced. But none of these blessings were vouchsafed Angela.
Indeed, she had so often been thrown down by men that, at the Almost-Fur factory, where she glued whiskers onto blotting paper, to make sealskin coats, they called her Angie the Unbreakable. Disappointed hopes had turned her hair prematurely yellow.
Ill as she could afford the luxury she would have given eight dollars any day for a husband, dead or alive. If wealthy, she would have preferred him dead. But all the matrimonial agencies had given her up as too wonderfully willing. Men, they said, kindly, liked to pursue an elusive woman, like a cake of soap in a wet bathtub—even men did who hated baths. But poor Angie began to smile when a man was blocks away, and kept it up till the cops asked her if she were looking for the Home for the Feeble Minded.
Yet she was fair—at least, fairly fair. She would have made a good wife for any dead husband. Besides her talent for gum-chewing, for which she had received a gold medal at the Garbage Collectors’ Annual Ball, she had incipient hydrophobia and many other accomplishments. But they accomplished little in the way of a husband.
The fact was, Angie was usually sound asleep in and around the region between the ears, and she woke up only when marriage was proposed, usually by herself. Brains she had nix. The only answer she knew was “Yes”; and that didn’t get her very far with the tightwads she knew, unless they happened to ask her did she want a trolley ride.
Yet it is always darkest just before Christmas. Even as she pored over the first lesson in the Correspondence School of Suicide, and had about decided to specialize in Rough on Rats, Romance was already sneaking into her hall bedroom, disguised in special delivery. The letter was unsigned, but she recognized the perfume as one on sale by all the best soapists.
“Oft,” it began—and she smiled. Angela liked soft letters, and one that began with “oft,” she knew, would be as gooey as the inside of a ripe Camembert cheese.
“Oft have I admired your smart closed carriage, your proud boardwalk, the graceful swinging of your gait. They have quite run away with my heart, although my liver and lungs still remain unmoved. If you care to share a little whale and buttermilk at Kid’s restaurant tonight with one who adores the very tacks you walk on, wire Ham-and-eggs, care United Stogie Store, No. 1112, Hoboken-on-the-Sewer. I thank you. Green Mustache.”
Hatched in the happiness of her soul, a baby hope, no bigger than a Boston baked bean, flapped its beak and cawed in ecstasy. That day for lunch Angela Bish ate a heavy dessert to keep her spirits down. But, all the afternoon, the girls at the Almost-Fur factory, seeing her giggle over her glue, decided that she must have received the happy news of a death in the family.
She walked to the restaurant as if on hair.
And sure enough his mustache was green; and he must have been green himself to take Angie so seriously. Few would have taken her at all. He held out a hand like twenty cents’ worth of bananas, and lifted his two-quart hat.
“Angela,” he said, “long as I have known you—and it is now almost a whole minute—never have I seen you more beautiful!”
The compliment instantly went to her head, and there, in the great dim solemn silent spaces, it roamed about like a tailless cat in a cathedral. And her smile was that of one who has just borrowed a $400 squirrel coat to be photographed in. That is, if there are $400 squirrels. I doubt it.
She couldn’t eat. Indeed, long as she had practised the art, it was all she could do to do nothing. But he ate heartily and handily and greedily and gaudily in great glorious gosh-awful gobs. Like a fireman feeding a furnace, his knife went up and down.
LIKE A FIREMAN FEEDING A FURNACE HIS KNIFE WENT UP AND DOWN
“Now, little one,” said he, “come along with me. We are going to have one of those wonder jazz evenings you read about in the fifteen cent magazines.”
This was no news to little Angela, only, it wouldn’t be like one of those short stories, she had decided; it would be a regular he-and-she serial, as illustrated by an artist with-three-names.
She took his arm, together with everything between his hat and heels, including the Flor de 14th St. cigar that was slowly turning his green mustache violet. Come with him? You couldn’t have melted her off with an acetylene blast. She had grown on him like a wart or a bad habit, for richer, for poorer, for sale or for instance till death did them puncture.
******
The hall of the Grafolion Company was cold, so cold as to be well-nigh rectangular. As he poked her through the transom Angie was saying to herself, “Once I get him in my arms, nothing shall ever part us except marriage!” With her personality and her biceps she felt sure that she could hold him and his cigar. Poor Angela! She was as optimistic as a centipede about to attempt to cross a freshly varnished floor.
And yet, once alone with him—for when they went in, his cigar went out—she found, somehow, she just couldn’t do it. It was not her will that relented, she had made no will. It was nothing so petty as pity, nor was it the mole on the bow of his nose. No, it was only the long overdue fact that she was handcuffed to the wall, and, try as she might, with all her might, she could not pull it down. She could not even bend it. It was lucky for her that she was used to being a wallflower.
I wish I didn’t have to describe the scene that followed. But your vulgar curiosity must be satisfied. Yet how shall I bring it home to you, if you insist upon having a ghastly thing like that in your own home? I can only say that, when that brute in human form approached her as if to kiss and, my gawd! did not kiss, her bloodshot shrieks sounded as follows:
D! pdq *-&Dzp$Bjz!!! AAR D!gdf*
One would have thought they were dismembering a Member of Congress. Her screams filled the hall to repletion.
And still the man she would vamp and could not, kept three-eighths of an inch from her, his green mustache brushing her nose. It was a ticklish situation for Angela. As near he was as rent day, yet far away as fairyland or the Differential Calculus. She never could tell them apart; few can.
But what, ladies and gentlemen, was the most mysterious machine just abaft her fore-quarter, whose wheel, the while, was revolving with the hellish cruelty of a taxi-meter taking a girl home to the Bronx? It turned on and on. . . . Once she had left the water turned on all day in the bathtub. This was like that—only the floor was not so wet. . . . And as it turned, by her mixed groans one might have suspected her to be a giraffe with a stiff neck.
But she was not. She was only a young girl growing bilious. And at last, answering her cries for help, the room rose on one corner and bowed politely, then looped the loop and did a tailspin. Angela knew no more; indeed, not so much.
******
A spoonful of gasoline, forced between her lips, revived her; and she was released by a red-headed Chinaman. Him she might have kissed, perhaps, for Angela’s love was usually all-embracing. But it was too late; her kisses had staled. The man with the green mustache had disappeared. At first she thought he had taken her heart with him, and felt anxiously inside her corset. No, it was not gone, but it was going.
******
Three weeks are supposed by some to have elapsed.
******
Entering a Hall of Records, one day, something—it may have been the Recorder—told her to ask for the new Catterwaulski records, so extensively advertised, of late, in all the best fly-papers. She heard, and, understanding, at last, thereby established a new record of her own for intelligence. Before her ears were reproduced the convulsive arpeggios of her late lamented anguish.
Yea, verily; in the distracted depths of Angela’s lovesickness, the Grafolion Company had discovered a new coloratura contralto. You can get her complete conniption on a 12-inch disc for $3.50.