Kept Woman/Chapter 5
"Come on, sit down, you don't have to go yet. Rose and Sylvia won't be home till twelve. On Saturday nights they both work till after eleven-thirty in the store. Don't worry, Hubert, I'm not anxious to have them catch me in a kimono entertaining a man. They'd put me out or call a cop or something. But it isn't nine-thirty yet. That's right, have a seat.
"Oh, I know what you're sulky about. You're still glooping over that snapshot on my bureau, aren't you? I told you who it was. I ought to throw it away, I guess, but I'm kind of soft about it. You know, love's young dream stuff. Gee, I was nuts about him and him married and me a kid sixteen years old. He was nice. No, honest, he didn't know I was only sixteen. I lied to him and told him I was nineteen. He wouldn't have took a chance otherwise. That's a State's prison offense.
"I guess he liked me all right. He had a store. A haberdashery it was. I use to play hooky from school and spend the afternoon in there talking to him. Of course he didn't know I was still a school kid. I use to steal nickels out of my mother's pocketbook to get carfare to go to him, and on days when her pocketbook wasn't handy I use to walk twenty-two blocks to see him. I was a dodo all right. We would go in the little room in back of his shop and we'd pet. For a long time it wasn't anything more than that. I guess the fear that a customer would come in always kept us from going further.
"Then one night—gee, I'll never forget it. It was a hot summer's night and, you know, the stars were all out and you could smell the flowers and green things and it was kind of romantic. I went out for a walk with my girl friend. Her name was Julia—Julia Hart. It was about nine o'clock and I'd just left her and was walking home when who should I see in an automobile but him. He was all alone and he asks me if I want to take a little ride. I says sure and we take a ride. Well, the God-dammed stars and the flowers was too much for us. We should 'a' stuck to the little room in back of the store.
"I went home scared to death. I didn't know much. I thought maybe I'd have a baby before the night was over. I cried and my mother comes in and asks me what's the matter. I wouldn't tell her and she went back to her room thinking, I suppose, that I'd had a fight with Julia or that I'd seen some jane with a prettier dress than I had. But the next day she could see there was something serious wrong with me. I couldn't eat and I bawled and I wouldn't talk decent to my kid brothers and then of course she wanted to know what was biting me.
"She comes to my room after the kids are gone to school and she's got all the work done and she suspects pretty much because she says, 'Lillian, I want to hear what you've done. You're my little girl and anything you've done is my trouble as well as yours.' She says it as nice as pie and I like a God-damn fool tells her everything except the boy friend's name.
"Then you should have heard her. She had a nice way of talking but I wasn't her little girl any more then. Once she had her curiosity satisfied she was herself again. I was a little bum and a lot of other things. I was surprised. I was only a kid, you know. I thought mothers always loved and forgave their children. But that's bunk. That's only greeting-card stuff. Cripes, didn't you ever notice how much store a childless woman sets by a dog? There you are. A woman's got so much love to dish out and a dog will do as well as a child. That will give you some idea of the high quality of love a kid actually gets. What? Oh, well, I suppose there are exceptions.
"Anyhow, the old lady tries to get Father O'Day to come talk to me about my downfall. He was a nice old fellow and he says no, he won't force himself on my bewildered young soul. Nice words, ain't they? That's what he told her. I heard her tell my old man. Father O'Day says that if she'll leave me in peace that I'd come to him myself in time. But her leave me in peace? Don't be a clown. She goes to my favorite teacher in school and tells her about it and asks her to come point out to me the error of my ways. As though I was going out with some man every night. Well, anyhow, little by little, the old lady has everybody in the neighborhood wise to what I did.
"So just before I was seventeen I left them all flat. I told my old lady to go to hell and I cleared out, 'You'll get your punishment,' she screams at me from the front window as I walk down the street and, mind you, all the neighbors listening. I felt like saying, 'I got all I could stand when I found out what you were really like,' but I just kept walking.
"No, I didn't go to the boy friend. I'd heard his wife just had a new baby and I thought maybe he had troubles enough without a homeless girl busting in on him. I'd never seen him since that night and I ain't seen him yet. He was nice though.
"Well, anyhow, I didn't have a baby. That was something to be thankful for. I got a job right away in a plumber's store. You know, answering the phone when the plumber was out and taking down all the addresses of all the leaking toilets in town. I saw his ad in the paper and he took me right on and advanced me half a week's salary, which was five berries. I got a room with it. Three dollars a week for the room. Some room. I was there a couple of months and then of course I started to look around for something better. I wanted a better job and a better room.
"I tried the telephone company but I didn't like it much. Too many people telling you what to do. Then I got a job in a movie theater as cashier. That was all right. Gee, this is like an old-fashioned melodrama, ain't it? The wronged girl leaves home and tries to make her way in the brutal world. Only it wasn't so awfully brutal. I met Vincent in the movie theater. He was the film operator. He rushed me like mad. I liked him. I thought he wanted to marry me. That wasn't his idea at all. Well, I wouldn't say it wasn't his idea. He wanted everything but the marriage. He had a big room in a kind of careless rooming-house. They let him cook in the room and bring women up to cook for him or do any other little thing they were in the mood for. One day he asked me up and I went. He pulls the old question and—God strike me dead if this is a lie—I fell for him because I was ashamed to let him think that I was fool enough to imagine he'd asked me up there for anything else. Sure, I'd sooner let him think that I came up there hard-boiled and willing than that he should know me for a dumb kid who'd make a scene about protecting her honor. So there you are. Strike two. What the hell, says I, why should I let a moving-picture operator think I'm a dumb kid?
"I never liked him much after that. I could hardly look at him. I suppose that's because he told the doorman that I was easy. I left that job because of him. I wanted to go to work in the stores anyhow. The hours were normal and I thought I'd get to know some girls. You see, I hadn't any friends at all. Here's a laugh. They asked me in the first store if I was acquainted with any special stock and I says, 'Sure, haberdashery.'
"Well, anyhow I drifted around and finally got in the store where I am now. I got a swell room on Washington Heights. The only thing though, I was kind of lonely around mealtimes. Eating in bakeries and restaurants alone is no fun, so I came here with the Friedrichs. I don't like it much though because I think they don't like me. I'm funny that way. I can't be comfortable if I feel I'm making somebody else uncomfortable.
"I got friends though. Anna Leitz works in the handkerchiefs with me. I see her often in the evenings. And Louise Casey use to work in the store but she don't now. I see her a lot though. She's engaged to be married to a fellow named Billy Fisher. I go to parties up at Louise's house and I chase around with her crowd some. I haven't had a boy friend—that is a serious case—in some time.
"There was Walter. He was nice. He was a clerk in a cigar store. I went with him for nearly a year. He was married and his wife was an invalid. You know, wheel-chair and all that. She couldn't have no kids of course and Walter was just crazy for kids. He'd asked me to go with him for a week-end, you know, somewhere, but I says to myself that I'll be respectable now. Then one night he tells me that he ain't just after me for low purposes, that he's really only trying to win me over because he thought maybe I'd have a child for him. Oh, it was real sad the way he tells about how he loves kids and his wife can't have them and all that. I guess I must have had my hair waved that day and was feeling reckless or something, so I says, 'Walter, you see me through and support the kid and I'll do it.' You see, I liked him and I knew what it was, having nothing to go home to in the evenings, and I felt that my life was a washout to me, so it might as well be some use to somebody else.
"Well, I'm strong and healthy. I got in the well-known condition and the boy friend gives me seventy-five dollars for an operation and fades out. Slick, eh? That's a line what is a line. Well, I kind of lost faith in men after that. Maybe I wouldn't have lost faith only it was tough laying sick in a furnished room with no one to so much as get me a drink of water. Cripes, I even had to come home alone from the doctor's. Cry? No, I didn't cry. I thought maybe the landlady would hear me.
"That's my story, Judge. There's my whole history up to tonight. The haberdasher, Vincent, Walter, and now you. Gee, fifteen minutes without a cigarette. Got a match?"