Silent Sam and Other Stories of Our Day/The Honeymoon Flat
THE HONEYMOON FLAT
THE HONEYMOON FLAT
I
THE ferry-house clock, at the foot of Christopher Street, marked fifteen minutes past five; and all the trucks of the wholesale district were hurrying in, over the paving-stones of the side streets, to the wide esplanade of asphalt that lies along this stretch of the New York water-front.
They kept coming, like the rout of a commissariat, with noise and confusion, clattering over the uneven pavements and humping across the car tracks. Already hundreds of them, their empty shafts thrown upbefore them like stiff arms, supplicated the sunset in long rows; and down the passageways between them, the drivers, on the hacks of their horses, raced to the boarding stables like farm-boys free for the night.
Carney was late. He had hoped to have his team in their stalls by five o'clock, but his last delivery of packing-cases had not been taken off his hands until ten minutes past five. Now he came down Christopher Street like a Roman chariot-racer, standing behind the high seat of his double truck, shaken to the ears with the jarring of the axles, his huge Clydesdales pounding along as if to break their hoofs.
He turned in on the asphalt at full speed, and wheeled with the recklessness of a battery going into action; and before the team could catch breath, he had unhitched the tugs, and freed the pole, and vaulted to "Sharkey's" back, and set off at a gallop to the stables.
He hoped to be married that night. At least, there was a possibility that he might be. And his bride-elect would leave Sturm & Bergman's display rooms at six. She might wait for him, and she might not.
It was already half-past five when he hurried into a water-front saloon to get a bundle of clothes that he had left with the barkeeper that morning; and he struggled in the little washroom there—fighting with starched linen and twisted suspenders—to get himself into his wedding garments. It was a hot August evening. His fingers were slippery with perspiration. His neck was swelled with blood. He strangled in his efforts to fasten his celluloid collar. And every time that he paused to take breath, he wiped his forehead on his shirt-sleeve and sighed hard.
He ran for a street-car with his coat over his arm, pawing at the back of his necktie in an attempt to catch it under his collar-button. The conductor pulled him to the platform as the car started with a jerk. "Wha' 's the time?" he gasped.
The conductor thrust him aside. "Quart' t' six."
He clung to the brass hand-rail weakly. He had had no food since breakfast, except a glass of beer and some free-lunch biscuits. His legs were aching from the vibration of the track. He swayed with the motion of the car; and every now and then, he blinked like a man in a drop-elevator when the cage floor leaves his feet.
Not so the lady. She was a cloak model, "36 figure," in Sturm & Bergman's; and she had been parading all day, in various winter furs and jackets, before the critical eyes of wholesale buyers from out of town. She had walked up and down interminably, as graceful as a drawing-room belle, but as indifferent as a dummy. One of the younger buyers, admiring the stately creature in her "princess" gown of black brilliantine that fitted her like a mold, asked her, with an air of gallantry, whether she did not ever tire. She lowered a supercilious stare on him, and said "Uh!" The salesman interposed hastily: "Now here 's one of our newest designs—"
At six o'clock, she turned from the window where she had been idle, and went to the dressing-rooms to put off her "harness" and clothe herself for the street. She did not hurry. The younger girls giggled and chattered around her, arraying themselves in open-work finery and picture hats. She was the last to leave. Her face had lost its work-hour heaviness and flushed, with the faintest twinkle of excitement.
It returned to affected indifference when she saw Carney across the street. They met, as if by accident, at the corner. "Well?" she said.
He reached his hat-brim awkwardly, his coat pinching him under the arms. "How yuh been?"
"Fine. How 're you?"
"A' right."
Carney usually relapsed into a satisfied silence as soon as they met; and she, to-night, instead of making conversation for him, looked straight before her, with an air of saying: "Go on, now. I 've helped you all I intend to. You 'll have to do this by yourself."
He looked puzzled, as if he did not know how to begin. They walked up Broadway, jostled by the crowds that poured from the shops and the office buildings. When they came to Astor Place, she turned east toward Third Avenue, as if she were going home. "Hol' on," he said. "Ain't yuh—"
"Ain't I what?"
He hitched up his neck in his tight collar. "Ain't yuh—goin' to have somethin' t' eat?"
She asked merely: "Where 'll we go?"
What 's the matter with Dinkey's?"
"All right."
And they went along again, in silence.
It was a week now since she had met Carney, one midday, as she was going out to her luncheon and he was delivering a load of goods to the freight elevator of Sturm & Bergman's. She had recognized him at once, by the scar on his upper lip, and remembered the day she had given him that wound, accidentally. (She had been breaking up a box for her mother's firing, and the head had slipped off the hatchet and struck him in the mouth.) He had been little Philly Carney then, going to school; and she had been "Clare" Walsh, carrying parcels for "Madame Gilligan" over on Ninth Street.
That was fifteen years ago. They had been neighbors in Cherry Hill's "Dublin Row" at the time. But when her widowed mother died, she revolted against the slavery of her apprenticeship to the dressmaker, and went on the stage as a chorus-girl for three contemptuous years. The vanities of the theater had sickened her sturdy independence; she had returned to the working world as a shop-girl, and accepted a better position as a cloak model.
When Carney met her, she was adrift on the life of the city in a sort of unambitious isolation, working stolidly, lonely among the younger girls with whom she had no sympathy, and bruskly repelling any flippant advances from the men. She had lost track of all her girlhood acquaintances. "Dublin Row" had long since been torn down. When she saw Carney with his truck, it was like meeting an old friend in a world of strangers.
And he had accepted her, as an old friend, with the sympathetic interest of old friendship in all that had happened to her in the interval of absence. He had told her nothing about himself—except that he had worked hard and saved his money, having no one dependent on him. "Say," she asked him, at last, "why did n't you get married?"
"Never met the right girl," he said.
"Well," she joked, tempted by his stolidity, "how 'd I do?"
He looked at her. "Fine. Will yuh do it?"
"Sure," she laughed.
They were parting at her door. "A' right," he said. "See yuh to-morrah night."
And here was "to-morrah night!"
II
When they arrived at Dinkey's, she sat down, to look over the greasy bill of fare, her arms on the little table. It was a basement restaurant that offered a "regular" dinner for fifty cents. There were ants in the sugar-bowl and gravy stains in the salt-cellars.
"I could eat a horse," she said.
He turned to the unshaven waiter, absent-mindedly. "Same fer me."
When he stopped laughing with her at his mistake, he was more at ease with the situation. "Well, an' that 's no joke," he said, as soon as the waiter had left them, to bring soup.
She patted her back hair, smiling at him with the flirtatious air that is proper to a café dinner. He looked at her as if the sparkle in her face were so brilliant that it dazzled him to any defect of beauty in her. He weighed his fork in his big fingers. "Say," he asked, "did yuh mean that, las' night?"
"Mean what?"
"You know."
She tried to laugh. "Did you?"
"I seen Father Dumphy this afternoon."
"You did!" Her lips still held the wrinkles of her smile, but her eyes, fixed on him, kept twitching in and widening out in an alternation of incredulity and hope.
"I thought yuh—I tol' 'em we 'd be aroun' to see 'm t'night—if yuh 'd come."
Her gaze searched his face like a light that took him full in the eyes and confused him. The waiter shuffled up with their soup and interrupted them. Carney, in his embarrassment, gulped a steaming spoonful and burned his throat. He felt her smile on him and met it with a twisted mouth.
"Did—did yuh mean it?" he insisted.
She answered, addressing her plate: "I guess so—if you did."
When she looked up, she saw him with another scalding mouthful at his lips, and she cried: "You 'll burn yourself!"
He spilled it into the plate. He wiped the splatter from his coat-front with his table napkin and mopped his forehead. "Gee!" he said.
"Fish?" the waiter asked, behind her.
"Yep," she answered. "Fish." And she spoke in the voice of a woman who was henceforth to do the ordering for two.
She had the feminine ability to take command of a sentimental situation, and Carney evidently had the masculine inability to do anything of the sort. She continued in charge of the dinner because he ate as if he did not know what he was putting in. his mouth. If she wondered what was going on in his mind, she did not ask him. At one moment, he devoured his food; at the next, he sat with meat impaled on the tines of his fork, forgetting to open his mouth for it; and when she spoke to him, he listened, smiling vaguely, without any apparent comprehension. Several times, when she was busy with her food, she felt his eyes on her, burningly, and she did not raise her own to meet them. She had achieved a manner of perfect commonplace calm.
"Well?" he said, when they had finished. "I said I 'd be there at eight—about."
She straightened her hat, trying to look up at it through her eyebrows. "Where?"
"Father Dumphy's."
"All right." She rose, with the manner of accepting a dare, nonchalantly. "You better pay the waiter first."
He grinned. "I forgot."
And he had forgotten more than that, as she discovered when they came down the stone steps of the church, married. She was both laughing and exasperated. "You 're a peach," she said. "How 'd you think we could get married without a ring."
He shook his head, blissfully unashamed.
"It 's bad luck," she said. "Besides, that ain't a wedding ring at all." She stretched out her finger with his huge seal-ring on it.
"Well, say," he proposed, "come an' get one."
"Yes! Where 'll we get one at this time o' night?"
"I don' know."
"No. Neither do I. Put on your hat."
He put it on. They walked to the corner. He hesitated there, fumbling in his pockets.
"Well?" she asked.
"Where—where 're we goin' to?"
"What!"
"Well, I—I did n't know whether yuh meant it," he said. "An' I did n't make no— My place ain't fit— It took all the money I had to pay him. I—"
"Well, Phil Carney," she cried. "If you ain't the limit!"
He did not deny it. He looked around, troubled, at the passers-by.
"What 're you going to do?" she demanded.
He had money in the savings-bank, but that was out of reach till morning. He had a brother in Brooklyn, but he and his brother were not on very friendly terms. He might borrow somewhere—enough for one night in a hotel, anyway—perhaps from Mrs. Kohn, from whom he rented his room, or from his friend the bar-keeper with whom he had left his clothes. But those two were at opposite ends of the town; and while he was trying to decide to which he should apply, she walked out into the road to meet an approaching street-car.
"Where yuh goin'?"
"I 'm going back to my room," she said disgustedly. "You can go where you like."
"Well, say," he protested.
"Well, say," she mocked him. "The next time you ask a girl to get married, you 'd better have some place to take her to. I can't live in the streets, can I?"
That silenced him. He stood beside the car step, undecided, as she got aboard. "Good night," she said. "I 'll see you to-morrow."
He remained in the middle of the street—watching the car climb the slope of the avenue—until a moving-van almost ran him down. The shouts of the driver sent him back to the sidewalk. The movement of the late shoppers turned him round. He drifted away aimlessly.
At midnight, he came back to the foot of Christopher Street and stood looking out at the bivouac of the army of trucks, like a deserter returned to his camp. His hat was slanted down over his eyes; the torn ends of his celluloid collar were protruding under his chin; he carried his coat over one shoulder. He stepped down heavily into the gutter and stumbled across the road.
"A' right, Jim," he answered the challenge of the watchman. "I 'm goin' to sleep in the cart."
III
Like most New York truckmen, Carney owned his own team and wagon; but unlike most of them, he hired out by the day, instead of by the week—for he had the best horses on the water-front, and he wished to reserve the right to keep them in their stalls whenever the streets were too dangerously iced in winter, or too dangerously sun-beaten in summer, for them to be at work. So, when he woke next morning, he was under no necessity of asking leave of absence for the day.
Long before the other drivers had arrived at their stables, he was hitching up. And by the time the water-front had wakened to the day's work, he was driving up and down the cross streets of the East Side, reading notices of flats to let. The janitors were putting out their ash-cans. He hailed them from his high seat with "How much 're yer rooms?" Then, with the price in his eye, he "sized up" the front of the building, shook his head, and drove on.
He wanted something new; no "second-hand" flats for him. He did not intend to pay more than fifteen dollars a month rent; and he did not wish more than four or five rooms.
It was eight o'clock before he came on the row of apartment houses that are known to the neighborhood of Second Avenue and Twelfth Street as "The Honeymoon Flats" but it did not take him ten minutes to decide that he had found his home. The last of the buildings had just been opened for occupancy; it was in red brick striped with white-stone facings; there was a shining brass hand-rail down the front steps; the halls were gay with crimson burlaps; and on the fifth floor there was a flat of five rooms, papered in gorgeous designs of red, green, and gold, to rent for twenty dollars a month.
The fact that the houses were called "The Honeymoon Flats" because none but inexperienced housekeepers would try to live in them, was not known to Carney. They were unheated, except by gas-grates; but he was not one to think of heating arrangements in midsummer, and the grates were bronzed and glittering. There were cracks around the window frames large enough to put a finger in, had he looked for them—but he did not. He saw gasoliers as resplendent as the most gorgeous he had ever seen in a saloon; and they hung from ceilings that were bright with squirt-brush decorations of red and blue flowers and red and green fruit. The bathroom shone like a plumber's window display.
Carney nodded. "'S all right," he said. "'S all right."
He left his watch as a "deposit" and drove off to his breakfast; but he went roundabout, by way of Third Avenue and Canal Street, slowly, on the lookout for furniture stores. When he came to one with a gold sign, in letters a yard high—"Everything for Housekeeping," he stopped short. Below it, on a net banner, he read: "Ask to see our $129 flat, furnished complete. Ten per cent, off for cash. One dollar opens an account." He read it twice, muttering it over. Then he whipped up his horses suddenly and rattled down the street with as much noise as a tally-ho.
"Gee!" he laughed as he swung the corner. "This 'll bust the bank."
By half-past ten, he was back at Mittelbaum & Schwarz's "Furniture Emporium." On the fourth floor, the enterprising manager had screened off four compartments to represent a parlor, a bedroom, a kitchen, and a dining-room. And when Carney entered that parlor, between pea-green portieres beautiful with yellow ball-fringe, he took off his hat. Four rich red "damask" chairs and a sofa were arranged about the walls; a square "parlor" table, as big as a chess-board, stood in the exact center of the room on the exact center of an "Oriental" rug that was made of a yard of cheap carpet with a border sewn on it; and in the exact center of the table, a very small lamp supported a very large globe-shade that was decorated like a dyed Easter egg.
A "pier mirror of French glass" distorted reflections from the wall opposite the doorway. A chromo on a bamboo easel stood before a pair of lace curtains that were hung to represent a window. Everything was brilliant with varnish, rich with scroll-saw carving, upholstered in imitation plushes and ball-fringe. Carney looked around him in awed silence; and when the salesman turned his back to lead the way into the bedroom, the big truckman furtively smoothed his hair.
That bedroom—from its "golden oak dressing-case and wash-stand to its "elegant, brass-trimmed, steel, enameled bed"—was luxuriously complete. In the dining-room, an "oak" table was set with "decorated English" dishes, as thick as quick-lunch china. An "elegant sewing-machine with a five-year guarantee" stood at the foot of a puffy leather couch. There were forty pieces of tinware in the kitchen, a "golden oak" refrigerator, ten yards of oilcloth—"everything to make home comfortable and a woman happy."
Carney said, with a heavy affectation of nonchalance: "I guess this 'll do." He went down into his bulging trousers pocket for the roll of bills he had drawn from the bank. "I got my truck outside. I 'll jus' take the stuff along with me."
There were difficulties, but he overcame them all. No carpets went with the $129 flat; he paid extra for them and got a superb design of yellow flowers, as big as pumpkins, on a flaming scarlet ground. There was a cotton-batting "down comfortable" on the bed, but no sheets or blankets; he bought them wholesale on the lower floors. If there was anything he seemed likely to forget, the salesman tactfully reminded him. He hired Mittelbaum Schwarz's official carpet-layer to help him move in; and having paid $25 on account and signed an agreement to pay $2 a week thereafter, he took his center-table in one hand and his parlor lamp in the other and led a procession of employees with chairs, tables, pillows, and tinware to his truck.
"Shake yerselves, now, boys," he said. "I ain't got all day on this job."
They shook themselves. By midday, the parlor carpet was laid; a green matting was down in the dining-room; the ten yards of oilcloth adorned the kitchen; and Carney, standing in the disorder of the bedroom where all the furniture was piled, smiled around him on the beginnings of his happiness—and felt hungry. It reminded him that his team had not been fed.
He was alone in his own house all afternoon, putting things to rights. The front room was easily arranged, because he remembered exactly how it had been set up in the furniture store; but the bedroom gave him a bad half-hour. The side pieces of the bed did not fit the ends; the brass ball-trimmings came off in his impatient grip; the pillows would not go into their slips until he took them between his knees and drew, the cases on them like stockings. The pillow-shams he spread on the wash-stand and dressing-table.
By four o'clock he had the forty pieces of tinware arranged on hooks around the kitchen, and the agateware kettle, filled with water, set on the gas-stove. It was then he found that there was no gas in the pipes; but the janitor, frantically summoned, led him to the meter in the bathroom—"quarter-in-the-slot" tenement-house meter—made change of a dollar for him, and showed him how to put his money in. The rest was a matter of hanging the curtains and the chromes in the front room. Carney shook his head doubtfully at one of the latter—a picture of a yellow horse dragging a sleigh-load of wood up a forest road in a snow-storm. "Darn mut," he said. "He 'd ought t' 've had a team fer that haul."
But the crowning audacity of his day was the purchase of a delicatessen dinner—cold chicken, sweet pickles, potato salad, Swiss cheese, bologna, rye bread, a wooden plate of butter, and four bottles of imported English ale. He spread it on the table, in the dishes of the "decorated English tea-set," drew up two chairs, and surveyed his work from the doorway with a chuckle of uncontainable delight.
IV
If Mrs. Carney had been a bride out of a romance, she might have entered that flat in the most adorable ecstasies of appreciation. But, unfortunately for Carney, her mind was not romantic, and she had been using it all day.
She had repented of leaving him, the night before, as soon as she had irrevocably paid her street-car fare; and she had hurried down to her work, that morning, expecting to find him at Sturm & Bergman's side door. When he had not appeared at luncheon hour, she had been so worried that she had not been able to eat; and the afternoon's parade in fall costumes, with the thermometer at 86°, had worn her weak. At six o'clock she came out, desperately resolved to inquire for him at his rooms. And he was at the corner to greet her with a smile that, in the circumstances, was idiotic.
His explanations were irritatingly incomplete and incoherent. It exasperated her still more to find that her bad temper could not chafe a geniality in him that had no adequate cause apparent. She was peevish with hunger. She wanted her dinner at once. She insisted that there was no sort of sense in going to look at flats before they ate.
But just this one, Carney said. They could get their dinner right near it.
She would have left him again, but her day's experience had made her wise. She yielded at last in a sulky exhaustion, unable to argue with a man who did nothing but grin. They had to stand in the street-car. She mounted the four flights of stairs to the flat with her jaw set on a determination to disappoint the eager assurance with which he led the way.
He unlocked the parlor door and ushered her in. She glanced around coldly. "What do you want to rent a furnished flat for?"
"I did n't," he bubbled. "I rented it empty, an' furnished it myself."
"To-day?" she cried.
"Yah," he confessed more doubtfully.
"And that 's what you 've been doing all day!"
He nodded.
"Well, Phil Carney!" she wailed. "If that ain't the meanest! Why—why—" She choked up with tears and anger. "Why, that 's all the fun! She sat down in one of his damask chairs, fumbling for her handkerchief.
He closed the door on his fiasco. "Well, say," he began.
"Aw, shut up," she wept. "You go 'n' do everything wrong. I bet you got the dangdest lot of old junk—"
"I ain't," he defended himself. "I got the best they had."
"The best they had!" She summed up the shoddy magnificence of the parlor in a sweeping glance of disgust.
He turned his back on her to look out of the window. She whisked into the bedroom. "Ach!" he heard her cry. "Pine! … Cotton battin'!… Excelsior! It ain't even a hair mattress!" She flung into the dining-room—and stopped in the doorway.
The pitiful mute expectation of the two chairs, drawn up to the delicatessen dinner, confronted her with a dumb reproach. Her face changed slowly, her eyebrows still knitted in a scowl that began to twitch uncertainly, her mouth trembling in a doubtful slant.
When she came back to him in the front room, she took him by the two ears, from behind, and shook his head from side to side. "Darn you, Phil," she said, between laughing and crying, "if you ain't the darnedest big baby—"
He turned around and saw her face. "Well, say—"
She had come to marriage as a strayed cat comes to a saucer of milk, with a boldness that is born of hunger, and a tense wariness that does not relax under the first caress. To escape from her single life of self-supported loneliness, she would have married any one of whom she was not altogether afraid; and she was not afraid of Carney. She had for him a feeling that was slightly contemptuous even when it was most tender—a feeling that held him off and smiled at him with an amused tolerance, at best.
It was with this smile that she sat down to their cold dinner. But in the middle of the meal, she gathered—from something Carney said—that he did not expect her to go back to her work in Sturm & Bergman's; and she was struck dumb. She had been prepared to work until the care of a family should keep her at home. She listened to him with a pathetic expression of wistfulness and doubt, while he—in clumsy apology for having furnished the flat without consulting her—took out his bank-book and explained his indebtedness to the "Furniture Emporium." "The stuff ain't all paid fer," he said, "an' we won't never pay fer it unless they take back what yuh don't like, an' give yuh somethin' else 'at yuh do."
He passed the book to her to keep, as the treasurer of the household. She turned it over in her hands as if it had been a jewel-box. "You better look out," she said with a tremulous laugh. "I 'll break you!"
Carney looked at her, solemnly trustful. "A' right. We go broke together now."
And suddenly she put her hands up to her face and began to sob.
She was somewhat tearful again in the morning when he left her to go to his work; and she hung out of the front window to wave him good-by as he turned the corner far below her. He was taking word to Sturm & Bergman's that their cloak-model had left them; and she drew in from the window-sill, and turned to look down the little flat, with a new light in her face, all the domestic instincts stirring in her chokingly. The inherited desire to be protected, sheltered, housed in respect and love, took her in its fulfilment with a hysteric swelling of the heart; and she clasped her hands under her breast and drew in a long breath, her eyes still shining with tears, her thin lips set in that hungry pout with which a child asks for either food or kisses.
She walked slowly back to the dining-room and sat in Carney's chair, stroking the handle of his knife caressingly. And when she was taking up the dishes to carry them out to the kitchen to be washed, she stooped over them and cuddled them and laughed.
It was some six weeks later that Mr. Philip Carney, in his shirt-sleeves, with his pipe in his mouth and his wife on his knee, sat in the breeze of the parlor window, enjoying the evening air. "Well," he said, "how d' yuh like bein' married?"
She tweaked his sunburned nose smilingly, cooing to him in the ridiculous "baby talk" that seems to be the universal language of young married couples.
He rescued his pipe. "Here," he laughed. "Don't do that. Yuh tickle the roof o' me mouth."
She pinched his lips, puckering up the cut she had given him in Dublin Row when she struck her "Philly wif 'm hatchet," as she said. There was a sort of fierce playfulness in her manner, a rough fondness that was all she had left of her old imperious treatment of him.
"Huh!" he teased her. "That ain't the way yuh talked that night when yuh lef ' me 'n Nint' Av—"
She clapped a hand over his mouth. "You promised you 'd never—"
He caught away her hand. "A' right," he said. "Not another word about it.… But how did yuh like the furnished flat that day— Ouch!"
She was pulling his hair. "Shut up, then, will you?"
"Ow! Ye-e-es! Quit it! I 'll shut up."
She settled back against his shoulder. He grunted as he got his teeth into the worn mouthpiece of his pipe again; and in the contented silence that ensued—looking out over the houses that had once been merely street-walls to them, and remembering the lives they had led on the pavements and in the shops—those two waifs of the city were vaguely conscious of the eternal miracle of domesticity and mildness that had been worked in them by their Honeymoon Flat.