A Stone for Danny Fisher (1952) (29 page)

I switched off the light. “Go to sleep, baby,” I said, bending over the bed and pressing my lips to her temple. “Things’ll be all right now.”

I went back into the kitchen and rinsed out the cup. I sat down in a chair by the table and was lighting a cigarette when the sound of the baby’s whimper caught my ear. I tossed the butt into the sink and hurried into the bedroom. Vickie was coughing—tiny, rasping coughs deep in her chest. Quickly I picked her up in her blanket and patted her back lightly until the coughing had stopped.

Nellie was sleeping a sleep of complete and utter exhaustion. I was glad that Vickie hadn’t awakened her. I touched the baby’s face. It was still warm and feverish. Her head slipped toward my shoulder. She was sleeping again. Gently I put her back in the crib and covered her.

I hurried back into the kitchen and ran water over the glowing butt in the sink. Then I turned out the light and went into the bedroom in the dark. I placed a chair next to the crib and sat down in it, then reached over the side of the crib and felt for Vickie’s fingers.
Instinctively
her tiny hand curled around my index finger. I sat there quietly, not daring to move for fear of disturbing her.

Outside the window the moonlight was bright and the night itself seemed new, as if it were another world. I felt Vickie move and I turned to look down into the crib. She was sleeping on her side. In the darkness I could see her curled up into a little ball around my hand. My daughter, I thought proudly. It took a scare like this to make me realize how precious she was to me. There were so many things about her I took for granted.

“I’ll make it up to you for havin’ to live like this, Vickie baby,” I promised her. My husky whisper in the darkness startled me.

I looked nervously at the bed, but Nellie was still sleeping. I turned back to the crib, and this time I was careful that my moving lips
made no sound. “Get well, Vickie baby,” I whispered. “Get well and strong for your daddy. There’s a whole world outside, and he wants you to share it with him.”

I felt her move again and peered down through the darkness at her. What a fool I had been all this time not to have known how rich she had made me! I looked up at the ceiling over her crib.

“Please, God,” I prayed, “please, God, make her well.”

The silence of the room was broken by the sound of Nellie coughing in her sleep. I heard her move restlessly in the bed. I got out of my chair and looked at her. The blankets had fallen away from her body. I covered her again and went back to the chair and sat down.

The night seemed long and still, and gradually I began to doze, my hand dangling over the side into the crib. Several times I tried to force my eyes to remain open, but they resisted all my efforts, they were so heavy and so weary.

There was a distant small sound of coughing in my ears and the grey-white light of dawn was beating against my eyelids. My eyes opened suddenly and I was staring into the crib.

Vickie was coughing violently. I picked her up, trying to pat her back. She couldn’t seem to stop coughing. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut and tiny drops of moisture stood out on her forehead in the morning light. Suddenly she seemed to grow rigid in my arms, her body stretching taut, her face turning a sick, bluish colour.

Desperately I forced her tiny mouth open with my lips. As hard as I could, I blew my breath into her, pressing her little sides gently. Again I poured my breath into her, the fear and knowledge of what was happening constricting my heart.

Again and again I tried to make my breath her breath, my life her life, even long after I knew that there was nothing I could ever do for her again.

I stood there silently in the room, holding her still body feeling the chill of the morning enter into her. This was my daughter. I could feel the salty edge of tears coming into my eyes.

“Danny!” Nellie’s frightened voice cried from the bed.

Slowly I turned to look at her. I stared at her for a long and knowing moment and a thousand things were said and never spoken. She knew. Somehow she had known all along. This was what she had been afraid of. Her arms reached out toward Vickie.

Slowly I walked toward the bed, holding out our child to her.

T
HE
wooden steps creaked beneath our feet as we slowly climbed the stairs. It was a familiar sound, one that our ears had become accustomed to hearing for a long time, but there was no joy in it now. A little more than three years had passed since we first had climbed that stairway.

We were happy then. We were young and our lives were bright before us. We were laughing and excited. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered how I had carried her across the threshold. But even as I remembered, the memory faded and grew dim. It had been so long ago.

I watched her back, stiff and straight, as she went up the stairway a step before me. She had been strong. Always she had been strong. There had been no tears, no screaming protestations of her grief. Only the hurt in her dark eyes and the twisted pain of her mouth, told me of her feelings.

This was a day to forget, to hide away and bury in some secret corner of your mind so that you didn’t remember the empty, aching loss that had come into you. Forget the solemn, quiet sounds of Mass, the white coffin gleaming in the light of the candles on the altar. Forget the metallic sounds of the shovels biting into the earth, the rain of dirt and stone pouring down on the little box of wood. Forget, forget, forget.

But how can you forget? How can you forget the kindness of your neighbours, their sympathy and gentleness? You knocked at their doors. You had no money and your child would lie in a pauper’s grave if it were not for them. Five dollars here, two dollars there, ten dollars, six dollars. Seventy in all. To pay for a coffin, for a Mass, for a grave, for a resting-place for a part of you that was no more. Seventy dollars torn from the poverty of their own lives to lighten some way the bitterness in your own.

You want to forget, but you can’t forget. Some day it will be buried deep, but it will not be forgotten. Just as she will not be
forgotten
.

I took a last drag at the cigarette and put it out. “Don’t you think you’d better lie down?” I asked.

Slowly Nellie turned her face to me. “I’m not tired,” she replied.

I took her hand. It was cold as ice. “Yuh better lie down,” I repeated gently.

Her eyes flew swiftly to the bedroom door, then back to me. There was a lonely look in them. “Danny, I can’t go in there. Her crib, her toys—” Her voice trailed away.

I knew exactly how she felt. “It’s all over now, baby,” I whispered. “Yuh gotta keep on goin’ yuh gotta keep on livin’.”

Her hands were gripping mine fiercely. There was a wild look of hysteria spilling into her eyes. “Why, Danny, why?” she cried.

I had to answer her though I had no idea what to say. “Because yuh gotta,” I replied weakly. “Because that’s the way she would have wanted it.”

Her fingernails were tearing into my palms. “She was a baby, Danny! My baby!” Her voice broke suddenly and she cried for the first time. “She was my baby and she wanted only one thing: to live! And I failed her!” Her hands covered her face and she was weeping bitterly.

Clumsily I put my arms around her shoulders and pulled her to me. I tried to make my voice as comforting as I could. “It wasn’t your fault, Nellie. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was in God’s hands.”

Her eyes were black with misery and they gleamed dully against the pallor of her face. She shook her head slowly. “No, Danny,” she said in a hopeless tone; “it was my fault—my fault from the very
beginning
. I did a sinful thing and let her become a part of it. She paid for my sin, not me. I should have known better than to think that I knew better than God.”

Her eyes as she looked up at me were flaming with a fanaticism I had never seen before. “I have sinned and lived in sin,” she continued dully. “I have never asked God’s blessing for my marriage. I was willing to settle for man’s word. How could I have expected His blessing for my child? Father Brennan told me that in the very
beginning
.”

“Father Brennan said nothing like that!” I said desperately. “In church today he said that God would make her welcome.” I held her face up to me with my hands. “We loved each other, we still love each other. That’s all that God asks.”

She looked at me with sad eyes, and her hand touched mine lightly. “Poor Danny,” she whispered softly. “You just can’t understand.”

I stared back at her. She was right; I didn’t understand. Love was a thing between people, and if it was real, it was a blessed thing. “I love you,” I said.

She smiled slowly through her tears, got to her feet, and looked
down pityingly at me. “Poor Danny,” she said again in that soft whisper. “You think that your love is all you need and can’t see that it is not enough for Him.”

I kissed her hand. “It always has been enough for us.”

There was a distant look in her eyes. She nodded her head slightly. “That’s what has been wrong about it, Danny,” she said. “I, too, thought that it would be enough for us, but now I know it isn’t.” I could feel her hand brushing lightly across my head. “We have to live with God too, not only with ourselves.”

She went into the bedroom and closed the door behind her. I could hear the creak of the bed as she lay down on it, and then there was silence. I lit another cigarette and turned to the window. It had begun to rain. A day to forget. The silence began to creep into my bones.

A curious numbness had crawled into my body, bringing with it a strange half-awake, half-asleep feeling. It was almost as if
my body had fallen asleep while my mind remained awake. Only thoughts were with me. Half-formed and indistinct remnants of memories slipped through my mind while my body remained coldly aloof from the pain that came with them.

That was why I didn’t hear the buzzer the first time it sounded. That is, I heard the sound, but didn’t recognize it. The second time it rang it was more strident, more demanding. Dully I wondered who was ringing the doorbell.

It rang again, this time piercing my consciousness. I jumped from my chair. I remember looking at my watch as I walked to the door and being surprised that it was only three o’clock. It seemed as if a year had passed since morning.

I opened the door. A strange man was standing there. “What do you want?” I asked.

The stranger took his wallet from his pocket and flipped it open in front of me. He held it so that I could read the badge pinned to it: “N.Y.C. Dept. of Welfare. Investigator.” “Mr. Fisher?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I’m John Morgan of the Welfare Department,” he said quietly. “May I see you for a moment? I have some questions that I have to ask you.”

I stared at him. This was no time for me to be answering questions. “Can’t you make it some other time, Mr. Morgan?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I have to ask them now,” he replied, an
unpleasant
note coming into his voice. “Miss Snyder has come across some information regarding your case that must be verified. It would be for your own good to answer my questions now.”

I began to resent his tone. A Department of Welfare badge didn’t make him God. I planted my feet firmly in the doorway. “Okay,” I said coldly. “I’ll answer your questions.”

He looked around uncomfortably for a moment; then, apparently deciding I wasn’t going to let him into the apartment, took out a small notebook and flipped it open. He glanced at it briefly, then at me. “You buried your daughter this morning?”

I nodded silently. The words coming from his lips, the way he spoke them, coldly and impersonally, hurt. It was profane.

He made scratches in his little book. All these investigators were the same. Give them a little notebook and automatically they begin to make scratches in it. If you ever took their little book away from them they wouldn’t be able to talk. “Undertaker’s services including casket were forty dollars, cemetery fees were twenty dollars, total sixty dollars for the funeral. Is that right?”

“No,” I answered bitterly. “Yuh left out somethin’.”

His eyes were sharp. “What?”

“We gave ten bucks to the Ascension Church for a special Mass,” I said coldly. “The whole thing came to seventy dollars.”

His pencil made scratching sounds in the notebook. He looked up again. “Where did you get the money, Mr. Fisher?”

“None of your Goddam business!” I snapped.

A faint smile appeared on his lips. “It is our business, Mr. Fisher. You see, you’re on relief. You’re supposed to be destitute. That means you have no money, that’s why we help you. Suddenly you have seventy dollars. We have a right to know where you got it.”

I looked down at the floor. That’s where they had you. You had to answer their questions or they’d cut you off. Still I couldn’t bring myself to tell him where I got the dough. That was something personal between Vickie and us. Nobody else had to know where we got the money to bury our own child. I didn’t answer him.

“Maybe you got the money from working nights without
reporting
it to us?” he suggested smoothly, a note of triumph in his voice. “You weren’t holding out on us, were you, Mr. Fisher?”

My gaze came up from the floor and fastened on his face. How could they have found out about that? “What’s that got to do with it?” I asked quickly.

He was smiling again. He seemed very proud of himself. “We have ways of finding out things,” he said mysteriously. “It doesn’t pay to fool us. You know, Mr. Fisher, you can go to jail for something like that. It constitutes fraud against the City of New York.”

My temper wore thin. I’d had enough misery for one day. “Since
when does a guy go to jail if he wants to work?” I burst out angrily. “What in hell are you trying to tell me?”

“Nothing, Mr. Fisher, nothing,” he said smoothly. “I’m just trying to get at the truth, that’s all.”

“The truth is that three people can’t live on seventy-two bucks a month and a supplementary diet of dried prunes and seed potatoes!” I had raised my voice and it echoed in the narrow hallway. “Yuh gotta try to grab an extra buck or yuh starve!”

“Then you admit you had a job nights while pretending to us that you were totally unemployed?” he asked calmly.

“I admit nothing!”

“Yet you had seventy dollars with which to bury your child.”

“Yes, I buried her!” I could feel the knots in my throat choking me. “That was all I could do. If I’d had any dough, do you think I would have waited for your bloody doctor to come? If I’d had any money I would have called another doctor. Maybe then she would be here now!”

His eyes surveyed me coldly. I didn’t know a human being could have so little feeling. “Then you were working nights?” he asked again.

Suddenly all the pain and bitterness and heartache welled up inside me and I grabbed him by the tie and pulled his face close to mine. “Yes, I was workin’ nights!” I snarled at him.

His face turned white and wriggled in my grip. “Let me go, Mr. Fisher,” he gasped. “Violence isn’t going to do you any good. You’re in enough trouble already!”

He didn’t know how right he was. A little more wouldn’t make any difference now. I hit him flush on the face and he fell back against the wall on the other side of the narrow hallway. I could see a smear of blood coming to his nose as I went after him.

His eyes were frightened and he scrambled quickly along the wall to the stairway. I stood there and watched him run. At the head of the stairs he turned and looked back at me. His voice was almost hysterical. “You’ll pay for this!” he screamed back at me. “You’ll get thrown off relief. You’ll starve! I’ll see to that!”

I stepped toward him threateningly. He began to hurry down the steps. I leaned over the railing. “If yuh come back, yuh little bastard,” I snouted down at him, “I’ll kill yuh! Stay the hell away from me!”

He disappeared down the next landing and I went back into the apartment. I was beginning to feel sick. There was a peculiar shame in me as if I had defiled the day. I shouldn’t have acted like that. Any other day maybe, but not today.

Nellie was standing in the bedroom door. “Who was it, Danny?”

I tried to calm my voice. “Some monkey from Welfare,” I said. “A wise guy. I sent him away.”

“What did he want?”

She’d had enough for one day, there was no use in making it worse. “Nothin’ special,” I said evasively. “He just wanted to ask some questions, that’s all. Go back to bed and rest, baby.”

Her voice was dull and hopeless. “They know about the night job, don’t they?”

I stared at her. She had heard. “Why don’t you try an’ get some sleep, baby?” I ducked her question.

Her eyes were fixed on mine. “Don’t lie to me, Danny. It was true what I said, wasn’t it?”

“What if it is?” I admitted. “It ain’t important now. We’ll make out on the job. The boss promised me a rise soon.”

She stood staring at me. I could see the tears welling into her eyes again. I crossed the room quickly and took her hand. “Nothing goes right for us, Danny,” she said hopelessly; “not even on a day like this. Trouble, always trouble.”

“It’s all over now, baby,” I said, holding on to her hand. “From now on things’ll go better.”

She looked up at me, her eyes dead in her face. “It will never be any different, Danny,” she said. “I’ve brought you nothing but hard luck.”

I twisted her face around to me. “Nellie, yuh gotta forget that idea!” I pressed my lips to her cheek. “Yuh can’t go on livin’ thinkin’ that nothing’s gonna be okay. Yuh gotta hope for better!”

Her gaze met mine levelly. “What is there to hope for?” she asked quietly. “How do you know you even have a job now? You haven’t called there in four days.”

“I’m not worried about that,” I said. But it was true. I had forgotten all about calling the store. “Jack will understand when I explain to him.”

She looked up at me doubtingly, and some of her doubt seeped into me.

Jack looked up at me as I walked into the store. There was no welcome in his eyes. I looked down the counter. Another man was working my station.

“Hello, Jack,” I said quietly.

“Hello, Danny,” he replied without enthusiasm.

I waited for him to ask me where I’d been, but he didn’t speak.
I could see he was angry, so I spoke first. “Something happened, Jack,” I explained. “I couldn’t come in.”