Ironweed (17 page)

          “We’re all quite organized now, you might describe it. It’s just possible that we’ll rent an apartment up on Hamilton Street.”

          “You’re back in the chips. Mighty good. Francis comin’ in tonight?”

          “He might be, and he might not be,” said Helen. “It all depends on his work, and how busy he might or might not be.”

          “I get it,” said Donovan.

          She opened the suitcase and found the kimono and put it on. She went then to wash herself, but before she could wash she vomited; sat on the floor in front of the toilet bowl and vomited until there was nothing left to come up: and then she retched dryly for five minutes. finally taking sips of water so there would be something to bring up. And Francis thought she was just being contrary, refusing Jack’s cheese sandwich.

          Finally it passed, and she rinsed her mouth and her stinging eyes and did, oh yes, did wash herself, and then padded back along the threadbare carpet to her room, where she sat in the chair at the foot of the bed, staring at the swan and remembering nights in this room with Francis.

          Clara, that cheap whore, rolled that nice young man in the brown suit and then came in here to hide. If you’re gonna sleep with a man, sleep with him, Francis said. Be a goddamn woman. If you’re gonna roll a man, roll him. But don’t sleep with him and then roll him. Francis had such nice morals. Oh Clara, why in heaven’s name do you come in here with your trouble? Haven’t we got trouble enough of our own without you? All Clara got was fourteen dollars. But that is a lot.

          Helen propped her Beethoven record against the pillow in the center of the bed and studied its perfection. Then she rummaged in the suitcase to see and touch all that was in it: another pair of bloomers, her rhinestone butterfly, her blue skirt with the rip in it, Francis’s safety razor and his penknife, his old baseball clippings, his red shirt, and his left brown shoe, the right one lost; but one shoe’s better than none, ain’t it? was Francis’s reasoning. Sandra lost a shoe but Francis found it for her. Francis was very thoughtful. Very everything. Very Catholic, though he pretended not to be. That was why Francis and Helen could never marry.

          Wasn’t it nice the way Helen and Francis put their religion in the way of marriage?

          Wasn’t that an excellent idea?

          For really, Helen wanted to fly free in the same way Francis did. After Arthur she knew she would always want to be free, even if she had to suffer for it.

          Arthur, Arthur, Helen no longer blames you for anything. She knows you were a man of frail allegiance in a way that Francis never was; knows too that she allowed you to hurt her.

          Helen remembers Arthur’s face and how relieved it was, how it smiled and wished her luck the day she said she was leaving to take a job playing piano for silent films and vaudeville acts. Moving along in the world willfully, that’s what Helen was doing then (and now). A will to grace, if you would like to call it that, however elusive that grace has proven to be..

          Was this willfulness a little deceit Helen was playing on herself?

          Was she moving, instead, in response to impulses out of that deep center?

          Why was it, really, that things never seemed to work out?

          Why was Helen’s life always turning into some back alley, like a wandering old cat?

          What is Helen?

          Who is Silvia, please?

          Please?

          Helen stands up and holds the brass. Helen’s feet are like fine brass. She is not unpolished like the brass of this bed. Helen is the very polished person who is standing at the end of the end bed in the end room of the end hotel of the end city of the end.

          And when a person like Helen comes to an ending of something, she grows nostalgic and sentimental. She has always appreciated the fine things in life: music, kind words, gentility, flowers, sunshine, and good men. People would feel sad if they knew what Helen’s life might have been like had it gone in another direction than the one that brought her to this room.

          People would perhaps even weep, possibly out of some hope that women like Helen could go on living until they found themselves, righted themselves, discovered ever unfolding joy instead of coming to lonely ends. People would perhaps feel that some particular thing went wrong somewhere and that if it had only gone right it wouldn’t have brought a woman like Helen so low.

          But that is the error; for there are no women like Helen.

          Helen is no symbol of lost anything, wrong-road-taken kind of person, if-they-only-knew-then kind of person.

          Helen is no pure instinct deranged, no monomaniacal yearning out of a deep center that wants everything, even the power to destroy itself.

          Helen is no wandering cat in its ninth termination.

          For since Helen was born, and so elegantly raised by her father, and so exquisitely self-developed, she has been making her own decisions based on rational thinking, reasonably current knowledge, intuition about limitations, and the usual instruction by friends, lovers, enemies, and others. Her head was never injured, and her brain, contrary to what some people might think, is not pickled. She did not miss reading the newspapers, although she has tapered off somewhat in recent years, for now all the news seems bad. She always listened to the radio and kept up on the latest in music. And in the winter in the library she read novels about women and love: Helen knows all about Lily Bart and Daisy Miller. Helen also cared for her appearance and kept her body clean. She washed her underthings regularly and wore earrings and dressed modestly and carried her rosary until they stole it. She did not sleep when sleep was not called for. She went through her life feeling: I really do believe I am doing the more-or-less right thing. I believe in God. I salute the flag. I wash my armpits and between my legs, and what if I did drink too much? Whose business is that? Who knows how much I didn’t drink?

          They never think of that sort of thing when they call a woman like Helen a drunken old douchebag. Why would anyone (like that nasty Little Red in the back of Finny’s car) ever want to revile Helen that way? When she hears people say such things about her, Helen then plays the pretend game. She dissembles. Helen remembers that word even though Francis thinks she has forgotten her education. But she has not. She is not a drunk and not a whore. Her attitude is: I flew through my years and I never let a man use me for money. I went Dutch lots of times. I would let them buy the drinks but that’s because it’s the man’s place to buy drink.

          And when you’re a woman like Helen who hasn’t turned out to be a whore, who hasn’t led anybody into sin… (Well, there were some young boys in her life occasionally, lonely in the bars like Helen so often was, but they seemed to know about sin already. Once.)

          Once.

          Was once a boy?

          Yes, with a face like a priest.

          Oh Helen, how blasphemous of you to have such a thought. Thank God you never loved up a priest. How would you ever explain that?

          Because priests are good.

          And so when Helen holds the brass, and looks at the clock that still says ten minutes to eleven, and thinks of slippers and music and the great butterfly and the white pebble with the hidden name, she has this passing thought for priests. For when you were raised like Helen was, you think of priests as holding the keys to the door of redemption. No matter how many sins you have committed (sands of the desert, salt of the sea), you are bound to come to the notion of absolution at the time of brass holding and clock watching, and to the remembering of how you even used to put Violet de Paris on your brassiere so that when he opened your dress to kiss you there, he wouldn’t smell any sweat.

          But priests, Helen, have nothing whatsoever to do with brassieres and kissing, and you should be ashamed to have put them all in the same thought. Helen does truly regret such a thought, but after all, it has been a most troubled time for her and her religion. And even though she prayed at mass this morning, and has prayed intermittently throughout the day ever since, even though she prayed in Finny’s car last night, saying her Now I Lay Me Down to Sleeps when there was no sleep or chance of it, then the point is that, despite all prayer, Helen has no compulsion to confess her sins to gain absolution.

          Helen has even come to the question of whether or not she is really a Catholic, and to what a Catholic really is these days. She thinks that, truly, she may not be one anymore. But if she isn’t, she certainly isn’t anything else either. She certainly isn’t a Methodist, Mr. Chester.

          What brought her to this uncertainty is the accumulation of her sins, and if you must call them sins, then there is certainly quite an accumulation. But Helen prefers to call them decisions, which is why she has no compulsion to confess them. On the other hand, Helen wonders whether anyone is aware of how really good a life she lived. She never betrayed anybody, and that, in the end, is what counts most with her. She admits she is leaving Francis, but no one could call that a betrayal. One might, perhaps, call it an abdication, the way the King of England abdicated for the woman he loved. Helen is abdicating for the man she used to love so he can be as free as Helen wants him to be, as free as she always was in her own way, as free as the two of them were even when they were most perfectly locked together. Didn’t Francis beg on the street for Helen when she was sick in ‘33? Why, he never begged even for himself before that. If Francis could become a beggar out of love, why can’t Helen abdicate for the same reason?

          Of course the relationships Helen had with Arthur and Francis were sinful in the eyes of some. And she admits that certain other liberties she has taken with the commandments of God and the Church might also loom large against her when the time of judgment comes (brass and clock, brass and clock). But even so, there will be no priests coming to see her, and she is surely not going out to see them. She is not going to declare to anyone for any reason that loving Francis was sinful when it was very probably—no, very certainly—the greatest thing in her life, greater, finally, than loving Arthur, for Arthur failed of honor.

          And so when crippled Donovan knocks again at eleven o’clock and asks if Helen needs anything, she says no, no thank you, old cripple, I don’t need anything or anybody anymore. And old Donovan says: The night man’s just comin’ on, and so I’m headin’ home. I’ll be here in the mornin’. And Helen says: Thank you, Donovan, thank you ever so much for your concern, and for saying good night to me. And after he goes away from the door she lets go of the brass and thinks of Beethoven, Ode to Joy,

          And hears the joyous multitudes advancing,

          Dah dah-dah,

          Dah dah-de-dah-dah,

          And feels her legs turning to feathers and sees that her head is floating down to meet them as her body bends under the weight of so much joy,

          Sees it floating ever so slowly

          As the white bird glides over the water until it comes to rest on the Japanese kimono

          That has fallen so quietly,

          So softly,

          Onto the grass where the moonlight grows.

VI

          First came the fire in a lower Broadway warehouse, near the old Fitzgibbon downtown ironworks. It rose in its own sphere, in an uprush into fire’s own perfection, and great flames violated the sky. Then, as Francis and Rosskam halted behind trucks and cars, Rosskam’s horse snorty and balky with elemental fear, the fire touched some store of thunder and the side of the warehouse blew out in a great rising cannon blossom of black smoke, which the wind carried toward them. Motorists rolled up their windows, but the vulnerable lights of Francis, Rosskam, and the horse smarted with evil fumes.

          Ahead of them a policeman routed traffic into a U-turn and sent it back north. Rosskam cursed in a foreign language Francis didn’t recognize. But that Rosskam was cursing was unmistakable. As they turned toward Madison Avenue, both men’s faces were astream with stinging tears.

          They were now pulling an empty wagon, fresh from dumping the day’s first load of junk back at Rosskam’s yard. Francis had lunched at the yard on an apple Rosskam gave him, and had changed into his new white-on-white shirt, throwing his old blue relic onto Rosskam’s rag mountain. They had then set out on the day’s second run, heading for the deep South End of the city, until the fire turned them around at three o’clock.

          Rosskam turned up Pearl Street and the wagon rolled along into North Albany, the smoke still rising into the heavens below and behind them. Rosskam called out his double-noted ragman’s dirge and caught the attention of a few cluttered housewives. From the backyard of an old house near Emmett Street, Francis hauled out a wheelless wheelbarrow with a rust hole through its bottom. As he heaved it upward into the wagon, the odor of fire still in his nostrils, he confronted Fiddler Quain, sitting on an upended metal chamber pot that had been shot full of holes by some backyard marksman.

          The Fiddler, erstwhile motorman, now wearing a tan tweed suit, brown polka-dot bow tie, and sailor straw hat, smiled coherently at Francis for the first time since that day on Broadway in 1901 when they both ignited the kerosene-soaked sheets that trapped the strike-breaking trolley car.

          When a soldier split the Fiddler’s skull with a rifle butt, the sympathetic mob spirited him away to safety before he could be arrested. But the blow left the man mindless for a dozen years, cared for by his spinster sister, Martha. Martyred herself by his wound, Martha paraded the Fiddler through the streets of North Albany, a heroic vegetable, so the neighbors could see the true consequences of the smartypants trolley strike.

          Francis offered to be a bearer at the Fiddler’s funeral in 1913, but Martha rejected him; for she believed it was Francis’s firebrand style that had seduced the Fiddler into violence that fated morning. Your hands have done enough damage, she told Francis. You’ll not touch my brother’s coffin.