My Sister's Hand in Mine (20 page)

Away in the back of the room a man was bowling up a small alley all by himself; Miss Goering listened to the rumble of the balls as they rolled along the wooden runway, and she wished that she were able to see him so that she could be at peace for the evening with the certainty that there was no one who could be considered a menace present in the room. Certainly there was a possibility that more clients would enter through the door, but this had entirely slipped her mind. Hard though she tried, it was impossible for her to get a look at the man who was rolling the balls.

The young boy and the girl were having a fight. Miss Goering could tell by the sound of their voices. She listened to them carefully without turning her head.

“I don't see why,” said the girl, “that you must be furious immediately just because I have mentioned that I always like to come in here and sit for a little while.”

“There is absolutely no reason,” said the boy, “why you should want to come in here and sit more than in any other place.”

“Then why—then why do you come in?” the girl asked hesitantly.

“I don't know,” said the boy; “maybe because it's the first thing we hit after we leave our room.”

“No,” said the girl, “there are other places. I wish you would just say that you liked it here; I don't know why, but it would make me so happy; we've been coming here for a long time.”

“I'll be God-damned if I'll say it, and I'll be God-damned if I'll come here any more if you're going to invest this place with witches' powers.”

“Oh, Pussycat,” said the girl, and there was real anguish in her tone, “Pussycat, I am not talking about witches and their powers; not even thinking about them. Only when I was a little girl. I should never have told you the story.”

The boy shook his head back and forth; he was disgusted with her.

“For God's sake,” he said, “that isn't anything near what I mean, Bernice.”

“I do not understand
what
you mean,” said Bernice. “Many people come into this place or some other place every night for years and years and without doing much but having a drink and talking to each other; it is only because it is like home to them. And we come here only because it is little by little becoming a home to us; a second home if you can call our little room a home; it is to me; I love it very much.”

The boy groaned with discontent.

“And,” she added, feeling that her words and her tone of voice could not help working a spell over the boy, “the tables and the chairs and the walls here have now become like the familiar faces of old friends.”

“What old friends?” said the boy, scowling more and more furiously. “What old friends? To me this is just another shit-house where poor people imbibe spirits in order to forget the state of their income, which is non-existent.”

He sat up very straight and glared at Bernice.

“I guess that is true, in a way,” she said vaguely, “but I feel that there is something more.”

“That's just the trouble.”

Meanwhile Frank, the bartender, had been listening to Bernice's conversation with Dick. It was a dull night and the more he thought about what the boy had said, the angrier he felt. He decided to go over to the table and start a row.

“Come on, Dick,” he said, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt. “If that's the way you feel about this place, get the hell out of here.” He yanked him out of his seat and gave him a terrific shove so that Dick staggered a few steps and fell headlong over the bar.

“You big fat-head,” Dick yelled at the bartender, lunging out at him. “You hunk of retrogressive lard. I'll push your white face in for you.”

The two were now fighting very hard. Bernice was standing on the table and pulling at the shirts of the fighters in an attempt to separate them. She was able to reach them even when they were quite a distance from the table because the benches terminated in posts at either end, and by grabbing hold of one of them she could swing out over the heads of the fighters.

Miss Goering, from where she was now standing, could see the flesh above Bernice's stocking whenever she leaned particularly far out of her booth. This would not have troubled her so much had she not noticed that the man who had been rolling the wooden balls had now moved away from his post and was staring quite fixedly at Bernice's bare flesh wherever the occasion presented itself. The man had a narrow red face, a pinched and somewhat inflamed nose, and very thin lips. His hair was almost orange in color. Miss Goering could not decide whether he was of an exceedingly upright character or of a criminal nature, but the intensity of his attitude almost scared her to death. Nor was it even possible for Miss Goering to decide whether he was looking at Bernice with interest or with scorn.

Although he was getting in some good punches and his face was streaming with sweat, Frank the bartender appeared to be very calm and it seemed to Miss Goering that he was losing interest in the fight and that actually the only really tense person in the room was the man who was standing behind her.

Soon Frank had a split lip and Dick a bloody nose. Very shortly after this they both stopped fighting and walked unsteadily towards the washroom. Bernice jumped off the table and ran after them.

They returned in a few minutes, all washed and combed and holding dirty handkerchiefs to their mouths. Miss Goering walked up to them and took hold of each man by the arm.

“I'm glad that it's all over now, and I want each of you to have a drink as my guest.”

Dick looked very sad now and very subdued. He nodded his head solemnly and they sat down together and waited for Frank to fix them their drinks. He returned with their drinks, and after he had served them, he too seated himself at the table. They all drank in silence for a little while. Frank was dreamy and seemed to be thinking of very personal things that had nothing to do with the events of the evening. Once he took out an address book and looked through its pages several times. It was Miss Goering who first broke the silence.

“Now tell me,” she said to Bernice and Dick,” “tell me what you are interested in.”

“I'm interested in the political struggle,” said Dick, “which is of course the only thing that any self-respecting human being could be interested in. I am also on the winning side and on the right side. The side that believes in the redistribution of capital.” He chuckled to himself and it was very easy to tell that he thought he was conversing with a complete fool.

“I've heard all about that,” said Miss Goering. “And what are you interested in?” she asked the girl.

“Anything he is interested in, but it is true that I had believed the political struggle was very important before I met him. You see, I have a different nature than he has. What makes me happy I seem to catch out of the sky with both hands; I only hold whatever it is that I love because that is all I can really see. The world interferes with me and my happiness, but I never interfere with the world except now since I am with Dick.” Bernice put her hand out on the table for Dick to take hold of it. She was already a little drunk.

“It makes me sad to hear you talk like this,” said Dick. “You, as a leftist, know perfectly well that before we fight for our own happiness we must fight for something else. We are living in a period when personal happiness means very little because the individual has very few moments left. It is wise to destroy yourself first; at least to keep only that part of you which can be of use to a big group of people. If you don't do this you lose sight of objective reality and so forth, and you fall plunk into the middle of a mysticism which right now would be a waste of time.”

“You are right, darling Dickie,” said Bernice, “but sometimes I would love to be waited on in a beautiful room. Sometimes I think it would be nice to be a bourgeois.” (She said the word “bourgeois,” Miss Goering noticed, as though she had just learned it.) Bernice continued: “I am such a human person. Even though I am poor I will miss the same things that they do, because sometimes at night the fact that they are sleeping in their houses with security, instead of making me angry, fills me with peace like a child who is scared at night likes to hear grown people talking down in the street. Don't you think there is some sense in what I say, Dickie?”

“None whatsoever!” said the boy. “We know perfectly well that it is this security of theirs that makes us cry out at night.”

Miss Goering by now was very anxious to get into the conversation.

“You,” she said to Dick, “are interested in winning a very correct and intelligent fight. I am far more interested in what is making this fight so hard to win.”

“They have the power in their hands; they have the press and the means of production.”

Miss Goering put her hand over the boy's mouth. He jumped. “This is very true,” she said, “but isn't it very obvious that there is something else too that you are fighting? You are fighting their present position on this earth, to which they are all grimly attached. Our race, as you know, is not torpid. They are grim because they still believe the earth is flat and that they are likely to fall off it at any minute. That is why they hold on so hard to the middle. That is, to all the ideals by which they have always lived. You cannot confront men who are still fighting the dark and all the dragons, with a new future.”

“Well, well,” said Dick, “what should I do then?”

“Just remember,” said Miss Goering, “that a revolution won is an adult who must kill his childhood once and for all.”

“I'll remember,” said Dick, sneering a bit at Miss Goering.

The man who had been rolling the balls was now standing at the bar.

“I better go see what Andy wants,” said Frank. He had been whistling softly all through Miss Goering's conversation with Dick, but he seemed to have been listening nevertheless, because as he was leaving the table he turned to Miss Goering.

“I think that the earth is a very nice place to be living on,” he said to her, “and I never felt that by going one step too far I was going to fall off it either. You can always do things two or three times on the earth and everybody's plenty patient till you get something right. First time wrong doesn't mean you're sunk.”

“Well, I wasn't talking about anything like that,” said Miss Goering.

“That's what you're talking about all right. Don't try to pussyfoot it out now. But I tell you it's perfectly all right as far as I'm concerned.” He was looking with feeling into Miss Goering's eyes. “My life,” he said, “is my own, whether it's a mongrel or a prince.”

“What on earth is he talking about?” Miss Goering asked Bernice and Dick. “He seems to think I've insulted him.”

“God knows!” said Dick. “At any rate I am sleepy. Bernice, let's go home.”

While Dick was paying Frank at the bar, Bernice leaned over Miss Goering and whispered in her ear.

“You know, darling,” she said, “he's not really like this when we are home together alone. He makes me really happy. He is a sweet boy and you should see the simple things that delight him when he is in his own room and not with strangers. Well”—she straightened up and seemed to be a little embarassed at her own burst of confidence—“well, I am very glad indeed that I met you and I hope we did not give you too much of a rough time. I promise you that it has never happened before, because underneath, Dick is really like you and me, but he is in a very nervous state of mind. So you must forgive him.”

“Certainly,” said Miss Goering, “but I do not see what for.”

“Well, good-by,” said Bernice.

Miss Goering was far too embarrassed and shocked by what Bernice had said behind Dick's back to notice at first that she was now the only person in the barroom besides the man who had been rolling the wooden balls and the old man, who had by now fallen asleep with his head on the bar. When she did notice, however, she felt for one desolate moment that the whole thing had been prearranged and that although she had forced herself to take this little trip to the mainland, she had somehow at the same time been tricked into taking it by the powers above. She felt that she could not leave and that even if she tried, something would happen to interfere with her departure.

She noticed with a faint heart that the man had lifted his drink from the bar and was coming towards her. He stopped about a foot away from her table and stood holding his glass in mid-air.

“You will have a drink with me, won't you?” he asked her without looking particularly cordial.

“I'm sorry,” said Frank from behind the bar, “but we're going to close up now. No more drinks served, I'm afraid.”

Andy said nothing, but he went out the door and slammed it behind him. They could hear him walking up and down outside of the saloon.

“He's going to have his own way again,” said Frank, “damn it all.”

“Oh, dear,” said Miss Goering, “are you afraid of him?”

“Sure I'm not,” said Frank, “but he's disagreeable—that's the only word I can think up for him—disagreeable; and after it's all said and done, life is too short.”

“Well,” said Miss Goering, “is he dangerous?”

Frank shrugged his shoulders. Soon Andy came back.

“The moon and the stars are out now,” he said, “and I could almost see clear to the edge of the town. There are no policemen in sight, so I think we can have our drink.”

He slid in, onto the bench opposite Miss Goering.

“It's cold and lifeless without a living thing on the street,” he began, “but that's the way I like it nowadays; you'll forgive me if I sound morose to a gay woman like yourself, but I have a habit of never paying attention to whoever I am talking to. I think people would say, about me: ‘Lacking in respect for other human beings.'
You
have great respect for your friends, I'm sure, but that is only because you respect yourself, which is always the starting-off point for everything: yourself.”