“There’s nothing delightful about war, but we do our part,” Carolyn said, before Constance could escape the room entirely. “Now I only wish you’d help me convince your sister to come along on the train when we take our pigeons to the five-hundred-mile mark. We’re only going as far as Columbus, and I’d like to make an outing of it.”
Norma hated to travel but didn’t like to admit it. “Why don’t you start with a conditioning program?” Constance said. “Begin by taking her ten miles east and see how she does.”
“You can go on back to jail now,” Norma said.
“I’m home for the night,” Constance said, “but I’ll take my soup in the other room and you can draw up your plans in peace.”
As she left, she heard Carolyn say, “I wish I had a sister.”
“I can’t think why,” Norma told her.
10
THERE WAS ABOUT to be another female inmate admitted to the Hackensack jail over a morality charge, but the girl in question didn’t know it yet. Minnie Davis was sleeping soundly in her own bed, in the early gray hours of the morning, when the police pounded on the door.
The events of the night before came back hazily at first. Tony and Minnie had quarreled—there was nothing new in that—but she’d won a round, for once, and forced Tony to take her somewhere on a Friday night.
There was no denying that Tony and Minnie had grown tired of each other. No love was left between them, if there had ever been any. But they were forced to live under the same roof—forced by circumstances of Minnie’s own making, if she wanted to admit it.
They used to go places together. Minnie didn’t see any reason why that should change, even now that things had soured between them. It was terrible to spend their evenings in a drab furnished room, under the dim light of one electrical bulb, with Tony pretending to be interested in a newspaper and Minnie making a half-hearted offer of a game of cards. Why couldn’t they ride the ferry across to Manhattan and visit one of the glittering dancing palaces she’d seen from the trolley on their first night together, or dine at a high-ceilinged restaurant with yellow light pulsing from the steamy windows? But Tony never had anything like that on offer.
“You’re always after me about the rent,” he complained, “and then you want to spend a week’s pay on Broadway. Maybe you picked the wrong fellow.”
She most certainly had, but what was she to do about it? If they were stuck together in their dismal room over the bakery, wasn’t he obligated to take her with him when he went out on a Friday night?
So she kept after him until he finally relented and said, “Fine. Get your coat.”
Tony’s idea of an evening’s entertainment turned out to be a card game at a house a few blocks away. Minnie put on a polka-dotted dress anyway, and rubbed her finger around an empty perfume bottle with the hope of finding something to dab behind her ears.
When they reached the house, she knew she needn’t have bothered. These were the men with whom Tony worked on the steamboat in the summertime. The card game was merely a continuation of every game they’d ever played below-decks. They only looked up from their cards long enough to slap him on the back and make room for him around the table. “The girls are in the kitchen,” one of them hollered, jerking his thumb down the hall.
Minnie went dispiritedly, having lost all hope of a fancy party. In the kitchen she found half a dozen women draped around the table or perched on the drain-board, all of them older than her and none of them dressed for any sort of evening out.
She never bothered to learn their names and they didn’t ask hers. “You’re Tony’s girl!” one of them shrieked. The others gave vigorous nods of understanding. One pulled out a chair for her.
“We’re having gin and lemonade,” said the woman nearest the icebox, “unless you’d rather have gin or lemonade.”
Minnie spoke boldly. “I’ll take them both, and I wouldn’t mind a cigarette if you can spare it.”
That was the right way to answer. Both were offered to her, and soon Minnie was at her ease, leaning back in her chair with a practiced air, grateful to have both hands occupied. The drink was sweet but bracingly strong: with the first sip, she told herself to go slow, and with the second, she forgot to. Although she never smoked in front of Tony, she’d had plenty of cigarettes along the boardwalk back in Catskill and knew what to do with one. The talk flowed around her, and she didn’t even have to bother over what to say.
These women, it developed, all worked at the sorts of jobs that Minnie used to dream about before she left home. They were office girls or clerks in department stores, and one took tickets at a moving picture theater, which was the very position Minnie hankered for the most. Another worked at a flower shop, and one—incredibly—poured the chocolates at a confectioner’s.
“I come home covered in sugar and cocoa powder,” she said, “and you can imagine what Stanley makes of that.”
“Stanley!” the others shrieked. “Don’t make us imagine it.”
But it was too late. The picture floated before Minnie’s eyes, and she wondered which of the men in the other room was Stanley. Tony might have gone in for something like that, at one time, before their troubles, but he hardly bothered with her anymore, and Minnie didn’t miss it. She was tired of his rough searching hands and his lazy mouth, and the way he never looked at her or paid her a compliment when he pulled her dress up. She hated to share her small bed with him afterward, but he was paying the rent, and didn’t someone have to pay it? She never had enough money, not on a factory salary. She either had to share a room with Tony, or with another girl in a boarding-house, where she would have to live under a curfew and hand over all her wages to the landlady, leaving her without a dime for herself. She chose Tony—for now, anyway.
Her glass seemed to stay full all night. The talk in the kitchen grew wilder and more wicked, even drawing the men away from their card game a few times to see what the commotion was about. Tony never appeared in the doorway. She only heard his voice once, when he called for more beer.
That voice didn’t do anything to Minnie when she heard it. She wanted to ask the others if they still felt any sort of a flutter at the sound of their fellows’ voices, or when they saw them again at the end of the day, but what difference would it have made if they did? There was something sick and poisoned between Tony and Minnie. She could live with it or she could go home to Catskill. She had ideas about running off, but she hadn’t gone yet, and what did that say about her?
Somehow the rest of the night slid away. Without her quite realizing how it happened, the laughter had subsided and most of the girls had gone. She found herself being pulled out of her chair and grabbed around the waist.