Kaleidoscope Page 3

  “Mart’ahn—” the old woman addressed a dark-haired youngster at the window. Martin turned a page of his book, another one from The Motor Boys series, Mamere noticed. Any number of books and magazines were stacked along the wall beneath the window, Zane Grey westerns and The Saturday Evening Post taking their place with The Motor Boys and The Radio Boys and God only knew what other serial attractions.

  “Mart’ahn, come to supper.”

  The nine-year old stifled a cough as he carried his adventure to the apartment’s solitary table. Dark eyes to go with hair like his father’s, raven-black and straight. A striking face, gaunt, prominent features. The cough came again—and again, this time not to be restrained. His grandmother took a square of cheesecloth off the top of the pitcher resting on their small table, poured water into a battered tin cup.

  “Put that nonsense away.”

  “Yes, Mamere.” He dropped his book to the floor.

  Mama Erbet would have been at home in Napoleon’s empire. A scarf covered the old woman’s head, black skirt falling below her booted ankles. She wore a wool sweater, even in the heat, a woman gnawed to the rind. Bent. Desiccated.

  There was electricity fed to the apartment, but except for a single plug-in dedicated to the radio that buzzed uncertainly beside the fire escape, the outlets were capped. The young boy took the chair nearest the radio.

  “Supper first, Mart’ahn,” the grandmother ladled the evening’s meal into a modest bowl. It was a triumph, of sorts, the stew she served, a beignet improvised from the peelings of potatoes. The old woman ladled another portion. “You need to eat.”

  Martin Romaine spooned the gruel mechanically.

  “Papa’s ’sposed to be home by now.”

  “Your father is working.”

  “He said we’d play ball. He promised.”

  “He has to make a living,” she offered without conviction.

  The door opened at that moment, practically burst off its flimsy hinges, startling the boy and his grandmother to their feet.

  “Papa!”

  “Son.”

  “Can we play? You said—!”

  “A minute, Martin, justa minute.”

  Jack Romaine tossing his hat to the table on a rush past his son to the radio.

  “Papa?”

  “Shhhh.”

  A squawk of static turning into discernible language: “…but it all ends when Joe Dawson—Dawson, can you believe it—? Comes up with a home run in the bottom of the eleventh inning…”

  “That can’t be!” Jack pounded the fragile table.

  “…to win the game, Pirates 7, Reds 6 in extra innings!”

  Jack sank into a chair, oblivious to his son and mother-in-law.

  “Goddamn Dawson, I can’t believe it.”

  The boy reached down and snatched the radio’s cord from its socket.

  “Martin! The hell, boy?”

  “You said we’d play ball!”

  “Mamere, tell him to plug that thing back in.”

  Mama Erbet rolled a frugal smoke from a tin of tobacco beside the sink.

  “You said you’d be back!” Martin insisted. “You said you had a day off work and we’d play ball!”

  “Oh, Christ, Sport, what can I tell ya? I was on my way. I got held up.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Don’t call your father a liar,” Mamere said by rote.

  “You were drinking,” the boy declared. “Or gambling—it was the game, wasn’t it? You bet on the Reds!”

  “Forget the Reds. I got work. A new job.”

  “But you promised—!”

  “I KNOW WHAT I GODDAMN PROMISED! JESUS AREN’T YOU HEARING ME? I GOT WORK!”

  The boy trembled suddenly, as if with a sudden chill.

  And then came the coughs, wracking, persistent.

  “Oh, jeez, Martin!” Jack reached clumsily for his son.

  Mart’ahn darted past his father and into the water closet.

  “Martin…”

  “Leave him alone,” the old woman ordered.

  “Don’t you start,” Jack turned on his mother-in-law. “Don’t you goddamn start!”

  “You broke a promise.” She held her cigarette from underneath, in the European fashion.

  “Hey, I got collared by a gorilla, all right? I didn’t have a lot of choice.”

  “And this is for your son to understand?”

  “Gotta grow up sometime.”

  “Not with gorillas. My daughter would not want to see her son in the company of apes.”

  “Don’t bring Gilette into this, awright? DON’T.”

  “She was your wife. The mother to your son, God rest her soul! She would want her son’s father coming home when the sun is still up. Playing ball with his boy. Reading books! Not drunk and gambling and rubbing elbows with animals!”

  “I’m getting a thousand smackers rubbing elbows. How would she like that?”

  The crone sniffed.

  “I believe it when I see it.”

  Jack reached into his second-hand trousers and threw a wad of cash onto the table.

  “That’s five hundred bucks. Minus a couple of beers. And that’s just up front.”

  Her hand trembled at her throat.

  “Mary and Joseph who will you kill?”

  “…Nobody.”

  “These are not honest wages!” She backed away from the table. “This is not good money, you cannot tell me it is!”

  “Buy a lot of baseballs, though, won’t it? Or what about a glove? Martin’s been wanting a new glove.”

  “What Martin wants is a father.”

  Jack clenched his fists. “You’re busting my hump, you know that, old woman?”

  “Who paid you this money?” she demanded.

  “The hell does it matter?”

  “Hah. A criminal.”

  Jack threw up his hands. “What am I supposed to do? Tell the man to take a hike? Kiss my ass?”

  “Whatever is right,” she replied. “That is what you must do.”

  “Bladehorn’s not just some shill, Mamere. He’s got me by the balls.”

  “Because you gave them to him! You and your drinking. Your cards!”

  Jack reached for his fedora.

  “I’m going out.”

  “Not with these!” She gathered the wad of bills off the table. “At least if we take blood money it will not go for gin!”

  Jack displayed a twenty in his suit pocket.

  “It’s all right. I got change.”

  Twenty dollars will buy you a good time and by the time Jack Romaine made his way back to his uneasy roost it was well past midnight. He stumbled through the unlocked door, bottle in hand, to find his mother-in-law snoring on her pallet beside the window. Martin tossed fitfully nearby, laboring for an easy breath in his cot. That hair, so rich, so dark.

  Jack saw the worn baseball glove that doubled for the boy’s pillow. He placed his bottle carefully onto the floor, fumbled deep into a trouser pocket, and pulled something out.

  It was a baseball.

  “Won it on a bet, mon petit,” Jack whispered to his son and slipped the ball beneath the boy’s leather pillow. “Got it autographed, too. Joe Dawson.”

  Romaine weaved unsteady as he slipped his broken watch off its fob. He tapped the crystal impatiently.

  “Papa’s gotta sleep,” he announced to the heedless room, and dropped like a loose suit onto the couch.

  First light. A rising sun caught the ramparts on what anyone would be excused for believing to be a castle. Cincinnati’s workhouse was an impressive stretch of architecture. Three tiers of cells housed inmates behind iron-barred windows that ran one-and-a-half football fields down the street. Corner towers rose to break up that long expanse, along with a mansarded center section. The walls were corbelled like ancient fortresses, and machicolations were cut at intervals as if hot tar or boiling water were to be poured down upon some unwitting invader.

  Sally Price had not expected to leav
e the workhouse alive. She had spent a year-and-a-half looking over her shoulder, fearing a garrotte or knife. But the forbidding walls had proven safe, and now Sally was free, a woman of thirty, small, unattractive, with an adolescent’s perennially blemished complexion, narrow eyes and poverty of hair.

  A sour German matron behind a metal grille required Sally to sign for the same portmanteau she’d brought to prison; all her earthly possessions were lumped in that bag. Well, almost all. Sally had already changed out of the striped muslin which identified her as a thief. A plaid skirt and sweater had replaced her prison garb.

  “Make sure it’s all there,” the clerk instructed.

  A change of underwear. A pair of eyeglasses, broken. A woolen handbag that Sally did not open.

  “That’s everything.”

  A pair of guards lingered as Miss Price received her final dispensation through a porthole in the chickenwire grill. Three dollars and seventy cents. Earned during time served.

  “Don’t spend it all in one place,” a screw mocked her.

  “How ’bout my letter?”

  The guard smirked. “Oh, Sally always gets her letter, don’t she? Every month, hah, Sal? Like yer period.”

  Sally just waited. Silently.

  The clerk scowled, “Awright,” and shoved a manila envelope through the wire along with a pen and clipboard.

  “Sign here. And again for your copy.”

  Sally signed the receipts slowly, elaborately.

  “Gotta hand you one thing, Price. You keep it buttoned better than most.”

  Sally did not reply. It seemed, still, the safest thing to do.

  The whitewashed wall opposite the Romaines’ home beat back a rising sun. Mama Erbet stirred sleepily. Martin slumbered over the baseball he did not yet know nestled inside his glove. Jack woke up still dressed and holding his head. He looked at his son, his son’s grandmother, and the cheaply framed photograph hanging on the wall above his sofa and bed.

  It could have been a movie marquee. A striking young woman with raven hair and Hollywood eyelashes smiles buoyantly in the arms of a handsome American corpsman beneath the Arc de Triomphe.

  Jack lingered over the photo a long moment. “Jill,” he appealed through a mouth dry as clay. “Jack and Jill.”

  He left the sofa, wobbled over to the water pitcher handy on the sill and slurped water straight from its metal lip. Only then did Jack glance outside to notice—

  The wall of the tenement on the other side of the street glowing pink with a well-risen sun.

  “Shit!”

  Sally Price emerged from prison to find an open street milling with people. What might at first have seemed to be a curb-side celebration was in fact a congress of citizens gathered to protest conditions inside the workhouse.

  REHABILITATION, NOT INCARCERATION, a well-lettered banner fluttered damply. WORK WITH DIGNITY, urged a placard alongside.

  Some of Cincinnati’s wealthiest were turned out in a public display of progressive fervor to urge a change in the situation Sally had so recently endured. They seemed so earnest, these nouveau riche, so flushed with painless purpose, the women dressed in summer skirts and cloche hats, their necks draped in wreaths of beaded necklaces. The husbands congregating casually in Oxford baggies, or jodhpurs, their eyes shaded by derbies or motor caps.

  Sally forged past the well-intended party, keeping her eyes on the ground just beyond her feet. It was hard after being imprisoned not to be distracted by so much activity. Ladies and gents were everywhere, tapping bunting onto booths erected in the landscaped park across the street, raising voices in warbled exhortation, or song, or prayer.

  Adding to that congestion were leisure seekers and hangers-on. There were at least a dozen cyclists, real pests, showing off their ridiculous contraptions, drawing protests from trolleybus jockeys as they played chicken across the tracks. And vendors hawked their wares from all points of the compass, their wheeled stalls a barrier along the street.

  Sally inhaled deeply. Food! The smells of sausage and chilli and cinnamon! But first the letter. Sally rummaged inside her fabric bag to find the manila envelope. She opened it carefully, almost reverently. And with the expected letter she found as well a handful of ten-dollar bills. Sally counted them quickly—

  Fifty dollars!

  It wasn’t hard to find a private cranny behind a vendor’s cart. Within moments she was gorging down the first real food of a year-and-a-half, the letter pressed smooth over her skirted knee as a Coney dog oozed chilli onto a napkin fashioned from the latest Enquirer.

  Dear S,

  You’re out! Sensational! I’ll see you, but it won’t be until sometime in the evening. Could be late. You’ll have found the cash inside the envelope, so go enjoy yourself for the day and then check into the Hotel Milner. It’s off Vine. There is a room reserved in your name. Check in some time around five o’clock, treat yourself to a good dinner and wait for me.

  Looking forward to seeing you,

  Alex Goodman

  Sally read the well-penned instructions once again. Then she returned the letter to its envelope, stuffing it along with the cash deep inside her blouse, pausing a moment, then, to consider—

  It was a long time until five o’clock. How best to spend her first day of freedom?

  Sally straightened suddenly. She walked with purpose to the front of the chilli dogcart. Waited for the vendor to acknowledge her presence.

  “Yeah?”

  “There a cross-town to Vine?”

  “Trolley, yeah. Be by in a snap.”

  “And then can I take Vine to the zoo?”

  “You want Number 78.” He lipped a cigarette. “Straight up.”

  Jack Romaine did not find Sally Price as she negotiated a course through knots of gentlemen, ladies, and cyclists on her way to the trolley bus that arrived in a shower of sparks. Jack was pacing back and forth on the prison side of the street, a hound anxious to pick up a buried scent. Once again he checked the faded lithograph that Bladehorn had provided.

  That was Sally. Bad skin, angular face, narrow eyes and mousy hair.

  “Jesus,” Jack had protested when Fist gave him the picture. “You expect me to know her from this?”

  “She’s the only one they’re lettin’ out,” Fist returned. “Just be there.”

  But Jack was late, way late. It was nearly eight o’clock, the street already busy as a bee in a tar bucket, and he had no idea where to look for Sally Price.

  A bell rang sharply. The trolley. Through a shifting crowd of cyclists and commuters Jack glimpsed a woman juggling a portmanteau and a Coney dog. Not too many women carrying suitcases, this morning. In fact—

  “Gotcha.”

  Jack sprinted across the street just in time to take a bicycle’s wheel square across his knee, rider and runner falling to the bricks together like a couple of footballers.

  The rider cursing from a pretzel of broken spokes.

  “Hell with you,” Jack rose limping to plunge back through the cordon that lay between him and Sally Price.

  Where was she?!

  There! There she was, on the trolley!

  She sat hindmost in a sandwich of commuters on the bottom level of a double-truck, a mousy woman almost smiling.

  “All aboard.”

  Jack limped toward the two-decker streetcar. A pedestrian cut him off. Damn near knocked him down, in fact.

  “HEY, BUDDY!” Jack challenged, but the guy just sailed past him, bounding like a goddamned deer from the sidewalk onto the streetcar.

  He was tall, this late boarder, and blond. A boutonnière fixed gaily to his vest. A new derby hat and spats.

  Their eyes met for a moment. Distant. Fleeting. But then wires sizzled overhead and Jack was still a stone’s throw away as the car began its clatter up the gentle grade toward Vine Street.

  “HOLD THE CAR!”

  Jack now charging past the chilli-dog cart. The trolley was pulling away, gathering speed—!

  “DRIVER! HOOO
OOOLD UP!”

  But the electric car clacked away noisily, accelerating uphill.

  “JESUS, HOLD UP!”

  Sally turned to see a man running up the tracks, his shouts muted by the racket of wheels and rails. He looked silly back there, like Charlie Chaplin. A handsome man holding his knee in a run for the trolley!

  For a moment it seemed he might even make it. A final sprint drew Jack almost within reach of the car.

  “SOMEBODY—GIVE ME—!” he gasped at a dead run.

  But then he stumbled.

  Sally laughed out loud when she saw Jack’s comic spill, the hands splayed out to break that awkward fall onto the pavement, the Charlie Chaplin hat flying off that otherwise handsome head. Sally wasn’t the only one amused by Romaine’s painful spill. Passengers widely separated by class and income and prospects joined her hoots of derision in a shared moment of Schadenfreude. And why not? The man pulling himself off the asphalt had to be a klutz. A loser.

  Prob’ly drunk, Sally was thinking. And anyway—

  He had nothing to do with her.

  Laughter trailed down the tracks, sharp and brittle. But there was one passenger who did not share the moment. The blonde man in spats did not laugh. It was not that he had missed the antics of the fellow running to catch the trolley. No, indeed. The tall, blond passenger with the boutonnière had noticed Jack as he leapt from the street to catch Number 78. He noticed Jack just as he noticed everything on the grounds outside the prison and on the street. But Romaine’s predicament was not an object of humor for this gentleman, nor even of curiosity. Arno Becker’s peculiar attentions were focused instead on the woman he had followed from prison. She had a strident laugh, he noted. Too much scalp showing for her years. And her mouth was smeared with chilli.

  Jack Romaine raised himself on knees scraped raw, craning to spot Sally among the passengers in the trolley that clack-clack-clacked up the hill. His shouted curse died long before it reached the ears of anyone aboard. Already, passengers were returning to their newspapers and cinnamon buns, their interest in Jack’s spill waning well ahead of his shouted profanity.