Crackpot, page 19
And even men who’d not intended to, who had reached a time in their lives when they only dreamed the opportunity might come their way again, ageing men, jumped and whacked their heels on the floor more smartly, inflamed by the movement and the heat and by her smell and her willingness, which, if conditional, was nevertheless somehow innocent, and gave them, too, the feeling of somehow innocence, even while they danced the fat girl harder, to make it understandable if wives should choose to wonder that they should want to slip out for a breath of air in the next break. When they left the hall they would cross to the woodyard where Hoda waited, or turn into the alley, or slip into the boiler room if it was cold out, or yes, unable to wait, would back her briefly against a wall or tree, and afterwards would pay her too, poor orphan, at times with an unexpected generosity born of schnapps and gratitude and the rare surprise of it all. And then they would limp back to the hall, to sit and mop their brows beside their wives who already sat spread-legged on straight chairs and hard benches around the walls of the room, and fanned themselves with handkerchiefs and now made mild fun of their exhausted spouses.
Soon after, Hoda would reappear; inexhaustible, dishevelled, Hoda would stand for a moment with her hands on her hips, her elbows out, her head on one side, and let her hips swing to the beat with ever widening gyrations, until, wound up again, she wound in again effortlessly among the dancers, to pursue again her pleasure and her luck.
Why shouldn’t she dream of being the lucky one for a change? Dreaming is different from expecting. She’d get a place right at the front, at the edge of the road where the royal car was going to pass. When he came by she’d get a good look at him, and give him a chance to get a good look at her too. That was one thing about being fat, you showed up better in a crowd. After that it would be his move. She certainly wasn’t going to throw herself at him, if he wasn’t interested in her. Those ritzy royal people didn’t like fatness. Or thought they didn’t. Well, he had seen a lot of beautiful, skinny dames in his life already; they lay down at his feet wherever he went, it even said so in the Yiddish papers, though not in those words exactly. But he danced with them, and Hoda knew how guys could get when they were dancing. And no one ever heard of a girl saying no to a prince. But he hadn’t picked one for steady yet, had he? He couldn’t have found the absolutely right one. He was like Hoda, not going to settle for just anything. So it could turn out, though he didn’t even know it himself yet, that the minute he saw her, the Prince might discover that the one he really wanted to love forever was a fat girl after all.
Even so it would be hard. There were powers that would do everything possible to discourage the match, though she, for one, was prepared to refuse all bribes. “We love each other,” was her simple reply to all cajolings, to every attempt at threat and coercion. She loved the sound of it, the simple dignity, the immense promise, the foreverness, and sometimes said it aloud to herself in the bedroom. Only when Daddy wept because she was marrying a gentile, and his mother the Queen begged him to prevent the civil war that was threatening, did they give each other up a few times, and she promised to love him alone, forever, though they were to part, and he promised to be good to the Jews forever, though his heart was broken. But most of the time he got both his mother the Queen and his father the King to realize that she was best for him and was so nice the people wouldn’t want to make civil war anymore when they got to know her, and she got Daddy to realize that she would be like Queen Esther and save the Jews her whole life long. It didn’t really matter that she didn’t believe any of it. All that was needed was for it to actually happen, for it to become absolutely true.
And if it had happened, would she really have liked him once she got to know him? Even if he was a prince, was he a nice person? Luckily, as she told herself later, she could take him or leave him. It was that cop who really griped her. Those damn cops, always bothering you for nothing, always interfering, always spoiling things. Just as the long, black motorcar had drawn close at last, just as she had really caught sight of him, just as she had surged forward, at the crest of the crowd, with her mouth opening to shout forth a great froth of joy, that cop came shoving along in front, bawling, “Back on the kerb! Keep to the kerb!” and planted himself, with his arms outspread and his big fat back square in front of her, shoving against her. At one instant the princely head had begun to turn toward her, and at the next, just as he was about to look into her eyes, the head and helmet of the cop shoved in between them, his back pushing her rudely, so that by the time she had jerked her face up over his shoulder the car had moved by and she was already out of the direct line of vision of His Royal Highness. She screamed desperately, raucously, “I’m here! I’m here!” instead of the “Hooray! Hooray!” that the crowd was shouting in unison, and that she thought she was going to shout when she opened her mouth, but the royal head in the sedately moving vehicle showed no sign of having heard her separate voice, and continued to acknowledge graciously the general cry.
Of course she’d been stupid even to hope it could be otherwise, especially while the country was full of cops and teachers and capitalists. They always fixed things so people didn’t get a chance. Why wasn’t he out chasing crooks somewhere? Dumb cops. No wonder dumb Morgan knew he wasn’t going to get caught by the cops, because they were even dumber than he was! All they knew how to do was stop you from trying to make a living and bully you around when you were just standing there waiting for the Prince of Wales. “Dumb cop!” Hoda yelled after the cop, who had moved on to shove other innocent people around. “Dumb cop!” she yelled truculently, complaining to the dissipating crowd, “He shoved right in front of me.” But everyone else was talking about the Prince and how handsome he was and how he seemed so nice and how they’d seen him so close up and how they’d never forget it and how he made them feel proud to be in the Empire.
What did they know? What did they care about the Empire? If she were queen she’d improve everything for everyone, and see those cops got told off too, but a lot these people cared, even if it was for their own good. Not that she was sure she really wanted to be queen. Mr. Polonick used to say that royal families were useless, and just wasted the tax money anyway, though if she were queen she wouldn’t be useless. Anyway, she would not have minded so much had His Royal Highness simply driven by without recognizing her. She wasn’t dumb enough to think it could really happen that he would find her in all that crowd. But why should he be prevented from even having the chance to see her? Daddy said that all the billions of people in the whole world must feel just like she did sometimes; they must wonder why things go wrong, too. Did they all secretly think of marrying a prince or a princess? Did they all want to improve things? Then why did they let that cop shove her around?
She was still standing there, raging, when somebody came up behind her and cried, in a high, congested nasal voice, right into her ear, “Hi, Hoda! Isn’t he wonderful?” She was tempted to snap out, “No he isn’t!” But she was glad, afterwards, that she hadn’t. It was only Seraphina, and she would have had to explain that she didn’t really mean it; she was only mad at the cop, and she didn’t feel like talking about it anyway. It was all silly kid stuff, standing on the kerb and screaming your head off. What for? What good did it do anybody?
But she didn’t say anything when Seraphina went on parroting what everyone else was saying, about how handsome he was and how she’d never forget him, no, never never. Not that she even got a chance to say much; Seraphina was talking so much you’d think the nuns hadn’t let her open her mouth for three years.
Hoda had heard from the boys that Seraphina was home from the nun’s reform school, and that she was a changed girl. When the guys who used to hang around with her heard she was back, some of them went around to see her, kind of expecting her to be glad to see them after spending all that time in a convent with only other dames, and figuring she would be nice to them like before. But she wouldn’t have anything to do with them. She had made new friends in the convent school, and now that she was out, she had, as Popowicki Polack described it darkly, “gone snob!”
Seraphina wasn’t interested in the local boys anymore. She told them they were just kids, to their faces. She said she wasn’t going to fuck for peanuts anymore. She had learned all about men in the girls’ school, and from now on she was going to operate downtown where the big money was. She told the guys a whole lot of stuff about how a girl couldn’t afford to waste her best years and good looks just giving it away for nothing. The guys were sore as hell. They said there ought to be a law against reform schools. Seraphina had been a nice kid before she got sent away. But it was funny, too, the way they had described it, imitating her high nasal voice and her silly giggle, especially when they came to the part about her good looks, because Seraphina, as Hoda remembered her, had always been pretty homely.
Hoda hadn’t even thought of seeing her after the boys told her all that, even though she didn’t have any girl friends to get together with now, except to talk for a few minutes if she ran into them outside, because most of her old friends were still just school kids, and she had nothing in common with them anymore, and wouldn’t want to have much to do with them even if they didn’t avoid her nowadays.
Seraphina, in spite of the way she was acting too good for the boys, wasn’t at all stand-offish with Hoda. Hoda could hardly believe the change that had come over her. In just a couple of years she had grown from a skinny, sallow-faced, narrow-jawed, thin-nosed, dirty-looking girl, with stringy orange hair and plugged sinuses, who smelled funny when you came near her, to this gay, sophisticated vamp, hair chopped short and dressed just like a movie actress, who posed before Hoda now, pleased by the surprised look on Hoda’s face, and cried out with the same whinnying, foolish, but good-natured laugh that Hoda remembered, “You like it?”
Hoda could not have told her whether she liked it or not; she had never seen anything precisely like it in real life before. She realized clearly, for the first time, that the backward, grubby Seraphina that she used to talk to because she felt sorry for her when the other girls called her a chippy and wouldn’t talk to her, was really older than she had thought. Maybe she wasn’t so dumb now that she was so grown up. Hoda was filled with a kind of startled respect. She had never seen so much stuff on anyone’s face so close up. Seraphina had buried her natural pallor in white powder, on which two dramatic spots of orange rouge glowed with hectic improbability, where her cheeks were not likely to have bloomed on their own. She had painted heavy, black rings around her eyes, just like that movie actress Hoda had seen in the picture, only her short, colourless lashes couldn’t droop down the way the screen star’s did, and hardly managed to retain the tiny bubbles of black clinging to them. Her eyes inside the carbon rings looked pale and trapped, as if they didn’t know what they were doing there. Her mouth was thickly plastered over with moist, black cherry lipstick, which ignored her thin lips to make an ambitious bow, with high points almost into the nose holes of her long, tapering nose. It looked kind of funny when Seraphina laughed, because when she drew back her lips the points of the bow looked as though they were picking her nose. Most impressive of all, Seraphina was wearing some kind of perfume. It was strong; it was sharp; close up it didn’t entirely hide her natural smell and the two together could make you kind of choky if you stayed close too long, like a whiff of dog does sometimes, but from a short distance it was very good and rich-smelling, and Hoda maintained her distance, in spite of Seraphina’s tendency to crowd, and breathed luxurious breaths. Perfume, to Hoda, was the height of elegance. Seraphina must have got hold of a lot of money somehow.
“So how you been, Hoda?” Seraphina paused long enough to ask but not long enough for Hoda to answer. “Boy, did I have a dirty weekend!” Seraphina giggled, rolled her eyes, and took Hoda under the arm, leaning on her intimately. She was scarcely a month out of reform school, but Hoda had a feeling that in relation to things hitherto unsuspected by herself, Seraphina was already a woman of the world.
“Didn’t they want to make you a nun at the convent?” she asked, holding her head bent awkwardly sideways to try to get upwind of Seraphina’s compounded scent.
“Me? A nun?” Seraphina whinnied delightedly. “Don’t be silly! Can you see me, a nun?” Seraphina giggled. “It’s unnatural!”
Hoda waited, politely, for an explanation. She had learned to be very careful when talking to goyem about their religions, in the hope that they would learn to be more delicate and stop making stupid remarks about her own. She was sick and tired of telling Pop the Polack to shut his goddam ignorant mouth. And the others were no better. She knew they did it sometimes just to tease her and see her get mad, but there were times when they talked, that she knew they weren’t just being nice guys kidding around. They believed all those things that came out of their dumb faces, and they actually thought they were paying her a compliment when they said, “But you’re all right, Hoda.”
Seraphina still had that knack of making most of what she said sound as though she didn’t know what it meant. But the things she said often made sense. You can’t be a nun if you want to persist in the sinful ways of this world, Seraphina explained, in the tones of one who had learned a lesson by rote. Actually, she had thought at first that she might like to be a nun, because she liked praying, and had even prayed herself into a trance a few times. Sister had had high hopes for her. If she would only rid herself of sinful thoughts and sinful ways, or even if she would just try very hard to do so, God might help her and she might find her vocation. But sister thought she was being stubborn when she said she didn’t have sinful thoughts; she didn’t have many thoughts at all, only feelings. Sister kept saying she must try to think of something else when she got those feelings. But when she tried to think of something else she had to remind herself first of what it was that she had to think of something else instead of, and that was how she got more sinful thoughts in the convent than she ever did otherwise, and they gave her more sinful feelings. Sister said that was devil’s work, leading her to hell, and the only thing for her to do when she had sinful feelings was to pray, and she used to pray so hard and fast to fight her sinful feelings that it was positively unnatural, and she used to wake up again absolutely exhausted. So she decided finally that she would just have to leave all the hard thinking and worrying about vocations to God, because what was the use of being dumb if you couldn’t? And she got pally with some of the other girls, and they all agreed you might as well leave the hard things, like being good, to the sisters, because that was their job and they enjoyed it, and the girls all talked instead, every chance they got, about the fun they were going to have and the guys they were going to go with when they got out of there.
Hoda should have heard some of the stories those kids told! Seraphina had learned a lot, and in the end she and the sisters agreed that she didn’t have the vocation, and she’d better learn a trade instead. Only she wasn’t very good with her hands. So they released her finally because her ma needed her to help with the younger ones at home. She didn’t like it much at home, either, and in a couple of months, when she wasn’t jail bait any longer, she was going to leave home and live downtown. No more convent and no more looking after the brats, either. Seraphina was going to be a high stepper in town. Would Hoda believe it, she hadn’t seen a guy close enough up to get a smell of for a couple of years, nearly three, except for maybe a priest or two, and they all smelled alike. There was even a sister sitting there when the doctor examined you; it was unnatural!
Seraphina had picked up that expression at the convent and she used it a lot, laying particular emphasis on the “nna” part of unnatural, perhaps because it bleated well through her nose. When Hoda admitted that no, she’d never gone downtown to look for pick-ups Seraphina said it was positively unnatural, and invited Hoda to come with her tonight. It would be a good time to go hunting, because a lot of rich Americans had come up to look at the Prince because they didn’t have one of their own, and those Americans paid so much moolah, it was unnatural.
Hoda didn’t much care for the idea of trying to pick up strange, grown men, in an area of town she didn’t know well. What would they be like? Would she be able to talk to them? Seraphina was very confident about going into the big time. She seemed to know an awful lot of things. There were all kinds of things that puzzled Hoda, that she hadn’t been able to ask anyone about since her mother had died. Maybe Seraphina knew. She sure knew stuff Hoda had never heard of. She could hardly believe that Hoda had never heard of jail bait, for instance. That was fucking under age. If they caught you, the guy got sent to jail, even if he paid you, and you could get sent to reform school, unless you started yelling it was rape, like that meant he forced you and you had nothing to do with it and they were sorry for you and let you go and told you to keep your legs crossed from now on.
Hoda didn’t think it was worthwhile going downtown if that was going to happen to you. What if the cops caught her, and suppose she didn’t remember to start hollering “rape” on time, or they didn’t believe her, and they put her in a reform school, what would happen to Daddy? But Seraphina said they’d never catch her. “I’ll lend you my makeup. They can’t tell how old you are if you’re wearing makeup.” Seraphina really wanted her to come. She kept talking about the fun you could have, how sometimes the men took you out and bought you a meal in a restaurant, and let you order what you liked, and then they took you to a hotel, like in the movies on a honeymoon, and you drank whiskey together and really had a hot time. Seraphina knew a couple of dancehalls where you could pick up some really classy meatballs. You could make more in one night than Hoda could get off those punks she hung around with in a week.
