The Vertical City Part 20

A uniform had shot her father from the underpinnings of the freight car. Her mother had died with the phantom of one marching across her delirium. Even opposite the long, narrow, and exceedingly respectable rooming house in which she now dwelt a uniform had stood for several days lately, contemplatively.

There was a menacing flicker of them almost across her eyeb.a.l.l.s, so close they lay to her experience, and yet how she could laugh when Getaway made a feint toward the one on her beat, straightening up into exaggerated decorum as the eye of the law, noting his approach, focused.

"Getaway," said Marylin, hop-skipping to keep up with him now, "why has old Deady got his eye on you nowadays?"

Here Getaway flung his most Yankee-Doodle-Dandy manner, collapsing inward at his extremely thin waistline, arms akimbo, his step designed to be a mincing one, and his voice as soprano as it could be.

"You don't know the half of it, dearie. I've been slapping granny's wrist, just like that. Ts-s-st!"

But somehow the laughter had run out of Marylin's voice. "Getaway," she said, stopping on the sidewalk, so that when he answered his face must be almost level with hers--"you're up to something again."

"I'm up to snuff," he said, and gyrated so that the bamboo cane looped a circle.

She almost cried as she looked at him, so swift was her change of mood, her lips trembling with the quiver of flesh that has been bruised.

"Oh, Getaway!" she said, "get away." And pushed him aside that she might walk on. He did not know, nor did she, for that matter, the rustling that was all of a sudden through her voice, but it was almost one of those moments when she could make his eyes smart.

But what he said was, "For the luvaG.o.d, whose dead?"

"Me, in here," she said, very quickly, and placed her hand to her flimsy blouse where her heart beat under it.

"Whadda you mean, dead?"

"Just dead, sometimes--as if something inside of me that can't get out had--had just curled up and croaked."

The walk from the s.h.i.+rt factory where Marylin worked, to the long, lean house in the long, lean street where she roomed, smelled of unfastidious bedclothes airing on window sills; of garbage cans that repulsed even high-legged cats; of petty tradesmen who, mysteriously enough, with aerial clotheslines flapping their perpetually was.h.i.+ngs, worked and sweated and even slept in the same sour garments. Facing her there on these sidewalks of slops, and the unprivacy of stoops swarming with enormous young mothers and puny old children, Getaway, with a certain fox pointiness out in his face, squeezed her arm until she could feel the bite of his elaborately manicured finger nails.

"Marry me, Marylin," he said, "and you'll wear diamonds."

In spite of herself, his bay-rummed nearness was not unpleasant to her.

"Cut it out--here, Getaway," she said through a blush.

He hooked her very close to him by the elbow, and together they crossed through the crash of a street bifurcated by elevated tracks.

"You hear, Marylin," he shouted above the din. "Marry me and you'll wear diamonds."

"Getaway, you're up to something again!"

"Whadda you mean?"

"Diamonds on your twenty a week! It can't be done."

His gaze lit up with the pointiness. "I tell you, Marylin, I can promise you headlights!"

"How?"

"Never you bother your little head how; O.K., though."

"_How_, Getaway?"

"Oh--clean--if that's what's worrying you. Clean-cut."

"It _is_ worrying me."

"Saw one on a little Jane yesterday out to Belmont race track. A fist-load for a little trick like her. And sparkle! Say, every time that little Jane daubed some whitewash on her little nosie she gave that grand stand the squints. That's what I'm going to do. Sparkle you up!

With a diamond engagement ring. Oh boy! How's that? A diamond engagement ring!"

"Oh, Getaway!" she said, with her hand on the flutter of her throat and closing her eyes as if to imprison the vision against her lids. "A pure white one with lots of fire dancing around it." And little Marylin, who didn't want to want it, actually kissed the bare dot on her left ring finger where she could feel the burn of it, and there in the crowded street, where he knew he was surest of his privacy with her, he stole a kiss off that selfsame finger, too.

"I'll make their eyes hang out on their cheeks like grapes when they see you coming along, Marylin."

"I love them because they're so clear--and clean! Mountain water that's been filtered through pebbles."

"Pebbles is right! I'm going to dike you out in one as big as a pebble.

And poils! Sa-y, they're what cost the spondulicks. A guy showed me a string of little ones no bigger than pimples. Know what? That little string could knock the three spots out of a thousand-dollar bond--I mean bill!"

It was then that something flashed out of Marylin's face. A shade might have been lowered; a candle blown out.

"Getaway," she said, with a quick little dig of fingers into his forearm, "you're up to something!"

"Snuff, I said."

"What did you mean by that word, 'bond'?"

"Who built a high fence around the word 'bond'?"

"Bonds! All that stuff in the newspapers about those messengers disappearing out of Wall Street with--bonds! Getaway, are you mixed up in that? Getaway!"

"Well, well! I like that! I had you doped out for fair and warmer to-day. The weather prophet didn't predict no brainstorm."

"That's not answering."

"Well, whadda you know! Miss Sherlock Holmes finds a corkscrew in the wine cellar and is sore because it's crooked!"

"Getaway--answer."

"Whadda you want me to answer, Fairylin? That I'm the master mind behind the--"

"It worries me so! You up in Monkey's room so much lately. You think I don't know it? I do! All the comings and goings up there. Muggs Towers sneaking up to Monkey's room in that messenger boy's suit he keeps wearing all the time now. He's no more messenger boy than I am. Getaway, tell me, you and Muggs up in Monkey's room so often? Footsteps up there!

Yours!"

"Gawalmighty! Now it's my footsteps!"

"I know them! Up in Monkey's room, right over mine. I know how you sneak up there evenings after you leave me. It don't look nice your going into the same house where I live, Getaway, even if it isn't to see me. It don't look right from the outside!"

"n.o.body can ever say I wanted to harm a hair of your little head. I even look the other way when I pa.s.s your door. That's the kind of a modest violet I am."

"It's not that, but the looks. That's the reason, I'll bet, if the truth's known, why Monkey squirmed himself into that room over mine--to hide your comings and goings as if they was to see me."