Adventure, July 1, 1928 — page 109: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ESPECIALLY DANCE HALL WOMEN with her sleek black pomaded hair, her short tight pussy willow taffeta one piece gown, her chiffon stockings and _ high- heeled satin pumps with rhinestone buckles, her vanity case almost as big as a traveling bag, her jeweled wrist watch and swinging bead girdle, Rosie saw Ally Schoonmaker, her older sister, who had married Timothy Bund practically on his death-bed for his house and his shares in the North Star Mine. And behind Ally, up the ladder of the years a rung or two, Dora Schoonmaker, breaking up the Watson home when Mike Watson’s mine began to pay, and somehow juggling him into a divorce from the woman who had seen him through the lean grim years of penury and into marriage with her and then carrying him off East. And Effie, the oldest of the four, who had run away with Perce Williams, nearly two decades her junior, when he came into his father’s money, and held him grimly to her side ever since. Yes, and even Bertha Schoonmaker, the mother, with her wig and her dirty chiffon blouses and her painted cheeks and brown teeth and pink-lined hats with floating pink veils, playing the man-game still, at sixty-four. Their lean, rapacious Schoonmaker hands were all alike If Lorraine took Jim, she’d take him to keep. At the altar. For very definite financial ends of her own. The tacit bargain between Long Jim and Rosie had never got itself into words; they hadn’t felt the need of them. He had pulled her out of hell. The strength of her allegiance to him couldn’t be in- creased by the mere saying of words, how- ever sacred, or the giving of a ring. Mar- riage would have added nothing to her side of it. Nor, ‘she had thought, to his. She wished now that she had it, but it had not occurred to her to wish it before. She had had something so much solider in poverty. Marriage might hold and it might not, but while he had been depen- dent upon her for his food and clothes, there had been no doubt. She went back to that over and over that night, seeing the placid years in the 103 little house as very beautiful through a mist of pain. She had a feeling that, pull- ing at the almost forgotten cadences of the song, she had brought the past down about her ears. She felt the old trapped fatalistic despair and sick rage, without the old vigor. Something began banking up inside of her, steadily, relentlessly. She was terribly afraid of it. It seemed to her that it was a great bubble of black blood in her brain, and that when it burst— She tried to keep from thinking to ease the strain on it, but her thoughts streamed out swiftly from oubliettes in obscure corners of her mind. They were hideous thoughts and really not hers at all. It seemed that some devil sent them to torture her. The unfair- ness of it gagged in her throat. She had fought her way out of filth and blackness to cleanness and the sun, and now, with- out volition, the old horror came on her again from within—clicked through her brain like yards and yards of cinema film. The current of her life had swept past its one clean tranquil place and was swirling along muddied and normal. The familiar ache was in her heart, and Rosie was her- self again—Captain Mac, of Al’s Dance Hall. You didn’t get away from things like that. Well, there were things that Captain Mac knew how to do that Rosie Briggs had forgotten. She had whipped a can along the street once with revolver bul- lets as a child whips a hoop, to the ad- miration of every idle man in town, and ended the demonstration by shooting a stranger’s plug hat off his head with- out disturbing his hair. Her whirling thoughts showed her Jim’s old .44 in the left-hand end of the bottom drawer of the dresser. She must wait, she told herself—and her heart gave a great bound—she must wait until she had them together! She laughed out with sudden raucous cruelty in the still cool night. Jim stirred in his sleep but didn’t waken. She raised her- self on one elbow and looked down at him, while her thoughts raced and danced, piling themselves into the bubble. comicloooks.com