Tomorrow Will Be Better: A Novel

1

THERE COULDN’T BE a colder—a lonelier place in the whole world, thought Margy Shannon, than a deserted Brooklyn street on a Saturday night. She pulled her firmly held coat more tightly about her as she turned a corner. She was out walking the cold wintry streets because she was seventeen and had a job. She was independent now. She didn’t have to be in the house by nine o’clock. She felt she had to use her hard-bought freedom even if it froze her to death. How easy to give up; go home and sit in the warm kitchen! But she had to hold out; get her mother used to the fact that there was a wider world outside the walls of the grudging home. So she walked the streets alone on a cold January night.

MARGY HAD LEFT school at sixteen after finishing two years at Eastern District High. She had looked forward to leaving school, getting a job, being independent, and having a little money of her own. She had been anxious to start leading a life of her own. She had found a job—an interesting job. She was mail reader in the Thomson-Jonson Mail Order House which had its offices and warehouses down near the Brooklyn docks; an hour’s trolley ride from her home.

But the expected independence had turned out to be merely technical. Her mother kept the silver cord taut and vibrant with possessiveness, and Margy, like many Brooklyn girls who came of poor families, had to turn in all of her salary at home.

She earned twelve dollars a week. Like her father, she placed her sealed pay envelope on her mother’s outstretched palm each Saturday afternoon. That was the tradition; a decent husband or a good child brought home the pay envelope unopened.

Flo gave Margy two dollars out of her envelope. Out of this Margy paid carfare to and from work and bought the daily bologna sandwich and cup of coffee which was the routine lunch of most of her coworkers. That left fifty cents a week for everything else; the hot dog she and a girl friend indulged in when they took a Sunday trolley ride to Canarsie in the summertime or the cup of hot chocolate with fake whipped cream on top and two crackers on the saucer which was the traditional treat at the end of a Sunday stroll in Brooklyn. An occasional dime-store lipstick had to come out of this fund, too.

Margy never had enough money for all the things a young girl wants so desperately. For instance she’d like to have one of the new-style wind-blown bobs, like her office friend, Reenie, had. But such a haircut meant frequent trips to the barber (with a nickel tip involved), to keep the hair in intricate trim. Since she couldn’t afford that, she had to be content with her shingle bob with thin, fishhook curls pasted to each cheek.

Sometimes she dreamed a little dream. Suppose she were to get a raise! Would she tell her mother? She could take the extra dollar or two out of the envelope and reseal it before bringing it home. And what Margy could do with that extra money! Still and all, she thought, that would be cheating. She remembered what a grade-school teacher had said that time she had caught Margy sliding her eyes over to a seatmate’s paper during a test.

That’s how a criminal begins, said the teacher. He cheats in a test and gets away with it. Then he cheats in bigger and bigger things. Finally he ends up in Sing Sing.

Margy had no intentions of becoming a criminal. Yet . . . ? Who’d ever find out? It was like the old childhood dilemma: If you’d press a button and a Chinaman died in China, leaving you a million dollars, would you press that button? Sometimes Margy had decided that she’d press it very firmly; other times she had decided that a million dollars would never compensate for causing a death—not even a Chinaman’s on the other side of the world. Well, she had never had a chance at the button and there was no immediate hope of getting a raise. So there was nothing to decide.

MARGY PLANNED TO pass Frankie’s house once more before she went home. She was not in love with Frankie but he was one of the few boys she knew. She had first become interested in him when he went up for his diploma the time both of them graduated from P.S. 18. She had known him only as Frankie, an obscure, dark, Irish boy. But at graduation they called out his full name: Francis Xavier Malone. The name sounded important—like a mystery revealed. And Frankie, himself, had seemed important from that time on.

She had passed Frankie’s house twice before in her walks around the block. This time she was rewarded. He clattered down the steps. She pretended to come out of a deep study with a slight start when he spoke to her.

What do you say, Marge?

It’s awfully cold, isn’t it? she replied in a tone that she tried to make lilting and provocative.

You said it!

He was off in the opposite direction, toward the corner candy store for a pack of cigarettes or to see if the morning paper had arrived. Margy cursed the luck that had made her walk around the block clockwise. If she had been walking the other way, he would have fallen in step with her and they would have walked as far as the corner together. Frankie wasn’t much, she knew, but he was better than nobody. He would have served until a real boy friend came along.

ALTHOUGH IT WAS only a little after nine when she got in, Flo questioned her suspiciously.

Where you been? she asked.

Nowhere.

Nobody goes nowheres on a winter night.

I was just walking around.

Nobody just walks around in the cold. You was somewheres and you’re afraid to tell your mother.

"Oh, Mama!" cried Margy.

I’m only telling you for your own good. If you run around and some man gets you in trouble, don’t come crying home to me.

I don’t know any men. And even if I did, there’s no place to go to get into trouble.

There’s places, and ways, too, if you’re looking for them, pronounced Flo darkly. Tell me where you been.

I was only walking around the block. And that’s the God’s honest truth. Let me alone, Mama. Please!

You and your father! Get up on your high horse the minute I ask a plain question.

Where is Papa? asked Margy, glad to change the subject.

God only knows. And it’s getting to be all hours. Night after night he leaves me sitting home alone, and . . .

Flo talked on, off on a familiar subject.

IT TOOK MARGY quite a while to get warm in bed. She finally accomplished it by pulling the covers over her head and breathing hard in the closed space. She relaxed in drowsiness, listening to the winter wind blowing against the window. How lucky I am, she thought, to have a home and to be warm. It must be terrible to have no place to go on a cold night—just to keep on walking the streets until you die from the cold. And if I get a raise, I’ll be glad to give it to Mama. It’s a wonderful thing to have a home and a family.

The dream started before she was sound asleep. It was an old recurrent dream: a reliving of the time when as a small child, she had been lost on the streets of Brooklyn. She knew the dream was coming and she knew the terror it held. Drowsily, she toyed with the idea of rousing herself before she drifted too far into sleep. But she could not fight off the delicious, relaxing weakness. She let herself sink into sleep.

IT WAS SUMMER in the dream; a hot summer morning. The dream started with the feeling of warm wind on her legs. She looked down. Yes, she was wearing socks and the new brown barefoot sandals that her mother had bought for her at Batterman’s for forty-nine cents. She had been so proud of those new sandals. The happiness about them had been one of her first memories. And in the dream she was proud of the sandals all over again.

She was a child of five in the dream and her mother was a beautiful woman of twenty-five—at least she seemed beautiful to the little girl. In some inexplicable way, the mother disappeared and the child was lost. Lost on the streets of Brooklyn. She wandered from one street to another, panic growing in her. Then she turned a corner onto a familiar street and was happy because she knew her home was around the next corner. But there was a pair of huge iron gates at the end of the street, closing it off. She hurried toward the gates. She saw Frankie standing behind the gates. It was Frankie, the youth, not Frankie the boy of P.S. 18. The child was relieved. Frankie would open the heavy iron gates for her. But as she approached the gates, she saw Frankie grin and heard a click. He had locked the gates and she couldn’t get past them. She sobbed.

A SOUND IN the room awakened her. She sat up and listened tensely a moment before she realized that the sound came from her. She had sobbed aloud in her dream. What a dope, she admonished herself, crying in my sleep! And how come Frankie was in the dream? She put out her hand and felt the wall. She looked through her bedroom door into the parlor and saw the long narrow windows luminous from the street lights beyond them. I’m home, she assured herself. I’m safe in my bed. But if I go to sleep again the dream will continue. I’ll count a hundred slowly.

But she was asleep before she reached sixty. This time she slept deep and dreamlessly—the way the young have a right to sleep.

2

A WOMAN HURRIED THROUGH the poor streets of Williamsburg accompanied by a little child who tried to keep up with her by trotting doggedly, stopping to pant, and then trotting faster to try to make up the time lost by the pause.

This is the last time I take you along, scolded the woman absently. Next time I’ll leave you home alone.

The threat meant nothing to the little girl. Her mother’s voice forever lifted in monotonous complaint, was the rhythm of life itself to the child. If the voice had turned tender, the little one would have been confused. She’d have been rocketed out of the only world she knew into something terrifyingly alien.

Every time the same, Flo fretted. Every time you whine and whine, ‘Take me! Take me along! I’ll be good,’ squeaked Flo in a reedy falsetto.

The panting child looked up at her mother, wondering whom she was mimicking. Margy didn’t know anyone who talked like that. The mother answered the child’s thoughts.

Yes, you! I mean you! And don’t make out like you don’t know what I’m saying, either. Her tone was aggrieved and the child felt guilty misery. You’re just like your father, the woman went on with vague indignation. You never know what you want, and when you get what you think you want are you ever satisfied? No! And so she kept on nagging.

Flo did not dislike the child. If the vein of essential truth in her could have been blasted free from its flinty layers of worry, bitterness and inarticulateness, her love for the child would have been revealed. She nagged and fretted at her because the child was her only emotional outlet; was someone to receive her voice; a symbol at which to direct thoughts spoken aloud. There was no one who listened so obligingly, who tried so hard to understand. Had she been challenged by God, Himself, for her ceaseless pecking at the little one, she would have said in defense:

It means nothing. She doesn’t understand what I talk about anyway. Then she would have added with her strange feminine refutation, Besides, the quicker she learns that the world ain’t all hearts and flowers, the better off she’ll be.

They came to a crossing. Flo groped for the girl’s hand. Margy, fearing that her mother wished to hurry her steps, put her hand behind her back and shook her head negatively.

All right! Don’t take my hand then. Get lost! See if I care.

They stood at the curb while Flo looked down the street that nobody liked. It was a one-block street, dead-ending at the twelve-foot-high iron gates of a grim, gray, charity hospital. The gates made a long narrow cage of the street. There was a feeling that if you turned into that street, the opening would close behind you and the locked gates ahead would hold you prisoner in that city block forever.

The street made Flo uneasy. Yet it fascinated her, too. Purgatory, she thought. Yes, it looks like Purgatory where lost souls walk up and down and nobody cares. It looks like nothing could live on that street; no trees, no chippy birds, no rubber plants, no geraniums.

I wonder if it’s true what people say about this street? That murdered man they say, was found buried in a block of cement in someone’s cellar. A prostitute in every second house. I wonder if he ever . . .

Quickly she dismissed the thought of her husband’s possible unfaithfulness. Where would he get the two dollars? she reasoned. He gives me all his pay. My mother, God rest her soul, was right. Make him give you his pay envelope still pasted, she said. Make him promise the first night you’re married. A man will promise anything, then, she said. I’m glad I made him promise six years ago. Because now he wouldn’t promise me nothing. She spoke out of her thoughts to the child.

Your granma was a good woman and don’t you ever forget it.

Margy was puzzled. She couldn’t figure out how Granma came in. She whimpered. Flo sighed in annoyance.

"Now what?" she asked.

The street, whimpered the child.

What’s a matter with the street?

I don’t like the way it looks at me.

Flo addressed the empty street. This little girl don’t like the way you look at her. So stop it now. Hear? If you don’t, I’ll give it to you, Street. Margy stared down the block with interest, actually expecting a miracle.

It ain’t stopping, she said. It keeps on looking at me.

Oh, you! said the exasperated parent. The street’s got no eyes. It can’t look at you. Besides, if the street is looking at you, she said with one of those changes so bewildering to Margy, you don’t have to stand there and look back at it. Let’s cross over and don’t let me hear no more silly talk out of you.

The child was afraid to cross the dreaded street. She reached for her mother’s hand. The woman took revenge by duplicating the child’s former gesture of independence. She put her hand behind her back and shook her head negatively. Tears came and stood in the child’s eyes.

See? How do you like it? asked Flo. And the child had no answer.

She crossed the street hurriedly. The girl’s thin legs worked like pistons trying to keep up. The woman walked faster when she reached the other side and the child began to lag behind. Flo was confident that the child would catch up.

That’s how you got to learn children, she thought. Make fun of them when they’re scared. Anyhow that’s how I had to learn things.

A thought faintly tried to form in the back of her mind. And just what did you learn, anyway? asked this faint thought. Why . . . why . . . I learned how to get along in the world. Yeah? jeered the thought. Yeah! she answered. But the answer was without much conviction.

FLO HAD GOTTEN so far ahead that Margy gave up trying to catch her. She turned around and went back to the street. She wanted to find out if it would still look at her in that funny way. She turned down into the street and slowly walked toward the gates, staring at each house, expecting something to happen. She came near the iron gates. To her surprise, they did not lock up the street. They were across the gutter on another street that went the other way. Her tiredness left her and she skipped across the street forgetting to look both ways as her mother had taught her. She grasped the iron bars of the gate, pushed her little body close against it, closed her eyes tightly for an instant so she’d be more surprised at what she saw, then opened them wide to look through.

Her disappointed eyes saw nothing at first but gaunt gray buildings and gaunt gray walls. But as she looked, a gray boxlike truck drove up to the building. Two white-dressed men took a bed out of the back. But what a funny bed! No head, foot or legs. She knew it must be a bed because a man was sleeping on it. She thought it was funny that a man slept in the daytime. Her father slept in the nighttime. Another funny thing was that the man was sleeping with his clothes on. She saw his shoes sticking out from the bottom of the gray blanket. And Margy guessed that he was going someplace the very minute he woke up because his hat was lying ready on his chest.

A door opened and a lady dressed in white came out. The men smiled at her and the tall man said something. The white lady smiled back and took the sleeping man’s hat and put it sideways on her own head. The tall man let go of the bed with one hand and tried to put his arm around her. All three laughed when the bed tipped a little.

Just then a Sister came out and stood in the doorway and made a muff out of her wide sleeves. The three people didn’t see the Sister and Margy whispered Chickee! trying to warn them. Somehow she knew that they weren’t supposed to be having fun while that dressed-up man slept so tight on that funny bed.

Suddenly the white lady turned and saw the Sister. She pulled off the hat, put it back on the man’s chest and ran into the building. The two men took a better hold on the bed and carried it in, with the Sister marching like a soldier behind them. The little girl waited but nothing more happened. The summer sun shone on gray emptiness.

Margy tried to puzzle out why the man slept in the daytime and out on the street, too, almost; why the men carried his bed as if they didn’t care if he fell off and hurt himself; why the tall man wanted to kiss the white lady when she put the man’s hat on and why they were so scared when they saw the Sister. The Sister hadn’t scolded. She had just stood there. But they had acted as if she were hollering at them.

Margy walked down the cross street and came to where some little girls were playing a game called Statchers. The leader took a girl’s hand and spun her around and let go. The spun one froze in whatever position the release had left her. There were three statchers made and two to go. Shyly, Margy sidled up to the leader and held out her hand. The leader ignored it, whereupon Margy spun around by herself, staggered with pretended dizziness and came to rest on one wobbling leg, lifted her hand like the Statue of Liberty and stuck her tongue out as an added touch. All of a sudden the other statchers came to life and shrilly attacked the outsider.

She don’t live on this block, said one.

Go ’way, you! screamed another.

Ger-rout-a-here! commanded the leader.

Git offa our block and play on your own dirty ol’ block, warned the biggest girl.

As if on signal, the girls began swatting at her with their hands. They didn’t hit her but swatted so close to her face that they made a breeze that moved her bangs. Margy cowered for a second with both hands over her face. Then she ran away down the street.

She turned a corner and sat down on the curb to get her breath back. She tried to figure the whole thing out and decided that the little girls had not wanted her on their block. She decided she’d do the same thing if any strange girl ever came to play on her block. That’s the way to do, she thought. Everybody must play on their own block. And I must chase all the strange girls that come to play on my block.

A great noise rose from the cobblestones under her feet. A big brewery truck with stacked kegs of beer was coming down the street. It was pulled along by four giant Percherons. Seen from the level of the child’s eyes, the sixteen hoofs rising and falling in labored rhythm seemed to fill the whole world. She forced her eyes upward, away from the fearful fascination of the flaying hoofs. The leather-aproned driver, his hands full of leather ribbons, was half sitting, half standing with his feet braced against the dashboard. He was pulling the reins back so hard that it made the horses hold their heads in a high curve. The big yellow teeth of one of the front horses were exposed and Margy was sure he was getting ready to bite her. A hoof striking a spark from the cobblestones drew her eyes down again. She thought fire was coming from the horses—fire that would burn her up if she kept sitting there. But she was too frightened to move. The horses’ legs loomed up larger, seeming to come right at her. She shut her eyes tightly. As the horses stormed by, she opened one eye a little. It focused on a horse’s leg and she saw something she had never seen before—a tuft of coarse hair attached to the leg. The tortured breeze made by the motion of the horses caused the tuft to blow. She opened both eyes wide and saw that all the horses had these bangs on their legs. As the truck went past, she stared at the wheels, fascinated by the way they turned, delighted with the shiny black of the axle grease in the hubs.

Well, the heavy truck went by without coming too close to her. The big kegs jigged up and down in an angry grumbling way but they did not fall off and roll over her as she had feared they might.

She sat there for a while waiting for more big horses with bangs on their legs to pound by. But only one other horse came along—a dark brown, skinny one who walked slowly with his head down. He wore a straw hat with holes for his ears to stick out, and pulled a little painted wagon that was piled up with fruit and vegetables. There was a big yellow and red umbrella over the driver’s seat with the word, BLOOMINGDALE’S printed on it. A dark, skinny man walked alongside the wagon. He put his hand to the side of his mouth and sang a strange song.

Straw-bebbs! Lawn-I’ll-dadoes! Spinch! Tur-rmps! Green led-duz!

He sang led-duz the way the priest sang Amen at High Mass. Women came out of houses, bargained briefly but passionately with the wandering green grocer and retired indoors victoriously with tops of bunched beets or carrots waving like triumphant green flags.

The vegetables reminded Margy of dinnertime and in her brief life she had learned one thing well: You had to be home at dinnertime. She started back in the direction from which she had come. Then, remembering the mean little girls, she turned and took another street. She turned the corner expecting to find the street with the gates. But it was a strange street without gates. Beginning to feel the oppressiveness of her naughtiness in leaving her mother, she tried to be a good girl by looking carefully both ways before she crossed the street. She turned another corner. No gates! She wondered where they were—began to fear that there never had been gates—that she had made them up. Maybe she had no Mama either. Or maybe she did and Mama didn’t like her any more and let her get lost on purpose. Hadn’t Mama said that the next time she was bad she was going to give her away to the ragman?

At that moment, a man came out of a house. After sleeping the night and half the day away in a windowless room, the first impact of fresh air almost killed him. He lurched as he drew a deep breath. Margy thought he was the ragman come to get her. She opened her mouth and bawled. The man staggered past without looking at her. He had a houseful of bawling kids. A strange kid bawling on the street didn’t interest him.

Even after the man had lunged away out of sight, she continued howling. Eventually the howling settled down into a senseless gulping sobbing. A woman came by and stopped.

"What’s a matter, little