There Is Confusion/Chapter 14

Poor Maggie! How relentlessly and completely had her illusions flown!

She had enjoyed the ride to Atlantic City. Her husband had surrounded her with magazines, fruit, candy, even books. She had had a wonderful dinner and when they got to Atlantic City, he took her to a very respectable, clean boarding-house. It was nice to be protected, she realized that. And, when, the day after they were married, he gave her seventy-five dollars, and told her to send part of it to her mother, her spirits, which had not yet recovered from the shock of the past two days, rose considerably.

She thought Mr. Neal remarkably kind and gentle. And he was always clean. On the whole, while she was not the least bit in love with him, she considered he did pretty well, though she did wish he knew a little more about English grammar. His deliberate incorrectness made her ashamed of him and because he was so kind to her, this feeling on her part made her a little ashamed of herself.

He was the soul of generosity. Besides giving her money, he had taken her to two of the best stores, and bought her whatever she wanted. He would have liked to buy her a complete outfit, but the prices made her demur.

"Wait till we get to New York again. We can do better there." But she did let him buy her a few things: There were a blue silk dress, a white satin skirt, two or three smart, delicately tinted blouses, a wonderful wrap, light but warm; tan and white shoes and stockings.

​Atlantic City was a revelation to her. She had literally never been out of New York City, except once to a funeral in Brooklyn in company with the lugubrious Mis' Sparrow. This fairyland by the sea with its colored lights, its human kaleidoscope, its boardwalk, its shops! She did not know the world held such as these.

But she was more interested in the Atlantic City that lay on the north side of Atlantic Avenue. There were many cottages here, a score of restaurants, a good drug store, all of them patronized by colored people. They were the kind of people Maggie wanted to know, she could see that at a glance. In the restaurant which she and her husband most frequented, she sat and watched the happy, laughing faces. They were like one big family although they came from Washington, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. She realized then how completely she had depended on the Marshalls and their immediate entourage. Cut off from them, she had no way of meeting these people, she possessed no background.

Some of the visitors seemed to know others hailing from the most remote places. One woman said, "Oh, there's Annie Mackinaw, she's been in San Francisco for five years you know, I must speak to her." Surely, Maggie thought, her husband must have met some of these people somewhere. But although an occasional man nodded to him, even came up and spoke, not one brought over his wife or daughters. The women looked at Maggie, a little curiously; once she thought as she passed a large party at a table that they stopped talking with that queer suddenness which made her sure they were discussing her. They looked at her clothes, appraising them, but she could never catch their direct, gaze.

She sought to find solace in the theaters, of which she was very fond. This was an opportunity, plenty of leisure and a willing companion ready and able to take her whenever and wherever she wished. But Atlantic City theaters make no ​secret of their unwillingness to serve colored patrons. After being told at the ticket office that there were no more balcony seats, only to see them calmly handed out to the next white person in line; after enduring an evening in the poorly ventilated gallery with a feeling of resentment rankling in her breast; above all after seeing how these mischances awoke her husband's passionate but futile anger, she desisted. He had a terrible, devastating temper, which left her speechless and cowering even though it was not directed toward her. Better do without the theater forever, she thought, than be the cause of awakening his savage wrath.

She returned to her survey of the colored visitors. Her husband found some friends and went off on mysterious trips with them, from which he returned amiable and pleasant and usually with some small gift for her. In his absence she sat on the piazza watching happy groups go by, or sat alone in the pavilion far down the boardwalk, where the colored people bathed. In time she came to know the characteristics of certain groups, could even tell from what city they came.

Philadelphians were not as a rule as strikingly dressed as the folks, say, from Washington, but they had a better time. They seemed bound by some kind of tie, family, perhaps—which made it possible for them to group together incongruously but with evident enjoyment. Old women and young girls, young girls and elderly men, young men and almost middle-aged women, laughed and bathed and gossiped like brothers and sisters. These were the hardest to approach; it was impossible to invade their solidarity. They made the status of the outsider very clear.

The Baltimore people were somewhat like these, only gayer. They were clannish, too, but more willing to let down bars. Clearly they were a cross between the Philadelphians and the gay Washingtonians who played about in very distinct groups, superb in their fashionable clothes and their deep assurance.

​Maggie's landlady introduced her to one girl, a Miss Talbert from Philadelphia, who came up on the piazza one day to inquire for a former boarder. She was brown, not pretty, rather plainly but well dressed, with a beautiful manner. An atmosphere of niceness hung about her.

She acknowledged the introduction pleasantly. "You're from New York, Mrs. Neal—I wonder if you know my cousin Sylvia Marshall?"

Maggie could have jumped for joy. "She's my best friend."

Things went a little better, then. Miss Talbert asked her to go in bathing, introduced her to a few people, beckoned her over to her table at lunch. But she and her party were staying for only three days more, and Maggie was almost as badly off as ever when she left.

Her husband took her down to the pavilion the next day, and left her there. A sharp-faced old woman wearing a plain sad-colored dress and a formidable false front, beckoned to her.

"What does your husband do?" she asked the girl, looking at her over sloping glasses.

Maggie, confused, said he was in the motor-business. The old woman turned incredulously away.

She determined to ask her husband about his work. But he gave her no satisfaction.

"You wouldn't understand it. Too much explaining to it. I make money enough for you, don't I, girl?" He laid a heavy hand on her frail shoulder.

He thought he'd go to Philadelphia to live. "Feller told me of some good prospects there. We'll just room for a while. If we don't like it, we can go back to New York."

She was satisfied. She didn't want to return to New York, she realized. Her mother could make out with the money which, Neal had assured her, she could send regularly. And it made her sick to think of the Marshalls.

Without regrets she mounted the train with him one day ​and went to the big, sprawling city. Its size, its long stretches of streets appalled her. The awful silence which seemed to descend over the town when she got below Walnut Street frightened her. One could be very lonely here, no doubt.

The "rooming" of which her husband had spoken proved to mean the second floor of a house in South Fifteenth Street. There were three rooms and a bath. She liked this because it gave her something to do. She kept them clean, arranged and rearranged the charming furniture which Neal gave her, and prepared their simple meals.

It was the first time she had had a really attractive setting. And she was soothed, bewitched by its effect. Her rather simple plan of life contained, it must be remembered, only three ideas,—comfort, respectability, and love. This last had been added to her list very recently. She would have married Philip any time during the last five years without loving him, for the sake of the security which he could have brought her. So it is not strange, then, that she and Neal sailed their little craft so smoothly. It is true that marriage did not in reality prove as interesting and picturesque as she in common with most girls had conceived it to be. But marriage was marriage, and she must make the best of it. Neal was still kind, almost fatherly, very generous, clean, and, as far as she could see, had no bad habits. He smoked one cigar after each meal, and almost never drank.

"Can't afford it in my business," she heard him say often. His business! If only he hadn't been so mysterious about that. Still it must be all right. Men called on him pretty often and he would see them in the middle room, which Maggie had turned into a restful living room. Certainly he made plenty of money.

She had comfort then and she did not feel the lack of love. Occasionally it occurred to her, it would be nice to be performing some of her housewifely duties for Philip. She ​thought he would enjoy doing some of them with her. But perhaps that was because he was young. Things seemed to change so when one became old,—at least elderly. And she did not think Philip would have been out as much as Neal.

Her passion, however, was for respectable company,—for more than that if she had but known it. She wanted friends, impeccable young women with whom she could talk over things, and exchange patterns and recipes, or go to the matinée. Once she met Miss Talbert on Christian Street. The girl greeted her kindly but a bit doubtfully, spoke about the weather. Then came the query:

"What did you say your husband's name was, Mrs. Neal?"

"Why Neal, of course, oh, Henderson, Henderson Neal."

Miss Talbert looked at her a little sadly, exchanged a few more banalities, and went on her assured way.

"I did hope she'd ask me to call," Maggie murmured. "How am I ever to get to know anybody in this great town?"

On the floor above her lived a girl and her brother, Annie and Thomas Mason. The brother played and the girl sewed and kept house. Once Annie got a letter of Neal's by mistake and brought it down to Maggie. She was in her living-room trying to shorten a skirt when Annie tapped.

She stepped to the door. "Oh, come in."

Miss Mason came in, nothing loth. "I got your husband's letter by mistake. He's Mr. H. Neal ain't he?" She held out the letter glancing about the room. "You've fixed it up real pretty here. The last roomers kept the place looking so bad. You going to stay long?"

Maggie didn't know. She was transported at the sight of the pleasant-voiced friendly girl and the North Pennsylvania accent which carried with it something very wholesome and grateful.

Miss Mason was frankly curious. "You here alone all day? What do you do while your husband's to work?"

​"Oh, clean, and sew and—and nap," Maggie laughed a little. "Don't you want to come to see me sometime, now, this afternoon?"

Miss Mason thought she "might's well, your room seems bigger'n mine 'cause we've got a piano and you've got a table there. Say, s'pose I was to bring my sewing down, and I could help you even off your skirt."

After that they spent a great deal of time together. They walked in the quiet autumn evenings down dingy Fifteenth Street, past the hideousness of Washington Avenue, down, down the stretch of unswerving street to Tasker or Morris, through to Broad Street which is really Fourteenth. They sauntered back arm in arm under young but fading trees, past the hurry of flying automobiles, under the soft silver of the street lights. Then they turned up Catherine Street, stopped at the bakery for ice-cream or a bag of cakes and so to the house to bed.

It was a pleasant, almost a bucolic friendship. Both girls had rather simple tastes. Sometimes they went further up Broad Street to the theaters, choosing the ones where they met with the least discrimination. Once Maggie took Annie to the Academy of Music. They stood in line for their seats and Maggie looked at the bill-boards. One of them read:

She turned away, a little sick.

Maggie usually paid for their outings. Annie's brother ​made a pretty fair salary, his sister told Maggie, for he played at private dances for wealthy white people in West Philadelphia, Rosemont, Sharon, Chestnut Hill and various other suburbs.

"But he don't give me much 'cause he wants to leave the country for good sometime. I keep house for him and he pays for the lodgings and for most of our food. I make what little extra I can by taking in plain sewing. Your husband's right open-handed, ain't he?"

"Yes," said Maggie heartily. "He's very generous and very kind." She wanted to change the subject, for Annie was inquisitive—one never knew what she'd ask next.

"Funny, ain't it," pursued Annie, her mouth full of pins—she was at her everlasting sewing, turning up the hem of a bath-robe—"I ain't never seen him yet, no, nor Tom neither."

"Well, you will. Come and walk up to South Street with me. I want to get some postal cards."

It was an aimless existence, but it had its points. Her mother was comfortable, she herself had ease, a husband and a companion.

She went out to market one chilly November morning and came back later than she expected. She had scarcely got in before Annie appeared, an unusual flush on her yellow, freckled cheeks. Annie had reddish, crinkled hair, which she wore brushed stiffly back from her high forehead into a hard, ungraceful knob; "rhiny" hair, Maggie knew Sylvia and the boys would call it. She could imagine how they would talk about Annie in their pleasant, unmalicious way. Joanna would strike her attitude and imitate her accent. Annie broke into these reminiscences.

"I been down here two or three times a'ready. Kind o' rawish like."

"Yes, I think it's going to rain. I'll light the gas-heater ​and we can sit here and thaw out. I enjoy a chilly day if it's warm inside."

"Kind o' that way myself."

"Oh, you said you'd been here before. Want to see me about anything special?"

"Oh, aimed I'd come set with you a spell. Me and Tom—now—we saw your husband last night."

"That so? Where? How'd you guess it was he?"

"Near Bainbridge Street, then we watched him come in here. Why, Tom knowed him a'ready. I didn't know his name was Henderson. I'd heard of him before myself."

Outside a steady soaking rain had begun to fall in the gray somberness of the November afternoon. The gas-heater cast a ruddy oblong of light on the white ceiling. Maggie, who had been straightening out a paper pattern, crossed the room and threw her slight figure on the couch, huddling close against the wall. She shivered a little in the luxurious warmth.

"Isn't it grand to be indoors? Where did you ever hear of my husband?"

She was becoming drowsy and did not notice at first that Annie had not answered her. When she did, she looked up suddenly to catch the girl's dog-like brown eyes fixed wistfully on hers.

"What's the matter Annie?"

"Nothing."

"Oh, but there is. Are you sick? Has Tom been unkind to you?"

"Oh, it isn't me. It's you! Oh, Maggie, how could you?"

"What about me? How could I what?"

"Marry him?"

"Marry whom? my husband,—why shouldn't I?"

"Didn't you know?"

"For God's sake speak up, Annie Mason. What is it you ​know about him? Has he got another wife? Is he an escaped convict?"

"He's a gambler."

"A what?"

"A gambler. Tom knows him well. And I guess I musta saw him when I was a little girl. He used to live up around Stroudsburg. They run him out of town."

"I'll never believe it." But in her heart she did. That money—why, of course, his long hours, especially at night, his reticence—all this combined to make her recognize the truth.

"You poor thing. Of course you don't want to believe it. That's what I said to Tom. I said, 'That poor thing, she's got no notion of it.'"

It was intolerable, such pity! "Where is your brother, Annie?"

"Who, Tom! Prob'ly up stairs, he don't go out to rehearsal till four."

"Tell him to come here."

Annie went out, whimpering a little, twisting her fingers in the folds of her white apron. She came back followed by a tall thin young man, dark, with kind, soft brown eyes. Maggie noticed that the hair in front of his ears was unshaven to form flat side-whiskers. "Siders" the boys used to call them. They had teased Sandy about them, for he had affected them in his college days.

She was standing by the table holding the envelope of the paper pattern in her hand. "Mr. Mason, what's this you know about my husband?"

"Annie shouldn't have told you, ma'am," he said abjectly. "It was none of her business."

"Well, she has. Sit down, please, and tell me all you know."

"I'd rather stand, thank you, ma'am. Well if I must. Even when I was a little boy, Henderson Neal was knowed to be a ​card-sharp. There wasn't nobody could stand against him. Used to wait for the men on a Saturday night, white and colored. He'd meet 'em in the bar and treat, and then ask 'em in on a little game. And they'd play, till they was cleaned out. Then he'd give 'em another drink, and clap 'em on the back. Perhaps he'd hand 'em back a dollar. 'Better luck next time old man!' And they'd come back the next Saturday night, the poor fools. Some of them blowed their brains out, they got so far back in their debts."

She was tearing the envelope into bits, but her voice was steady. "You're sure of this?"

"My uncle was one of them that killed theirselves. They was a colored minister come to Stroudsburg and he run him out of town. Then he crossed over to Phillipsburg, then down to Trenton. They made things too hot for him there, too. Then he got in with a white saloon-keeper in the mining districts in Pennsylvania. Finally things got too hot for him and he left the country for a while, was servant to an actor. He come back in about five years with another name."

"An alias," murmured Annie who read the papers.

"But pretty soon he started out again under his own name. You see he got some political protection in New York, and I guess he's got the same here. Most people know about him a'ready. I'm sorry I had to tell you, ma'am."

"Yes, yes, I'm sure. Would—would you mind leaving me now? You, too, Annie—please."

She didn't lie down and moan and cry as she had done—was it less than six months ago?—when she received Joanna's letter. That was child's trouble compared to this. She had wanted so to be decent, and she was a gambler's wife. God! how funny!

Now she must think, she must think. Oh, what was she to do? Leave him, she knew that. But afterwards? She had no money. He had given her her very clothes. Her old ones were at her mother's. Her mother!

​"Poor Mamma!" she said again as on a former occasion. "What a hell her life's always been!"

No wonder those people, those men in Atlantic City who knew him didn't introduce their women folks to her.

"I suppose they thought 'You thief! Dressing that girl on other men's money!'"

Pretty soon he'd be home for dinner. She heard him presently coming up the stairs. There! He had stepped on the creaky one. That meant he was—now—just outside the door. He stepped in.

"Nice and warm in here."

She barely allowed him time to take off his overcoat. "Henderson, I know how you make your money. You're a gambler."

He didn't deny it. "Who told you that?"

"The nephew of that man, that Mr. Mason (she hazarded the name) who shot himself in Stroudsburg."

"Where'd you see him?"

"What difference does that make? And I've been living like a queen off stolen money. I want you to know I'm leaving you this instant."

He caught her by the arm. "Don't be a fool, Maggie!"

She could see the blood mounting, as his temper rose, shadowing his dark face.

"That's what I'm trying to do—stop being a fool."

"Where will you go, how can you live? Off my money? You've none of your own."

"I'll make some."

"I'll never let you go. I'll kill you first." He crushed both slender wrists in his brutal hand and she went ashen with pain.

"I wish you would kill me."

He flung her away from him then and she leaned back against the wall, breathing hard.

​"I suppose you'll go back to that man, that fine gentleman that didn't want you."

"Isn't it likely he'd want me now? I was a nice girl then, not the wife of a gambler."

He broke down suddenly at that, sank in a chair, buried his head in his hands.

"What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to let me go." Her voice was hard.

He lifted a wretched face. "You wouldn't stay even if I was to do something else—something decent?"

But she couldn't forgive him for dragging her into this abyss, this slough of degradation.

"You couldn't change now, and anyway I wouldn't live with you."

To her amazement he got up, took his hat and coat and started for the door.

"I'll go. You're not the one to be turned out. You know I pay for these rooms a quarter in advance. This here's the beginning of the second quarter. There's some money in the top bureau drawer."

"I don't want the money. Take it with you." She got it and stuffed a handful of bills—yellow ones—in the pocket of his overcoat. "I don't want your rooms, either."

"You'll have to keep them. You've no money and you've no place to go. You ain't got a friend in Philadelphia, and you can't walk to New York. If you walk around the streets long enough, you'll find there's worse things can happen than being a gambler's wife." He straightened up. "If you don't promise me to stay, I'll tag around after you everywheres you go."

"If I stay—for a while—will you promise me not to come back?"

"I promise."

"Pooh, the promise of a gambler!" She hated him.

​"I'll show you. Best not to try me too far though, Maggie."

"Well, are you going?"

He walked out, closing the door very quietly after him. She had not shed a tear, she did not now. Instead she sat, with her brow wrinkled, trying to recall something.

"Oh, yes," she sprang up and rushed to the closet, pulling with nervous, shaking fingers at the garments hanging there. In the pocket of her little poplin suit, the suit in which she was married, she found what she was looking for.

It was an oblong business card, slightly soiled around the edges. She had come across it in Atlantic City and for some reason had kept it. Across the front ran a neat superscription

Her glance dropped to the left-hand corner. Yes, she was right, there it was: Branch offices—Washington, D. C., 1307 U Street, N. W.; Baltimore, 1816 Druid Hill Avenue; Philadelphia, 2021 South Street.

She sat all night brooding wide eyed over the purring gas-stove. In the morning she made herself tidy and walked up to Twentieth and South.