The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride by Hortense Calisher Page B

between their fantasies and their needs—“For Rosie’s piano”—she would never play it; “For Mannie’s funeral”—he had already had it; “For luck” to the gambler; “For the patent leathers”; “For the pimp”—since after all, wasn’t this what I was doing for myself?
    As I went up the stairs to leave the last envelope—for my old client whose politeness was always to warn me away from her own bedbugs, I felt relaxed and yet a-tingle, greased for the long birth-canal and ready to slide into the light. The fact was that my scarf, a Liberty tie-silk, ill-chosen to stay on a bare skull, must have slipped its knot sometime back—later I found it caught inside the lining of my Aquascutum. But I was by now too tired to notice anything but that the old woman’s door was dark, or to recall that her insomnia went without electricity except when visited. Her hearing too, was as sharp as the rats she kept at bay with her broom handle. I had no sooner stepped to the door, hand not yet in pouch, when the door opened. She knew me, almost at once, I think. But she was a resourceful woman. She didn’t want to.
    “A dybbuk, a dybbuk!” she shouted—which wasn’t likely to wake anybody in this house of Italians. Then she shut the door. But she was lonely. A minute later, it opened a crack. “If you are a dybbuk,” her voice said, “touch the mezuzah on the door above, it will rest you, then leave yet, hah? If you are the worker from the agency, come in.”
    Her kindness to dybbuks melted me. I entered. She was ready for me, already moaning and ritually gnashing. “Oy, what an accident. What to happen, Oy.”
    “Not … an accident.” Confiding was new to me. “I—we—” I don’t know where I meant to begin.
    She opened her eyes. “Those Italienisches. A fight maybe?”
    I opened mine. Could she think they had scalped me? “No—no—”
    “So, ah-hah, I thought so. Those crooks,” she said. “You go to the priest,” she said. She hissed it. “Go to their priest; he’ll get it back for you before they sell it, such a beautiful wig.”
    I wept then, from shock.
    “Oy, dolling,” she said, rocking me. “All of them you have, so byudifful. Musta cost a fortune. Those crooks.”
    We were on the couch. I noticed she no longer bothered to warn me about the boggles. It’s no trick at all to come down in the world.
    That cheered me. I dried my tears. “Does everybody know? That I wear them?”
    “I don’t know wedder from everybody?” she said sulkily. “Me. My friend Mrs. Levin the beautician, she said it. And maybe we told Mrs. Yutzik in Hester Street, she’s an invalid.”
    “And the Italians,” I said. I thought it best to leave it at that.
    When I was ready to go, having found the scarf, she scuttled off, telling me to wait, and returned with something wrapped in newspaper. “Put on to go home,” she said. “And good riddance to it.” She struck her own brow. “Such connections it has, in the mind. Wait till donstairs, hah. To put.”
    It was a sheitel, the ugly wig worn after marriage and meant to be known as such, shiny red-brown and bumpy as their Friday bread. That reminded me. Down the block, yes, there the baker was already at his ovens, it must be half-past three. I missed having a watch, but the disciplines must begin; later I would be rewarded for its loss by a spryer time-sense, the total loss of One that comes to those without watches. For every so-called loss, I could look forward to other gains.
    I went in to buy rolls, and while the baker’s back was turned, dropped the sheitel lightly on a tray of the breads which would always tell me, newspaper-less though I might be, that it was indeed Friday. I did this in imitation of my friends under the viaduct, who saved as queerly as anybody who was not on the move, but when they threw something away, did so with an indefinable elegance. Then I retraced my steps to the old lady’s house—she would have to chance it on the