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Because they rarely had boarders who had to be in an office at eight-thirty or nine o’clock, Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie did not rise until nearly eight. It was Maggie who got up first to be downstairs and start the fire in the kitchen because she was the cook. A little later Mrs. Lefferty rose, put on a black dress (she had worn nothing but black ever since Mr. Lefferty died twelve years before and very little else before that event), joined Maggie and had a cup of strong coffee at the kitchen table. Then by eight-thirty or a quarter to nine the boarders began to appear in the dining room–old Mr. Van Diver, Miss Flint, Mr. Boldini and Mr. Salmon who were always with them, and occasionally a transient or two. Mrs. Lefferty sat at the head of the table, poured the coffee, dished out the oatmeal and the eggs and led the conversation. Luckily, she always wakened in high spirits, for Miss Flint nearly always had a headache in the mornings, Mr. Boldini suffered from chronic biliousness and Mr. Salmon in the early morning always seemed to be in a kind of haze, confused and poetic and a little sullen. Only Mr. Van Diver was bright and gay because he was so old that he slept very little and so his day had already begun hours before the others were out of their beds. As a rule he wakened and was washed and dressed and reading a motion picture magazine a little after daybreak, so that by the time breakfast was ready he was already in full possession of all his faculties save his memory.

After breakfast Mrs. Lefferty cleared the table, put the dishes on the dumb-waiter and whisked them down to Maggie. Then if it was her turn, she put on her hat and coat and went out to do the marketing, and if it happened to be Maggie’s turn, she at once set about cleaning the house and doing up the rooms. While she did Mr. Boldini’s room, he took his poodle for an airing. A little while later Mr. Salmon went out, he said, to visit editors and publishers, and with relief she threw open his windows (which he always kept closed at night) and made up his bed. She sometimes argued with him about the windows, telling him that it was lack of air which gave him such a pallor, but nothing could persuade Mr. Salmon. As a young man he had had a pallor and as he passed middle age and threatened to become stout and ruddy in a Jewish way, he fought to keep his youthful pallor because it was an impressive part of the picture he had made of himself long ago.

Old Mr. Van Diver never left the house until nightfall, so while she did up his room, he took a motion picture magazine and went downstairs to sit in the parlor among poor Miss Minnie’s Victorian furniture. Miss Flint always did her own room. If there were transients Mrs. Lefferty did their rooms last with very little interest because they rarely stayed long enough for her to feel that they had become a part of her life. Either they had come to her boardinghouse because they wanted to hide or because they were a little broke, and as soon as the reasons were removed they disappeared.

The four star boarders–Miss Flint, Mr. Van Diver, Mr. Boldini and Mr. Salmon–had been there for so long that their lives and hers seemed to have become entangled and grown together beyond separation. Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie were both affectionate, easy-going and creatures of habit, all of which was a handicap in keepers of boardinghouses. The transients nearly always seemed to them violent creatures blown in by the wind from the strange hard outside world, to be blown out again after a week or two, always mysterious and remote and cantankerous, never fitting the leisurely old-fashioned tempo of the establishment. None of that inner circle of boarders, the permanents, at Mrs. Lefferty’s ever seemed to be in a hurry like the people one met outside the house, rushing for the bus or the subway or the elevated, dashing about in taxis and motors. In the middle of Manhattan Island, Mrs. Lefferty’s boardinghouse was an island where time seemed to have stood still. Mrs. Lefferty would never have taken transients save that the income from them gave her and Maggie a tiny margin that permitted them to keep the place going for Miss Flint, Mr. Boldini and the rest.

A little before noon Mrs. Lefferty went down to the kitchen and helped Maggie finish the preparations for lunch. Then she went upstairs again and sounded the bronze Chinese gong in the lower hall, just as she had done when poor Miss Minnie was still alive, every day in her life since she was twenty-three years old. At lunch everyone was, as a rule, cheerful, and after lunch they all had coffee in the parlor. That was where Miss Minnie had always had it and Mrs. Lefferty continued the custom because it was elegant and also because it made old Mr. Van Diver feel at home, as if nothing had changed. She felt sorry for him because his mind was failing and at times he didn’t seem to realize that he was old and poverty-stricken and living in a boardinghouse, and Miss Flint knew that having coffee in the parlor was the proper thing to do because they had always had coffee in the parlor in all the fine houses where once, long ago, she had gone to sew.

When coffee was finished Mrs. Lefferty went downstairs to help Maggie with the dishes and then dressed and went out to the pictures. Now and then, rarely, Maggie went with her but usually Maggie preferred to take a nap or soak the feet she had been standing on for eighteen hours a day for thirty-one years. About six Mrs. Lefferty came in again, climbed the stairs and wakened Maggie who was a great sleeper and but for alarm clocks and Mrs. Lefferty would have slept, as Mrs. Lefferty said, “until the trump of doom.” Together they got ready the evening meal and after supper Mrs. Lefferty left Miss Flint to serve the coffee in the parlor while she descended to the kitchen to have her own coffee off a shelf while she helped Maggie with the dishes. This she did in order to gain time so that she might get upstairs to the rummy game a little earlier. When the dishes were finished she put out the cat and Maggie turned out the lights and they went upstairs to find Miss Flint, Mr. Boldini and Mr. Salmon already gathered impatiently about the card table with old Mr. Van Diver dozing or reading a movie magazine in poor Miss Minnie’s plush armchair by the fire.

There were no stakes in the rummy game because none of them could afford to play for money, but they kept a running score of the games, month after month, year after year, and played with passion. Mrs. Lefferty, who was full of tricks and played every night, had eighteen hundred and thirty-four games; Miss Flint, who was less successful because there were times when she seemed foggy and unable to give her full attention, had fourteen hundred and three. Mr. Boldini, who was handicapped by having to be absent when he had a professional engagement, had twelve hundred and forty-five, and Mr. Salmon, who was frequently called away by his muse, had eleven hundred and sixty-three. Because Mr. Boldini and Mr. Salmon were unable to play every night, they were each allowed the value of one and a half games for every game they won. As Mr. Salmon grew older his muse called him less and less frequently and he had been able to catch up a little on the general score.

About midnight Mrs. Lefferty brought up a cold snack from the kitchen and then they all went to bed.

Every day with Mrs. Lefferty was exactly the same except Sundays when sometimes she went to Mass, and on the first and the fifteenth of each month when she and Maggie took an evening off to go over their hopelessly muddled accounts in an effort to discover whether they were making or losing money, something which they never did discover until the insurance came due or the taxes had to be paid. Always after these evenings spent over the accounts, the meals became noticeably slimmer and the cuts of meat a little poorer. This would last for three or four days and then the generous, carefree spirits of Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie would defeat their sense of impending doom, and the food would become excellent again and plentiful until the next day of reckoning.

The truth was that Mrs. Lefferty was an incurable romantic, and that the reckless temperament of her partner, Maggie, did not help. If she had not begun life as a kitchen maid too early to have learned in school much more than the merest elements of reading, writing and arithmetic, she might have been a writer instead of keeping a boardinghouse in the sixties too near the elevated. She would have had a great popular success, for in all her romances, in all the stories she was always making up about her boarders and the people she met while marketing, the ending was always perfectly happy or so sad that it wrung the heart and so was almost more satisfactory than if it had been happy.

Mrs. Lefferty’s imaginings had very little to do with what was known as “life”; there was, even in the blackest moments of her “stories,” no evil or bitterness but at worst only the rather mechanical plottings of the “villain”; there was never any misery, nor any irony nor any real malice. Mrs. Lefferty never even made people into villains unless it was necessary to the story; and even then in her heart she knew all the time that they were not really villains but only made up that way like actors on the stage. She knew from her reading of the picture magazines that all the vamps and villains were in private life good, kindly, respectable people who either had large families or adopted large ones, and spent their evenings at home knitting or reading books of philosophy. Being just able to read, her awe of the printed word was so great that she believed whatever she saw in print.

That was the way she felt about people in real life–they were never really bad. When they seemed to be bad they were only playing parts; and watching them playing parts gave Mrs. Lefferty a deep satisfaction, even when she herself suffered from their evil actions. Thus twice she and Maggie had lost all their small savings because she became fascinated by gentlemen who came to see her and discuss investments. Thus life was always interesting to Mrs. Lefferty, whether she was cleaning the rooms or shopping on Third Avenue or helping Maggie in the kitchen, and there were moments when she grew a little confused in the head, not knowing where what went on about her in the boardinghouse ended and where what went on while she was in the picture house across the street began.

Aside from the fact that optimism was a part of her romantic nature, Mrs. Lefferty remained incurable because somehow, in some mysterious fashion her romantic imaginings were always coming true. She knew in her heart that the two gentlemen who had swindled her had not gone out of her life forever but would one day return bringing all her money and a lot of profit besides. She was certain that some day luck would turn for Miss Flint and that once again Mr. Boldini would be “the sensation of three continents,” that Mr. Salmon would be a famous writer, and that Maggie’s daughter Sarah Jane would settle down and “get a break” and cease to be a burden and a worry. Mr. Van Diver was much too old to have any ending but the inevitable one and Mrs. Lefferty, taking care of him, was planning as happy an ending as possible.

Only in the case of her son Tommy did she ever have any doubts and those only came to her at times in the middle of the night when she lay awake unable to sleep, and kept seeing Tom as a little boy playing in the back garden of poor Miss Minnie’s house on Murray Hill with Maggie’s Sarah Jane. Watching them long ago when poor Mr. Lefferty and Maggie’s husband Mr. Ryan were still alive, she had imagined all sorts of wonderful stories about them both. But Sarah Jane hadn’t turned out so well and it was more than five years since she had heard anything at all from Tommy.

To ease her heartache she told herself that it was really not Tom’s fault that he had neglected and forgotten her but because poor Miss Minnie had paid for his music lessons and sent him to college. Mrs. Lefferty still had old world ideas and she was not at all certain of the virtues of democracy. It did no good, she felt, to educate people above their stations in life. It only made them feel restless and insecure. Being ambitious, Mrs. Lefferty knew wisely, did not make you happier. Even if you gained your ambitions, it didn’t make you any happier because you only wanted more. The important thing in life, Mrs. Lefferty believed, was not to make a great deal of money nor to win a great deal of glory but to have a good time and help others to have a good time. After all, that was the only important thing when you got to be old and the only thing you could take into the grave with you. If people had always to be wanting things in order to be happy, then there was a curse on them.

That was the trouble with Tommy. He would have made an excellent butler like his father, with his good looks and his gentlemanly air, but education had put ideas into his head and unsettled him. It was really his father’s fault. Because he was an Ulsterman, he had been ambitious and wanted a better life for his son; if he had been south of Ireland like herself and Maggie he would have known better. It was Mr. Lefferty who let poor Miss Minnie educate Tom and teach him to play the piano.

And it was American ideas and those dancing lessons that poor Miss Minnie had given Sarah Jane which had sent her off into the chorus with ideas about becoming a famous actress, instead of being content with being a good typist and coming home regularly with her money. Sarah Jane was always coming and going, returning to live with her mother, and Mrs. Lefferty when she was out of a job and dead broke. Choruses, Mrs. Lefferty observed, seemed to work in a spasmodic fashion for two or three months at a time with long gaps in between, and Sarah Jane never seemed to get one of those “breaks” Mrs. Lefferty was always reading about in the picture magazines. Just the same she knew that Maggie was lucky to have her come home at all, instead of never seeing her the way she never saw Tommy, not knowing what had become of him or whether he was alive or dead. She had his picture and his baby shoes and sometimes in the night when she could not sleep she got them out and looked at them and the baby shoes always made her see him crawling about the floors of the servants’ sitting room in poor Miss Minnie’s “big house” or climbing the dark back stairs which always infuriated his father who might at any moment descend the stairs with a tray full of things. Those were happy days! Because Mrs. Lefferty was a romantic she forgot whatever was unpleasant and so she remembered nothing at all about the endless stairs of poor Miss Minnie’s “big house” and the carrying of coal and hot water and the tantrums of “the old gentleman,” Miss Minnie’s father, and the fact that the house had been overlarge and understaffed. Sometimes a horrible suspicion came to her that Tommy had disappeared because he was ashamed that his mother had been a housemaid and now kept a boardinghouse. Once long ago in the Grand Central Station she had seen him talking to another boy about his own age, a nice boy dressed like a gentleman, but Tommy seemed not to see her. She was never sure whether he had seen her or not and she had never had the courage to ask him and now, perhaps, it was too late and she would never know.

It was only at night that she thought much about Tommy because in the daytime she was too busy, what with Maggie and herself seeing to the whole house and the buying to do, which meant listening to the troubles of all the friends she had made at the grocer’s and the butcher’s and the chain stores. She had a great many friends for she had no shyness. If she liked a person’s looks she had a friendly “good morning” and something about the spinach or the chops or the weather. Sometimes people were standoffish and sometimes they were not, but very few held out for long against her faint Cork brogue and her grin which seemed to say, “Well, the world is a fine place, and it’s a fine morning for sure and Myers hasn’t any right to charge that much a pound for rumpsteak.” And so she knew almost everybody–the young housewives who needed advice about cuts and such things, the tired, shabby, respectable, middle-aged women with husbands out of work trying to keep up their respectability and dignity with only twenty-five cents to spend, and even the one or two cooks from the “big houses.” There weren’t many “big houses” because the neighborhood was run-down and shabby-respectable, not a grand neighborhood like Murray Hill in the days of poor Miss Minnie and “the old gentleman,” where there were only big houses and fine carriages and coachmen.

Miss Minnie had been dead for ten years but she still lived so far as Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie were concerned. They had both gone to the funeral in Long Island, wrapped in yards of hired crepe, and seen her with their own eyes laid away in the earth of the old cemetery alongside “the old gentleman” and her mother, among the other Randolphs, the last Randolph who would ever be buried there because Miss Minerva Randolph was the last of them. There weren’t many people there—just the clergyman and old Mr. Van Diver and two or three elderly respectable friends of Miss Minerva. By the time she died she hadn’t many friends left because she was not only the last of her family, but almost the last of a generation and of a whole society which had lived quietly and well and had very nearly disappeared. And when Maggie and Mrs. Lefferty came back to the empty house they wept and keened not only because poor Miss Minnie was gone but because without her, the world itself seemed to have come to an end.

Poor Miss Minnie had been their mistress, their charge, the figure about which their whole world revolved since they had come from Ireland long ago. They had seen her grow from a thin, delicate, middle-aged spinster into an old lady, waiting upon her, worrying about her health, fetching her cushions and delicacies, never once seeing that they too had changed, from young apple-cheeked girls into women past middle age. They had both come home to Miss Minnie’s house from their weddings, in the old days when it was a grand house on Murray Hill, Mrs. Lefferty married to Miss Minnie’s butler and Maggie to Mr. Ryan, the coachman. In her house Maggie’s Sarah Jane and Mrs. Lefferty’s Tommy had been born. In her house Mr. Lefferty had died of pneumonia contracted when he rose on one winter night and went downstairs in his nightshirt to help Miss Minnie calm “the old gentleman” who was in one of his tantrums. To Miss Minnie’s house Mr. Ryan had been brought home to die after his horses shied at “one of those new horseless carriages” and threw him out on his head in Central Park. To Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie, sitting in their crepe in the servants’ sitting room of the house near the elevated where Miss Minnie had come when “the old gentleman” died, the world had come to an end. Not only had they lost poor Miss Minnie but there would no longer be a house with fine walnut furniture and the remnants of beautiful china, and a beautiful linen closet, but Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie would have to find new places and perhaps be separated and Sarah Jane and Tom could no longer live at home.

And then the day after the funeral Miss Minnie’s lawyer, old Mr. Prendergast, came to the house and called Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie into the long tunnel of a drawing room and told them that Miss Minerva had left the{557} house to the two of them with everything in it and all the money she had left from the great fortune founded by her grandfather which, if everything went well, would be about enough to pay the taxes and insurance. Mr. Prendergast advised them to sell the house and its contents and invest the money, but neither Mrs. Lefferty nor Maggie could bring herself to do such a thing. Sell all that furniture they had always lived with? It would be like being evicted. Anyway neither of them wanted to retire. They could not imagine what retirement would be like. What could they do with themselves?

Mr. Prendergast painted a bright picture of the joys of living on one’s income, but neither Mrs. Lefferty nor Maggie was moved. They would not have been moved if the prospective incomes had been ten times greater than the figures which Mr. Prendergast made on a bit of paper showed they would be.

Ten years afterward Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie still spoke of Miss Minerva as if she were still alive, calling her “poor Miss Minnie” or simply “she,” discussing what she would have liked and what she would have thought and said and done. There was wisdom in their calling her “poor Miss Minnie.” They had always felt sorry for her, from the beginning when they had come into the house fresh from Ireland, for the emptiness of her life and the tyranny of “the old gentleman.” She may have had money and been beyond the need of working with her hands, but in their hearts Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie knew this was nothing, because she had never known what it was like to have the love of a fine upstanding man like Mr. Lefferty or a big good-natured fellow like Mr. Ryan, and she had never had any children and never any fun.

Miss Minnie, they were vaguely aware, had been a relic of a New York that was gone forever, a New York which had already begun to wither and fade when they stepped off the boat long ago at Castle Garden. Miss Minnie had lived gently and discreetly and well while the world into which she was born withered all about her, until at last “the old gentleman” died and she had no longer to take care of him and put up with his tyrannies and pretend to him that they were still as rich as ever. When Mr. Ryan was killed Miss Minnie gave up the horses and when Mr. Lefferty died she did not take on another butler, and put off “the old gentleman’s” rages over the indignity of having no manservant in the house by explaining that she could not find a man as satisfactory as Lefferty; and all the time she knew that they were living no longer off income but off capital. But being a timid soul she was unwilling and afraid to let her father know they were no longer rich and no longer of very much importance. In the big house on Murray Hill, Maggie, belowstairs, and Mrs. Lefferty, above, went on doing all the work, and when “the old gentleman” died, Miss Minnie quickly{558} sold the big house on Murray Hill and bought the nondescript brownstone front in the sixties near the elevated, where she lived until she died.

It was an ordinary four-story brownstone house like a score of others in the same street, with a high stoop and a tunnel-like parlor. At that time it still stood within the limits of gentility. One house farther east would have been too near the tenements and one farther west would have been too expensive for the money Miss Minnie had left out of the ruin. As it was, she managed to get along; nothing would have induced her to suffer the indignities of an apartment house or a hotel. She couldn’t, she said, feel comfortable and genteel living in the same building with a hundred other people whom she had never even met.

She was a little, dry, withered old lady. As often as she could afford it, she had friends to tea or to dinner, always the same friends because there were not more than a half dozen who remained out of the world in which she had spent her youth and middle age. They were old ladies and gentlemen as gentle and dry and withered as herself, timid and a little frightened of automobiles and subways and skyscrapers. One by one they died until there remained only old Miss Tilton who long ago had sat next to her at Miss Waterbury’s School for Young Ladies in Washington Square and old Mr. Van Diver who had been courting her for forty years. After she came down in the world to the brownstone house, she never bought any more new clothes but wore out the dozens of old dresses that filled the closets, strange, fussy garments of heavy, durable purple or black satin and grosgrain. She gradually became deaf, not so deaf that conversation was difficult, but only so deaf that she could not hear the sordid noise of the elevated trains passing a couple of hundred feet from her door.

She never said anything about it, but Maggie’s Sarah Jane and Mrs. Lefferty’s Tommy went on living in the new house. It would not have been genteel to say anything, even if she had not in her heart felt that they were like her own grandchildren, denied to her by her long devotion to her father and to virtues which no one any longer regarded. An extraordinary love existed between Miss Minnie and Maggie and Mrs. Lefferty. None of them ever spoke of it. Miss Minnie knew that it would not have been genteel, and Maggie and Mrs. Lefferty would never have dreamed of giving any sign that they were aware of it. But they all knew that it existed. It existed because the three of them, so different in character and circumstances—Miss Minnie with her desiccated correctness, Maggie with her terrible temper and Mrs. Lefferty with her good-natured romanticism—were simple and good.

When Maggie and Mrs. Lefferty were left the house, there seemed only one thing to do in order to keep it going and that was to open a boardinghouse. It was all there, ready and waiting, furniture and all, in a good location save that it was a little too near the elevated. And they knew, because{559} they had known poor Miss Minnie for so long, that the plan would have pleased her. They talked it all out in terms of what poor Miss Minnie would have thought and said and done. It was Maggie’s opinion that poor Miss Minnie had left them the house, hoping that they would go on living there.

So Mrs. Lefferty, because of her appearance and because she had been a housemaid all her life, was obviously the choice as nominal proprietress. She was plump and pleasant with humorous eyes and a kindly manner, so kindly that she sometimes failed in one aspect of her duties; she would have been swindled again and again but for Maggie’s peasant shrewdness. Mrs. Lefferty’s romantic imagination made her want to believe the stories her boarders told her partly because their tales of pending inheritance and vast checks gone astray and huge projects with success just around the corner, were always so much more exciting than the simple truth that they were broke and that there was no prospect of ever paying her.

Sometimes as in the case of Miss Flint, the seamstress, and the Great Boldini, weeks passed without any payment being made, but Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie knew that when they had money they would pay, and besides they were almost members of the family; at least they were members of the club. Old Mr. Van Diver had only thirty dollars a month when he first came to them and when stocks began to go bad, this was cut to twenty dollars. He paid Maggie and Mrs. Lefferty everything he received, simply turning over to them the endorsed checks. He did not smoke, and like poor Miss Minnie, he had enough clothes left from his prosperous days to last him until he died. The sum he paid them scarcely covered the cost of his food, but they could not turn him out. For forty years he had been devoted to poor Miss Minnie. For thirty years he had called three times a week and come to supper every Sunday evening. For thirty years he and poor Miss Minnie had waited for “the old gentleman” to die or give his permission for them to marry, and when at last he died it was too late and the habit of courtship had become fixed and agreeable. Not only were they too old, they were too poor to marry. And so one day about three years after Miss Minnie died, old Mr. Van Diver came to the door and asked Mrs. Lefferty to take him as a lodger. Trembling and shy, he told her that if she did not take him he would have to go to a charitable institution. He told her exactly how much money he had. So while he sat in the familiar parlor, Mrs. Lefferty went belowstairs to consult Maggie. Her own mind was made up, but she was afraid of Maggie who sometimes lost her Irish temper and told Mrs. Lefferty that before long they would be paying boarders to stay with them.

Belowstairs, Maggie was busy with the supper. She was a squat little woman, very fat and built rather like a hippopotamus. For thirty-seven of her fifty years she had lived between the basement and the top floor. For thirty years she had been constantly on her feet and so she waddled a little{560} as she walked. She wore her gray hair yanked back from her plain face and twisted into a tight screw on the top of her head. Worn in that fashion it took simply a jerk and a twist to do it in the morning and it never came down, and the danger of hairs in the soup was practically nonexistent. Her face and her nature alike would have been hard save for her sense of the comic and the twinkle in her blue eyes which betrayed her. Without it she might have been a murderess, not one who employed slow poison, but one who used a meat cleaver. Mrs. Lefferty knew that in the old days, when Mr. Ryan the coachman, came home drunk, Maggie gave him a beating, big as he was, which kept him in order for weeks afterward. She was a black Catholic and a Fenian. She would, as she bluntly said, have gone to the grave a virgin like poor Miss Minnie, before she would have married an Orangeman like Mr. Lefferty. Sometimes Mrs. Lefferty, corrupted by the Ulsterman husband, long since dead, missed Mass and confession, but Maggie had missed neither the one nor the other since the day she was confirmed.

So when Mrs. Lefferty proposed Mr. Van Diver as a boarder at thirty dollars a month Maggie, oddly enough, did not fly into a temper. She only said, “We’ll have to do it, I guess. Poor Miss Minnie, God rest her soul, would like to know that he’s well taken care of.” Both of them referred to their late mistress as “Poor Miss Minnie, God rest her soul” so that for a long time after the Great Boldini, who never learned English very well, came to the boardinghouse, he had an idea that “Godresthersoul” was Miss Minnie’s last name.

So they took in Mr. Van Diver and his few belongings—some books, a few worn suits of clothes, a gold-headed stick and a photograph of Miss Minnie taken during her twenties in which she wore a dress with a bustle in a gentle storm of artificial snow. From the beginning the old gentleman was happy. He never went out save after nightfall because his clothes were shabby and he lived in gentle terror of a world which moved too rapidly and too noisily for him. He was very clean and gentle and retiring and as Mrs. Lefferty said, “He gave class to the house.”

Mrs. Lefferty gave him all her motion picture magazines to read, and because he was so old that he did not remember what he read, they were always new to him and he read them over and over again until at last they fell apart and were used by Maggie to start the kitchen fire in the morning. In all his life he had never been inside a moving picture theater, but, at eighty, virtually his only reading was stories about the stars and their lives. It opened a whole new world to him in which everyone seemed to rise from poverty to riches with amazing rapidity, a world in which existed none of the baser motives and weakness of life, where everyone was happy and pure and rejoiced only in doing good for others. He had not seen{561} many beautiful women in his life and no naked ones whatever and the pages of Mrs. Lefferty’s magazines seemed filled with little else; he regarded the pictures with a certain gentle wistfulness, and regret that he had been a young man in the days when bathing beauties wore costumes with ankle-length skirts, high collars and long sleeves. He and Mrs. Lefferty talked a great deal together about the picture stars and presently he began to use the phrases he read in the magazines as freely as Mrs. Lefferty herself. It gave them pleasure that Myrna Loy “had got a break” at last and for days the two of them were troubled after reading an article entitled, “Is Baby Le Roy Through?”

The magazines stood in a huge pile in the corner of his room, mounting higher and higher each month until at last the worn ones were carted off by Maggie, a whole compendium of extravagant romance, beauty and excitement, out of a world which to Mr. Van Diver in his childishness was as wonderful as the Arabian Nights.

At last Mrs. Lefferty took him for the first time to see a picture with Miss Ileana Dangerfield, whom he thought the most beautiful of all, in “Love or Die.” But he found that the pictures hurt his eyes and gave him a headache and that Miss Dangerfield, seen from all angles and portraying all emotions, was rather like a great many of the girls he passed on the street during his excursions after nightfall, and not nearly so beautiful as in the carefully posed photograph at the edge of her swimming pool just outside the galleria of her lovely house in Hot Water Canyon. So he never went again and gradually he forgot the shock of reality and slipped back again into the lovely hazy world of the magazines.

As he grew older and his mind a little more confused there were moments when, living in poor Miss Minnie’s house, surrounded by the furniture and the pictures and the carpets he had known for forty years, he forgot that she had been dead for a long time, and now and then when he found himself alone with Mrs. Lefferty in the parlor, he would look up and ask gently just as he had done in the old days, if Miss Minnie would be down soon, and Mrs. Lefferty would always reply in a friendly way, “You know where poor Miss Minnie is, Mr. Van Diver,” as if she were not in her grave but had just gone round the corner on an errand.

Mr. Van Diver, like poor Miss Minnie, belonged to a world that had vanished and Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie belonged to one that was rapidly vanishing. There weren’t any more Irish servants like themselves, belonging for their lifetimes to one family—witty, sloppy, slap-dash, good-humored and devoted. Even boardinghouses like theirs with sober respectable pasts, where the lodgers all sat down at one table like a large family and knew each other’s failures, disappointments, vanities and weaknesses and which piece of chicken each one preferred, were rapidly going the way of poor Miss Minnie{562} and Mr. Van Diver. Nowadays, Mrs. Lefferty knew, people who had no homes lived in vast mechanical structures divided into cubicles, with the sexes segregated as often as not, where the food appeared mysteriously out of the walls into which the laundry in turn disappeared to come back mysteriously fresh and clean in a few days. Maggie and Mrs. Lefferty and their boardinghouse were swiftly becoming as odd and incongruous in the New York of the thirties as the horseless carriage which frightened Mr. Ryan’s horse and killed him, had been in the New York of the nineties.

And so slowly they had come to be a shelter and a refuge for those who in the march of time had lagged behind and found in turkey-red carpets and high ceilings, pullman drawing rooms and old-fashioned chandeliers, a refuge and a solace which they could not find in hotels and furnished flats.

That was why Miss Flint had come to them and why after nine years was still with them. All her life she had been a “sewing woman” who went out by the day to make the dresses of whole families in the days when the rows of brownstone houses lay monotonous and respectable in a gigantic gridiron across the whole of Manhattan north of Thirty-fourth Street. But slowly everything had changed for Miss Flint. People no longer had in “the sewing woman” spring and fall to stay day after day and sometimes overnight, gossiping, wielding her scissors, her mouth full of pins. Something had happened which Miss Flint, a little puzzled and hurt, could never quite understand. People didn’t seem to have big families any longer and if there were children, their parents seemed to buy their clothes, as Miss Flint said scornfully, “ready-made.” She still had one or two clients, ladies like herself who were no longer young and could not abide buying things off the racks. Twice a year she visited them to “go over” their dresses, but most of the time she stayed in her room at Mrs. Lefferty’s working in melancholy solitude on the crocheted bags she sold occasionally at the Women’s Exchange.

It was not only that she was left miserably poor by the decline of her fortunes; it was much more than that, for in the old days she had led a kind of exciting vicarious existence in which she knew everything about family life and almost everything about matrimony, going to houses where there were big families, knowing their griefs and pleasures, their joys and their disappointments, hearing fresh bits of gossip, and bringing gossip with her from house to house along with her scissors and pins. Then she had been a person of importance. There were even families who had looked forward to her coming. Now no one looked forward to seeing her. Nobody knew that she existed, or cared whether she lived or died. Mrs. Lefferty and Mrs. Ryan were kind to her and Mrs. Lefferty sometimes took her to the pictures, but after all, as Miss Flint, who was a snob, knew, they were only a pair of Irish servants who had set up a boardinghouse and were not genteel like the{563} people she had worked for in the old days. She had never taken her meals with the servants. Either she had eaten alone in the sewing room or at the table with the family.

Miss Flint dyed her hair now in order to make herself look more “youthful,” not discreetly, but a strange, flaming red, which resembled the color of no hair on land or sea. She did it herself in the bathroom and because she was unfamiliar with the art of hairdressing and too nearsighted to read the directions correctly, she may have been guilty of some error in the use of the dye. In any case the unnaturalness of the shade did not seem to trouble her; rather she flaunted it as if she thought it becoming to her tired, raddled face. There were times when the sight of poor respectable Miss Flint coming down the steps of the boardinghouse on her way to the Women’s Exchange with a crocheted bag, was almost too much to be borne by Maggie who said, “Sure and she gets herself up like a madame.”

She did her own room and mended the sheets and pillow cases and napkins as a contribution toward the board and lodging with which she had never been able to catch up during the nine years she had lived with them. She spent no money except on whisky which she used “medicinally,” and always wakened in the morning with a bad headache. Lately she had returned home from the Women’s Exchange again and again with the story that she had been “followed”; twice the man dared to come almost to the door itself. When she recounted these stories Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie listened sympathetically, pretending that they believed them, but after she had gone upstairs Maggie said one night, “Sure and she’s lucky to have only one man following her. It’s a wonder there ain’t a whole crowd the way she gets herself up.”

And there was Mr. Boldini whom Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie sometimes called with a kind of pride, “The Great Boldini.” He was not much better pay than Miss Flint or Mr. Van Diver but they were attached to him because long ago he had been their first boarder. In those prosperous days he had been in and out a good deal, now staying for a week, now away on tour for four or five weeks at a time. Occasionally when he was what he called “at liberty,” he was with them for as long as three months at a time, but as the years passed, the engagements grew steadily fewer and fewer until at last he seemed to be “at liberty” most of the time and became a “permanent.”

He was a tall man of about sixty who looked rather like a bloodhound, with large hypnotic Mussolini eyes, a sallow skin, and hair which he wore very long and, like Miss Flint, dyed to give himself a youthful appearance. His clothes, like those of Mr. Van Diver, showed signs of once, a long time ago, having cost a great deal of money. It was the Great Boldini who, as the Original Boarder, occupied what had once been poor Miss Minnie’s sitting room at the front of the house overlooking the picture theater so much{564} frequented by Mrs. Lefferty; but the room no longer bore, save in shape, the slightest resemblance to the room where Miss Minnie spent the last years of her life. The closets which once contained her starched and whale-boned clothing were now filled with costumes—Spanish, Turkish, Indian and Chinese together with a great many which were created in a moment of fantasy by some creator as Roman. Once bright and gay, they were faded now and their gold and silver braid and embroidery was tarnished beyond repair; but the Great Boldini clung to them, keeping them wrapped carefully in newspapers and sprinkled with camphor.

The shelves on which Miss Minnie’s hats once stood were burdened with turbans, berets, Roman helmets and headdresses with plumes, carefully put away against the day when Mr. Boldini would stage his great “comeback” and be able to pay all he owed Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie. Luckily the house was old-fashioned and the closets were enormous for Mr. Boldini had stowed away in them not only his own costumes but those of a whole troupe as well. In the past when great magicians were still held in esteem, he had believed in giving his act novelty by changing the costumes of his troupe each season; and being of an economical nature, he had always kept them as his own property.

The walls were covered with photographs of himself in all his various costumes, some framed, some merely fastened to the wall with thumbtacks. In some of them he was surrounded by his troupe of “Fourteen Performers, Fourteen Magicians, Jugglers and Acrobats.” And in one corner, where they were a great nuisance to Mrs. Lefferty because they gathered dust, stood a huge pile of books filled with clippings. Once or twice Mrs. Lefferty had suggested storing them in the attic but the Great Boldini objected and she had not the heart to pursue the idea because she knew that he liked to have them at hand where he might read them over and over. They were the only reading Mr. Boldini ever did. There might be wars, floods, catastrophes, but the Great Boldini lived on in happy ignorance of them, lost in the raptures of reading the notices he had got long ago in London and New York, Berlin and Budapest, Bombay and Singapore and Shanghai. Whenever he was embarrassingly far behind with his rent he got out the books and read aloud to Mrs. Lefferty the clippings about his invitation performances before the Kaiser and the Emperor of Austria, and Mrs. Lefferty was impressed, never noticing that royalty had fallen to an estate very nearly as low as that of the Great Boldini. Nowadays his agent, hounded by Mr. Boldini, occasionally produced a three-day engagement in some picture house in the “sticks” but the bulk of his income came from pulling rabbits out of top hats at children’s parties. The very families which once had engaged Miss Flint to make up their children’s clothes for the year now spent their money in engaging Mr. Boldini to perform tricks.{565}

In one corner of the room there was a large and shabby basket with a cushion in it. Here slept Fanto, Mr. Boldini’s poodle. He was no longer a young dog for he had already had a career as part of his master’s act in the days when vaudeville was still prosperous; but despite his rheumatism, he was as clever as he had ever been and none of his tricks had been forgotten. Sometimes he performed with Mr. Boldini at children’s parties where he always experienced a greater success than his master. For Fanto Mr. Boldini charged extra. His agents announced him as “The Great Boldini. With Fanto, the World’s Most Extraordinary Dog, Fifty Dollars. Without Fanto, Thirty-five Dollars.” The billing was incorrect, for of the two Fanto was certainly the star and always had much the greater success. They loved each other, but like a husband and wife in “a double,” professional jealousy sometimes disturbed the happiness of their relationship. On the occasions when the children, delighted by Fanto, shouted for more and more tricks from him, Mr. Boldini was always a little hurt and outdid himself to regain prestige, and Fanto, aware of his own success, barked and turned somersaults and heartlessly thrust his master into the background. When Mr. Boldini had engagements without Fanto, the poodle would sulk jealously at home, melancholy and heartbroken, or would lavish his affections on Mrs. Lefferty and scarcely notice Mr. Boldini on his return. At such times he would follow Mrs. Lefferty about the house, from room to room, while she did her work, and from her he learned all sorts of new tricks. He would fetch her scrubbing brush and dust cloth and he even learned to help her make the beds, holding the sheets gently in his dull old teeth on one side of the bed while Mrs. Lefferty drew them smooth and tight on the opposite side. He did all this joyfully with wild barkings and waggings of the tail which sometimes made Mrs. Lefferty helpless with laughter so that she had to sit down for a moment in the midst of her work.

In the beginning Mrs. Lefferty had been dubious about allowing dogs in the house. Poor Miss Minnie had always preferred cats, so until Fanto came neither Mrs. Lefferty nor Maggie knew anything about dogs. They took poor Miss Minnie’s opinion that they were untidy beasts. But once Fanto was allowed inside the door he made forever secure not only his own place but that of his master as well, for although there were times, at the bi-monthly reckonings, when Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie would have been willing to see Mr. Boldini leave, they could never bring themselves to see Fanto go. Once as a joke Mrs. Lefferty, working on the third floor, put Fanto into the dumb-waiter and sent him down to the kitchen where Maggie, opening it in the expectation of finding a wastepaper basket or some soiled linen, was nearly knocked down by the joyful Fanto, barking and wagging his tail. After that whenever Fanto had finished helping Mrs. Lefferty with her work, he jumped into the dumb-waiter and rode down to the kitchen{566} where Maggie wickedly fed him all sorts of delicious tidbits outside the dull diet of vegetables, rice and dog biscuit which Mr. Boldini prescribed for his rheumatism.

Sometimes when Mr. Boldini had engagements at picture houses in places like Troy or New Haven or Atlantic City, he would be gone for a whole week and then Fanto’s basket was moved up to Mrs. Lefferty’s room on the fourth floor because, Fanto, left alone, would droop and grow melancholy and actually become ill. Occasionally, about three times a year, one end of poor Miss Minnie’s parlor was cleared of its clutter of Victorian furniture and the Great Boldini and Fanto, with the finest of professional manners, would go through a whole performance of magic and tricks before an audience made up of old Mr. Van Diver, Miss Flint, Mr. Salmon, Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie, who always finished the evening, her eyes popping with excitement and real terror, by saying, “Sure, and it’s all black magic!” And as the months and years passed it became more and more evident to Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie that no matter how far behind the Great Boldini became with his board and lodging, they would have to keep him on.

Mr. René Salmon, né Joseph Solomon, was, financially speaking, the rod and staff of the establishment. Luckily, for he was a poet, he received three hundred dollars a month quite regularly from his father who owned the extremely prosperous Boston Store in Great Falls, Indiana. Mr. Solomon, senior, a delightful old gentleman over eighty years old, had for more than thirty years found it worth three hundred dollars a month to be able to open a magazine now and then and read poems filled with sentiments, either very high-flown or completely incomprehensible, bearing the signature of René Salmon. He always kept the magazines in a pile in the corner of his office and showed them to citizens of Great Falls and the girls in the shop saying, “Who’d have thought that my Joe would ever get to be a famous poet?” He even thought it worth a few hundred dollars more from time to time to bring out Joe’s poems in limited editions in bindings which he thought a little loud but accepted in his humbleness as beyond his under standing. And when Joe came back to Great Falls, which he did about once every six or seven years, he read his poetry before palpitating assemblies of middle-aged women who would have died rather than admit that they understood none of it, and before somewhat puzzled congresses of businessmen who understood only the dirtier parts. With them he had a great success during his “breast and buttock” period and fell into unpopularity with his poems written during what he called the “Freudian Influence.”

Mr. Salmon, like the others at Mrs. Lefferty’s, was a relic, although of a vintage somewhat later than that of Miss Flint and old Mr. Van Diver. He had begun his career a little before the turn of the century when Mouquin’s was Mouquin’s and poets were creatures full of light who dressed in such{567} a way that there could be no doubt of their calling. At that time he had come fresh from the West, a dark, slender, good-looking boy with large gazelle eyes, who attracted notice as much by his physical beauty as by his talents. He wrote poems about the High Road and Golden Girls and the Joy of Living, for at that time, long before the war, New York was a joyous place, comfortable and secure and gentle, where a joy might still be found in living, not the hysterical, frantic excitement of life which left Mr. Salmon, as a poet past middle age, bewildered, frustrated and stranded, but a gentle, rich kind of joy. Not only did he frequent Mouquin’s and sit elbow to elbow with the great literary men of his time; he was invited to read his poems in the salons of female poets and patrons of the artistic where he had, although he failed to understand it at the time, a greater success from his beauty than from his verse. The “free” languid ladies would watch him as he read, hearing nothing of the dubious music of his verse, but absorbed completely in the music of his gazelle eyes, his thick, dark, curling hair and the pure line of his throat above the black flowing tie. Life was easy then; there were always plenty of women, good wine and tobacco and talk, and on the three hundred dollars a month which came from the Boston Store in Great Falls, he lived like a king. He knew John Drew and Richard Watson Gilder and Richard Harding Davis and once he was invited to dinner by Robert Underwood Johnson.

Then the war came, and that lovely world of Golden Girls and the Joy of Living was shattered beyond all repair, and when the bewildered Mr. Salmon wakened among the fragments, he was over forty and no longer a somewhat corrupt and opportunist gazelle-eyed boy but a middle-aged man with a paunch and bags beneath the gazelle eyes, and Greenwich Village had taken the place of Mouquin’s. Richard Harding Davis was dead and all the figures of the Happy Period, both men and women, had become old and tired. Luckily he still had enough resilience and adaptability to cope with the situation, and before long he was sitting in a room in Eighth Street surrounded by another group of admiring ladies, no longer languid New York females with salons, but plainly dressed and rather plain ladies no longer in their first youth who had come from high schools and kitchens of comfortable homes in the Middle West and New England to be “free” in the Village. Despite his paunch and the bags under his eyes, René Salmon was not yet out of the running, for he had two great advantages—his three hundred a month which was about one hundred times as much money as anyone else in the Village possessed, and he had a wonderful technique, learned from the ladies of the good old Golden Girl period. And so for a time he became a kind of king in a flat painted black and orange with red curtains, where there were always plenty of cigarettes and gin and whisky. At this period Mr. Salmon also brought his poetry up to date. He began to{568} write verse full of breasts and buttocks and freedom, touched, as he expressed it, “with a harsh animal beauty,” and under the strain his liver began to give way.

And then after a little time that world crashed too, not in a violent explosion of war like the world of the High Road and the Joy of Living, but slowly, crumbling bit by bit like a jerry-built house constructed upon a fraudulent foundation. It was the tourists and the uptown drunks and prohibition which ruined the Village. It became intolerable to Mr. Salmon and it had proved too great a strain on his health and left him with dyspepsia and a tendency to bilious attacks as well as forty or fifty extra pounds of weight, which made him seem less and less like a poet and more and more like Mr. Solomon who ran the Boston Store in Great Falls.

It was too late for him to change again and impossible for him, who had known the ease and splendor of the Happy Period, ever to adapt himself to the raucous bitter realities of a New York dominated by speakeasies and night clubs. So he went into retreat, temporarily, he thought, at Mrs. Lefferty’s, and while he was there had himself psychoanalyzed.

From that time on the “Freudian Influence” made itself apparent, and instead of writing poems about breasts and buttocks, he wrote, virtually the same poems over again, about mountains and hillocks, Maypoles and serpents, wells and horses and balloons, all of which confused the businessmen back in Great Falls who had never felt lasciviously about any of these things and did not understand the poet’s excitement over them.

Back in Great Falls, old Mr. Solomon began to grow a little alarmed by two things—the suspicion that his son Joe was going a little potty, and the fact that for the past few years Joe’s “pomes” appeared less and less frequently in the magazines; and presently, about five years after Mr. Salmon came to Mrs. Lefferty’s to live, old Mr. Solomon wrote timidly suggesting that since the poetic vein of his son seemed to be running out and Mr. Solomon himself was growing old, it might be a good idea if Joe came home and took over the Boston Store. To which Joe responded with a great sheaf of poems of the Village and the “Freudian period” which he said he meant to bring out in a privately printed edition. They only succeeded in shocking and puzzling the old gentleman. René, né Joe, wrote that all editors were nincompoops and prudes and that naturally they would not publish poems about breasts and buttocks and did not understand the deeper significance of the poems written during the “Freudian period.”

He had neither the desire nor the intention to go home and take over the Boston Store and he was very happy at Mrs. Lefferty’s, for by the time his psychoanalysis, which took nearly two years, was finished, he found himself very much at home there. In that obsolete establishment where time stood still, with Maggie and Mrs. Lefferty, old Mr. Van Diver, Miss Flint,{569} Mr. Boldini and the eternal presence of poor Miss Minnie, he found again something of the peace and security of the old days at the turn of the century. It was the old play done over again by a new cast. The characters were the same, only the values had changed. Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie with their awe of anyone who could read and write without difficulty, would listen, eyes and mouth wide open, while he read his poetry, understanding not a word of it and accepting the blame for themselves, because they were not properly educated. They and the bedizened Miss Flint, with her conviction of her fatal effect upon all men, took the place of the palpitating ladies with literary salons. Miss Flint understood no more of the poetry than Mrs. Lefferty and Maggie but out of the confusion of Maypoles and mountains, serpents and cisterns, her distracted mind gained a muddled, half-voluptuous excitement filled with the intimations of carnal pleasures she had never known; and afterward, aided by the “medicinal” whisky, she experienced the most strange and exciting dreams. Now and then, about twice a month, she spent twenty-five cents out of what they paid her at the Women’s Exchange for one of her bags, on a gardenia which she left on the mat outside Mr. Salmon’s door. The first one, unluckily, was discovered by Mrs. Lefferty instead of Mr. Salmon, and, puzzled by the discovery of a gardenia apparently fallen miraculously from heaven, Mrs. Lefferty picked it up and put it in a vase in the parlor. At supper she discussed the miraculous flower before the blushing Miss Flint who said nothing whatever of its origin. Mr. Salmon only smirked and implied that it was a sign from the gods, indicating his genius. Afterward in private, a bridling Miss Flint explained to Mrs. Lefferty, and from then on Mrs. Lefferty always left the gardenias respectfully on Mr. Salmon’s doormat.

So Mr. Salmon, nearing sixty, still had a life that was carefree and filled with adulation, a life which perhaps he could have found nowhere else in New York of the nineteen-thirties. Only the values had changed; and nature itself had been unkind, changing the appearance of Mr. Salmon bit by bit, maliciously, without his becoming aware of it. He still wore his hair long and “touched it up” but he was a little bald in front and despite the flowing black tie and the large black felt hat which both screamed “Poet!” at every passer-by, he no longer looked like a gazelle-eyed boy poet but a prosperous businessman who needed a haircut. For a year or more he had written almost no verse but was engaged upon his memoirs.