Joan Thursday: A Novel

"Ain't you going back there?"

Joan shut down the lid of the suit-case and began to strap it. "Yes," she said with a trace of reluctance.

"I might wanta write to you," insisted Edna. "Anything might happen and you not know – "

"Oh, well, then," Joan admitted, with an air of extreme ennui, "the number's Two-eighty-nine. Catch that? Don't forget."

"I won't."

"Besides," Joan added, lifting her voice for the benefit of the listener in the dining-room, "you don't need to be so much in a rush to think I ain't ever coming back to see you. You got no right to think that of me, after the way I've turned in my pay week in and week out, right straight along. I don't know what makes you think I've turned mean. I'm going to come and see you and ma every week, and as soon's I begin to make money you'll get your share, all right, all right!"

"Joan – " the younger girl whispered, drawing nearer.

"What?"

"They had a nawful row last night – ma and pa – after you went."

"I bet he done all the rowing!"

"He" – Edna's thin, pale cheeks coloured faintly with indignation – "he said rotten things to her – said it was because you took after her made you want to go on the stage."

"That's like him, the brute!" Joan commented between her teeth. "What'd she say?"

"Nothing. Then he lit into Butch, but Butch stood up to him and told him to shut his face or he'd knock his block off."

"And he did shut his face, didn't he?"

Edna nodded vigorously. "Yeh – but he rowed with ma for hours after they'd went to bed. I could hear him fussing and swearing. She never answered one word."

Reminiscences of like experiences of her own, long white nights through which she had lain sleepless, listening to the endless, indistinguishable monologue of recrimination and abuse in the adjoining bedroom, softened Joan's mood.

She returned to the dining-room.

Her mother's head had fallen forward on arms folded amidst the odious disorder of unclean dishes. Through a long minute Joan regarded with sombre eyes that unlovely and pitiful head, with its scant covering of greyish hair stretched taut from nape to temple and brow and twisted into a ragged knot at the back, with its hollowed temples and sunken cheeks, its thin and stringy neck emerging from the collar of a cheap and soiled Mother Hubbard. With new intentness, as if seeing them for the first time, she studied the dejected curve of those toil-bent shoulders, and the lean red forearms with their gnarled and scalded hands.

Dull emotions troubled the girl, pity and apprehension entering into her mood to war with selfishness and obstinacy.

This drudge that was her mother had once been a woman like herself, straight and strong and fashioned in clean, firm contours of wholesome flesh. To what was due this dreadful metamorphosis? To the stage? Or to Man? Or to both?.. Must she in the end become as her mother was, a battered derelict of womanhood, hopeless of salvage?

Slipping to her knees, she passed an arm across the thin, sharp shoulders of the woman.

"Ma …" she said gently.

The response was a whisper barely audible, her name breathed in a sigh: "Joan…"

Beneath her warm, strong arm there was the faintest perceptible movement of the shoulders.

"Listen to me, ma: I ain't going to forget you and Edna. I am going to work hard and take care of you."

The mother moved her head slightly, turning her face away from her daughter. Otherwise she was wholly unresponsive. Joan might have been talking to the deaf.

She divined suddenly something of the tragedy and despair of this inarticulate creature whose body had borne her, who had once been as her daughter was now. Before her mental vision unfolded a vast and sordid tapestry – a patchwork-thing made up of hints, innuendoes and snatches of half-remembered conversations, heretofore meaningless, of a thousand-and-one insignificant circumstances, individually valueless, assembling into an almost intelligible whole: picturing in dim, distorted perspective the history of her mother, drab, pitiful, appalling…

Abruptly, bending forward, Joan touched her lips to the sallow cheek.

"Good-bye," she said stiffly; "I got to go."

She rose. Her mother did not move. Edna stared wonderingly, as though a bystander at a scene of whose meaning she was ignorant. Joan took up her suit-case and went to the door.

"S'long, kid," she saluted her sister lightly. "Take good care of ma while I'm away. See you before long."

She hesitated again in the open doorway, with her hand on the knob.

"And tell Butch I said thanks."

She was half-way down to the next landing before she became aware of Edna bending over the banisters.

"Joan – "

"What?"

The girl paused.

"I 'most forgot: Butch said if you was to come in to tell you to drop around to the store th'safternoon. Said he had something to tell you."

"What?" demanded Joan, incredulous.

"I dunno. He just said that this morning."

"All right. Good-bye."

"Good-bye, Joan."

To eyes dazzled by ambition, the news-stand, shouldered on either side by a prosperous delicatessen shop and a more prosperous and ornate corner saloon, wore a look unusually hopeless and pitiful: it was so small, so narrow-chested, so shabby!

Its plate-glass show-window, dim with the accumulated grime of years, bore in block letters of white enamel – with several letters missing – the legend:

A THUR BY

Newsd ler & Stationer

igars & Con tionery

Before the door stood a wooden newspaper stand, painted red and black, advertising the one-cent evening sheet which furnished it gratis. A few dusty stacks of papers ornamented it. The door was wide open, disclosing an interior furnished with dirt-smeared show-cases which housed a stock of cheap cigars and tobacco, boxes of villainous candy to be retailed by the cent's-worth, writing-paper in gaudy, fly-specked packages, magazines, and a handful of brittle toys, perennially unsold. The floor was seldom swept and had never been scrubbed in all the nine years that Thursby had been a tenant of the place.

The establishment was, as Joan had anticipated, in sole charge of Butch, who occupied a tilted chair, his lean nose exploring the sporting pages of The Evening Journal. Inevitably, a half-consumed Sweet Caporal cigarette ornamented his cynic mouth. He greeted Joan with a flicker of amusement.

"'Lo, kid!" he said: and threw aside the paper. "What's doing?"