Joan Thursday: A Novel

"Hello!" he growled. "How the h – how long've you been in?"

"Only a few minutes, pa," the girl returned quietly.

"Well – what're you standing there – staring! – for, anyhow?"

"I didn't mean anything: I was just taking off my hat."

"Well" – his face was now purple with senseless anger – "cut along! Don't bother me. I'm busy."

"I see."

There was a damnable superciliousness in the tone of the girl as she turned away. Thursby meditated an explosion, but refrained at discretion: Joan had taught him that, unlike her browbeaten mother and timid sister and her sleek, loaferish brother, she could give as good as he could send. He bent again, grumbling, over his dope. Instantly it gripped him, obliterating all else in his cosmos. He frowned, moistened the pencil at his mouth, and scrawled another note in the greasy little book.

Joan slipped quietly away to her bedroom. She found it stifling; ventilated solely from the parlour and the open door to Butch's kennel, it reeked with the smell of human flesh and cheap perfume. She noted resentfully the fact that her sister had neglected to make up the bed: its rumpled sheets and pillows, still retaining the impression of over-night, lent the cubicle the final effect of sordid poverty.

Hanging up her hat and coat, she sat for a time on the edge of the bed, thinking profoundly.

Such an existence, she felt, passed human endurance. And a gate of escape stood ajar to her, with a mundane paradise beyond, if only she had the courage to adventure…

In any event, conditions as they were now with the Thursbys could not obtain much longer. If the Old Man continued to follow the races through the poolrooms, he would soon be forced out of his small business and his family dispossessed of their mean lodgings; and there was no longer any excuse for hope that he would ever shake off the bondage of his infatuation. As it was, he gave little enough toward the support of his family, and grudged that little; almost all his meagre profits went to the poolrooms; it was only when he won (or seldom otherwise) that he would spare his wife a few dollars. Furthermore, his business was heavily involved in an intricate meshing of debt.

Thursby, at least, persisted in calling it a business; though Joan's lips shaped scornfully at mention of that mean and insignificant newspaper shop, crowded in between a saloon and a delicatessen shop, in the shadow of the Third Avenue Elevated Railway. In her understanding it was chiefly remarkable as the one place where one could be certain of not finding Thursby during the afternoon or Butch at night. They were seldom there together: it was as if father and son could not breathe the same atmosphere for long at a time.

Nominally, Butch was his father's assistant; actually, he alone kept the business alive; had it not been for his supervision of the morning and evening paper deliveries, it would long since have wasted inconspicuously away. By way of compensation, Butch, shrewdly alive to signs of a winning day, would now and again wheedle a dollar or two out of the Old Man. Wages he neither received nor expected, being well content with a nominal employment which served to cover many an hour of unlicensed liberty; and he seemed to have access to some mysterious if occasionally scanty fund, for he was never without some little money in pocket. After dinner, if Butch elected to eat the evening meal at home, he invariably disappeared; and his return was a matter of his personal convenience. He had been known not to sleep at home at all; his favourite bedtime was between one and two in the morning – after the saloons had closed. Yet no one had ever seen him drunk.

He was younger than Joan by a year. Born to the name of Edgar, he had been dubbed Butch in the public schools, and the name had stuck; even his mother and father employed it. And yet it could not be said to suit him; rather, the boy suggested a jocky. He was short, slender, and wiry; with a strong, emaciated nose flanked by small eyes sunk deep in sallow cheeks – his mouth set in a perpetually sardonic curve. He dressed neatly, whatever the straits and necessities of the family (to the mitigation of which he contributed nothing whatever) and had a failing for narrow red neckties and flashy waistcoats. His hard, thin lips were generally tight upon a cigarette; they were forever tight upon his personal affairs: if he opened them at home it was to "kid" the girls, which he did with a slangy, mordant wit, or to drop some casually affectionate word to his mother. His conversation with his father, whom he seemed always to be watching with a narrow, grim suspicion, was ordinarily confined to monosyllables of affirmation or negation.

He went his secret ways, self-sufficient, wary, reserved; a perpetual subject of covert speculation to the women of his family.

Joan had heard it whispered that he was a member of the "Car-barn Gang." But she never dared question Butch, though she trembled every time she came upon newspaper headlines advertising some fresh hooliganism on the part of the gang – a policeman "beaten up," a sober citizen "held up and frisked" in the small hours, or a member of some rival organization found stabbed and weltering on the sawdust floor of a grisly dive.

Between this girl and her brother there existed a strange harmony of understanding, quite tacit and almost unrecognized by either. Joan's nearest approach to acknowledgment of it resided in infrequent admissions to friends that she could "get on with Butch," whereas "the rest of the bunch made her weary."

Almost all the vigour and vitality of the mother seemed to have been surrendered to Butch and Joan; there had been little left for Edna. The girl was frail, anæmic, flat-chested, pretty in an appealing way: fit only for one of two things, tuberculosis or reconstruction in the country. As it was, in the busy seasons she found underpaid employment in the workrooms of Sixth Avenue dressmaking establishments; between whiles she drudged at housework to the limits of her small strength.

As for Mrs. Thursby… It was singularly difficult for Joan to realize her mother. There was about the woman something formless and intangible. She seemed to fail to make a definite impression even upon the retina of the physical eye. She had the faculty of effacing herself, seemed more a woman that had been than a woman who was. The four boundary walls of the flat comprehended her existence; she seldom left the house; she never changed her dress save for bed. It might have been thought that she would thus dominate her world: to the contrary, she haunted it, more a wraith than a body, a creature of functions rather than of faculties. She had a way of being in a room without attracting a glance, of passing through and from it without leaving an impression of her transit.

When Joan made herself look directly at her mother, she was able to detect traces of ravaged beauty. A living shell in which its tenant lay dormant, her subjective will to live alone kept this woman going her sempiternal rounds of monotony. Capacity for affection she apparently had none; she regarded her children with as little interest as her husband. Nor had she the power to excite or sustain affection.

Joan believed she loved her mother. She did not: she accepted her as a convention in which affection inhered through tradition alone…

Seated on the edge of the bed, her face flushed with the heat of the smouldering evening, sombre eyes staring steadfastly at the threadbare carpet, the girl shook her head silently, in dreary wonder.

She stood at crossroads. She could, of course, go on as she had gone – bartering youth and strength for a few dollars a week. But every fibre of her being, every instinct of her forlorn soul, was in vital mutiny against such servitude. In fact, doubt no longer existed in Joan's mind as to which way she would turn: dread of the inevitable rupture alone deterred her from the first steps.

From the rear of the flat Edna called her fretfully: "Joan! Jo-an! Ain't you coming to eat?"

Joan rose. She answered affirmatively in a strong voice. Her mind was now made up: she would tell them after supper – after the Old Man had gone back to the shop.

She posed before a mirror, touching her hair with deft fingers while she stared curiously at the face falsified in the depths of the uneven sheet of glass.

Then placing her hands on her hips, at the belt-line, thumbs to the back, she lifted her shoulders, at one and the same time smoothing out the wrinkles in her waist and settling her belt into place.

"Oh," she said, as casually as if there had been any one to hear, "I guess I'll do, all right, all right!"

III

With a careless nod to her mother and sister, Joan slipped into her chair and helped herself mechanically but liberally to the remains of pork and cabbage. Her mother tilted a granite-ware pot over a cup and filled the latter with the decoction which, in the Thursby menu, masqueraded as coffee.

Joan acknowledged the service with an outspoken "Thanks."

At this Edna plucked up courage to say, with some animation: "Joan – "

The mother interrupted with a sibilant warning, "Hush!"

Thursby lifted his head and raked the three faces with an angry glance. "In God's name!" he cried – "can't you women hold your tongues?"

The girls made their resentment variously visible: Joan with a scowl and a toss of her head, Edna with a timid pout. The mother's face betrayed no emotion whatsoever. Thereafter, as far as they were concerned, the meal progressed in silence.

Thursby bent low over his plate, in the intervals devoted to mastication intently studying the file of dope at his elbow. Now and again he would drop knife and fork to take up his pencil and check the name of a horse or jot additional memoranda in his note-book. Infrequently he spoke or, rather, grunted, to indicate a desire for some dish beyond his reach. Curiously enough (Joan remarked for the thousandth time) he was punctilious to say "please" and "thank you." The idiosyncrasy was all a piece (she thought) with the ease with which he employed knife, fork, and spoon: a careless grace which the girl considered "elegant" and did him the honour to imitate.

Furtively throughout the meal she studied her father. These little peculiarities of his, these refinements which sat so strangely on his gross, neglected person and were so exotic to his circumstances, exerted a compelling fascination upon the nimble curiosity of the girl. She both feared and despised him, but none the less cherished a sneaking admiration for the man. Beyond the fact that their estate had not always been so sorry, she knew nothing of the history of her parents; but she liked to think of her father, that he had once been, in some unknown way, superior: that he was a man ruined by a marriage beneath his station. To think this flattered her own secret dreams of rising out of her environment: girls, she had heard, took after their fathers – and vice-versa: perhaps she had inherited some of Anthony Thursby's keener intelligence, adaptability, and sensitiveness – those qualities with which she chose to endow the man who had been Thursby before he became her father. Other circumstances lent colour to this theory: Butch, for instance, had unquestionably inherited his mother's physique and her reticence, while Joan had her father's vigorous constitution and a body like his for sturdiness and good proportion…

Suddenly thrusting back his chair, Thursby rose, buttoned a soiled collar round his neck, shrugged a shabby coat upon his shoulders and, pocketing his dope, departed with neither word nor glance for his womenfolk.

His heavy footsteps were pounding the second flight of steps before a voice broke the hush in the stuffy little room, a voice faint and toneless, dim and passionless. It was Mrs. Thursby's.

"He's had a bad day, I guess…"

Edna placed a tender hand over the scalded, listless one that rested on the oilcloth. Joan, abandoning her determination to air her personal grievances at the first available instant, said suddenly:

"Never mind, ma. It ain't like he was a drinking man."

The vacant eyes in the faded face of the mother were fathoming distances remote from the four walls of the slatternly room. Her thin and colourless lips trembled slightly; little more than a whisper escaped them:

"Sometimes I wish he was – wish he had been. It'd 've been easier to stand – all this." A faltering gesture indicated vaguely the misery of their environment.

Edna continued to pet the unresponsive hand.

"Don't, mother!" she pleaded.

The woman stirred, withdrew her hand, and slowly got up.

"Come on, Edna. Le's get done with them dishes."

With eyes hard and calculating, Joan watched the two drift into the kitchen. Their wretched state touched her less than the fact that she must continue forever to share it, or else try to better it in open defiance of her father's prejudices.

"Something's got to be done for this family," she grumbled – "and I don't see anybody even thinking of doing anything but me!"