Joan Thursday: A Novel

"Mr. Winter insulted me – one of the floor-walkers – if you've got to know."

Thursby's head wagged heavily while he weighed this information, and he regarded his daughter with a baleful, morose glare, his fat hands trembling.

"What did you say to this man, Winter?" he asked presently.

"Told him I'd slap his face if he tried anything like that on me again. So he reported me up to the management – lied about me – and I got fired."

There was a long silence, through which Thursby pondered the matter, his thick lips moving inaudibly, while Joan sat upright, maintaining her attitude of independence and defiance, and Butch, grinning lazily, as if at some private jest, manufactured ring after ring of smoke in the still, close air.

Before her father spoke again, Joan became cognizant of Edna and her mother, like twin ghosts in their night-dresses, stealing silently, barefooted, to listen just within the door of the adjoining bedroom.

"And what do you propose to do now?" asked Thursby at length, lifting his weary, haunted gaze to his daughter's face. "What's this about your going on the stage?"

Joan set her jaw firmly. "That's what I'm going to do."

Thursby shook his head with decision. "I won't have it," he said.

"Oh, you won't? Well, I'd like to know how you're going to stop me. I'm tired slaving behind a counter for a dog's wages – and that eaten up by fines because I won't go out with the floor-walkers. I'm going to do the best I can for myself. I'm going to be an actress, so's I can make a decent living for Edna and ma and myself."

"A decent living!" Thursby mocked without mirth. "You're old enough to know better than that."

"I'm old enough to know which side my bread's buttered on," the girl flashed back angrily. "I'm through living in this dirty flat and giving up every dollar I make to keep us all from starving. God knows what we'd do if it wasn't for me with a steady job, and Edna working during the season. You don't do anything to help us out: all you get goes on the ponies. I don't see any reason why I got to consult you if I choose to better myself."

She rose the better to end her tirade with a stamp of her foot. Thursby likewise got up, if more sluggishly, and moved round the table to confront her.

"You don't go on the stage – no!" he said. "That's settled. Understand?"

"Oh, I get you," she replied, with a flirt of her head, "but I don't agree with you. I'm going down town first thing tomorrow to try for a job with – with," she hesitated, "Ziegfield's Follies!"

"You will do nothing of the sort," he insisted fiercely, congested veins starting out upon his forehead. "You're my daughter, and those are my orders to you, and you'll obey 'em or I'll know the reason why. You…" He faltered as if choking. Then he flung out an arm, with a violent gesture indicating the shrinking woman in the doorway. "You – your mother was an actress when I married her and took her off the stage. She – she – "

"Don't you dare say a word against my mother!" Joan screamed passionately into his louring face. "Don't you dare! You hear me: don't you dare!"

Her infuriated accents were echoed by a smothered gasp and a spasm of sobbing from the other room.

Momentarily abashed by the sheer force of this defiance, the father fell back a pace. An expression of almost ludicrous disconcertion shadowed his discoloured features. Then slowly, as if thoughtfully, he lifted one hand and deliberately tore his collar from its fastening and cast it from him.

At this, hastily jerking his cigarette into the air-shaft, Butch got up, removed his hat and carefully placed it on the mantel, out of harm's way.

"You," said Thursby with apparent difficulty, breathing heavily between his words – "you shan't use that tone to me, young woman, and live in this house. More than that, you'll leave it this very night – now! – unless you promise to give up this fool's notion of the stage."

"Tonight!"

Joan paled; her lips tightened; but the glint in her eyes wasn't one of fright.

"Tonight!" her father reiterated with malicious pleasure in what he thought to be evidences of consternation. "And what's more, you're going to apologize to me now."

"Apologize to you!" Joan caught her breath sharply, and her next words came without premeditation; she was barely conscious, in her rage, that she employed them: "I'll be damned if I do!"

With an inarticulate cry, maddened beyond reason, Thursby lifted a heavy hand and stepped toward her.

Simultaneously Butch sprang forward, seized the menacing fist and dragged it down and back, with a movement so swift and deft that its purpose was accomplished and the hand pinned to the small of Thursby's back actually before he appreciated what was happening.

Even Joan was slow to comprehend the fact of this amazing intervention…

Nodding emphatically, "Beat it, kid," Butch counselled in a pleasant, unstrained tone – "beat it while the going's good… Easy, now, guvner!"

Speechless, Joan slipped out into the hall and slammed the door. Stumbling blindly in the murk, she was none the less quick to find the head of the stairway.

On the ground floor, panting and sobbing, she paused to listen. There came from above no sound of pursuit to speed her on; yet on she went, out of the house, to scurry away through the midnight hush of the squalid street like a hunted thing.

There was no sort of coherence in her thoughts, nothing but shreds and tatters of rage, fear, and despair, all clouded with a faint and vain regret. She gave no heed to the way she went: impulse controlled and blind instinct guided her. But at the corner of Park Avenue she was obliged to pause for breath, and took advantage of that pause to review her plight and plan her future.

Her first concern must be to find a lodging for the night. Tomorrow could take care of itself…

Uttering a low cry of dismay, the girl clutched at the handbag swinging by its strap from her wrist: its latch was broken, its wide jaws yawned. In a breath she had grasped the empty substance of her most dire apprehensions: the slender fold of bills, handed her when she left the store for the last time that evening, was gone. Whether some sneak-thief had robbed her on a surface-car or in the Broadway rabble, or whether the lock had been broken, releasing its poor treasure, during her struggle with Austin on the stairs – or afterwards or before – she could not guess. But she was swift to recognize in its bitter fulness the heart-rending futility of retracing her steps to search for the vanished money – even though it was all that had stood between her and the world, between a common room with food for a week or two and starvation and – the streets.

It was a fact, established and irrefutable in her understanding, that she could never go back…

Diligently exploring the bag, she brought to light a scanty store of small change: three quarters, a nickel, seven coppers – eighty-seven cents wherewith to face the world!

Further rummaging educed a handful of odds and ends, from which, by the light of a corner lamp, she presently succeeded in sorting out a folded scrap of paper bearing a pencilled memorandum, faint almost to illegibility, so that only with some difficulty could Joan decipher its legend: "Maizie Dean (Lizzie Fogarty) 289 W. 45 St."

Slowly conning the address with mute, moving lips, until she had it by heart, the girl trudged on to Madison Avenue and there signalled and boarded a southbound surface-car. It carried few passengers. She had a long seat all to herself, and about fifteen minutes wherein to debate ways and means…

She reckoned it several years since Lizzie Fogarty (predecessor of faithless Gussie Inness, both at the stocking counter and in Joan's confidence) suddenly, and with no warning or explanation, had left the department store and for fully eight months thereafter had kept her where-abouts a mystery to her erstwhile associates – though rumours were not lacking in support of a shrewd suspicion that she had "gone on the stage." The truth only transpired when, one day, she drifted languidly up to the counter behind which she had once served, haughtily inspected and selected from goods offered her by a stupefied and indignant Gussie, and promptly broke down, confessing the truth amid giggles not guiltless of a suspicion of tears. Lizzie was in "vodeveal," partner in a "sister-act" – witness her card – "The Dancing Deans, Maizie & May."

Beyond shadow of doubt she had prospered. Not only was she amazingly and awfully arrayed, but there was in evidence an accomplishment believed to be singular to people of great wealth, an "English accent" – or what Joan and Gussie ingenuously accepted as such. As practised by Miss Maizie Dean this embellishment consisted merely in broadening every A in the language (when she didn't forget) and speaking rapidly in a high, strained voice. Its effect upon her former associates was to render the wake she ploughed through their ranks phosphorescent with envy.

Departing in good time to spare the girls the censure of the floor-walker, she had left with Joan the pencilled address and this counsel: "If ever you dream of goin' into the business, my deah, don't do anythin' before you see me. That ad-dress will always make me, no mattah wheah 'm woikin': and I'd do anythin' in the woild for you. I know you'd make good anywheres– with that shape and them eyes!.."

Of such stuff as this had Joan fashioned her dreams. Confident in the generosity of Lizzie Fogarty, she relied implicitly upon the willingness of Miss Maizie Dean to help her into the magic circle of "the profession." She had no more doubt that Maizie would make it her business, even at cost of personal inconvenience, to secure her an engagement, than she had that tomorrow's sun would rise upon a world tenanted by one Joan Thursby. Or if such doubt entered her mind by stealth, she fought it down and cast it forth with all the power of her will. For in Miss Dean, née Fogarty, now resided her sole immediate hope of friendly aid and advice…

Alighting at Forty-fifth Street, Joan hastened westward, past Fifth Avenue and Sixth to Longacre Square. Here on the corner, she paused to don her coat; for the low-swinging draperies of the painted skies had begun to distil upon the city a gentle drizzle, soft and warm.

Only two hours ago a vortex of vivid animation, the Square now presented a singular aspect of sleepy emptiness. With its high glittering walls of steel and glass, its polished black paving like moiré silk, its blushing canopy of cloud, its air filled with an infinity of globular atoms of moisture, swirling and weltering in a shimmer of incandescence: it was like a pool of limpid light, deep and still. Few moving things were visible: now and again a taxicab, infrequently a surface-car, here and there, singly, a few prowling women, a scattering of predacious men.

Of these latter, one who had been skulking beneath the shelter of the New York Theatre fire-escapes strolled idly out toward Joan and addressed her in a whisper of loathly intimacy. Fortunately she did not hear what he said. Even as he spoke she slipped away from the curb and like a haunted shadow darted across the open space and into the kindly obscurity of the side-street.

Number 289 reared its five-storey brown-stone front on the northern side of the street, hard upon Eighth Avenue. Joan inspected it doubtfully. Its three lower tiers of windows were all dark and lightless, but on the fourth floor a single oblong shone with gas-light, while on the fifth as many as three were dully aglow. The outer doors, at the top of the high, old-style stoop, were closed, and even the most hopeful vision could detect no definite illumination through the fan-light.

Into the heart of Joan a wretched apprehension stole and there abode, cold and crawling. From something in the sedate aspect of the house she garnered grim and terrible forebodings.

Nevertheless she dared not lose grasp on hope. Mounting the stoop, she sought the bell-pull, and found it just below a small strip of paper glued to the stone; frayed and weatherbeaten, it published in letters in faded ink scrawled by an infirm hand the information: "Rooms to let furnished."

For some reason which she did not stop to analyze, this announcement spelled encouragement to Joan. She wrought lustily at the bell.

It evoked no sound that she could hear. Trembling with expectancy, she waited several minutes, then pulled again, and once more waited while the cold of dread spread from her heart to chill and benumb her hands and feet. She heard never a sound. It was no use – she knew it – yet she rang again and again, frantically, with determination, in despair. And once she vainly tried the door.