• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Muggsy, looking like the con, round-shouldered, a cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth, tried to scrounge two bits off Keefe.

“So long, boys. I’m going home and sleep,” Studs said, yawning.

“Hang around. The Alky Squad is here, and something might happen,” Slug said.

TB tried to hit Studs for a quarter. Studs told him to get away.

“Flannagan, you lousy paper salesman, give these mooching bastards a quarter. I can’t stand their sight,” Keefe said. Flannagan fell on his face, mumbling incoherently.

Kelly suggested a poker game at his house. Studs said he had to go home. He went with the boys. Flannagan was left draped around the fire plug. Muggsy and Mush rolled him, and had a meal. Stepping out of the Greek Restaurant, Muggsy wished now that they could pick up a bum broad and take her back with them to the basement where they slept. Muggsy said it was the best meal he’d had all week.

Studs left Kelly’s at three o’clock. He walked along with his eyes heavy. He bumped into a building, and realized that he was asleep on his feet. What a chump he’d been! He’d be pooped tomorrow, and only have a couple of hours sleep. And he’d lost eight bucks.

X

Davey Cohen pulled up the collar of his thin overcoat. He climbed a hilly street of Jamestown, New York, in the rain. He spewed up a racking cough, and spat. He entered the public library for shelter. A girl looked askance at him, and he felt as if he were an interloper. A blue-covered book lay before him. He read the title. The Collected Poems of Heinrich Heine, translated by Louis Untermeyer. He opened the book, just to pass the time, and read the preface. He read the facts of the poet’s life, saddened at his fate, proud that he had been, a Jew. A quotation from one of Heine’s letters excited him:

“When the harvest moon was up last year, I had to take to my bed, and since then I have not risen from it... I am no longer a divine biped: I am no longer a joyous though slightly corpulent Hellene, smiling gaily down on the melancholy Nazarene. I am now only an etching of sorrow, an unhappy man—a poor sick Jew.”

Words that might have been tortured from Davey’s own consumptive being. For what was he, too, but an etching of sorrow, a poor, sick, and homeless Jew.

He turned the pages and came upon Monolog From A Mattress. He could visualize the Jewish poet, twisted in body, unhappy in mind, expressing crucified thoughts from his mat-tress grave. The deepest poignancy of his whole life trembled within him.

For the rest

That any son should be as sick as I,

No mother could believe.

It washed gloom into him. Might he not die on a mat-tress grave from con in the charity ward of a hospital if he did not die in a prairie or doorway. Just like Heine, who suffered so many years ago in Paris, exiled. He was like an exile from Chicago. He thought of Heine, “who has all the poet’s gifts but love,” Heine, “a twisted trunk in chilly isolation.” Day after day he lay:

Slightly propped up upon this mattress grave

In which I’ve been interred these few eight years.

So unhappy that he envied a dog! How many times hadn’t Davey Cohen, hungry, cold, knowing he was useless to the world, walked along the streets of strange towns, envying the dogs that people owned, knowing that the dogs were better fed than he, that some people thought more of them than any human being did of him. He thought of dusk coming upon the poet on his mattress grave, another day of life robbed from his twisted body. Outside, in the rain, dusk came too, robbing Davey of another miserable day. He read and re-read Heine’s monologue, and then, other poems. The library closed, and the hours had seemed like minutes.

Davey slipped the book under his coat, and left. Rain slapped his face. He was back in the world now. He felt himself an “etching of sorrow, an unhappy man—a poor sick Jew.” He coughed, a sharp sword-like pain slicing through his lungs. He spat blood.

He was hungry.

CHAPTER TEN

I

Studs Lonigan arose with the ringing of the alarm clock, and rode to work on a crowded surface-car which ran backwards. As