U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [421]
"Let's go skating, Frank, it's so awful to be in the house al day."
"Everything's horrible," he said. Suddenly he pul ed her to him and kissed her lips. She felt dizzy with the smel of bayrum and cigarettes and whiskey and cloves and armpits that came from him. She pul ed away from him. "Frank, don't, don't." He had tight hold of her. She could feel his hands trembling, his heart thumping under his vest. He had grabbed her to him with one arm and was pul ing at her clothes with the other. His voice wasn't like Frank's voice at al . "I won't hurt you. I won't hurt you, child. Just forget. It's nothing. I can't stand it any more." The voice went on and on whining in her ears. "Please. Please."
She didn't dare yel for fear the people in the house might come. She clenched her teeth and punched and
scratched at the big wetlipped face pressing down hers. She felt weak like in a dream. His knee was pushing her legs apart.
When it was over, she wasn't crying. She didn't care. He was walking up and down the room sobbing. She got up and straightened her dress.
He came over to her and shook her by the shoulders.
-182-"If you ever tel anybody I'l kil you, you damn little brat. . . . Are you bleeding?" She shook her head. He went over to the washstand and washed his face.
"I couldn't help it, I'm not a saint. . . . I've been under a terrible strain." Margie heard Agnes coming, the creak of her steps on the stairs. Agnes was puffing as she fumbled with the door-knob. "Why, what on earth's the matter?" she said, coming in al out of breath.
" Agnes, I've had to scold your child," Frank was say-ing in his tragedy voice. "I come in deadtired and find the child reading that filthy magazine. . . . I won't have it.
. . . Not while you are under my protection."
"Oh, Margie, you promised you wouldn't. . . . But what did you do to your face?" Frank came forward into the center of the room, pat-ting his face al over with the towel. " Agnes, I have a con-fession to make. . . . I got into an altercation downtown. I've had a very trying day downtown. My nerves have al gone to pieces. What wil you think of me when I tel you I've signed a contract with a burlesque house?"
"Why, that's fine," said Agnes. We certainly need the money. . . . How much wil you be making?"
"It's shameful . . . twenty a week."
"Oh, I'm so relieved . . . I thought something terrible had happened. Maybe Margie can start her lessons again."
"If she's a good girl and doesn't waste her time reading trashy magazines." Margie was trembly like jel y inside. She felt herself breaking out in a cold sweat. She ran upstairs to the bath-room and doublelocked the door and stumbled to the toilet and threw up. Then she sat a long time on the edge of the bathtub. Al she could think of was to run away. But she couldn't seem to get to run away. At Christmas some friends of Frank's got her a job in a children's play. She made twentyfive dol ars a performance and was the
-183-pet of al the society ladies. It made her feel quite stuckup. She almost got caught with the boy who played the Knight doing it behind some old flats when the theater was dark during a rehearsal.
It was awful living in the same room with Frank and Agnes. She hated them now. At night she'd lie awake with her eyes hot in the stuffy cubicle and listen to them. She knew that they were trying to be quiet, that they didn't want her to hear, but she couldn't help straining her ears and holding her breath when the faint rattle of springs from the rickety old iron bed they slept in began. She slept late after those nights in a horrible deep sleep she never wanted to wake up from. She began to be saucy and spiteful with Agnes and would never do anything she said. It was easy to make Agnes cry. "Drat the child," she'd say, wiping her eyes. "I can't do anything with her. It's that little bit of success that went to her head." That winter she began to find Indian in the door of his consultationroom when she went past, standing there brown and sinewy in his white coat,