U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [449]
-248-black silk shawls and took the baby to the church to be christened. Its little face looked awful blue in the middle of al the lace they dressed it in. That night it turned almost black. In the morning it was dead. Tony cried and the old women al carried on and they spent a lot of money on a little white casket with silver handles and a hearse and a priest for the funeral. Afterwards the Sisters of Mercy came and prayed beside her bed and the priest came and talked to the old women in a beautiful tragedy voice like Frank's voice when he wore his morningcoat, but Margo just lay there in the bed hoping she'd die too, with her eyes closed and her lips pressed tight together. No matter what anybody said to her she wouldn't answer or open her eyes.
When she got wel enough to sit up she wouldn't go to the clinic the way Tony was going. She wouldn't speak to him or to the old women. She pretended not to under-stand what they said. La mamá would look into her face in a spiteful way she had and shake her head and say,
"Loca." That meant crazy.
Margo wrote desperate letters to Agnes: for God's sake she must sel something and send her fifty dol ars so that she could get home. Just to get to Florida would be enough. She'd get a job. She didn't care what she did if she could only get back to God's Country. She just said that Tony was a bum and that she didn't like it in Havana. She never said a word about the baby or being sick. Then one day she got an idea; she was an American citizen, wasn't she? She'd go to the consul and see if they wouldn't send her home. It was weeks before she could get out without one of the old women. The first time she got down to the consulate al dressed up in her one good dress only to find it closed. The next time she went in the morning when the old women were out marketing and got to see a clerk who was a towheaded American col egeboy. My, she felt good talking American again.
-249-She could see he thought she was a knockout. She liked him too but she didn't let him see it. She told him she was sick and had to go back to the States and that she'd been gotten down there on false pretenses on the promise of an engagement at the Alhambra. "The Alhambra," said the clerk. "Gosh, you don't look like that kind of a girl."
"I'm not," she said.
His name was George. He said that if she'd married a Cuban there was nothing he could do as you lost your citizenship if you married a foreigner. She said suppose they weren't real y married. He said he thought she'd said she wasn't that kind of a girl. She began to blubber and said she didn't care what kind of a girl she was, she had to get home. He said to come back next day and he'd see what the consulate could do, anyway wouldn't she have tea with him at the Miami that afternoon.
She said it was a date and hurried back to the house feel-ing better than she had for a long time. The minute she was by herself in the alcove she took the marriagelicense out of her bag and tore it up into little tiny bits and dropped it into the filthy yel ow bowl of the old water-closet in the back of the court. For once the chain worked and every last bit of forgetmenotspotted paper went down into the sewer.
That afternoon she got a letter from Agnes with a fifty-dol ar draft on the National City Bank in it. She was so excited her heart almost stopped beating. Tony was out gal ivanting around somewhere with the sugarbroker. She wrote him a note saying it was