Ironweed - William Kennedy [50]
She went into the store and looked at, and touched, the instruments. She looked at the rack of new song sheets: “The Flat Foot Floogie.”
“My Heart Belongs to Daddy.”
“You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.” She walked to the counter and asked the young man with the slick brown hair: “Do you have Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony?” She paused. “And might I see that Schubert album in your window?”
“We do, and you may,” said the man, and he found them and handed them to her and pointed her to the booth where she could listen to the music in private.
She played the Schubert first, John McCormack inquiring: Who is Silvia? What is she? That all our swains commend her?… Is she as kind as she is fair? And then, though she absolutely loved McCormack, adored Schubert, she put them both aside for the fourth movement of the Choral Symphony.
Joy, thou spark from flame immortal,
Daughter of Elysium!
The words tumbled at Helen in the German and she converted them to her own joyful tongue.
He that’s won a noble woman,
Let him join our jubilee!
Oh the rapture she felt. She grew dizzy at the sounds: the oboes, the bassoons, the voices, the grand march of the fugal theme. Scherzo. Molto vivace.
Helen swooned.
A young woman customer saw her fall and was at her side almost instantly. Helen came to with her head in the young woman’s lap, the young clerk fanning her with a green record jacket. Beethoven, once green, green as a glade. The needle scratched in the record’s end groove. The music had stopped, but not in Helen’s brain, It rang out still, the first rays of the rising sun in May.
“How you feeling, ma’am,” the clerk asked.
Helen smiled, hearing flutes and violas.
“I think I’m all right. Will you help me up?”
“Rest a minute,” the girl said. “Get your bearings first. Would you like a doctor?”
“No, no thank you. I know what it is. I’ll be all right in a minute or two.”
But she knew now that she would have to get the room and get it immediately. She did not want to collapse crossing the street. She needed a place of her own, warm and dry, and with her belongings near her. The clerk and the young woman customer helped her to her feet and stood by as she settled herself again on the bench of the listening booth. When the young people were reassured that Helen was fully alert and probably not going to collapse again, they left her. And that’s when she slipped the record of the fourth movement inside her coat, under her blouse, and let it rest on the slope of her tumor her doctor said was benign. But how could anything so big be benign? She pulled her coat around her as tightly as she could without cracking the record, said her thank yous to both her benefactors, and walked slowly out of the store.
Her bag was at Palombo’s Hotel and she headed for there: all the way past Madison Avenue. Would she make it to the hotel without a collapse? Well, she did. She was exhausted but she found crippled old Donovan in his rickety rocker, and his spittoon at his feet, on the landing between the first and second floors, all there was of a lobby in this establishment. She said she wanted to redeem her bag and rent a room, the same room she and Francis always took whenever it was empty. And it was empty.
Six dollars to redeem the bag, old Donovan told her, and a dollar and a half for one night, or two-fifty for two nights running. Just one, Helen said, but then she thought: What if I don’t die tonight? I will need it tomorrow too. And so she took the bargain rate, which left her with three dollars and thirty-five cents.
Old Donovan gave her the key to the second-floor room and went to the cellar for her suitcase.
“Ain’t seen ya much.” Donovan said when he brought the bag to her room.
“We’ve been busy.” Helen said. “Francis got a job.”
“A job? Ya don’t say.”
“We’re all quite organized now, you might describe it. It’s just possible that we’ll rent an apartment up on Hamilton Street.”
“You’re back in the chips. Mighty good. Francis comin’ in tonight?”
“He might be, and he might not be,” said Helen. “It all depends on his work, and how busy he might or might not be.