Manhattan Transfer Read Online Free PDF

hard and abrupt as nickel. Then he pushed Congo’s face down against the deck and ran aft, the wooden clogs clattering on his bare feet as he went.
    Outside, the hot June Saturday was dragging its frazzled ends down 110th Street. Susie Thatcher lay uneasily in bed, her hands spread blue and bony on the coverlet before her. Voices came through the thin partition. A young girl was crying through her nose:
    ‘I tell yer mommer I aint agoin back to him.’
    Then came expostulating an old staid Jewish woman’s voice: ‘But Rosie, married life aint all beer and skittles. A vife must submit and vork for her husband.’
    ‘I wont. I cant help it. I wont go back to the dirty brute.’
    Susie sat up in bed, but she couldn’t hear the next thing the old woman said.
    ‘But I aint a Jew no more,’ suddenly screeched the young girl. ‘This aint Russia; it’s little old New York. A girl’s got some rights here.’ Then a door slammed and everything was quiet.
    Susie Thatcher stirred in bed moaning fretfully. Those awfulpeople never give me a moment’s peace. From below came the jingle of a pianola playing the Merry Widow Waltz. O Lord! why dont Ed come home? It’s cruel of them to leave a sick woman alone like this. Selfish. She twisted up her mouth and began to cry. Then she lay quiet again, staring at the ceiling watching the flies buzz teasingly round the electriclight fixture. A wagon clattered by down the street. She could hear children’s voices screeching. A boy passed yelling an extra. Suppose there’d been a fire. That terrible Chicago theater fire. Oh I’ll go mad! She tossed about in the bed, her pointed nails digging into the palms of her hands. I’ll take another tablet. Maybe I can get some sleep. She raised herself on her elbow and took the last tablet out of a little tin box. The gulp of water that washed the tablet down was soothing to her throat. She closed her eyes and lay quiet.
    She woke with a start. Ellen was jumping round the room, her green tam falling off the back of her head, her coppery curls wild.
    ‘Oh mummy I want to be a little boy.’
    ‘Quieter dear. Mother’s not feeling a bit well.’
    ‘I want to be a little boy.’
    ‘Why Ed what have you done to the child? She’s all wrought up.’
    ‘We’re just excited, Susie. We’ve been to the most wonderful play. You’d have loved it, it’s so poetic and all that sort of thing. And Maude Adams was fine. Ellie loved every minute of it.’
    ‘It seems silly, as I said before, to take such a young child…’
    ‘Oh daddy I want to be a boy.’
    ‘I like my little girl the way she is. We’ll have to go again Susie and take you.’
    ‘Ed you know very well I wont be well enough.’ She sat bolt upright, her hair hanging a straight faded yellow down her back. ‘Oh, I wish I’d die… I wish I’d die, and not be a burden to you any more… You hate me both of you. If you didnt hate me you wouldnt leave me alone like this.’ She choked and put her face in her hands. ‘Oh I wish I’d die,’ she sobbed through her fingers.
    ‘Now Susie for Heaven’s sakes, it’s wicked to talk like that.’ He put his arm round her and sat on the bed beside her.
    Crying quietly she dropped her head on his shoulder. Ellen stood staring at them out of round gray eyes. Then she started jumping up and down, chanting to herself, ‘Ellie’s goin to be a boy, Ellie’s goin to be a boy.’
    *
    With a long slow stride, limping a little from his blistered feet, Bud walked down Broadway, past empty lots where tin cans glittered among grass and sumach bushes and ragweed, between ranks of billboards and Bull Durham signs, past shanties and abandoned squatters’ shacks, past gulches heaped with wheelscarred rubbishpiles where dumpcarts were dumping ashes and clinkers, past knobs of gray outcrop where steamdrills continually tapped and nibbled, past excavations out of which wagons full of rock and clay toiled up plank roads to the street, until he was walking