Place in the City Read Online Free PDF

in that funny way of hers. Or was it his memory playing tricks with him now?
    Then he saw Jack coming, all the way down the block, yet when he first saw him, he already knew that it would mean a fight; and then the girl didn’t matter any more, only that he and Jack were enemies sworn to do battle. That was a long time back; but even now Shutzey felt that it would cleanse him to fight with the priest, hand to hand, the way two strong men should fight, right against wrong: and then he would know. But what would he know?
    â€œYer a dirty bastard,” Jack had said to him, and when they came together, the girl was watching with dancing eyes; but in the end she lost her nerve and ran away; then Shutzey knew that she wasn’t worth it, for all of her inscrutable smile: since then no woman had been worth it. Now this slip behind the counter looked at him the same way.
    But all in all, that was not why he fought with Jack. He would never forget that fight, because it was bigger in its way than any other fight in his life. He was fighting to show that the strength in him was more than the calm smile the priest had even then. And he knew he would win. Right in the beginning, he knew that he would win, that wrong needed only strength, and that there was a bitter long strength inside of him.
    As he lit his cigar, Jessica eagerly watched his handsome, dark face behind the sheen of smoke, watched his blue eyes, the eyelids fluttering ever so slightly. God, but he was strong! What kind of evil was there in strength?
    He remembered that in the beginning they measured each other.
    â€œI’m a dirty bastard?” Shutzey said to Jack.
    â€œYeller bastard.”
    â€œC’mon.”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œYer yeller.”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œMake me ead it, yu lousy sonuvabitch.”
    â€œYeah?”
    Shutzey had measured him, easy. Shutzey had known that in the end it would be his. As he knew now that the priest’s entire philosophy of good was inherently wrong.
    After the first stinging exchange of blows, Shutzey felt nothing. They fought toe to toe, steady and hard. Boys hardly ever fight like that. And after a while, they were surrounded by a circle of eager, waiting faces. Strength was the only good. Now Shutzey smiled at the girl, really noticing her for the first time. He took the cigar out of his mouth.
    It had seemed to Shutzey, then, that they fought for hours. But he always knew what the end would be. When the other boy finally lay at his feet, he was grinning, still.
    â€œYu yeller bastard,” he whispered.

T HE GIRL grew up, and Shutzey forgot, only remembering now as he looked at the girl across the counter, in whom there appeared to be some resemblance. She might have said to him: “It was my sister,” if she had known.
    Alice Meyer forgot, too; and now when she saw Shutzey, something inside her made her slightly sick; but she never thought of Shutzey as the boy who had once tried to take her down into a cellar, to explain in his way what mysteries there are in the making of life.
    Thus, through Alice, Danny comes into our tale. School teaching, for four years, made Alice prim, all drawn up and together. She was naturally tall and thin anyway, and she had always worn her dark blond hair in a bun at the back of her head. And after four years she had fallen into a rut that was as long as the road that leads down through life, into whatever comes after. If she hated anything—she didn’t hate easily—she hated Apple Place, to which she was as surely connected as any one of the brownstone houses. That was before Danny fell in love with her, even though he was a year younger: and he thought that she was beautiful.
    Today, when she came home to the place over the cigar store, through the early winter twilight, she was still trembling, weak as a child, and longing with all her heart for Danny: and for no good reason, all because of a silly little incident at school that