Manhattan Transfer quotes

As she set her basket down she glanced into it with pursed-up lips.

The newborn baby squirmed in the cottonwool feebly like a knot of earthworms.

On the ferry there was an old man playing the violin. He had a monkey’s face puckered up in one corner and kept time with the toe of a cracked patent-leather shoe. Bud Korpenning sat on the rail watching him, his back to the river.

“

Walk east a block and turn down Broadway and you’ll find the center of things if you walk far enough.

”

“Big money’s what I’ll have to have, for my little girl.”

“Kids, they eat money,” continued Mr. Zucher, in a deep voice.

“Wont you let me set you up to a bottle?” said Thatcher, figuring up how much he had in his pocket. “Poor Susie wouldn’t like me to be drinking in a saloon like this. But just this once, and I’m learning, learning about fatherhood.”

“That’s nothing but gambling,” snapped Thatcher.

“Well sir it’s a gamblin game,”

said the barkeep as he walked back to the bar swinging the two empty bottles.

Then he started shaving very carefully with the new nickelbright safety razor. He stood trembling running his fingers down his smooth white cheeks in front of the stained mirror. He was trimming his mustache when he heard a noise behind him.

He turned towards them a face smooth as the face of King C. Gillette, a face with a dollarbland smile.

The two little girls’ eyes were popping out of their heads. “Mommer … it’s popper,” the biggest one yelled. His wife dropped like a laundrybag into the rocker and threw the apron over her head.

He turned towards them a face smooth as the face of King C. Gillette, a face with a dollarbland smile. The two little girls’ eyes were popping out of their heads. “Mommer … it’s popper,” the biggest one yelled.

His wife dropped like a laundrybag into the rocker and threw the apron over her head.

“Oyoy! Oyoy!” she moaned rocking back and forth.

There were Babylon and Nineveh; they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble.

In Constantinople the minarets flame like great candles round the Golden Horn … Steel, glass, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skyscrapers. Crammed on the narrow island the millionwindowed buildings will jut glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white cloudhead above a thunderstorm.

There were Babylon and Nineveh; they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets flame like great candles round the Golden Horn …

Steel, glass, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skyscrapers. Crammed on the narrow island the millionwindowed buildings will jut glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white cloudhead above a thunderstorm.

When the door of the room closed behind him, Ed Thatcher felt very lonely, full of prickly restlessness.

“

Aint no good place to look for a job, young feller.

… There’s jobs all right. … I’ll be sixty-five years old in a month and four days an I’ve worked sence I was five I reckon, an I aint found a good job yet.”

“

Boy, I got a thoist on me.

…”

Baldwin staggered dizzily down the stairs. His head was full of blood. The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my life. Outside it had begun to snow. The snowflakes were cold furtive caresses to his hot cheeks.

The sky over the Park was mottled with little tiptailed clouds like a field of white chickens.

“Look Alice, lets us go down this little path.”

… Oh I’m so tired. … I’ll run out onto Central Park West and down the street home. She was scared to turn round. She ran with a stitch in her side.

She ran till her mouth tasted like pennies.

“What are you running for Ellie?” asked Gloria Drayton who was skipping rope outside the Norelands.

Ed Thatcher looked out across the bay that stretched in blue sparkling reaches into the brown haze towards the Narrows.

The statue of Liberty stood up vague as a sleepwalker among the curling smoke of tugboats and the masts of schooners and the blunt lumbering masses of brickbarges and sandscows.

Here and there the glary sun shone out white on a sail or on the superstructure of a steamer. Red ferryboats shuttled back and forth.

“Hum. … I’m from Buffalo.

This is certainly the city for everyone being from somewhere else.

… Well you’re probably a burglar’s accomplice, but I cant help it I’ve got to have that coal in.

The fly buzzed tinglingly in his palm. He groped for it with two fingers, held it slowly squeezing it into mashed gray jelly between finger and thumb. He wiped it off under the windowledge. A hot sick feeling went through him.

Poor old fly, after washing himself so carefully, too.

He stood a long time looking down the airshaft through the dusty pane where the sun gave a tiny glitter to the dust. Now and then a man in shirtsleeves crossed the court below with a tray of dishes.

Take a plunge and come up with three hundred and twentyfive thousand, six hundred and sixtysix dollars.

Dollars swarming up like steam, twisting scattering against the stars.

Millionaire Thatcher leaned out of the window of the bright patchouliscented room to look at the dark-jutting city steaming with laughter, voices, tinkling and lights; behind him orchestras played among the azaleas, private wires click click clickclicked dollars from Singapore, Valparaiso, Mukden, Hong Kong, Chicago.

Dusk gently smooths crispangled streets.

Dark presses tight the steaming asphalt city, crushes the fretwork of windows and lettered signs and chimneys and watertanks and ventilators and fireescapes and moldings and patterns and corrugations and eyes and hands and neckties into blue chunks, into black enormous blocks.

Under the rolling heavier heavier pressure windows blurt light.

Night crushes bright milk out of arclights, squeezes the sullen blocks until they drip red, yellow, green into streets resounding with feet.

All the asphalt oozes light. Light spurts from lettering on roofs, mills dizzily among wheels, stains rolling tons of sky.

… side, sweatyfaced messengers, crisscross glances, sauntering hips, red jowls masticating cigars, sallow concave faces, flat bodies of young men and women, paunched bodies of elderly men, all elbowing, shoving, shuffling, fed in two endless tapes through the revolving doors out into Broadway, in off Broadway.

Jimmy fed in a tape in and out the revolving doors, noon and night and morning, the revolving doors grinding out his years like sausage meat.

All of a sudden his muscles stiffen. Uncle Jeff and his office can go plumb to hell. The words are so loud inside him he glances to one side and the other to see if anyone heard him say them.

Bud brushed past him walking with a tough swagger. I dont care about him; let him follow me. The arching footwalk was empty except for a single policeman who stood yawning, looking up at the sky.

It was like walking among the stars.

Below in either direction streets tapered into dotted lines of lights between square blackwindowed buildings. The river glimmered underneath like the Milky Way above. Silently smoothly the bunch of lights of a tug slipped through the moist darkness.

let him follow me. The arching footwalk was empty except for a single policeman who stood yawning, looking up at the sky. It was like walking among the stars. Below in either direction streets tapered into dotted lines of lights between square blackwindowed buildings.

The river glimmered underneath like the Milky Way above.

Silently smoothly the bunch of lights of a tug slipped through the moist darkness. A car whirred across the bridge making the girders rattle and the spiderwork of cables thrum like a shaken banjo.

Captain McAvoy sucked a good half of his mustache into his mouth. “God damn it to hell,” he groaned.

“A pretty thing to happen on a man’s wedding day.”

Tubs of gherkins, pimentos, melonrind, piccalilli give out twining vines and cold tendrils of dank pepperyfragrance that grow like a marshgarden out of the musky bedsmells and the rancid clangor of the cobbled awakening street.

The old man with the hempen beard who sleeps where nobody knows sits in the midst of it like Jonah under his gourd.

Jimmy Herf walked up four creaky flights and knocked at a white door fingermarked above the knob where the name Sunderland appeared in old English characters on a card neatly held in place by brass thumbtacks.

She had a pale startled face with a big mouth and blue underlids. “This morning I knew I ought to be up and ready, but I just couldn’t. It’s so discouraging to get up when you haven’t got a job. …

Sometimes I think I’ll go to bed and just stay there till the end of the world.

”

“

So many things shock me, I dont see that it matters much.

… But come along let’s get out of here. The sun’s shining outside and people are coming out of church and going home to overeat and read at their Sunday papers among the rubberplants …”

O God wont my luck ever turn; used to have good enough luck in the old days. His knees were trembling, there was a sick burning in the pit of his stomach.

A fine mess you’ve made of your life Joseph Harland. Forty-five and no friends and not a cent to bless yourself with.

The sail of a catboat was a crimson triangle when it luffed a few feet from the concrete walk. A young man and a young girl ducked together as the slender boom swung across.

“

Why that girl’d marry a trolleycar if she thought she could get anything by it.

”

“

Matrimony isnt much is it?

”

“You said it.

What leads up to it’s all right, but gettin married is loike de mornin after.

”

“

Why the hell does everybody want to succeed? I’d like to meet somebody who wanted to fail. That’s the only sublime thing.

”

Joe Harland got to his feet breathing hard. “Goddam you cant you shut up?” His voice broke into a whine. “

Isnt there anywhere you can get a little peace? There’s nowhere you can get any peace.

” He pulled his cap over his eyes, shoved his hands down into his pockets and shambled out of the lunchroom. Over Chatham Square the sky was brightening redviolet through the latticework of elevated tracks.

she sits dreamily, drowsily listening. A sudden twinge of men’s voices knotting about her. She sits up cold white out of reach like a lighthouse.

Men’s hands crawl like bugs on the unbreakable glass. Men’s looks blunder and flutter against it helpless as moths.

But in deep pitblackness inside something clangs like a fire engine.

now and then a donkeyengine whistled and there was a jingle of chains and a fresh girder soared crosswise in the air. Men in blue overalls moved about the scaffolding. Beyond to the northwest a shining head of clouds soared blooming compactly like a cauliflower.

Oh if it would only rain.

As the thought came to her there was a low growl of thunder above the din of building and of traffic. Oh if it would only rain.

“Stan take little steps and if we meet anybody go right on and jump in a taxi. …

You can get away with anything if you do it quick enough.

” Ellen’s hands were trembling as they came down the steps. She tucked one in under Stan’s elbow and began talking in a low chatty voice.

“

Why shouldn’t things get beyond a joke? You’re getting beyond a joke and I dont complain.

”

“Correspondent very good ting. …

Always drunk in American bar very far from battlefield.

”

In your case it’s just luck, hellish bad luck. Martin used to say: Everything would be so much better if suddenly a bell rang and everybody told everybody else honestly what they did about it, how they lived, how they loved.

It’s hiding things makes them putrefy.

By God it’s horrible. As if life wasn’t difficult enough without that.”

The rain seethed along the pavements, against storewindows, on brownstone steps. His knees were wet, a slow trickle started down his back, there were chilly cascades off his sleeves onto his wrists, his whole body itched and tingled. He walked on through Brooklyn.

Obsession of all the beds in all the pigeonhole bedrooms, tangled sleepers twisted and strangled like the roots of potbound plants.

Obsession of feet creaking on the stairs of lodginghouses, hands fumbling at doorknobs. Obsession of pounding temples and solitary bodies rigid on their beds.

And it rained forty days and it rained forty nights And it didn’t stop till Christmas And the only man who survived the flood Was longlegged Jack of the Isthmus. …

Kerist I wish I was a skyscraper.

The lock spun round in a circle to keep out the key. Dexterously Stan bided his time and caught it. He shot headlong through the open door and down the long hall shouting Pearline into the livingroom.

… You need blood. … Why dont you get some blood in your veins? … Back in Russia the poor people … not so much poorer’n we are … believe in wampires, things come suck your blood at night. …

That’s what Capitalism is, a wampire that sucks your blood⁠ ⁠… day⁠ ⁠… and⁠ ⁠… night.

”

It is beginning to snow. The flakes are giltedged where they pass the streetlamp.

Through the plate glass the Cosmopolitan Café full of blue and green opal rifts of smoke looks like a muddy aquarium; faces blob whitely round the tables like illassorted fishes.

Umbrellas begin to bob in clusters up the snowmottled street. The orator turns up his collar and walks briskly east along Houston, holding the muddy soapbox away from his trousers.

Sandbourne turned abruptly on his heel and walked down the avenue again. He was tired and his legs ached. It was almost dark.

On the way back to the station the grimy brick and brownstone blocks dragged past monotonously like the days of his life.

Under the skin of her temples iron clamps tighten till her head will mash like an egg; she begins to walk with long strides up and down the room that bristles with itching stuffiness;

There are flags on all the flagpoles up Fifth Avenue.

In the shrill wind of history the great flags flap and tug at their lashings on the creaking goldknobbed poles up Fifth Avenue.

The stars jiggle sedately against the slate sky, the red and white stripes writhe against the clouds.

He hugged Maisie with one arm and his mother with the other. Nobody spoke.

“Well,” said Merivale walking into the living room, “it was a great war while it lasted.”

His mother and sister followed on his heels. He sat down in the leather chair and stretched out his polished legs. “You dont know how wonderful it is to get home.”

“You fix us a drink out of the hotwaterbottle. We’ve got to use that up or it’ll eat the rubber. … And we’ll drink to the Café d’Harcourt.”

“Of course what you kids dont realize,” said Hildebrand, “is that the difficulty under prohibition is keeping sober.”

Ellen laughed; she stood over the little lamp that gave out a quiet domestic smell of hot nickel and burned alcohol.

A nickel before midnight buys tomorrow

… holdup headlines, a cup of coffee in the automat, a ride to Woodlawn, Fort Lee, Flatbush. … A nickel in the slot buys chewing gum.

“

Life’s just temporary for that matter.

”

Smells of diapers and coffeepots and typewriter oil and Dutch Cleanser oppressed them. Ellen put out the empty milkbottle and went to bed. Jimmy kept walking nervously about the front room. His drunkenness ebbed away leaving him icily sober.

In the empty chamber of his brain a doublefaced word clinked like a coin: Success Failure, Success Failure.

I’m just wild about Harree And Harry’s just wild about me

Glowworm trains shuttle in the gloaming through the foggy looms of spiderweb bridges, elevators soar and drop in their shafts, harbor lights wink.

Like sap at the first frost at five o’clock men and women begin to drain gradually out of the tall buildings downtown, grayfaced throngs flood subways and tubes, vanish underground.

All night the great buildings stand quiet and empty, their million windows dark. Drooling light the ferries chew tracks across the lacquered harbor. At midnight the fourfunneled express steamers slide into the dark out of their glary berths.

I want to speak to Mr. Jack Cunningham please. … Hello. Is this Mr. Cunningham’s office? Mr. James Merivale speaking. … Out of town. … And when will he be back? … Hum.” He strode back along the hall. “The damn scoundrel’s out of town.”

“All the years I’ve known him,” said the little lady in the round hat, “that has always been where he was.”

Outside the broad office windows the night is gray and foggy. Here and there a few lights make up dim horizontals and perpendiculars of asterisks. Phineas Blackhead sits at his desk tipping far back in the small leather armchair.

“Just as you like,” he said dully. An impulse to grab her hands to crush her to him until he hurt her went up through him like a rocket and died. She picked up the coffeethings and swished away.

His lips knew her lips, his arms knew the twining of her arms, he knew the deep woods of her hair, he loved her.

He sat for a long time looking at his feet, lanky reddish feet with swollen blue veins, shoebound toes twisted by stairs and pavements. On each little toe there was a corn. He found his eyes filling with pitying tears. The baby had stopped crying.

Everything made him bubble with repressed giggles. It was eleven o’clock. He hadnt been to bed.

Life was upside down, he was a fly walking on the ceiling of a topsy-turvy city.

He’d thrown up his job, he had nothing to do today, tomorrow, next day, day after. Whatever goes up comes down, but not for weeks, months. Spring rich in gluten.

The fever had seeped out of him. He felt cool and tired. Another spring, God how many springs ago, walking from the cemetery up the blue macadam road where fieldsparrows sang and the sign said: Yonkers.

In Yonkers I buried my boyhood, in Marseilles with the wind in my face I dumped my calf years into the harbor. Where in New York shall I bury my twenties?

Maybe they were deported and went out to sea on the Ellis Island ferry singing the International. The growl of the International over the water, fading sighing into the mist.

As they reached the Spuyten Duyvil, they were incontinently drowned, rank after rank, in an attempt to swim to Yonkers.

And as I sit here, thought Jimmy Herf, print itches like a rash inside me. I sit here pockmarked with print.

He got to his feet. A little yellow dog was curled up asleep under the bench. The little yellow dog looked very happy. “What I need’s a good sleep,” Jimmy said aloud.

Anna sat bolt upright on the seat.

“I aint never goin to have any children,” she said between her teeth, “never, never, never.”

Alice touched his arm as they turned to look in the window of an Italian pastryshop. On each cake ornamented with bright analin flowers and flutings stood a sugar lamb for Easter and the resurrection banner.

But what’s the use of spending your whole life fleeing the City of Destruction? What about your unalienable right, Thirteen Provinces? His mind unreeling phrases, he walks on doggedly. There’s nowhere in particular he wants to go.

If only I still had faith in words.

“How do you do Mr. Goldstein?” the reporter breezily chanted as he squeezed the thick flipper held out to him over the counter of the cigar store. “My name’s Brewster. … I’m writing up the crime wave for the News.”

Mr. Goldstein laughed a sardonic laugh. “I’m ready for em next time they come,” he shouted after the reporter who was already making for the Subway.

“Our business, my dear Mrs. Herf,” declaimed Mr. Harpsicourt, looking sweetly in her eyes and smiling his gray Cheshire cat smile, “is to roll ashore on the wave of fashion the second before it breaks, like riding a surfboard.”

Ellen was delicately digging with her spoon into half an alligator pear; she kept her eyes on her plate, her lips a little parted;

All her nerves were sharp steel jangled wires cutting into her. “What does it matter?” she kept asking herself. “He’ll wait. I’m in no hurry to see him. Let’s see, how many blocks? … Less than twenty, eighteen.”

It must have been to keep from going crazy people invented numbers.

The multiplication table better than Coué as a cure for jangled nerves. Probably that’s what old Peter Stuyvesant thought, or whoever laid the city out in numbers. She was smiling to herself. The taxi had started moving again.

Inexorably his lips closed on to hers.

Beyond the shaking glass window of the taxi, like someone drowning, she saw out of a corner of an eye whirling faces, streetlights, zooming nickelglinting wheels.

The old man in the checked cap sits on the brownstone stoop with his face in his hands. With the glare of Broadway in their backs there is a continual flickering of people past him towards the theaters down the street.

The old man is sobbing through his fingers in a sour reek of gin. Once in a while he raises his head and shouts hoarsely, “I cant, dont you see I cant?”

The voice is inhuman like the splitting of a plank.

Footsteps quicken. Middleaged people look the other way. Two girls giggle shrilly as they look at him. Streeturchins nudging each other peer in and out through the dark crowd. “Bum Hootch.” “He’ll get his when the cop on the block comes by.” “Prohibition liquor.”

She stood waiting for him beside the information desk while he went to get the tickets. She felt alone and tiny in the middle of the great white vault of the station.

All her life with Roy was going by her like a movie reeled off backwards, faster and faster.

Buck came back looking happy and masterful, his hands full of greenbacks and railway tickets. “No train till seven ten Al,” he said. “Suppose you go to the Palace and leave me a seat at the boxoffice. … I’ll run up and fetch my kit.

They didn’t know whether he was talking to them or to himself. They pretended he wasnt there and went on nervously preparing to grill a piece of ham on a gridiron made of an old umbrellaframe.

Below them beyond a sulphurgreen lace of budding trees was the Hudson going silver with evening and the white palisade of apartment-houses of upper Manhattan.

“Dont say nutten,” whispered Joe, making a swift cranking motion in the region of his ear. “He’s nuts.”

“Sit down brother. I wont hurt you. I understand kids. We like kids me an the Lord God. … Scared of me cause I’m a tramp aint you? Well lemme tell you somethin, dont you never be afraid of a tramp.

Tramps wont hurt ye, they’re good people. The Lord God was a tramp when he lived on earth.

My buddy the angel Gabriel says he’s been a tramp many a time. … Look I got some fried chicken an old colored woman gave me. … O Lordy me!” groaning he sat down on a rock beside the two boys.

D., Armand Duval. Him and me ran away togedder an always he say to me, ‘Armand you never make a success, too lazy, run after the leetle girls too much. …’ Now he’s my cook … first class chef, cordon bleu, eh?

Life is one funny ting, Meester ’Erf.

”

… Your sons’ll be like that Congo. … If I’d had a decent education and started soon enough I might have been a great scientist. If I’d been a little more highly sexed I might have been an artist or gone in for religion. …

But here I am by Jesus Christ almost thirty years old and very anxious to live.

… If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I’d have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I havent even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.”

On his third glass of Bourbon Herf began to talk. Congo sat listening with his heavy lips a little open, occasionally nodding his head. “

The difference between you and me is that you’re going up in the social scale, Armand, and I’m going down.

… When you were a messboy on a steamboat I was a horrid little chalkyfaced kid living at the Ritz. My mother and father did all this Vermont marble blackwalnut grand Babylonian stuff … there’s nothing more for me to do about it.

… But here I am by Jesus Christ almost thirty years old and very anxious to live. … If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I’d have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me.

I havent even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.

”

… When you were a messboy on a steamboat I was a horrid little chalkyfaced kid living at the Ritz. My mother and father did all this Vermont marble blackwalnut grand Babylonian stuff … there’s nothing more for me to do about it. …

Women are like rats, you know, they leave a sinking ship.

She’s going to marry this man Baldwin who’s just been appointed District Attorney. They’re said to be grooming him for mayor on a fusion reform ticket. … The delusion of power, that’s what’s biting him. Women fall for it like hell.

“Looks like,” said Congo filling the little glasses again with a slow smile, “

Meester ’Erf you tink too much.

”

She came close to him and spoke in a low voice. “Just forget about me and him will you? … Gawd the boy’s breath’d knock you down. …

Tony’s one of God’s mistakes, I’m through with him.

… Found him chewing the edges of the rug rolling on the floor of the dressing room one day because he was afraid he was going to be unfaithful to me with an acrobat.