Trolley No. 1852 Read Free Page A

in the very least
as my strained mind envisioned it, was all that gave me the will to
forge on. I fared well at my new post (a man of erudition? A
university professor?) and rose up the few ladders of advancement
that were extant; whereas I soon was promoted to night-office
manager whose undesirable hours rewarded me with a modest pay
increment. The enterprise, namely Bartleby & Sons, L.T.D.,
occupied the top floor of a rather Dickensian building that
harkened from the middle of the Nineteenth Century, in the lower
“meat-packers” borough. Of course, they’d long-since refitted
materially with modern typing-machines, (chiefly Remington Model
One’s on which I’d grown adroit at Brown) and more recently curious
devices of almost supernatural capability, called Mimeographs. My
status quickly charged me with the overwatch of the night-staff:
all stalwart men and women possessed of acceptable typing skills
and an accurate eye, who’d been discarded from better posts by the
all-pervading economic gloom. It was for the most part elder
holographed documents of financial and governmental importance that
we were charged with transcribing, from seven o’clock in evening to
three-thirty or so in the morn.
    As for Selina, however…
    It necessitated less than
a week’s time to discern that the illustrious Monroe Clothiers
chain was illustrious no more; the abrupt sign on the front doors
announced that the enterprise had gone on “Holiday” much the same
way as most banking institutions; in a more accurate manner of
speaking: bankrupt, and all employees let go. Worse than that, by
far, however, was my horror in learning that Selina’s apartment
building in the West Side had burned to the ground; though I was
relieved to be informed by the New York Office of Public Safety
that no deaths or injuries had been reported. Next, my forlorn
sojourn through the mephitis piloted me to the local police
precinct’s Missing Persons Bureau. Here, to my abject despair, I
was informed that said bureau was no longer operational due to
budget decreases and the simple unserviceability of such a
function. “You got any idea how many people ‘disappear’ with the
economy the way it is?” my complaint was chastised by a surly
sergeant at the desk. “Well do ya, bub?” Ultimately, of course, I
could comprehend his point; in such dismal economic times, people
moved on to unknown pastures they hoped would be greener but oft
were not. But Selina would’ve written me
had she elected to relocate, I knew full
well. The granite-faced sergeant was unkind enough to add an
acerbic statistical datum: “Lots’a women have took to sellin’
thereselfs, ya know. What else they got when there’s no jobs and
bread’s up to a dime’a half-loaf?” Then, another datum: “Oh, and
bub? You do know that the murder and suicide rate’s doubled since
the Crash in ‘29, don’t ya?”
    When not tending my duties at the scrivenry,
then, I walked…
    Walked, I say, through
every chasm, byway, and alley in vicinity to Selina’s former home
and place of employment; walked through the harrowing and
ill-scented masses—that loathly, dead-faced human sprawl—thrusting
forward my only photograph of Selina to random passersby and
shop-keepers, coppers and vagrants alike, refugees and natural-born
citizens—indeed, anyone, with the plea hot in my voice, “Have you seen
this woman?”
    None had.
    When I’d covered the most
logical geographical propinquities, an absence of alternatives
forced me to proceed in depressingly widening radii. First what
remained of Manhattan, then Queens, the Bronx, then ghastly
Flatbush and the horrendous Brooklyn and its appalling appendage
Red Hook full of leaning tenements and unrestrained hooliganism;
Staten Island and its waves of cretins, then across the blackly
gushing Hudson to Hoboken, Union City, and beyond. All, all to no
avail. In no time, however, I became deft in all modes of travel
(ferries, trolleys, motor-carriages)