Chapter Text
Prologue:
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack,
All dressed in black, black, black,
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons,
All down her back, back, back.
-Childrens jump rope or clapping song
It was 1933 and the great depression was at its worst - or everyone hoped so at least. It couldn’t get any worse than this wretched excuse for an existence, surely. Levi Ackerman, clerk at a bookshop, hurrying home, was used to seeing lines of men, hoping for jobs. Lines at the factory, lines at the docks. Sometimes the lines at the local soup kitchen, of people hoping for food, stretched around the corner.
For women, jobs were virtually non existent and few times a week, gaunt, nameless women would solicit Levi; their bodies in exchange for a few coins or food, a crowd of ragged children clutching each other in the alley behind. Levi never accepted - despite the temptation - and always gave them a few pennies. Enough to buy a loaf of bread.
He hated it. Hated that these women and children were so desperate and he couldn’t help them more. He was weary of the heartbreaking sound of children crying in doorways.
He also felt guilty about being tempted. Levi would have loved to have had a special person of his own. A wife, a partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, anything. He was lonely; terribly, terribly lonely, caught in the endless loop of working, coming home, dropping into bed, then repeating it all the next day, alone. All just to barely pay the rent and keep a bit of food in the cupboard. He craved some normalcy, some interaction with a caring human. He also was tired of jerking off every day when he could have a warm body to hold, a person to love.
If he had someone, he felt like the cycle of work and sleep just to get by would seem more bearable.
When he had these thoughts he felt selfish and pathetic. He supposed that not everybody found somebody. He really wished he would, though. At 30 he had waited so long.
Despite everything, Levi knew he was lucky. He had a job and a place to live and food in the cupboard, such as they were.
He’d been apprenticed to a shoe maker at the age of 21 when the man’s son had had an arm torn off falling, drunk, under a street car. Levi had learned the business with the intention of taking over one day. Then the depression had happened. Soon folks couldn’t afford new shoes. After awhile they couldn’t afford to get their old ones fixed.
The old cobbler had put a bullet in his head one new years eve and his money and his business went to relatives. Levi was left with nothing.
While Levi’s fortunes were plummeting, Lemuel Goldmeyer’s were rising.
Mr Goldmeyer had recently inherited his father’s business - a bookshop Levi frequented - when the two men met. At first Lemuel’s interest was romantic. Then he began to notice how much Levi knew about books. How he could direct a customer to the exact tome they wanted, how he meticulously returned books to the shelves - even ones he had not taken out. Attraction gave way to financial advantage and Goldmeyer asked Levi to work for him.
Soon, Goldmeyer, who had inherited two apartment buildings and a kosher deli as well as the bookshop, was rarely seen around the place. He didn’t drop the store because it brought in decent money. Desperate folks flocked there to spend their last few pennies on something to get their minds off of abject poverty. Who would he sell the store to in the middle of a depression, anyway?
Levi ran the whole shop by himself. Goldmeyer refused to hire anyone else. He also insisted that the shop be open from 7am to 7pm. So Levi worked 12 hours a day, six days a week. He made 3 dollars a day.
Ch 1 - Monday - I’m no Angel
It was cold and wet when Levi finally locked up the bookshop and he pulled his coat tight around himself. It was a threadbare thing, a dark blue navyman’s peacoat, bought at a second hand shop, frayed at the cuffs and collar, meticulously repaired tears at several seams. It was pissing down freezing rain, battering at Levi’s dark, narrow-brimmed fedora, making him curse. He hurried down 12th st, crossed First Gate onto West Wall, and was in his own squalid neighborhood. Most of the businesses were closed, the dark tenements pregnant with hungry people. He was stepping carefully and almost delicately over a puddle when he saw the man across the street. The man in the brown tweed suit.
He pulled up sharply, face lit by the flickering marquee of a movie theatre. Several people were going in and one bumped his shoulder. He brushed absently at the cloth as if brushing off the other human’s touch.
He’d seen the man in the brown suit yesterday. Why in the world was he still there? Who would sit on the street for 24 hours? Was he injured? Sick? Mentally unstable?
He was a big man, his pale blonde hair slicked down in the rain, darkened to gold with the wet. He wore a nice camel colored coat of wool and sat against the stone wall of a now defunct bank. Not in the sheltered doorway that was six feet to his left, but right there on the sidewalk. He had his wet head down and his knees pulled up. His shoes were gone, leaving only soaked, dirty socks. They, and his hat, had most likely been stolen.
This was a grown man and, unless appearances deceived, well built. Enough for hard labor.
But he simply sat. He wasn’t looking for work, he wasn’t waiting in line for food. He wasn’t even panhandling, though Levi saw some kind folks toss a few pennies his way. He just sat, hands on his knees, head down, just as he had the day before. His skin was ashen in the cold.
Levi, who couldn’t afford any strays and who had seen so much suffering already, resolutely turned his face away with a muffled sigh, and, like the other people, he walked on.
Tuesday
His morning walk to work sent him along a different path. He liked to stop at a local bakery and get a heavy, steaming hot bagel that would serve as his breakfast and lunch both.
He reached the bookshop at precisely five minutes to seven, unlocked the door and hustled to stoke the coal stove and put the kettle on. As he bustled about, talking to the shop cat, Mercutio, pricing a small stack of books he’d bought yesterday and shelving them, his mind wandered to the poor man on the street. How big he was, how handsomely built. Levi couldn’t help but wonder - a bit romantically - what had happened to the man. Maybe he escaped from Wall Rose Sanitorium. Or was running from the law.
The first customer drifted in by 7:20 paying 4 cents for a worn paperback romance - the same cost as a half a loaf of bread - and Levi tried to keep his mind on business for the rest of the day.
That evening, as Levi hurried down West Wall st, the man was still there and, like the body of an animal run down in the road, he seemed smaller, impossibly bedraggled, drooping, worn down by the insistent rain.
Levi hesitated, glancing at the small but regular 7 o'clock crowd filing into the movie theatre. None of them acted as if the man in the brown tweed suit across the narrow street existed. Could they not see him? His hair slicked flat, his coat sodden? Anguished, Levi looked from face to face and then caught sight of the movie poster for the film that was showing; Mae West in “I’m No Angel.”
Me neither, Mae, me neither
Levi tightened his coat around himself and resolutely resumed walking. No one else cared about the man, so he didn’t either, he told himself. It was none of his business.
The rain began to freeze as he hurried home.
Wednesday 12:08 am
Levi awoke with a start. There was ice on his window. The temperature had dropped to just below freezing outside and he could see his breath in his room. His mind was seething with thoughts of that man - the one out there on the streets. He had been dreaming of him. He was probably gone, he told himself. Or dead, frozen to the sidewalk like some homeless derelict. And why did Levi care anyway?
No. No, he couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t bear the thought of a man dying alone on the street when he, Levi, had seen him and he, Levi, could help him.
In a flash he had thrown off the blessedly warm covers and shuffled into his shoes. He donned his coat over the old sweater and nightshirt he slept in and left the apartment.
His legs immediately felt frozen and he belatedly remembered that he was clad only in thin cotton below mid hip. Levi hurried. Hurried through the rain, more sleet than rain now, avoiding the puddles that were already frozen around the edges, till he reached the theatre.
Levi paused under the now dark marquee, staring across the street. The man was still there. He had fallen or laid over to one side and drawn his feet up. Jesus, was he dead?
The precipitation had given over the pok pok pok of rain on his hat to the angry, insistent tik tik tik of sleet. The hem of his nightshirt was soaked and starting to freeze.
Levi, despite his better judgement screaming in his ear, crossed the street towards the slumping man.
“Oi,”
The man didn’t react at all.
“Oi! Hey!”
No reaction. Levi instinctively bent to pick up the pennies passersby had thrown - the man hadn’t bothered to collect them.
“You dead?” Levi demanded, wondering, again, why he cared, why he had left his warm bed to stand in the bitter cold speaking to a complete, and possibly dead, stranger. “Asleep?”
Levi crouched down and from this position he could see the man’s face. He was not asleep, or dead, but Levi wondered if he was sane. His eyes were open, but glassy, and his blue-lipped mouth moved as if he was talking to himself.
Levi reached tentatively out and touched the man’s knee, shaking it slightly.
“Oi … fella … talk to me.”
The man didn’t answer. Levi realised that his head was nodding slightly and Levi sniffed the air, smelling for booze. No, the nodding was not the tremors of a drunk but rhythmic. A low sound became audible. It was him.
Levi shuffled closer.
“With silver buttons, buttons, buttons, all down her back …” The man’s voice faded.
“What the fuck?” Levi said, drawing back, incredulous. The chant was one that little girls sang when playing a clapping game. The guy wasn’t drunk, he was crazy.
Levi almost drove himself to madness trying to decide what to do, trying to justify helping this man whom he didn’t even know. But he just couldn’t leave; go back to his warm, safe bed. If he didn’t help, the man would surely die. It was sleeting hard now and the guy’s coat and trousers were soaked and rapidly freezing. Ice had formed on the blonde strands of hair that had fallen into his handsome face
Levi hadn’t come out in this mess for nothing. In the freezing middle of the night. Maybe he was an angel. Levi held a frantic inner dialogue with this own mind.
(Levi’s brain) You don’t even know his name,
(Levi’s heart) He will die out here like an animal!
He could be a crazy man or a killer
He seems so lost ...
You’re just lonely. This is the loneliness talking.
So beautiful and alone in the world.
Yes, he’s very handsome but this is NOT the partner you seek. It’s just a crazy drunk, dying on the streets like so many others.
Levi finally came to a decision and, shoving his logical brain aside, he struggled to get the man up.
After nearly 10 minutes of pushing pulling and hoarse shouting on Levi’s part he had the man up, one arm draped over Levi’s shoulder. The man was crushingly heavy and outrageously tall. Levi hoped desperately that the man would be able to make it to Levi’s apartment.