The winter of 1933, particularly the three weeks preceding Christmas, was by far the unhappiest period of my life. That winter, the fifth winter of the depression and the winter of repeal, I was a reporter on a newspaper. Several of the editors believed that nothing brightened up the paper so much as stories about human misery. In the three weeks before Christmas there was an abundance of such stories, and for one reason or another I was picked to handle most of them. One morning I spent a harried half-hour in the anteroom of a magistrates’ court talking with a woman who had assaulted her husband because he took money she had saved for Christmas presents for their children and spent it in one of the new repeal gin mills. That afternoon I was sent up to the big “Hoover village” on the Hudson at Seventy-fourth Street to ask about the plans the people there were making for Christmas. The gaunt squatters thought I was crazy; if they had thrown me into the river I wouldn’t have blamed them. Next day I was sent out to stand on a busy corner with a Salvation Army woman whose job was to ring a bell and attract attention to a kettle in the hope that passers-by would drop money in it for the Army’s Christmas Fund. I was told, “Just stand there four or five hours and see what happens; there ought to be a story in it.” The bellringer was elderly and hollow-eyed and she had a head cold, which I caught.
Day in and day out, I was sent to breadlines, to relief bureaus, to cold-water flats; each morning I called on cringing, abject humans who sat and stared at me as I goaded them with questions. My editors sincerely believed that such interviews would provoke people to contribute to the various Christmas funds, and they undoubtedly did, but that did not help me conquer the feeling that I had no right to knock on tenement doors and catechize men and women who were interesting only because they were miserable in some unusual way. Also, the attitude of the people I talked with made me wretched. They were without indignation. They were utterly spiritless. I am sure that few of them wanted their stories printed, but they answered my questions, questions I absolutely had to ask, because they were afraid something might happen to their relief if they didn’t; all of them thought I was connected in some way with the relief administration. I began to feel that I was preying on the unfortunate. My faith in human dignity was almost gone when something happened that did a lot to restore it.
Early one morning, only a few days before Christmas, a man telephoned the newspaper and said that the evening before, while walking in Central Park, a friend of his had come upon a man and woman who said they had lived for a year in a cave in the Park. This was one of the caves uncovered when the old lower reservoir was abandoned and emptied, an area since filled in for baseball diamonds and playgrounds. I was familiar with the caves; several people had been found living in them that winter. The man on the telephone said his friend had discovered the man and woman squatting beside a little fire in the cave, but had been afraid they would freeze to death during the night, so he had persuaded them to leave the Park and had put them up in a furnished room.
“I wish your newspaper would run a story about them,” said the man on the telephone. “It might help them get jobs.” I went up to see the man and woman. They were living in one of a cluster of brownstone rooming houses on West Sixtieth Street, off Columbus Avenue, two blocks from the Park. They were on the fourth floor. An inch and a half of snow had fallen during the night and there was a ridge of it on the window sill of their furnished room. The man said his name was James Hollinan and that he was an unemployed carpenter. He was small, wiry, and white-haired. He wore corduroy trousers and a greasy leather windbreaker. The woman was his wife. Her name was Elizabeth and she was an unemployed hotel maid. When I arrived, Mr. Hollinan was preparing to go out. He had his hat on and was getting into a tattered overcoat. I told him who I was.
“I’d like to ask a few questions,” I said.
“Talk to my wife,” he said. “She does all the talking.”
He turned to his wife. “I’ll go get some breakfast,” he said.
“Get egg sandwiches and some coffee,” she said, taking a few coins out of her purse and placing them, one by one, in his hand, “and we’ll have seven cents left.”
“O.K.,” he said, and left.
I asked Mrs. Hollinan to tell me about their life in the cave. While she answered my questions she made the bed, and she appeared to get a lot of pleasure out of the task. I could understand it; it was the first bed she had made in a long time.
“Well, I tell you,” she said, smacking a pillow against the iron bedstead, “we got dispossessed from a flat up in Washington Heights the middle of last December, a year ago. When we went to the relief bureau they tried to separate us. They wanted to send my husband one place and me another. So I said, ‘We’ll starve together.’ That night we ended up in Central Park. We found the cave and hid in it. Late at night we built a fire. We been doing that almost every night for a year.”
She smoothed out the counterpane until there wasn’t a wrinkle in it and then rather reluctantly sat down on the bed. There was only one chair in the room.
“Of course,” she continued, “some nights it got too cold and rainy. Then we’d go to a church uptown that’s left open at night. We’d sleep in a pew, sitting up. Most mornings we’d part and look for work. He hardly ever found anything to do. It was worse for him. He’s older than me. Couple of times a week I’d pick up a cleaning job and that would mean a few dollars, and we’d eat on that. We’d carry water to the cave and make stews.”
“How did you sleep in the cave?” I asked.
“We’d take turns snoozing on a bed we made of a pile of cardboard boxes,” she said. “We kept a fire going. A little fire, so the cops wouldn’t run us off. The Park cops knew we were there, but so long as we didn’t build up a big fire and attract attention, they’d let us alone. Last summer the cave was better than a house. But lately, when it rained, we’d get rheumatism, and it was awful.”
Mrs. Hollinan’s dress was nearly worn out, but it was clean and neat. I wondered how she had kept so clean, living in a cave. I think she guessed what was on my mind, because she said, “We’d go to a public bath about twice a week, and I used to put my dresses and his shirts in an old lard stand in the cave and boil them.” We talked for about fifteen minutes and then her husband returned. He had a cardboard container of coffee and two sandwiches in a paper bag. I knew they didn’t want me around while they ate breakfast, so I said goodbye.
“I hope we get some relief this time,” said Mrs. Hollinan as I went out of the door, and I realized she thought I was a relief investigator. I didn’t have the nerve to tell her she was mistaken.
I wasn’t especially interested in Mr. and Mrs. Hollinan; compared with some of the people I had seen that winter, they were living off the fat of the land. In the story I wrote about them I mentioned the incident in which Mrs. Hollinan told her husband that when breakfast was paid for they would have seven cents left, and I gave the address of the rooming house in case someone wanted to offer Mr. Hollinan a job. The story was in the late editions.
Next day was my day off, but that afternoon I dropped by the office to get my mail. My box was stuffed with letters from people who had read the story about Mr. and Mrs. Hollinan, and attached to many of the letters were bills or checks to be turned over to them. The biggest check, one for twenty-five dollars, was from Robert Nathan. His novel, “One More Spring,” which concerned some derelicts who lived a winter in a drafty Central Park toolhouse, had been published earlier that year. In all, there was eighty-five dollars, and there were two telegrams offering jobs.
I had an appointment to meet a girl and help her with Christmas shopping, and I telephoned her that I couldn’t keep it, that I had to go give eighty-five dollars to a man and woman who had spent a year in a cave. She wanted to go with me. I met her at Columbus Circle and we walked over to the rooming house. The streets were crowded with Christmas shoppers and store windows were full of holly and tinsel and red Christmas bells. The cheerful shoppers depressed me. “How can men and women be so happy,” I thought, “when all over the city people are starving?” I was very gloomy that afternoon.
The landlady of the rooming house met us at the door. She appeared to be in an angry mood. I told her I was the reporter who had come to see Mr. and Mrs. Hollinan the day before. She said people had been calling on them since early morning, bringing them money and food.
“They read that story you had in the paper last night,” the landlady said. “They keep coming, but I haven’t let anybody upstairs this afternoon. That was a lot of baloney you had in the paper . Why, those cave people are upstairs celebrating.”
“I don’t blame them,” said my girl.
“Well, I do,” said the landlady.
She wouldn’t let my girl go upstairs with me.
“You’ll have to wait down here, young lady,” she said severely.
I went on upstairs, carrying the fistful of letters. I knocked on their door and someone shouted, “Come on in!” I opened the door. The room was in magnificent disorder. On the table were two big steamer baskets, cellophane-wrapped, with red ribbons tied to their handles. The steamer baskets looked odd in the shabby room. Also on the table were bottles of beer and gin and ginger ale and some half-eaten sandwiches. The floor was strewn with wrapping paper and boxes and cigar butts. Mrs. Hollinan was sitting on the bed with a tumbler in her hand. A cigar was sticking out of a corner of Mr. Hollinan’s mouth and he was pouring himself a drink of gin. They were quite drunk, without a doubt. Mr. Hollinan looked at me, but he didn’t seem to recognize me.
“Sit down and make yourself at home,” he said, waving me to the bed. “Have a drink?”
“It’s that man from the newspaper,” said Mrs. Hollinan. “Give him hell, Jim.”
Mr. Hollinan stood up. He wasn’t very steady on his feet.
“What do you mean,” he said, “putting that writeup in the paper?”
“What was wrong with it?” I asked.
“You said we only had seven cents left, you liar.”
“Well, that’s what your wife said.”
“I did not,” said Mrs. Hollinan indignantly. She got up from her seat on the bed and waved her tumbler, spilling gin and ginger ale all over the bed. “I said we had seventy cents left,” she said.
“That’s right,” said Mr. Hollinan. “What do you mean, putting lies about us in the paper?”
Mr. Hollinan took a square bottle of gin off the table. He got a good grip on it and started toward me, waving the bottle in the air.
“Wait a minute,” I said, edging toward the door. “I brought you some money.”
“I don’t want your money,” he said. “I got money.”
“Well,” I said, holding out the telegrams, “I think I have a job for you.”
“I don’t want your help,” he said. “You put a lie about us in the paper.”
“That’s right, Jim,” said Mrs. Hollinan, giggling. “Give him hell.”
I closed the door and hurried to the stairs. Mr. Hollinan stumbled out of the room and stood at the head of the stairs, clutching for the railing with one hand. Just as I reached the landing on the second floor he threw the bottle of gin. It hit the wall above my head and broke into pieces. I was sprayed with gin and bits of wet glass. I ran on down the stairs, getting out of Mr. Hollinan’s range. All the way down the stairs I could hear Mrs. Hollinan up in the room yelling, “Give him hell, Jim!”
“Mother of God,” said the landlady when I got downstairs, “what happened? What was that crash?”
“You smell like a distillery,” said my girl.
I was laughing. “Mr. Hollinan threw a bottle of gin at me,” I said.
“That’s nothing to laugh about,” said the landlady sharply. “Why don’t you call an officer?”
“Let’s get out of here,” I said to my girl. We went to a liquor store over on Columbus Circle. I bought a bottle of Holland gin and had it wrapped in Christmas-gift paper, and I gave the liquor-store man Mr. Hollinan’s address and told him to deliver the order. My girl thought I was crazy, but I didn’t mind. It was the first time I had laughed in weeks.
Early the following morning I went back to the rooming house. I had decided it was my duty to make another attempt to give the money to Mr. and Mrs. Hollinan.
“Those cave people are gone,” the landlady told me, “A man came here last night in a limousine, with a driver. He took them away. He put them in the back seat with him. He said he was going to give Mr. Hollinan a job on his farm.”
The landlady seemed amazed by all that was happening. “They were still drunk, but that man in the limousine didn’t seem to care,” she said. “He was drunk, too. Drunker than they were, if you ask me. He kept slapping them on the back, first one and then the other.”
She had the benefactor’s name and address written down and I made a note of them. It was a New Jersey address. I went back to the office and wrote letters to all the people who had sent money to Mr. and Mrs. Hollinan, returning it. I told them Mr. Hollinan had found a job and had refused to accept their contributions.
Until perhaps a week before Christmas of the following year, Christmas of 1934, I forgot Mr. and Mrs. Hollinan. Then I recalled the experience and began to wonder about them. I wondered if the man in the limousine did give Mr. Hollinan a job and if he was getting along all right. I kept thinking about them all that week and on Christmas Eve I decided I would try to get in touch with them and wish them a merry Christmas and a happy New Year. I searched through a stack of old notebooks in the bottom drawer of my desk and finally found their benefactor’s name and address. I asked Information to get me his telephone number in New Jersey and I put in a call for him. He answered the telephone and I told him I was the reporter who wrote the story about the people he had befriended last Christmas, the people who had lived in a cave. I started to ask him if he would let Mr. Hollinan come to the telephone, but he interrupted me.
“Do you know where they are?” he asked. “Have you seen them?”
“No,” I said. “Aren’t they with you now?”
“I certainly would like to see them,” he answered, a little irrelevantly. “I was just having a few drinks and I was thinking how much I’d like to see them. I used to have a few drinks with old man Hollinan. He was a pretty wonderful fellow. Wonderful fellow.” He paused.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “I have a little farm here and he took care of it for me when I was in the city. He was the caretaker, sort of. They stayed until about the end of March, and then one day the old man and his wife just wandered off and I never saw them again. Just wandered off, free people. Free people, yes sir, free as hell.”
“I wonder why they left.”
“I don’t know for sure,” he said, “but you know what I think? I think living in that cave ruined them. Ruined them. I think they left me because they just got tired of living in a house.”
“Thank you, and merry Christmas,” I said.
“Wonderful people,” he said, and hung up. ♦
