she would say, trying to appear casual. "Our apartment's in the front, third floor, nine."
Minnie searched a long time through her deep, messy pocketbook before she found her key. Click, she heard the lock slip. She put her shoulder to the door and leaned her weight against it. It sagged on its rusty hinges and it took all of her strength to move it even far enough to let her slender body slip through. It closed with a screech.
Minnie was in the dark, dank, foul-smelling lower hallway that tunneled to the rear of the house. The narrow stairway which coiled in a spiral, was half covered with worn linoleum, its pattern lost in stains and greasy layers of dirt.
Minnie paused for a moment on the first landing to tie her shoelace. She winced. Like a shallow well the hall was a sounding board which reverberated with all the chaotic noises of the sixteen apartments. Those brats! Weak-looking kids, but how they screamed! Cursing, phonographs, dishes rattling, the thunder of the elevated as it tore past the house, high, shrill voices—God, what a racket, she thought.
On the second flight Minnie felt her way through the stifling darkness, thumbing the wall to keep from stumbling over empty milk bottles or newspaper bundles of garbage. Clinks of light outlined two doors. One led into the apartment occupied by an Italian family. In three rooms lived a man, his wife, her mother and father, and five little children. Minnie was resentful that "Wops" were allowed in her apartment house, even though Carlotti was a first-class barber with a job in an uptown hotel. As if the place wasn't stinking enough without the acrid smell of garlic and rancid olive oil.
Minnie hated offensive odors. Her dream was to own a bottle of expensive perfume. She called it perfumery, and her favorite extracts were lilac and carnation.
The Flynns' apartment was one of the largest in The
