Ironweed by William Kennedy

believe we stand as much as we can and then we die when we can, and Sandra decided she could die.”
              “I don’t fight that. Die when you can. That’s as good a sayin’ as there is.”
              “I’m glad we agree on something,” Helen said.
              “We get along all right. You ain’t a bad sort.”
              “You’re all right too.”
              “We’re both all right,” Francis said, “and we ain’t got a damn penny and noplace to flop. We on the bum. Let’s get the hell up to Jack’s before he puts the lights out on us.”
              Helen slipped her arm inside Francis’s. Across the street Aldo Campione and Dick Doolan, who in the latter years of his life was known as Rowdy Dick, kept silent pace.

                                           o          o          o

              Helen pulled her arm away from Francis and tightened her collar around her neck, then hugged herself and buried her hands in her armpits.
              “I’m chilled to my bones,” she said.
              “It’s chilly, all right.”
              “I mean a real chill, a deep chill.”
              Francis put his arm around her and walked her up the steps of Jack’s house. It stood on the east side of Ten Broeck Street, a three-block street in Arbor Hill named for a Revolutionary War hero and noted in the 1870s and 1880s as the place where a dozen of the city’s arriviste lumber barons lived, all in a row, in competitive luxury. For their homes the barons built handsome brownstones, most of them now cut into apartments like Jack’s, or into furnished rooms.
              The downstairs door to Jack’s opened without a key. Helen and Francis climbed the broad walnut staircase, still vaguely elegant despite the threadbare carpet, and Francis knocked. Jack opened the door and looked out with the expression of an ominous crustacean. With one hand he held the door ajar, with the other he gripped the jamb.
              “Hey Jack,” Francis said, “we come to see ya. How’s chances for a bum gettin’ a drink?”
              Jack opened the door wider to look beyond Francis and when he saw Helen he let his arm fall and backed into the apartment. Kate Smith came at them, piped out of a small phonograph through the speaker of the radio. The Carolina moon was shining on somebody waiting for Kate. Beside the phonograph sat Clara, balancing herself on a chamber pot, propped on all sides with purple throw pillows, giving her the look of being astride a great animal. A red bedspread covered her legs, but it had fallen away at one side, revealing the outside of her naked left thigh, visible to the buttocks. A bottle of white fluid sat on the table by the phonograph, and on a smaller table on her other side a swinging rack cradled a gallon of muscatel, tiltable for pouring. Helen walked over to Clara and stood by her.
              “Golly it’s cold for this time of year, and they’re calling for snow. Just feel my hands.”
              “This happens to be my home,” Clara said hoarsely, “and I ain’t about to feel your hands, or your head either. I don’t see any snow.”
              “Have a drink,” Jack said to Francis.
              “Sure,” Francis said. “I had a bowl of soup about six o’clock but it went right through me. I’m gonna have to eat somethin’ soon.”
              “I don’t care whether you eat or not,” Jack said.
              Jack went to the kitchen and Francis asked Clara: “You feelin’ better?”
              “No.”
              “She’s got the runs,” Helen said.
              “I’ll tell people what I got,” Clara said.
              “She lost her husband this week,” Jack said, returning with two empty tumblers. He