They got into a taxi and started uptown. Vivaldo sat beside her, his hands on his knees, staring straight ahead. She watched the streets. Traffic was heavy, but rolling; the cab kept swerving and jerking, slowing down and speeding up but managing not to stop. Then, at Thirty-fourth Street, the red light brought it to a halt. They were surrounded by a violence of cars, great trucks, green buses lumbering across town, and boys, dark boys, pushing wooden wagons full of clothes. The people on the sidewalks overflowed into the streets. Women in heavy coats moved heavily, carrying large packages and enormous handbags— for Thanksgiving was over but signs proclaimed the dwindling number of shopping days to Christmas. Men, relatively unburdened, pursuing the money which Christmas cost, hurried around and past the women; boys in ducktail haircuts swung over the cold black asphalt as though it were a dance floor. Outside the window, as close to her as Vivaldo, one of the colored boys stopped his wagon, lit a cigarette, and laughed. The taxi could not move and the driver began cursing. Cass lit a cigarette and handed it to Vivaldo. She lit another for herself. Then, abruptly, the taxi jerked forward.
The driver turned on his radio and the car was filled suddenly with the sound of a guitar, a high, neighing voice, and a chorus, crying, “love me!” The other words were swallowed in the guttural moans of the singer, which were nearly as obscene as the driver’s curses had been, but these two words kept recurring.
“My whole family thinks I’m a bum,” said Vivaldo. “I’d say they’ve given me up, except I know they’re scared to death of what I’ll do next.”
She said nothing. He looked out of the cab window. They were crossing Columbus Circle.
“Sometimes— like today,” he said, “I think they’re probably right and I’ve just been kidding myself. About everything.”
The walls of the park now closed on either side of them and beyond these walls, through speed and barren trees, the walls of hotels and apartment buildings.
“My family thinks I married beneath me,” she said. “Beneath them.” And she smiled at him and crushed out her cigarette on the floor.
“I don’t think I ever saw my father sober,” he said, “not in all these years. He used to say, ‘I want you to tell me the truth now, always tell me the truth.’ And then, if I told him the truth, he’d slap me up against the wall. So, naturally, I didn’t tell him the truth, I’d just tell him any old lie, I didn’t give a shit. The last time I went over to the house to see them I was wearing my red shirt, and he said, ‘What’s the matter, you turned queer?’ Jesus.”
She lit another cigarette and she listened. There was a horseback rider on the bridle path, a pale girl with a haughty, bewildered face. Cass had time to think, unwillingly, as the rider vanished forever from sight, that it might have been herself, many years ago, in New England.
“That neighborhood was terrific,” Vivaldo said, “you had to be tough, they’d kill you if you weren’t, people were dying around us all the time, for nothing. I wasn’t really much interested in hanging out with most of those kids, they bored me. But they scared me, too. I couldn’t stand watching my father. He’s such an awful coward. He spent all his time pretending— well, I don’t know what he was pretending, that everything was great, I guess— while his wife was going crazy in the hardware store we’ve got. And he knew that neither me nor my brother had any respect for him. And his daughter was turning into the biggest cock teaser going. She finally got married, I hate to think what her husband must have to promise her each time she lets him have a little bit.”
He was silent for a moment. Then, “Of course, he’s an asshole, too. Lord. I used to like to just get on a bus and go to some strange part of town by myself and just walk around or go to the movies by myself or just read or just goof. But, no. You had to be a man where I come from, and you had to prove it, prove it all the time. But I could tell you things” He sighed. “Well, my Dad’s still there, sort of helping to keep the liquor industry going. Most of the kids I knew are dead or in jail or on junk. I’m just a bum; I’m lucky.”
She listened because she knew that he was going back over it, looking at it, trying to put it all together, to understand it, to express it. But he had not expressed it. He had left something of himself back there on the streets of Brooklyn which he was afraid to look at again.
“One time,” he said, “we got into a car and drove over to the Village and we picked up this queer, a young guy, and we drove him back to Brooklyn. Poor guy, he was scared green before we got halfway there but he couldn’t jump out of the car. We drove into this garage, there were seven of us, and we made him go down on all of us and then we beat the piss out of him and took all his money and took his clothes and left him lying on that cement floor, and, you know, it was winter.” He looked over at her, looked directly at her for the first time that morning. “Sometimes I still wonder if they found him in time, or if he died, or what.” He put his hands together and looked out of the window. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m still the same person who did those things— so long ago.”
No. It was not expressed. She wondered why. Perhaps it was because Vivaldo’s recollections in no sense freed him from the things recalled. He had not gone back into it— that time, that boy; he regarded it with a fascinated, even romantic horror, and he was looking for a way to deny it.
Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world’s experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed, the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness; and she saw, with a dreadful reluctance, why this effort was so rare. Reluctantly, because she then realized that Richard had bitterly disappointed her by writing a book in which he did not believe. In that moment she knew, and she knew that Richard would never face it, that the book he had written to make money represented the absolute limit of his talent. It had not really been written to make money— if only it had been! It had been written because he was afraid, afraid of things dark, strange, dangerous, difficult, and deep.
I don’t care, she told herself, quickly. And: It’s not his fault if he’s not Dostoievski, I don’t care. But whether or not she cared didn’t matter. He cared, cared tremendously, and he was dependent on her faith in him.
“Isn’t it strange,” she said, suddenly, “that you should be remembering all these things now!”
“Maybe,” he said, after a moment, “it’s because of her. When I went up there, the day she called me to say Rufus was dead— I don’t know— I walked through that block and I walked in that house and it all seemed— I don’t know— familiar.” He turned his pale, troubled face toward her but she felt that he was staring at the high, hard wall which stood between himself and his past. “I don’t just mean that I used to spend a lot of time in Harlem,” and he looked away, nervously, “I was hardly ever there in the daytime anyway. I mean, there were the same kids on the block that used to be on my block— they were colored but they were the same, really the same— and, hell, the hallways have the same stink, and everybody’s, well, trying to make it but they know they haven’t got much of a chance. The same old women, the same old men— maybe they’re a little bit more alive— and I walked into that house and they were just sitting there, Ida and her mother and her father, and there were some other people there, relatives, maybe, and friends. I don’t know, no one really spoke to me except Ida and she didn’t say much. And they all looked at me as though— well, as though I had done it— and, oh, I wanted so bad to take that girl in my arms and kiss that look off her face and make her know that I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t do it, whoever was doing it was doing it to me, too.” He was crying, silently, and he bent forward, hiding his face with one long hand. “I know I failed him, but I loved him, too, and nobody there wanted to know that. I kept thinking, They’re colored and I’m white but the same things have happened, really the same thi
ngs, and how can I make them know that?”
“But they didn’t,” she said, “happen to you because you were white. They just happened. But what happens up here”— and the cab came out of the park; she stretched her hands, inviting him to look— “happens because they are colored. And that makes a difference.” And, after a moment, she dared to add, “You’ll be kissing a long time, my friend, before you kiss any of this away.”
He looked out of the window, drying his eyes. They had come out on Lenox Avenue, though their destination was on Seventh; and nothing they passed was unfamiliar because everything they passed was wretched. It was not hard to imagine that horse carriages had once paraded proudly up this wide avenue and ladies and gentlemen, ribboned, be-flowered, brocaded, plumed, had stepped down from their carriages to enter these houses which time and folly had so blasted and darkened. The cornices had once been new, had once gleamed as brightly as now they sulked in shame, all tarnished and despised. The windows had not always been blind. The doors had not always brought to mind the distrust and secrecy of a city long besieged. At one time people had cared about these houses— that was the difference; they had been proud to walk on this Avenue; it had once been home, whereas now it was prison.
Now, no one cared: this indifference was all that joined this ghetto to the mainland. Now, everything was falling down and the owners didn’t care; no one cared. The beautiful children in the street, black-blue, brown, and copper, all with a gray ash on their faces and legs from the cold wind, like the faint coating of frost on a window or a flower, didn’t seem to care, that no one saw their beauty. Their elders, great, trudging, black women, lean, shuffling men, had taught them, by precept or example, what it meant to care or not to care: whatever precepts were daily being lost, the examples remained, all up and down the street. The trudging women trudged, paused, came in and out of dark doors, talked to each other, to the men, to policemen, stared into shop windows, shouted at the children, laughed, stopped to caress them. All the faces, even those of the children, held a sweet or poisonous disenchantment which made their faces extraordinarily definite, as though they had been struck out of stone. The cab sped uptown, past men in front of barber shops, in front of barbeque joints, in front of bars; sped past side streets, long, dark, noisome, with gray houses leaning forward to cut out the sky; and in the shadow of these houses, children buzzed and boomed, as thick as flies on flypaper. Then they turned off the Avenue, west, crawled up a long, gray street. They had to crawl, for the street was choked with unhurrying people and children kept darting out from between the cars which were parked, for the length of the street, on either side. There were people on the stoops, people shouting out of windows, and young men peered indifferently into the slow-moving cab, their faces set ironically and their eyes unreadable.
“Did Rufus ever have you up here?” she asked. “To visit his family, I mean.”
“Yes,” said Vivaldo. “A long time ago. I had almost forgotten it. I had forgotten it until Ida reminded me. She was in pigtails then, the cutest little colored girl you ever saw. She was about fifteen. Rufus and I took her to Radio City.”
She smiled at his description of Ida, and at his tone, which was unconsciously erotic. The cab crossed the Avenue and stopped on the far corner of the block they had come through, where the chapel stood. Two women stood on the steps of the chapel, talking together in low tones. As Cass watched and Vivaldo paid the driver, a young man joined them and they went inside.
Suddenly, with a curse, she put her hand on her uncovered head.
“Vivaldo,” she said, “I can’t go in there.”
He stared at her blankly, while the taxi driver paused in the act of handing him his change.
“What’re you talking about?” he asked. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing. Nothing. But a woman’s head has to be covered. I can’t go in there without a hat.”
“Of course you can!” But at the same moment he remembered that he had never in his life seen a bareheaded woman in a church.
“No, no, I can’t. They’re all wearing hats, all of them. It would be an insult if I didn’t, it would be like coming here in slacks.” She paused. “It’s a church, Vivaldo, it’s a funeral, it would be an insult.”
He had already conceded her point and he stared at her helplessly. The cab driver still held the change and watched Vivaldo with a careful lack of expression.
“Well, haven’t you got a scarf, or something?”
“No.” She dug in her handbag, the pockets of her coat, close to tears. “No. Nothing.”
“Listen, buddy,” the driver said.
Vivaldo’s face lightened. “What about your belt? Can’t you tie that around your head? It’s black.”
“Oh, no. That’ll never work. Besides— they’d know it was my belt.”
“Try it.”
To end the argument and prove her point, she took off her belt and tied it around her head. “You see? It’ll never work.”
“What’re you people going to do?” the driver asked. “I ain’t got all day.”
“I’ll have to buy something,” Cass said.
“We’ll be late.”
“Well, you go on in. I’ll just drive to a store somewhere and I’ll come right back.”
“Ain’t no stores around here, lady,” the driver said.
“Of course there are stores somewhere near here,” Cass said, sharply. “You go on in, Vivaldo; I’ll come right back. What’s the address here?”
Vivaldo gave her the address and said, “You’ll have to go to 125th Street, that’s the only place I know where there are any stores.” Then he took his change from the driver and tipped him. “The lady wants to go to 125th street,” he said.
The driver turned in his seat resignedly, and turned on his meter. “You go on in, Vivaldo,” Cass said again. “I’m sorry. I’ll be right back.”
“You have enough money on you?”
“Yes. Go on in.”
He got out of the cab, looking helpless and annoyed, and turned into the chapel as the cab pulled away. The driver left her at the corner of 125th Street and Eighth Avenue and she realized, as she hurried down the wide, crowded street, that she was in a strange, unnameable state, neither rage nor tears but close to both. One small, lone, white woman hurrying along 125th Street on a Saturday morning was apparently a very common sight, for no one looked at her at all. She did not see any stores with ladies hats in the window. But she was hurrying too fast and looking too hard. If she did not pull herself together, she might very well spend the day wandering up and down this street. For a moment she thought to stop one of the women— one of the women whose faces she watched as though they contained something it was necessary for her to learn— to ask directions. Then she realized that she was mysteriously afraid: afraid of these people, these streets, the chapel to which she must return. She forced herself to walk more slowly. She saw a store and entered it.
A Negro girl came toward her, a girl with red, loosely waved hair, who wore a violently green dress and whose skin was a kind of dusty copper.
“Can I help you?”
The girl was smiling, the same smile— as Cass insisted to herself— that all salesgirls, everywhere, have always worn. This smile made Cass feel poor and shabby indeed. But now she felt it more vehemently than she had ever felt it before. And though she was beginning to shake with a thoroughly mysterious anger, she knew that her dry, aristocratic sharpness, however well it had always worked downtown, would fail of its usual effect here.
“I want,” she stammered, “to see a hat.”
Then she remembered that she hated hats and never wore them. The girl, whose smile had clearly been taught her by masters, looked as though she sold at least one hat, every Saturday morning, to a strange, breathless, white woman.
“Will you come with me?” she asked.
“Well— no,” Cass said, suddenly— and the girl turned, impeccably made up eyebrows arched— “I mean, I don’t
really want a hat.” Cass tried to smile; she wanted to run. Silence had fallen over the shop. “I think I’d just like to get a scarf. Black”— and how the word seemed to roll through the shop!— “for my head,” she added, and felt that in another moment they would call the police. And she had no way of identifying herself.
“Oh,” said the girl. Cass had managed to wipe away the smile. “Marie!” she called, sharply, “will you take care of this lady?”
She walked away and another, older and plainer girl, who was also, however, very carefully dressed and made-up, came over to Cass, wearing a very different smile: a bawdy, amused smile, full of complicity and contempt. Cass felt herself blushing. The girl pulled out boxes of scarves. They all seemed sleazy and expensive, but she was in no position to complain. She took one, paid for it, tied it around her head, and left. Her knees were shaking. She managed to find a cab at the corner and, after fighting a small duel with herself, gave the driver the address of the chapel: she had really wanted to tell him to take her home.
The chapel was small and there were not many people in it. She entered as silently as she could, but heads turned at her entrance. An elderly man, probably an usher, hurried silently toward her, but she sat down in the first seat she saw, in the very last row, near the door. Vivaldo was sitting further up, near the middle; the only other white person, as far as she could tell, in the place. People sat rather scattered from each other— in the same way, perhaps, that the elements of Rufus’ life had been scattered— and this made the chapel seem emptier than it was. There were many young people there, Rufus’ friends, she supposed, the boys and girls who had grown up with him. In the front row sat six figures, the family: no amount of mourning could make Ida’s proud back less proud. Just before the family, just below the altar, stood the bier, dominating the place, mother of pearl, closed.
Another Country Page 12
