The Tribe

by Bari Wood

  Julie Kassin, who owned this house on Beekman Place, was watching him now. He had a glass of champagne with the mayor, another with the commissioner, keeping as far away from her as possible. But she went on staring as she talked to her guests. She stared at his mouth, then into his eyes. She was over forty, but still handsome; her dress was cut deeply at the neckline and he looked at her smooth pale crease of cleavage before he could stop himself. She saw where his eyes went and smiled at him, and without wanting to he saw himself making love to her in front of the mirrored mantel under the elegant Renoir after the guests were gone. But she was white, and rich, and if anyone found out, he’d be done for. He watched her for a second, wondering if she’d talk about it, then knew she would. Maybe to Sally Barnard or even to the mayor’s fat little wife. He could almost hear her: Darling, it was almost rape. And he’s enormous . . . but gentle, terribly gentle. There’s something about black men, don’t you think? The chief would hear about it, they’d find some way to break him, and in a few months he’d be back in Brooklyn where he’d started. He smiled back at her, and almost imperceptibly he shook his head, then looked around for someone else to talk to.

  Joe Alston was standing under a Matisse on the far side of the room, and when Hawkins saw Julie Kassin heading for him, he crossed the room and started talking to Alston. Alston was black too. He was the Democratic party chairman, and he seemed to like Hawkins.

  Alston got two more glasses of champagne from the circulating waiter and gave one to Hawkins. “We need to talk,” he said, sounding significant.

  At the end of the long room, in front of big windows that looked out over the East River, a black woman was singing on a small platform. She was at the piano, without a mike, and her voice came through the room softly, blending with the talk.

  Saturday night ’n Sunday too . . .

  True love on my mi . . . ind.

  Monday mornin’ good ’n soon,

  White man’s got me gwine . . .

  Alston smiled. “White man’s got me gwine . . .” he said softly.

  Hawkins drank and listened to the song. The woman’s voice was full and sweet and more guests stopped talking to listen.

  Blue Jay pulled a four-­horse plow . . .

  Sparrow, why can’t you . . .

  ’Cause my legs is li’l ’n long

  ’N they might get broke in two . . .

  Nonsense, Hawkins thought. Some old, tribal song that no one remembered the real words to. But Alston was enchanted; he closed his eyes and swayed to the music. He was much shorter than Hawkins, and thinner. His shirt was still crisp, his tie sharp, and his jacket hung on him the way it was supposed to. Hawkins envied him for a second. His own shirt was wrinkled and starting to come out of his pants; his jacket felt so tight he thought if he moved his arms forward too far, the fabric would split up the back, exposing the vest ties that didn’t meet in the back.

  “White man got you goin’ too, Roger?” Alston asked him.

  “Sometimes,” Hawkins said.

  “Don’t let ’em. We’ve got power in this town.”

  “Blacks, cops, Democrats? Who, Joe?”

  Alston laughed. “All of the above,” he said. “A high-­echelon cop like you could do some real good. You look good, you’re reasonably articulate . . . what college did you go to?”

  “None,” Hawkins said.

  “Really?”

  “Well, in some circles that’s a disadvantage,” Alston said. “In others . . .”

  They went to the buffet in the palace-­sized dining room. Alston talked while Hawkins made a thick, fold-over sandwich of pâté and French bread.

  “College or no college, you’ve got currency. The mayor likes you; the governor asked me who you were last month at the commissioner’s. You could help, I mean you are a Democrat. . . .”

  The butler interrupted to tell Hawkins he had a phone call and the caller said it was important. He left Alston, and nodded at Julie Kassin in the hall. She shrugged delicately, as if they had an assignation he was delayed in keeping. The butler led him to an empty room where a Degas pastel hung on a paneled wall. The pastel was of a dancer bending to tie her shoe ribbon, and she looked alive enough to straighten up any second and move out of the picture. He wished Jacob were here to see the pastel. Jacob had probably never been in a house like this. The butler left him alone and he finished his sandwich and picked up the phone.

  “Roger . . .” It was Mo Ableson from the precinct in Brooklyn. He sounded terrible. “Roger, it’s Mo. Rog, sit down.”

  Hawkins knew his mother was dead; he forced the bread down and braced himself against the phone table. Mo said, “Roger, Adam Levy’s dead. . . . He was stabbed. Fifteen, twenty times, Roger. In the gut, the back . . .”

  Feelings started to come—he was never going to see Adam or talk to him again, and when he thought that, tears ran out of his eyes and he sobbed. He remembered that there were people in the hall and some might hear him even over the party noises. He pulled out his handkerchief and pushed it against his mouth. “Jacob,” he mumbled, but Ableson didn’t understand.

  He waited a second, took the handkerchief away from his face, and said as clearly as he could, “Someone’s got to tell Jacob.”

  The chief told him to take the department limousine. It was a gray Cadillac and the chauffeur, Johnny Baer, drove too fast and would do anything to avoid a traffic jam. Tonight he started down Second toward the bridges, but it was tight, so he cut over to the Drive. Hawkins put his head back and tried to think what he was going to say to Jacob Levy. Jacob. Your son is dead. Adam’s dead.

  They passed the Houston Street exit. Years ago, a couple of miles west of here, he’d taken Adam to a bar in the West Village to get laid. They found two pretty white girls, students at the New School. The women took them to a run-­down apartment building on Bank Street, almost to the river, and afterward Hawkins and Adam went to a greasy little restaurant on Bleecker. They’d ordered hamburgers and pecan pie. But when the food came, Adam said he felt too guilty to eat. Hawkins had wanted to say something wise to him—that the guilt would pass, that lust and sadness were natural partners—but Adam was twenty-­eight then, only two years younger than Hawkins, and he was sure Adam knew all that, so he kept quiet and ate Adam’s hamburger and pie. On the way home, though, as they crossed the slick humming grid of the Brooklyn Bridge, Hawkins did say, “I used to feel like you.”

  “When did you stop?” Adam had asked. His thin, pale face turned to Hawkins in the flashing lights of the other cars.

  “When I got married.”

  “You’re married?” Adam sounded upset.

  “No . . . no. She walked out.” Hawkins had turned and smiled at him. “Ran out,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I was too—slow.”

  It was a bad explanation, but he couldn’t think of anything better, until he remembered Pierre Bezuhov. “Like Count Bezuhov in War and Peace . . . you remember him?” Adam nodded.

  “That was me,” Hawkins said, then added, “is me. Big, and slow. No dash.”

  His wife had found a tall, thin man who made book in Jersey. He wore raw silk suits that hung on him like Alston’s did. He had long skinny legs that were always moving, and he wore a heavy ring set with diamonds on one of his long, thin fingers.

  Adam had stared earnestly at Hawkins. “She was a fool.” Then he added in his soft Israeli accent, “I think you very dashing. . . .”

  Adam . . . Adam, Hawkins thought. He started crying again and pressed his damp handkerchief to his eyes. Johnny Baer watched him in the rearview mirror.

  “You okay, Inspector?”

  “No,” Hawkins choked.

  “I’m sorry . . . you want me to . . .”

  “Just drive, Johnny,” Hawkins said gently. “Keep driving.”

  He closed his eyes and didn’t open
them again until they’d reached Flatbush. The street was long and crummy, lined with delis, pizza stands, and discount stores. It didn’t look like New York anymore, but like the strip in any depressed town. A few bums sat in doorways, kids leaned wearily against cars and store windows.

  They left the lit stores behind and swung around Grand Army Plaza and into Nostrand and the neighborhood that had been his beat after he came back from Vietnam.

  They turned off Nostrand at Sterling, a dark, tree-­lined street with short stoops leading to once neat two-­family houses. But now, Hawkins saw litter in the gutters and on the sidewalk. Red-­and-­white-­labeled cans, brown paper bags, silver foil that caught the street light. In the next block the litter was sparser, and in the block after that it almost disappeared. Baer pulled up in front of Levy’s building, and Hawkins got out, his head throbbing as he moved. Someone had scratched initials on the mailboxes; half-­washed-­out graffiti covered the walls and the elevator was broken. He rang the downstairs bell.

  Adam’s wife called, “Adam?” and Hawkins stopped on the stairs and untied his bow tie because he felt like he was choking. Then he went up the stairs.

  She didn’t move when she saw him; he stopped a few steps down from the landing and she raised her hand to her throat.

  “Is Adam with you?” she whispered.

  “No,” he said.

  She went on looking at him, hand at her neck. Then in her eyes he saw that dawning intuition that he’d seen other people have at times like this. The hand dropped to her side and she said without hope, “He’s dead. . . .”

  He nodded and she moaned sickly. He tried to touch her, but she put her arm out straight to keep him off, and she turned back and moaned again. He followed her into the living room where she grabbed the back of the plush easy chair he remembered from the old days. The lace doilies were still on the arms, the place was still too hot, the air too dry. She held the back of the chair and rocked, still moaning. She was six or seven months pregnant, and her legs looked too frail to carry her belly. He thought he could span her ankles with his hand. Her hair was thick, black, and cut short; he could see the point of bone at the back of her neck.

  Jacob Levy came in from the dining room holding a steaming casserole in his hands, which were covered with oven mitts.

  “The kugel!” Levy cried. He saw Hawkins, not Adam. He saw Hawkins’s rumpled tux, and his daughter-in-­law bending in anguish over the chair. It was eight-thirty; Adam should have been home at seven, and he was never late. Levy turned very slowly back to the dining room. He carried the hot dish carefully to the table and put it on the mat, then stood there without moving, his back to Hawkins. His head was bowed over the steam that still came up from the casserole and Hawkins realized that Levy’s hair was entirely white under his yarmulke. The first time he’d seen Levy it was still black.

  He was twenty-­four then and new on the beat. It was spring 1965 and Dutch elm disease was everywhere. The elms on Nostrand were dying, and the city was cutting them down. Hawkins had stopped to watch a man sawing at a limb from a metal box raised on a mechanized arm; the branch snapped as a blast of spring wind came up the street and pulled the branch out of the ropes. Hawkins dodged, but he was too slow and the thick part of the branch grazed his head. He didn’t think it had hit him with any force at all; but he sat down without knowing he was going to. He saw people coming out of the shops and rushing toward him along the street, and felt his own blood run down the side of his face and into the corner of his mouth. He meant to lean back until the dizziness went away, and all of a sudden he was back in Vietnam—Laos, to be exact—in a tree, his parachute hopelessly tangled in the branches, his arm caught up in the shrouds and broken. The B-­52 pilot was dead, he knew the rest of the crew was dead, too, and there was nothing for miles in any direction but the Laotian jungle. He tried to pull free. But the pain made him faint, and when he woke up it was raining. At least he wouldn’t die of thirst, and he raised his head, opened his mouth, and let the fungus-­tasting rain wash down his throat. Later he slept. When he woke, he reached for one of the frondlike leaves of the tree he hung in; he chewed it, then spat it out. It rained again; the pain radiated from his arm to his groin, to his ankle, then it changed direction and focused in his ear and the back of his head. Then it eased, or he numbed, and he fell asleep again. It rained again, the integument of his skin began to break down, and he could feel insects inside his clothes. He fantasized that there were leeches in his boots, and he thought he would rot before he died, hanging there in the fog and rain. As the rest of his consciousness thinned out, the pain got worse, until he wasn’t aware of anything else except that he thought he’d been hanging there for three days. He heard something in the bush; he prayed for a tiger or some wild animal capable of killing him; but from the sounds he knew it was men coming through the jungle and he hoped the VC would kill him quickly, not try to keep him alive as a prize of war. They got closer, and through the fog he saw that they were Americans. They cut him down, laid him back on a stretcher, gave him a shot, and in a few minutes the pain stopped. The end of that pain was the best feeling he’d ever had. It was so good, he risked opening his eyes.

  A middle-­aged man was kneeling next to him on the sidewalk. His face was very pale against his black hair, and his wide-­brimmed black hat threw a shadow over his face which made him look a little unearthly. Good unearthly, like an angel. Sure enough, he smiled, the sweetest smile Hawkins had ever seen, and he said, “Nu, you wake up. Gut.” Then he frowned and asked, “Do you know where you are?”

  Hawkins looked past him up the street. “Nostrand Avenue,” he said.

  The man beamed. “Good, good. Do you know who you are?”

  “Yes,” Hawkins answered.

  “Nu?” the man said.

  “I’m Roger Hawkins.”

  The man looked like Hawkins had just said something brilliant. “I’m Jacob Levy,” he said. He took Hawkins’s hand, and even though he was short and very thin, he helped Hawkins to his feet.

  Levy was forty-­eight then; he was a rabbi and he owned a small bookstore on the corner of Nostrand and President. He had books in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and some in English, and in ten or twelve years, Hawkins read Pushkin, Dostoevski, Goncharov, and Tolstoy. He even read Sholokhov, and Olyesha, who Levy said had offended the government and had disappeared. He read English and American novels, too: Henry James, Dickens, George Eliot. He even bought a set of Gibbon, thinking that if he could read Sholokhov, he could read anything. But three pages of Gibbon put him to sleep, and he never got past the first chapter. Levy confessed that he never had either, but he believed his English, not Gibbon, was to blame.

  Levy was dark and frail-­looking and he never raised his voice or lost his temper. If Hawkins wanted to stop reading something Levy thought was good, Levy would spend hours convincing him to go on. They sat at the folding table in the front of the bookstore, drinking tea, with Isaac Luria always there on a raised chair, his long legs bent up, holding an open book. When Levy left Hawkins alone to take care of a customer, Hawkins would try not to look at Luria. Once he did and caught Luria staring at him. Both men looked away.

  Hawkins stopped at the bookstore every morning and when his shift changed, and every afternoon but Saturday. The little shop turned into a refuge. He would see old men and women who’d been bludgeoned, stabbed, robbed, and ten- or twelve-­year-­old girls who’d been raped, holding bloodstained skirts around them, too frightened and abused to even cry, and he would run to Levy’s. He would fight with his wife and slam out of his house, leaving his wife, mother, sister shouting at the kitchen table and his daughter in her high chair with her eyes wide with shock at all the noise, and he would run to Levy’s. He started bringing Levy gifts of food he searched the city for. Pickles from Max’s on Essex Street, homemade herring from the BG, sturgeon from Zabar’s, and blueberry knishes from Delancey Street.

 
Every June, Levy would go to Israel to see his son and Hawkins dreaded the month. Luria kept the shop open, but Hawkins never went in. He’d walk by and look in the window, and once Luria saw him. The two men stared at each other through the glass and across the rows of books; Luria didn’t wave at him to come in, and after a minute, Hawkins turned away and didn’t go back until Jacob was there again. July first was the best day of the summer. He’d take the squad car out to Kennedy to wait for the El Al flight that brought Jacob home.

  Hawkins had seen pictures of the son, and Levy talked about him, but he stayed shadowy in Hawkins’s mind, and there were times—when the plane had finally landed, and Levy was waving up to him from the customs hall—(that it almost seemed to Hawkins that he was the son Levy was coming home to.

  Hawkins bought his own car and started taking Levy for drives into the city or out on the Island. Luria came with them, and he brought another man, Abe Dworkin, who was as short as Levy and had soft brown eyes and thick, curly hair.

  Levy loved the ocean. He would walk for hours on the beach with Hawkins. People stared at the big black man walking with a little Jew who wore a black skullcap held on his head with a bobby pin, and a white tieless shirt. Levy never rolled up his sleeves, but he would fold over the bottoms of his trousers, take off his shoes, and wade out a few feet into the Sound, looking for shells. Luria and Dworkin stayed behind in whatever shelter was available, and little Dworkin would hold his jacket across his thin chest and complain about the cold. But Luria watched Levy, and if he lost sight of him for a few minutes, he would come after them.

  Contact with Levy and constant reading started to pay off. Hawkins passed the detective exam ahead of Ableson, and he made sergeant; then Elaine left and took their daughter. His sister got married and moved to Weehawken and his mother retreated into TV and born-­again Christianity. He told Levy how lonely he was and Levy had listened, with an expression of pain in his dark eyes.

  Then Hawkins met Alma and, on a hot day in May, when he and Levy were walking on a pebble beach on the Sound side of the Island, he told Levy about her.