The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  *

  Adam Zignelik thought of the Pilgrim Baptist Church and remembered why it had sounded so familiar to him. This was the Chicago landmark, the one-time south side Kehilath Anshe Ma’ariv synagogue. It had become the Pilgrim Baptist Church in 1922. It was in this guise that it became the birthplace of gospel music under the musical directorship of Thomas A. Dorsey and was, in 1946, where some 2500 people made their way inside while outside thousands lined the surrounding streets, all of them there to pay their respects at the funeral of Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champion of the world, the man who defeated every great white hope they could throw at him and a lot more besides. The Staples Singers, Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin had all sung there. Martin Luther King had preached there at the height of the civil rights struggle. That was the Pilgrim Baptist Church to which Henry Border had made a donation in 1946. Now Adam remembered. He kept hearing Border’s voice at the conclusion of the last wire recording at the point where the woman had finished the story of the loss of her daughter. It had sounded as though the man’s voice was held up by only the hum and the crackle of the recording, as though without that surface noise to support it, the voice would not ever have made it on to the wire. And this was the way it sounded in Adam’s mind as it followed him around his Morningside Heights apartment in the middle of the night in the city of orphans.

  ‘What we have heard from this woman … is the story we have heard from everybody … I’m concluding my project in Germany … I want to thank the UNRRA, Jack Thompson from The Chicago Tribune … and … I can’t speak. I don’t remember the names … now … because I’m too emotional … this woman’s report. I’m concluding this project. The automobile is waiting. I am going to Frankfurt. Who will sit in judgement over all this? And who is going to judge my work? … Who is going to judge … me? IIT wire recording. Leaving tonight for Paris. This project is concluded.’

  *

  A lot of people were in attendance at the Workmen’s Circle cemetery in the very late winter of 1982 when they buried Jake Zignelik following his sudden heart attack; more black folks than Jews as far as William McCray could tell. This might have been surprising to a casual onlooker at a Jewish cemetery, especially because by then relations between African Americans and Jews had passed what some might have called their golden age. But anyone who had really known Jake Zignelik would not have been so surprised. At the time of his death he was still director-counsel of the LDF and he had socialised with African Americans as much as if not more than with Jews or with anybody else. The frozen ground made it hard for his son to navigate the shovel around the soil to begin the process of covering the plain pine wood coffin dictated by Jewish tradition. William McCray stood near the grave and watched the stick of a kid, Jake’s son, Adam, trying to keep himself composed long enough to get a few shovels’ worth of soil on to the coffin. The kid was sixteen and had just got off a plane from Australia. The cemetery was crowded but the kid, Jake’s only child, knew hardly anyone and when he heard the first ‘thud’ of hard earth hit the coffin William McCray thought he might be about to buckle at the knees and collapse in the grave on top of his father’s coffin.

  That’s when William’s son, Charles, who had been standing at the graveside beside his father, caught Adam and hugged him, held him very tight. This was Charles’ first Jewish funeral but it hadn’t been the first for William and, later, Charles asked his father whether Jake had died with so little money that he couldn’t afford more than the most rudimentary pine box for a coffin, a coffin so lacking in ornamentation that the best that could be said for it was that it was fit for its service. William explained that while Jake didn’t die a wealthy man by any means, it wasn’t impecuniousness that explained the pine box coffin. It was Jewish tradition, he explained, that all people, irrespective of their wealth or status or achievements, should leave the world as equals before their Creator.

  William McCray found himself thinking about Jake’s funeral as he walked on the grounds of Columbia University. He made his way past the library towards Fayerweather Hall where his son was Chair of History and it wasn’t until he was seated outside his son’s office that he retraced the route by which his memory had arrived at Jake’s funeral. Usually at this time he met his son for a cup of coffee, a chat and, depending on the weather and on how he was feeling, maybe a walk. Today though he had a medical appointment and, as medical appointments always did these days, it focused his mind on his own mortality. Additionally, he’d heard from Charles that Adam had been to Chicago to follow up some information from his veteran friend in Boston that he, William, had passed on to him. Perhaps Charlie knew what had come of it. What was going to happen to Adam? He should never have let Diana go. These were the paths taken by William’s mind that afternoon to arrive at Jake Zignelik’s funeral. He could still hear that skinny kid trying to get through Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer.

  ‘Hello, Mr McCray,’ said the young woman warmly who was either his son’s secretary or his personal assistant, as they now called them, or else she was a secretary all the department could call on. Who the hell knew what she did when she wasn’t greeting him cheerfully?

  ‘Lovely to see you. How are you today, Mr McCray?’

  ‘Fine, thank you, and you?’ William could never remember her name.

  ‘Your son has just stepped out of the office but he isn’t far,’ she said before whispering, ‘I think he’s gone to the bathroom but he won’t be long,’ before adding more audibly, ‘He’s locked the office and he has his coat on.’

  ‘His coat?’ William enquired.

  ‘Oh, I always have to remind him to take his coat. Did you?’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘When he’s going out,’ she explained.

  ‘He’s going out?’

  ‘You have a medical appointment today, don’t you, sir?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Downtown isn’t it? He asked me to cancel his appointments. He’s going with you.’

  It was night again. In Co-op City, the Bronx, Lamont Williams’ grandmother looked over with a discomfort she would have found difficult to articulate at a large and sturdy-looking umbrella with a shiny black handle. Then she looked over at her grandson who was reading the paper. She hoped her granddaughter would never ask to see the umbrella she had bought for her and given her at the steak restaurant off Union Square. At least, she contented herself, she hadn’t lost the envelope that contained Sonia’s card. Putting the money from its envelope in her purse, she looked over at her grandson and hoped with all her might, to the point of mouthing a brief impromptu prayer, that he was going to be all right. He noticed her looking at him. He saw her lips moving without any sound coming out and he asked, ‘You okay, Grandma? Can I get you something?’

  *

  Many hours later that night, a few miles south across the Harlem River in his Morningside Heights apartment, Adam Zignelik was unable to sleep. He could not quieten his mind. Deciding to take a sleeping pill, he went into the bathroom and, opening the mirror cabinet, saw Diana’s comb, the comb she had left that held strands of her hair. He picked it up, looked at it, and gripped it tight till the skin on the palm of his hand was white and indented. He didn’t want to put it down. He didn’t see why he ever should put it down. Looking at it there in his hand and at his face in the mirror, he was overwhelmed by a wave of self-loathing, panic and a sense of loss that, in staccato bursts, flushed the air from his lungs till the moisture in his sleep-starved eyes formed a vitreous glaze that mercifully blurred his reflection in the mirror. Everything else, though, everything else in his life, every regret, every flaw, every mistake he’d ever made was clear, all 3 am-sharp, and he gripped the comb still tighter. Where were the sleeping pills?

  ‘Did you take them?’

  Diana’s reply was drowned out by Henry Border’s anguish through the crackle and hum Marvin Cadden hadn’t yet been able to eradicate. ‘Who will sit in judgement over all this … And
who is going to judge my work? … Who is going to judge – ?’

  part seven

  ‘ELISE … ELISE!’

  Henry Border stood at the bottom of the staircase and called up to her but there was no answer. The once-grand house had been built at the turn of the century when the land around there could be snatched up for a song. A number of similar places had been built just in time for the rumour to calcify into the incontrovertible fact that the Northwestern Elevated Railroad was coming to Uptown. It was a large house with more rooms than they needed just for themselves. There had been a number of reasons Henry Border had chosen it at the time he and his daughter had moved in but a major attraction had been the extra rooms that he had planned to sublet to help with the rent and perhaps even to help with their other living expenses. There had been a shifting cast of subtenants for a time but the war had eventually taken them all away and by the summer of 1946 when he and Elise were living there alone the house had almost none of the grandeur it had once had.

  For such a reserved and, by nature, private man, subletting had been a necessary accommodation to the uncomfortable economic realities from which he tried to shelter his daughter as he sought to make his way in America. By both his instruction and example his daughter had learned to find a self-contained richness within the walls of the room she had been allocated when they had moved in years earlier. She could lose herself in her books – her own or from libraries – or even in her school homework. It was perhaps in one of those books that her mind sojourned that summer’s day when the sound of her father’s voice eventually reached her through her closed bedroom door. Her father, who could appear formal to the point of being curt to strangers, was not usually this way with her. If anything, even his brusquest admonishments were almost always delivered as appeals to reason and had, if not a sugar coating, then at least the flavour of cinnamon. But the tenor of the voice that found her through her now-opened bedroom door, and which had grown ever more urgent with the mounting evidence of its impotence, suggested to her that her father was calling out to her in the presence of another person. When she got from her bedroom to the top of the stairs and looked down she saw that she was right. Standing beside him at the bottom of the stairs was a black woman she had never seen before.

  ‘Elise, I want you to meet Miss Ford.’

  ‘How do you do, Miss Ford?’ she said, shaking the black woman’s hand. The woman glanced down at the twelve-and-a-half-year-old girl’s hand clasping hers and said with a tentative smile, ‘Please, miss, call me Callie, miss.’

  ‘Callie?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Please call me Elise, Callie … or Elly, if you like, or Lissenka, my father sometimes calls me that … Sort of foreign, Polish, I think,’ Elise said shyly, briefly lowering her head while she tried to work out who this woman was and what she was doing there.

  Henry Border ushered his daughter and Callie Ford further into the living room and bade them sit down.

  ‘Miss Ford is going to be staying with you.’

  ‘With me?’ Elise said, surprised that his sentence permitted the possibility of a separation from her father.

  ‘Yes, when I go to Europe. Why don’t I make us all a cup of tea while you two get to know one another? You drink tea, Miss Ford?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you, Dr Border.’

  He left the room for the kitchen and Elise smiled nervously as her feet moved back and forth slightly in what was the most immediate and obvious sign of her rising nervousness. Her father had mentioned a trip to Europe for his work. In fact, he had mentioned it many times but it had seemed like it was never really ever going to happen.

  ‘You at school, miss?’

  ‘Yes,’ Elise said, continuing to smile. ‘I mean not at the moment though … summer and all.’ She noticed what her feet were doing and the movement gave way to embarrassment for having been caught out being a nervous twelve-and-a-half-year-old girl. Adults didn’t move their feet that way in company and she was grown-up enough to know that.

  Callie Ford had worked as a housekeeper before, originally in the south where she’d been born and raised and then for a time in Detroit before moving to Chicago. The work had involved her taking care of other people’s children even when she had still been a child herself. So it wasn’t the child-minding that made her every bit as anxious as the fidgeting girl on the couch with the jet-black, wavy, shoulder-length hair and huge black eyes trying to smile her way through this situation, a girl with skin the colour of alabaster, white as if it had never been outside, had never seen a minute of this or any other summer. Callie Ford had thought the position was for a visiting housekeeper. She hadn’t known how many days a week she was going to be required and, depending on the pay, she would have been prepared to come every day. But she hadn’t realised the doctor wanted her to stay there overnight too. Was that really what he had in mind, just her and the girl in that otherwise empty house?

  ‘Here we are … tea for everyone!’ Henry Border said with a hurried and forced bonhomie as he placed a tray down on the table in front of Callie Ford’s chair and the couch.

  ‘Do you take milk, Miss Ford? Or perhaps sugar? I’m afraid we have no cake.’

  They were treating her like she was a guest, not someone they were interviewing to be the help, but still she couldn’t stay there.

  ‘Perhaps she takes both, Daddy.’

  ‘Both what?’ Henry Border asked his daughter.

  ‘Both milk and sugar. Do you, Callie?’

  Callie Ford looked at her, the girl with her jet-black wavy hair and eyes ever wider, the same colour as her hair, almost a woman but not quite yet. What could she say to this girl?

  ‘Milk and sugar, please,’ Callie replied hesitantly.

  She was twenty-nine years old. Since moving from Detroit three years earlier she had lived in a series of wooden tenements on the south side of Chicago until moving into one of the rooms in one of the 176 apartments that housed more than two thousand black men, women and children inside the grey brick monolith that took up half the block between State and Dearborn streets just north of 34th Street known as the Mecca Flats. She needed money as badly as anyone she knew there and she knew a lot of people, or at least had met some and had seen the rest living out their lives, many in public, right there in front of her; a mass of people herded together by their circumstances. She saw them, some in families of varying and changing sizes, some of them alone, some old, some young and some of an indeterminate age that kept increasing as you looked, their youth draining from their bodies. She saw them trying to help one another, giving to each other, saw them coming home from work or going out to look for it, saw them in various states of undress, some hollering, laughing, spitting, drinking, fighting, cursing, loving, smoking, dancing, singing, starving, bleeding, stealing, begging, washing up and sweating; all of it on top of her. But Callie Ford didn’t know anyone who lived in the part of town this old foreign white man and his daughter with her various names did. And she certainly had never before been there herself.

  She had worked for women before but never for a man. Women could grind you down mercilessly with the hours they would make you work. From her own experience and from the stories of other black women who worked as domestics she knew that sometimes the ladies of the house didn’t care how young or old you were or what shape you were in. They could work you worse than a mule. Even a mule got to sleep but in some houses you might be expected to be on call twenty-four hours a day.

  Men, however, harboured their own dangers. Callie had once been chased by a boss’s drunken husband. She had been asleep at the time and so half undressed. The first she knew of it she was feeling warm licks of this strange man’s flammable breath on her face and woke to a nightmare feeling his drunken hand inside her nightgown fumbling for her breast. She had got out from under him, out of bed still half asleep, and had run out of the room and down the hall. Was it better to keep quiet about it in the morning? Would it happen again? Would the wom
an blame her, disbelieve her or would she recognise the husband from the details of the assault but make Callie pack her few belongings and leave anyway? On another occasion back when she was barely out of childhood and still in the south, a woman’s son had come back from boarding school for the weekend only to make rough advances when the rest of the house was asleep. The son, who was growing stronger with each visit home, thought of only one thing. Fortunately he wasn’t there that much.

  But this man here didn’t seem that kind of man. It wasn’t so much that he was foreign, old or educated, although perhaps that helped. Not that she could know. She’d never met anyone like this. He wore a three-piece suit though it was the beginning of summer. She knew he was a doctor of some kind but, as he hastily showed her around the house, he appeared to need a doctor himself. In his hurry to show her each room he quickly became out of breath. In the kitchen pantry, and again in his bedroom, he didn’t take the opportunity to see how close she would let him get. It looked as if the thought had never occurred to him. He was exceedingly polite but he seemed like he wanted to get the tour of the house over and done. His explanation of the workings of the house didn’t extend beyond pointing out what she could already see just standing there. What could she see? It was a big house with many rooms that would take a long time to dust but it was almost empty. There was no one living there but the old man and the girl, whom at first she had mistaken for the doctor’s granddaughter. He was offering her a wage that exceeded the market rate. Why? Was he too old or too foreign to know the going rate? Well, she thought, it was a rate set unofficially by a marketplace of white women and perhaps the only woman in his life was the little black-haired dolly sitting there lonely on the couch.

  Henry Border and his daughter Elise waited for her to say something. She had survived on her instincts and in the faded glory of that living room her instincts were telling her that this was possibly the best or at least the easiest job she would ever be offered. Unless she was missing something, it was the kind of job no one in her position, no one in their right mind, would turn down. But she was going to have to turn it down much as it would hurt her, and it would hurt her a lot. It would hurt her for days and even weeks back in the foyer, on the stairs and in her room back in the Mecca as she remembered the chance she’d had. But there was no way around it. She couldn’t possibly stay there as the Borders’ live-in housekeeper. They looked at her expectantly. No, it was out of the question, just not possible. Who would take care of her son?