by Sarah Blake
When he came back he was quits with whatever debt he thought he’d owed. He’d paid his dues. He came back, roaring. He got a summer job at a brokerage firm where a college classmate worked, only meaning to get his feet wet, but discovered himself to be a natural at numbers, and more important, at getting himself through a door and into the next room. The summer had led to a year, at the end of which he found himself at Harvard Business School.
“I see exactly who you are,” his advisor had chuckled over lunch. “I see exactly where you are going.”
“Where is that, sir?”
“Right to the top, I’d wager. Though the question remains, Levy—do you want to be a lamb among lions, or a lion among lambs?”
“Sir?”
“Choose, Levy. Choose where you land.”
Len understood. Seek the softest target and take your best shot. When he’d graduated from Harvard a month ago, he turned down the Rothschilds, choosing instead to work at Milton Higginson and Co., a white-shoe firm with a pedigree on its masthead stretching back to the Mayflower and a reputation for quiet and solid investments, without advertisement of any kind. If you don’t know about us, the joke went around the halls at the firm, then you don’t need us. But Len had every intention for them to know all about him, and soon. Len intended to be the lion.
A girl on the opposite corner paused, her foot hovering on the curb. A taxicab slid past, pushing the yellow light into red, the cabbie leaning on his horn like a scold, forcing her back onto the curb, flushing. Len watched her hand brush her hair into place and thought again of the girl in Penn Station, the toss of that dark head and the salute before she had collapsed. He’d started off at a run, pushing through people coming down the stairs. And then, when she was lying there, so still on the floor, watched over by her sister. Why had he taken her hand? For those few minutes, he had felt her fingers resting under his, like a bird he’d caught. For those few minutes, he’d wanted nothing more.
The light changed back to green, and Len stepped off the curb and into the throng on Broadway, whose asphalt line planed all the way to the tip of Manhattan, down into the Village, where he was headed, where the lights were coming on in the cafés and bars, though it was not yet dark and the light in the sky still burned.
* * *
ON THE CORNER of Hudson and Bank Street, the Italian grocer pulled the guard down over his shopwindow and the metal banged his good night on the pavement. The heat of the day still draped a light wool over the streets, and girls in their summer dresses flickered in and out of doorways, under men’s arms, or tilted away, teasing—so that the men wanted to reach out and touch them, as if they were in a story. And it was a story, a story of a summer evening and the city that roared above the small pockets into which anyone could stumble and find quiet and a cold beer.
Moss Milton was sitting where he always did at the back of the White Horse Tavern, watching the table of writers through the haze of smoke. The loose federation of men, leaning one toward another, speaking what he was too far from to overhear, leaning in, and then away, syncopated the smoke; their bursts of tight talk and laughter, a pattern. Moss watched them as if he were invisible, indeed was invisible, just another young man in horn-rimmed glasses, clean-cut, his thick black hair parted on the side.
If he could get all this into a song. This smoke and the talk on a summer evening, the dark wood of the tavern walls rising around the hot, flushed faces. Men with their sleeves rolled above the elbow, one of them punching his point out with a cigarette. Fellowship. One voice, pure and lovely, a single tenor in the air, then another joining, the two weaving, then one. A third voice, higher by a third, in and out flashing like a bird through the trees of the other two. Then a fourth. A cappella. Men coming together and moving apart lightly, but sure-footed and strong—everything possible, everything flying on the wings of a song. If a song could manage all this, could catch you so that you stopped where you were to listen, and then, listening, could hear the strands being woven, twined and tuned until that silver lane—the ten chords where all the voices, all the notes combined—opened out for one bar, for two, for a wide mile of sound riding forward on those bars, then everything really might be as possible as it seemed to Moss these days. These days the country seemed poised, holding its breath, like a diver at the top of a dive. It would be a song for America—for this moment, right now—and he could almost hear the notes in his head.
Almost. The two-beat word sounded. He shut his eyes and tossed the last inch of the whiskey down. Too late. Almost.
He had money and an old name. He had everything one is supposed to have to launch forward in the world made of frame houses and evening trains from the city and dry martinis before dinner and the well-turned curls of perfumed wives. He had suits cut from good cloth. And he was unforgivably wild with protest. His future lay before him like a brick cell appearing—solid, ineluctable—in the middle of what had up until then been an open meadow. It was the last summer, the last true summer, for him. In the fall would come the end of all this singing. There was no way around it that he could see.
The rim of the chair met him as he leaned his long frame back and crossed his arms. For the past few months, he had been going along cheerfully enough, putting on the suit when it was asked for, meeting his father at Milton Higginson for lunch once a week, all the while certain that something would give—something had to give—one of his songs would get picked up, published, or better, one of these guys he knew down here at one of the joints would play one of his tunes. Though tonight, that seemed more and more like a dream, and he was a fool for dreaming.
The picture in front of him shifted almost audibly as a slight brunette nudged her way into the group at the table. The men at the end hailed her, one of them turned and grabbed the back of an empty chair, shoving it toward her, the legs grating on the tile. She smiled at him, teased another one, and sank into the chair, talking all the while, her bright, high tones crossing over the top of the talk to Moss, like froth on the roll of waves.
He’d read her pieces in the Voice, and they were not froth at all, her sentences arrowed clean and clear. Moss thought she’d come in once or twice with Mailer, who wasn’t sitting at the center of the table as he often was. And Moss was glad. Men like Norman Mailer changed the contours of a song and flattened the middle parts, the sustaining notes that traveled down the track, carrying the pattern forward.
Moss got to his feet and wandered through the press of hot drinkers, forward toward the bar on the wave of voices and laughter. There was no birdsong as beautiful as this, he decided, wondering in the same moment whether he could get it down in a score. He lifted his glass and nodded to the bartender, one more. Birdsong and laughter. The one not the other. The one not a reflection or a repetition. The skein. And there, outlined against the evening outside, a girl hesitated at the threshold of the tavern considering where to alight. A heron, he thought, watching her. On the rocks at the end of Crockett’s Island. A high treble. Like his sister Joanie, he thought.
Behind the girl, just off the sidewalk, a slight Negro man was pointing one of the new Polaroid cameras at the long table of dockworkers ringing several pitchers of beer, set outside the bar. His white shirt was brilliant in the twilight. But the men at the table didn’t see him; they were pulled tight into the table, making fun of another man, one of their own, who sat, elbows on the table, grinning, nodding—going along, but coiled, Moss could see. It was a game of chicken. Would he crack, or would they stop? Moss drank. The goading went on. The man kept smiling from where he sat.
Moss watched, the moment building to its crescendo, thinking without thinking how he would score this—legato and piano—step by step. The light in the sky shifted slowly down.
The black man waited with his camera, still unnoticed by the group. Moss frowned. He was familiar somehow, though Moss couldn’t think how.
Suddenly—game over—the cornered worker rose to his feet, roaring, pushed to the end of the teasing at last,
and the others sprang up also, smiling, crowing, bloodlusty, ready to fight, loving the fight, erupting—and one of these caught sight of the black man and pointed at him, the anger turned.
The camera went off with a flash. The whole table’s attention shifted, and now there was angry shouting as two of the men pushed back their chairs and stood.
Moss put down his drink.
The black man lowered his camera.
No one moved. Was he daring the men?
His eyes on the table, the photographer pulled the picture from off its roller in the waiting quiet.
Jesus, Moss thought.
“Sit down,” said the big man who had started it all, as he sat back down at the table.
“Sit down,” he said to the two still on their feet.
Moss watched as the black man stepped off the curb, walking backward, keeping his eye on the group, moving away, and then—as no one followed—turned his back on them, his wrist shaking dry the picture in his hand.
* * *
REG PAULING WALKED away smiling, seeing nothing, the adrenaline surging through him, carrying him past his feet, his shaking hands, the relieved laughter; he could have gotten himself hurt, he knew it, and the fear had held him, grabbed him, and let him go. Right now the blood in him was so strong, he could have run laughing all the way down to the tip of the island. He’d gotten it back there. He’d gotten it down in film—whatever it was, that moment inside these workers’ heads when they saw him. He’d gotten the look. He’d caught the shift in the one man’s eyes when he’d seen Reg and seen Negro and put him away, closed the box and pushed it back in its line, the handler inside his head coming forward.
The moment Reg wanted to capture, wanted the man to see—to see himself seeing. The American moment.
Shut up, man. Reg snorted, catching himself.
Who was he kidding? If people came to see this kind of thing at all, it was usually at the end of a fist or a stick.
JUST GO! the billboard rising above the Christopher Street subway station urged him. JUST GO! To the beach, to the mountains, into the hot, lit city—a dark-haired boy and a blond girl in the back seat of the new blue Plymouth mirrored the good-looking man and his blond wife in front, smiling and pointing toward the imagined road before them. Anywhere was possible in a car like that. A family of four could drive across the new interstate highways, staying along the way in the new Holiday Inn, eating at the new Howard Johnson’s restaurants, tossing a Frisbee back and forth on the freshly asphalted parking lots. They ate fruit cups, steak and french fries with peas, a roll and butter, followed by apple pie à la mode washed down with coffee. On fresh mornings in the newly minted suburbs they drove through, neighbors called to each other across the hedges by their first names, and girls went downtown with their hair in curlers and a kerchief. If you were white.
Reg stalled in front of the image stretched above his head, used to this kind of chatter, this near constant magpie in his head, pecking. That breezy, inclusive belief that anyone could get in their car and just go was the fundamental American lie, and catching sight of it was the reason he’d come back home after three years in Europe. The grades of difference, these shades of meaning, only hit if one were in one’s own language. One’s own country. For the colors of this country—Reg shoved his hands deep in his pockets—are laid down in American English. Black and white. And seeing it like this, stretched baldly across the avenue, gave him a peculiar satisfaction, as if he’d caught the country once again with its pants down, and he grinned as he turned from the billboard and started walking.
Small but well proportioned, Reg Pauling favored white oxford shirts and navy blue ties no matter the occasion, and leaned forward at the waist when he listened, giving him a courtliness he couldn’t shake, and then stopped trying to, as he realized both whites and blacks turned toward him because of it. There were advantages in not speaking until one is spoken to, developing an ear and a patience for listening to what was not being said. As a writer it was an essential tool. As a black man it allowed him to look everyone squarely in the eye.
A man and his girl walked toward him, loosely joined. Reg’s hands lifted to the camera that hung around his neck, though he saw what was coming would be too quick to catch. The eyes of the girl darted toward him, then away, as though the sidewalk in front of her were empty of anything but air, but the man kept his eyes on Reg as they drew even, straightening his shoulders when he passed as though he could flick Reg off him like a bug.
See that, thought Reg, wheeling around and framing the two of them, the girl’s heels clicking down the pavement.
Every American writer must leave America to find America in him, Jimmy Baldwin had told Reg four years ago, waving him off, telling him not to come home until he had something to say. So he’d gone away. He’d gone away Reginald Pauling, Harvard class of 1953, son of a doctor from Chicago’s South Side, and worked his way across a postwar Europe where playgrounds had risen on bomb sites in Berlin, and the gaps in a block of buildings still marked the murderous skyfall over London. He sent back vignettes, portraits of life after the war for Ebony, for Jet, and three short pieces for Norman Mailer’s gig, The Village Voice. He chronicled the giddy, dizzying effect of American cash, even now, ten years after the Marshall Plan had run its course. There was meat again. Apartments rising. Like a child restored to health after the wasting effects of a fever, Europe was flushed and laughing, running forward.
The first time a white man had passed him on the street in Berlin, his gaze glancing over him without heat, Reg had stopped right where he was, turned around, and watched the man walking away until he was out of sight. Then a woman. And again. People passed with quick, curious attention, but the fear he saw on the shuttered faces of the Germans had nothing to do with him. He wasn’t a Jew. He wasn’t a German. He was free of that history. So he was free.
And he was miserable. Though he couldn’t square why.
With his Italian, and some German, he could buy his dinner in the market, his coffee in the bar, he fell into talk at tables late into the night, walked the streets of Europe easily and widely. An American. Unreadable man. A book without a cover, an animal without markings taken in with the anonymous glance he’d never felt before back home.
Three months ago, he’d been standing next to an American couple on the terrazza of a famous expat who threw party after party into the Florentine evenings. The slender woman in the white linen shift and the man in the bright blue shirt and ruddy tan of his class had taken to him, Reg observed, once they heard the magic, improbable word Harvard, and, meaning to be friendly, thinking this the way to show their true colors—the way that people intent on harm advance with their palms up—began telling him what it was like to be a Negro.
“Well, you’ve struggled so,” the wife said, regarding him. “Struggle has been the way up, I’d guess.”
“The way toward being an individual,” her husband corrected her.
A flush sprang into the hollows of her cheekbones. “If you like,” she’d allowed.
They were only in Italy for a year. On sabbatical. And the freedom, the immense freedom of walking out of their apartment—anonymous, he said; invisible, she’d added—and simply closing the door had been terrific. No demands. No expectations.
“I wish it could go on and on.”
Standing there, nodding at her beneath the twining vines, in the perfect umbered dusk, Reg had understood simply and precisely the difference between those who were running toward something and those who were running away. He had been free without history. But there was no freedom without history. That was America in him.
So he’d come home. He had walked off the plane at Idlewild on a late spring evening in April and—hanging on to the leather strap of the city bus, his typewriter between his feet—he bent at the waist to catch glimpses of the skyline as it drew nearer and nearer, and started grinning at New York. He’d followed his stories back to the city where he had sent them. Len Levy, his ol
dest friend, had a fifth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village, and when an ad appeared that first week for a copy editor at Houghton Mifflin—the publisher of The American Heritage Dictionary—he’d answered it, gotten it, and gone to work. It was a good steady salary, and his days were full of words.
With his first month’s salary, he’d bought a camera.
The slight breeze coming off the Hudson River to the west, the wet damp in the midst of heat carried with it the memory of summer nights in childhood. On the right, he drew even with the triangle park, the coming dark hanging there in the deep summer green of the leaves, three white men sitting on the bench below the tree, old men, the likes of whom peopled every city square, men who sat in silence, past working, past family, who sat and watched and remarked. He felt the shove of their stare between his shoulder blades, move along. He nodded. And not a word. Not a word need be said.
One’s own country? Even silence here was colored.
The sprinkler was on in the children’s playground, and the smell of water in the hot air carried all the summer nights in Chicago where he’d run through water, just like these Italian boys and girls, hair plastered to their skulls, shrieking as they ran back and forth through the wet, their skin dripping, cooling, pushing the heat back.
“Buonasera,” he said politely to the mother who had turned to stare at him, and walked into the swarm of children without pausing, shielding his camera through the wet, and out the other side, the water sliding down his cheeks and from the top of his head into his collar, the air immediately cooler as he continued down the avenue, smiling to himself and feeling the damp on the shoulders of his summer jacket.
At the corner of Bleecker and Tenth, Reg climbed the steps to the door of the apartment building and slid in his key, holding the handle to jimmy the old lock. In the dim cool of the hallway inside, the sounds of children playing in the tiny inner courtyard mixed with the clarinet in 4B and the smell of fish frying. It was hot, and he took the stairs slow.
