But there was one time when the Quarter was strange to him, and that was late at night. Several times on his way home late from hunting or when he was just restless, he had walked through the street at that time. The doors were all closed to the moonlight and the houses looked shrunk and had the look of shanties that have been empty a long time. At the same time there was that silence that never comes to a deserted place—and can only be sensed where there are many people sleeping. But as he would listen to this utter quietness he would always gradually become aware of a sound, and it was this that made the Quarter strange to him in the late night. The sound was never the same and it seemed always to come from a different place. Once it was like a girl laughing—softly laughing on and on. Again it was the low moan of a man in the darkness. The sound was like music except that it had no shape—it made him pause to hear and quiver as would a song. And when he would go home to bed the sound would still be inside him; he would twist in the darkness and his hard brown limbs would chafe each other because he could find no rest.
He never told Harry Minowitz about any of his walks. He could not imagine trying to tell anyone about that sound, least of all Harry, because it was a secret thing.
And he never talked to Harry about Vitalis.
When after school he would go back to the kitchen to Vitalis there were three words he always said. It was like answering present at the school roll-call. He would put down his books and stand in the doorway a moment and say: "I'm so hungry." The little sentence never changed and often he would not realize he had even spoken. Sometimes when he had just finished all the food he could eat and was still sitting there in the chair before the stove, restless but somehow not wanting to leave, he would mechanically mouth those three words. Just watching Vitalis brought them to his mind.
"You eats more than any lanky boy I ever seen," she would say. "What the matter with you? I believe you just eats cause you want to do something and you don't know what else to do."
But she always had food for him. Maybe pot liquor and cornbread or biscuit and syrup. Sometimes she even made candy just for him or cut off a piece of the steak they were going to have for supper.
Watching Vitalis was almost as good as eating and his eyes would follow her around. She was not coal black like some colored girls and her hair was always neatly plaited and shining with oil. Early every morning Sylvester, her boy-friend, walked to work with her and she usually wore a fancy red satin dress and earrings and high heeled green shoes. Then when she got in the house she would take off her shoes and wiggle her toes a while before putting on the bedroom slippers she wore to work in. She always hung her satin dress on the back porch and changed to a gingham one she kept at the house. She had the walk of colored people who have carried baskets of clothes on their heads. Vitalis was good and there wasn't anybody else like her.
Their talks together were warm and idle. What she didn't understand didn't gnaw on her and bother her. Sometimes he would blurt out things to her—and in a way it was like talking to himself. Her answers were always comfortable. They would make him feel like a kid again and he would laugh. One day he told her a little about Harry.
"I seen him down to your Daddy's store many a time. He a puny little white man, ain't he? You know this here is a funny thing—nearly bout all little puny peoples is biggety. The littler they is the larger they thinks they is. Just watch the way they rares up they heads when they walk. Great big mens—like Sylvester and like you ghy be—they ain't that way at all. When they be about six foots tall they liable to act soft and shamed like chilluns. Once I knowed a little biggety dwarf man name Hunch. I wish you could have seed the way on a Sunday he would commence to walk around. He carried a great big umbrella and he would priss down them streets by hisself like he was God—"
Then there was a morning when he came into the kitchen after playing a new Beethoven record he had gotten. The music had been in his head half the night and he had waked up early so as to play it awhile before school time. When he came into the kitchen Vitalis was changing her shoes. "Honey," she said. "You ought to been here a minute ago. I come in the kitchen and you was playing that there gramophone in your room. Sound like band music folks march by. Then I done looked down at the floor and you know what I seen? A whole fambly of little mices the size of your finger, setting up on their hind legs and dancing. That the truth. Them rats really does like such music."
Maybe it was for words like this that he was always going in to Vitalis and saying, "I'm so hungry." It wasn't only for warmed up food and coffee she would give him.
Sometimes they would talk about Sara. All the eighteen months that she was away she hardly ever wrote. And then the letter would just be about Aunt Esther and her music lessons and what they were going to have for dinner that night. He knew she was changed. And he had a feeling she was in trouble or something important was happening to her. But it got so that Sara was very vague to him—and it was terrible but when he tried to remember her face he couldn't see it clearly. She got to be almost like their dead mother to him.
So it was Harry Minowitz and Vitalis who were nearest to him during that time. Vitalis and Harry. When he tried to think of them together he would have to laugh. It was like putting red with lavender—or a Bach fugue with a sad nigger whistling. Everything he knew seemed that way. Nothing fitted.
Sara came back but that didn't change things much. They weren't close like they had been before. Their Dad had thought it was time for her to come home but she didn't seem glad to be back with her own family. And all the next year she would often get very quiet and just stare ahead like she was homesick. They didn't go with the same crowd of boys and girls anymore and often they didn't even wait for each other to walk to school in the mornings. Sara had learned a lot of music in Detroit and her piano playing was different and very careful. He could tell that she had loved their Aunt Esther a lot but for some reason she didn't talk about her much.
The trouble was that he saw Sara in a hazy way at that time. That was the way everything looked to him then. Crazy and upsidedown. And he was getting to be a man and he did not know what was going to come. And always he was hungry and always he felt that something was just about to happen. And that happening he felt would be terrible and would destroy him. But he would not mold that prescience into thought. Even the time—the two long years after Sara returned—seemed to have passed through his body and not his mind. It was just long months of either floundering or quiet vacantness. And when he thought back over it there was little that he could realize.
He was getting to be a man and he was seventeen years old.
It was then that the thing happened that he had expected without knowing in his mind. This thing he had never imagined and afterward it seemed to have leapt up out of nowhere—to his mind it seemed that way but there was another part of him where this was not so.
The time was late summer and in a few weeks he was planning to leave for Atlanta to enter Tech. He did not want to go to Tech—but it was cheap because he could take the co-op course and his Dad wanted him to graduate from there and be an engineer. There didn't seem to be anything else that he could do and in a way he was eager to leave home so that he could live in a new place by himself. That late summer afternoon he was walking in the woods behind Sherman's Quarter, thinking of this and of a hundred vague things. Remembering all the other times when he had walked through those woods made him restless and he felt lost and alone.
It was almost sundown when he left the woods and started through the street where Vitalis lived. Although it was Sunday afternoon the houses were very quiet and everyone seemed to be gone. The air was sultry and there was the smell of sun-baked pine straw. On the edges of the little street were trampled weeds and a few early goldenrods. As he was walking past the houses, his ankles grey with the lazy swirls of dust that his footsteps made and his eyes tired from the sun, he suddenly heard Vitalis speak to him.
"What you doing round this way, Andrew?"
She
was sitting on her front steps and seemed to be alone in the empty Quarter. "Nothing," he said. "Just wandering around."
"They having a big funeral down at our church. It the preacher dead this time. Everybody done gone but me. I just now got away from your house. Even Sylvester done gone."
He didn't know what to say but just the sight of her made him mumble, "Gosh I'm so hungry. All this walking around. And thirsty—"
"I'll get you some."
She got up slowly and he noticed for the first time that she was barefooted and her green shoes and stockings were on the porch. She stooped to put them on. "I done taken these off cause ever body done gone except a sick lady in one of them end houses. These here green shoes has always scrunched my toes—and sometimes the ground sure do feel good to my feets."
On the little stoop behind the house he drank the cool water and dashed some of it into his burning face. Again he felt as though he were hearing that strange sound ly had heard late at night along this street. When he went back through the house where Vitalis had been waiting for him he felt his body tremble. He did not know why they both paused a moment in the dim little room. It was very quiet and a clock ticked slowly. There was a kewpie doll with a gauze sash on the mantelpiece and the air was close and musty.
"What ails you, Andrew? Why you shaking so? What is it ails you, Honey?"
It wasn't him and it wasn't her. It was the thing in both of them. It was the strange sound he had heard there late at night. It was the dim room and the quietness. And all the afternoons he had spent with her in the kitchen. And all his hunger and the times when he had been alone. After it happened that was what he thought.
Later she went out of the house with him and they stood by a pine tree on the edge of the woods. "Andrew, quit your looking at me like that," she kept saying. "Everthing is all right. Don't you worry none about that."
It was like he was staring at her from the bottom of a well and that was all he could think.
"That ain't nothing real wrong. It ain't the first time with me and you a grown man. Quit your looking at me like that, Andrew."
This had never been in his mind. But it had been there waiting and had crept up and smothered his other thoughts—And this was not the only thing that would do him that way. Always. Always.
"Us didn't mean nothing. Sylvester ain't ghy ever know—or your Daddy. Us haven't arranged this. Us haven't done no real sin."
He had imagined how it would be when he was twenty. And she had a pale face like a flower and that was all he knew of her.
"Peoples can't plan on everthing."
He left her. Harry's chessmen, those precise and shrunken little dolls, neat problems in geometry, music that spun itself out immense and symmetrical. He was lost lost and it seemed to him that the end had surely come. He wanted to put his hands on all that had happened to him in his life, to grasp it to him and shape it whole. He was lost lost. He was alone and naked. And along with the chessmen and the music he suddenly remembered an aerial map of New York that he had seen—with the sharp skyscrapers and the blocks neatly plotted. He wanted to go far away and Atlanta was too near his home. He remembered the map of New York, frozen and delicate it was and he knew that was where he was going. That was all that he knew.
In the restaurant of the town where he had gotten off of the bus Andrew Leander finished the last of his beers. The place was closing and there would not be a bus to Georgia until morning. He could not get Vitalis and Sara and Harry and his Dad from his mind. And there were others besides them. He realized suddenly that he had hardly remembered Chandler. Chandler West who lived across the street—whom he had been with so often and who was at the same time so obscure. And the girl who wore red fingernail polish at high school. And the little rat of a boy named Peeper whom he had once talked with at South Highlands.
He got up from the table and picked up his bags. He was the last one in the restaurant and the waiter was ready to lock up. For a moment he hung around near the door that opened into the dark quiet street.
When he had first sat down at the table everything had seemed for the first time so clear. And now he was more lost than ever. But somehow it didn't matter. He felt strong. In that dark sleepy place he was a stranger—but after three years he was going home. Not just to Georgia but to a nearer home than that. He was drunk and there was power in him to shape things. He thought of all of them at home whom he had loved. And it would not be himself but through all of them that he would find this pattern. He felt drunk and sick for home. He wanted to go out and lift up his voice and search in the night for all that he wanted. He was drunk drunk. He was Andrew Leander.
"Say," he said to the boy who was waiting to lock the door. "Can you give me the name of some place around here where I can get a room for the night?"
The boy gave him some directions and in the surface of his mind he noted them. The street was dark and silent and he stood a moment longer in the open doorway. "Say," he said again. "I got off the bus half drunk. Will you tell me the name of this place?"
The Jockey
The jockey came to the doorway of the dining room, then after a moment stepped to one side and stood motionless, with his back to the wall. The room was crowded, as this was the third day of the season and all the hotels in the town were full. In the dining room bouquets of August roses scattered their petals on the white table linen and from the adjoining bar came a warm, drunken wash of voices. The jockey waited with his back to the wall and scrutinized the room with pinched, crepy eyes. He examined the room until at last his eyes reached a table in a corner diagonally across from him, at which three men were sitting. As he watched, the jockey raised his chin and tilted his head back to one side, his dwarfed body grew rigid, and his hands stiffened so that the fingers curled inward like gray claws. Tense against the wall of the dining room, he watched and waited in this way.
He was wearing a suit of green Chinese silk that evening, tailored precisely and the size of a costume outfit for a child. The shirt was yellow, the tie striped with pastel colors. He had no hat with him and wore his hair brushed down in a stiff, wet bang on his forehead. His face was drawn, ageless, and gray. There were shadowed hollows at his temples and his mouth was set in a wiry smile. After a time he was aware that he had been seen by one of the three men he had been watching. But the jockey did not nod; he only raised his chin still higher and hooked the thumb of his tense hand in the pocket of his coat.
The three men at the corner table were a trainer, a bookie, and a rich man. The trainer was Sylvester—a large, loosely built fellow with a flushed nose and slow blue eyes. The bookie was Simmons. The rich man was the owner of a horse named Seltzer, which the jockey had ridden that afternoon. The three of them drank whiskey with soda, and a white-coated waiter had just brought on the main course of the dinner.
It was Sylvester who first saw the jockey. He looked away quickly, put down his whiskey glass, and nervously mashed the tip of his red nose with his thumb. "It's Bitsy Barlow," he said. "Standing over there across the room. Just watching us."
"Oh, the jockey," said the rich man. He was facing the wall and he half turned his head to look behind him. "Ask him over."
"God no," Sylvester said.
"He's crazy," Simmons said. The bookie's voice was flat and without inflection. He had the face of a born gambler, carefully adjusted, the expression a permanent deadlock between fear and greed.
"Well, I wouldn't call him that exactly," said Sylvester. "I've known him a long time. He was O.K. until about six months ago. But if he goes on like this, I can't see him lasting another year. I just can't."
"It was what happened in Miami," said Simmons.
"What?" asked the rich man.
Sylvester glanced across the room at the jockey and wet the corner of his mouth with his red, fleshy tongue. "A accident. A kid got hurt on the track. Broke a leg and a hip. He was a particular pal of Bitsy's. A Irish kid. Not a bad rider, either."
"That's a pity," said the rich m
an.
"Yeah. They were particular friends," Sylvester said. "You would always find him up in Bitsy's hotel room. They would be playing rummy or else lying on the floor reading the sports page together."
"Well, those things happen," said the rich man.
Simmons cut into his beefsteak. He held his fork prongs downward on the plate and carefully piled on mushrooms with the blade of his knife. "He's crazy," he repeated. "He gives me the creeps."
All the tables in the dining room were occupied. There was a party at the banquet table in the center, and green-white August moths had found their way in from the night and fluttered about the clear candle flames. Two girls wearing flannel slacks and blazers walked arm in arm across the room into the bar. From the main street outside came the echoes of holiday hysteria.
"They claim that in August Saratoga is the wealthiest town per capita in the world." Sylvester turned to the rich man. "What do you think?"
"I wouldn't know," said the rich man. "It may very well be so."
Daintily, Simmons wiped his greasy mouth with the tip of his forefinger. "How about Hollywood? And Wall Street—"
"Wait," said Sylvester. "He's decided to come over here."
Collected Stories Page 13
