In the Slammer With Carol Smith

by Hortense Calisher

  ‘Free?’ I find I have no gesture for it. ‘Free? Since when?’

  On his face, wiped clean now, I see the years I have lost.

  ‘Not soon enough.’ He takes my hand, swinging it. ‘You been in stir, eh. So was I once, when I was young. But nothing could be kept from us. We had the drums.’

  He has dropped my hand. But we are still walking. ‘I was young. But I wasn’t in that long.’

  We walk on.

  ‘I took you for maybe color-blind,’ he says. ‘Or trying to be.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we be?’ I toss out. ‘Like a church?’

  ‘When the whole world is. Not until.’

  ‘My two aunts brought me up white. Best they could do.’

  ‘Which side were they?’

  ‘Side?’ I say. A patch of rouge still on his nose twitches. I see he’s amused. ‘Oh, they were white all right. It was a wartime thing. So was I.’

  ‘Orphan, eh. They adopt you?’

  ‘Oh no. One of them was my mother. They just never told which.’

  The big surprise about a memory returned is how it wants to pour. As if that itself is the blessing. Else how could I be smiling? Of course part of that is having a person to tell it to, natural. ‘They kept us apart from both sides. So people wouldn’t do it to them first.’

  He stops us on the curb. Passes his hands near to my cheeks, one to a side. But doesn’t touch. Like a magician? Or a dermatologist? Or as a man might do if you are his first of your kind. ‘Be any way you want, Carol. You deserve it.’

  I can’t quite believe this, but it’s balm to hear. ‘You get that much charge out of being what you are?’

  He winces. ‘Only way to go on being it.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Deserved.’ He rubs his face. His palm comes off pink. He grins. ‘But it’s a real relief sometimes, being a Wall.’

  And there, way down the block, is a news-stand. The street we’re coming to is a main artery, four-lane and buzzing double-time, like an old movie. Not the kind for me. When we get there I better leave, but not without telling him what I should. We are walking slower anyway.

  ‘When you’re on a mental ward, Martyn, there is no news. None that affects you. That’s when I lost the habit. And when you get out—that’s the big news.’ I sneak a look. No change in that blunt profile. ‘Alphonse tell you about me?’

  ‘Nope.’ He turns his full face to me. ‘You’re telling me yourself.’

  So I am. So I am. ‘Want to know what I was in for?’

  He shrugs. ‘This is now.’

  So it is. ‘Thanks.’

  All of a sudden I would like to make him laugh. ‘Back in the slammer where I was first, there was more variety, at least on the women’s side. The hookers took a real interest in “Family Court,” that program. But the real draw were the serial killers. The general opinion was that women don’t get an equal chance at it.’

  He laughs all right. What I haven’t counted on is that so do I.

  At the stand I say: ‘I’ll buy one too. It’ll be a start.’

  ‘It’ll be a weight. The Sundays always are.’

  ‘I can use it, wherever I bed down.’

  He lets that pass.

  But what do you know, the Paki in charge of the stand shakes his head.

  ‘No more Times?’ Martyn asks. The Paki, an older man, signals No, turning his back. He and a younger man start closing up the stand.

  ‘Hey, wait—’ I say. ‘They’re not sold out. They’ve just already tied up the leftovers for pickup, and don’t want to bother to untie. I’ve often seen the trucks coming by.’ And sure enough, near the curb back of the stand are the bundled papers.

  When Martyn points, they shrug.

  ‘Bet you—’ Martyn says to me. Leaning close to the older man, he says something in what must be their language. The older gives the younger a look. The younger goes to untie, pulling out one copy. When Martyn pays up with a fiver they have to unearth the money box. All without a word. They begin again to close up.

  ‘What did you say to them?’ I whisper.

  When he grins, his eyes close halfway. ‘It wasn’t from the Koran.’

  When you can whisper with a person it expands you. ‘News-stands used to be places where you could ask direction. Or even be greeted, if you were a daily customer. There was one like that in the barrio, my old neighborhood.’ Where the bar owner bought the Spanish paper every afternoon, below my window. ‘But these people, they never talk, never smile. Yet they own nearly all the kiosks.’

  ‘They’re separated from their country. They don’t yet think of this one as theirs.’

  The sun is behind Martyn’s profile, raised like a person who doesn’t whisper but will accept one.

  I manage a voice. ‘Maybe they’ve had amnesia too.’

  He knows what I’m telling him. When he answers, it’s to the bundle of newsprint under his arm. ‘Morning rehearsals are a bitch. Screw up the whole day, fuck it.… Join me in a spot of tea?’

  That breaks me up, the style of it.

  ‘Your place or mine?’ he says.

  ‘I don’t have a place.’

  ‘You have the whole city.’

  To have someone say that. Like it’s in the Koran. ‘In that case, yours is okay.’

  When he dumps the newspaper on me I think he’s backing off after all. But he’s only running after a cab.

  Years since I’ve been in one. It feels tight. I have so much to relearn. At least I know how to walk.

  ‘Where we were standing—’ he says. ‘Canal Street. Asia city, all the way East. Wristwatch stalls, where you can buy a fake Cartier or Gucci self-winder, last you a year. For ten, twelve bucks. Give it a shake, and it’ll last you another.’

  ‘I’ve never walked East much. From now on, maybe I will.’

  We exchange the proud smiles of New York know-it-alls.

  We stop somewhere in the Twenties. I’ve no compass for wheels.

  ‘This is the wholesale fur district,’ he says. ‘Lost a little steam during the animal protests. But up a few blocks, on Seventh, the flower sector has shrunk too. Don’t know why.’

  ‘The city’s like an iceberg herd. Keel one over and who knows what’ll come up for air. A robot maybe, screaming “Raise the Rent.”’

  ‘You do sound—professional.’

  ‘Only on a street.’ Put me behind a window-pane and I’m a ball of fluff—but I’m not saying. We’re entering a small commercial building, four-story, down-at-the-heel.

  ‘Top floor,’ he says. ‘No lift. The shaft is crumbling. Place belongs to an estate. Statutory rent. Started out as my office. But they let you bunk here, don’t hassle. Haven’t used it much lately. Been on the road.’

  I haven’t climbed stairs since the pad and the Cat Club. The pills, they’ll only keep you in the present, and no future to count on. I have stopped taking them.—‘You can stop,’ the doc said in parting, ‘when you feel able. But I warn you, only if you put something else in the drug’s place. A routine, say.’ He spares me the four-letter word the SW’s keep flinging you, like you’re on mental welfare—W-o-r-k.

  These stairs may not be residential but they are nothing like the Cat Club’s either. They’re in the normal world. They’re working stairs. It helps to climb them. The fifth floor is the top. Only one flat up here, he says. The lock responds to his key. The door swings open. Some doors push in. Open sesame is what you should feel, not a stifling. I don’t feel either. This room is Martyn’s. Martyn’s life.

  Twenty by thirty, say, and barely furnished. Like the ante-room of some village doctor with a practice not in need of too many chairs. One armchair, which can chat with its neighbor, a captain’s seat, two other bony spares. The left-hand wall is solid bulletin board covered with clippings and photos, down to the dado of filing cabinets below. When he turns on a fan the clips flutter like messages, incoming but ignored.

  Center wall, broken by a hallway door, has a cubby-holed refrigerator,
sink and grill. But the main feature of the room is that the right-hand corner has been sectioned off floor-to-ceiling, with that semi-transparent glass. ‘My office.’

  Ten by ten or so; the door must be at the side. One of the two front windows must be within. Even now the enclosure gleams faintly with reflections from buildings opposite; by daylight or summer sun it must dazzle. In front of its long wall is a line of—?

  ‘Drums. I managed a tribal song-and-dance troupe from home. We lived here during their two-year run.’

  Any drum is primitive. But these, of umber and tan stretched skin in varying tones and sizes, must be what he has said: tribal. One or two would be tall enough to reach a man’s thigh. Several are paired: to be slapped alternately? Or with the heel of the hand? No drumsticks are visible.

  ‘Bathroom?’

  ‘Down the hall.’

  I go.

  The hall is lined with bedrolls, neatly hung but hard to creep by. I see that one of them is actually like what I am toting, a Shelter-Pak. The bathroom is ordinary, to anyone but me, to whom all-white tile is votive now. On the wall opposite the toilet is a two-foot-long framed photograph, a family picture?—a household? People lined up in front of a low house or barn in a stunted landscape, the whole thing mostly sepia brown. I haven’t time to examine either the costumes or the faces. What I covet is a bath, but must pass the tub by.

  When I come out he has the kettle aboil and a brass tray-on-legs set between two of the chairs. ‘Crowded, when the troupe was here, but jolly too, once we settled the food. Found an African cafe that would cater too, across town, and a grocery on lower Ninth. Once in a while we cooked. You can get anything edible in this town except maybe grilled larks. And those too, if you know somebody in Little Italy with a cousin who regularly plies the airlines. The hotels and motels wouldn’t take us—they said because of the noise. Though I’ve known practicing bag-pipers to be quartered.’ He chuckles. A kilt is top entrée almost anywhere in the States.’ A good host, he’s talking to ease me. What I hear is that on another level this man knows the city as well as one who walks.

  ‘How many was the troupe?’

  ‘Six, usually. Eight was too many. Sometimes only four, if some had to go back for family reasons. But they could fill a stage. And they’ve not gone quiet. My country will be needing new songs.’

  I am projected back into that youthful climate where nations were seen to need song. And were sung to. So it still goes on.… He has been at the newspaper, scattered now on the floor. I see the floor is gouged, where the singers might have banged it with their—staves? Several such troupes had played the Boston political arenas.

  The tea is strong. In prison one slurped, dug at a nostril, felt the back teeth with a fingertip, smoothed the mouth with the flat of a hand. On the ward, one might see worse. On tea-break, a new patient, a bride whose husband had discovered she was a klepto, had come to the table wearing a feces moustache. But I have kept my home manners, whether for good or bad. Look how Carol eats, Carmen had said to Angel. Sure, twelve years old, you’re a man—but here they don’t shovel it.

  Tea is drinkable memory all by itself.…

  This dark plain tea is the kind brewed on sail-boats by the fathers of the families who once a summer invited the town’s Girl Scouts for a day on the water. I wasn’t a Scout, but some extra were invited. Our patron, a big blond man in whites, wore one of those white duck hats with a brim too small for him, as did many of the men. The joke was—and the mothers on board gaily made it one—that outfitted by the aunts too eagerly plundering our attic for a hat to keep me from sunburn, I was wearing one too.…

  ‘Male tea—’ I say, with a glance at a theater poster center of the bulletins, on which a trio of men, bare except for a clout of fringed cloth tied over their sex, squat wide-kneed over their drums.

  I amuse him. ‘Do you always say the right wrong thing?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Like what you said about my noggin.’

  And does he always ask the right questions?

  ‘I don’t yet have a firm “always.” It’s still shaking down. From before.’

  ‘Before—’ he says, musing. Not asking. That’s why I can answer.

  ‘Before my break. Since then, until now, oh I had the facts. I was told them, over and over. But not the feelings that went with them. Or much else.’

  He’s staring so hard and steady he’s drawing it out of me. He must have been good with the troupe. Drawing them all the way from Africa. Barefooted, to these streets.

  ‘It was like the case-record they attached to me was more theirs than mine.’

  ‘Carol—’ he says, and I twinge to it.

  ‘That’s me. I made them name the record Carol Carol.’ I am looking back at that day now. ‘In hope.’

  ‘I’d a nickname when I came out of jug,’ he says. ‘Political. You carry it like a flag. Useful, when a man is on the run. Though I was never that.’

  … ‘You have to settle what you’re running from,’ Dr. Cee said.… And I said, ‘Couldn’t I be running toward?’ …

  ‘I walk—’ I say now. ‘But I could never carry myself like a flag.’

  ‘No, that’s not been your style.’

  ‘How could you know that?’

  He’s messing with the newspaper on the floor. One section has had its top page cut out of. He tears the date border from that page and stows it in a pocket. ‘Because I saw you once, and never forgot you. You and I never met. But I saw you. Before.’

  In the slammer? On the ward?

  I only mouth those, but he shakes his head. He hasn’t one of those mythic faces you’re supposed to remember best. Or be caught by. Like are in old pottery, or growing out of the stone ruins, or in an artistic photograph. His face is blunted by what’s been pushed at it. Or by hard thoughts from behind. No wonder the part he played had been given him. ‘But I can’t have seen you, Martyn.’

  ‘I was in your Cambridge once. The Boston one.’

  ‘The rally? Where they showed the films of the townships? That’s the one I went to.’

  He rocks a bit, like he’s back there. I would recognize that rally rhythm anywhere. Like you’re rocking in time with the convictions all around you. Like you’re with inner song. I cover my mouth with my hand.

  ‘You were with a yellow-haired girl I did meet,’ he says. ‘And two or three others I didn’t. None of them spoke. Nor you. I watched you stay in the background.’

  ‘You were Carey’s guy, then? We knew she was going to meet him there.’

  ‘No. That was Dabney, British-style black from one of the island governments. He pointed you out. He said, “She’s the way these girls are showing cause.” But then his girl pipes up: “She’s the only one of our cell who’s not an amateur. But she doesn’t know.” And then I lost track of them, Dabney and her, in that crowd. Never saw him again.’

  ‘Neither did she.’ Poor Carey, grinding her teeth against my shoulder later, not a sob out of her. ‘I wanted that kid of his, but he wouldn’t marry it. He said girls like me were dangerous to the cause.’ And when she’d said to him, ‘What cause am I a danger to? Could its name possibly be Dabney?’ he’d given her the big stare, and lit out.… ‘I was in danger, all right,’ she said to me. And sat up, smoothing her hips with a movie star smile. Abortions thin you,’ she said. ‘Let’s go swimming somewhere!’—

  ‘I lost track of her too,’ I say. ‘I must have wanted to.’ He sees me looking down at the cut-out news page. ‘Bad blood now, in some of the townships I worked with. Before freedom, many in the worst places weren’t paying their rents. Because what they were getting wasn’t worth living in. Now the banks won’t give mortgages in those townships, using non-payment as excuse. Bah! Freedom is owning. As anybody knows.’

  Not to me. I don’t know my total self yet. But surely it’s not an owning one. ‘You don’t agree?’

  ‘You going back for that—for just a mess of mortgages?’ He laughs. After a revo
lution, you cope with civil life.’ The dark brew we’re sipping gives me impudence. And sitting in a civilized chair is such a help to argument. The two basic needs being sated, if temporarily. ‘When I was a student, any American sympathizer could like own a piece of some revolution, from afar. I went for that. It made me feel more American.’ I choke on that last. I’m getting back my background. ‘But then a revolution would be shut down. Or be over. And the newspapers would point us to another one.’

  ‘One needs to be on local ground. Which reminds me.’ Rummaging on a shelf, he brings out some crackers. ‘Peek & Frean’s. Ate bushels of them when I was at school in England. But they taste bland across the water. Sorry.’

  ‘Why, we had those at home. For company that just might happen.’ If not, we ate them at Christmas. They’d tasted abstract, as food often did in that house so separate from the gatherings. I take one of these to remind me. It does. ‘I am on local ground—’ I flash at him. Saying that heartens me. ‘I’ll keep this for the road.’ There’s a place for such stores in my pack. My fingers fumble; they hint at what I may be leaving. But I have made a pact with the bag. ‘Thanks for the tea. And the walk.’ Can he tell which I value most?

  ‘We have a bag like that here. What’s it called again?’

  ‘Shelter-Pak.’

  ‘A well-wisher gave it to one of our men, to take home with him. But it wasn’t the cold he would need most to be sheltered from. And toting it would mark him, even for some of his own kind. Besides, going from place to place in our countryside, he would stay with kin. Or some who felt kinship. If a man is on the run, say. Hospitality might even empty a house for such a traveler. Or fill it suddenly, so that a newcomer can’t be targeted.’

  I can see the houses, or huts, crowded with sudden kin. All over the land, a sudden gathering. ‘Were you—a target?’

  His eyebrows go up, thick ones that had needed no extra tufting. ‘Not long enough.’ He stares at his hands.

  ‘Sorry. I’ve been told I have no tact.’

  ‘That has its uses.’ He’s looking at the drums. All appear to be of natural skins, stretched over varying woods. Some are identical in size and fringe decoration. One pair, not as high as the rest, has a design on each drumhead, a face with slashed cheeks. No need for drumsticks. They would be played with the heel of the hand then, and slapped. Even with elbows. All usable anatomy.