“Miss Mildred? Is my brother here?”
She pulled me inside, with one hand, saying nothing. In the hall stood Dolores. I was led down the long hall to the two big rooms. Caleb sat on the sofa, dressed in his black lumberjacket. He had his arms wrapped around himself, as though he were cold. He looked over at me. His face looked dry, as though he had never sweated. He said, “Hello, little Leo. Don’t look so frightened.” I started to cry, and I walked over to him. He pulled me onto his lap.
“Caleb didn’t do it, Leo,” Dolores said. “We know he didn’t do it, and we’ll go to court and say so.” Caleb continued rubbing his hand over my head. He sighed, a great sigh, my head moved with it, and he pulled my head back and looked into my face. “Don’t be afraid, Leo,” he said. “Please don’t be afraid. Will you do that? For me?” I nodded. Then he said, “I didn’t do it. I just want you to hear it from me. All right?”
I said, “All right.” Then I said, “But I don’t care if you did!”
He laughed. He cried, too. He said, “I know that, Leo.” He laughed again.
“Caleb—are you going to run away?” He stared at me. “The cops have been at the house,” I said.
“Did you see them?”
“No. Mama and Daddy told me.”
The three of them looked at each other. “That Arthur,” said Miss Mildred, “that Arthur.”
“If I run,” said Caleb, “I won’t get far. And then they’ll fix my ass for sure.”
“I got some money,” I said. But he didn’t hear me. He was listening to something in the street. Dolores walked to the window and looked out. She turned back into the room. “Here they come,” she said. I had never seen a face so bitter. And she did not seem to be able to move. Then she looked at Caleb, and she smiled. She tried to say something. Caleb suddenly rose and ran to her, and grabbed her.
“I hear you,” said Miss Mildred, for there was a pounding at the door. She started down the hall. “I hear you,” she cried again, “ain’t no need for all that.” I heard her opening the door. Dolores stood with Caleb; now it was I who could not move. “Do you people have to make such a racket?” I heard Miss Mildred ask. “Don’t you people have good sense? Don’t you push past me this way! This is my house! Ain’t you people able to ask for what you want?”
They came down the hall, three of them, white; one of them had his gun drawn. Still, I could not move.
“We’re looking for Caleb Proudhammer,” one of them said.
“What for?” asked Dolores.
“That’s none of your business,” one of them said.
“Yes, it is my business,” Dolores said, “to ask you what you’re arresting him for. And it’s your business to tell me.”
“Listen to the nigger bitch,” one of them said.
“I’m Caleb Proudhammer,” Caleb said. “You don’t need those guns. I’ve never shot nobody in my life.”
“Come on over here. We’re taking you down to the station.”
“What for?”
“You’re a very inquisitive bunch of niggers. Here’s what for,” and he suddenly grabbed Caleb and smashed the pistol butt against the side of his head. The blood ran down—my brother’s blood. I jumped up, howling, from the sofa, trying to get to Caleb, but they knocked me back. I couldn’t catch my breath; they were pulling him down the hall. I called his name. I tried to crawl down the hall. Miss Mildred was trying to hold me back. Dolores was screaming. I punched Miss Mildred, I bit her hand. They were carrying him down the steps. I screamed his name again. I butted one cop in the behind, with all my might I dragged on one of his legs. “Get that kid out of here,” one of them said, and somebody tried to grab me, but I kicked and bit again. I tumbled headlong down the steps and grabbed the policeman’s leg again. I held on, I held on, he dragged me down. I called Caleb’s name again. We were in the downstairs hall. They were carrying him into the streets. Now, the cop kicked me, and I tasted blood. I crawled down the hall, screaming my brother’s name. We were in the cold air; there were many people. I picked myself up, and I ran to the car, crying, Please. Please. That’s my brother. I tried to crawl into the car, but I was pushed out of it; then I tried to get in front of it, to push it back, but someone lifted me high in the air. I called his name again. I heard the car doors slam, and I cried, Please. Please. I heard the motor start, and I cried, Please. Please. I fought my way to the sidewalk, I punched and kicked myself free, I ran after the red lights of the car. Oh Caleb Caleb Caleb Caleb Caleb. Oh Caleb. Caleb. The lights of the car disappeared, I stumbled and fell on my face on the sidewalk, I cried, I cried. They picked me up, they took me upstairs, they washed me, they took me home. My father tried to stroke my head. I pushed his hand away. My mother offered me a bowl of soup. I knocked the bowl from her hand. I hate you, I said, I hate you, and I buried myself in the pillow which still held Caleb’s smell.
BOOK TWO
IS THERE ANYBODY THERE? SAID THE TRAVELER
Ain’t misbehaving.
Saving myself for you.
—FATS WALLER
BARBARA AND JERRY were in front of the toolshed painting signs which read, THE ACTORS’ MEANS WORKSHOP PRESENTS THE CELEBRATED PLAY BY GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Arms and the Man. Barbara wore a scarlet, two-piece bathing suit, her hair was tied up with a string; she was on her knees, being very meticulous with the small a in “play.” Jerry, standing, in black trunks, was being very swift, and far from meticulous, with “Bernard.” The sweat glistened on his brown back, and he kept throwing his hair back from his eyes. Jerry and Barbara had nearly as much paint on their bodies as they had managed to get onto the signs. I had just driven the Workshop jalopy from The Green Barn where one set of actors was rehearsing Arms and the Man, and where it would soon open to play for six performances. The drawing card was not Shaw, but an aging, rather pompously dipsomaniacal actor, who was no longer in much demand in Hollywood. From what I had seen of him in rehearsal, this present venture wasn’t going to help him any. Now I was on my way to town to get hamburgers and coffee and Coke for another group of actors, who, in Lola San-Marquand’s living room, were rehearsing a play by Ben Hecht, called To Quito and Back. This play, which was to follow the Shaw, had no drawing card, merely some fairly well-established professionals and a few kids like ourselves; and since it was political in subject, we felt that we were being very brave. Then I was to come back to Bull Dog Road and collect the signs, and Barbara and Jerry and I were to drive into town to hang them up. But, at the rate Barbara and Jerry were making it, I would have to pitch in and help them.
They were at a distance from the road. I stopped the car and I yelled, “Jesus! Are you two still fucking around?”
Jerry turned, and gestured with his paintbrush, managing to splash paint on his hairy chest. I laughed. He shouted, “Up yours, buddy! I don’t see you doing any work.”
Barbara stood up. “Leo! You have been driving around like an overseer all day! Where are you going now?”
“To town, baby! To town!”
“What are you going to do in town?”
“I’m going to drink me a couple of mint juleps while you all finish painting them signs. We have been placed in a supervisory position—and we expect you to have them signs ready when we return!”
They both looked for something to throw at me. I yodeled, “Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton!” and roared down the road, away.
Jerry had come out at our insistence, and also because he really had nothing else to do. He was a big, cheerful, open-hearted Italian boy, a very gentle creature. He was not at the Workshop, he was working as an artists’ model in town; but he hung out with us and he helped us out. I had been evicted from my quarters in Paradise Alley. This made the idea of working at the Workshop not only more attractive, but imperative, for it meant that I would be certain to eat all summer long and that I would spend the summer in the open air. The money was nominal—so nominal that both Barbara and I were also working as artists’ models, and Jerry and I mowed lawns.
But we were happy, or nearly so. We worked hard all week, sometimes we got drunk in town at night, on Sundays we went rowing or fishing. My Paradise Alley roommate, Charlie, had gone hitchhiking back to Iowa—to find an old girl-friend, he said, though this quest, this possibility, did not appear to cheer him. Barbara had padlocked her door in Paradise Alley, and her things and Jerry’s things and mine were there.
It was early July, and the sun was a busy and persistent sun. I had turned darker, with a lot of red in my skin and hair; while Barbara had turned mulatto and her hair had turned blond on her forehead and on the curly sides and edges. Jerry was browner than Arabs, and we called ourselves, when we journeyed through town, “the Negro color problem.” We were just outside a small town on a bluff above a river. The Indian Magua, in The Last of the Mohicans, had forced the British maiden, for whom honor was more important than life, over this bluff, into this river—so, at least, Fenimore Cooper and his Hollywood descendants had informed me; it was not hard to imagine Indian braves catapulting down this river, and one heard the fury of their arrows through the leaves of trees. In the hope of catching some whisper of the past, we sometimes wandered through the graveyard in town—a dreadful town, built and ruined by financiers, but saved by a war. Though the graveyard failed to give us any sense of our past, the town gave us all too vivid a sense of our actual condition. The town had been moribund a long time, but factories and government contracts and army installations and eventually soldiers with their pay came to the town and saved it. The people in the town were, therefore, happily making money and the nature and the degree of their happiness made them haltingly friendly and quickly cruel. Although it was recognized that our presence in the town conferred on the town a peculiar prestige and was even good for business, we certainly were not liked. The San-Marquands had rented a big, white wooden house in town, and it was a tremendous sign of status to be invited to one of their parties. It was suspected that the San-Marquands were Jewish, and people said terrible things about them behind their backs; but, on the other hand, they were friends with the stars of stage and screen, and some of these stars would, in fact, be appearing under the Workshop banner. The gentry came to the San-Marquand parties, dazzled, supercilious, and drunk; and we, the Workshop kids, who were often there, serving canapés and drinks, sometimes picked up an odd job or two—or vice versa; but, whatever the use they might occasionally make of us, the combination of our youth and our aims was distressingly and sharply distasteful to them. Everyone was certain that the San-Marquands were exotically, unimaginably, erotically corrupt, and so were the movie stars, their friends. They had gotten away with it, and, thus, were obviously a bad example for us; obviously, kids in such fast company were bound to be depraved. They did not want to know why, when we could have been doing other things, we painted signs and mowed lawns and posed naked. They disliked Jerry because he was Italian, they disliked Barbara because she was not, and, therefore, had no excuse, and they disliked me because I did not appear to realize that both Barbara and Jerry were white. I did not, in fact, appear to know that I was colored and this filled them with such a baleful exasperation, such an exasperated wonder, that the waitress’ hand, when I stopped in the diner, actually trembled as she poured my coffee, and people moved away from me, staring as though I were possessed by evil spirits. Naturally, I despised them. They didn’t even have the courage of their sick convictions, for, if they had, they would have tarred me and feathered me and ridden me out of town. But they didn’t dare do this because of my connection with the Workshop. Naturally, they brought out the worst in all three of us. Their minds were like dirty windowpanes; and so we obligingly acted out their fantasies for them. When Jerry and I walked through town together, for example, everyone assumed we were queer—there couldn’t be any other reason for our walking together; and so we sometimes walked with our arms around each other. If Jerry had not been so big and I had not been so bold, we would have paid—more often than we did—a bloody price for this. But Jerry’s size intimidated and bewildered them—he certainly didn’t act queer—and so did my boldness, which seemed to contradict my color; on the whole, we were rather too queer to be easily molested. Of course, when Barbara and Jerry walked through town, Barbara had only to put her head on Jerry’s shoulder for them both to become, at once, a pair of lewd and abandoned lovers; while for the three of us, walking together and holding hands, they had no words at all. Nevertheless, they endured us because the San-Marquands gave parties at which they might meet movie stars.
The Workshop kids—there were about fifteen of us—lived along a mile or two of roads, about three miles outside of town, in wooden shacks. These shacks had been built in the twenties; the place was known as Bull Dog Road; it had been a celebrated artists’ colony. But all the artists had eventually left it, either upon becoming successful or upon realizing that success was impossible. The Actors’ Means Workshop, aided by the gentry, had taken over this celebrated road. It cost almost nothing to live there, except energy; but it took rather a lot of that. Barbara and Jerry and I shared a two-story shack, for which we paid, I think, about twelve dollars a month.
We thought it was a fine place. Downstairs, where Barbara and Jerry stayed, there was a small, dark kitchen with old, battered pots and pans and chipped dishes and heavy stone mugs; Jerry had strung it with his Italian spices, and it stank of gorgonzola cheese. We loved it—luckily, since Jerry was the only one of us who really knew how to cook. The bathroom was very old and primitive, with a metal tub which took hours to fill and hours to empty; Jerry and I put up a shower of sorts in the yard—really no more than an ingenious way of being enabled to dump a couple of pails of water over oneself. Their big room had an enormous double bed, big enough for six people, and a fireplace, and two rocking chairs. We screened all the windows and doors and then left them open all the time. At night, we put the rocking chairs on the porch and sat there, talking, and wondering, silently, what it would be like to be old. My room was smaller than theirs, but it had two big windows and outside of one window leaned an old tree, taller than our house, and the other window faced the far-off mountains. We had whitewashed the entire house, inside and out, and the moonlight did strange things to the walls of my room at night. I sat there many nights, all alone, after Barbara and Jerry had gone to bed, sometimes simply staring out at the night and sometimes strumming the guitar I had bought.
Though we had been at the Workshop for three weeks, neither Barbara nor I had yet presented Saul with a scene or an improvisation. The kind of workers we had become would more probably have been appreciated in a mill or on a farm; at least insofar as this work could reveal any of our qualifications for the theater. We began to mind this, but we had not minded it in the beginning. We were too excited by the hard preparation necessary to get the Workshop set up, and to get its first summer production on the stage. Our first week, we did a great deal of demolishing—of walls, doors, panels—and a great deal of carting and burning; we became relatively efficient with the hammer and the nail and the saw, and also fairly swift with first aid; and then we plastered and painted. We made an inventory of the props, which were piled helter-skelter, and covered with dust, in the attic of the theater, and built shelves and compartments for the bells, knives, samovars, lamps, and telephones, and classified them according to a system worked out by Barbara and Lola which I found peculiarly pretentious, PERIOD, TOLSTOIAN, for example, took care of the samovars and ikons, of which there were a great many, the San-Marquands being partial to the Russian drama; MODERN, NORTH AMERICA, took care of all the phones but one, which stood arrogantly alone on a shelf labeled, CONTEMPORARY, VIENNA. “Contemporary, my ass,” Jerry snarled. “When was the last time anybody around here saw Vienna?” Nor was it likely that anyone would be seeing it soon. We examined every costume, no matter how old, faded, or torn, and salvaged as many as possible. The costumes gave me a strange, sad thrill: these uniforms of Czarist generals, of Civil War soldiers, the shawls and dresses of Lorca heroines, the
patched jackets of Steinbeck peasants, of Odets insurgents, these buckles, shoes, boots, pumps, bonnets, rugged shirts and ruffled shirts, tight breeches and baggy pants, cowls, capes, helmets, swords, shields, spears, drums, harps, horns, so deeply drenched in human salt that sometimes they shredded at a touch, so icily trapped in time’s indifference that they chilled the hand, spoke of the reality, operating relentlessly every hour, which would one day overtake me and all my styles and poses and all my uniforms. These garments had been worn—by real people; real music had been played for them, and they had moved in a genuine light; they had put their hands on their hearts and delivered their vows, and the curtain had come down. These costumes were like their dispersed, indifferent bones, and the attic always reminded me of Ezekiel’s valley, and Ezekiel’s question: Oh, Lord, can these bones live?
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone Page 12
