Grand Union

by Zadie Smith

  Now Polly emerged, barefoot despite the autumn chill. Donovan waved; his mother mimed her incapacity. In her left hand, she gripped a long piece of green velvet attached to a stake, held high to keep it from dragging on the ground, and in her right, three colored feathers, each a foot long. Flying over to him, velvet streaming like the banner of a medieval princess, she moved with her toes pointed, so that what might simply be “running” in another woman looked like a series of darting pliés.

  “Just when I need you, darling—the whole of the forest has come away from the blocks. It’ll need something better than glue this time—maybe tacks—and a whole new set of ferns from some very evergreen thing—it’s of the utmost importance that it look lovely for Tuesday. Oh, Eleanor Glugel came by just after school and told me all about it and I think it’s an excellent opportunity for the show, really excellent. I’ve been dying to talk to you about it—what took you so long? I had to listen to Glugel rattling on about her grandmother’s tattoo for half an hour—that’s what she’s bringing in, to show—or tell—if you can believe it—her own grandmother.” Polly shuddered, and indicated a spot on the underside of her own delicate wrist: “What an uplifting subject! Oh, but don’t we all already know the world is full of horror? Do we really need to hear about it all the livelong day? There’s no romance in that child whatsoever. No clue of the magic of storytelling. I’ll bet you a dollar she wears a girdle already.”

  All of this poured right into his ear, as Polly’s lips were exactly level with it. She pressed his hand; he pressed back. She was perfect—an elf princess who had sworn allegiance only to him. Yet sometimes he wished that she could see, as he did, that theirs was a steely bond, not as easily broken as she seemed to imagine—one which he would never, ever give up, no matter how many four-bedroom apartments or soda fountains he came across in this life. Who else could make him agree to appear before his classmates in a pair of long johns, a nightshirt and a droopy hat with a bell on it? What larger sign of fealty could a knight offer a princess than his pride?

  * * *

  • • •

  But the next morning Miss Steinhardt made a further announcement: the children were to work in pairs, encouraging the values of compromise, shared responsibility and teamwork, so lacking in these difficult times. She gazed in a pained sort of a way out the far window. Thus would a small public school in the Village, in its own little way, act as a beacon for the world. It took a few minutes for Donovan to recognize in this new directive the last-minute reprieve for which he had not even dared to hope. “Me and you!” cried a child called Donna Ford, grabbing the hand of another child called Carla Woodbeck, who flushed happily and replied, “Yeah, us two!” and in another moment the room was filled with similar cries, requested and answered, all around Donovan, like a series of doors shutting in his face. Reduced to trying to catch the eye of Walter Ulbricht, he found even Walter Ulbricht avoiding him, apparently holding out for a better option.

  “Part of my point,” said Miss Steinhardt, in a queer wobbly voice that silenced her class, “is we don’t always get to choose whom we work with.” Miss Steinhardt had spent yesterday at her grandparents’ home in Brooklyn Heights, watching tanks cross the Suez Canal. “Line up, please, as I call your names.”

  The pairing was to be achieved alphabetically, as if a third of the class wasn’t colored and Walter Ulbricht didn’t have a port-wine stain eating half his face. A second flurry of anxious voices went up; Miss Steinhardt ignored them; the double line was achieved; the bell rang. In the hall, Cassandra Kent fell in step with Donovan Kendal. They walked out like this, onto Sullivan, neither holding hands nor talking, yet clearly walking together. Once again he passed through Washington Square Park, as he did daily, but the fact of Cassie Kent transformed it: the leaves were not merely crunchy but entirely golden, and the fountain threw up glorious columns of water, over and over, an engine of joy. Whatever it was that glistened in the wide skull-gaps between her tight plaits smelled of a vacation somewhere wonderful.

  “Let’s do yours,” said Cassie. “The museum. Since you got it all figured already.”

  “Oh. Well, all right.”

  “Gu-Gu-Guggenheim,” she said, imitating him but somehow not unkindly. “Now, it’s gonna look like an ice cream, we know that.”

  “A temple for the s-s-pirit. Hundred and ten feet tall,” said the boy, as they went under the arch. “And this is, how tall d’you think—”

  “Seventy-seven. So thirty percent smaller,” said Cassie, without pausing. “I’m mathematical. Wanna play?”

  They took a left and sat on two stone benches under the shade of a sycamore tree, in front of a game Donovan had never before played in his life. Cassie drew a ratty string bag from her satchel and emptied a small pile of chess pieces onto the concrete table. Donovan tried to concentrate on her instructions. All around them, the men the Kendals usually took the long route round the park to avoid gathered close. One of them was completely topless under his shearling jacket and had old newspapers wound tightly round both shoes. Another had only a handful of teeth and wore a broken gambler’s visor to keep the winter sun out of his eyes. He appeared to know Cassie.

  “Hey, boy—you ready?” asked the visor man, of Donovan. He knelt down by both children and planted his rusty elbows on the table. “This girl ’bout to school you.”

  Donovan’s plan was to watch each of Cassie’s moves intently, hoping to follow the logic of the game, and, from there, re-create this logic in his own woolly mind. But where she moved her pieces ruthlessly over the concrete table, with an eye only to their strategic use, to Donovan these were noble Kings and Queens, and those were the castles in which they lived; here were the advisers they trusted, and there the minions waiting in lines outside the castle wall—and no amount of explanation from Cassie about the rigid rules that were meant to dictate all their movements could stop the boy from instinctively arranging his pieces by rank or relationship.

  “Can’t win anything, playing like that,” said Cassie, abducting Donovan’s Queen, who had rashly stepped out of her chamber to stroke a favored white steed. “Can’t even get started playing like that.”

  By the time she had his King surrounded, not too long after they’d begun, she was sat up on her own heels, laughing and clapping her hands.

  “Donovan Kendal,” she crowed, jabbing a finger into his sternum, “you got no place to turn.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “But couldn’t this Cassie whoever-she-is just learn the lines?” Polly wanted to know. She was holding a tube of glue unwisely between her teeth. Her son passed the paper doily of Grandmother’s cap and the cardboard face of the wolf, to be affixed to each other, a task that had to be redone almost every week. “I mean, we could certainly do with another pair of hands.”

  “But turns out it’s got to be just two kids together. Just me and her. Teacher said so.”

  “Well, all right, but I still don’t see why that should—”

  “She’s a colored girl,” said Donovan, hardly knowing why, but in its way, the intervention worked; for reasons of consistency it was now impossible for Polly to speak ill of the project. Anyone who knew anything at all about Polly Kendal knew she held the idea of Racial Integration almost as close to her heart as she did The Power of Storytelling or The Innocence of Children. Once upon a time—on what was back then a rare trip downtown—she herself had been caught up in the drama of Racial Integration, in the form of a large, excitable crowd pushing through Washington Square toward Judson Church. Being, by temperament, “a lifelong seeker,” she’d joined this crowd, finding herself, a few minutes later, three pews back from the podium listening to the young Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. give a speech. A lively story for coffee mornings and parent-teacher conferences. “His eyes! The only word I can find for them is limpid. Limpid. I could see them looking straight at me: this kooky, sixteen-year-old scrap
of a white girl from Brighton Beach. I mean, naturally I stood out. And I’ll tell you something else and I’m not the least bit ashamed of it: whatever he would have asked me to do, I would have done it! I would have done anything!” But as it happened the Reverend King had not asked the teenage Polly to do anything at all and her practical involvement with the civil rights movement ended with that sermon, leaving behind only a residuum of enthusiasm.

  “Why shouldn’t the children of Harlem get the equal chance to hear our stories?” she asked Cassie two days later, as the child pulled a rattan chair to a circular table covered by a fringed, gypsy cloth, missing only a crystal ball. “Telling someone a story is a way of showing love. Don’t they deserve love?”

  “I love everybody!” said Cassie happily, and accepted the breadstick that was passed to her. “But: if I am attacked, I will defend. You play chess, Mr. Kendal?”

  “Me?” Irving lowered his newspaper. “Nope. Not my game.”

  “I play.”

  “You do?” Polly stopped stirring her spaghetti sauce and took a second, anthropological look at Cassie Kent. There were the girls in pigtails who skipped and sang by the fountain, and then there were the grubby old men hunched over the stone tables by the far west gate, but the two groups had always been quite separate in her mind. “At school, you mean?”

  “In the park sometimes. Whenever, wherever. I’m pretty good, too.”

  “I’ll bet you are!”

  “I beat Donovan good.”

  “Cassie, do you know Donny never brings any of his friends round to see his poor Maw and Paw,” said Polly, putting her hands on slender hips and delving into her small trove of accents. “So I’m real glad he thought to bring you round to see us.”

  “I was gonna show-and-tell my chess . . . but when you think about it, there ain’t that much to show.”

  “Of course, our show is up and ready to go, any time,” said Polly, slowly. The train was coming back down the line, and Donovan, tied to the track, did his best to divert it.

  “But that’s not—you can’t teach a person to do that in just a few days. Puppets are a real craft,” he said, quoting Polly back to Polly, which seemed to calm her; she stopped biting the spoon and put it back in the pot.

  “Well, that’s very true. It is a craft. Not everyone can pick it up just like that.”

  “There’s a war on,” said Irving loudly, and flicked a finger at the front page. “Somebody should show-and-tell about that.”

  Cassie examined the photograph: “They your people over there?”

  “Hmm?” said Polly, with her back to them all. “Oh, no, not mine. Irving’s. Technically. I mean, he doesn’t have any relatives over there or anything.”

  “Technically?”

  The door caught on the usual tile and failed to slam; Polly did not flinch. Polly, Cassie and Donovan listened to Irving leave the cottage, and—such was the silence of the mews in those days—strike a match against an outside wall. Polly returned placidly to her sauce.

  “Of course, in the end,” she said, with a contented look on her face, “we’re all one people.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “This is a scale model,” said Cassie, holding up, in front of the class, a circular, inverted ziggurat made of cardboard, and Donovan read the scale off a piece of paper, and then Cassie said the name of the architect, and Donovan somehow got through the phrase “gun-placed concrete,” and it all passed off without a hitch. But in the hallway, afterward, when they should have been simply congratulating each other, Cassie announced her intention to soon visit the Polly Kendal Puppet Theater.

  “But—it’s two bucks.”

  “I’m not in the poorhouse—we got two bucks!”

  “It’s just for little kids,” tried Donovan, gripped by the horrible confirmation of a private fear—that all roads led back to his mother. “You’re too old. And it’s on a S-S-Sunday. You’ll go to church, won’t you?”

  “I’m coming.”

  “It’s not two bucks, that was a lie,” said Donovan, turning red. Having put his hand up inside Pinocchio every Saturday for the whole of the previous year, he had been unable to rid himself of a feeling of deep identification. “If you really want to know it’s only fifty c— fifty c—”

  Most adults would keep looking into his face when he was in trouble, smiling kindly, until the word, whatever it happened to be, was completed. Cassie, like all children, only said, “What? What? What?” and groaned with impatience. She walked ahead. When he caught her up, she turned on him: “Man oh man, can’t you stop that?”

  “Yes,” said Donovan, feebly, but perhaps that was just another lie. A man called Cory Wallace had assured the Kendals that their son could be easily “cured” of his trouble, but he did not seem to be a proper doctor—he had no certificates on his wall and his office was next to a Chinese restaurant down on Canal. Still Polly had “faith in his sincerity.”

  “Donovan Kendal,” said Cassie, sighing and putting her hands on her hips like somebody’s mother, “you tire me out. Wanna see my titty?”

  They were within spitting distance of their classroom; it did not seem a viable prospect. But in the turn of the stairwell, Cassie pressed herself against a wall and pulled her pinafore to one side. Donovan stared dumbly at a breast no different than his own except that the nipple was slightly larger and the skin a deep and lovely brown. He put his palm flat against its flatness. They stood there like that until a footstep was heard on the stair. “If I was a hooker,” whispered Cassie, pulling the fabric back over and looking serious, “that would be ten bucks easy.” After which they walked to the exit and parted without another word.

  Matters developed. One morning before school, Donovan lunged at her and was rewarded with a long, chaste, beautiful kiss: two closed mouths pressed against each other while Cassie jerked her head violently back and forth, as perhaps she had seen people do in the movies. At an arbitrary moment, she pulled away and primly flattened her pinafore against her chest.

  “Don’t think I’ve forgotten,” she said. “I’m coming to that show.”

  That same afternoon, in a restroom cubicle, he asked to see her “ding-a-ling” and she obliged—a confusion of black folds that parted to reveal a shockingly pink interior. He was permitted to put one finger in and then take it out again. After which it was hard to see how he could refuse her.

  * * *

  • • •

  Black folds, green velvet. Donovan peering through. He could see Cassie sitting with the adults on the chairs, her feet up by her bottom, hugging herself. “Please remember,” said Polly backstage, drawing the heads of her crouching husband and son toward her own, “I don’t want to see Goldilocks or the bowls until I’ve dismantled the woodshed. You were much too quick with that, last week, both of you—but you, Irving, in particular.” Irving thrust his hand violently into Papa Bear: “Don’t tell me what to do. I know what I’m doing.” Donovan rang the little bell, and the churchwarden dimmed the “house lights” and Goldilocks’s hair got caught on a nail, and all this had happened before, many times. In a sort of dream, Donovan got off his knees and walked round the front to invite all the little believers to join him in the Land of Nod. He was sure enough that he said his lines (carefully written by Polly, free of the dangerous letters) and sang his song; he could hear the children yelling, and knew the brown smudge of the wolf must be behind him, appearing and disappearing, in rhythm with their cries. But all he could see was Cassie’s upper lip pulled tight into her mouth, and the deep crease of her brow. Somehow, he got through the half hour. The house lights went up. Polly was by his side once more, all in black, a tiny piece of punctuation, and she was saying My Husband Irving and My Son Donovan and they were all three holding hands and bowing.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Cassie, you came!”

  Poll
y reached both hands out to the girl. Cassie kept her own in the back pockets of her jeans.

  “I’ll tell you what: would you like to come backstage? There’s a box of tricks back there.”

  She led the girl behind the velvet to where Irving sat on the floor, smoking a cigarette, placing props and puppets into open shoeboxes. He held up the wolf and put it over Cassie’s hand.

  “You try—move it.”

  Cassie moved it slightly to the right. Its Grandmother’s cap came unglued and fell away. She handed it back to Irving.

  “This goddamned—”

  Polly rescued the wolf from her husband before it could be flung, and placed it back with its cap softly in a box marked BAD GUYS #2.

  “Why all the puppets so raggedy?” Cassie asked.

  “Well . . . if they look homemade, I suppose that’s because we make them ourselves.”

  “Thought you meant puppets like puppets,” said Cassie, turning to Donovan. “Like Howdy Doody or somebody.”

  Polly stepped in: “Well, that’s really not a hand puppet. That’s a marionette. Which is fine—if you like that sort of thing. But it’s really not puppetry.”

  “Puppets got arms and legs and bodies,” Cassie persisted, pointing to Goldilocks at rest. “That’s just a cut-out cardboard face. It ain’t even got more than one side.”

  Polly put an arm around Cassie and led her back out into the hall. “I hope we see you again,” she said, speaking over Cassie’s head to the fleeing families. “We do a charity show in the Bronx, and in Harlem, once a month, paid for by your generous contributions. Do please leave what you can in the bottle by the door. We’ve been doing this show in this spot for almost six years! But not everyone’s as fortunate as our children of Greenwich Village.” She put a hand on top of Cassie’s head. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for the children up there.”