by Jerry
He said, “Gentlemen, it might interest you to know that Miss Cecilia Jackson has higher scores on her IQ tests than the two of you put together. And I am told by the drama department that she has also more talent than the two of you put together. And considering the grades both of you have managed to achieve in the fall term, I’m not at all surprised.”
Al said under his breath, “Yeah, and fifty times as many problems.” Well, the principal went on and told us about how we should welcome this chance to work with her because she was so brilliant she was positively a genius, and that as soon as we stopped spreading idiotic rumors, the better chance Miss Jackson would have to adjust to Central, and if he heard anything about our bothering her again or spreading stories about her, both of us were going to get it but good, and maybe we would even be expelled.
And then his voice lost the ice, and he told us about some white cop shooting her pa for no reason at all when she was five, right in front of her, and her pa bleeding into the gutter and dying in little Cissie’s lap, and how poor her mother was, and a couple of other awful things that had happened to her, and if that wasn’t enough to drive anybody crazy—though he said “cause problems,” you know—anyhow, by the time he’d finished, I felt like a rat and Coppolino went outside the principal’s office, put his face down against the tiles—they always had tiles up as high as you could reach, so they could wash off the graffiti, though we didn’t use the word “graffiti” in those days—and he blubbered like a baby.
So we started a Help Cecilia Jackson campaign.
And by God, Milty, could that girl act! She wasn’t reliable, that was the trouble; one week she’d be in there, working like a dog, voice exercises, gym, fencing, reading Stanislavsky in the cafeteria, gorgeous performances, the next week: nothing. Oh, she was there in the flesh, all right, all eighty-five pounds of her, but she would walk through everything as if her mind was someplace else: technically perfect, emotionally nowhere. I heard later those were also the times when she’d refuse to answer questions in history or geography classes, just fade out and not talk. But when she was concentrating, she could walk onto that stage and take it over as if she owned it. I never saw such a natural. At fifteen! And tiny. I mean not a particularly good voice—though I guess just getting older would’ve helped that—and a figure that, frankly, Milt, it was the old W.C. Fields joke, two aspirins on an ironing board. And tiny, no real good looks, but my God, you know and I know that doesn’t matter if you’ve got the presence. And she had it to burn. She played the Queen of Sheba once, in a one-act play we put on before a live audience—all right, our parents and the other kids, who else?—and she was the role. And another time I saw her do things from Shakespeare. And once, of all things, a lioness in a mime class. She had it all. Real, absolute, pure concentration. And she was smart, too; by then she and Al had become pretty good friends; I once heard her explain to him (that was in the green room the afternoon of the Queen of Sheba thing when she was taking off her make-up with cold cream) just how she’d figured out each bit of business for the character. Then she stuck her whole arm out at me, pointing straight at me as if her arm was a machine gun, and said:
“For you, Mister Jim, let me tell you: the main thing is belief.”
It was a funny thing, Milt. She got better and better friends with Al, and when they let me tag along, I felt privileged. He loaned her some of those crazy books of his and I overheard things about her life, bits and pieces. That girl had a mother who was so uptight and so God-fearing and so respectable it was a wonder Cissie could even breathe without asking permission. Her mother wouldn’t even let her straighten her hair—not ideological reasons, you understand, not then, but because—get this—Cissie was too young. I think her mamma must’ve been crazier than she was. Course I was a damn stupid kid (who wasn’t?) and I really thought all blacks were real loose; they went around snapping their fingers and hanging from chandeliers, you know, all that stuff, dancing and singing. But here was this genius from a family where they wouldn’t let her out at night; she wasn’t allowed to go to parties or dance or play cards; she couldn’t wear make-up or even jewelry. Believe me, I think if anything drove her batty it was being socked over the head so often with a Bible. I guess her imagination just had to find some way out. Her mother, by the way, would’ve dragged her out of Central High by the hair if she’d found out about the drama classes; we all had to swear to keep that strictly on the q.t. The theater was even more sinful and wicked than dancing, I guess.
You know, I think it shocked me. It really did, Al’s family was sort-of-nothing-really Catholic and mine was sort-of-nothing Jewish. I’d never met anybody with a mamma like that. I mean she would’ve beaten Cissie up if Cissie had ever come home with a gold circle pin on that white blouse she wore day in and day out; you remember the kind all the girls wore. And of course there were no horsehair petticoats for Miss Jackson; Miss Jackson wore pleated skirts that were much too short, even for her, and straight skirts that looked faded and all bunched up. For a while I had some vague idea that the short skirts meant she was daring, you know, sexy, but it wasn’t that; they were from a much younger cousin, let down. She just couldn’t afford her own clothes. I think it was the mamma and the Bible business that finally made me stop seeing Cissie as the Integration Prize Nut we had to be nice to because of the principal or the scared little rabbit who still, by the way, whispered everyplace but in drama class. I just saw Cecilia Jackson plain, I guess, not that it lasted for more than a few minutes, but I knew she was something special. So one day in the hall, going from one class to another, I met her and Al and I said, “Cissie, your name is going to be up there in lights someday. I think you’re the best actress I ever met and I just want to say it’s a privilege knowing you.” And then I swept her a big corny bow, like Errol Flynn.
She looked at Al and Al looked at her, sort of sly. Then she let down her head over her books and giggled. She was so tiny you sometimes wondered how she could drag those books around all day; they hunched her over so.
Al said, “Aw, come on. Let’s tell him.”
So they told me their big secret. Cissie had a girl cousin named Gloriette, and Gloriette and Cissie together owned an honest-to-God slip for a boat in the marina out in Silverhampton. Each of them paid half the slip fee—which was about two bucks a month then, Milt—you have to remember that a marina then just meant a long wooden dock you could tie your rowboat up to.
“Gloriette’s away,” said Cissie, in that whisper. “She had to go visit auntie, in Carolina. And mamma’s goin’ to follow her next week on Sunday.”
“So we’re going to go out in the boat!” Al finished it for her. “You wanna come?”
“Sunday?”
“Sure, mamma will go to the bus station after church,” said Cissie. “That’s about one o’clock. Aunt Evelyn comes to take care of me at nine. So we have eight hours.
“And it takes two hours to get there,” said Al. “First you take the subway; then you take a bus—”
“Unless we use your car, Jim!” said Cissie, laughing so hard she dropped her books.
“Well, thanks very much!” I said. She scooped them up again and smiled at me. “No, Jim,” she said. “We want you to come, anyway. Al never saw the boat yet. Gloriette and me, we call it My Boat.” Fifteen years old and she knew how to smile at you so’s to twist your heart like a pretzel. Or maybe I just thought: what a wicked secret to have! A big sin, I guess, according to her family.
I said, “Sure, I’ll drive you. May I ask what kind of boat it is, Miss Jackson?”
“Don’t be so damn silly,” she said daringly. “I’m Cissie or Cecilia. Silly Jim.”
“And as for My Boat,” she added, “it’s a big yacht. Enormous.”
I was going to laugh at that, but then I saw she meant it. No, she was just playing. She was smiling wickedly at me again. She said we should meet at the bus stop near her house, and then she went down the tiled hall next to skinny little Al Coppolino, in her o
ld, baggy, green skirt and her always-the-same white blouse. No beautiful, big, white, sloppy bobby socks for Miss Jackson; she just wore old loafers coming apart at the seams. She looked different, though: her head was up, her step springy, and she hadn’t been whispering.
And then it occurred to me it was the first time I had ever seen her smile or laugh—off stage. Mind you, she cried easily enough, like the time in class she realized from something the teacher had said that Anton Chekhov you know; the great Russian playwright—was dead. I heard her telling Alan later that she didn’t believe it. There were lots of little crazy things like that.
Well, I picked her up Sunday in what was probably the oldest car in the world, even then—not a museum piece, Milty; it’d still be a mess—frankly I was lucky to get it started at all—and when I got to the bus station near Cissie’s house in Brooklyn, there she was in her faded, hand-me-down, pleated skirt and that same blouse. I guess little elves named Cecilia Jackson came out of the woodwork every night and washed and ironed it. Funny, she and Al really did make a pair—you know, he was like the Woody Allen of Central High and I think he went in for his crazy books—sure, Milt, very crazy in 1952—because otherwise what could a little Italian plunk do who was five foot three and so brilliant no other kid could understand half the time what he was talking about? I don’t know why I was friends with him; I think it made me feel big, you know, generous and good, like being friends with Cissie. They were almost the same size, waiting there by the bus stop, and I think their heads were in the same place. I know it now. I guess he was just a couple of decades ahead of himself, like his books. And maybe if the civil rights movement had started a few years earlier—
Anyway, we drove out to Silverhampton and it was a nice drive, lots of country, though all flat—in those days there were still truck farms on the Island—and found the marina, which was nothing more than a big old quay, but sound enough; and I parked the car and Al took out a shopping bag Cissie’d been carrying. “Lunch,” he said.
My Boat was there, all right, halfway down the dock. Somehow I hadn’t expected it would exist, even. It was an old leaky wooden rowboat with only one oar, and there were three inches of bilge in the bottom. On the bow somebody had painted the name, “My Boat,” shakily in orange paint. My Boat was tied to the mooring by a rope about as sturdy as a piece of string. Still, it didn’t look like it would sink right away; after all, it’d been sitting there for months, getting rained on, maybe even snowed on, and it was still floating. So I stepped down into it, wishing I’d had the sense to take off my shoes, and started bailing with a tin can I’d brought from the car. Alan and Cissie were taking things out of the bag in the middle of the boat. I guess they were setting out lunch. It was pretty clear that My Boat spent most of its time sitting at the dock while Cissie and Gloriette ate lunch and maybe pretended they were on the Queen Mary, because neither Alan nor Cissie seemed to notice the missing oar. It was a nice day but in-and-outish; you know, clouds one minute, sun the next, but little fluffy clouds, no sign of rain. I bailed a lot of the gunk out and then moved up into the bow, and as the sun came out I saw that I’d been wrong about the orange paint. It was yellow.
Then I looked closer: it wasn’t paint but something set into the side of My Boat like the names on people’s office doors; I guess I must’ve not looked too closely the first time. It was a nice, flowing script, a real professional job. Brass, I guess. Not a plate, Milt, kind of—what do they call it, parquet? Intaglio? Each letter was put in separately. Must’ve been Alan; he had a talent for stuff like that, used to make weird illustrations for his crazy books. I turned around to find Al and Cissie taking a big piece of cheesecloth out of the shopping bag and drapling it over high poles that were built into the sides of the boat. They were making a kind of awning. I said:
“Hey, I bet you took that from the theater shop!”
She just smiled.
Al said, “Would you get us some fresh water, Jim?”
“Sure,” I said. “Where, up the dock?”
“No, from the bucket. Back in the stern. Cissie says it’s marked.” Oh, sure, I thought, sure. Out in the middle of the Pacific we set out our bucket and pray for rain. There was a pail there all right, and somebody had laboriously stenciled “Fresh Water” on it in green paint, sort of smudgy, but that pail was never going to hold anything ever again. It was bone-dry, empty, and so badly rusted that when you held it up to the light, you could see through the bottom in a couple of places. I said, “Cissie, it’s empty.” She said, “Look again, Jim.”
I said, “But look, Cissie—” and turned the bucket upside-down.
Cold water drenched me from my knees to the soles of my shoes.
“See?” she said. “Never empty.” I thought: Hell, I didn’t look, that’s all. Maybe it rained yesterday. Still, a full pail of water is heavy and I had lifted that thing with one finger. I set it down—if it had been full before, it certainly wasn’t now—and looked again.
It was full, right to the brim. I dipped my hand into the stuff and drank a little of it: cold and clear as spring water and it smelled—I don’t know—of ferns warmed by the sun, of raspberries, of field flowers, of grass. I thought: my God, I’m becoming a filbert myself! And then I turned around and saw that Alan and Cissie had replaced the cheesecloth on the poles with a striped blue-and-white awning, the kind you see in movies about Cleopatra, you know? The stuff they put over her barge to keep the sun off. And Cissie had taken out of her shopping bag something patterned orange-and-green-and-blue and had wrapped it around her old clothes. She had on gold-colored earrings, big hoop things, and a black turban over that funny hair. And she must’ve put her loafers somewhere because she was barefoot. Then I saw that she had one shoulder bare, too, and I sat down on one of the marble benches of My Boat under the awning because I was probably having hallucinations. I mean she hadn’t had time—and where were her old clothes? I thought to myself that they must’ve lifted a whole bagful of stuff from the theater shop, like that big old wicked-looking knife she had stuck into her amber-studded, leather belt, the hilt all covered with gold and stones: red ones, green ones, and blue ones with little crosses of light winking in them that you couldn’t really follow with your eyes. I didn’t know what the blue ones were then, but I know now. You don’t make star sapphires in a theater shop. Or a ten-inch, crescent-shaped steel blade so sharp the sun dazzles you coming off its edge.
I said, “Cissie, you look like the Queen of Sheba.”
She smiled. She said to me, “Jim, iss not Shee-bah as in thee Bible, but Saba. Sah-bah. You mus’ remember when we meet her.”
I thought to myself: Yeah, this is where little old girl genius Cissie Jackson comes to freak out every Sunday. Lost weekend. I figured this was the perfect time to get away, make some excuse, you know, and call her mamma or her auntie, or maybe just the nearest hospital. I mean just for her own sake; Cissie wouldn’t hurt anybody because she wasn’t mean, not ever. And anyhow she was too little to hurt anyone. I stood up.
Her eyes were level with mine. And she was standing below me.
Al said, “Be careful, Jim. Look again. Always look again.” I went back to the stern. There was the bucket that said “Fresh Water,” but as I looked the sun came out and I saw I’d been mistaken; it wasn’t old, rusty, galvanized iron with splotchy, green-painted letters.
It was silver, pure silver. It was sitting in a sort of marble well built into the stern, and the letters were jade inlay. It was still full. It would always be full. I looked back at Cissie standing under the blue-and-white-striped silk awning with her star sapphires and emeralds and rubies in her dagger and her funny talk—I know it now, Milt, it was West Indian, but I didn’t then—and I knew as sure as if I’d seen it that if I looked at the letters “My Boat” in the sun, they wouldn’t be brass but pure gold. And the wood would be ebony. I wasn’t even surprised. Although everything had changed, you understand, I’d never seen it change; it was either that I hadn’t looked caref
ully the first time, or I’d made a mistake, or I hadn’t noticed something, or I’d just forgotten. Like what I thought had been an old crate in the middle of My Boat, which was really the roof of a cabin with little portholes in it, and looking in I saw three bunk beds below, a closet, and a beautiful little galley with a refrigerator and a stove, and off to one side in the sink, where I couldn’t really see it clearly, a bottle with a napkin around its neck, sticking up from an ice bucket full of crushed ice, just like an old Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie. And the whole inside of the cabin was paneled in teakwood.
Cissie said, “No, Jim. Is not teak. Is cedar, from Lebanon. You see now why I cannot take seriously in this school this nonsense about places and where they are and what happen in them. Crude oil in Lebanon! It is cedar they have. And ivory. I have been there many, many time. I have talk’ with the wise Solomon. I have been at court of Queen of Saba and have made eternal treaty with the Knossos women, the people of the double ax which is waxing and waning moon together. I have visit Akhnaton and Nofretari, and have seen great kings at Benin and at Dar. I even go to Atlantis, where the Royal Couple teach me many things. The priest and priestess, they show me how to make My Boat go anywhere I like, even under the sea. Oh, we have manhy improvin’ chats upon roof of Pahlahss at dusk!”
It was real. It was all real. She was not fifteen, Milt. She sat in the bow at the controls of My Boat, and there were as many dials and toggles and buttons and switches and gauges on that thing as on a B-57. And she was at least ten years older. Al Coppolino, too, he looked like a picture I’d seen in a history book of Sir Francis Drake, and he had long hair and a little pointy beard. He was dressed like Drake, except for the ruff, with rubies in his ears and rings all over his fingers, and he, too, was no seventeen-year-old. He had a faint scar running from his left temple at the hairline down past his eye to his cheekbone. I could also see that under her turban Cissie’s hair was braided in some very fancy way. I’ve seen it since. Oh, long before everybody was doing “corn rows.” I saw it at the Metropolitan Museum, in silver face-mask sculptures from the city of Benin, in Africa. Old, Milt, centuries old.