The Stone Face

by William Gardner Smith

  “Why didn’t you want to shake my hand yesterday?”

  She shrugged in annoyance. Without looking up, she said, “It is because you are so conceited.”

  “Conceited?” His smile reflected amusement and surprise. “How can you say that? You don’t even know me.”

  “I know you well enough.” She spoke with a heavy Slavic accent, which made well sound like waahhll. She seemed embarrassed, as though she realized that what she was saying made sense to no one but herself. “I have seen you several times on the street. Walking with your head so high, like a king. Always I say to myself: ‘Why does he walk like that, without even seeing other people, like he is better than everybody else?’ And I think: ‘Ha, here is one of those conceited men.’”

  She blushed, glaring at the machine. Simeon’s laugh irritated her. “I don’t like conceited men,” she said defiantly.

  “I’m not conceited, I have a crick in my neck.”

  “Pardon? Creek? What is that?”

  “A royal illness. Never mind. Will you have a drink with me?”

  She hit the machine angrily with her open palm. “Merde! I lose again! Always, always I lose. I don’t know why I play. Yes, I take that drink.”

  They sat at a table in the rear. Simeon waved to Carlos and the other Brazilians.

  “I take vodka,” Maria said.

  Simeon whistled. “In the afternoon!”

  “I am Pole!” Maria said triumphantly. The waiter brought the drinks. “I do not stay long,” Maria said. “Must go meet Paris mother.”

  “What does that mean, Paris mother?”

  “Wife of Paris father. He is Polish refugee, friend of my family in Warsaw, takes care of me while I am here in Paris. I sit with him here sometimes; he is tall with very severe face. He gives me money to live here, and my uncle in Warsaw gives money to his relatives there.”

  “You are not a refugee?”

  “No.”

  “You are going back?”

  “I don’t know yet. And you?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  They were seated on opposite sides of the table, she on the cushioned bench, he on the chair with his back toward the door. She leaned on the table, inspecting him, and said, “What happen to your eye?”

  He said, “It’s better having only one. It concentrates, like a magnifying glass. The better to see beautiful Polish girls.”

  Her face lighted. “You think I am beautiful?”

  She was pleased as a child. He said, “I think you’re lovely.”

  Maria scowled. “You didn’t act so! Walking with your head so high, seeing nobody on the street!”

  She was infuriated by his roaring laughter. Simeon said, “How old are you?”

  “I am twenty-four. Why?”

  “In many ways, you make me think of a child.”

  “Is good to be a child.” Simeon thought he heard a hint of defiance in her voice.

  Simeon wanted to see her eyes. “Why do you hide your eyes behind dark glasses?”

  She shrugged, looking beyond him to the door. “I must. Eyes weak. I am becoming blind.”

  She said it so simply, so casually, that Simeon was not sure he had heard her correctly.

  “Blind?”

  She looked at him again, vaguely annoyed. It was evidently something she did not want to think about. “It’s a long story. Anyway, it is not certain. The doctors in Poland could do nothing, but they said maybe specialists in France could save my eyes. I am having treatments. In some months I will have an operation. Maybe they can be saved. Nobody knows.”

  He was moved. She saw his face and laughed. “Don’t look like it’s a funeral already. Is not sure. Besides, what counts is the present. I want to live in present. You understand me? I want to live.”

  “What do you mean by live?”

  “Enjoy self. Not worry about things. Do all things I always want to do—laugh, sing, dance, see bright lights. Froth, I want froth of life for once, you understand me? Maybe that sounds bad. Is not bad.”

  She sipped her vodka and thought for a moment, frowning. “I tell you something. People like me, who are young in Poland, we have not had much froth. First the war, and I cannot describe to you that war, a horrible war, barbarous war. War of annihilation, you understand? My mother and father dead, friends dead, everything in ruins. And after war it is necessary to build everything from nothing. We are poor, everything is cold and gray. Government says, ‘We must sacrifice now, build for future.’ I do not criticize the government, I do not make politics, you understand? But we, young ones, we tired of sacrifice. Is weakness, maybe. But the young ones get tired, they want play a little, want have their childhood. Life cannot always be gray, one must have colors sometime.”

  She stopped, caught her breath: “So doctors tell me, ‘You are becoming blind, you be blind maybe in two-three years.’ I say, ‘Yes, all right, I be blind, but first I see. First, I see colors in life, something besides gray.’ So I come to Paris. I want play like child, play games like child for while. Maybe become actress, so I go to drama school. Visit other countries. See bright lights, dance, sing, laugh. Even play pinball machine, you see. We had no such froth as pinball machine when I was child.”

  Looking at her now, Simeon saw for the first time something more than a pretty empty-headed doll. He was astonished by the extraordinary contrast between what she seemed externally and what she felt and had lived. This child-role was a mask; there were nightmares inside her head. He thought of his own former nightmares, of the portrait of the face in his room. For years that face had been at the center of all his dreams. Sometimes the face simply floated in the air. Sometimes it perched itself on the bodies of people Simeon knew: neighbors, schoolteachers, and even on occasion his brothers or father. Walking in a dream field on a pleasant day, he would see the face pop up from behind a stone or leer through the branches of a tree. Sometimes it shone burning in the sky, a horrifying sun.

  Maria said, “You are American, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lots of bright lights there, far from the grayness. Lots of comfort, lots of big houses and big cars, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why did you leave?”

  “To escape the grayness.”

  “You joke.”

  “No.”

  II

  1

  WHEN SIMEON had been a boy in Philadelphia, on Tenth Street just off South, where children yelled as they ran in oversize knickers and garbage rotted on the street, “The Chase” had been the game which had excited him most.

  The Chase: a game, a sport, an entertainment for simmering summer evenings when the sun leaned red over the rooftops and boredom threatened with approaching night. A ball, the key to the game, was tossed lazily back and forth in the street among the sweating boys. Old folks sat on the scrubbed marble steps, gossiping and fanning away mosquitoes and flies. Rattletrap street cars went noisily by. Radios shrieked baseball results, the Jack Benny Show, The March of Time, jazz, or, on Sundays, Elder Johnson’s gospel choir. On the sidewalks, languid, watching the boys, stood the girls.

  Back and forth, back and forth went the ball, as the stifling air heated more than skin. Old folks talked about the Race Problem, about Our Folks and Them Folks. Dim, still-alive memory of the other, physical, chains. The girls stirred, watching the boys. The girls exchanged nervous glances, words, smiles. The boys saw the smiles and the restlessness. The girls whispered, giggled; the boys saw them whisper, heard them giggle; and then suddenly it would begin, the gradual thickening of tension, the trembling perspiration of the hands, the accelerated heartbeats and the hot obstruction of throats. No one said anything. Outwardly, nothing changed. But the electricity was there in the humid summer air, and all of them knew that The Chase was about to begin.

  The tossed ball would seem to float in
the air. A girl would dart from the pavement into the street, leap with hand upstretched into the air and snatch the ball in flight. Laughing, she would then stand between the two groups of boys, holding the ball in her hand, stretching the hand toward them teasingly. “Come get it, come get it.” Meanwhile, the other girls would have raced up to the end of the street, far beyond the boys. Gristle or Joe or Snakes would say: “Okay, okay, Sarah, give us the ball.” Sarah would laugh. “Come take it from me, if you’re big enough!”

  The boys would look at each other, shrug, grin and begin closing in on the girl. She would hold the ball temptingly at arm’s length. They would come closer, closer, and when they were very near Sarah would howl with glee and hurl the ball with all her strength up the street, to the other girls. Laughing in triumph, then, Sarah would dash through the ranks of the boys and run to join the other girls.

  “If you want the ball, come git it!” cried the girls.

  The boys would look at one another. “Let’s go git ’em,” one of them would say.

  In no particular hurry, at an easy trot, the boys would start up the street toward the girls. Shrieking with delight and fear, the girls kicked up their heels and ran around the corner, onto South Street. The Chase was on.

  How far did they run? For miles it had always seemed to Simeon. Around corners, across squares, through alleys, up and down big streets and small. Down the stairs of subway stations and up into the dusk again. They ran until they could no longer breathe, until their muscles ached and the sweat-chilled shirts clung to their bodies; and still they ran, until their legs groaned and their heads swam, ran until the “breakthrough” came, until they got their second wind and could breathe again. White folks turned and stared at them, and shook their heads. Motorists cursed, applying shrieking brakes. Policemen glared suspiciously: niggers running—they must of stolen something!

  From time to time the girls, when they could really bear to run no longer, slowed down to a walk. So did the boys. Their aim, now, was not so much to catch the girls as to keep them in sight, keep the distance between them constant. The girls giggled and whispered again in excited complicity, glancing nervously behind them to make certain the boys were not sneaking closer. Boy to boy: “That Reety sure is got some fine legs!” Boy to boy: “Look at Sarah’s nice big jelly-roll ass!”

  In this way they crossed the city, the Negro neighborhoods and the white, passed Italians, Poles, Irish, Jews, Anglo-Saxons, running the gamut of races, nationalities and classes. Sweat poured from their young bodies. Dirty old shirts hanging out of dirty old pants. Their eyes glistened and their bellies were furnaces.

  They would finally reach the outskirts of the city, the endless wasteland of vacant lots covered with twisted grass and littered with stones, cans, bottles, papers and other refuse. Here, on the brink, the girls hesitated, dizzy and terrified; wanting to shout for help, to be safe at home, at mother’s knee. They turned terrorstricken eyes on the approaching boys, whose frozen smiles belied their trembling legs, the unbearable drumming of their hearts. The boys came on relentlessly.

  Turning, in a dream, the girls dashed onto the grass, running and screaming, running as though for dear life now, falling, getting up, running again. The lumbering bull-boys ran, too—no longer talking and joking, no longer trying merely to keep the girls in sight, but running in earnest, running to trap and hold and take. In the fast-fading dusk, the distance between the two groups narrowed swiftly. The girls cried for help with all their might, but there was no one to hear; their screams rolled out across the wasteland of lots and up to the darkening sky. The foremost boy leaped and tackled the nearest girl, bringing her roughly to the ground. One by one each of the girls felt hungry hands seize her and hold her and throw her to the grass. There were not enough girls for all the boys. No matter: two boys could take one girl.

  What always followed, though not precisely rape, had always seemed like rape to Simeon. The girls kicked and clawed and punched and bit. The boys held them fast, forcing their dresses up and their drawers down. Exhausted, overpowered, the girls were taken one by one. Nightfall, and strange sounds in the silence of the twisted grass. Sweat mingling with sweat. Eventually it was over. All of them, boys and girls, lay on their backs among the cans and stones, smoking cigarettes and staring dazedly at the star-filled sky. How long did they lie there, silent and alive? For half an hour, an hour perhaps. Then, slowly, the girls stood up, brushed their skirts, looking at each other sheepishly, and walked off in a group for the long journey home. Shortly afterward, the boys stood up and followed them.

  2

  Child with marveling eyes, leaning on the bedroom window, looking at the night sky, wondering: Where does space end? It never ends. But that’s impossible! When did time begin? It never began and will never end. But that’s impossible! Where did people come from? Why?

  Sensitivity was a curse, that marked the world of Simeon’s childhood. It was a violent world.

  The big family jammed into a five-room house. Grandpa, Grandma, Mom, Pop, aunts, uncles and five sisters and brothers. A family of laborers and domestic servants. There was little air in that house, and not much affection. Destiny was the rent man, the insurance man, the breadman, the milkman, the refrigerator man, the furniture man, the grocer. Simeon was a grocery delivery boy and general helper after school, at three dollars and fifty cents per week. It was fun if you turned it into a game: the deliveries were secret missions, the tin cans were soldiers which he lined in battle order on the shelves. On Saturdays he loved to browse among the books at the public library or sometimes even listen to records in the music room of the Logan Square Library.

  The six children slept in two beds in one room. There were two girls and four boys, so Simeon, the youngest, was put in the bed with the girls. Sometimes at night his nervous hands explored his older sister’s body. She never moved, but he always thought she was only pretending to be asleep. Each child slept in his underwear, and they woke up two or three times every night to brush the bedbugs from the sheets.

  On winter mornings the boys got up early to clean and light the kitchen stove and build up the fire in the cellar furnace. They boiled salted water on the kitchen stove and added flakes of oatmeal to make their breakfast before going to school. Winter was the time of peril. Their bedrooms were heated by rickety kerosene stoves on flimsy legs; the stoves blazed red at night; four times in Simeon’s childhood the stoves had been knocked over, four times the flaming kerosene had hissed along the floor and caught at the furnishings and the wall. It was a miracle that none of them had ever been seriously hurt. Rats lived in the cellar, giant rats which entered from the broken sewers. Sometimes they invaded the house itself, and rat traps and poison were everywhere. When they had been very young, a rat had scrambled into the bed and chewed at the hand of Simeon’s youngest sister. It was strange that she did not wake up.

  Violence was in the streets and in the schools. Individual fights, gang wars, race wars. Inexplicable violence, purposeless violence. Before this Simeon recoiled.

  “C’mon! C’mon! Put up your fists!”

  “Hey, Simeon, put on a suit and meet all the boys on the corner tonight, there’s gonna be a dance.”

  He did not want to go. There was always trouble at the dances. Of course he could not let the others think he was afraid; he had to go.

  But he asked, trying to sound casual: “You think the Northsiders will try to break in?”

  “Who cares? Whatsamatter, you scared?”

  “Who, me? Scared? Hell, no!”

  “We’ll beat the livin’ shit outta them if they show up.”

  And of course they showed up. There was a riot, knives were drawn and people injured and even killed in a bedlam of insane curses and screams. Simeon was knocked flat on his back by a chair, trampled by fleeing feet as the police vans arrived. He did not know how he managed to get home.

  His aunt bathed the head wound.
He lay in the dark room unable to sleep, and late at night got out of bed and went to stand at the window. There was peace up there, in that sky of stars. What he wanted was to attain that peace. But that was impossible. The world was here, and it was violent and brutal. Wasps killed spiders and spiders killed flies. That was the Law. The world made sensitivity a curse; one had to live within the Law.

  He prayed softly to the sky: “Make me strong, make me a man. Make me respected by the others, make me brave and tough. I don’t want to be soft; I want to be strong. I’ll make a sacrifice, take a sacrifice in exchange. I’d give anything, make any sacrifice, to be strong and respected, to be a man.”

  The next day, his grandmother said: “Go around on Reed Street to the Italian store and get me some spaghetti sauce.”

  Simeon was frightened. The Poles and Italians lived in that neighborhood, and they were at war with the Negroes.

  “What you waiting for, Simeon? You hear me?”

  He was ashamed. “It’s them Poles, Grandma. They having a war with the colored boys.”

  “You ain’t scared of no white boys, is you?”

  “No’m.”

  “Ain’t no grandson of mine supposed to be scared of no white boys. You go buy me that sauce.”

  He made his way toward Reed Street as slowly as possible. He paused at every store window, kicked every stone he saw. But he knew he was simply delaying his arrival; he knew he was afraid, and he was furious with himself. “Ain’t no grandson of mine supposed to be scared. . . .” What sacrifice could he make to acquire toughness? “I’ll give a—a toe,” he suggested tentatively, looking up at the sky. The sky gave no indication that it accepted the bargain, and he had a suspicion that a toe would not be enough. Besides, it would hurt, cutting off a toe. He grimaced.

  Now he was on Reed Street and up ahead, on a corner, he saw a group of boys, most of them Poles. With them was a tall kid named Chris, leader of the gang and the toughest boy in their neighborhood. He had a solid reputation for hating Negroes. Simeon swallowed hard. He wanted to cross to the other side of the street, but something inside him, some deep core of pride, made him stay on the pavement. The group appeared not to notice him and Simeon continued cautiously on his way, walking as close to the curb as possible.