Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann

  Walk, don’t walk.

  I flat- out wanted to go home and curl up, to be buried in my apartment, away from traffic signals. I didn’t want the shame, or anger, or jeal-ousy, even—I just wanted to be home, the doors locked, the stereo on, some libretto sounding out around me, to sit on the broken- backed sofa, drowning everything else until it was all invisible.

  Walk, don’t walk.

  Then again, I was thinking that I shouldn’t be acting this way, maybe I was getting it all wrong, maybe the truth is that she was just a lonely white woman living up on Park Avenue, lost her boy the exact same way as I lost three of mine, treated me well, didn’t ask for nothing, brought me in her house, kissed me on the cheek, made sure my teacup was full, and she just flat- out made a mistake by running her mouth off, one silly little statement I was allowing to ruin everything. I had liked her when she was fussing all over us, and she didn’t mean harm, maybe she was just nervous. People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time—but even on the best day nobody’s perfect.

  I could imagine her there, staring at the elevator, watching the numbers go down, chewing on her fingers, watching it all descend. Kicking herself for trying too hard. Running back to the intercom and begging us to stay just a minute more.

  After almost ten blocks I got a little stab in my stomach, a stitch. I leaned up against the doorway of a doctor’s office on Eighty- fifth Street, under the awning, breathing heavily, and weighing it all up in my mind, but then I thought, No, I’m not going to turn back, not now, I’m going to keep right on going, that’s my duty and nobody’s going to stop me.

  Sometimes you get a bug in your mind. I’m going to make it all the way home even if it takes me a week, I thought, I’m going to step every inch of the way, gospel, that’s what I had to do, no matter what, back to the Bronx.

  Marcia, Janet, Jacqueline weren’t calling after me anymore. Part of me was relieved that they let me go, that I didn’t give in to them, didn’t turn around. I wasn’t sure what sort of response I would’ve let loose if they came trundling up alongside me. But another part of me thought that McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 302

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  Claire at least should have kept after me, I deserved that much, I wanted her to come tap me on the shoulder and beg a second time so that I knew it mattered, like our boys mattered. And I didn’t want that to be the end of things for my boys.

  I looked up the avenue. Park was gray and wide and there was a small rise of hill up ahead, a stepping- stone of traffic lights. I tightened the buckles on my shoes and stepped out into the crosswalk.

  —

  w h e n i le f t mis sour i , I was seventeen years old, and I made my way to Syracuse, where I survived on an academic scholarship. I fared pretty well, even if I say so myself. I had gifts for putting together some fine written sentences, and I could juggle a good slice of American history, and so—like a few young colored women my age—we were invited to elegant rooms, places with wooden panels and flickering candles and fine crystal glasses, and we were asked to give opinions on what had happened to our boys over Anzio, and who W.E.B. Du Bois was, and what it really meant to be emancipated, and how the Tuskegee Airmen came about, and what Lincoln would think of our achievements. People listened to our answers with that glazed- over look in their eyes. It was like they really wanted to believe what was being said in their presence, but they couldn’t believe they were present for it.

  Late in the evenings I played the piano stiffly, but it was as if they wanted jazz to leap from my fingers. This was not the Negro they expected. Sometimes they would look up, jolted, as if they’d just brought themselves, cold, out from a dream.

  We were ushered to the door by the dean of one school or another. I could tell the parties only really began after the door closed and we were gone.

  After visiting those splendid houses, I didn’t want to go back to my little dorm room anymore. I walked around the city, down by Thornden Park and out to White Chapel gardens, sometimes until the blue dawn rose, wearing holes in my shoes.

  Most of the rest of my college days were spent clutching my school satchel close to my chest and pretending not to hear the suggestions of the fraternity boys who wouldn’t have minded a colored woman for a tro-phy: they had a safari intent to them.

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  Sure, I ached for the backroads of my hometown in Missouri, but leaving behind a scholarship would’ve been a defeat for my folks, who had no idea what it was like for me—they who thought their little girl was up north learning the truth of America in the sort of place where a young woman could cross the thresholds of the rich. They told me that my southern charm would get me by. My father wrote letters that began: My Little Glorious. I wrote back on airmail paper. I told them how much I loved my history classes, which was true. I told them I loved walking the woods, true too. I told them that I always had clean linen in my dorm room, true as well.

  I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.

  Still, I graduated with honors. I was one of the first colored women at Syracuse to do so. I went up the steps, looked down on the crowd of gowns and hats, emerged into a stunned applause. A light rain fell across the college courtyard. I stepped past my college mates, terrified. My mother and father, up from Missouri, hugged me. They were old and ruined and held each other’s hands as if they were just one piece. We went to a Denny’s to celebrate. My mother said that we’d come a long way, us and our people. I shrank back down in the seat. They had packed the car so there was space for me in the back. No, I told them. I’d rather stay a little while as long as they didn’t mind, I wasn’t ready to return just yet.

  “Oh,” they said, in unison, grinning just a little, “you’re a Yankee now?”

  It was a grin that held pain—I guess you’d call it a grimace.

  My mother, in the passenger seat, adjusted the rearview mirror as they drove off: she watched me go and waved out the window and shouted at me to hurry home.

  I went into my first marriage, blank to the schemes of love. My husband- to- be was from a family in Des Moines. He was an engineering student and a well- known debater on the all- Negro debating circuit: he could hold any subject in the palm of his hand. He had bad skin and a beautiful bent nose. His hair was cut into a conservative Afro, tinged cinnamon at the edges. He was the sort of man who adjusted his glasses, precisely, with a middle finger. I met him on the night when he said that what America didn’t realize was that it was forever censored, forever would be, unless common rights were changed. They were the words he used instead of civil rights: common rights. It brought a silence to the hall.

  My desire for him gripped my throat. He glanced across the room at me.

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  He had a lean boyishness, a full mouth. We dated for six weeks, then took the plunge. My parents and two remaining brothers drove north to join us for the wedding. The party had been arranged in a run- down hall on the outskirts of town. We danced until midnight and then the band left, dragging their trombones behind them. We searched around for our coats. My father had been silent most of the time. He kissed my cheek.

  He told me that not many people were ordering hand- painted signs anymore, that they were all going neon, but if he had one sign he could put on the world he would say that he was Gloria’s father.

  My mother gave advice—I still can’t remember a single thing she said—and then my new husband whisked me away.

  I looked across at him and smiled and he smiled back, and we both knew instantly that we’d made a mistake.

  Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you’re lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive of
f, but most people who’ve been around awhile know it’s just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it’s never even there in the first place.

  Our honeymoon was a disaster. The cold sunlight slanted through the windows of a rooming house in a small upstate New York town. I’d heard there were lots of wives who spent their wedding nights apart from their husbands. It didn’t alarm me at first. I saw him curled, sleeplessly, on the couch, trembling as if in a fever. I could give him time. He insisted he was tired and spoke gravely of the strain of the day—I found out years later that he had spent absolutely all of his family savings on the marriage ceremony. I still felt a strong residue of desire for him when I heard him speak, or when he called me on the phone to tell me he wouldn’t be home—it seemed that words had an affection for him, the way he spoke was magical, but after a while even his voice began to grate and he began to remind me of the colors of the walls in the hotel rooms in which he stayed: the colors leached into him and took him over.

  After a while he didn’t seem to have a name.

  And then he said—in 1947, after eleven months of marriage—that he had been looking for another empty box to fit inside. This was the boy who had been the star of the Negro debating team. Another empty box. It felt as if my skull was being lifted from my flesh. I left him.

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  I avoided going home. I made up excuses, elaborate lies. My parents were still clinging on—what use was it to hurt them? The thought of them knowing that I had failed was coiled up inside me. I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t even tell them that I was divorced. I would phone my mother and tell her that my husband was in the bath, or down at the basketball courts, or out on a big job interview for a Boston engineering firm. I’d stretch the phone all the way to the front door and press the bell and say:

  “Oh, gotta go, Mom—Thomas has a friend here.”

  Now that he was gone he had a name again. Thomas. I wrote it in blue eyeliner on my bathroom mirror. I looked through it, beyond, at myself.

  I should have gone back to Missouri, found myself a good job, settled back with my folks, maybe even uncovered a husband who wasn’t scared of the world, but I didn’t go back; I kept pretending I would, and soon enough my parents passed. My mother first, my father a broken man just one week later. I remember thinking that they went like lovers. They could not survive without each other. It was like they had spent their lives breathing each other’s breath.

  There was a loss lit in me now, and a rage, and I wanted to see New York. I heard it was a city that danced. I arrived at the bus station with two very fancy suitcases, high heels, and a hat. Men wanted to carry my cases but I walked on, head held high, down Eighth Avenue. I found a rooming house and applied to a scholarship foundation but heard nothing, and took the first job I could find: as a clerk for a betting outfit at the Belmont racetrack. I was a window girl. Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it’s not a coat at all, it’s more like another skin. I was more than overqualified, but I took it anyway. Out I went to the racetrack every day. I thought I’d get out of the job in a matter of weeks, that it was just a moment, a blip of pleasure for a girl who knew what pleasure was but hadn’t fully tasted it. I was twenty- two years old. All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the ordinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past. Besides, I loved the sound of the gallop. On mornings, before the races, I would walk down among the stalls and breathe in all the scents of the hay and the soap and the saddle leather.

  There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we’ve left it. In New York, at the racetrack, I loved to see the McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 306

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  horses up close. Their flanks looked as blue as insect wings. They swished their manes back in the air. They were like Missouri to me. They smelled of home, of fields, of creek sides.

  A man came around the corner with a horse brush in his hand. He was tall, dark, elegant. He wore overalls. His smile was so very wide and white.

  My second and last marriage was the one that left me eleven floors up in the Bronx projects with my three boys—and I suppose, in a way, with those two baby girls.

  Sometimes you’ve got to go up to a very high floor to see what the past has done to the present.

  —

  i w e n t s t r ai gh t on up Park and made it to 116th Street, at the crosswalk, and had begun to ponder just how exactly I was going to make my way across the river. There were always the bridges, but my feet had begun to swell and my shoes were cutting the back of my heels. The shoes were a half- size too big. I had bought them that way on purpose, for the opera on Sundays, when I liked to lean back and quietly flip the shoe off, let the cool take me. But now they rode up with each step and cut a little trench in my heels. I tried adjusting my stride, but the flaps of skin were beginning to come away. Each step dug a little deeper. I had a dime for the bus and a token for the subway but I had insisted to myself that I’d walk, that I’d make it back home under my own steam, one foot after the other. So, I kept on north.

  The streets of Harlem felt like they were under siege—fences and ramps and barbed wire, radios in the windows, kids out on the sidewalks.

  Up in the high windows women leaned out on their elbows like they were looking back into a better decade. Below, wheelchair beggars with scraggly beards raced each other to cars stopped at the lights: they took their char-iot duel seriously, and the winner dipped to pick a dime off the ground.

  I caught glimpses of people’s rooms: a white enamel jar against a window frame, a round wooden table with a newspaper spread out, a pleated shade over a green chair. What, I wondered, were the sounds filling those rooms? It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.

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  A small blade of pain shot through me each time I stepped, but I could handle it—there were worse things than a torn- up pair of heels. A pop song traveled across my memory, Nancy Sinatra singing about her boots being made for walking. I had it in my thoughts that the more I hummed the less my feet would hurt. One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you. One corner to another. One more crack in the pavement. That’s the way we all walk: the more we have to occupy our minds the better. I started humming louder, not caring a bit who saw or heard me. Another corner, another note. As a little girl I had walked home through the fields, my socks disappearing into my shoes.

  The sun was still high. I’d been walking slow, two hours or more.

  Water ran down a drain: up ahead some kids had opened a fire hydrant and were dancing through the spray in their underwear. Their shiny little bodies were beautiful and dark. The older kids hung out on stoops, watching their brothers and sisters in their wet underclothes, maybe wishing they too could be that young again.

  I crossed to the bright side of the street.

  Over the years, in New York, I’ve been mugged seven times. There is an inevitability to it. You can feel it coming, even if from behind. A ripple in the air. A pulse in the light. An intent. In the distance, waiting for you, at a street garbage can. Under a hat, or a sweatshirt. The eye flick away.

  The glance back again. For a split second, when it happens, you’re not even in the world. You’re in your handbag and it’s moving away. That’s how it feels. There goes my life down the street, being carried by a pair of scattering shoes.

  This time, the yo
ung girl, a Puerto Rican, stepped out of a vestibule on 127th. Alone. A swagger to her. Shadows from a fire escape crisscross-ing her. She held a knife in under her own chin. A drugged- out shine to her eyes. I had seen that look before: if she didn’t slice me she’d slice herself. Her eyelids were painted bright silver.

  “The world’s bad enough,” I said to her, using my church tone, but she just pointed the blade of the knife at me.

  “Give me your fucking bag.”

  “It’s a sin to make it worse than it is.”

  She looped the handbag on the blade of the knife. “Pockets,” she said.

  “You don’t have to do this.”

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  elbow. It was as if she already knew from the weight that there was nothing inside but a handkerchief and some photographs. Then, swiftly, she leaned forward with the knife and sliced open the side pocket of my dress. The knife blade ran against my hip. My purse, my license, and two more photos of my boys were kept inside the pocket. She sliced open the second side.

  “Fat bitch,” she said as she walked around the corner.

  The street throbbed around me. Nobody’s fault but my own. The bark of a dog flew by. I pondered the notion that I had nothing to lose anymore, that I should follow her, rip the empty handbag from her, rescue my old self. It was the photographs that bothered me the most. I went to the corner. She was already far down the street. The photos were scattered in a line down the pavement. I stooped and picked up what remained of my boys. I caught the eye of a woman, older than me, peeping out the window. She was framed by the rotting wood. The sill was lined with plaster saints and a few artificial flowers. I would have swapped my life for hers at that moment, but she closed the window and turned away.