!Click Song

by John A. Williams

  Then we seemed to dissolve, our group moving respectfully behind Mailer’s as it ferreted out the nearest saloon. We listened to statements, arguments, questions, but it was plain that nothing had been settled; the old gestures had been made and rejected out of hand, as governments in their massive nonentities will do. Perhaps it occurred to all of us at the very same time. We had produced no heroes that day, but the situation called for a hero, indeed, demanded one. Who would shoot MacNamara or Johnson or Rostow? Can I have a volunteer?

  As we settled on the plane back to New York an hour or so later, someone said, “Don’t worry. Norman will do something.”

  Burnt Offering was published to ecstatic reviews. Some WASP reviewers likened Paul to Bellow, Malamud and Phil, not Henry, Roth, but could not find nor recall any firm with four Jewish names in it, so one reviewer simply headed his review “Hart, Schaffner, Marx and Cummings,” and let it go at that. (The same man had once written that Whittington and Huysmans certainly were not to be mistaken for Amos and Andy.) Others praised his fine sensibilities, his courage in baring his soul. All this often on the front pages of book review publications. Hardly any of them mentioned the quality of the writing, which was splendid; it was composed of some blessed alloy, woven fine; it was resplendent; it nearly blinded.

  I suppose that had it not been for the imminent birth of our child, I would have felt a keener jealousy, a deeper bitterness.

  5

  Mack arrived on a Thursday night in New York Hospital.

  We had gone to the hospital in the morning, before the rush hour, when the streets appeared fresh and strong; at the time when filmmakers took the first clear light of day to shoot sequences of their pictures. The cab pulled over within seconds, although I was prepared for all the heroics—jumping in front of one to stop it, flagging down cops, commandeering a car from a bewildered private citizen at gunpoint.

  Allis’ pains came and went through most of the day. She was not dilating. Was it because of age? I helped time her breathing, her pushing; I held her hand, wiped her forehead; our fetid breaths mixed. Evil-eyed West Indian nurses passed, regarding us with disdain. In adjoining rooms I heard shrieks from time to time. By now, traffic along the FDR Drive rushed steadily along.

  We had been eating a steak, Catherine and I, the first we’d had in a month, when she went into labor. It was frightfully fast. I knocked at Kendall’s door across the hall. He was an engineering student. He’d bragged that his jeep had been sent home part by part, crated, from Europe, where he’d fought with the 29th Division. The Kendalls had two kids. He drove us to the hospital around seven on that March evening, along roads crusted with snow and ice. Glenn was born two hours later.

  The nurses then were Irish and it was St. Patrick’s Day; they pinned a bit o’ the green on Glenn’s swaddlings and called him O’Douglass.

  “Push, baby,” I urged Allis.

  “Aaummph!”

  “Again, harder.”

  “I am, damn it! AAaauuuooouuummpphh! There!”

  “Good.”

  She rested, sweating. “I’m tired,” she said.

  “I know,” the doctor said. “But you must keep pushing.”

  Twelve hours later he decided that he would have to take the baby. “Now.”

  Mack was born near midnight. Allis was all right, but exhausted. They’d already sewn up her belly. The doctor and I smoked a cigarette together and I left.

  For York Avenue it was already late. The singles bars hadn’t yet taken over the East Side. The street was quiet, settled for the night. I hailed a taxi. It kept on going. I hailed another and it did not stop. I had experienced this before, had been to the Hack Bureau many times. This night of all nights I’d wanted to contemplate my son, though I’d hoped for a daughter.

  The next cab went by, the driver paying no more attention to me than he would have to a johnny pump. My hand, with the gun in it, was almost out of my pocket before I realized it. I shoved it back and started racing toward the cab, now stopped at a red light a half-block away. I was going to kill that motherfucking driver; he would be completely unrecognizable when I finished with him. I was going to drag him out of his fucking yellow cab and beat the shit out of him until he died right in the middle of the dogshit-littered street. I had not run so fast in years; the street seemed a blur; my body ached with the anticipation of my hands on his neck. Didn’t he understand what was going on in the country at that very moment? Didn’t he comprehend the extent of his jeopardy? Had he not ever read Izzy Stone? I ran, leaning into the night. I was almost there. I could taste my gorge bubbling furiously like a Krakatoa summoning explosive powers that would decimate.

  He must have glanced in the mirror and spotted me, the black slender apocalypse streaking like a part of the night itself right at him. The cigarette in his mouth stiffened as if even it were fearful. I grabbed the door handle with my left hand and flung it open, seizing his neck with my right. He was a big man, soft to the touch, and my fingers sank like the talons of a hawk sharply into his neck. His face snapped toward me. He was afraid. He stamped the gas pedal and the car lurched forward, pieces of the flesh of his neck packing under my fingernails. The door handle snapped away from my left hand and I spun and fell down in the street. He gunned his way through the red light.

  I walked home because I knew that I would shoot the next cabbie and I didn’t want to do that with the new baby, the new life that I had to care for. My left hand was so sprained that I couldn’t use it for a month. But my right hand felt very good.

  My anger speeds me into my foxhole. I crouch there, smelling my fear. Fear smells like snakes, which are not supposed to have scent. There is silence, an unimaginable silence, as though nothing is moving—wind, waves, palm leaves, bright tiny things in the sky; it is like the moment billions of years ago, before the Big Bang.

  I think of pawns, that first row of symbolically short pieces whose numbers are fingered silently forward to permit the gallops of knights, the obliquities of bishops, the linear dashes of rooks and the dalliances of the queens.

  I hear a noise. The universe is back in motion.

  “Stop,” I say to the noise in front of me. It must be a Japanese soldier. Yet I imagine the faces of Keye Luke, Richard Loo and S. I. Hayakawa; didn’t Hollywood make all Orientals the same?

  “Stop. I don’t want to kill you. And I don’t want to be killed. In whose book is it written that I must be killed by men as powerless as I because someone luckier, whiter and whose historical turn it is, perhaps, says so?

  “You out there. Yes, you. What I want is the fearlessness that comes from having nothing to fear, not the fearlessness of the Gawains, Rolands and El Cids and Colin Kellys. Listen: I will walk with you across the Nihon-Bashi Bridge and you will walk with me across the Brooklyn Bridge and look down and together we will see Walt Whitman on the ferry looking up at us, puzzled. I will admire your gardens of chrysanthemums and you will praise my brave stands of autumnally brilliant sugar maples, all right?”

  I came awake slowly, the way one does in a foxhole when the senses provide some assurance of safety with the coming of dawn. You remain motionless, your eyes searching the universe within their range. And then you move. Slowly.

  The bed seemed large without Allis. I stretched and turned to fill it, noticed the baby things, and these reminded me of the shards of shit zinged into my head last night. As I looked, my inner eyes seemed to close and then open on another morning strong with the ascent of its young sun. I smelled water whose waves brought with it the scents of tropical places, of oil, of aluminum eaten away by the salt sea, and of rotting corpses filled with sea worms.

  Treasure Island, near San Francisco. From there we would be shipped to various separation centers, given our ruptured ducks and slipped back into a society that had already changed beyond our most fevered imaginations. I sauntered up and down the streets of the former amusement park, pleased to be alive, to be still young and strong and, in all visible respects, whole. Marine
s and sailors slid along the streets, going as I was to the nearest chow hall, where, in the exuberance of victory, we were fed steak any time we wished it. After three years it was strange, but it felt uncommonly good.

  And then a hush, lean and without a name yet affixed to it, pressed down along the street. Like everyone else I stopped and began to watch the cause of it; like everyone else I could not prevent myself from taking one or two steps backward.

  Down the street, in spotless fatigues, creases razor-sharp, marched a phalanx of three hundred Afrika Korps prisoners of war. Though no one was calling cadence, they marched in unison. There were no bands to arrange their pace, no flags. They were uniformly large men and all were freshly shaven. Their peaked caps reached for the same precise angle. Brrr ummp, brrr ummp, brr ummp. Their feet were all hitting the ground and lifting from it with terrifying precision, like history being repeated beyond Santayana’s imagination, this while from other streets I could hear navy petty officers and marine corporals and sergeants exhorting their disheveled crews to work details with youngish cries of “Hut, two, hut, two, ya lef, ya lef …”

  Rommel’s men, their lines cast-iron straight, came on, little smiles on their faces, just as they had come on for millennia out of their northern mists in the shadows of Arminius and Siegfried.

  Brrr ummp, brrr ummp, brr ump.

  This time it was the janitor sweeping the walk outside with his worn broom.

  Flowers, I thought, swinging out of bed to make some coffee. I would take flowers to Allis today.

  I called Glenn. “You got a brother,” I said.

  “Does he look like a sprinter or a distance man?”

  “More like a fish right now. Did I wake you?”

  “Yeah, but it was time to get up.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay. See you.”

  “Tell Allis nice going—and you, too, fella.”

  I found Allis’ father’s number where she’d left it. His voice carried the sound of expectancy mixed with reticence.

  “Mr. Greenberg, it’s Cato Douglass.”

  “Who? Who’s this?”

  “Cato Douglass.” I dragged out the pause. “Your son-in-law.”

  There was a longer pause on his end. I waited. Finally, he said, “Ah—yes. Cato? Hello.”

  “Hello. I thought you should know that Allis had the baby last night. It’s a boy.”

  “She’s all right?”

  “Of course.” I guessed that he wanted to ask, but didn’t dare. “We named him Mackland.”

  “What?”

  “Mackland. That was my father’s name.”

  “Your father, yes. Allis told me he was killed in the war. I’m sorry. Well, it’s nice that you name your son after him. Honor thy father.” There was another pause. “Cato, we have not talked.”

  “No.”

  “When are visiting hours?”

  “You’re going to the hospital?”

  “Naturally.”

  I told him the visiting hours (though we would never meet there) and then he said, “Listen. I’m sorry about everything. Truly sorry. I know that doesn’t make it better, but—well, goodbye. Thanks for calling.”

  Newborn babies are like first flowers, first warm days, first reds and golds dripped on the foliage in the fall. Maybe it is only that new babies make you momentarily conscious of life’s changes, for there you are, the frenzy and passion of the conception long, long past, with this five- or six- or seven- or eight-pound creature in a corner of your apartment reeking with everything Johnson & Johnson ever manufactured in the way of infant emollients and powders.

  Tenants stopped by to see; congratulatory notes were slipped under the door. The elevator men smiled when we boarded their cars and then it did not seem troublesome that Mack Douglass was going to be with us, more or less, for seventeen or eighteen years. The approaching Christmas season made it all the more pleasurable. There were two other events that we looked forward to: a big party Paul was throwing in honor of his book (and, he told me, “a fuckin’ great paperback sale”) and his new bride.

  “Betsy?”

  “Who else, man? That’s what it was all about.”

  “Did you have a Jewish wedding?” (To which we were not invited?)

  “Ah—no. We’ll do that later, when she converts. Like you, we did City Hall.” (Oh.)

  And Glenn was going to spend a part of his vacation with us.

  6

  He arrived in a long leather coat, bell-bottoms the saltiest sailors on the Barbary Coast would have envied and a mountainous Afro. An ankh dangled around his neck on a gold chain and his bag carried a red, black and green I.D. tag.

  He embraced me. We laid the shake on each other, with all the cuties: grips, snaps and twirls.

  Did he hesitate to kiss Allis or was it my imagination?

  He looked long at his brother, but I couldn’t read his mind. “Cute,” he announced.

  School, was it okay?

  It was. A few demonstrations.

  What for?

  “Black Studies,” he said.

  “Did you get them?”

  “Yeah. Sure nuff did.”

  I could not shake the sense that he was being stiff and barely cordial with Allis and there was more distance, or seemed to be, than I had expected. A tension crept into the apartment.

  “He’s changed,” Allis said.

  “Of course. On his own now—”

  “That’s not what I meant.” I knew that hadn’t been what she meant.

  “He seems—well, hostile.”

  “C’mon. Do you think so?” The word was one I’d thought of and quickly discarded. I couldn’t discern any reason for his hostility. But it was there, covert, beneath his often extravagant politeness.

  I sighed. I’d been to a few colleges to speak, the English departments feeling some pressure to respond positively to the action in the streets. Black students at the integrated colleges attended readings and lectures in small, sullen bands, challenging visiting black lecturers to be or sound as revolutionary as they thought themselves to be; they appeared to be more interested in displaying what was then called “black militancy” before mainly white audiences than in what was being read or said to them.

  What was one to say to them? Like everyone else, they had roles to play; we all played roles assigned to us by unknown directors in a play without name before an audience of shifting, unreliable sympathies. The mainly white audiences expected (one could both see and sense it) instant miracles.

  Had Glenn suffered and changed because of isolation? My son? I had managed, but I’d had a family with me. There had been the Paul Robesons, the George Gregorys, the Sterling Browns, the Jerome Hollands, the Saunders Reddings—they had managed in those cold white colleges; had they turned hostile toward their parents or was it simply a different time?

  I sighed again. Allis said no more.

  A couple of mornings later—the day of Paul’s party, in fact—I was in the bathroom. Glenn’s hair was everywhere. (He picked it for thirty minutes each morning.) I realized that Allis had decided to stop cleaning it up and that he wasn’t going to do it either.

  “Hey, Glenn. Clean up the hair.” I knew he’d never dare leave Catherine’s bathroom like that.

  I still remember my amazement at the way he turned to me, quickly, his teeth bared. And I also recall my own shock, for there it was, overt, barely held in check, his hostility, the posture of his own private, youthful revolution against Whitey and all the Nee-groes who had dealings with him—or her. No more than a second passed as we stood there reading each other with the greatest intensity. I had had occasion to spank him perhaps four times in his life, and each time I labored over my apology. As I gazed down the tunnel of his contempt, he said, “What hair?”

  I half-turned away from him. “Look. Allis has been cleaning up behind you; it’s as if you’re leaving a mess just so she can. And, hey, I see you with your feet all up on the be
dspread, shining your shoes. Why?”

  Smirk.

  I saw myself afterward. I’d slapped him, hard, and he’d gone over backward, eyes bulging not with hostility, but surprise and perhaps a little fear. I’d leaped forward to catch him, to prevent his head from hitting the door. He thought I was following up with another blow and covered up. I caught him and held him. His eyes burned into mine. He loosened himself, went to the closet and got his coat and stalked out of the apartment.

  “You’d better get a baby sitter for tonight,” I told Allis when she came into the living room, where I was sitting, trying to listen to what my racing heart was telling me.

  “Where’s Glenn? What happened? I heard the door.”

  I told her.

  “Aw, no. Where do you suppose he went?”

  “I dunno. He’ll be back, but I don’t think we ought to count on him to sit with Mack tonight.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Is it the black-white thing, do you think?”

  “I guess so.” I walked to the window and looked down into the street.

  “It’ll pass,” she said. “Won’t it? I mean with him?”

  I didn’t answer because I didn’t know.

  “I’ll see who I can get,” she said.

  I went to the bedroom to take another look at Mack; it seemed that I was always doing that. I’d done it with Glenn, too. When I came out, Allis was on the phone in the kitchen. “I’m going to the Park,” I said.

  She nodded.

  A cab swerved toward me and slowed when I reached the corner. “Fuck you,” I shouted. The driver shrugged and picked up speed.

  I gained the track that runs around the reservoir and started walking southward, just walking, just thinking, and before long I was on the Fifth Avenue side, moving northward past the Guggenheim Museum. On my side of town once more, I moved down to the walks, which were gray with the cold, although it hadn’t snowed. I saw him on a bench between Ninety-sixth and Ninety-fifth streets, and I moved toward him with a heavy sense of relief.