But with the parties came drinking and fights. Sundays were bad days after the Saturday-night parties. I remember once that Buster’s father, also long and loose, always wearing a dirty gray Homburg hat, chased another black man in the street with a half-inch chisel. The other one, maybe five feet high, lost his shoe and when they wrestled on the ground he was already bleeding through his suit, a thick red blood smearing the sidewalk. I was frightened by the blood and wanted to pour it back in the man who was bleeding from the chisel. On another time Buster’s father was playing in a crap game with two big bouncy red dice, in the back of an alley between two middle houses. Then about six men started fistfighting there, and they ran out of the alley and hit each other in the street. The neighbors, including children, came out and watched, everybody afraid but nobody moving to do anything. I saw the same thing near my store in Harlem, years later, a big crowd watching two men in the street, their breaths hanging in the air on a winter night, murdering each other with switchblade knives, but nobody moved to call a cop. I didn’t either. Anyway, I was just a young kid but I still remember how the cops drove up in a police paddy wagon and broke up the fight by hitting everybody they could hit with big nightsticks. This was in the days before La Guardia. Most of the fighters were knocked out cold, only one or two got away. Buster’s father started to run back in his house but a cop ran after him and cracked him on his Homburg hat with a club, right on the front porch. Then the Negro men were lifted up by the cops, one at the arms and the other at the feet, and they heaved them in the paddy wagon. Buster’s father hit the back of the wagon and fell, with his nose spouting very red blood, on top of three other men. I personally couldn’t stand it, I was scared of the human race so I ran home, but I remember Buster watching without any expression in his eyes. I stole an extra fifteen cents from my mother’s pocketbook and I ran back and asked Buster if he wanted to go to the movies, I would pay. He said yes. This was the first time he talked to me.
So we went more than once to the movies. But we never got to be friends. Maybe because it was a one-way proposition—from me to him. Which includes my invitations to go with me, my (poor mother’s) movie money, Hershey chocolate bars, watermelon slices, even my best Nick Carter and Merriwell books that I spent hours picking up in the junk shops, and that he never gave me back. Once, he let me go in his house to get a match so we could smoke some butts we found, but it smelled so heavy, so impossible, I died till I got out of there. What I saw in the way of furniture I won’t mention—the best was falling apart in pieces. Maybe we went to the movies altogether five or six matinees that spring and in the summertime, but when the shows were over he usually walked home by himself.
“Why don’t you wait for me, Buster?” I said. “We’re both going in the same direction.”
But he was walking ahead and didn’t hear me. Anyway he didn’t answer.
One day when I wasn’t expecting it he hit me in the teeth. I felt like crying but not because of the pain. I spit blood and said, “What did you hit me for? What did I do to you?”
“Because you a Jew bastard. Take your Jew movies and your Jew candy and shove them up your Jew ass.”
And he ran away.
I thought to myself how was I to know he didn’t like the movies. When I was a man I thought, You can’t force it.
Years later, in the prime of my life, I met Mrs. Ornita Harris. She was standing by herself under an open umbrella at the bus stop, crosstown 110th, and I picked up her green glove that she had dropped on the wet sidewalk. It was in the end of November. Before I could ask her was it hers, she grabbed the glove out of my hand, closed her umbrella, and stepped in the bus. I got on right after her. I was annoyed so I said, “If you’ll pardon me, miss, there’s no law that you have to say thanks, but at least don’t make a criminal out of me.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said, “but I don’t like white men trying to do me favors.”
I tipped my hat and that was that. In ten minutes I got off the bus but she was already gone.
Who expected to see her again, but I did. She came into my store about a week later for a bottle of Scotch.
“I would offer you a discount,” I told her, “but I know you don’t like a certain kind of a favor and I’m not looking for a slap in the face.”
Then she recognized me and got a little embarrassed.
“I’m sorry I misunderstood you that day.”
“So mistakes happen.”
The result was she took the discount. I gave her a dollar off.
She used to come in every two weeks for a fifth of Haig & Haig. Sometimes I waited on her, sometimes my helpers, Jimmy or Mason, also colored, but I said to give the discount. They both looked at me but I had nothing to be ashamed. In the spring when she came in we used to talk once in a while. She was a slim woman, dark, but not the most dark, about thirty years I would say, also well built, with a combination nice legs and a good-size bosom that I like. Her face was pretty, with big eyes and high cheekbones, but lips a little thick and nose a little broad. Sometimes she didn’t feel like talking, she paid for the bottle, less discount, and walked out. Her eyes were tired and she didn’t look to me like a happy woman.
I found out her husband was once a window cleaner on the big buildings, but one day his safety belt broke and he fell fifteen stories. After the funeral she got a job as a manicurist in a Times Square barbershop. I told her I was a bachelor and lived with my mother in a small three-room apartment on West Eighty-third near Broadway. My mother had cancer, and Ornita said she was very sorry.
One night in July we went out together. How that happened I’m still not so sure. I guess I asked her and she didn’t say no. Where do you go out with a Negro woman? We went to the Village. We had a good dinner and walked in Washington Square Park. It was a hot night. Nobody was surprised when they saw us, nobody looked at us like we were against the law. If they looked maybe they saw my new lightweight suit that I bought yesterday and my shiny bald spot when we walked under a lamp, also how pretty she was for a man my type. We went in a movie on West Eighth Street. I didn’t want to go in but she said she had heard about the picture. We went in like strangers and we came out like strangers. I wondered what was in her mind and I thought to myself, Whatever is in there it’s not a certain white man that I know. All night long we went together like we were chained. After the movie she wouldn’t let me take her back to Harlem. When I put her in a taxi she asked me, “Why did we bother?”
For the steak, I thought of saying. Instead I said, “You’re worth the bother.”
“Thanks anyway.”
Kiddo, I thought to myself after the taxi left, you just found out what’s what, now the best thing is forget her.
It’s easy to say. In August we went out the second time. That was the night she wore a purple dress and I thought to myself, My God, what colors. Who paints that picture paints a masterpiece. Everybody looked at us but I had pleasure. That night when she took off her dress it was in a furnished room I had the sense to rent a few days before. With my sick mother, I couldn’t ask her to come to my apartment, and she didn’t want me to go home with her where she lived with her brother’s family on West 115th near Lenox Avenue. Under her purple dress she wore a black slip, and when she took that off she had white underwear. When she took off the white underwear she was black again. But I know where the next white was, if you want to call it white. And that was the night I think I fell in love with her, the first time in my life, though I have liked one or two nice girls I used to go with when I was a boy. It was a serious proposition. I’m the kind of a man when I think of love I’m thinking of marriage. I guess that’s why I am a bachelor.
That same week I had a holdup in my place, two big men—both black—with revolvers. One got excited when I rang open the cash register so he could take the money, and he hit me over the ear with his gun. I stayed in the hospital a couple of weeks. Otherwise I was insured. Ornita came to see me. She sat on a chair without talking much. Final
ly I saw she was uncomfortable so I suggested she ought to go home.
“I’m sorry it happened,” she said.
“Don’t talk like it’s your fault.”
When I got out of the hospital my mother was dead. She was a wonderful person. My father died when I was thirteen and all by herself she kept the family alive and together. I sat shiva for a week and remembered how she sold paper bags on her pushcart. I remembered her life and what she tried to teach me. Nathan, she said, if you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you. Mama, I said, rest in peace on this subject. But if I do something you don’t like, remember, on earth it’s harder than where you are. Then when my week of mourning was finished, one night I said, “Ornita, let’s get married. We’re both honest people and if you love me like I love you it won’t be such a bad time. If you don’t like New York I’ll sell out here and we’ll move someplace else. Maybe to San Francisco, where nobody knows us. I was there for a week in the Second War and I saw white and colored living together.”
“Nat,” she answered me, “I like you but I’d be afraid. My husband woulda killed me.”
“Your husband is dead.”
“Not in my memory.”
“In that case I’ll wait.”
“Do you know what it’d be like—I mean the life we could expect?”
“Ornita,” I said, “I’m the kind of a man, if he picks his own way of life he’s satisfied.”
“What about children? Were you looking forward to half-Jewish polka dots?”
“I was looking forward to children.”
“I can’t,” she said.
Can’t is can’t. I saw she was afraid and the best thing was not to push. Sometimes when we met she was so nervous that whatever we did she couldn’t enjoy it. At the same time I still thought I had a chance. We were together more and more. I got rid of my furnished room and she came to my apartment—I gave away Mama’s bed and bought a new one. She stayed with me all day on Sundays. When she wasn’t so nervous she was affectionate, and if I know what love is, I had it. We went out a couple of times a week, the same way—usually I met her in Times Square and sent her home in a taxi, but I talked more about marriage and she talked less against it. One night she told me she was still trying to convince herself but she was almost convinced. I took an inventory of my liquor stock so I could put the store up for sale.
Ornita knew what I was doing. One day she quit her job, the next she took it back. She also went away a week to visit her sister in Philadelphia for a little rest. She came back tired but said maybe. Maybe is maybe so I’ll wait. The way she said it, it was closer to yes. That was the winter two years ago. When she was in Philadelphia I called up a friend of mine from the army, now a CPA, and told him I would appreciate an invitation for an evening. He knew why. His wife said yes right away. When Ornita came back we went there. The wife made a fine dinner. It wasn’t a bad time and they told us to come again. Ornita had a few drinks. She looked relaxed, wonderful. Later, because of a twenty-four-hour taxi strike I had to take her home on the subway. When we got to the 116th Street station she told me to go back on the train, and she would walk the couple of blocks to her house. I didn’t like a woman walking alone on the streets at that time of the night. She said she never had any trouble but I insisted nothing doing. I said I would walk to her stoop with her and when she went upstairs I would go to the subway.
On the way there, on 115th in the middle of the block before Lenox, we were stopped by three men—maybe they were boys. One had a black hat with a half-inch brim, one a green cloth hat, and the third wore a black leather cap. The green hat was wearing a short coat and the other two had long ones. It was under a streetlight but the leather cap snapped a six-inch switchblade open in the light.
“What you doin with this white son of a bitch?” he said to Ornita.
“I’m minding my own business,” she answered him, “and I wish you would too.”
“Boys,” I said, “we’re all brothers. I’m a reliable merchant in the neighborhood. This young lady is my dear friend. We don’t want any trouble. Please let us pass.”
“You talk like a Jew landlord,” said the green hat. “Fifty a week for a single room.”
“No charge fo the rats,” said the half-inch brim.
“Believe me, I’m no landlord. My store is Nathan’s Liquors between Hundred Tenth and Eleventh. I also have two colored clerks, Mason and Jimmy, and they will tell you I pay good wages as well as I give discounts to certain customers.”
“Shut your mouth, Jewboy,” said the leather cap, and he moved the knife back and forth in front of my coat button. “No more black pussy for you.”
“Speak with respect about this lady, please.”
I got slapped on my mouth.
“That ain’t no lady,” said the long face in the half-inch brim, “that’s black pussy. She deserve to have evvy bit of her hair shave off. How you like to have evvy bit of your hair shave off, black pussy?”
“Please leave me and this gentleman alone or I’m gonna scream long and loud. That’s my house three doors down.”
They slapped her. I never heard such a scream. Like her husband was falling fifteen stories.
I hit the one that slapped her and the next I knew I was laying in the gutter with a pain in my head. I thought, Goodbye, Nat, they’ll stab me for sure, but all they did was take my wallet and run in three directions.
Ornita walked back with me to the subway and she wouldn’t let me go home with her again.
“Just get home safely.”
She looked terrible. Her face was gray and I still remembered her scream. It was a terrible winter night, very cold February, and it took me an hour and ten minutes to get home. I felt bad for leaving her but what could I do?
We had a date downtown the next night but she didn’t show up, the first time.
In the morning I called her in her place of business.
“For God’s sake, Ornita, if we got married and moved away we wouldn’t have the kind of trouble that we had. We wouldn’t come in that neighborhood anymore.”
“Yes, we would. I have family there and don’t want to move anyplace else. The truth of it is I can’t marry you, Nat. I got troubles enough of my own.”
“I coulda sworn you love me.”
“Maybe I do but I can’t marry you.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“I got enough trouble of my own.”
I went that night in a cab to her brother’s house to see her. He was a quiet man with a thin mustache. “She gone,” he said, “left for a long visit to some close relatives in the South. She said to tell you she appreciate your intentions but didn’t think it will work out.”
“Thank you kindly,” I said.
Don’t ask me how I got home.
Once, on Eighth Avenue, a couple of blocks from my store, I saw a blind man with a white cane tapping on the sidewalk. I figured we were going in the same direction so I took his arm.
“I can tell you’re white,” he said.
A heavy colored woman with a full shopping bag rushed after us.
“Never mind,” she said, “I know where he live.”
She pushed me with her shoulder and I hurt my leg on the fire hydrant.
That’s how it is. I give my heart and they kick me in my teeth.
“Charity Quietness—you hear me?—come out of that goddamn toilet!”
1963
Naked Nude
1
Fidelman listlessly doodled all over a sheet of yellow paper. Odd indecipherable designs, ink-spotted blotched words, esoteric ideographs, tormented figures in a steaming sulfurous lake, including a stylish nude rising newborn from the water. Not bad at all, though more mannequin than Knidean Aphrodite. Scarpio, sharp-nosed on the former art student’s gaunt left, looking up from his cards inspected her with his good eye.
“Not bad, who is she?”
“Nobody I really know.”
“You must be hard up.”
“Quiet,” rumbled Angelo, the padrone, on Fidelman’s fat right, his two-chinned face molded in lard. He flipped the top card.
The Complete Stories Page 41